On 1^st May, Prof Grunde Jomaas travelled to Letterkenny, Ireland, to participate in the Fire & Safety Engineering: International Conference & Technical Industry Expo, hosted by Atlantic Technological University (ATU) in collaboration with Engineers Ireland's Fire & Safety Division.

The conference marked a significant milestone: 25 years of ATU delivering undergraduate programmes in fire safety engineering design. To celebrate the occasion, the university assembled a programme of leading international researchers and practitioners, with a focus on the application of performance-based fire safety engineering in tall and complex buildings, including quantitative analysis, engineering judgement, and emerging regulatory expectations.

Prof Jomaas delivered a presentation entitled "Burning and Learning – Ensuring a Fire-Safe, Sustainable Built Environment Through Research", reflecting on how rigorous experimental research underpins the development of safer and more sustainable buildings, and on the role of innovation in addressing the fire safety challenges of contemporary construction.

He was joined by a distinguished lineup of international speakers: Dr Robert McNamee (RISE Research Institutes of Sweden) on a century-long perspective on robustness in fire safety; Dr Barbara Lane (Arup, UK) on ethical practice and the duty to protect the public; Dr Mikko Salminen (Jensen Hughes, Finland) on holistic structural fire engineering; Prof Steve Gwynne (University of Greenwich, UK) on evacuation modelling; and Dr Wojciech Węgrzyński (Building Research Institute, Poland) on fire safety in an ever-changing built environment. The day concluded with a panel discussion bringing together all speakers for a broader exchange with the audience.

The conference offered a timely reminder of how far the discipline of fire safety engineering has come in 25 years, and of the research, collaboration, and critical thinking still needed to meet the challenges ahead.