Where Science Meets the Street

Capabilities

Our expertise extends across firefighting to fire science and engineering, and has expanded to include the outreach, multimedia and instructional design skills needed to drive reach and active engagement with key stakeholder groups, including the fire service, academia, government, industry, fire and life safety educators, and the general public. We take pride in developing rich, ongoing, collaborative relationships, which are core to who we are as an organization and how we operate. We’re driven by our partnerships with research organizations, including the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and Illinois Fire Service Institute (IFSI), as well as collaborations with key stakeholders in the fire and life safety education space, including Vision 20/20 and NFPA’s Educational Messaging Advisory Council (EMAC). We also have a fellowship program that attracts top talent students from institutions like the University of Maryland and have developed a Visiting Scholar Program that brings in experts from across the globe.

Together, with our advisors and partners, and through unrivaled real-scale fire research and experiments, we focus our work on building knowledge in our key pillars of expertise: science and engineering, and amplifying that knowledge through education, all with a spirit of and deep commitment to collaboration. Our research spans multiple scales and domains, so we can experiment, model and investigate the experience and impact of situations our stakeholders face. By conducting these experiments, we generate comprehensive scientific data, measurements and evidence-based insights, and define what evolutions in strategies and tactics may need to be considered across our core areas of enablement of prediction, protection, control and investigation.

The resulting data, knowledge and insights are most useful when they are in the hands of our stakeholders, and that’s why research amplification is central to our organization. We document and bring to life our research through impactful video, imagery and data visualization to make our science-driven insights clear and engaging for a variety of uses. We then utilize a wide range of communication channels and tactics to engage with different stakeholders. We collaborate with fire departments, public and private agencies, universities and research bodies to share our findings with the world. Whether it’s through research reports, peer-reviewed journal articles, speaking engagements, online training, on-site demonstrations, public safety announcements, explainer videos, social media or digital data portals, we get our science to the streets like no other, so everyone can become active fire safety advocates and practitioners.

We are relentless in our pursuit of fire safety, and our thinking and practice is always evolving to keep pace with the world around us. Through our research and insights, we test scenarios and conditions, we find answers to questions, and when a new question arises, we work to find an answer to that too. No matter the fire safety challenge, we strive to find solutions, collaboratively. Through sharing and embedding the knowledge, insights and best practices our work generates, FSRI is advancing fire safety for a fire safe world, protecting and saving lives and property.

Footprint

FSRI has multiple locations in the US, each with its own unique capabilities.