Karen De Lannoye (IntlAssoc)

Karen De Lannoye currently works with the Flammability Reduction Group of the Fire Research Division (FRD) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Before joining NIST, she worked at Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany). During this time, she obtained her PhD from the University of Wuppertal, with research focused on designing, developing, and performing experiments with a new bench-scale test apparatus for pyrolysis testing. Afterwards, she was responsible for conducting experiments – from milligram-scale thermal analysis tests to room corner fires – for the BESKID project (design fire simulation in railway vehicles using AI-based data).

At NIST, Karen is a key member of the Material Flammability Characterization Project Team, which is focused on developing the NIST Material Flammability Database to maintain experimental and analytical tools needed to enable quantitative prediction of material flammability behavior (e.g., ignition, steady burning, and fire growth). She is responsible for maintaining and running the microscale combustion calorimeter (MCC) and the NIST Gasification Apparatus, both of which are used to determine material properties included in the database (i.e., for model calibration). She also develops and conducts experiments on an intermediate-scale flame spread apparatus, with a focus on wall flame interactions; these experiments are included in the database for fire model validation.