Fire Research at NYU Today
The history of the NYU Fire Research Group in the years following the release of the ALIVE software has been difficult to trace. As best as I can tell, the group does technically still exist, however I have not found any evidence of full scale experimentation post Governors Island. Their website, located at fire.engineering.nyu.edu is still live, but it doesn't appear to have been updated recently. The group's YouTube channel, which was once active, has not posted a video since June 2020, with most of their research videos being from 2014 or earlier. The same is true for other online accounts operated by the group.
Dr. Sunil Kumar, the lead Brooklyn Poly researcher at the Governors Island Experiment, has since transferred to NYU Abu Dhabi according to his NYU profile page, but Dr. Prabodh Panindre, another researcher listed as a coauthor on many of the group's papers, still teaches in the Mechanical Engineering department at NYU Tandon. Attempts to interview him for this report were unsuccessful.
The NYU Fire Research Group has published papers since the Governors Island Experiment, but these papers appear to be technical notes based on fire simulations, with no indication that any further burn tests were conducted. As the titles of these papers reveal, they were likely intended as further analysis of the Governors Island data rather than as new, original research. The papers include:
- "Positive Pressure Ventilation for fighting wind-driven high-rise fires: Simulation-based analysis and optimization" published in the Fire Safety Journal in January 2017, with Panindre listed as the lead author.
- "Improvement of Positive Pressure Ventilation by optimizing stairwell door opening area" again published in the Fire Safety Journal in September 2017, with Panindre again listed as the lead author.
- "Positive Pressurization and Ventilation for Fighting Fires in High-Rise Structures with Multiple Stairwells" published in the Journal of Physics: Conference Series in 2018 based on a lecture given by Panindre at the 3rd European Symposium on Fire Safety Science.
In any case, the 2018 conference paper is the most recent publication from the group listed on their website. The most recent paper I could find from Panindre, "Heat transfer in a form-stable direct-contact latent thermal energy storage unit" published in 2024 in the Journal of Enhanced Heat Transfer, although listing Kumar as a coauthor, does not appear to be directly related to fire research, and there is nothing indicating that the paper is officially connected to the NYU Fire Research Group.
The most recent secondary source mentioning the group that I could find is a July 2019 blog post from the Highland Falls Fire Department mentioning that Panindre had visted them to discuss firefighter breathing systems being researched by the group (Smith). This appears to be connected to the videos published by the group in 2020, which were about a similar topic. This research about breathing systems, which was ultimately published as a technical note for the National Fire Protection Association in April 2021 (Gu and Panindre) is the most recent instance of post-Governors Island original research that I was able to find. However, this appears to have been student led research, and it's unclear what role the NYU Fire Research Group played.
The ALIVE software is still available for download on the group's website and on the App Store. It does not appear to have been updated recently. As mentioned in the previous section, the lack of secondary source information has made it difficult to track the history and status of the software, but at this point I would venture a guess that it is no longer being maintained.
In addition to ALIVE, the group's website discusses another application called FireBeats. According to the summary on the App Store, "FireBeats is an AI-based remote health monitoring app for firefighters that monitors the physiological data of firefighters using personal wireless wearable health trackers, evaluates cardiovascular risk factors, and alerts firefighters about impending risks for sudden cardiac events" (NYU-Poly, Apple). The FireBeats copyright was last updated in 2019, but version history for the app show that it was updated with "Minor Bug Fixes" as recently as May 2024. This app is clearly being maintained, but it's not clear by whom.
The FireBeats app was submitted to the 2023-24 NYU Entrepreneurs Challenge hosted by the Berkley Center at NYU Stern (Berkley Center). Panindre is listed as a faculty advisor, but from what I can tell, the app is probably being maintained by the graduate students who submitted it. Once again, it's unclear what role, if any, the NYU Fire Research Group played in the development of the application.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the fate of the NYU Fire Research Group remains obscure. Casual discussion with professors in the Mechanical Engineering department at NYU Tandon revealed that while many had heard of the group, most were under the impression that it was defunct, despite the fact that it is still listed by NYU as an active research group.
I was also unable to determine whether the group is still connected to USI in any way, and if not, when that association was terminated. The USI papers in the Poly Archives deal exclusively with the early grant application phase in the lead-up to the Governors Island experiment. USI, like the Fire Research Group, is still listed as an active initiative by NYU, but it is part of the Civil, rather than Mechanical, Engineering department, suggesting that a restructuring may have occured since Governors Island.
Whether looking at the Fire Research Center at CUES, or the NYU Fire Research Group, the research groups at Brooklyn Poly and later NYU Tandon have proven to be difficult things to pin down. In both cases, it is much easier to say with certainty when they were active than when they were not.
Perhaps this is a general pattern for academic research groups. Unlike full fledged departments, these groups may only exist for as long as individual researchers choose to keep publishing under their name. It is likely, in my estimation, that the Fire Research Center at CUES ceased operations because Dr. DeCicco simply moved on to other projects. Dr. Kumar's move to NYU Abu Dhabi may have had a similar effect on the NYU Fire Research Group.
I believe that research groups like the ones at Brooklyn Poly fill an important niche in academia in that they allow researchers from different disciplines and backgrounds to work together on collaborative projects, share resources, and investigate potential avenues for further research without the inflexibility of a formal research department. These groups are difficult to research after the fact because the things that make them useful at the time — less bureaucratic overhead; flexibility to undergo rapid structural change in response to changing research needs; and an ever changing, informal collection of associated researchers — can also result in an inconsistent and patchy paper trail.
Moving forward, I imagine that the NYU Fire Research Group will continue to exist in its current form unless and until some new development, maybe a request from the City for help rewriting the building code, or the widespread adoption of a new material in construction, results in a need for new research, in which case an entirely new group may suddenly appear at NYU Tandon with a new approach and new techniques to solve the same fundamental problem of fire safety.