Steve Gwynne
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Steve Gwynne is a British fire safety scientist whose work focuses on human behaviour in emergencies and evacuation modelling. He is professor of Evacuation and Pedestrian Dynamics at the University of Greenwich's Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG).[1][2] He has held research and leadership roles in government and industry, including at the National Research Council Canada and at Movement Strategies (a GHD company).[3][4]
Gwynne completed a PhD at the University of Greenwich in 2000 with a dissertation on representing occupant interaction with smoke for evacuation modelling.[5][6]
Career
Gwynne began his career with the Fire Safety Engineering Group at the University of Greenwich, publishing on evacuation modelling and human behaviour in fire.[7] He later worked as a senior and principal research officer at the National Research Council Canada on evacuation and pedestrian dynamics, co-authoring government-backed technical work on human behaviour in fire and wildfire evacuation modelling.[8][9]
In industry, he served as research lead at Movement Strategies, contributing to studies and guidance on evacuation drills, crowd behaviour and wildfire evacuation.[10][11] In 2024–2025 he was listed as an author from the University of Greenwich on an ISCRAM proceedings paper documenting the 2024 Roxborough Park (Colorado) wildfire evacuation drill, a cross-agency exercise studied by researchers and emergency managers.[12][13]
He has also held adjunct or visiting roles, including adjunct faculty at the University of Maryland and an adjunct/visiting appointment at Lund University in Sweden which focused on evacuation and pedestrian dynamics.[3][14][4]
Gwynne's research includes widely cited work on evacuation modelling and human factors in fire. A 2001 study co-authored with Ed Galea and colleagues described modelling occupant interaction with fire conditions using the buildingEXODUS evacuation model.[15] His later publications include a peer-reviewed paper documenting a community wildfire evacuation drill at Roxborough Park, Colorado (2019), published in Fire Technology and indexed by PubMed Central.[16]
His work on wildfire evacuation modelling (including the WUI-NITY platform) appears in government and academic sources, such as National Research Council Canada reports and journal articles on wildland–urban interface (WUI) evacuation.[9][17]
Gwynne and collaborators have also published on the design and assessment of evacuation drills and behavioural assumptions in modelling, topics that have been discussed in practitioner media and professional outlets, including the SFPE's Fire Protection Engineering magazine and interviews/podcasts.[11][18][19][20]