About me, in short

I am Nikolaos Kalogeropoulos, though Nick or Nico is shorter. I am a fire scientist, working on simulating wildfires, and through that creating decision support systems pertaining to the evacuation process. In 2018 my grandparents went through the catastrophic wildfire of Mati; They and their home was spared, but many people were not as lucky. Our house itself was saved by a miracle; the house next door is gone, and there was a tall pine tree connecting our houses, which somehow only got charred instead of burning. After that I decided to devote at least the 4 years after my masters into making something that someday might mitigate another such catastrophe. I approached Prof. Guillermo Rein at the Mechanical Engineering Department of Imperial College London, who runs Hazelab, a very successful fire dynamics laboratory. I talked to him about my story and how I want to work on a PhD with him. I did my masters project with him first, and we worked well together, so we continue to do so to this day.

Before this position I studied Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London, from 2017 to 2021. My focus was on design and manufacturing; I simply love the design process and making things from scratch. A day where I went home with aluminum shavings on my boots was a day well spent. A day when I wanted to cry because of Solidworks was a day well spent (me and Solidworks have a long term love-hate relationship). I never expected to work on something programming and computation related, but life works in mysterious ways.

I am always looking for more projects to work on, another opportunity to open Solidworks and spend a solid 11 hours straight designing and another week making my inventions. For now, most of my time is spent on a computer, reading papers or working on code to help save people and Stop the Bad Fires.

Pines are so bad, they are not natural and they burn like kerosene. Can we not just take down all the pines and replace them with oaks, like what the Mediterranean used to be before humans?