Thomas Gernay


Thomas Gernay is a Belgian-American structural engineer and fire safety scientist. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he leads research in structural fire engineering, performance-based design, and structural reliability.

Education

Gernay earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in civil engineering from the University of Liège in Belgium. He completed his PhD at the same institution in 2012, developing a multiaxial constitutive model for concrete under fire conditions.

Career

After completing his PhD, Gernay held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and at the University of Liège. He joined Johns Hopkins University in 2018 as an Assistant Professor and became an Associate Professor in 2025.
He is a co-developer of the structural fire simulation software SAFIR, widely used for modeling the behavior of building structures in fire. Gernay has contributed to international building standards, including the American Iron and Steel Institute's fire design appendix and the ACI CODE-562 for concrete structures. Gernay's research spans fire safety engineering, performance-based design, structural reliability, and community resilience. He has published extensively on the behavior of steel, concrete, and timber structures in fire and on the use of machine learning in fire performance modeling.

Awards

Gernay has received several prestigious awards, including:

Selected works

  • Gernay, T.,. "Performance-based design for structures in fire: Advances, challenges, and perspectives." Fire Safety Journal, 142, 104036.
  • Gernay T.. "Fire resistance and burnout resistance of reinforced concrete columns". Fire Safety Journal, 104, 67-78.
  • Gernay, T., Elhami Khorasani, N.. "Recommendations for performance-based fire design of composite steel buildings using computational analysis." Journal of Constructional Steel Research, 166.