Professor Daniel Nilsson

Daniel Nilsson is a Swedish fire-safety engineer whose research centres on how people behave during building and wildfire evacuations. He is professor of Fire Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and was head of its Civil and Natural Resources Engineering department from 2021 to 2024. Nilsson's work spans human behaviour in building fires, wildfires and tsunami evacuation, and he often uses virtual reality and GPS-based methods to study how people respond to warnings, signage and evacuation routes. Since 2014, Nilsson has represented Sweden on ISO Technical Committee 92/SC 4 Fire safety engineering, chairing the subcommittee (2014–2022) and, from 2023, convening its working group on human behaviour in fire. In 2017, the Swedish chapter of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (BIV) awarded him the BIV-stipendiet for his contributions to research on human behaviour in fire, teaching and international standards work.

Education Nilsson was raised in Lund. He earned a B.Sc. in Fire Protection Engineering (2002) and a Ph.D. in Fire-safety Engineering (2009) at Lund University, the latter for work on how flashing lights influence evacuees' choice of exit. Lund University awarded him the title of docent in 2013.

Nilsson’s research blends full-scale evacuation trials, virtual-reality studies and computer models to improve signage, way-finding and agent-based egress simulations. In Sweden he investigated how flashing lights and other visual cues affect evacuees' choice of exit, and a 2019 profile in the Swedish fire-safety magazine Brandsäkert notes that his group's results have influenced evacuation alarm design with light and sound and contributed to the evacuation design of Förbifart Stockholm. In an article for Engineering New Zealand he described a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)–funded research project that uses anonymised GPS data from mobile phones to reconstruct when people evacuated, which routes they took and which communities were most affected during the 2019 Kincade Fire in California and other wildfires. He has discussed related themes in the Uncovered Witness: Fire Science Revelations podcast, which features him as a guest in an episode on familiarity, affiliation and myths about panic and emphasises altruistic behaviour and the dangers of using “panic” as a scapegoat for technical failures.

Nilsson heads the BRANZ-funded project "Changing evacuation behaviour to meet densified housing needs" (2023–2025) and contributes to New Zealand's MBIE programme "Extreme Wildfire: Our new reality" (2021–2026) as well as the NIST GPS-tracking study of wildfire evacuations. Within ISO he helped draft ISO 20414:2020, the first international protocol for verifying and validating building-fire evacuation models.

Selected works

Nilsson, D. Exit Choice in Fire Emergencies – Influencing Choice of Exit with Flashing Lights. Ph.D. thesis, Lund University, 2009. Lovreglio, R.; Nilsson, D.; Kuligowski, E.; Cain, L.; Walpole, E.; Johnston, D.; Rothas, F. The Pigeon Valley Fire: A questionnaire study about the evacuation process. Fire and Emergency New Zealand Report 183, June 2021.

Honours Nilsson received Lund University's "Teacher of the Year" award in Fire-safety Engineering in 2015 and 2018. In 2017, he was awarded the BIV-stipendiet by BIV, the Swedish chapter of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, which cited his research on human behaviour in fire, his willingness to share knowledge with students and practising engineers, and his work to raise international awareness of Swedish fire engineering through ISO/TC 92/SC 4.