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. 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: NSF CAREER Award (2023) for work on performance-based fire design for cold-formed steel structures IAFSS Magnusson Early Career Award (2023) AISC Early Career Terry Peshia Faculty Award (2023) NFPA Foundation Medal (2019)

Selected works Gernay, T., (2024). "Performance-based design for structures in fire: Advances, challenges, and perspectives." Fire Safety Journal, 142, 104036. Gernay T. (2019). "Fire resistance and burnout resistance of reinforced concrete columns". Fire Safety Journal, 104, 67-78. Gernay, T., Elhami Khorasani, N. (2020). "Recommendations for performance-based fire design of composite steel buildings using computational analysis." Journal of Constructional Steel Research, 166.