InToxFIRE’s First Online Workshop Highlights
Last week, on Tuesday, 12-Aug-25, we held the InToxFIRE’s first online workshop on “Understanding the Movement of Toxic Chemicals through Firefighters Protective Clothing and PPE” organized by FireSERT, Ulster University.
The wonderful speakers with different backgrounds and experiences, along with interesting questions and great discussions coming from the attendees turned the online workshop into an amazing lively event with high level of engagement. Before starting the workshop, the presenters and organizers meet to review the workshop rules and tested the presentations and devices, and then proceeded on starting of the event on 3:00 PM (GMT+1).
550 people from 69 countries were registered to workshop via the SurveyMonkey registration from. In live event, 222 participants joined the workshop from 52 countries and engaged with workshop sessions effectively, regardless of the significant time difference from GMT+12 (Fiji) to GMT-7 (California, US), and stayed on for 4 hours. The average attendance time of the workshop was 153 minutes and the total length of the workshop was 210 minutes.
It keeps us motivated in doing our dedication to collect, generate, and share the frontline knowledge in fire-born toxic chemicals and their movement through firefighter’s PPE as well as creating impact on training, decontamination technologies, regulations and the related standards.
The event has been recorded, and as per frequent requests to broadcast it globally, we are planning to share the permitted part of the content on the outreach tab of InToxFIRE’s website and its social media channels after granting the required permissions.
The attendance certificates are under preparations and the participants will receive them in the coming weeks.
We would like to say thank you to our fantastic speakers, Adam Stone, Arlene Kidd, Brett Egan-Briers, Chen Yong Kai, Kevin Howlette and Richard Kesler as well as the workshop’s organizers, Hamed Rasouli Sadabad, Svetlana Tretsiakova-McNally, Ali Nadjai, Jianping Zhang for their efforts in holding the workshop and keeping it on track.
Special thanks to the facilitators, Mostafa Hashemi, Hayley Corbett, Fredrick Akpomie, and Izaak Parris-Twyning and all our colleagues and friends in Fire Safety Engineering Research and Technology Centre (FireSERT), Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI), UL Research Institutes (ULRI), The Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE), Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), 5th International Fire Safety Symposium (IFireSS 2025), Fire Science and Engineering Conference (Interflam 2025), and National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) for their support in organizing and promoting the workshop and the ULRI for funding the InToxFIRE project.
The participants received an invitation to share their feedback on weaknesses and strengths of the workshop and its organizing team. This feedback is highly valuable for us in improving our future events and workshops. Together we can drive real change and provide invaluable impact.
We are planning InToxFIRE’s next workshop in 2026 in Ireland which is going to be in-person. We are assessing the possibilities to promote it to an hybrid event.
Stay tuned for more updates on the InToxFire project and future developments in fire protection research.
