Gollner Fire, Inc.

Welcome to GollnerFire, Inc. We provide consulting services related to fire and combustion phenomena, primarily focused on fire safety and wildland fire related issues. Some past work has included:

  • Fire Cause and Origin Investigation
  • Forensic Reconstruction of Fires
  • Safety and Risk Assessment
  • Design of Wildland-Urban Interface Communities
  • Collaborative project design with Architects and Planners
  • Risk-Assessment in Wildland Fire related to Insurance and Utility concerns

The corporation is led by Dr. Michael J. Gollner, a leading international expert in fire. He has assisted attorneys, power utilities, and other clients by providing technical expertise to understand complex fire phenomena. He has testified as an expert witness to the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Environment and served on technical panels addressing wildfire policy at the state and national level.

Contact Dr. Gollner

Prof. Gollner’s Academic Research Group has moved!

The Gollner Fire Research Group, led by Associate Professor Michael J. Gollner moved in January 2020 from the University of Maryland to the University of California, Berkeley and is now rebranded the Berkeley Fire Research Lab.

About Dr. Gollner:

Dr. Michael Gollner is President and CEO of Gollner Fire, Inc. He is also an Associate Professor and Deb Faculty Fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously an Associate Professor of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD from 2012-2019. Dr. Gollner studies how fires ignite and spread within the wildland-urban interface (WUI), the physics and dynamics of wildland fire spread, the processes by which structures ignite from embers, and emissions and associated health effects from wildfire smoke. Highlights from this work include discovering new physical mechanisms of wildfire spread, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and authoring the two leading reviews on how fires spread into and within communities in Fire Technology and Progress in Energy and Combustion Science. This research has been funded by the US Forest Service, the Department of the Interior, the Joint Fire Science Program, the National Science Foundation, the National Fire Protection Association, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the California Air Resources Board, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the National Institutes of Health, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.  Dr. Gollner has authored 75 peer-reviewed publications in leading international journals and over a hundred other presentations, articles, and reports related to these topics.

Dr. Gollner has served as the Treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors for the International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF), Chair of the Research Advisory Board of the National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA) Fire Protection Research Foundation, and as a member of the Management Committee of the International Association for Fire Safety Science. He has also been a member of a Technical Review Committee (TRC) for CAL FIRE to review and provide comments to the State of California on its impending revised model for Fire Hazard Severity Zones (FHSZ). He serves as Associate Editor for the journal Fire Technology and is on boards for Fire Safety Journal and the International Journal of Wildland Fire. He has been awarded the NSF CAREER award, Tsuji Early Career Award by the Combustion Institute, Proulx Early Career Award in Fire Safety Science, the Early Career Award in Fire Science by the International Association of Wildland Fire, and the Fire Protection Research Foundation Medal.

Contact Dr. Gollner