Jonathan Hodges

Background

About Jonathan Hodges

Dr. Hodges leads a research group in the Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation Division at Jensen Hughes which focuses on the intersection of risk assessment, computational modeling, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. He has eight years of expertise in the areas of fire dynamics, computational modeling, risk assessment, and machine learning. In this time, he has worked on countless commercial fire safety assessments, participated in several related industry task groups, and conducted state-of-the-art research in the field. In his current role as Service Line Leader in Advanced Modeling, he is in charge of overseeing technical quality in modeling efforts across Jensen Hughes. Dr. Hodges is also a contributor to the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) source code, including development of a new pyrolysis model designed to improve flame spread predictions in post-flashover fires. He also contributes new verification and validation studies to the software repositories and updates the corresponding documentation. He actively supports discussions on best practices in the use of FDS in fire safety engineering in the user discussion forums. He is also the primary developer of the publicly available pyfdstools post-processing toolkit for analysis of FDS software predictions. Dr. Hodges has experience using the US Forestry Service fire behavior modeling tools, such as FARSITE, FlamMap, and BehavePlus as well as detailed fire modeling tools such as FDS, Fluent, and OpenFOAM, and coupled atmosphere-wildfire behavior tools such as WRF-SFIRE. In addition to commercial fire modeling packages, he has experience developing custom solutions using C/C++, Python, Fortran, and Matlab. Jonathan has co-authored over 40 technical publications in journals, book chapters, conferences, and research reports.