Keynote - Professor Aoife Hunt MBE

Title and abstract to follow.

Aoife is a Professor of Crowd Safety and Security Science at the University of Greenwich. She also serves on the leadership team for M34Impact, an ambitious new project funded by the Expanding Excellence in England (E3) fund of Research England. M34Impact brings together and expands world-leading research from the Centre for Safety, Resilience and Protective Security (CSRPS) and the Computational Science and Engineering Group (CSEG). Aoife’s focus is on business development and partnership activity for the project, and on driving new high-impact research and innovation to fast-track growth in multi-disciplinary and multi-scale modelling expertise. 

Aoife is a leading specialist in people movement, crowd dynamics and emergency evacuation strategies. She has over 17 years’ experience in simulating human behaviour and pedestrian dynamics and has led high profile projects across the globe, advising on all aspects of people movement and behaviour in buildings, hospitals, stadia and events, the public realm, and transport systems. She has delivered more than 80 projects in pedestrian and evacuation planning, contributing to capacity assessments, design reviews, event and concert planning, vertical circulation assessments, static and dynamic crowd modelling, flow and density analysis, and alternative use assessments. She leads research projects to advance the safety and security of crowded places, specialising in human behaviour in emergencies and pedestrian movement through security overlays, including through hostile vehicle mitigation (HVM) barriers, and search and screening checkpoints. She is a specialist in designing CCTV studies of human behaviour and led the world’s largest study into virus transmission risk behaviours in crowded places during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As an industry leader, Aoife is regularly consulted on national and international guidance documents such as the Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds (Green Guide), CIBSE Guide D, and PAS 127, and is currently co-authoring the chapter on evacuation modelling in the SFPE Fire Engineering handbook. 

She is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland and delivers lectures at several academic institutions. She has presented at over 100 conferences and events, holds memberships and committee roles across the industry and in 2023 was awarded an MBE for her services to the COVID-19 response.