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Contributors
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Christine Pongratz, PE
Christine Pongratz is currently a Senior Fire Protection Engineer in Los Angeles, California. She has worked for Jensen Hughes for two years, and prior to this she worked in the London, Boston, and Los Angeles office for Arup. Christine studied Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland and has a significant technical understanding in subjects ranging from enclosure fire dynamics, smoke management, human behavior in fire, suppression system design, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), Wildland Urban Interface fires, risk mitigation and resilience strategy. With over 8 years of global experience in Fire and Life Safety consulting, Christine enjoys specializing in smoke control design to inform holistic design strategies on a range of projects worldwide.
Christine has worked on projects spanning a variety of sectors, including healthcare, residential, rail, education, sports, arts & culture, retail, office, and informal settlements. A project highlight for her was working on the Lusail Stadium Fire Strategy with Arup London from 2015-2017. Christine assisted in producing the fire safety strategy for the main stadium of the 2022 Football World Cup and delivered a complex fire and smoke model to optimize the smoke exhaust system in the 40 ºC summer climate of Qatar.
Christine completed her M.S. thesis using Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) software, to study the effects of increased make-up air velocities on the entrainment rate and smoke layer height within atria. The restriction on make-up air velocity in atria, in line with NFPA 92 Smoke Control Systems, is contested amongst architects and engineers. The research derived an equation allowing for an alternative solution and has been incorporated as appendix information in the 2021 edition of NFPA 92.
Christine enjoys sharing her knowledge and experience and has presented at various Fire Engineering conferences over her career and co-taught the online Graduate Smoke Management Course for the University of Maryland in 2018. She has guest lectured for numerous Architecture and Engineering Universities to introduce fire engineering concepts and the complexities of performance-based design solutions.