Thomas Roche (Assoc)

Thomas Roche is a PhD Candidate (Mechanical Engineering) at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) where he is advised by Dr. Fernando Raffan-Montoya and Dr. Stanislav Stoiliarov. His PhD work is a continuation of his Master’s in Fire Protection Engineering where he investigated the use of the Milligram-Scale Flame Calorimeter (MFC) for fabric flammability testing.

Thomas is also a part-time researcher with the Flammability Reduction Group in the NIST Fire Research Division (FRD). His work at NIST is focused on restoring the Thermal Protective Performance (TPP) apparatus back to full operational capacity and upgrading its capabilities for data and video recording. Thomas’s collaboration at NIST extends his PhD work to assess the potential correlation between thermal performance of fabrics when measured at multiple scales (i.e., from the milligram-scale tests in the MCC and gram-scale tests in the TPP).