 Welcome to this episode of the Structural Engineering Channel podcast. A podcast focused on helping structural engineering professionals stay up-to-date on technical trends in the field and also help them to succeed in their careers and lives. I'm your co-host Alexis Clark. I work in Hilti's North American headquarters as the product manager of our chemical anchoring portfolio in the US and Canada. I'm a licensed professional engineer in Texas and I graduated with a degree in civil engineering from UT Austin. I'm your co-host Matt Bacartal. I'm a licensed engineer at DCI Engineers, practicing on structural projects in California with an undergraduate degree from Cal Poly Pomona and a master's degree in structural engineering from UC San Diego. In this episode, we talk to Professor Dr. Olivier Vesaut, Chief Executive Officer or CEO of Stelligence at Arcelor Metall. Olivier will be talking about fire in structural design as well as his nomination as CEO of the Stelligence Business Unit and how Stelligence can benefit the construction industry as we know it. Our sponsor for today's program is Giza Steel, a design software specifically created for structural steel connection design. Giza supports over 400 connection configurations in the sheer moment, vertical and horizontal bracing groups. Selected as an AISC modern steel construction hot product for the past two years, Giza continues to expand its connection library and add new tools that help users spend less time on connection design and produce concise and thorough design reports. You can try Giza today for free by going to www.GizaSteel.com and downloading the 15-day trial. Giza created by steel design professionals for steel design. Again, that's www.GizaSteel.com. We also want to let you know that the Engineering Management Institute recently launched yet another podcast, the Geotechnical Engineering Podcast, which can be found at geotechnicalengineeringpodcast.com. This podcast will be focused on helping geotechnical engineers stay up-to-date with technical trends in the field. The host is the award-winning geotechnical leader, Jared Green. He's a licensed professional engineer who has been practicing as a geotechnical engineer for the last 20 years. You can find all the episodes on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to your podcast, and you can request a guest and topic ideas at geotechnicalengineeringpodcast.com. Now let's jump into our conversation with Dr. Professor Olivier Versant. Olivier, welcome to the Structural Engineering Channel podcast. Thank you for this interview and welcome to all of you. Wonderful. Before we dive into the meat of today's topic, can you share with us a little bit more detail about what it is you do in your job at Arsalaam Metal? So today I'm the CEO of a branch of the group, which is called Stelligence. So this branch is regrouping the activities we have in the construction market in Europe and in South America. So more in detail, in fact, we are looking at increasing the use of steel in the construction market by advising the investors, the architect, building designers, builders to make the right choice and the right technical solution when they want to use steel in their building. So we advise them to choose the right product and then we look at the full supply of the different products of the group in the given region. That is really interesting. Do you guys spend any time with regulatory bodies as well? Yes, so we are significantly involved in the different regulation committees in the different countries. So in Europe, for example, you have the Eurocodes. So as you probably know, since now more than four years, Eurocodes are under revision. So we are revising with a large group of experts the different Eurocodes for all the material and or engineers and expert are significantly involved in this process to support the academic world and the regulators to settle properly the regulations. And also in the US, we are involved in many committees of AISC, which is dealing with steel design. Interesting. Very cool. Olivier, it looks like you got started in fire engineering in your career, right? Can you tell us a little more about that and how you got started in that? Yes, so in fact, I started my career in Arcelor Metal. It was not Arcelor Metal at this time. So it was Arcelor and I started as researcher in Luxembourg. So my main background is structural engineer. And I started to work in the research center to develop new products and new design methodologies using steel. And quite quickly, I was directed into the direction of fire engineering. You know, when we use steel, we have really often questions about fire how to resolve, how to design with fire. And I saw a quite big evolution in the way fire engineering is tackled by designer and also by regulators in the last two decades. So since 20 years, approximately now, people have started to work on what we call performance-based design. So in the regulation, you have the prescriptive design. So you use a prescriptive curve, the ISO curve, for example, for building to calculate the resistance. And then if you have a steel structure, really often you need to protect it and to put fire protection on the steel. If you have a concrete structure, you need to calculate the thickness of concrete that you need to cover the rebars. If you have wood, you need to calculate the speed of chiring of the wood to design the element. But when you go deeper in the thinking and you go with a design which is not based on the prescription, but based on the real performance, you can start to design to calculate what will be the fire in your building. And of course, from a building to another, it can be completely different. At the two extremes, you think about the swimming pool. You do a swimming pool. In the swimming pool, you have barely nothing to burn in it or a museum or a art gallery or something like this. The fire load density is really small. So if you have a fire, the fire will not be severe. If the building itself is not combustible, then the fire load is really small. So you have a fire, but it will be quite small. On the other hand, if you think about IKEA, so most of the people have already gone once in IKEA. And then when you go in the part where you go to take the furniture, you see you are in this big stock of wooden material. So if you have a fire there, everyone can feel that this fire will be far more severe than the one you have in the swimming pool. And performance-based design is coming from there. So we have started to look at what will be the fire that we have in the building we want to design. And then we structurally calculate the building to resist the fire. So from a safety point of view, at the end, people think that we want just when we do fire engineering, we want just to save money, but it's not true because doing fire engineering, we ask the right question. We look at the right thing and we calculate the building to survive to the fire that will occur. So some part of the building needs to be reinforced. So it's not magic. It's not because you calculate that you do nothing. It means that then as an engineer, you can really decide and make your engineering job and decide where you need to intelligently reinforce the protection, reinforce the building and where it's not necessary. So sometime in some area, you will put significantly more than what you would have put using a prescriptive approach. And in some other parts of the building, you will put less because you don't need. And that's what is good when you do that. You ask the right question. You think about the fire procedure you want to apply and you really think about what will happen in the building. When you use prescriptive rules, you do it in a sense blindly. You have OK. You have this curve. You apply it. You apply it element by element. And you think you have done a great job and that you have a safe building. That's not always true. If you pile elements and it has nothing to deal with the material you use. It's a matter of design. If you pile element, which have two hours, iso fire resistance. This does not mean at all that you will have a building which has two hours fire resistance. But often when people apply these prescriptive rules without thinking too much, it's what they do. They just look at each part of the building individually and then they put protection or they increase the thickness of concrete to cover the rebars or they increase the thickness of the wood element to have a longer theoretical duration. But they don't tackle at all the safety itself of the building. And that's what has been developed in the last 20 years, I want to say. And we see that in most of the European country today, it is applied as a daily business by engineering offices. So to calculate this real fire that can occur, to define fire scenarios, to validate them with the authorities, and then to design the building following this. Yeah, exactly what you're saying because at least in the projects that I've worked on, it still is prescriptive design but there's definitely, I know there's firms out there that do these performance-based design and it makes sense because like you were saying with prescriptive design, it's kind of cookie-cutter. It's fire-rating here, applied to everywhere for the most part. But even with the performance-based design, I think for the structural engineering industry, at least in the US and the West Coast, from my experience, I'd like to see it go that way because, like you were saying, Olivier, it is asking the right questions. As engineers, we should be asking the right questions. Is this how we want it to perform? Whether it's structure-wise or fire engineering-wise, it makes, I mean, to me, it makes perfect sense. Like, yeah, fire at the pool versus fire in a place where there's a lot of furniture, kind of intuitively, you can see that. But maybe with the code, just not like that, but with performance-based design, it really is optimizing the structure overall. I think everyone wins from that, you know, from the owner perspective, from safety perspective. So it's great that the fire engineering is going that way. And I know I'm seeing it more and more come up in the US. That's great. It is interesting because the European codes are much more sophisticated than ours are when it comes to fire design and even having a prescriptive base to work from. We just really don't even have that infrastructure in our regulatory framework. And I'm glad to hear that Matt echoes the same belief that I have, which is this is becoming more and more of a concern and more of an issue that we raise on especially high-profile buildings. I know that some of it may even be pushed by an insurance company who is looking to try and get the best bang for their buck earlier in the process of the building design. And I think this is really fascinating. So thank you for sharing those. I'm also really happy to hear you talk about IKEA because I have personal, like when I'm in an IKEA store, I haven't been one in a long time because the exit, I mean, this is more on, you know, the architect and whoever is laying out the floor plan, but they keep telling you they have fire exit signs everywhere and you can never escape the building. And I mean, you're literally in the best environment to have nothing but flames up all around you because everything is flammable. So I'm glad you brought that up from a structural engineering standpoint as well. Yeah, but they have, they have exits. They do. It means it means that, of course, they design in their showroom. They design it in the way that you need to follow a long path to go through. It's to see all the things. Yes, it makes total sense. In case of emergency, they have a lot of shortcuts. Yes. So because we already designed several IKEA and, in fact, they follow the regulation. You are never far from an exit. It's that you don't see it, but in case of emergency, you will see them because they are visible. They have all this lighting system and so on that will, that will guide you to the most, the closest safety exit. Yes, absolutely. I completely agree and I mostly just give IKEA a little bit of trouble because I feel like you can never find the exit of the store. Wonderful. So while we're on the topic of speaking about the different types of projects you've worked on, Olivier, can you kind of expand? What are some of the most unique projects you've done fire engineering on? So, in fact, when, so in 2002, when I joined, when I joined the group, we have started to be really active in what we call structural fire engineering. It means that you have the fire engineering, which is calculating the fire that will develop in the building. But then you have a discipline, which is structural fire engineering. It's to see our structure, which can be a composite structure. So it's not made from a unique material. It can be a combination of steel and concrete together, joint, not joint. So there is a discipline which is looking at how the structure will behave. And during several time we worked a lot on the development of finite element software able to work with structural fire engineering. So thermal mechanical behavior of steel and composite construction. And at this period, so this was, I would say, between around 2005, we were a steel company designing, doing a lot of fire engineering for the project we were selling. But the demand was growing so much that it was not our business to do that. We are a steel production company. We are not a engineering practice. So we were doing that because on the market, in continental Europe, not a lot of companies were able to do it. Of course, you have some giant company like Arup, which was really active on this, but on really large project. But our clients were smaller project, like parking lots, small offices and so on. And they didn't have the engineering practice of the size of Arup or Tertun Tomasetti or something like this. So we decided, okay, if we want to scale it up, we need to train the people. So we created at this time a network, I would say, of engineering offices that we trained. So we offered classes for free. So we organized classes of calculation of real fire, thermal mechanical calculation, finite element, and we trained many engineering offices to have on the market enough people to be able to do this. So we continue to advise engineering office, so on large project where the fire engineering is used. We continue to advise the different engineering. For example, Arup is a member of the network. London in an even tower, for example, was fire engineered, but fire engineering is not only calculating the real fire and looking at the structural response. Sometimes even with prescriptive rules, you can do fire engineering. When you do a building like the air on tower, you are not forced to put fire protection everywhere. So there is a physical behavior, which is called membrane action, which has been, I would say, the father of this is Professor Colin Bailey. He was at this time at the University of Manchester, and he worked on a model where you can, you start to rely on the membrane action of the composite slab when you have a composite structure. And it means that you can let your secondary steel element without any protection. So you fire protect the beam which are connecting the column and all the secondary elements, you don't protect them. And you rely on the membrane action of the concrete slab. When we look at air on tower, it has been done like this. But globally, you over design a bit. The fire protection of the beam connecting the column and you don't protect the other. So at the end, you increase the level of safety of the building. And you decrease the cost for the for the final user. So Aaron tower has been calculated like this. The chart has been calculated like this. Nearly all the parking lots. So open car parks. So it's a car park at the supermarket and so on in France in Belgium in Luxembourg. They are now totally fire engineered. So on this one, you don't have any fire protection. It does not mean that you do nothing. Once again, it's not magic. You need to put some compensation to put a bit more rebars in the slab to strengthen some elements. But at the end, you have no fire protection. So in terms of maintenance, as the structure are subjected to natural weather, because they are open, it's far better because from maintenance point of view, it's easier to maintain. So I had a question kind of related to the business of that. So it looks like you're saying that there was a demand for fire engineering. And was that kind of being driven by the codes? Or was it mostly by the owners looking to save cost on the building and increase the safety of the building? Or is it kind of a both? I think it's a kind of both. It means you it's always difficult to to make building which are not in line with the codes. So of course, when we were thinking a really great example is the open carparks in France. So if we take 15 years ago, all these carparks were made from concrete because regulation was requesting 90 minutes fire resistance. And as the structure were outside, you cannot spray. You cannot. So it was complicated. So all of them were were made in concrete. But from an architectural point of view, they had some weaknesses. It means with concrete to me to make really large clear span. It's quite complicated when you do this car park from steel. You have 15 meter span clear. It means that you have two cars and the road and you don't have any pillars. It means to park the car. It's far easy. Think about when you go to the supermarket and when you try to put your car and and when you have this, this column, which is which is blocking you to open the door, which is blocking you to to park the car when when when you design a steel car park. You don't have this. It's totally free to park. And they saw in Germany, where the regulation was less severe. There, all the car parks were in steel, mainly because of this of this reason. So we worked a lot with the French regulator not to ask them to decrease this 90 minutes because that's, I would say it's a safety level. It's, it's their choice to impose a safety level, but to allow designers to calculate the real fire that will occur. It means that beginning of the year 2000 and even a bit before a lot of research has been made at European level where we have burned a lot of cars. Measuring the power that that's called measuring the way the fire is moving from one car to the other and developing models to allow designer to simply, I want to say, calculate what will be the impact of the fire on the structure. And then a game by compensation. It means it's not a steel structure. It's a composite. It means the the beams are are connected mechanically on the with the floors, which are in concrete. You have a quite strong reinforcing mesh in the in the concrete slab because just above one car burning. You will have 900 degree. That's the temperature of the flame. It's it's about 900 degrees. So with this temperature and the power of the car, the steel beam, which is just under the car burning. We lose its property. So you need to to to distribute the forces somewhere else. And that's again come from the this Professor Bailey, Colin Bailey method on the membrane is that we use this effect to redistribute the load on other area of the structure where the temperature is lower. And like that we can design car park without protection. And it was not enough to demonstrate it. So what has been done is that I think that was also early 2002 or 2003 something like this. We built a car park. And we burned it. So it means we came with cars and we instrument everything of course, and we burned the car to demonstrate on a scale one one that it will not fail. And this is how it changed the approach of the regulator. It didn't decrease the safety level, but they allow people to go performance based because we demonstrated that it reached the same level of safety even better than than simply applying prescriptive rules. That's one of the beauties of performance based design and having the flexibility to go out and do tests to prove that there are other innovative systems outside of just a standard material or composite system that we're used to using that's allowed in the code. So I love that you guys did that and to do those kind of tests and have that kind of funding to be able to support that test work in the early 2000s is nothing to sneeze at. I do want to make one quick disclaimer for our audiences who are in North America that when the living a speaks about 900 degrees that's in Celsius. Yes, so we're looking at 1650 degrees Fahrenheit, which is, you know, a little toasty. Hey, you're perfectly fine. I guilty has an entire group that does nothing but fire protection with with fire stop products. So I hear about these temperatures all the time and my European colleagues speak to me and Celsius most of the time but I know that many of our listeners are probably a Fahrenheit forward. Wonderful. I was, I was going to jump into. I don't know if it ties into it but with. Could you go into Steligence. Can you talk a little more about that and what you do there and what's still what Steligence is. Yeah, so in fact the, the Steligence initiative, it popped up in your mind. It was already 2015. So at this time, I was requested to take over a research and development of the arsenal metal group for the construction part. And we started to look at research in construction from another perspective. Since ever we are a steel producer. So we are constantly developing new product new methodologies and so on but we were always looking at our development strategy towards the eyes of our clients. So our clients are the people who are buying us the steam. So mainly they are the people who are building. So they are the builders. So we were always looking at construction market towards the, the eyes of the builders. But in fact, in the construction market, there are many, many other actors that have the power to decide about which material will be used and which have also dramatic advantages to use steel. So we have started the experience by interviewing many, many stakeholders. So we had a lot of interview with investors, building owners, architect, urban planners, construction planners, construction company, building users, administration, all these, all these people which play a role. I want to say in the, in the construction chain and we have also looked at how the market was organized. So first things we saw that the market and the organization around construction was very fragmented. So if I think from a design perspective, you have one team which is doing the structural design. You have another team which is doing the architectural choices. You have a third team which is taking care of the envelope and the facade. You have a fourth team which is taking care about the energy, ventilation, air quality, air conditioning. And perhaps at the end you have even another team which takes into account the foundation who calculate the foundation of the building. And the building is after the agglomeration of all these parts that are plugged together. Of course we have in the last decade developed a lot of BIM. A lot of engineering firms and architectural firm, they are using BIM. So BIM help us to check if the building is buildable. It means when we put all these things together, we can see if they match. If on the job side we will be able to put them together. But it does not mean that with this you can optimize anything. So each of these groups was optimizing its own part. And at the end the building was the sum, I would say the assembly of all these optimum. And in mathematics, in many disciplines, the sum of optimum is really rarely the optimum. You need always to sacrifice somewhere to optimize the entire body. And it's how everything started. We said okay, we need to stop thinking about our product. We need to think about the building. And try to find a methodology which is not optimizing the elements, but something which is optimizing the building. Then optimization, what does it mean? If you think and you speak with an investor, of course money, so budget and speed will be the key driver. But when you speak with a building user, flexibility of the building is one key driver. If you think with a lot of people in Europe, administration, regulators, environmental footprint, is also one optimization criteria. If you discuss with urban planners and administration, traffic jam. And impact of the construction on the urban environment and on the traffic all around is a key point. So you had many ways to optimize a structure. So we decided, okay, we need to develop a method that will allow us to optimize not an element, but a building, and that will reconcile all these criteria. So with external experts, universities, laboratories, we took their support to develop a method which is based, we have 17 KPI. We have three pillars, economic, environmental and social. And we are able to assess the building. And when you design the choices that you will do on your building. So do I use short span? This will give points in a sense advantage on some of the criteria, but will kill other. If I use long span, it can cost perhaps a bit more, but you will have a lot of advantages in other parts. So you can at the design stage see the impact that a simple choice can have on your building. So that was the basic ID. And it totally changed our relationship with investors, for example. In the past, we are a steel producer. You go to discuss with an investor about steel. What does he care? He does not care at all about my steel product. But today I go and I speak about buildings. And I can discuss with him about for his dedicated building. What is the best solution we can propose? And what are the outcome of this? The advantages for him? And when you talk about building, you speak the same language. And then you can start to have a meaningful conversation. Absolutely. I think it's so fascinating that I always work with European colleagues and the European framework and the entire building system and the team that comes together is so much more complex than what we deal with in North America. And I hope that any listeners who are especially younger in their tenure as a structural engineer in their career take some of these things to heart because the North American codes do eventually follow European trends, even if it's 10 to 15 years behind. And many of these complexities are going to become more and more important in the way that we design and cultivate buildings. I think it's really interesting you mentioned earlier. You want the entire building to be optimized, but to optimize the system does not mean to optimize the parts. It has to be an entire system solution that complements each other. And I think as we continue to see environmental regulations become more important in the building environments that we shape and that we design, we're going to see greater complexities when we have more educated inspectors, when we have higher expectations of education levels and training levels for everyone involved in the building process. It's going to become more complex for us, which is exciting because that should be a new challenge. But I think many of our listeners who may have just heard that laundry list of different things you have to balance in the projects that you work on, the one that probably stuck out to most North Americans is going to be the cost effectiveness. My owner wants to spend the least amount of money and get things done in the least amount of time. And feed and price often come there. Maybe that's the two-part balance that we're mostly dealing with here in North America. Whereas you're dealing with much more, I would say, long-term thinking when we talk about the sustainability of the environmental piece as well as the social piece. I think that those are two aspects that the North American market is going to have to become sharper on in order to have more sustainable and long-term buildings that work for the owner in the long term rather than the short term. So I think that was really fantastic that you share all of those nuances with us because we're just really not as burdened by them currently, or challenged by them, I guess I would say. It's not so much a burden as it's a new design challenge. But we are also really active in North America and in USA. If you look at the skyline of New York, most of the building are using pillars which are coming from Luxembourg. So it's not known by many of the structural engineers in the US, but in most of your buildings, the column, the steel column, they come from Luxembourg. I had no idea. So the old one and the new ones. So Freedom Tower, the pillars of the basement and the pillars of the first floor. I don't remember how many. They were rolled in Luxembourg because we are able to do, we call them jumbo sections. So it's sections in steel which are really massive in high string steel and which have unique weldability properties. So you can weld them together nearly without pre-eating because they are not coming from a steel with a lot of alloy. It's a quench and sulfur tempering steel. So to say it easily, if you look at a blacksmith in the middle age, when he was forging the sword, he was hammering it and then he was putting it in the water. It was not only to cool it down. It was to cool it down quickly. Because at really high temperature, steel has one molecular organization. And when it cooled down, when it go under 700 degree, it changed. But if you cool it down quickly, you can keep the molecular organization of high temperature at lower temperature. So you can create high string steel without putting any alloy in it. And we do the same at a larger scale because it's really massive element of steel. But we quench it and we can reach really high strength until grade 80 without nearly any alloy in it. Like that you can easily weld it. And it's why many American steel fabricators are using this type of steel for the tool buildings. That makes so much sense. It's been a while since we've taken a materials course. That's wonderful. So thank you so much for that really in-depth conversation about how you guys are really shaping the building environment there. I want to pivot really quickly. I know that we were talking about intelligence and some of the work that you do. When did you become nominated as CEO? And how did you get to that point? Because I know there's a lot of listeners who may have an entrepreneurial spirit and may see for themselves a path in business leadership. And it's not common that we hear a structural engineer is achieving the title of CEO. Yeah, that in our metal it's quite rare because I would say we are not so many structural engineer in a steel company because of the basis. We are a steel producer or technical specialist. They are often a metallurgist, mechanical engineer, electrical engineers. But I would say I took over the R&D long product in 2015. Before me, at this position, it was always a metallurgist. So at this type of position, they always use technical people, but they use metallurgists because it was, I would say, the biggest amount of people they had is metallurgists. But they wanted a fresh. So Greg Ludkovski, which was my head, so he was vice president of R&D for the group, wanted someone looking from another highs, from the high of the user, from the high of the builder, from the high of someone with designing buildings. So we created all this intelligence philosophy starting from research and development and looking at another way to develop product, another way to develop solution, another way to develop the market. And when we launched the branding in 2018, it was June 2018, we launched the branding intelligence in Europe by putting on the market structural engineers, architect that will help the community and the designer to apply the methodology. And develop, I would say, their building with our solution. We saw quickly that we needed also to reorganize ourselves from a sales and marketing point of view. Because as the market, we were organizing in product line. So a mill is producing a product and was marketing this product. And in the intelligence philosophy, we look at the building as a holistic element. It means that we needed also to be able to deliver the entire product range the group is producing at one place that will also ease the relationship with the with the client. And when we created the division, they asked me to take it over. It was a surprise, I would say for me, I'm quite young for this type of position. But I think I'm I'm fascinated by by by what I what I do. It was something which was really new, a new way of of doing things. So I think they want it also to to look at someone which is a which is not doing things as usual, because I look always from from another angle. And as I'm as I'm structural engineer, I will, I will not think like someone coming from metallurgy or from finance. So I think it's why it's why they requested me to to do this. And yeah, I really enjoy it, because also for me, it's everything was new. It was someone really based on the on the technical things and on the development. And now I need to strengthen, I would say my my skills in organization finance and production, but it's it's really enjoying. That's awesome. And I think that's a great a great little tidbit of advice to bring home. Many of us probably feel that a role or as an exciting opportunity as big as CEO is out of reach at least for several decades. And I think that there's something to be said for having passion and the desire to think outside the box that makes younger candidates more attractive than they ever have been to take on these leadership roles because they're not afraid to try something new. They have the the the enthusiasm behind them to take it on and embrace this new challenge. That's awesome. So Olivier, what advice can you give to our listeners about the profession that you've chosen? And what gets you excited about fire engineering? I would say when I started in in our center, so in 2002, I was fresh from school, so I graduated and and it was it was my first job. So I must tell you, when when I arrived there, I arrived with more interrogation than answer. So it means I will. I will do research. I knew I'm not a metallurgist. So it was quite not natural for a structural engineer to join a steel production company as a researcher. I really discover that the research on the way we are applying material, and this is not only linked to steel, it's linked to any construction material, the leverage you have to improve things. And when I say improve, it can be with any KPI, it can be on the cost, it can be on the safety, it can be on the sustainability, the leverage you have to improve the status quo is even bigger. When you deep dive the way you use material, then the way you do new material, of course you need to do both, but you have a big leverage and fire, it came, I would say by hazard, in a sense that my head of departments, my first mentor, he was specialist in fire engineering, and he just took over the position as head of department, and his former head of department was Professor Schleich, who was also a specialist in fire engineering. So when I arrived, it was a place to take, in a sense that he was becoming the head of the department, so he had less time to devote to the science and to the fire engineering. So he told me, okay, you will do fire engineering. And I said, okay, I don't know anything in fire engineering. I heard the name before, and I had a bit of touch at university, but that's all. And what he teach me, I had also a lot of help for the structural fire engineering community is a kind of family. The amount of people which are really knowledgeable in this field, we are just a few. So after some years, you know everyone nearly from all over the world, because you have a lot of people which are doing fire engineering. It means the smoke exhaust system, these type of fire development and so on, but structural fire engineering. It's a really small world. So I was quite quickly accepted by the international science community in fire engineering and many big professors helped me, teach me. Then, during the time I was working in our sort of middle I made a PhD. So, at the same time I was working on the evening and the weekend I started a PhD in fire engineering. And that's how the adventure started. I think the advice to the people is that they must not be afraid about new things. It's not because it's new that it's bad. Of course, when it's new it's difficult, always, because you are in the unknown. But for me, I really like to work in the unknown, because when you start to know, it starts to be boring. So, you need always to go into the unknown and it was the way with the fire engineering and now it's the same with my new position. When I took over, I didn't knew if I'm able to do all this. But you discover, you do, you need to like what you do. It's always what I tell myself the morning. If I don't like to go at the office, then why would I go? Of course, it's not each day easy. Then don't believe this. You have bad days, you have bad periods, but globally you need to enjoy. And when you enjoy and when you can transmit this joy to the people who are working around you, your teams, your peers, your boss, when you can transmit this energy, then everything is easier. I love that. I think the word that keeps coming to my mind as I'm listening to you talk about this is courage. In French, coeur is heart. And it sounds like you have a lot of heart and enjoyment and love for the work that you do. But I think the other big takeaway that I'm taking away from this is that structural engineers in order to embrace this unknown need to have courage and the bravery to try something new and not be the expert, because I think a lot of us like being the technical knowledge. We like having that technical knowledge and being able to show our expertise and our intelligence and our creativity in the way we solve things. But as the world continues to use different materials and experience with the experiment with different things and as new systems come about, we need to be brave and have courage to pursue these new opportunities and feel comfortable in the unknown and not be the expert every single time. That's fantastic information. For me, at least, that was a great piece of advice. I really appreciate your mindset on saying yes to new things, fire engineer. I'm not sure what that is, but I'll figure it out, saying yes to that opportunity. And yeah, test it out and see if you like it. I think that's great advice. And I think you're a great example of someone that went into research and development and still found a path in industry because I think a lot of students think if they go the research route, you're going to be stuck in academic institution. You can apply this research and development into the actual industry. So I think that's great advice and I think it's such a great example for any engineers that want to get into fire engineering or any new aspects of engineering that may not be too known, but it really has the benefits and the leverage that you were talking about. So Olivier, I just wanted to thank you for coming on. I definitely learned a lot about fire engineering and learning a lot from you. And I know our listeners did too, so thanks a lot for that. And if they have questions or if they need advice or support for fire engineering, they can contact us. It's a intelligence at ArseroMetal.com and we have four people which are there to support them in their design. If they have technical questions about fire or anything else, we can support them. Wonderful. And we'll make sure that our audience has that link in our show notes to this episode. Thank you Olivier for joining us. Thank you very much. We hope you enjoyed the episode today. We would love to hear your feedback, comments and or questions. To leave them, please visit structuralengineeringchannel.com. There you'll find a summary of the key points discussed in today's episode as well as links to any of the resources, websites or books mentioned. Don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcast. Until next time, we wish you the best in all of your structural engineering endeavors.