Marc Fehling graduated with a master’s degree in physics from the Ruhr University Bochum in the field of theoretical plasma physics. Currently, he switched to fire safety science for his PhD. Since the simulation of fire and smoke spread in large geometries is an expensive task, he is working on parallel hp-adaptive finite element methods that promise to speed up multi-scale simulations significantly. A reference implementation follows in the open-source library ‘deal.II’, with whose developers he works closely.