Rickard Hansen (PhD, MSc) is a researcher and a fire protection engineer, specialised in fire behaviour and fire safety in underground hard rock mines. In 2015 he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on heat release rates of mining vehicles in underground hard rock mines. During his doctoral studies he conducted a number of full-scale fire experiments on mining vehicles in an underground mine. He has published a large number of papers and reports on the fire behaviour in underground hard rock mines. His research interests are fire dynamics in underground mines, suppression of fires in underground mines, fire and rescue operations underground, smoke spread in underground mines and ignition of solid materials. During 2017 he visited SMI, conducting research on the fire suppression in underground mines. He is currently a fire expert at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), specialising in fire and rescue operations as well as fire safety in underground structures/mines.

Besides his research activities he has more than 25 years of experience as a fire officer as well as a fire protection engineer. A majority of those years have been spent on fire and rescue in underground mines as well as the fire safety design of underground mines in a number of projects in northwestern Europe.

Rickard also holds a MSc degree in Fire Protection Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (USA), a BSc degree in Fire Safety Engineering from Lund University (Sweden) and a MSc degree in Mathematical Modelling from Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden).