Keynote Speakers

Asher Gehl

Asher Gehl is the Managing Director of Karagozian & Case in Australia with responsibility over the Asia Pacific Region. Asher is a Principal Member of the UK National Protective Security Authority (NPSA) Register of Security Engineers and Specialists (RSES) in addition to being a Singapore Government classified Competent Person (Blast) and a Chartered Professional Engineer. Asher has over 20 years of experience and exposure to explosive safety, counterterrorism and security and has successfully delivered numerous high-profile projects requiring design for blast, vehicular impact and progressive collapse across several sectors including Commercial and multi-purpose buildings, Transport Infrastructure, Aviation, Defence, Government, Mining and Civil Infrastructure. Over this time, he has developed a trusting working relationship with key Australian Government, Defence, Transport and Police stakeholders. Asher has been a long-standing IAPS member and is currently the Vice Chair of the Australian Chapter.

David Lecompte

Prof. Dr. Ir. David Lecompte is a Professor at the Royal Military Academy in Brussels and head of its Structural & Blast Engineering Department, specializing in structural engineering and explosion effects. He lectures on structural engineering and the effects of explosions on structures and his research activities mainly lie in the fields of blast effect mitigation, combined blast and fragment impact, explosive breaching and small scale explosive testing. Formerly responsible for military mobility and protection research (2012–2015) and an EU security sector reform advisor in the Democratic Republic of Congo (2016), he represents Belgium in the International Physical Security Forum and is active in NATO and European critical infrastructure networks. He also leads Praetorian Engineering, a firm dedicated to designing and assessing structural robustness against explosion and impact risks for sectors including finance, government, nuclear, and transport.

Eric Jacques

Eric Jacques, Ph.D., P.Eng., is the Thomas M. Murray Family Associate Professor in Structural Engineering & Materials at Virginia Tech and Director of the Thomas M. Murray Structural Engineering and Materials Laboratory. He is recognized for his work combining large-scale experiments and high-fidelity simulation to protect buildings and critical infrastructure from blast, impact, and other extreme loads. He leads Virginia Tech’s Shock Tube Research Facility – one of the few large-scale explosive-driven blast laboratories in the United States – and has directed major programs on energy release from fuel–air explosives, protecting infrastructure from UAS-delivered threats, and retrofitting deficient reinforced concrete structures with FRP to increase strength and reduce residual deformations. His team’s work with federal, state, and industry partners is redefining how critical infrastructure is assessed and retrofitted for extreme loading. He is equally committed to mentoring the next generation of protective-design engineers through immersive, experiment-driven education.

Francis T. S. Lok

Prof Lok retired from academia at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in February 2019. He set up a consultancy advisory office in Singapore and is currently in professional practice in UK and Singapore advising architects, consultants, project managers and contractors on protective security solutions, offering design/testing service expertise to comply with current local and international test standards in blast, ballistics, force entry, air-tightness tests, and vehicle crash tests on vehicle security barriers. He undertakes selective specialised consultancy projects on risk assessment, protective security engineering and security master security architecture/planning. He has been involved in the design and management of numerous full-scale field explosions tests, ballistics/fragmentation tests, forced entry tests, vehicle impact of walls/bollards/glazing façade/cable fence barriers, and conducted blast simulator tests since 1985. He has been actively engaged in full-scale field test planning and R&D in his entire career. He has also acted as an Expert Witness in a State Court.

Steeve Chung Kim Yuen

Steeve Chung Kim Yuen is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Cape Town and Director of the Blast Impact and Survivability Research Centre (BISRU). An NRF-rated researcher with over 30 years of experience in structural impact, he has worked on projects ranging from cricket batting performance to the response of structures to blast loads. His research combines material characterization, experimental work, and finite element simulations, focusing on structural survivability. Due to the cost and limitations of full-scale experiments, he emphasizes small-scale testing to study blast scenarios that mitigate high pressure or fragment damage. Recently, his work has addressed the effects of foreign objects in explosives to simulate improvised explosive devices, as well as buried and encased charges linked to landmines and confined blasts in urban settings—all aimed at reducing life-changing injuries and saving lives.