Professor Galea is the founding director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG) and the Centre for Safety, Resilience and Protective Security (CSRPS) of the University of Greenwich in London, where he has worked in Computational Fire Engineering (CFE) research since 1986.

Professor Ed Galea, originally from Melbourne, Australia, studied at Monash University (BSc Hons, DipEd) and the University of Newcastle, NSW (PhD). After graduating with a PhD in Astrophysics, he worked for the BHP Research Laboratory Melbourne before moving to the UK in 1985 to take up an appointment as a postdoctoral fellow at St Andrews University.

The Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG), part of the Centre for Safety, Resilience and Protective Security (CSRPS), develops the EXODUS suite of evacuation simulation software and the SMARTFIRE fire simulation software. He is the author of over 300 academic and professional publications and has successfully supervised 35 PhD students. He was the vice chair of the International Association of Fire Safety Science, 2014–2021, and has served on several standards committees concerned with fire and evacuation for organisations such as IMO, ISO, BSI, and the SFPE Task Group on Human Behaviour in Fire.

He has served on several UK Government committees concerned with civil defence. He has served on several and major inquiries and legal cases as an expert in fire and evacuation in several major public inquiries and legal cases, including the Paddington Rail Crash, the Swissair MD11 crash, and the Admiral Duncan Pub bombing and. He is currently an expert serving on the Grenfell Tower Fire Inquiry. He assisted the IMO in framing the passenger ship evacuation guidance documents MSC Circ 1033, 1238 and 1533. His work is applied to the building, aviation, maritime and rail industries. He is the director for the MSc By Research within the School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Greenwich and is a Visiting Professor at Ghent University Belgium and the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (HVL), Haugesund, Norway, where he teaches on Fire Safety Engineering MSc courses and supervises doctoral students.

Among his many awards and honours are, 2001 British Computer Society Gold Medal, 2002 Queen’s Anniversary prize, 2006 and 2018 Royal Aeronautical Society Gold Award; 2013 Royal Institution of Naval Architects Medal of Distinction, and the 2014 The Guardian University Award for Research Impact.