Meet the Team: Dr Luis Guarín

We are pleased to introduce Dr Luis Guarín, Principal Naval Architect based in Brookes Bell’s Houston office. With more than two decades’ experience in ship safety, design and performance, Luis supports clients across the Americas and beyond with clear, evidence-based advice on complex technical and regulatory matters.

Luis joined Brookes Bell in 2011 following the firm’s merger with Safety at Sea Ltd, where he had been focused on passenger-ship safety, damaged stability and risk assessment.

“I did my PhD at the University of Strathclyde, at which point our research group evolved into a consultancy,” he recalls. “When we merged with Brookes Bell I did not jump straight into their traditional casework, I carried on with risk-based design and first-principles analysis for the large passenger vessels we were helping to verify.” In 2022 he relocated to the United States to work with Brookes Bell’s US team, supporting projects across major shipping hubs.

His technical focus spans seakeeping and stability, structural assessment, fire safety and evacuation analysis, along with the evaluation of alternative designs and arrangements. In his role, Luis has delivered marine risk assessments for berths and terminals, ensuring that operational innovation is underpinned by robust safety cases and compliance with statutory and class requirements.

“What we bring is strong numerical and analysis capability, which fits naturally alongside colleagues with deep sea-going and engineering experience,” says Luis. “That combination works well for investigations, litigation and dispute support.”

While Luis’s portfolio is wide-ranging, a lot of his work is focused on safety. He has managed ship safety verification, including damaged ship survivability and fire risk assessment, conducted damaged-ship stability model tests and upgrades for ro-ro passenger ships to meet the Stockholm Agreement, performed safe-return-to-port verification for cruise vessels, and undertaken passenger-comfort seakeeping studies. He has completed evacuation analyses for more than 30 passenger ships and supported escape, evacuation and rescue studies for large offshore units.

“Most of my work has been about safety rather than pure performance,” he explains. “Understanding design factors, risk contributors and the chain of events that can lead to an incident is essential. A broad view helps you integrate many disciplines into one coherent answer to why something happened.”

That safety focus was forged early on in his career. “When I arrived at Strathclyde, it was a few years after the MS ESTONIA and MS HERALD OF FREE ENTERPRISE disasters,” he says. “There was intense European research on damage stability for ferries, and later the cruise sector needed parallel safety verification for very large ships. We built first-principles tools and simulations to test concepts beyond prescriptive rules.”

The team’s work also fed into safe-return-to-port thinking. “On a cruise ship you can lose half your power-generation capacity while having to keep essential systems available, such as air conditioning, water and sanitation for thousands of people, while you make your way to port. Ensuring there is a plan of action to keep passengers and crew safe during times of crisis is key for modern shipping,” he notes.

Field attendances form an important part of his role. Luis has carried out ship damage surveys, participated in wreck-removal operations, investigated structural failures and navigational incidents, and advised on disputes requiring expert technical opinion. He provides evidence in legal proceedings, combining computational analysis, model testing and first-principles engineering to support clear, defensible findings.

Luis’s academic path is as international as his casework. He studied naval architecture at Gdańsk University of Technology in Poland, noting, “I moved to Poland at 17, learned the language and completed both my undergraduate and my masters,” he says. He later completed his PhD at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, developing a probabilistic risk model for green-seas loads on bulk carriers in extreme weather, and remained as a Research Fellow delivering EU-funded ship-safety research.

His published work centres on risk-based design and Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) studies, with notable contributions to bulk carrier safety. His PhD examined design standards for hatch cover design, undertaken in the wake of the sinking of the M/V DERBYSHIRE on behalf of the UK DETR/MCA, and elements of this research were discussed at the IMO’s Maritime Safety Committee (MSC 71 and MSC 72). He carried out FSA studies on behalf of the Hellenic Minister of Mercantile Marine, leading to the IMO deciding at MSC 78 not to mandate double side skin construction on bulk carriers. “I published to share methods that practitioners can use, and to ensure our research made a practical contribution to safety,” he notes.

Asked what matters most in his Brookes Bell work, Luis is clear. “No one knows everything,” he says. “The value is integrating many experts and many strands of evidence, design and operational, into a single safety assessment. That is how you give clients answers they can rely on.”