Scholarships

2024 IAWF Scholarship Recipients

We are pleased to share the 2024 scholarships recipients

Marie Claire Aravena Acuña
Ph.D. student in the Doctoral Program of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences,
National University of La Plata (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, UNLP), Argentina.

Marie Claire studied for a bachelor’s degree in Forestry Science and Nature Conservation, and later earned her qualification as a Forestry Engineer from the University of Chile in 2019. After graduation, she worked as a research and teaching assistant at the Department of Silviculture and Nature Conservation at the University of Chile, where she participated in various GIS and fieldwork projects, relating to fire, drought and anthropogenic impacts in central Chile.

She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the School of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences at the National University of La Plata. She was awarded a scholarship from the Argentine government, enabling her to relocate to Argentine Patagonia and conduct her research at the Austral Center of Scientific Research (CADIC) of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) in Ushuaia. There, she is collecting field data, performing laboratory work, and conducting statistical analyses to investigate the effects of wildfires on Sphagnum peatlands in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. Her research aims to assess changes in the functional ecology of wildfire-damaged peatlands and their role as carbon sinks. This work is fundamental to understanding the impacts of wildfire on local forests and peatlands, which is necessary for their conservation and restoration.

Marie Claire’s specialties and interests include fire ecology, remote sensing, and spatial analysis using GIS and Google Earth Engine (GEE) tools. She is also committed to ecological conservation and communicating of scientific knowledge to the community.

Marie Claire is grateful to the international wildfire community, through the IAWF, for supporting her research work on Patagonian peatlands and forests.

Harrison Raine, MSc Student
Masters of City Planning, Masters of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
University of California, Berkeley

Harrison began his wildfire research and work as a Forestry Technician for the US Forest Service in 2016. Since then, he spent six fire seasons with the USFS, graduated from Colorado College with a B.A. in Organismal Biology and Ecology, and conducted an international Thomas J Watson Fellowship focused on the socio-ecological balance of wildfires. Currently a dual masters student at UC Berkeley in City Planning and Landscape Architecture, Harrison’s research focuses on the “urban” side of the wildland-urban interface. His thesis work explores wildfire risk within mobile home parks, a critical form of affordable housing in the American West with elevated physical and social vulnerability to wildfire loss. This work identifies that homes in mobile home parks experience disproportionate rates of wildfire loss compared to other housing types in California’s recent wildfire seasons. He is grateful to IAWF for their support in this work. Beyond school, Harrison intends to work on projects that improve wildfire resiliency within the wildland-urban interface.

2023 IAWF Scholarship Recipients

We are pleased to share the 2023 scholarships recipients

Elise Brown-Dussault, MSc Student in Integrative Biology, Wilfrid Laurier University

Elise was introduced to boreal burns in 2019, when she took her first field job assisting a master’s student on the Chilcotin Plateau in Central British Columbia. After her first soot-coated summer, she found her interests continuing to gravitate towards boreal wildfires and forest dynamics. As a resident of Canada’s Yukon Territory, she sees first-hand the complex socioenvironmental effects of wildfire in the north. She started a master’s with the Forest Ecology Research Group at Wilfrid Laurier University in 2022, hoping to contribute to climate change resilience in the northern boreal. Her research looks at caribou lichen transplantation as a method of accelerating caribou winter habitat regeneration, specifically seeking ideal transplant conditions for caribou lichen in boreal burns. She conducts research on the lands of Ka’a’gee Tu, Deh Gah Got’ie First Nations, and Tłı̨chǫ nation in the Northwest Territories.

Stella Mosher, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Geography, University of Utah

Stella received her BS in Natural Sciences, with an emphasis in Geology from the University of Puget Sound, and her MS in Geology from the University of Cincinnati, before choosing to pursue paleoecology and paleofire research for her Ph.D. She has a deep interest in understanding how climate and people have modified Earth systems, and specifically how changes in fire activity have shaped (and continue to shape) our landscapes and communities.

Stella’s current research is focused on reconstructing fire histories over millennia in South Africa’s highly biodiverse and fire-adapted Fynbos Biome. She is particularly interested in understanding how this ecosystem has evolved due to climate and anthropogenic changes, including the onset of pastoralism in the Fynbos ~2,000 years ago, and subsequent landscape transformations through fire suppression since ~1650 CE. She is reconstructing fire histories at ~2-year intervals over the past 4,200 years to better understand these climate-vegetation-fire-human linkages and hopes that her research will provide a paleoecological context for understanding how climate and people have influenced fire in the Fynbos.

2022 IAWF Scholarship Recipients

We are pleased to share the 2022 scholarships recipients. We had a tie for the PhD applicants so we awarded an additional scholarship this year.

Sam Ebright
Master of Science, Forestry
Northern Arizona University

Sam Ebright has worked in fire ecology and management as a student, wildland firefighter, and researcher since 2014. He graduated from Northern Arizona University (NAU) in 2018 with a B.S. Forestry and B.A. Modern Languages (Spanish), returning to NAU for a M.Sc. Forestry in 2021. As an undergraduate he was funded by NASA to study high-severity fire impacts to aspen regeneration with remote sensing and assisted international field research in Argentinean Patagonia. With the forest ecology lab, he also had the opportunity to work with the Navajo Nation and Mescalero Apache Tribe to study historic fire regimes and culturally sensitive resources. After college he worked four seasons as a USFS wildland firefighter, with two seasons on the Flagstaff Interagency Hotshot Crew. Sam’s thesis continues his remote sensing work by exploring spatiotemporal relationships of fire and forest cover change in his father’s homeland of Vietnam. His specialties and interests are fire ecology, remote-sensing, dendrochronology, and international conservation. Sam now works in the US Forest Service, Washington Office; one step closer to a lifelong career in international conservation and fire ecology.

Simin Rahmani
PhD of Environmental Science
Western Sydney University

Simin is a PhD student in the field of fire ecology in Western Sydney University (WSU). She received her Master of Environmental Biology from University of Wollongong (UOW) in 2018. She studied the pollution level from bushfire smoke plumes. She started working as a research assistant in UOW and Western Sydney University where she collected field data, did laboratory works and statistical analysis to examine effects of drought and fire on forest mortality and recovery. After that, she started my PhD and my research focuses on drought and fire integration and their effect on tree mortality and recruitment.

Matt Ruggirello
Doctoral program in agricutlural and forest sciences
National University of La Plata (Universidad Nacional de la Plata), Argentina

Originally from Chicago, Matt has spent much of his adult life living in the western U.S and Argentina. He graduated from Northern Arizona University in 2017 with a master’s degree in forestry. While in Flagstaff, Arizona, he spent a summer on a seasonal conservation crew, hand-felling conifers to release aspen and reduce fire risk for The Nature Conservancy.  After graduating, he worked for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) and the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) as a forester. In the latter job, he oversaw every element of multiple restoration timber sales aimed at reducing fire risk and improving forest health around local communities. Matt also had the opportunity to work with prescribed fire crews and regularly burn slash piles during that time. His personal and professional experiences in the western U.S. introduced him to fire and ever since he has been fascinated by its power to drive ecosystem change. When the opportunity arose to study post-fire tree regeneration dynamics in his wife’s hometown of Ushuaia, in southern Argentina, he jumped at the opportunity. Matt currently lives in Ushuaia where he is raising his newborn son, Luca, while he pursues his doctorate in forestry. After completing his PhD, he hopes to become the first permanent researcher in the region to focus exclusively on the impacts of wildfire on native forests. Matt is very grateful for IAWF’s support of his PhD work and is thankful to be engaged with the international wildfire community through IAWF.

2021 IAWF Scholarship Recipients

Emma Sherwood, Masters student, Earth and Environmental Sciences, McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario)

Emma received her BSc in Geographical Sciences from the University of British Columbia in 2020. Through her undergraduate degree, she worked on various GIS and fieldwork projects including looking at the impacts of climate change on bird diversity in northern Saskatchewan, caribou habitat disturbance in BC, and Horned Lark ecology in the southern Alberta prairies. Fire impacts on the landscape were present on all these projects, and Emma is excited to be able to focus her Masters thesis on wildfire in Northern Ontario. Her research involves mapping peat vulnerability to smouldering using remote sensing and machine learning. The project leverages known relationships between smouldering vulnerability and peat properties, and the mapping methodology will be verified against the Parry Sound 33 fire at the study site. In addition to the new methodology, Emma’s project will investigate spatial patterns in peat properties and peat smouldering vulnerability from an ecohydrological perspective.

Joseph Novak, PhD Student, University of California, Santa Cruz

Joseph Novak (23) from Raleigh, North Carolina, entered college skeptical of climate change. An introductory Biology course convinced Joseph that climate change is a serious threat to the planet and society. After a change of heart and major, Joseph graduated Brown University with a B.S. in Geology Biology in May 2020. Now, Joseph is pursuing a PhD in Ocean Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studies molecular fossils in lake and ocean sediments to understand relationships between fire regimes, climate, and vegetation in Earth’s distant past. The IAWF PhD Fellowship will support Joseph’s study of fire proxies in sediments from Lake Baikal, Russia, where he seeks to understand the relationship between combustion products preserved on the lake bottom and historical wildfire records. This study is the first step in a larger project that will integrate 8.4 million years of climate, fire, and vegetation data preserved in Lake Baikal’s sediments, which Joseph hopes will prove to be foundational datasets for understanding the relationship between fire and climate state in boreal forests. Joseph humbly thanks the IAWF for their support of his work.

2020 IAWF Scholarship Recipients

Mary Armstrong, MSc Student , University of Florida
As a master’s student at the University of Florida in the School of Forest Resources and Conservation, Mary is writing her thesis on the effects of season of prescribed fire on reproductive characteristics of several species in the Asteraceae and Poaceae families. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies from Eckerd College, she began her career in prescribed fire with The Nature Conservancy in southeast Georgia. Since then, she has worked on prescribed fire crews with The Department of Natural Resources in Georgia, Lake Travis Fire Rescue in Texas, and Wildland Restoration International in Florida. She has also worked wildfire suppression on an engine and helicopter crew in Helena, Montana.  After four years of field work, she decided to continue her education at the University of Florida to expand her knowledge of ecosystems and prescribed fire, and to write a thesis that could assist land managers in their decision making. In her fire career, she learned that land managers across all four states have many similar research questions. Her goal is to conduct research to help answer these questions, beginning with timing of fire and its effects on the reproduction of groundcover plants.

Robert Scott, PhD Student, Sociology, University of Colorado Boulder
Robert received a BS in Sociology from Westminster College (Salt Lake City, UT) and an MA in Sociology from the University of Victoria (Victoria, BC). He is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Colorado and has worked in various fire management positions (Type 1 Crew Member, Type 1 Crew Leader, Provincial Training Officer) for the Government of Saskatchewan.

For his doctoral research, Robert uses historical and interview methods to investigate how single- and multiple-fatality incidents involving firefighters affect the construction of self among other firefighters. The research includes a comparative analysis of Canadian and American firefighter fatalities that occurred in a 30-year period. Robert is especially interested in how firefighter fatalities influence who firefighters become in terms of their subsequent experiences and perceptions of risk. He anticipates his research will have significant value for the wildland fire community as well as occupations involving risk.

Scholarship recipients in 2016

Noémie Gonzalez Bautista, PhD candidate, Université Laval, Québec, Canada

Noémie received her first master’s degree in environmental science in 2005 from the Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine (France). After several years working in environmental education, she returned to university to earn a master’s degree in ecological anthropology from the Museum d’Histoire naturelle de Paris (France) which led her to her present PhD research in anthropology at Université Laval (Québec, Canada). For this project she will be working with the Atikamekw community of Wemotaci in the Nitaskinan territory within the province of Québec, and with the SOPFEU, the provincial forest fire protection agency. The primary objective of her study is to understand and to describe the relationship between these two groups, with a particular emphasis on their respective ways of interacting with wildfires and the territory. In particular, she will be examining the coexistence of SOPFEU’s technical knowledge and know-how and indigenous knowledge and know-how. Noémie hopes that this study will serve as a tool to help SOPFEU and the Atikamekw, as well as other forest fire management agencies and First Nations, to share knowledge, experiences and capacities for better wildfire management and more resilient communities.

Monique Wynecoop, Master of Science, Fire Science Program, College of Natural Resources, University of Idaho

Monique received a dual major in Ecology and Conservation Biology and Fishery Sciences and a minor in American Indian Studies at University of Idaho in 2010. She is now employed as a USFS Fire Ecologist for the Colville National Forest and is pursuing a Masters of Science in the Department of Forest, Rangeland, and Fire Sciences at the University of Idaho. She is Mountain Maidu and her husband and children are Spokane Tribal members. Her research project is inspired by her family and the cultural importance of their ancestral homelands. It is her goal that her children and all of the future generations of local tribes feel that their best interests are addressed in the management of natural resources, on and off the reservation. As a Fire Ecologist, and part of the monitoring committee, she developed her thesis as a collaborative socio-economic and fire effects monitoring project for the Colville National Forest Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP). The project emphasizes cross-cultural collaboration and fire ecology of understory vegetation of the western half of the Colville National Forest. She uses modified monitoring techniques to look at the impacts of wildfire and U.S. Forest Service fuels reduction treatments on understory vegetation while also using a participatory GIS program developed by the Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS) to look at the perspectives of the Confederated Colville Tribal community regarding how their cultural practices and livelihoods are being impacted by such treatments. Her research has required constant collaboration and trust-building between all parties involved, and she plans on continuing this monitoring project as part of her Forest Service position to further collaboration and knowledge-sharing between local tribal and non-tribal governments and scientific communities for years to come.

Scholarship recipients in 2014

Miltiadis Athanasiou (PhD student), National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece Miltiadis studied Environmental Science at the University of the Aegean, Lesvos, Greece and has received a M.Sc. Degree in Prevention and Management of Natural Disasters from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. Degree in the same field at the same University. The emphasis in his post-graduate studies is on forest fire management. The title of his Ph.D. dissertation will be “Development of an optimal methodology for forecasting forest fire behavior in Greece”. His work includes data collection on “live” wildfires and relevant analysis. So far, he has produced a number of interim publications documenting wildfires and analyzing fire behavior (fire spread, spotting) in Greece. In parallel with his studies he has compounded a total of seventeen years of experience in environmental management and has built significant experience in forest fire management. His firefighting training and operational experience commenced in 2000, when he started being trained by the Special Units of Disaster Response, Hellenic Fire Corps on a weekly basis until 2003. At the same time he was the Lead Supervisor and Operational Coordinator, of a Natural Disaster Response and Relief Volunteer Team. He has also served with the 6th Fire Department Station of Athens as a Volunteer Firefighter (fire engine crew member). Since 2008, he is officially recognized as Specialized Volunteer Expert by the Hellenic General Secretariat of Civil Protection. In his professional career that runs parallel to his studies, he has undertaken and carried out research projects, studies and operational plans for wildfires management and suppression, cooperating with the Technological Educational Institute of the Ionian Islands, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and with private companies. Since the summer of 2011, he also works in firefighting, as crew member of heavy-lift helicopters in Greece, during each fire season.

Trisha Gabbert, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, USA (MSc student)

Trisha is currently a Masters student in Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and an Air Force veteran.  She is researching biomass burning emissions in the Northern Sub-Saharan African region.  The project utilizes a first ever, gridded smoke-aerosol emissions coefficient (Ce) product developed by NASA’s Fire Energetics and Emissions Research (FEER) team.  The goal is to process satellite measured fire radiative power and use FEER’s Ce product to generate smoke aerosol emissions to be ingested into NASA Unified Weather Research and Forecasting (NU-WRF) model for representation of smoke dynamics and impacts in the African Sahel and surrounding areas.  Trisha was first introduced to smoke emissions research during a summer internship at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center during her undergraduate studies.  She is very excited to continue learning about the interactions of fire emissions on our climate, weather, and air quality.

Scholarship recipients in 2012

Rachel Anne Carter, LaTrobe University (PhD Candidate), Victoria, Australia

Rachel Anne Carter is a PhD Candidate and Legal Scholar with La Trobe University located in Bundoora, Victoria, Australia. As part of her PhD, Rachel holds an industry scholarship with the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre in Melbourne, Australia. Rachel’s work is primarily centred on insurance and fire related events. Her research involves an international comparative approach whereby she is currently undertaking an analysis of different systems in Europe, America, Asia and the Australia pacific region. In order to undertake this aspect of her research Rachel spent time as a visiting scholar at the International Institute of Sociology and the Law in Onati, Spain and also in the research offices at the OECD, Paris. At the OECD, Rachel liaised with policy makers, economists and senior officials discussing the different insurance models. Rachel has co-authored a book, published in academic journals and presented at conferences both in Australia and internationally. In 2011 Rachel presented evidence to the Senate in relation to insurance in Australia in the aftermath of the Queensland flooding. Rachel was also involved in the insurance media work in the aftermath of the flooding which resulted in political attention being drawn to the issue and subsequently the issue was cited by various senators. She has also worked with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in reviewing disaster policy. Rachel hopes that her overall findings will better assist in improved individual economic planning for disaster events particularly through the means of insurance.

Dianne Hall, San Jose State University (MSc), Los Gatos, California, USA

Dianne is a Masters student in the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San Jose State University. Her current area of research is to measure and document the interaction between fire and the atmosphere in complex terrain through a series of head fire experiments on slopes. The data set created from the fires will be used by scientists to help understand fire behavior at a micrometeorological scale and thus lead to improvement of fire behavior models. Dianne has worked multiple seasons as a firefighter in California and has been a volunteer fire fighter in her community for more than 12 years. She was drawn into this research by her fascination with fire behavior while studying to be a FBAN.

Scholarship recipients in 2010

Carissa Brown  (Ph. D. student), University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada

Carissa Brown is a Ph.D. candidate in the Northern Plant Ecology Lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Saskatchewan. Carissa investigates how the successional trajectory of black spruce stands may change if they are burned too frequently to produce seed and self-replace, as well as how changes to the fire regime affect carbon dynamics. She conducts her research at the northern range of the boreal forest in the Yukon, a region where summer temperatures have increased over the past several decades, and where fires are predicted to occur more frequently with warming. Update as of June 2012: Carissa is currently a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Mark Vellend at l’Université de Sherbrooke in Sherbrooke, Québec. She is continuing her research on the dynamics of tree species at the limits of their distributions, now on elevational gradients in mountain ecosystems of southern Québec. She is also continuing her Yukon/latitudinal treeline research through collaborations and data syntheses with other arctic researchers.

Brooke Cassell (MA student), University of Washington, Seattle, Washington

Brooke Cassell is a second year masters student in the School of Forest Resources, University of Washington. Her research focuses on using dendrochronology to understand the historical range of variability of fire in high elevation pine-oak forests in Mexico. She aims to increase knowledge about fire management in patchy landscapes consisting of fire adapted and fire sensitive ecosystem types. Brooke is also a Teaching Assistant at the University of Washington and is active in the Student Chapter of the Society for Ecological Restoration, National Forestry Honor’s Society, and is an avid bicyclist.   Update as of June 2012: Brooke recently defended her masters thesis on the Fire History of the Sierra de Manantlán Biosphere Reserve in Western México and will be working with the USDA Forest Service as a student tech this summer before starting a PhD program in the fall. She’ll be continuing her studies with the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington.

Scholarship recipients in 2008

Kara Marie Yedinak (Ph.D. student), Laboratory of Atmospheric Science, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington

Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Brian Lamb, Regents Professor and Boeing Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Washington State University Pullman, WA 99164-2910 The IAWF Scholarship recipient for 2008 is Kara Yedinak of Washington State University in Pullman.  Kara Marie is working toward a Ph.D. in engineering science with the Laboratory of Atmospheric Research (LAR) at Washington State University. LAR is an interdisciplinary graduate program focusing on air quality with an emphasis on interactions between the biosphere and atmosphere. At LAR, Kara is pursuing her interests in understanding the links between fire behavior and the atmosphere to better understand the role and scale of wildland fire in air quality.  Update as of June 2012: Kara is working towards finishing her PhD in Engineering Science at Washington State University. Her work continues on the sensitivity analysis and evaluation of WRF-Fire, a coupled fire-atmosphere model.

Cathelijne Stoof  (Ph.D. student), Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Principal Academic Advisor: Dr. Coen J. Ritsema, Professor in Physical Soil Quality Wageningen University The Netherlands The IAWF Scholarship recipient for 2008 is Cathelijne Stoof of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Cathelijne has been working on soils and hydrology combining field, lab and modeling approaches in the Netherlands and abroad. In her Ph.D. research she uses a multiscale approach to explain post-fire erosion and flooding events by studying the effects of fire on soil water movement. Update as of June 2012: After receiving the IAWF scholarship in 2008 Cathelijne continued her fieldwork in Portugal where she had her 10-ha research catchment burned by experimental fire in 2009 to study fire impact on soil and hydrology. In 2010, she used the IAWF funds to develop a method for evaluating the effects of ash on water movement in soil at the Steenhuis lab at Cornell University (USA) where she works as a post-doc after graduating in 2011. In her current job she studies sustainable management of soil, water and landscapes, from bioenergy and hydrofracking impacts to fire risks and effects.