Dr. Max Moritz

Students

Alison Forrestel, Graduate Student

Alison is a doctoral student in the department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her M.F. from Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Alison has spent the last several years working as a Fire Ecologist for the National Park Service based out of Point Reyes National Seashore. Her research interests are focused on the role of fire in driving landscape scale vegetation patterns. Specifically, she will look at the fire history and ecology of subalpine forests in Crater Lake National Park, Oregon.

Alison can be reached at UC Berkeley, 137 Mulford Hall #3114, Berkeley, CA 94720-3114, phone: (510) 643-1377, email: aforrestel[at]gmail.com

Marc Parisien, Graduate Student

Marc is a doctoral student with the UC Berkeley Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy & Management. He received his B.Sc. from McGill University (Montreal, Quebec) and his M.Sc. from l’Université du Québec à Rimouski (Rimouski, Quebec). Prior to his arrival at UC Berkeley, Marc worked for the fire research group of the Canadian Forest Service. His thesis work will focus on developing techniques for mapping wildfire susceptibility and optimizing fuels management strategies in time and space. Click here for Marc's publication list.

Marc can be reached at UC Berkeley, 137 Mulford Hall #3114, Berkeley, CA 94720-3114, phone: (510) 643-1377, email: parisien[at]nature.berkeley.edu.

Rachel Smith, Graduate Student

Rachel is a graduate student in the Moritz lab at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her bachelor's degree in Bioethics from Whitman College in 2003 and has subsequently worked for various international fire organizations. A former United States Forest Service Smokejumper and Hotshot, she has extensive wildland and urban firefighting experience. In 2005, she was part of The Nature Conservancy's Global Fire Assessment. She is working on her thesis on abating fire risk under the auspices of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Her publication list can be found here and her web site is here.

Rachel can be reached at UC Berkeley 137 Mulford Hall #3114, Berkeley, CA 94720-3114 phone: (510) 643-1377, email: smithrc[at]nature.berkeley.edu

Eric Waller, Graduate Student

Eric Waller is a doctoral student in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. He received a B.A. in Integrative Biology with an ecology emphasis at U.C. Berkeley, and an M.A. in Geography at U.C. Santa Barbara. He has extensive experience in mapping land cover with satellite imagery, at scales ranging from the global level while at the U.S. Geological Survey's EROS Data Center, to the state level while working for the Colorado Division of Wildlife. He is interested in the environmental processes that have generated these land cover patterns, and will explore the extent to which fire dynamics might play a role in various ecosystems.

Eric can be reached at UC Berkeley 137 Mulford Hall #3114, Berkeley, CA 94720-3114, phone: (510) 643-1377, email: ewaller[at]nature.berkeley.edu

Affiliates

Meg Krawchuk, Post-doctoral Researcher

Meg Krawchuk is a NSERC post-doctoral fellow working with the Center for Fire Research and Outreach. Meg is working on numerous projects studying the "abiogeography" of fire at regional, continental and global scales. Her current work is an extension of previous research supported by The Nature Conservancy's Global Fire Assessment. Meg did her Ph.D. research at the University of Alberta (Canada) with a dissertation focused on the biophysical regulation of lightning fire in mixedwood boreal forests of Canada in the context of forest management and climate change. Meg is a research generalist and her interests cover a wide range of topics including: functional elements responsible for broad-scale ecological patterns, disturbance ecology, impacts of landscape change on component species, statistical analysis of hierarchical data, scale variance in ecology. Most of these interests stem from previous research on a variety of taxa and systems in Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, West Virginia, and Belize. Click here for Meg's publication list.

Meg can be reached at UC Berkeley, Center for Fire Research and Outreach, 137 Mulford Hall #3114, Berkeley, CA 94720-3114. Phone: (510) 643-1377. email: megk[at]nature.berkeley.edu

Tadashi Moody, Staff Research Associate

Tadashi received an M.S. in Environmental Science, Policy and Management from UC Berkeley. He also holds a B.S. from Cal Poly State University in Forestry and Natural Resources, and an A.S. from West Valley College in Park Management. Prior to coming to UCB, Tadashi has worked for the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Alaska State Parks. He is currently also a part-time outdoor adventure guide.

Tadashi's primary research interests are centered on the analysis of fire history, both at the site and landscape scales, and how this can inform contemporary fire management. His current projects include a study of the fire history underlying the 2003 Southern California wildfires; a spatial analysis of fire danger and fire history during extreme fire weather events in California; and an analysis of fuel hazard at Point Reyes National Seashore related to Sudden Oak Death disease. Past projects have included predicting the effect of climate change on wildfire severity and outcomes in California.

Tadashi can be reached at UC Berkeley 137 Mulford Hall #3114, Berkeley, CA 94720-3114, phone: (510) 643-1377, email: tmoody[at]nature.berkeley.edu

Faith Kearns, Associate Director

Faith Kearns is the Associate Director of the Center for Fire Research and Outreach. She received her doctorate from the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley, where her research focused on landscape ecology and community-based natural resource monitoring using web-based Geographic Information Systems. She spent a year as a AAAS diplomacy fellow at the US Department of State before returning to Berkeley.

Faith can be reached at UC Berkeley, Center for Fire Research and Outreach, 137 Mulford Hall #3114, Berkeley, CA 94720-3114. Phone: (510) 643-0409. email: fkearns[at]nature.berkeley.edu

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