Dr. Amber Soja

Dr. Amber Soja

Dr. Amber Soja is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace and is resident at NASA’s Langley Research Center, where she has served since 1997. She earned her PhD in Environmental Sciences from the University of Virginia, and she has over 25 years of research experience in using remotely-sensed data and models to explore the interactions between fire, the biosphere, and atmosphere, as weather and climate change. She has taken part in and led numerous interdisciplinary, national and international field campaigns that investigated feedbacks between fire and fuels, ecosystems, and weather and climate, primarily in remote Siberia. She holds one of the core papers comprising the research front in Boreal Forest Fires and Climate Change according to ScienceWatch.com. Amber also has an infinity towards making NASA ‘data and science’ into ‘usable’ information that is used by agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), U.S. Forest Service (USFS), U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS), Universities, and non-profit international organizations. In her spare time, she absolutely adores being outside: hiking, gardening, walking, water activities, snow skiing,and her family, furry and all.

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Kate Dargan Marquis

Kate Dargan Marquis

Kate Dargan Marquis most recently worked for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as Assistant Director for Preparedness and Response. She has returned to her previous role as Chief Strategy Officer for Intterra, a technology company she co-founded in 2010. Prior to that Kate was a pioneering California firefighter/chief for 30 years and the first woman State Fire Marshal for California and a proud Cal Poly San Luis Obispo graduate. She has led numerous wildfire prevention, mitigation, and response initiatives over her career and is a national expert on wildfire. She has worked at the community, public agency, industry, technology, and policy levels of the California fire service and is widely recognized for her consensus-building style and innovative approaches to old problems. She is married to Jim Marquis and they have 5 children, 3 of which are in public safety. Her current favorite fun thing to do is hiking around Lake Tahoe where she lives.

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Dr. Susan Conard​

Dr. Susan Conard​

Trends in fire research and publications: the last 50 years
Susan G. Conard holds a BA in environmental studies from Antioch College and completed her PhD in ecology at the University of California, Davis in 1980. Dr. Conard’s fire research career started in graduate school, where she studied fire effects and vegetation dynamics in white fir forests in the Sierra Nevada and in chamise chaparral in the California Coast Range. She worked as a fire researcher and research project leader at the US Forest Service Riverside Fire Lab from 1983 to 1996, where she focused on California chaparral and forest ecosystems. From 1996 through 2008 she was the Forest Service National Program Leader for Fire Ecology Research in the Washington, D.C. office. While there she worked on program development (National Fire Plan and Joint Fire Science Program) and oversight in collaboration with Forest Service researchers and fire management staff and with other agencies. By 1996 her research had shifted to Siberia, and her collaboration with Russian and North American colleagues are ongoing. Her wildland fire research focus has evolved over time, with an emphasis on integration across scales and disciplines, including fire regimes and fire effects, fire behavior, and remote sensing. She currently holds an Affiliate Faculty position at George Mason University. Dr. Conard is a past president of the International Boreal Forest Research Association, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She has been co Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Wildland Fire since her retirement in late 2008. She has over 75 publications.

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Dr. Natasha Stavros​

Dr. Natasha Stavros​

Dr. Natasha Stavros the Director of the Earth Lab Analytics Hub at Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) with the University of Colorado Boulder. She is focused on solutions science in the information age. She has a B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science, an MS in Environmental Sustainability, and a Ph.D. in Quantitative Fire Ecology with a focus on Megafires and Climate. She applies system engineering to climate, fire, and complex systems science and is particularly interested in technology development designed with adoption and use in mind from the start to inform more resilient futures.

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Dr. Crystal Kolden​

Dr. Crystal Kolden

The Rise of Wildfire Disasters in the 21st Century: What Have We Learned?​
Dr. Kolden is a pyrogeographer who conducts research on causes of consequences of increasing wildfire disasters, and how we can live with wildfire. She began her career as a wildland firefighter for the US Forest Service near Lake Tahoe, California, and earned a doctorate in Geography from Clark University. She was a landscape ecologist with USGS in Alaska and a professor of fire science at the University of Idaho for over a decade before moving back to California to join the faculty at UC Merced. She has conducted research with colleagues across the globe, from Australia to Chile and Alaska to England, seeking to understand how climate change is altering our wildfire reality and what we can do to adapt. When she isn’t working with communities to develop Community Wildfire Protection Plans and other mitigation strategies, Dr. Kolden is either prescribed burning on her property in the Sierra foothills or enjoying the outdoors with her husband and twin boys.

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Dr. Patrick Gonzalez

Dr. Patrick Gonzalez​

Climate change impacts on wildfire and solutions across global ecosystems​
Patrick Gonzalez, Ph.D. is a forest ecologist, Assistant Director for Climate and Biodiversity, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Associate Adjunct Professor, University of California, Berkeley. He advances science-based action on human-caused climate change through research on climate change, ecosystems, deforestation, wildfire, and carbon solutions and assistance to local people and policymakers. Dr. Gonzalez has conducted field research in Africa, Latin America, and the U.S., published in Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and other journals, and assisted field managers and local people in 25 countries and 269 U.S. national parks.

His research has revealed previously unreported carbon losses across California forests due to wildfire, heating due to climate change in U.S. national parks at double the national rate, and tree mortality across the African Sahel due to climate change. These scientific results prompted new actions and policies of forest carbon protection in California, climate change-focused conservation in U.S. national parks, and natural regeneration of native trees in Africa. He has stood publicly for scientific integrity and broadened public understanding of climate change in 127 published articles on his research in the New York Times and other media. Dr. Gonzalez has served as a lead author for four reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the science panel awarded a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

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