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WIFIRE Convergence Advisory Board

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Jennifer Anderson

Advisory Board Member

Jennifer Anderson is the Division Chief of Prescribed Fire and Fuels at Yosemite National Park. Her focus is planning and implementing landscape level prescribed burns and working on new, simple approaches to forest monitoring using the latest technology. During her 20-year career with the federal government, she has worked at several field stations and in multiple fire/fuels positions for three federal agencies in the Southeast, Southwest, and California.

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Daniel E. Atkins

Advisory Board Member

Dr. Daniel E. Atkins is a professor emeritus of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His scholarship is in computer architecture and interdisciplinary research on cyber-enabled distributed knowledge communities. He chaired the Blue Ribbon Panel on Research Cyberinfrastructure for the NSF that became an international roadmap for initiatives on cyber-enabled research in the digital age. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

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Jeremy C. Avise, Ph.D.

Advisory Board Member

Dr. Jeremy C. Avise is the Manager of the Modeling and Metereology Branch of the California Air Resources Board (CARB). He leads a team of scientists who focus on the impacts of wildfires and climate change on air quality, emissions inventory development for natural sources, and NOx/VOC sensitivity of ozone production and PM2.5 formation in California. He also serves as an adjunct professor at Washington State University's Laboratory for Atmospheric Research.

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Brian D'Agostino

Advisory Board Member

Brian D’Agostino is the Director of Fire Science & Climate Adaptation for San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), a position through which he is responsible for meteorology, fire science, and climate adaptation initiatives. He oversaw the development of SDG&E’s weather network, one of the nation’s largest and most sophisticated privately-owned weather networks. He is a founding member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Committee on Wildfire Weather, Technology and Risk.

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Kate Dargan

Advisory Board Member

Kate Dargan is the Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of Intterra, Inc. Along with her colleagues at Intterra, Inc., she introduces cutting-edge geospatial and geoweb technologies, which assist first responders in visualizing dynamic emergency environments, into the emergency intelligence and situation awareness software market. Prior to joining Intterra, Dargan served as a firefighter and as California's first female State Fire Marshal.

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Thomas G. Dietterich, Ph.D.

Advisory Board Member

Dr. Thomas G. Dietterich is a distinguished professor emeritus and the Associate Director of Policy of the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute (CoRIS) at Oregon State University. He is a pioneer in the field of machine learning. In collaboration with Claire Montgomery (OSU Forestry), he led a project in reinforcement learning for long-term wildfire management. This project also studied liability rules for fuel reduction treatments on private forest lands.

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Brian Fennessy

Advisory Board Member

Brian Fennessy is the Fire Chief of the Orange County Fire Authority (OCFA). He is currently Chair of the FIRESCOPE Board of Directors and in this capacity, serves as Advisor to the Director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES). Prior to joining OCFA, he served as the Chief of the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department (SDFD), and developed and established a multi-mission Fire/Rescue/EMS helicopter program to serve the San Diego Metropolitan Area.

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Olivia A. Graeve, Ph.D.

Advisory Board Member

Dr. Olivia A. Graeve is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of the CaliBaja Center for Resilient Materials and Systems at UCSD. Her research focuses on the design and processing of new materials for extreme environments, including extremes of temperature, pressure, and radiation. She has been involved in many activities related to the recruitment and retention of women and Hispanic students in science and engineering.

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James H. Furman

Convergence Advisory Board Chair

James H. Furman serves as a U.S. Forest Service (USFS) liaison to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). He previously served as Chief of the Air Force Wildland Fire Center and as Eglin Air Force Base's Wildland Fire Program Manager. Eglin AFB's prescribed fire program tripled its productivity under his leadership, becoming a national leader with an average of approximately 125 prescribed fires and more than 100,000 acres/year over the last five years of his tenure there.

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Krzysztof Janowicz, Ph.D.

Advisory Board Member

Dr. Krzysztof Janowicz is a professor of geographic information science and geoinformatics with the Department of Geography, and the Director of the Center for Spatial Studies at UCSB, where he also runs the Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Observatory (STKO) Lab. The STKO Lab investigates the role of space and time in knowledge organization. His research interests lie at the intersection of geographic information science, behavioral geography, and cognitive science.

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Laurie A. Johnson, Ph.D.

Advisory Board Member

Dr. Laurie A. Johnson serves as the Chief Catastrophe Response and Resiliency Officer of the California Earthquake Authority (CEA). She is an urban planner specializing in disaster recovery and catastrophe risk management, and has developed CEA’s enterprise risk management program. She also advises on earthquake response planning and community seismic resilience initiatives. Prior to her current position, she served as CEA's Enterprise & Strategic Risk Advisor.

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Jeffrey Meston

Advisory Board Member

Jeffrey Meston is the Executive Director of the California Fire Chiefs Association (CFCA). He is the former CEO of the California State Firefighters' Association (CSFA) and former President of the CFCA, Northern Division, Fire Training Officers Section. He has served as a program developer and instructor for management courses at the National Fire Academy, and led the task force to implement ethics training for the California State Fire Marshals Office State Wide Training Program.

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Claire Monteleoni, Ph.D.

Advisory Board Member

Dr. Claire Monteleoni is an associate professor and the Associate Chair for Inclusive Excellence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the founding Editor in Chief of Environmental Data Science, a Cambridge University Press journal launched in 2020. She co-founded the Climate Informatics Conference, which has been held annually since 2011 and has attracted climate scientists and data scientists from over 19 countries and 30 states.

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Max A. Moritz

Advisory Board Member

Dr. Max A. Moritz is a statewide wildfire specialist within the University of California (UC) Cooperative Extension, and an adjunct professor of wildfire dynamics at UCSB. His research is focused on understanding the dynamics of fire regimes at relatively broad scales and applying this information to the planning and management of fire-prone landscapes. He has applied a number of different spatial approaches to quantitative analyses of fire history patterns.

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Larry Smarr, Ph.D.

Advisory Board Member

Dr. Larry Smarr is a distinguished professor emeritus with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at UCSD. He was previously the Founding Director of the Qualcomm Institute, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the National Computational Science Alliance. His research interests include bioinformatics, metagenomics, and visualization technologies.

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Paul Steblein

Advisory Board Member

Paul Steblein is the Wildland Fire Science Coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and on the Board of the Joint Fire Science Program. He previously oversaw wildland fire management policies and budgets for the U.S. Department of the Interior as Deputy Director of the Office of Wildland Fire. He also served as the Chief of the Branch of Policy and Chief of Budget for the National Wildlife Refuge System (NWRS) of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USWFS).

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Robert Tse

Advisory Board Member

Robert Tse is the Senior Policy Advisor of the Rural Development mission area of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). He specializes in matters at the intersection of agriculture technology, broadband, and innovation, and serves on California Congressman John Garamendi's Agricultural Advisory Committee. Using his strategic vision, he integrates policies, resources and initiatives at all levels of government and creates successful public-private collaboration models.

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Julie Meier Wright

Advisory Board Member

Julie Meier Wright is the Co-Founder and CEO of Integrative Insights, Inc. She is California's former and first Secretary of Trade and Commerce, and former CEO of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation. She has also served on several advisory boards in academia, including the Board of Advisors of UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering and Qualcomm Institute, and the advisory board of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.

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Lilit Yeghiazarian, Ph.D.

Advisory Board Member

Dr. Lilit Yeghiazarian is an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering at the University of Cincinnati, where she also runs the Complex Systems & Processes Lab. Her research interests lie in multifunctional advanced materials and environmental sensing, porous media, watershed processes and environmental sustainability, and vulnerability and resilience analysis.