University of ÁùºÏ±¦µä, Reno faculty offer a range of expertise related to wildfire science and wildfires' impacts on communities, ecosystems and watersheds around the world. Please email the University communications team to schedule an interview with one of the experts below.
Dean and professor of the School of Public Health
Research centers on environmental and occupational health and its impacts on vulnerable communities. As a public health leader, she focuses on developing solutions for pressing climate change issues in global health. She also concentrates on the One Health research agenda, developed by the World Health Organization, which examines the interconnected impacts of climate change on human, animal and environmental health, focusing on how shifts in climate patterns affect air pollution and disease transmission.
Associate professor and director of the Whittell Forest & Wildlife Area
Dr. Bisbing is a forester whose research aims to identify proactive steps to ensure forests exist within the landscapes of the future. Her lab leverages forestry experiments to identify forest management practices that promote resistance, resilience, and adaptation to climate change and novel disturbance regimes. Her team also explores factors that determine successful regeneration and establishment of forests. As the director of the University’s school forest, the Whittell Forest and Wildlife Area, she is additionally responsible for the leadership, programs and administration of the forest and the associated Little Valley Research Station.
Professor of limnology, director of the Ozmen Institute for Global Studies and director of the Global Water Center
Research focuses on the conservation of aquatic ecosystems and the betterment of livelihoods through the development of science-based environment policies. He is currently studying the impact of wildfire smoke on freshwater ecosystems. He has conducted work around the world, including research in Cambodia, Italy, Mongolia and Russia. Since 1997, Chandra has been active in understanding the ecological changes in Lake Tahoe and cocreating management solutions to protect the second-deepest lake in the United States.
Associate professor of geography and department chair of the Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering
Research includes the study of growth rings in trees to reconstruct past climates and the impacts of climate change on trees. He also studies historic land use patterns and finds novel ways to use data from the past to inform adaptation to climate change today by understanding risk, vulnerability and resiliency. His past studies range from climate reconstructions and land use change to studies of drought and tree mortality. Ongoing projects include the response of trees to climatic change and reconstructions of large-scale atmospheric patterns, streamflow, lake levels and historic atmospheric pollution. He primarily works in western North America, the Arctic and sub-Arctic. He is also available for interviews in French.
Assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering
Serves as the principal investigator on wildfire-relevant National Science Foundation and Department of Defense projects and director of the University of ÁùºÏ±¦µä, Reno Wildfire Hub. He has expertise in wildfire engineering, wildland and wildland-urban-interface fire simulation, AI-assisted wildfire data analytics, and technology development for fire response and management. He has studied several historic wildfires and works to improve computational and data capabilities for wildfire prediction and risk assessment.
Lead scientist of the ÁùºÏ±¦µä Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit
Research focuses on the population and community ecology of freshwater fishes. He examines how stressors such as climate change, wildfire and invasive species interact to affect freshwater fish population dynamics and aquatic ecosystems.
Assistant professor of fire & ecosystem ecology
Research examines interactions among plant, soil and hydrologic processes in land ecosystems. She studies how disturbances such as wildfire, insect outbreaks and forest clearing play an important role in these ecosystems and how disturbance events are becoming more frequent and severe in response to climate change and growing human populations. Her work also looks at how to mitigate the effects of climate change through management.
Associate professor of mountain ecohydrology
Research focuses on water’s movement through mountain ecosystems and interactions with plants, animals and the environment. He studies the impact of wildfires on snow water as well as the impacts of extreme climates on mountain snowpack and precipitation. He runs the , which tackles grand challenges related to water sustainability in response to unprecedented environmental change and increasing water demand in the 21st century.
Associate dean of faculty and academic affairs and foundation professor of computer science and engineering
Serves as the principal investigator on the statewide , which was funded with a $20 million National Science Foundation grant. The project will increase the capacity of ÁùºÏ±¦µä for wildland fire research, education and workforce development and demonstrate this increased capacity through technology-enhanced fire science in the regionally important sagebrush ecosystem. Harris’ research includes data science, software engineering, computer graphics and virtual reality.
Assistant professor of science education
Research includes an innovative project that enables middle school students in ÁùºÏ±¦µä to engage in various data practices, gaining insights into the impacts of wildfires on their lives and communities. This project, for which Ke received the prestigious NSF CAREER Award, directly impacts 15 middle school teachers and 1,500 middle school students in northwestern ÁùºÏ±¦µä, including those from low socioeconomic backgrounds and underrepresented groups. This research has the potential to transform how young learners understand and interact with data, especially regarding complex societal issues like wildfires. The project will demonstrate how data science can be integrated into K-12 curricula to help students use science and data to address pressing environmental issues.
Assistant professor of physics
Research focuses on high-impact weather in the western United States, including fire weather and wildfire plume dynamics (fire-tornadoes, pyrocumulonimbus clouds, etc.), the behavior of wildfires in the wildland/urban interface and tracking of wildfires. He recently worked with a team of researchers to study data from the Lahaina fire in Hawaii to assist emergency responders with decision-making to help reduce major loss of life and property damage during a wildfire. He has commented on wildfire-related topics for national news organizations including the New York Times, the Washington Post and Fox Weather.
Professor and director of Museum of Natural History
Research focuses on native plant recovery and restoration after wildfire, focusing on sagebrush shrublands. She works closely with state and federal partners to identify plants with the best characteristics for establishing in burned and invaded sites and conducts work on herbicides and controlled grazing in post-fire settings. Leger has also conducted research on invasive species, including cheatgrass, a dominant and problematic invasive species in our region.
Whittell Forest manager
Research focuses on how forest management can be used to replicate and reintroduce historic disturbance regimes of the Sierra ÁùºÏ±¦µä that promote resistance and resilience to climate change while meeting the diverse needs of stakeholders and society. His work focuses on forest sustainability, including the use of prescribed fire as a forest management tool and other work to identify ways to sustain forests with natural disturbances such as wildfire, insect outbreaks and drought becoming more severe and frequent due to climate change. As forest manager of Whittell Forest & Wildlife Area, he aims to use the area as a living laboratory in the Sierras, ensuring it serves as a center for research, education and outreach for both the University community and the public.
Professor of geography
Research focuses on snow hydrology and climate, snow-forest-fire interactions and mountains as social-ecological systems. She has three decades of experience in remote sensing, field measurements and modeling of changing snow and ice. She and her students have published on “at risk” snow, impacts of wildfire on snow, new snow metrics in a warming world, melting snow and glaciers from Greenland to Alaska to the Andes, and new ways of mapping snow and ice from space.
ÁùºÏ±¦µä engineering distinguished professor
Research focuses on mass and energy transport through porous media. He studies the mechanics of landslide and debris flows, evaporation from land surfaces, and aspects of plants and microbial activity in soil. He is presently studying interactions between wildfire characteristics and impacts on soil and landscape functioning. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022 and was a professor of environmental physics at ETH Zurich before joining the University of ÁùºÏ±¦µä, Reno in 2023.
Senior rangeland ecologist
Research interests include studying the locations, distributions and patterns of plant communities, utilizing GIS and emerging technologies such as machine learning and remote sensing to assist in management and restoration of rangelands after a wildfire. He has worked in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, ÁùºÏ±¦µä, Utah and Washington in environmental consulting projects, specializing in field ecology and GIS.
Assistant professor, natural resources state specialist and director of the Living with Fire program
Research focuses on the intersection of land management and forest resilience to fire, drought and climate change. Her work has spanned the western United States and has focused more recently in the Sierra ÁùºÏ±¦µä region of California and ÁùºÏ±¦µä. As the director of the , she guides a team that creates science-based education and outreach resources for homeowners, educators, community groups and firefighting professionals to improve defensible space, ensure homes have proper building materials, manage native and non-native vegetation and prepare for evacuation.
Professor and department chair of biostatistics, epidemiology and environmental health
Research examines the population-level health effects of outdoor air pollutant concentrations. Presently, he is leading a study in Reno to estimate the cardiorespiratory health effects of smoke from wildfires. His work has also focused on susceptibility to air pollutants among children, adverse pregnancy outcomes with air pollution mixtures in urban, suburban and rural settings, and the impacts of air pollution exposure measurement error on health association estimates.
Associate professor of computer science and engineering
Serves as the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded project "Protecting Yourself from Wildfire Smoke: Big Data Driven Adaptive Air Quality Prediction Methodologies." His team has developed a labeled wildfire smoke dataset with an open-sourced wildfire smoke detection benchmark, a camera data transportation framework to efficiently transmit camera data in real-time, and agile parallel and distributed data processing methodologies to efficiently process vast amounts of data for real-time prediction. Yang's research focuses on big data, AI/ML, edge intelligence and cyber-physical systems.