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Fighting Fire with Fire: Using prescribed burning to mitigate wildfires and climate change
Supervisor: Matthew Jones (ENV)
Alice is a Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar at the University of East Anglia as part of the Critical Decade for Climate Change programme. Her research will examine how climate change will affect the weather conditions under which prescribed burning can be conducted, and also engage land managers from diverse backgrounds to analyze their perspectives on the challenges these changes present.
Alice holds a BA in Chemistry from Washington University in St. Louis and an MSc in Environmental Engineering from University of California, Berkeley. She has conducted research on wildfires, air quality, atmospheric sciences, and climate change at Argonne National Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and most recently completed a research fellowship at the US Environmental Protection Agency.
Along with her studies, Alice is also passionate about equitable teaching practices, education reform, and increasing the accessibility of science and engineering, and hopes to integrate elements of rethinking how research is conducted into her project.
What are you most excited about in joining the Critical Decade PhD programme?
I am most excited about the multidisciplinary aspect of the program! Scientific research has a shameful legacy of disenfranchising the communities it purports to help, and this has been largely perpetuated by the myth that science can exist apart from the social and political contexts that we live in. I am looking forward to not only diving deeper into my project, but also collaborating with my peers from other disciplines to rethink how climate change research can be made more accessible, intentional, and empowering.