Maureen Kennedy

Expertise: General regional wildfire issues, wildfire ecology, wildfire science, wildfire severity, strategies to reduce wildfire fuels, reducing fire hazards and impacts on wildlife and homes.

Maureen Kennedy is an associate professor at UW Tacoma. She is affiliated with the Fire and Environmental Research Applications (FERA) team at the USFS Pacific Wildland Fire Sciences Laboratory in Seattle.

Kennedy’s main research interest is to develop innovative tools that improve the role of ecological models in theory development and environmental decision-making. A current focus is the coupling of a fire spread model that she developed (WMFire) with a hydroecological model (RHESSys), housed in the Bren School of Envrionmental Science and Management at UC Santa Barbara.

Kennedy is also adapting advanced spatially explicit statistical modeling to better understand stand and lansdcape-level patterns of wildfire and fuel-treatment interactions.

Kennedy seeks every opportunity to participate in the education of science students and early-career scientists in the practice of quantitative scientific methods. She has developed courses in environmental modeling, introductory and advanced statistics, and model assessment. She currently teaches such courses at UW Tacoma.