A global, interdisciplinary community of scientists, engineers and social researchers across five partner institutions — working together to understand, predict and manage wildfires worldwide.
The Centre is directed by a six-strong Leadership Team of a Director and Associate Directors, covering a wide range of areas of expertise that are crucial for the materialisation of our Centre:
Colin is Chair in Biosphere and Climate Impacts in the Department of Life Sciences. As well as being our Director, and therefore responsible for research coordination across the Centre, he is also supervising several projects relating to impacts and feedback between climate, fire and ecology, particularly from an earth system perspective. Colin is a co-lead of our ‘Fire-Veg Team.’
Apostolos is a Professor in Climate Change and Atmospheric Environment in the School of Environmental Engineering at the Technical University of Crete. He is Professor in Atmospheric Physics in the Department of Physics at Imperial, where he founded our Centre. Apostolos is co-lead of our ‘Climate Team’.
Sandy is Professor in Global Palaeoclimates and Biogeochemical Cycles in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science. She is leading the work on palaeofires at the Centre, focusing on the history of wildfire, vegetation, and climate change, and she a co-lead of our ‘Fire-Veg Team’.
Martin is a Professor in Earth Observation Science in the Department of Geography. He is an expert on satellite Earth Observation (EO) and the quantification of landscape fire, including air quality and wildfire emissions. Martin is co-lead of our ‘Air-Health Team’ and our ‘Info System Team’. We are working closely with Martin’s research team – King’s Earth Observation and Wildfire Research Group.
Jay Mistry is a Professor of Environmental Geography in the Department of Geography, specialising in political ecology and environmental management in the tropics. She co-lead of the ‘Just Fire’ team in Centre, and is leading our work relating to indigenous and local fire knowledges and practices.
David is a Professor of Geography in the Department of Geography, and an expert in environmental policy and risk governance. He is co-lead of our ‘WIR3 Team’ focusing on wildfire insurance, risk, regulation and recovery.
Adedayo is a former postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography. His research involved optimizing fire emission datasets and exploring the potential of developing trace gas emissions data from wildfires leveraging on satellites and ground observations. He was also assessing the air quality impact of wildfires by adding the optimized fire emissions data into atmospheric models such as GEOS-Chem. The research aimed to help fill the research gap in modelling ozone formation from wildfires
Alex is an Associate Professor in the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, specialising in the study of migration, movement and displacement. He supervised the Sophie De Pauw’s PhD project ‘Farmers’ burning practices and conservation in Mozambique.’
Enrico is Associate Professor of Actuarial Finance in the Business School and former PDRA supervisor in the Centre. He lead projects relating to insurance and fire at the wildland-urban interface.
Katie is a former PhD student based in the Department of Physics, supervised by Apostolos Voulgarakis, Chantelle Burton (Met Office Hadley Centre) and Colin Prentice. Her research interests were on the relationships between fire, climate, and ecosystems in the Earth system. Her PhD focused specifically on the role of peat fires in shaping future atmospheric composition, the carbon cycle and climate. Katie aims to build a peat fire capability into the UKESM, in collaboration with the Met Office, to simulate future changes in peat fires and their impacts. After leaving the Centre, Katie moved into a research role at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. Read more about her PhD project
Giuseppe is a former postdoctoral researcher based in the Business School. He has an interdisciplinary background in economics and applied mathematics and devoted most of his research to economic and financial data analysis. At the Centre, Giuseppe looked into how wildfires data and modeling can be incorporated into financial analytics and how wildfires affect financial risk for specific asset classes.
Helen is Professor in Earth Observation in the Department of Physics and a former PhD supervisor in the Centre. Her work focuses on dust, aerosols and other atmospheric pollution in the global climate system.
Sibo is a former postdoctoral researcher at the Data Science Institute. His research aimed to improve numerical wildfire forecasting accuracy by combining data assimilation/machine learning algorithms and reduced-order modelling techniques. Read more
Daniele was a Lecturer in Physical Geography in the Department of Geography. His research lay at the interface between biogeography, palaeoecology and conservation biology, and he co-supervised several wildfire projects at the Centre. Daniele was a highly respected and much-liked colleague who is sorely missed. Read more about Daniele here.
Sophie is a former PhD student supervised by Alex Arnall, Jem Woods and Morena Mills. She was interested in understanding how humans interact with their environment and the downstream ecological consequences. Her PhD looked at how local communities manage their natural resources in relation to fire in the Niassa Nature Reserve, Northern Mozambique. She is studying the spatio-temporal patterns of burning, as well as the motivations behind the use of anthropogenic fire. By understanding how, when, and why indigenous people use burning to support their livelihood activities, the hope is to better integrate their needs into conservation frameworks. After leaving the Centre, Sophie moved to a role at the Zoological Society of London. Read more about her PhD research
Vissia is a former PhD student in the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine. Her PhD focused on investigating an alteration of pregnancy related birth weight in pregnant women exposed by toxic air during peat fires in Indonesia. It involved assessing the impact of outdoor on indoor air quality in different house characteristics and on personal exposure of pregnant women during peat fires. Her background is in environmental health epidemiology, and she is funded by Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP). Supervision: Martin Wooster
Simona is a former PhD based in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, in the Hazelab research group. Her PhD, which is funded by PyroLife, analysed vulnerabilities to wildfires in rural Mediterranean houses. Through computer modelling and laboratory experiments, Simona’s research aimed to identify and quantify the associated wildfire ignition risk to common house features, building materials, and surrounding conditions. Read more Supervision: Guillermo Rein
Michaela is a former PhD student based in the Department of Physics. Her PhD aimed to help quantify the radiative impact of African landscape fires, to help us evaluate both the immediate as well as long-term effects. After her PhD she has continued working on climate research at Imperial. Supervision: Helen Brindley, Martin Wooster
Daniel is a former PhD student based in the Department of Geography. His PhD aimed to increase our understanding of the complex interactions between climate, ecological processes and human impact in the tropics. With a particular focus in Guyana, new high-resolution pollen and charcoal series, as well as Indigenous knowledge on the use of fire, his PhD provided an understanding into the processes driving long-term tropical ecosystem dynamics. This was complemented by further analysis on the limited number of existing records available. Read more Supervision: Daniele Colombaroli, Jay Mistry and Sandy Harrison.
David is a former MRes student based in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science. His research sought to understand vegetation responses to fire during glacial and interglacial states. In particular, he looked at feedbacks between fire and vegetation on a regional scale and how these may be influenced by climate changes associated with glacial/interglacial cycles. This involved combining data from the Global Charcoal Database and pollen records of vegetation change. Read more Supervision: Sandy Harrison and Colin Prentice
Alex is a former PhD student based in the Department of Physics, who graduated in 2023. His primary research interest was to investigate wildfire models and to improve their capacity to represent the ecological impacts of future wildfire changes. He was also interested in investigating whether controls on wildfire vary regionally, and how this is represented by different fire models. Read more Supervision: Apostolos Voulgarakis
Paul is a former postdoctoral researcher who was based in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, working with Prof Sandy Harrison. His role encompassed providing palaeo-expertise on past fire histories and investigating potential drivers of palaeowildfires. He also updated and maintains the Reading Palaeofire Database (RPD) and provided palaeodata that can be implemented into future models. Read more about his project here. Paul moved on to a new research role at RHUL.
Yanan is a former PhD student in Department of Geography, which she completed in 2023. Her PhD topic was investigating impact of smoke pollution from wildfire burning on migratory insects, focusing on exploring the flight ability changes of migratory insects affected by smoke pollution. Read more Supervision: Martin Wooster
Tim served on our Advisory Board from 2019-2025.
Haleema is a former PhD student based in the Centre for Environmental Policy, supervised by Ioannis Kountouris, Apostolos Voulgarakis and David Demeritt. Her PhD project focused on quantifying and monetizing the wildfire impact on human welfare, focusing ecosystem services provision, productivity, health and social capital. After leaving the Centre, Haleema moved to a research role in the United States Department of Agriculture.
Hannah is former Research Associate in the Department of Geography. Her research was focused on the development of long-term fire emissions records using geostationary satellite fire products. Her work also included using tailored fire emissions datasets in regional chemical transport modelling to produce Air Quality simulations to accompany health studies investigating the effects of fire-related haze events, and to be used in fire emission inventory validation. Read more
Ramesh is a former Research Associate in Wildfire Taxonomy in the Department of Life Sciences. His research expertise is in applying Earth Observation data to physical models. At the Centre, Ramesh used multi-temporal, high-resolution optical and radar satellite data to develop a global taxonomy of wildfire and its controls. Read more
Erika is a former PhD student based in the Centre for Environmental Policy. Her PhD investigated the human drivers of wildfire, focusing on the influence on incentives – how officials’ and politicians’ reflection and promotion incentives determine wildfire occurrence, and how incentives generated by international, jurisdictional, and ethnic borders impact wildfire. Read more Supervision: Yiannis Kountouris
Anastasios is a former PhD student based in the School of Environmental Engineering. In his PhD he assessed forest fire risk due to future global warming over the Mediterranean region through the use of the FWI climate index. Read more Supervision: Apostolos Voulgarakis
Agung is a former postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He was working with Prof. Guillermo Rein and Imperial Hazelab research group to experimentally study the smouldering dynamics of peat fire in the Arctic.
Kaveh is a former postdoctoral researcher at the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis within the Business School. His area of research lies within the domains of high-dimensional statistics and nonparametric inference. Kaveh investigated the viability of forestry assets as means of constructing optimal portfolios.
João is a former PhD student who based both at the Met Office and University of Exeter who was affiliated with the Centre (co supervised by Apostolos Voulgarakis). During his PhD (funded by the Met Office) he worked towards the development and application of a fully coupled fire-composition-climate Earth system model to quantify the impacts of fire variability on atmospheric composition-climate interactions in present and future worlds. Read more
Enoch is a former PhD student based at the Department of Physics in the Space and Atmospheric Physics Group. His research project looked into an observed correlation between tropical cyclones and wildfires occurring to the south of the region with active tropical storms. Using a combination of climate modelling techniques and observed data, he aimed to understand the relationship between hurricanes and favourable atmospheric conditions for wildfires in the Amazon and California. Read more Supervision: Ralf Toumi
Luke is a former PhD student who was based in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science. His PhD looked at the impact of anthropogenic land-use changes on fire regimes during the Holocene, using population and land-use reconstructions with charcoal-based records of palaeofires. Read more. After completing his PhD, he moved on to a PDRA position in Rome, looking at plant traits, invasive species and fire.
Ralf is Professor of Atmospheric Physics, and was Head of the Space and Atmospheric Physics Group from 2014-2020. Since 2020 he is Co-director of the Grantham Institute (Environment and Climate Change). His research focuses on extreme events, particularly tropical cyclones. From 2000-2024 he supervised a project in the Centre on the correlation between tropical cyclones and wildfires in the Amazon and California.
Ingrid was based in the Department of Geography as a visiting student from Urban and Regional Development at the Polytechnic of Turin – University of Turin. Her research focused on community-based management strategies for wildfire risk prevention, with a case study in the Alpine valley in Italy. The aim of the research was to develop an integrated fuel management strategy, economically sustainable and directly involving the local population. Visiting: 2021, Supervision: James Millington
Li is a former Research Associate in the Department of Geography. His research expertise is in the regulation and reduction of social and natural risks. In collaboration with Prof. David Demeritt, he employed both qualitative and quantitative methods to describe and explain local diversities and effectiveness of agricultural burning regulation in China.
Chris is a former PhD student who was based in the Department of Physics in the Space and Atmospheric Physics group. His NERC-funded PhD research studied how changing emissions from the tropics, including fire emissions from Africa, influence local and remote climates and health. He used the UKESM global climate model, based at the Met Office, to do this. Read more Supervision: Apostolos Voulgarakis, Majid Ezzati
Jem is Reader in Sustainable Development in the Centre for Environmental Policy and supervised PhD research at the Centre. His work focuses on the interplay between development, land-use and the sustainable use of natural resources, and links environmental impact, techno-economic and sustainability assessment frameworks.
Arun served on our Advisory Board from 2019-2023.
John was previously part of our Advisory Board, from 2019-2024.
Stephen served on our Advisory Board from 2019-2023.
Verena is a PhD student based in the Department of Geography. Her PhD, funded by NERC TREES DLA, focuses on Evaluating the impact of fire on the sustainability of vegetation recovery in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. Supervision: James Millington
Olivia is based in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her research aims to improve the accuracy and lead-time of the prediction of flash drought and associated wildfires in the Peruvian Andes. To do this, Olivia will combine participatory in-situ soil moisture monitoring and machine learning techniques to localise early warnings. Supervision: Wouter Buytaert, Rossella Arcucci
Sophia is based in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science. Her research, funded by the LEMONTREE project, will focus on linking fire to ecosystem services and subsequently, human health using broad scale spatial analysis and national level case studies. Supervisors: Sandy Harrison and Kris Murray (LSHTM)
Marissa is based in the Department of Engineering.. Her research, which is funded by ERC FIREMOD, focuses on modelling combustion characteristics for vegetation present in the arctic and identifying effects of fuel moisture, distribution and modes of combustion on fire spread. Supervision: Francesco Restuccia
Elisabed is based in the Centre for Environmental Policy. Elisabed’s interests include climate change, queer theory, and infrastructure as well as prefigurative politics. Elisabed works in academic and wider-than-academic media, mixing visual, written, collaborative, and experimental forms. Elisabed’s PhD in the Centre will explore environmental justice in fire governance through arts-based approaches. Supervisors: Elia Apostolopoulou and Adriana Ford
Angel is based in the Department of Geography. His PhD aims to develop an integrated wildfire risk-based mitigation model through policy, organizational structures and public perception of wildfires in the wildland-urban interface areas in South Africa. Read more… Supervision: David Demeritt and Adriana Ford
Sophy is based in the Centre for Environmental Policy. Her research is centred on wildfire emerging threats to the UK. She will focus on wildfire policy interventions, exploring attitudes and preferences to wildfire risk mitigation and adaptation measures from wildfire stakeholders and the UK public. Read more… Supervision: Yiannis Kountouris;
Chris is based in the Global Environmental Health research group at the School of Public Health, having joined the Centre in Sept. 2024. His PhD focusses on the public health risks of wildfires in Africa, investigating spatial patterns of exposure, vulnerability, and health inequalities. Read more… Supervisors: Majid Ezzati and Sandy Harrison
Nick is part of the Hazelab research group at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His PhD focuses on creating mathematical models and programs to simulate forest fire propagation near inhabited communities, working for the WUI-NITY project. Simulating forest fires allows us to make better plans for emergency response and evacuation. His work also focuses on calculating safety boundaries around WUI areas to act as evacuation trigger points, and provide a more accurate, fast, and reliable tool for emergency response and long-term planning. E-mail: nk1017@imperial.ac.uk Supervision: Guillermo Rein, Yannis Kountouris
Jake is based in the Data Science Institute, supported by the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and Environment, and the Department of Life Sciences. His PhD project focusses on using machine learning algorithms in data assimilation processes to improve the efficiency and accuracy of wildfire predictions, and social sentiment analysis towards wildfires. Read more Supervision: Rossella Arcucci and Colin Prentice
Zitong is based in in the Department of Geography. Her PhD is focused on the use of AI and Earth Observation in quantifying plume of emissions from Landscape Fire. Read more… Supervision: Martin Wooster
Alex is based in the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London. His PhD research identifies and analyses political and financial challenges North American insurance markets and regional stakeholders face when mitigating and adapting to the impacts of wildfires. The project aims to provide comparative, interstate analysis of identified challenges to develop holistically sustainable insurance outcomes for communities and markets. Read more… Supervision: Yiannis Kountouris, David Demeritt
Monika is based in the Department of Geography. Her PhD research aims to use interdisciplinary approaches such as participatory methods and vegetation/fire modelling to explore future fire regimes and narratives in southern Europe. Read more… Supervision: James Millington and Kate Schrekenberg
Rafaila is based in the School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. Her PhD focuses on the wildfire impacts on atmospheric composition and climate change. Specifically, during her PhD, she will study the effect of wildfire emissions on a global scale from the pre-industrial period to the present day and the future, using earth system models. Her research is funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I). Read more… Supervision: Apostolos Voulgarakis
Chege is based at Department of Geography at King’s College London. His PhD project aims to identify wildfire ignition patterns, map burnt areas and identify spatial temporal patterns and how they interact with large mammals to shape habitats, influencing human interaction in changing climate across key Kenya’s protected areas. Read more… Supervision: James Millington, Emma Tebbs, Kristofer Chan
Konstantina is based in the School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at TUC. Her PhD focuses on the wildfire-atmosphere interactions in the context of a changing climate. Currently, she is studying trace gases and aerosols in the atmosphere using different biomass burning (BB) emission datasets as inputs over multiple years. Her study is based on simulations with a Chemical Transport Model (CTM), with satellite information on burned area, emissions, and atmospheric constituents used for model validation purposes. Subsequently, her analysis will expand to utilising a full state-of-the-art Earth system model, namely EC-Earth. Supervision: Apostolos Voulgarakis
Andrianirina is based in the Department of Earth Science & Engineering. His PhD research focuses on the “Coupling of Remote Sensing Data and Machine Learning for Greenhouse Gas Emissions Monitoring” and specifically explores generative models (diffusion models), super-resolution, and the analysis of spatio-temporal data for climate applications. He is collaborating with the European Space Agency (ESA) to improve the accuracy and timeliness of wildfire detection using deep learning techniques. Read more… Supervision: Rossella Arcucci
Abdullah is based in the Department of Engineering, based in the Heat and Fire Lab. Joining the group in Oct 2024, he is studying the impact of wildfires on wildland urban interfaces and urban infrastructure. Read more
Imogen is based in the Department of Engineering. The aim of her research is to understand the fundamental dynamics causing fire spread mechanism for wood in various environmental and ambient conditions, including effects of moisture, wind and fuel type. Supervision: Francesco Restuccia
Luke is a member of the King’s Earth Observation and Wildfire Research Group. His research primarily focuses on the measurement of emissions from peatland and soil wildfires, and how they relate to ecosystem properties. By developing and refining hyperspectral remote sensing techniques, his PhD seeks to understand how peatland and soil wildfires affect the climate and human health. Read more… Supervision: Martin Wooster, Simon Lewis, Daniel Schillereff.
Yicheng is a PhD student based in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science. Her project focuses on the relationships between fire and fire-related plant traits (e.g. resprouting), with the ultimate goal to develop a theoretical basis for predicting fire regimes and develop a simple fire model incorporating plant controls on traits in fire-adapted vegetation. Yicheng’s project is funded by LEMONTREE. Read more here Supervision: Sandy Harrison, Colin Prentice
Rahina is based in the Department of Geography. Her PhD, which is funded through ESRC LISS-DTP, will explore the trade-offs between traditional and government approaches to fire management in the savannah woodlands of northern Ghana. Read more Supervision: Kate Schreckenberg
Minxue ‘Georgina’ Tang is based in Department of Life Sciences, where her PhD research focuses on nature-related financial risks in Southeast Asia. Her work integrates biodiversity and ecosystem service assessments into financial risk frameworks, specifically addressing environmental risks related to primary production, carbon stocks, and biodiversity. Minxue’s research is conducted in collaboration with the Singapore Green Finance Centre, the Centre for Climate Finance & Investment (Imperial Business School) and Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics (Singapore Management University). Supervision: Colin Prentice, Enrico Biffis (Imperial College Business School)
Dimitra is based in the School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at TUC. Her PhD (funded by AXA) investigates how the present-day atmosphere is influenced by fire emissions from boreal forests and peatlands and explores how the future of the climate system will be impacted by the changing wildfire regimes at high northern latitudes.. Read more… Supervision: Apostolos Voulgarakis
Henry is based in the Department of Geography. His research project investigates changing fire dynamics in Ethiopia, the drivers of these changes and the consequences for local communities. The project aims to incorporate satellite remote sensing and participatory methods and contribute to the advancement of a wider model of human-climate-fire interaction. Read more Supervision: Emma Tebbs, Kate Schreckenberg
Viera is based in the Department of Geography. Using agent-based modelling, her PhD aims to understand how companies and financial institutions impact deforestation and forest fire regimes in the tropics and if their strategies could contribute to a 1.5°C world. Read more Supervision: James Millington, David Demeritt
Chrysoula is a member of the group of Atmospheric Environment and Climate Change at TUC. She is a physicist, with research experience in physicochemical ocean, river and atmosphere data processing and analysis. Currently, her work focuses on studying trace gases and aerosols in the atmosphere using different biomass burning (BB) emission datasets as inputs over multiple years and conducting simulations with an atmospheric chemistry and transport model (CTM).
Toby is based in the Department of Geography in the Earth Observation and Wildfire research group. His research focuses on quantifying the air quality impacts of agricultural biomass burning in the upper ASEAN region and using ground-truth PM2.5 observations to validate air quality and smoke forecasts made by global and regional atmospheric models. Read more here Supervision: Martin Wooster
Anthi is based in the School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. Her PhD research focuses on quantifying the impacts of climate change on wildfires in the areas of Australia and Southeast Asia. For this, she utilises the INFERNO global fire model to predict fire occurrence, burnt area, emissions and air quality consequences, under future climate change scenarios. Her work involves high-resolution fire modelling as part of a quantitative, risk-based end-to-end approach that links climate change to wildfire activity, air pollution exposure, and health impacts. The PhD is part of the CANBREATHE project, led by the University of Canberra and funded by the Wellcome Trust. Supervision: Apostolos Voulgarakis
Prerita is a Research Associate in Global Peat Fire Modelling in the Department of Physics, integrating the INFERNO-peat module into UKESM to study feedback between peat fires, atmospheric composition, and climate. Her broader research spans atmospheric chemistry, aerosol pollution, biomass burning emissions, and aerosol–climate interactions, using high-resolution atmospheric models, AI-based approaches, and observational data.
Irini is a Postdoctoral researcher in the Technical University of Crete in the group of Atmospheric Environment and Climate Change. She is a physicist with a specialization in atmospheric and climate physics and a PhD in statistical modelling of air pollution. As part of the Centre, Irini is working on understanding the interaction between wildfires and climate, with a focus on fire-induced cloud changes. Read more…
Alin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Atmospheric Environment and Climate Change of the Technical University of Crete in Greece. He is a physicist specializing in atmospheric physics. His work currently involves employing earth system models to study the impacts of extreme wildfire emissions, ranging from large-scale surface cooling to teleconnections between wildfire-forced atmospheric anomalies and atmospheric circulation patterns. His research also encompasses developing novel methods of quantifying and modelling wildfires through fractal theory.
Candice is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Atmospheric Environment and Climate Change of the Technical University of Crete in Greece. She is a physicist specialising in energy and environmental physics, with a PhD in statistical modelling of long-term seasonal wildfire potential in Jamaica under climate scenarios. She also has research experience in investigating climate change and variability in the Caribbean region. Candice is working on developing a seasonal forecasting framework that adapts to region-specific driving conditions for wildfire (funded by AXA).
Andrew is a postdoctoral researcher within the DataLearning Group in the Department of Computing at Imperial. During his PhD he made machine learning forecasts of future wildfire occurrence in the Arctic-boreal zone under different climate change scenarios. Andrew now uses machine learning and AI to integrate satellite imagery with “human sensor” information from social media to improve real-time forecasting of wildfires. Read more…
Abi is a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University, and former Centre PhD student, based at Imperial College London, and supervised by Yiannis Kountouris and Jem Woods. Her PhD research (funded by Imperial College’s Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet DTP) explored whether community-based fire management (CBFiM) is an extension of the colonial narrative in an East and Southern African savanna context, or whether it provides an alternative and realizable equitable, effective, and sustainable ‘bottom-up’ fire management framework. Abi is now exploring the drivers and impacts of carbon-based payment for ecosystem service schemes on fire-adapted ecological systems across the tropical savanna-forest transitional zone, and continues to collaborate with the Centre.
Kayla is a Program Coordinator at the South Rupununi Conservation Society and former Centre PhD student at Royal Holloway, supervised by Jay Mistry, Daniel Colombaroli and Martin Wooster. Her research experience is in community conservation, sustainable development planning and eco-tourism, predominantly in her home country of Guyana. Her PhD research investigated changing fire management practices of the Indigenous people living in and around the Kanuku Mountains Protected Area in southern Guyana. Kayla continues to collaborate with the Centre on our ongoing work in the Rupununi region of Guyana.
Eleni is a postdoctoral researcher at TUC in the Atmospheric Environment and Climate Change Laboratory. She is an environmental engineer with specialization in atmospheric chemistry and health effects. She obtained her PhD from Harvard University, where she focused on molecular level reactions in the troposphere. She has experimental, field and modeling experience. Her current research focuses on understanding the effect of extreme events, and especially fires, targeting the potential chemical mechanisms that dominate and influence future air quality. Read more…
Jose is a postdoctoral researcher in Earth Observation and Landscape Fire Science, in the Department of Geography. He is is interested in fundamental modelling to understand the EO signal, developing capabilities to blend observations from different sensors and models, and Bayesian methods for data assimilation. In the Centre he works with satellite data from geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites and will implement simulations from models to simulate the impact of landscape fires on Earth’s atmosphere. Jose is co-lead of our ‘Info System Team’.
Manolis is a postdoctoral research engineer at Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas in Greece, working on climate change impacts on hydrological processes. In collaboration with Prof. Apostolos Voulgarakis, he aims to contribute to the understanding of drought effects on wildfires. Read more
Mark is a Research Associate in the Department of Geography. His research is focussed on quantification of wildfire emissions in the real-world and from laboratory experiments. His work includes using King’s Wildfire Testing Chamber facility to measure emissions data from different biomass and to optimise sensors for use in the field. Mark is co-lead of our ‘Air-Health Team’. Read more
Olivia is based a Research Associate in Fire-Vegetation Modelling. She co-leads the ‘Fire-Veg Giraffe Team’ of the Centre focusing on modelling fire-vegetation interactions. Before joining Reading, she completed her PhD with us, exploring the impact of CO2 on fire regimes and ecosystems in rapid warming events. Read more about her PhD and read more about her post-doctoral research…
Will is a Research Associate in the Department of Geography, with a background in conservation ecology and community development. His research focuses on governance structures surrounding fire use in Guyana and the role of Indigenous fire practices in savannah ecosystems. This research aims to inform and advocate for fire management policies in Guyana that prioritise Indigenous leadership and knowledge. In addition, Will’s research in Ireland explores how governance structures affect farmers’ land management decisions, particularly regarding burning practices. Read more…
Matt is a Research Associate in Earth Systems Modelling in the Department of Physics and a co-lead of the ‘Climate Team’ in the Centre. His research involves using state-of-the-art computer models to help researchers across the Centre understand the impacts of wildfire on the atmosphere and air quality, and predict how fire regimes may evolve under a changing climate. Read more
Theodore is based in the World Weather Attribution. He completed his PhD with the Centre at the University of Reading, focussed on the development of a probabilistic global wildfire model related to the spread of near future climate projections (Read more on his PhD). InWWA, he continues to work on climate and wildfires, and remains affiliated with the Centre.
Will is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography. His previous remote sensing research has involved quantifying microwave emissions from the natural snowpack, and analysing surface soil moisture patterns for Natural Flood Management. Will is currently investigating the quantification of agricultural fire emissions from Arctic wildfires.
Sina is based in the Data Learning and AI4Good Group, in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering. During his PhD, he focused on analysing large-scale dynamical mechanisms of Arctic-mid-latitudes linkage using physics-informed machine learning. In the Centre he is focusing on leveraging AI and deep learning to enhance our understanding of wildfire dynamics and their interactions with other variables. For nowcasting and early warning systems, his goal is to incorporate human-in-the-loop approaches and integrate human sensors into the models. Read more…
Hafizha (Afi) is a Research Associate at the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She has research experience on the smouldering of tropical peat fires and how to extinguish them for prevention and mitigation efforts. In her new role, she is working with Prof. Guillermo Rein and Imperial Hazelab research group to experimentally study the behaviour of smouldering wildfires in the Artic. Read more here.
Farrer is in the King’s Earth Observation and Wildfire research group, formally a PhD student and now a PDRA. His research explores how the use of multi- and hyper-spectral laboratory and airborne remote sensing in characterising landscape fire properties can improve emissions estimates. In August 2023 he helped to lead an ESA-funded airborne campaign over Canadian wildfires. Farrer’s PhD was funded by the National Productivity Investment Fund and delivered through the London NERC DTP. Read more
Ol is an alumni affiliate based at University of East Anglia. They completed their PhD at the Centre at King’s College London, developing the first agent-based model of anthropogenic wildfire applicable at a global scale (read more on their PhD here). Ol then worked as a PDRA at KCL on investigate how fire use varies globally and is likely to change into the future, considering both climatic changes and potential governance responses.
David is postdoctoral researcher in the Life Sciences department at Imperial College, having completed his PhD with the Centre. His main research is focused on understanding how complex terrain affects water and carbon fluxes, and how these fluxes and feedbacks shape ecosystems’ emergent functioning and services. At the Centre, he will be contributing with the development of a fire’s rate of spread model. With a background in environmental sciences and tropical ecology his research interests comprise ecophysiology, ecohydrology, remote sensing and land surface modelling. Read more Supervision: Colin Prentice , Guillermo Rein
Dharma is a Research Associate in Fire Ecology at the Department of Life Sciences based at Silwood Park Campus. He has previously researched the impact of fire and the post-fire recovery of tropical and subtropical plant biodiversity. He works with Professor Colin Prentice at ICL and with the fire-vegetation interaction working group led by Professor Sandy Harrison at the University of Reading. His role is to develop new models representing the connections between fire characteristics and plant adaptation to fire. Read more…
Kostas is based in the School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. He uses his extensive experience as a research engineer, including in the analysis, design, configuration and implementation of GIS, to provide technical support in the Centre, with the aim of designing and structuring a platform to facilitate the research of the TUC team.
Hamed is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography within the KCL EO and Wildfires Research Group. He has expertise in a diverse array of ex-situ and in-situ atmospheric sampling techniques, including utilising both ground and airborne systems, such as CH4 and VLW HyperCams and Telops HyperCams. Hamed employs these advanced technologies to detect and quantify a spectrum of species, and he helps design and implement versatile sampling kits capable of measuring concentrations of gases, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and particulates. Read more…
Cathy is a Research Associate in Indigenous and Local Knowledges in the Department of Geography. She has an interdisciplinary background in ecology and human geography, and her research previously has focused on the political ecology of wildfire in Belize’s coastal savannas since 1920, and community-based fire management in Belize. In the Centre, she is working on two projects – firstly, a global analysis of fire practices within smallholder and subsistence-oriented livelihoods, and secondly, crofting fire use in Scotland.
Michel is based in the Centre for Environmental Policy. He completed his PhD with the Centre in 2025, investigating drivers of fire regimes in the Brazilian Amazon, with a focus on the impact of changing forest governance and initiatives to reduce deforestation in the region (Read more).
Max is based at the Department of Geography. He first joined the Centre as a visiting research student from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Max is working with Dr. David Demeritt on natural language processing of natural hazard mitigation plans to construct a dataset for analyzing the effectiveness of wildfire prevention strategies. His broader research interests are in climate risk modeling.
Ivan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, with a background in human geography. His research focuses on fire governance, community-based fire management, and climate risk in the Arctic and Latin America. At the Centre, he is currently contributing to a project that examines how international fire agreements have framed the issue of fire and assesses the current state of fire-related research in the Arctic.
Kapil is based in the Department of Geography. With a background in community-based natural resource management, Kapil’s research focused on fire, livelihoods and biodiversity, particularly in India and South Africa. Kapil previously completed his PhD research with the Centre at KCL, supervised by Kate Schreckenberg, on contested fire management and understanding trade-offs between traditional and government approaches to fire management.
Elia is a human geographer and political ecologist whose research focuses ofn nature-society relationships in capitalism with an emphasis on the political ecology of nature conservation and urban political ecology. Her research includes exploring potential of grassroots activism and community struggles to promote social-environmental sustainability and justice. At the Centre, Elia is supervising a PhD project on environment justice in fire governance through arts-based approaches.
Rossella is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering and She is Director of Research at the Imperial Data Science Institute. She leads projects that use multimodal data (e.g. from social media or satellites) and incorporate machine learning algorithms, data assimilation processes and AI models to improve efficiency and accuracy of wildfire estimations and predictions.
Majid is Chair in Global Environmental Health in the School of Public Health. He leads the Global Environmental Health research group at Imperial, which includes air pollution and climate, nutrition, disease, and health forecasting and inequalities. At the Centre, Majid will supervise a project on global mapping of human risk from wildfires.
Yiannis is Lecturer in Economics and the Environment at the Centre for Environmental Policy. He is an applied economist with interests ranging from political economy and carbon markets through to social capital and well-being. Yiannis is co-lead of our ‘WIR3 Team’ focusing on wildfire insurance, risk, regulation and recovery.
James is Professor of Environmental Geography in the Department of Geography. He is supervising work on agent-based methods for representing anthropogenic fire in global fire models and the use of quantitative and simulation modelling approaches to understand landscape dynamics and support sustainable management and livelihoods. James is a co-lead of our ‘Just Fire Team’.
Morena is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Social Science in the Centre for Environmental Policy. Her focus is on applied biodiversity conservation research and in improving policy that impacts the persistence of species and people’s wellbeing.
Guillermo is Professor of Fire Science in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His research is centred on heat transfer, combustion and fire, and he leads the research group Imperial Hazelab. He is leading a project at the Centre on thermodynamics of Arctic wildfire and is co-lead of our ‘Climate Team’.
Francesco is a Senior Lecturer in Engineering in the Department of Engineering where he leads the Heat and Fire Lab. His main areas of interest are: Heat Transfer; Energy; Fire Science; Combustion; and Thermal Management of Electrochemical Devices.
Kate is Reader in Development Geography in the Department of Geography. Her main interests focus on community-based resource management and equity in the context of ecosystem services. Kate is supervising a project on contested fire management, looking to understand trade-offs between traditional and government approaches to fire management. She is a co-lead of our ‘Just Fire Team’.
Emma is Lecturer in Physical Geography and Earth Observation in the Department of Geography. Her expertise and interest lie in the application of Earth observation technology to issues of biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. She is supervising a project on the drivers of changing fire dynamics in Ethiopia’s drylands and the impacts on ecosystem services.
Varyl is a Senior Lecturer and geomorphologist with research expertise in Late Quaternary palaeohydrology.