Governing Board

Our program is jointly funded by the Departments of Agriculture and Interior and governance is through a 10-member Governing Board with 5 members from the Forest Service and 1 member each from the Bureaus of Land Management, Indian Affairs, Fish and Wildlife Service, Park Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

	Nate Benson Governing Board Chair Fire Ecologist Program Leader DOI National Park Service National Interagency Fire Center, Boise, Idaho
Nate Benson has worked for the National Park Service for more than fifteen years in a variety of positions. He started his NPS fire career as a fire effects monitor at Glacier National Park, and then moved to Yellowstone and Great Smoky Mountains National Parks as a Fire Use Module Leader. More recently he was the Prescribed Fire Specialist at Everglades National Park. He is currently at the NPS Fire Management Program Center as the National Fire Ecology Program Lead. Nate has a Master of Science - Land Resources degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Environmental Studies.
	Paul Langowski Governing Board Vice-Chair Branch Chief for Fuels and Fire Ecology USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Region
As Branch Chief for Fuels and Fire Ecology, Paul has program leadership responsibility for fuels management and fire use programs on National Forests and Grasslands lands in Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. Paul is a 1977 graduate of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where he received a B.S. in Resources Management. His Forest Service career began in 1977 as a seasonal employee with the White River National Forest in Colorado. Since then, he has served as a resource technician on the Helena National Forest, in Montana, District Silviculturist and Timber Staff on the Kaibab National Forest in Arizona, Forest Silviculturist on the Lincoln National Forest in New Mexico and Zone Timber and Fire Management Staff on the Arapaho Roosevelt National Forest in Colorado. Paul is currently the Forest Service Representative to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) Fire Use Sub-committee. He has been a member of the Joint Fire Science Program Governing Board since 2002. Paul was a certified silviculturist and a graduate of Technical Fire Management. Paul is actively involved with integrating fire management issues into the land management planning process, in the development of processes and procedures for the analysis of the effects of fuels treatments and increasing the effectiveness of science delivery. He spends his off time telemark skiing, biking, hiking and running.
	Elizabeth Reinhardt Fire Reseach Program Leader USDA Forest Service
Elizabeth is the Forest Service's National Program Leader for Fire Research. She started working for the Forest Service as a seasonal employee in 1978 and spent most of her career at the Rocky Mountain Research Station's Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory where she was a research forester. Her research focused on fire ecology and wildland fuel treatment. She is a principle developer of FOFEM (a First Order Fire Effects Model) and FFE-FVS (the Fire and Fuels Extension to the Forest Vegetation Simulator. She served as Project Leader of the Fire Ecology and Fuels Project, and the Director of the Fire Modeling Institute for several years. In 2009 she came to Washington DC as a member of the Policy Analysis staff, and then served in the Climate Change Advisor's Office for two years as staff assistant. She has degrees in English (A.B., Harvard University), and forestry (M.S. and Ph.D., University of Montana).
	Lynda Boody Deputy Assistant Director Fire & Aviation Bureau of Land Management Washington, DC
(biography not yet available)
	Mark Kaib Deputy Regional Fire Mgmt Coordinator DOI US Fish & Wildlife Service, Southwest Region 2
Mark began his career in fire as an Arizona hotshot crewmember for the USFS in 1982, his first summer out of high school. Over the next 13 years he worked on other hotshot crews, engine and helitack crews for the USFS, NPS, and the BLM. Mark was a hotshot superintendent and also worked in Alaska with Native American Crews for the Alaska Fire Service. As a seasonal firefighter Mark either went to college or traveled in the winter months. Mark traveled extensively throughout Latin America, Southeast Asia, and to 24 countries in Africa between 1985 and 2000. Mark attended graduate school at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring research. In northern Mexico and the Southwest United States, Mark conducted research on past land-uses, fire history, and human fire influences in mixed-conifer, pine-oak forest, and semi-desert grassland ecosystems. Mark is currently the Deputy Regional Fire Management Coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southwest Region in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he consults the Refuge in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. Mark has been involved with International fire management training and planning in Central America and Mexico, through the Interior Technical Assistance Program and The Nature Conservancy. Marks personal interests include hiking, biking, fishing, international travel and outdoor activities with his wife Kelli, and their 7 year old son Nate. Education B.S., Environmental Sciences; Range and Wildlife, Arizona State University, 1992 M.S., Watershed Management, The University of Arizona, 1998 MS, Arid Lands Resource Sciences, The University of Arizona, 2004
	M. L. Smith Deputy Forest Supervisor USDA Forest Service, Boise National Forest
Marie-Louise "ML" Smith is currently serving as the Deputy Forest Supervisor on the Boise National Forest in southwest Idaho. ML came to this position in August 2010 after serving as Staff Assistant to the Deputy Chief for the National Forest System in Washington DC. ML started her career in 1987 as a seasonal backcountry ranger and wildland firefighter on the Chugach National Forest in Alaska. Since then, she has served as an ecologist and research ecologist with the Northern Research Station in Durham, NH, and in Washington, D.C. as a legislative specialist on Forest Service Legislative Affairs staff and as Acting Assistant Director for Integrated Vegetation Management. ML earned a B.S. in Natural Resources at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, a M.S. in Forestry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Ph.D. in Forest Ecology from the University of New Hampshire.
	Jeanne Higgins Forest Supervisor, Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest USDA Forest Service, Intermountain Region
Jeanne Higgins is currently serving as the Forest Supervisor on the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada and Eastern California. Jeanne came to this position in March 2010 after serving as the Forest Supervisor on Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest in Northern Wisconsin. Jeanne completed a BS degree in Forest Resource Management at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho in 1988. After graduation Jeanne worked in numerous district staff positions on the Kootenai and Malhuer National Forests including small sales forester: GIS coordinator; NEPA coordinator; Fish, Wildlife, Botany and Planning Staff Officer; District Environmental Coordinator; and Operations Forester before transferring to the Fishlake National Forest in 1999 where she served as the District Ranger and Planning Staff Officer on the Richfield Ranger District. Jeanne also served as the District Ranger on the Stevensville Ranger District on the Bitterroot NF in western Montana and the Deputy Forest Supervisor on the Chequamegon-Nicolet NF. Jeanne has been active in fire suppression since 1980 where she started as a “militia” fire fighter. She has served on Incident Management Teams since 1995, most recently as a Resource Unit Leader on a Northern Rockies Type I IMT since 2002. Jeanne has also served as an Agency Administrator Representative on numerous Type 1, 2, and 3 incidents since becoming a line officer in 1999.
	Ed Brunson BIA, Eastern Region
(biography not yet available)
	Jim Menakis National Fire Ecologist Washington Office - Fire and Aviation Management (Detached) USDA Forest Service Missoula, MT
Since 1990, Menakis has worked on various research projects related to fire ecology at the community and landscape levels for the Fire Ecology and Fuels Project. Currently, he is working for the Fire Modeling Institute on the Hazardous Fuels Prioritization Allocation System (HFPAS) for Forest Service and Department Interior, mapping Wild Fire Potential for the nation, providing technical support on the Cohesive Strategy, and providing continued support on Fire Regime Condition Class (FRCC). Menakis was recently the Rapid Assessment team lead for the LANDFIRE project. He has recently worked on mapping Historical Natural Fire Regimes, FRCC, and Wildland Fire Risk to Flammable Structures for the conterminous United States and relative FRCC for the western United States. Before that, he was the GIS Coordinator of the Landscape Ecology Team for the Interior Columbia River Basin Scientific Assessment Project and was involved with mapping FARSITE layers for the Gila Wilderness and the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. Menakis received his B.S. degree in Forestry and M.S. degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Montana, Missoula.
	Matt Rollins USGS-EROS Data Center Sioux Falls, SD
Currently, Matthew Rollins is the lead of the Wildland Fire Science Team at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center in Sioux, Falls South Dakota. Prior to that he was a supervisory ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana. His research emphases have included 1) evaluating changes in 20th century wildland fire and landscape patterns under different wilderness fire management scenarios in large wilderness areas of the western United States; 2) integrating biophysical gradient modeling with ecosystem simulation and remote sensing for vegetation and wildland fuel mapping applications; and 3) integration of national level wildland fuel and fire regime data into fire management decision support applications. He earned a B.S. in Wildlife Biology in 1993 and an M.S. in Forestry in 1995 from the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana. His Ph.D. was awarded by The University of Arizona in 2000, where he worked at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.