The International Association of Wildland Fire announced today the two winners of their Wildland Fire Scholarships for 2011. They are Alexis Lewis and Victoria Pantoja-Campa. Alexis Lewis is studying at Oregon State University and Victoria is at the Universidad Autonoma Chapingo in Mexico.
I don’t have the pleasure of knowing Victoria Pantoja-Campa but I have worked around Alexis on a couple of extended details at Yellowstone National Park when she was working on the helitack crew. Since then she has received her master’s in a wildland fire-related field and now is working on her PhD. She is an extraordinary person, and I am not surprised that people will soon be calling Alexis, who will be working on a fire crew again this summer, “Doc”.
Below is a photo of her that I had sitting around. It was taken at the IAWF’s Human Dimensions of Wildland Fire conference in Colorado in 2007 while she was presenting a paper on “Firefighters’ Experiences of Comfort with Decision Making in Wildland Firefighting”. The proceedings for the conference are here, but they are all in one huge zipped file.
Congratulations to the two women for being winners of the $2,500 scholarships. More details and photos about the scholarships and the two winners are at the IAWF site.
