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.
![Alexis Lewis 10-23-2007 Hum Dim conf Alexis Lewis 10-23-2007 Hum Dim conf](https://wildfiretoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Alexis-Lewis-10-23-2007-Hum-Dim-conf.jpg)
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.