MEET OUR CAL POLY TEAM

Adrienne I. Greve is a Professor in the City and Regional Planning Department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where she has been a member of the faculty since 2006. She holds a Ph.D. from the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Urban Design and Planning, Urban Ecology Program, at the University of Washington, Seattle, an M.S. in Bioresource Engineering, Environmental Engineering Option, from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and a B.S. in Biological and Agricultural Engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca. Her academic and professional experience includes working as a Surface-Water Hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, CO, and as Science, Technology, & Watersheds Staff with the Science, Sustainability, and Watershed Group at Seattle Public Utilities, Seattle, WA. Additionally, she has served as a Visiting Professor at the Research Center for Disaster Reduction Systems, Disaster Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, Uji, Kyoto, Japan. Dr. Greve's research interests are focused on climate adaptation planning and policy, disaster risk reduction, and climate-smart investment planning. She has contributed to several publications on these topics, including the California Adaptation Planning Guide, Climate Action Planning: A Guide to Creating Low-Carbon, Resilient Communities, and Local Climate Action Planning. In addition to her research, Dr. Greve is involved in several capacity-building initiatives, including serving as Co-Principal Investigator for Capacity Building Activities for Five Indian Cities to Develop Climate-Smart Investment Plans for the United Nations International Development Organization.

Christopher Dicus is an accomplished Professor of Wildland Fire & Fuels Management at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He holds a PhD in Silviculture from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, an MS in Fire Ecology from Utah State University, Logan, UT, and a BS in Forestry/Wildlife from Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, LA. With over 20 years of experience in the field, he has become a leading expert in Wildland-Urban Interface, fuel treatment impacts on fire behavior and ecosystem services, and Fire Ecology. He has also led several high-impact projects, including "The California Fire Science Consortium – The Wildland Urban Interface," which was awarded $474,120 by the Joint Fire Sciences Program. He also led "Efficacy of Wildland-Urban Interface Mitigation Strategies in Advancing Community Disaster Resilience" and "Quantification of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Benefits Associated with CAL FIRE California Climate Investments, Fire Prevention Grant Program Projects." In terms of leadership, he has presented numerous keynote speeches at international conferences and served as an expert panelist in virtual webinars. He has also written several publications, technical reports, and scientific articles, including "Fire Spread and structural loss during the 2016 Fort McMurray Wildfire" and "How fuel treatment types, locations, and amounts impact landscape-scale fire behavior and carbon dynamics in the Klamath Mountains."

Dan Turner is a retired Fire Chief with an extensive career of 37 years with CAL FIRE-San Luis Obispo, Santa Cruz, and Tulare counties. Throughout his career, Chief Turner served as a Type 1 Incident Commander on numerous major emergencies, including the Oakland Hills (Tunnel) fire, Loma Prieta Earthquake, and 9 other federally declared disasters. Since the 1991 Tunnel fire, Chief Turner has focused on making a significant impact on education and preparedness in reducing consequences of WUI fires. As a graduate of Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Chief Turner served as the Interim Director of Cal Poly’s Wildland Urban Interface FIRE Institute. He coordinated the Wildland Urban Interface Fire Colloquium in California and Australia on behalf of the US Dept of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate and prepared a detailed study of Homeland Security and Emergency Management professionals and higher education programs throughout California for the CA Office of Emergency Services. Chief Turner also served on the Board of Directors of the CA Fire Chief’s Association, representing SLO, Santa Barbara, and Ventura counties and was Chair of CAL FIRE’s Cooperative Fire Protection Committee. Since his retirement, Chief Turner has served as the Executive Director of the SLO County Fire Safe Council, a 501.c.3 non-profit organization that conducts education, preparedness, outreach, and hazardous fuel reduction programs throughout San Luis Obispo County. With his vast experience, Chief Turner continues to make a difference in educating communities and reducing the risk and consequences of WUI fires.

Jeremy J. James is a renowned plant ecologist and researcher. He is currently serving as a Professor and Department Head at the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He obtained his Ph.D. in Plant Biology from the University of California, Davis, in 2004 and his B.S. in Ecology and Statistics minor from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, in 1998. Jeremy has an illustrious career in research, with 76 peer-reviewed publications to his credit, and has obtained several grants to fund his research. Some of his recent research funding includes a $4.2 million grant from CAL FIRE for workforce educational programs to increase vegetation treatments' pace and scale for forest health and fire hazard reduction in California. Jeremy has served in several academic and professional roles throughout his career. He has held several research scientist positions at the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Burns, OR, from 2005 to 2011. From 2011 to 2012, he served as a Research Scientist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Burns, OR, before joining the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. He served as an Associate Specialist in Cooperative Extension at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources and Director of the Sierra Foothill Research & Extension Center from 2012 to 2018. Jeremy served as a Specialist in Cooperative Extension at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources and Director of the Sierra Foothill Research & Extension Center from 2018 to 2020. Throughout his academic and professional career, Jeremy has made substantial contributions to the field of ecology and plant biology. His recent research efforts have focused on improving rangeland soil health and drought resilience, restoring blue oak woodlands, and using diversity and facilitation to enhance establishment and resilience during restoration of invaded rangeland. His research work has been published in several prominent scientific journals, including Nature Ecology & Evolution, Oecologia, and Rangeland Ecology & Management, among others.

Margot McDonald, AIA, NOMA, NCARB, LEED AP, is a licensed architect and Professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where she served as the former Architecture Department Head from 2002-03 and 2013-2022. With over 20 years of experience in the field of architecture, she has established herself as an expert in building energy performance, sustainability, and interdisciplinary building design. Her areas of teaching include passive solar heating, passive cooling, daylighting, acoustics, water and waste, resilience, and design for wildfire in the built environment. Margot holds a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Oregon and a BS in Mathematics and BA in French from UC Santa Barbara. She is a licensed architect in the State of Oregon and has been actively involved in numerous national organizations, including the American Institute of Architect’s National Resilience Initiative, where she served as co-lead with Dr. Bill Siembieda in City & Regional Planning at Cal Poly. She also chaired the national U.S. Green Building Council’s Formal Education Committee and served as Chairman of the Board of Directors for the American Solar Energy Society. Throughout her career, she has been committed to advancing sustainable architecture and has worked tirelessly to promote interdisciplinary collaboration between students and faculty in architecture, structural engineering, construction management, and landscape architecture.

Samuel A. Vigil is a Professor Emeritus of Civil and Environmental Engineering at California Polytechnic State University. Dr. Vigil has a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Davis, an MS in Environmental Engineering from Texas A&M, College Station, and a BS in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an expert in remote sensing, environmental engineering, solid waste, recycling, energy from waste, and sustainability engineering. Dr. Vigil has worked at California Polytechnic State University since 1982, where he served as a Professor until 2009, and has been a Professor Emeritus since. Prior to joining the university, Dr. Vigil was a Principal Engineer at Brown and Caldwell Consulting Engineers in Walnut Creek, California, from 1980 to 1982. His extensive knowledge and experience in the field have led him to conduct research on a variety of environmental issues, including carbon dioxide and methane emissions, satellite observations for CO2 monitoring, leachate treatment technologies, and solid waste management. Dr. Vigil has authored technical reports, presentations, symposia, and publications on environmental issues. His work on methane emissions from Californian landfills was published in the journal Atmos. Meas. Tech., and he presented his research on the ecology of man-made ecosystems at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Carbon Club Meeting. His other work includes presenting a poster on the HUMSAT system, a CubeSat-based constellation for in-situ and inexpensive environmental measurements, at the 2014 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, and co-authoring a handbook of guidelines for the sustainable technology park. Dr. Vigil's contributions have been recognized by the World Bank and the US Trade and Development Program.

William Siembieda is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He has extensive expertise in the study of resiliency, risk reduction, and hazard mitigation, with a focus on policy and informed choices in constructing resilient and reduced-risk communities. Dr. Siembieda's professional practice efforts are transnational and he has been a subject matter expert to the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Chilean National Center for Integrated Natural Hazard Management, and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency. He was also a co-director of the State of California Multi-Hazard Mitigation Plan, which won national acclaim for its early inclusion of climate adaptation. As an expert in state hazard mitigation plan preparation, Dr. Siembieda has contributed to the State of California Adaptation Planning Guide 1.0, which was five years ahead of its time. He currently serves as an advisor to the County of Santa Barbara, CA Core Team for its Climate Changes Vulnerability Assessment and is a Principal Faculty Researcher at Cal Poly, working to establish the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) Fire Institute. Dr. Siembieda is recognized for his understanding of the dynamics of disaster and recovery systems and has been asked to lead planning and policy groups for various earthquake and geotechnical extreme events in Chile and New Zealand. He has also participated in the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government Center for Crisis Leadership program on major issues in disaster recovery. Dr. Siembieda's decades of research and practice have led to the development of new approaches, such as the asset-access-time model and the ASCI framework, for assessing how to make land use development decisions in high-hazard risk areas. His work has been published in a range of peer-reviewed journals and professional publications. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an Economics B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Siembieda is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and has received numerous academic honors, including a Fulbright to Mexico, a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship, and the International Society for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (IDRiM) Norio Okada Distinguished Implementation Science Award in 2019.