Faculty & Researchers
Dr. Craig B. Clements
Professor and Director
Dr. Craig Clements is a Professor of Meteorology and Director of the WIRC and the Fire Weather Research Laboratory. He leads research on fire weather, extreme fire behavior, fire-atmosphere interactions, and conducting wildland fire field experiments. Dr. Clements has over 20 years of experience in meteorological field observations and teaches courses in Fire Weather, Wildfire Science, Mountain Meteorology, Climate Change, and Meteorological Instrumentation. He received his PhD in Geophysics from the University of Houston, his MS in Meteorology from the University of Utah, and a BS degree in Geography from the University of Nevada, Reno. In 2012, Dr. Clements received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award for his research on wildfire dynamics and fire weather. His current research focuses on obtaining meteorological measurements using state-of-the-art Mobile Atmospheric Profiling Systems such as Doppler Lidar and Radar at active wildfires in the western US and his research has been featured in PBS NOVA, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Time, CNN, and Scientific American.
Contact: craig.clements@sjsu.edu
Dr. Ismaila Diallo
Assistant Professor of Climate Dynamics
Dr. Ismaila Diallo is an Earth System scientist whose research centers on predicting and understanding the physical relationship between natural climate variability, extreme weather events, and climate change within the coupled Earth system. The primary goal of his research is to improve our understanding of monsoon systems and precipitation variability in a changing climate to improve predictability of hydroclimatological changes in response to anthropogenic warming, but also to environmental changes.
Contact: ismaila.diallo@sjsu.edu
Dr. Adam Kochanski
Assistant Professor of Wildfire Modeling
Dr. Adam Kochanski is an assistant professor working at the San José State University as part of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center. He received his M.Eng in Chemical Engineering and MBA from Technical University of Lodz (Poland) and Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Nevada, Reno. His main research interests include fire-atmosphere interactions including air quality impacts of wildland fires. He is a modeler with extensive experience in running numerical simulations of fire, smoke, and regional climate on high-performance computing platforms. He is a co-developer of the coupled fire-atmosphere model WRF-SFIRE, the integrated fire and air quality system WRF-SFIRE-CHEM, as well as the fire forecasting system WRFX. He is one the modeling leads for the Fire and Smoke Model Evaluation Experiment (FASMEE), a member of the Rocky Mountain Center for Fire-Weather Intelligence (RMC) steering committee and an author of over 30 scientific publications.
Contact: adam.kochanski@sjsu.edu
Dr. Ali Tohidi
Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Wildfire Dynamics
Dr. Ali Tohidi is a fluid dynamicist and a data scientist. His research and development interests are at the nexus of experimental, data-driven, and mathematical modeling of large-scale complex systems, particularly the phenomena revolving around fluid and fire dynamics. He received his M.Sc. from Sharif University of Technology where he showed the effects of wind-induced surface cooling on transport processes in aquatic canopies. He, also, received his Ph.D. in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Clemson University, where he studied wildfire spread via firebrand shower phenomenon. Later, he held a Postdoctoral Scholar position in Fire Protection Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, College Park where he worked on the combustion-induced thermo-mechanical failure of cellular solids as well as dynamics of fire whirls; an extreme fire behavior. His current efforts are focused on developing the new generation of operational wildfire behavior models and characterization of the near-term risk for grid resiliency.
Contact: ali.tohidi@sjsu.edu
Dr. Kate Wilkin
Assistant Professor of Fire Ecology
Dr. Kate Wilkin is a new Professor of Fire Ecology in the Biology Department at San José State University. She has nearly 20 years of experience in natural resource management, outreach, and research. She focuses on how we can live sustainability in fire-prone ecosystems like California and spans fire ecology and management from the wilderness to the wildland urban interface (WUI). Her research explores wildfire recovery of communities and natural lands, prescribed fire on private lands, and wildfire mitigation including fire resistant homes, defensible space, and fuel treatments. Wilkin lead a team to build fire literacy in California by adapting and updating the USFS FireWorks curriculum. Her team used trauma-informed principles to create three Next Generation Science Standards cycles for Northern California middle school students, which will be published this summer. Wilkin and her work have been featured in Science Magazine, NPR’s Science Friday, Outside Magazine, and Sunset Magazine.
Contact: kate.wilkin@sjsu.edu
Dr. Minghui Diao
Associate Professor of Meteorology and Climate Science
Dr. Diao is an associate professor in the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San Jose State University. She received her B.S. degree from Peking University and Ph.D. degree from Princeton University. She is a member of the NASA Health and Air Quality Applied Sciences Team (HAQAST). Her current research interests include remote sensing of wildfire smoke and aerosol optical depth and PM2.5, air quality assessment in California, aircraft-based observations of clouds and aerosols, and climate model simulations.
Contact: minghui.diao@sjsu.edu
Dr. A.J. Faas
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Dr. A.J. Faas is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Graduate Coordinator for the MA Program in Applied Anthropology. He completed a Ph.D. in Applied Anthropology at the University of South Florida and both a BA and MA in Anthropology at Montclair State University. Dr. Faas studies the historical and social production of disaster (with attention to “vulnerability”), the formation and performance of response networks, cooperation and mutual aid in disaster, and state and nongovernmental humanitarian operations for recovery, reconstruction, and resettlement.
Contact: aj.faas@sjsu.edu
Dr. Ben Reed
Professor of Computer Science
Ben Reed is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at San José State University. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Cruz, M.S. in Computer Science from DePaul University, and a B.A in Mathematics from Miami University. He spent over 20 years doing systems research in industry at IBM Almaden Research, Yahoo! Research, and Meta. His work on big data and distributed systems infrastructure includes co-founding open source projects such as Apache Pig, a language for processing large datasets, and Apache ZooKeeper, a coordination system for building large scale applications.
Contact: ben.reed@sjsu.edu
Dr. Bo Yang
Assistant Professor of Urban & Regional Planning
Dr. Bo Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban & Regional Planning at San José State University. He has interdisciplinary education background with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics, an M.S. in Computer Science, and Ph.D. in Geography. Dr. Yang's research interests include GIS, Remote Sensing, Spatial Statistics, UAV/Drone Mapping for environmental science, Urban Heat Effect, and Citizen Science. He uses high resolution UAV/drone and GIS to map and analyze the wildfire environment and the impact to air quality, urban land use, local climate, and environmental resilience.
Contact: bo.yang02@sjsu.edu
Julia Gaudinski
Research Director WIRC, Research Scientist in Soil Biogeochemistry
Dr. Julia Gaudinski is the Research Director for WIRC and brings three areas of capability. First, she is a climate scientist with research expertise in terrestrial carbon cycling, particularly in forests. Second, she brings experience in strategic grant getting having built the centralized five-person Research Development unit within the Division of Research and Innovation at San Jose State University (SJSU) between 2019 and 2022. Third, she knows how to communicate science to diverse audiences. The mission of her 2012-2016 startup, “Mobile Ranger,” was to “connect people to places” by telling compelling stories of place based on information from science and history experts. Julia holds Bachelor’s degrees in Earth Science and Environmental Studies from the University of California Santa Cruz and a Ph.D. from the University of California Irvine in Earth System Science.
Contact: julia.gaudinski@sjsu.edu
Dr. Aurélien Costes
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Aurélien Costes is a post-doctoral research associate working at San José StateUniversity as part of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center. He holds an M.S. in Computational Fluid Mechanics from the ENSEEIHT engineering school (France) and a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Physics from Paul Sabatier University (France). His main research interests are in coupled atmosphere-fire modeling, scientific tool development, and high performancecomputing. He is the main developer of the Blaze fire model, which forms the coupled atmosphere-fire model MésoNH-Blaze. He is currently working to improve the physical processes represented in the coupled model WRF-SFIRE and to improve model performance.
Contact: aurelien.costes@sjsu.edu
Dr. Angel Farguell Caus
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dr. Angel Farguell is a post-doctoral research associate working at the San José State University as part of the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center. He holds a B.S. in Mathematics, an M.S. in Modeling for Science and Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). His main research interests focus on coupled atmosphere-fire modeling, statistical learning, remote sensing, and GIS. He is a co-developer of the coupled atmosphere-fire model WRF-SFIRE, as well as the fire forecasting system WRFx. He is currently working on projects applying machine learning methods to support fire-atmosphere simulations using satellite data conducted by the WIRC modeling group.
Contact: angel.farguellcaus@sjsu.edu