Dr. Janice Coen holds positions of Senior Research Scientist at the University of San Francisco in San Francisco, California, and Project Scientist in the Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Laboratory at NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. She received a B.S. in Engineering Physics from Grove City College and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago.
She studies fire behavior and its interaction with weather using coupled weather-fire CFD models and flow analysis of high-speed IR fire imagery. Her recent work investigated the mechanisms leading to extreme wildfire events, fine-scale wind extrema that lead to ignitions by the electric grid, and integration of coupled models with satellite active fire detection data to forecast the growth of landscape-scale wildfires.