ICW welcomes Rebecca Miller and Will Cowan as Postdoctoral Scholars

August 2021

Rebecca Miller joins the West on Fire Project for the 2021-2022 academic year. Rebecca completed her PhD in Environment and Resources with a minor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. As a postdoc, Rebecca will continue her dissertation work on the impacts of wildfires on state policies and local communities across California. She is pursuing numerous wildfire-related projects and collaborations, including analyses of the state legislature’s attention on wildfire bills, trends in neighborhood-driven wildfire mitigation efforts, patterns in smoke-related school closures, and policy opportunities for professional mitigation training programs. Rebecca is also an affiliated scholar with the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University.

Will Cowan joins The West on Fire as a postdoctoral researcher. He studies the history of weather and water extremes in the North American West. He earned his Ph.D. in history from USC. His dissertation tells the environmental and social histories of the Big Winter of 1862 and presents a broad overview of atmospheric rivers, elemental meteorological forces in the Pacific Slope’s past, present, and future. Will will develop a Scalar-based publication/presentation.