Kristin Braziunas

Dr. Kristin Braziunas is a research scientist in the Harvey Lab at the University of Washington. Her work focuses on understanding forest and disturbance dynamics in the face of climate change, with an emphasis on mountain landscapes in the western United States and European Alps. Prior to her current position, she was a postdoctoral researcher with the Ecosystem Dynamics and Forest Management Group at the Technical University of Munich. There, she primarily worked on forest landscape model development, specifically adding a new microclimate temperature module and developing methods for projecting future forest understory plant distributions from model outputs. Dr. Braziunas earned a PhD (2021) and MS (2018) in Integrative Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BA (2008) in Environmental Studies from Oberlin College. Her graduate work examined how forests and fuels recover after more frequent fire, as well as how fuels treatments alter fire risk and ecosystem services in wildland urban interface landscapes, using a blend of field work, forest simulation modeling, and remote sensing methods. Between undergraduate and graduate school, Dr. Braziunas worked for eight years in sustainability planning and program management, and she was a firefighter/emergency medical technician with the Oberlin Fire Department, where she achieved the rank of Lieutenant.