Reed Humphrey

Reed Humphrey entered the Evans School Ph.D. program in Public Policy and Management in the autumn of 2021. As a collaborator on the Managing Future Risk of Increasing Simultaneous Megafires project, which takes a convergence research approach to improving wildfire management, Reed has worked extensively with officials at the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center to develop decision support tools that exploit the connection between synoptic weather patterns and wildfire activity to support decision making around the allocation of wildfire suppression resources. Prior to joining the Evans School, Reed worked as a policy researcher on a variety of issues, from immigration to education to urban air quality. He holds an MPP from the University of Southern California and a BS in Economics from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Reed’s dissertation, From Measurement to Mitigation: Wildfire Hazard, Social Vulnerability, and Federal Funding in the Wildland-Urban Interface, focuses on the methods used to assess wildfire risk to communities, as well as the distributional outcomes of the federal Community Wildfire Defense Grant program. By exploring the relationship between wildfire hazard, social vulnerability, and grant funding outcomes, this research aims to improve the targeting of assistance to communities in mitigating the wildfire risk faced by their residents.