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 convergent 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, Wildfire Risk, Vulnerability, and Migration in the Wildland-Urban Interface, focuses on the communities most affected by wildfire and on their ability to mitigate this risk. In addition to building on the methods currently used to assess the wildfire risk that communities face, the influence of urban-to-rural migration and social vulnerability on community-level risk mitigation are explored. Ultimately, this research aims to improve the targeting of federal and state grants to communities in need of assistance in mitigating the wildfire risk faced by their residents.