Fire Center Staff

LLoyd Queen

LLoyd Queen
Director & Professor

LLoyd teaches courses in Fire Measurements, Remote Sensing and Image Processing, and team-teaches the Prescribed Fire Practicum.  He is active in the student Fire Club and past Advisor for the UM Woodsmen’s Team.  As Center Director he is responsible for development and implementation of NCLFA’s Annual and Five-Year Workplans, and works closely with UM Administration and Agency Partners to ensure the Center’s viability on long time-scales.  During fire seasons he enjoys working with public land managers on fire planning, logistics and operations. He also enjoys fly fishing, alpine skiing, marlinspike seamanship and camping.

lloyd.queen@firecenter.umt.edu

Carl Seielstad

Carl Seielstad

Fire and Fuels Program Manager & Associate Professor

Carl's research interests are in forest & range management in wildfire and prescribed fire settings. His research integrates innovative fuels inventory methods, fire monitoring, fire weather, and technology development and transfer. Current projects include measurement of fuel bed properties beneath close-canopies using laser altimetry, development of cost-effective, low power, ad hoc wireless weather sensor networks with fault tolerance, and exploration of new, real-time fire intelligence gathering/delivery capacity. His technical expertise is concentrated in the geospatial technologies of remote sensing and geographic information systems. Carl remains active in operational fire in an effort to link academic activities and fire management.

carl.seielstad@firecenter.umt.edu

Jami Sindelar

jami sindelar

Business Practices Manager

Jami's primary role is as Grants & Agreement Specialist for Fire Center Principal Investigators. She also carries a red card with qualifications that enable her to provide assistance to the Fire Intelligence Module and Missoula Interagency Dispatch when needed. In addition to learning about fire, Jami enjoys hunting, camping, fishing, hiking, and volunteering at local pet rescues and shelters.

jami.sindelar@firecenter.umt.edu

Valentijn Hoff

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Prescribed Fire Program Manager

Valentijn is the Prescribed Fire Program Manager at the FireCenter. After fighting and lighting a lot of fires in the southeastern United States, Valentijn moved to Montana in 2008 to help wildland fire managers and researchers as a GIS Analyst at the FireCenter. Valentijn is a sUAS pilot, collecting pre-, during- and post-burn data, and in the summer he works on wildfires across the country, helping wildland fire modules, and as a single resource Field Observer. He serves as Situation Unit Leader on the Northern Rockies Type 1 Incident Management Team 2.

valentijn.hoff@firecenter.umt.edu

Christopher Moran

chris moran
Post-Doc Researcher

Chris's research interests focus on spatial analysis of LiDAR data for vegetation and fuel characterization and classification. He also assists in development of UAV research methods. Chris enjoys science, the outdoors, woodworking and reading.

chris.moran@firecenter.umt.edu

Dan Jimenez

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Mechanical Engineer & Ph.D. student

Dan is a research engineer at the Missoula Fire Science Lab. Dan is a Montana State Certified Emergency Medical Technician (EMT). He serves as the fire behavior research representative on the National Wildland Fire Coordinating Group (NWCG), Fire Behavior Subcommittee. He also serves as the medical awareness representative on the Lab Safety Committee. Dan's research includes studies on heat transfer and fluid flow model development and validation used to predict incident heat, temperature, wind profiles, and fire effects on forest landscapes, vegetation, and soil types. In collaboration with scientists at the Fire Lab and elsewhere, he has worked on the development and delivery of computer software to support fire and fuels managers, including the soil heating component of FOFEM (First Order Fire Effects Model), FireStem (a physics-based tree mortality model), and WindWizard (a gridded wind profile model). In addition, he works with fellow Lab engineers and technicians to design, develop, and fabricate field instrumentation used for data collection on prescribed and wildland fires. 

 

daniel.jimenez@usda.gov

Maggie Epstein

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Geospatial Analyst

Maggie is a geospatial analyst with a focus on wildland fuels. Her current work focuses on machine learning approaches to monitoring canopy fuels through time on pyrologically active landscapes in the Northern Rockies. She received her Bachelors of Science in rangeland ecology and natural resource management at Montana State University and her Masters of Science in forestry at the University of Montana.  Her favorite part of working at the Fire Center is that she gets to solve problems through science while staying engaged in practical fire management. She is an active member of Northern Rockies Incident Command Team 2 and works at St. Patrick's Hospital as an EMT in her free time. Outside of work Maggie enjoys trail running and skiing.