Scott Dehnisch is the Wildfire Unit Leader for USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA), the United States’ lead government agency for international disaster response. In this role, Scott coordinates BHA’s wildfire responses in support of the Bureau’s three geographic offices, the Office of Middle East, North Africa, and Europe; the Office of Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean; and the Office of Africa. He first came to USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) on temporary assignment in 2005 while in the middle of a 20-year career with the United States Forest Service's Fire and Aviation Management. In 2014, Scott swapped his domestic firefighting role for an international one, joining USAID/OFDA (now BHA) permanently through the Forest Service’s Disaster Assistance Support Program (DASP). Scott has coordinated and supported USAID wildfire responses to Indonesia, Israel, Paraguay, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Russia, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil, among others. Scott also supports other BHA disaster responses as a Deputy Manager for Operations.

David Callery is a hydrologist and assistant National Program Leader with the United States Forest Service Post-fire Program, based in the state of Montana. He also serves as Fireline Resource Advisor Coordinator and is a national technical lead for post-fire water-related issues. Dave has worked in hydrology and watershed management throughout western North America, including the last two decades in the northern Rocky Mountains. His work in fire and post-fire response includes instructing at numerous regional, national, and international post-wildfire and prescribed fire technical trainings.

Cara Sponaugel became a soil scientist after her father, also a soil scientist, instilled a love of soils and landscape ecology in her at a very young age. After completing a few degrees focusing on forest soils, the fire bug caught her several years ago with the Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) program evaluation of post-fire landscape effects. As a result, she has worked for over 20 years as soil scientist and post-fire specialist across the United States for multiple land management agencies, as well as post-fire assignments in Greece, Portugal, and India. Cara has been serving as the National Post-fire Program Leader for the United States Forest Service since 2019.

Corina Cerovski-Darriau is the USGS-USAID Landslides Hazards Advisor and Landslide Disaster Assistance Team (LDAT) manager, and oversees a variety of international educational and technical capacity building projects as part of a joint USGS and USAID Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance program. These projects work closely with in-country counterparts to support landslide mapping and monitoring efforts. Corina’s focus is capacity building to assess landslide hazards and create landslide awareness in order to prepare for future landslide events, and acting as a liaison between USGS and USAID. Her past research covered various topics in hillslope geomorphology – from producing geomorphic process maps to identify and quantify sediment erosion sources, to monitoring how long wildfire impacts soil hydraulic conductivity post-fire, to conducting landslide hazard assessment through field and remote mapping, to sampling and dating material properties to understand landscape evolution. Her scientific interest is the interaction of longer-term geomorphic processes on short-term hazards.