Katherine Hayes is in her fifth -year as a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Colorado Denver. She works in the intersection of paleoecology, fire science, and landscape ecology studying how ecosystems change over space and time. Her interest in fire sparked from working on charcoal records in a paleoecology lab as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Prior to her Ph.D., she studied long-term records of fire in coast redwood forests as part of her master’s research at the University of Oregon. Her doctoral research explores how increasing fires in Alaska are driving shifts in forest communities, forest carbon storage and future landscape flammability.