Fire Scientist

Fire is a component of nature, as old and natural as water and light. It is powerful enough to strip entire forests and eliminate communities. While Firefighters battle these blazes with determination and the newest technology, Fire Scientists work to better understand how the flames function and how they can be stopped.

When you’re a Fire Scientist, your goal is to learn how fire works. What does it feed on? How does it spread? When you understand how it behaves, you can reconstruct history.

That makes you valuable in a court of law. For this portion of your job, you gather the findings of the Fire Investigator and turn her best guess into a scientifically based model that is reliable enough for the jury to hear. Lawyers rely on your expertise to build their case. Then you offer testimony in court.

When you’re not on the witness stand, your days as a Fire Scientist are spent dreaming up new technologies that fight fire in clean and sustainable ways. For example, Fire Scientists created automatic fire sprinkler systems and, most recently, a new vapor product that puts out fire before it stretches into a flame, and doesn’t result in smoke or water damage to the home, business, or museum.

So, whether you build models just to watch them burn down, or explain to others how fires burn, your knowledge helps educate people and protect forests, animals, homes, businesses, and artifacts from the destructive nature of the blaze.