Val Densmore is a fire scientist working at WA’s Dept of Biodiversity, Conservation & Attractions. Early in T3 Val reached out to DeadlyScience via the website as she was keen to contribute to our programs. Val eventually participated in Deadly Learners as a STEM legend presenting to Years 7 students at Centralian Middle School, NT. 

Val shared her experience as a fire ecologist on Pibulmen Country, and that she studies how plants, animals and communities respond to fire and the best way to apply fire for the health of the bush. She spoke about her current role working for the WA government as a scientist and also a firefighter. Val impressed everybody by speaking about how she carries first hand knowledge of how fires burn in different circumstances, and that she even knows how different trees and plants smell when they’re burning.

In addition to this, Val kindly shared a bit of her life story and spoke about life growing up in the original Country of the Cherokee people, Oklahoma. She explained that the word “Oklahoma” means Red Earth, and that it’s very flat with mostly grass and trees that follow watercourses. She shared that her father is from a more desert country, Arizona, and her mother from pine forest country in Arkansas.

Val reflected about how when she was in school, she was very curious, loved to learn, and always loved being outdoors in nature and observing things. This led her to knowing that she wanted to be a scientist from about as early as year 4. She shared her STEM journey by explaining that she studied biology first, then she studied neuroendocrinology. She eventually  realised that she wanted to focus on the environment rather than human beings, so she went back to school and studied first bush regeneration and then fire.

Her particular field of STEM appealed to her for lots of reasons. She’s really passionate about caring for the environment – either protecting healthy places so they stay healthy or helping unhealthy places improve. She believes that fire is the key tool to do that, plus it lets her spend heaps of time outside observing and learning. Val says that everything is interrelated, so it’s really complex and you can learn every moment for your whole life and still not know or understand everything.

Val is currently working on how to keep wetlands, or swamps, from burning. Where Val lives, they’ve been getting less and less rain every year, so the wetlands are getting dry and then can start to burn when there’s a fire. She collects a lot of soil samples and has wet them to various degrees to find out how wet they need to be to stay protected. She is also trying to find out what other factors influence the moisture threshold, such as how much organic moisture is in the soil, the types of soil particles (sand, silt or clay) present, where in the landscape the wetland occurs, and even the past fire history of the area.

Val truly is a STEM Legend!