Scott Ritter, PhD

Scott Ritter writes on catastrophes, claims, and risk management for IRMI.com.

Dr. Ritter is a wildfire scientist at Delos Insurance Solutions, where he leads development of proprietary risk and catastrophe models spanning hazard, vulnerability, and portfolio loss, and works on applying those models to underwriting, pricing, and reinsurance. Before moving into insurance, he was a research ecologist with the US Forest Service's Wildfire Risk Management Science Team.

Dr. Ritter's research has applied wildfire models at all spatial scales. Using computational fluid dynamics fire simulators, he has studied how three-dimensional forest structure governs ignition, crown fire spread, and fuel consumption at the tree and stand scale. His work in this area has been published in journals including Ecological Applications, Ecosphere, Fire, and Fire Ecology. At the landscape scale, he has built spatial wildfire risk assessments and treatment prioritization analyses for county, state, and federal clients, and has led research on fuel break effectiveness, potential operational delineations, and the drivers of wildfire containment and suppression success. He has also studied climate-fire interactions, including research as a coauthor in Global Ecology and Biogeography on how extreme fire spread events and area burned are changing under recent and future climate in the western United States.

He holds a doctor in philosophy (PhD) and master of science degree in forest science from Colorado State University and a bachelor of science degree in environmental science from the University of Vermont.