Luca is a PhD student at Earth Lab, working with Dr. Bill Travis, whose research investigates the societal impacts of wildfires by connecting narrative, domain-specific data with remote sensing and other wildfire-related datasets. She is particularly interested in wildfire risk and how that risk is defined, perceived, and managed in our society. In her doctoral research, she explores deep learning techniques applied to Earth Sciences as she works on developing an open-science, large language modeling approach to extract the previously non-synthesized insights from the narrative fields of the ICS-209-PLUS-WILDFIRE, a science-grade dataset mined from the public archive of the US National Incident Management System Incident Status Summary forms. 

Luca earned her BS and BA in Geography and Economics from Southern Illinois University of Carbondale and her MA in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder.