Dr. Judi Beck has been the Director General of the Pacific Forestry Centre (PFC) of the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) at Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) since January 2014. As the senior executive for NRCan-CFS in the Pacific Region, she represents the Government of Canada as negotiator and spokesperson on forestry issues. She directs the CFS Centre in Victoria, and plans, implements and evaluates the regional delivery of a broad spectrum of CFS programs. With her provincial counterparts, she has co-chaired both the Forest Pest and Wildland Fire Management Working Groups of the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers, and she has co-chaired the national file on Disturbance (fire, integrated pest management, forest invasive alien species, climate change) related research for CFS, NRCan. Dr. Beck is currently CFS’s strategic executive lead on Forest Climate Change.
Dr. Beck has a passion for engaging leadership and building learning organizations, and enabling a culture of continuous improvement and excellence in research, forestry and forest governance.
She started with the CFS as Director of the Forest Innovation & Dynamics Division for PFC in 2009, and as such managed research programs that addressed science issues in a variety of disciplines within the forestry sector including genomics, wildland fire, bioenergy, soil productivity, and pathology. Prior to joining the CFS, she was Manager, Wildfire Management for the province of British Columbia (BC), and she worked for the BC Forest Service in policy, legislative development, litigation management, international technology transfer and operational emergency management from 1993 through 2009. She has enjoyed working internationally in Australia, Argentina, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico and the USA. She obtained her B.Sc. (Forestry) from the University of New Brunswick in 1985, an M.Sc. (Forestry) from the Australian National University in 1988; and her Ph.D. (Fire Growth / GIS) from Curtin University, Western Australia in 2000. She is a registered forest professional in British Columbia.
