Francisca Belart is a graduate student completing her doctoral studies and research at the College of Forestry at Oregon State University (OSU). Her research focus is on forest residue management opportunities to reduce moisture content and improve transportation efficiencies. She is interested in finding the optimal storage time and configuration by monitoring environmental variables and implementing physics models. Ultimately, she wants this information to be used by forest professionals so that they can deliver forest residuals economically.
As a Ph.D graduate student she jointly taught Forest Operations Analysis and Production Planning and Control for forestry seniors at OSU. She also worked as a forest planner for Forestal Mininco S.A. (Empresas CMPC) in Chile for more than three years before starting her Ph.D program.
Francisca earned a master’s degree in forest engineering at Oregon State University in 2008 and completed her bachelor’s degree in forest engineering at the Universidad Austral de Chile in 2006.