Jessica Block is the Associate Director in the Societal Computing and Innovation Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Her work in fire response began in Australia with the University of Melbourne and the University of Ballarat, when the Black Saturday fires burned through Victoria in 2009. She has been with WIFIRE since its inception in 2014 and has since been developing research and technology to accelerate local and state agency innovation in disaster response. Her work aims to mitigate natural disasters using emerging technologies including satellites, sensor networks, machine learning tools, and virtual reality.

The WIFIRE program has been an integral part of the creation of the Fire Integrated Real-time Intelligence System (FIRIS) in California which has revolutionized wildfire initial attack response, integrating real-time geospatial data and predictive wildfire spread models at the wildland urban interface. In October of 2019, she was appointed by Governor Newsom to the California Wildfire Safety Advisory Board and became Board Chair in 2022. The Board’s role is to advise the State on effective wildfire mitigation strategies to electric utilities. She holds a bachelor's degree from UCLA and a master's degree from ASU in Geology with a focus in sustainability and urban ecology.