Instructor - Barbara Cowling - Instructors - International Rescue Training Centre

About Our Instructors

Our Instructors come from many varied backgrounds including Military, Police, Fire Service, Ambulance Service and the Outdoor Pursuits Industry, also from the voluntary sector i.e., Mountain Search and Rescue, Water Rescue. All are highly skilled and qualified in their respective disciplines.

As International Rescue Training Centre Wales evolves it is expected that many more Instructors will join the team in the future.

Instructor - Donald C. Cooper

DONALD C. COOPER

Ph.D., CFO, OFE, EMT-P

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, USA

Dr. Cooper currently serves as the Chief Deputy Ohio State Fire Marshal and has served the fire service as a paramedic, fire/rescue chief officer, dive team commander, and technical search and rescue instructor since 1979. He earned an MBA and PhD in Business Administration from the University of California at Los Angeles and has consulted and taught technical search and rescue operations, planning and management, tracking and leadership in over 200 jurisdictions in numerous countries around the world.

In addition, Dr. Cooper has served as a researcher for several significant search-related research projects sponsored by the U.S. National SAR Committee and funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and NASA; is the Chair of the National Fire Protection Association’s (NFPA) Technical Search and Rescue Committee and was formerly a member of the NFPA Disaster Management Committee; is a research evaluator for the U.S. Fire Administration (Department of Homeland Security); is the author of several emergency service textbooks including Fundamentals of Search and Rescue, Fundamentals of Mantracking: The Step-By-Step Method, and The Aviation Survival Handbook; is co-author of the book Managing Search Operations and a major contributor to the medical reference text Wilderness Medicine: Management of Wilderness and Environmental Emergencies (6^th Edition in press); is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Advanced Rescue Technology Magazine; and, serves as an Assistant Professor at the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine.

Dr. Cooper serves as the Incident Commander for Ohio’s Incident Management Team, which deployed to St. Bernard’s Parish, Louisiana, in Sept/Oct 2005 during hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and he formerly served as the Operations Chief of FEMA’s Urban SAR (US&R) Task Force in Ohio (Ohio Task Force 1) and as an SME to the FEMA US&R National Search Working Group. In 2002, Dr. Cooper was awarded the National Association for Search and Rescue’s (NASAR) most prestigious recognition—the Hal Foss Award—for both national and international contributions to the field of search and rescue.