Leah has been an invaluable collaborator on this project, providing critical input on the research design, interpreting our findings, and helping to coordinate with other community partners. For more about Leah, see: https://www.lakesheriff.com/1351/Administration. You can also read about Leah’s role in these recent articles in Government Technology and the Record-Bee.

Coming soon.

He has been studying the resilience and adaptation of critical infrastructure (e.g., levees, dams) to extreme events (e.g., drought, flooding, wildfires, compound and cascading hazards) in a changing climate, with a particular focus on improving conditions for disadvantaged communities. Farshid deeply values multidisciplinary collaboration and is the lead investigator for this project. For more information about Farshid, see: https://facultyprofiles.tufts.edu/farshid-vahedifard.

Roxane has been involved in this project from the beginning, and is one of the lead investigators researching the impacts of wildfire exposure on psychological well being. For more information about Roxane, see: https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/rsilver/.

Amir’s team has also contributed to a centralized fire dataset, called the Fire-Occurrence Database (FOD), which compiles various fire-related attributes, including the burned area and cause (e.g., lightning, arson, power lines, fireworks), allowing researchers to analyze patterns across different regions. Using this dataset to explore fire patterns in Lake County and surrounding areas, Amir’s team has identified trends such as an increase in the frequency of human-caused fires. For more about Amir, see: https://amir.eng.uci.edu/index.php.

These initiatives are informed by questions related to climate change, community adaptation, environmental justice, and urban resilience. For this project, Alireza and his team have been focused on modeling access and barriers to emergency evacuation shelters for Lake County residents. For more about Alireza, see: https://alirezaermagun.com/.

For this project, Diego conducted focus groups with emergency managers, planners, and community members including seniors, low-income residents, Hispanic residents (including non-english speakers), and tribal groups to identify information gaps and behavioral responses related to wildfire preparedness among vulnerable groups in Lake County. For more information about Diego, see: https://www.sociology.msstate.edu/directory/dt1282.

In particular, his team has investigated the impacts of wildfires, such as how fire contributes to erosion, debris flows, and landslide susceptibility in Lake County. For more about Ben, see: https://directory.forestry.oregonstate.edu/people/leshchinsky-ben.

For this project, he is studying the impact of wildfires on the stability of natural slopes with ongoing weather monitoring in burned and unburned regions. To learn more about this work, visit our Field Monitoring page. For more about Tim, see: https://cee.illinois.edu/directory/profile/tstark.

Tirtha also serves on the Science Advisory Panel of the Fire and Forest Resilience Task Force in the State of California. For this project, Tirtha’s team has focused on mapping Wildland-Urban Interfaces (WUI)—identifying wildfire ignition points and high-risk areas where wildfires are more likely to impact human communities. Using this updated WUI map, the team was able to identify previously overlooked low-density buildings at risk of fire in Lake County, providing a clearer picture of fire risk zones. For more about Tirtha, see: https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/banerjeelab/tirtha-banerjee-ph-d/.

Katya has been involved in this project since its inception and developed the Lake County Cascading Hazards curriculum unit for grades 6-10, available here: https://ceee.colorado.edu/resources/lake-county-cascading-hazards-unit. For more about Katya, see: https://ceee.colorado.edu/people/katya-schloesser.

She’s led several community-based studies of coping with trauma (e.g., firestorms, terrorism), and has helped to pioneer new research approaches, including rapid response to assess acute stress in real time and internet-based methods with representative samples that allow participants’ anonymity in responding to sensitive questions. Dr. Holman joined the project in 2023, and will be leading new initiatives focused on the impacts of climate change on mental and physical health. For more about Alison, See: https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=5441.

Kayley tries to understand which factors are associated with perceptions of risk after a tragedy and if the risk perceptions are linked to certain downstream mental health symptoms and behaviors. For this project, Kayley led the development and implementation of the survey on wildfire exposure, evacuation experiences, and related mental and physical health consequences. For more about Kayley, see: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayley-estes-b093a2231/.

Quinn joined the project in 2024 and is involved in the development and interpretation of the project surveys, and is acting as a community liaison focused on gathering community input and communicating the research findings to Lake County residents. For more about Quinn, see: https://www.linkedin.com/in/quinn-conklin/.

Amirali has also been comparing trends in California wildfires compared to the broader United States—finding that California’s wildfire situation is becoming extreme at a faster rate than other parts of the country, with more severe fires happening more frequently and at higher elevations. For more about Amirali, see: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirali-asadian/

The outcomes of Fatemeh’s work aim to incorporate shelter accessibility as a key factor in assessing community resilience. For more about Fatemeh, see: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fatemeh-janatabadi-160aab84/.