How can we chart a safer path forward in the wake of the historic LA fires

When hundreds of researchers studying everything from fire-related contaminants to survivor health and recovery gathered at UCLA this week, they were not there to relive the Palisades and Eaton blazes. They were there to confront a harder question: how to respond to the growing reality of urban wildfires and to protect public health before, during and long after these disasters.

Hosted by UCLA, the Jan. 14 LA Fire Health Research Conference, held at Covel Commons on campus, brought together researchers and partners working within the LA Fire HEALTH Study, a nationwide consortium including UCLA and eight other institutions, formed in the aftermath of the January 2025 fires to understand what members of the public were exposed to - including where and at what levels - and how those exposures could affect their health over time.

That reality, the researchers said, has forced a shift in how such wildfire exposures are understood.

Mission-driven fire research

In opening remarks, UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk framed the gathering as an example of research designed to meet an urgent public need.

"This is truly an example of mission-driven research," said Frenk, who is also a faculty member at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. "It connects not only different disciplines but different levels of analysis, and it connects with communities and policymakers to ensure that discoveries are translated into action."

Building on that charge, the conference marked the first time many members of the consortium came together in person to share early findings, surface unanswered questions and begin shaping a coordinated response to inform the response to future disasters.

Much of that work was based on the efforts of UCLA researchers and their colleagues, who in the days and months following the fires spread out across the region, gathering information on health, environmental and social impacts in collaboration with affected communities.

Dr. David Eisenman, a professor-in-residence at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and at the Fielding School, has been a central architect of the research effort, helping connect and engage researchers across institutions and disciplines while keeping the work grounded in the practical needs of those impacted by the fires.

"This extraordinary disaster was met with an extraordinary research effort," he said, noting that "this conference is intentionally broader than any single group because the strength of this field comes from the diversity of perspectives and methods represented in this room."

A disaster that exposed a critical gaps in knowledge

The Los Angeles fires were the most destructive natural disaster in the city's history, leaving entire neighborhoods reeling not only with loss and displacement but with unanswered questions about environmental exposures and long-term health risks. Smoke blanketed the region. Ash and debris settled into homes. A slew of chemical contaminants filled the air and entered soil and water systems, often invisibly.

Researchers emphasized that while wildland fires have been studied for decades, urban wildfires of this scale present a fundamentally different challenge. In particular, they said, an estimated 70% of emissions during these events comes not from vegetation but from human-made infrastructure such as homes, vehicles and consumer products - posing new public health concerns.

"We have to start thinking about consumer products differently," said research panelist David Allen from the University of Texas, Austin. "If these products go up in smoke, what emissions are we talking about?"

Measuring chemical exposures - both expected and unexpected

The lack of a clear playbook for urban wildfires meant that early monitoring efforts often focused on a limited set of known hazards. Yet as chemical transport modeling and exposure reconstruction advanced, researchers began detecting far more than they initially expected.

In some cases, scientists who began by looking at the spread of common fire-related toxins like lead and arsenic later found more than 20 additional volatile metals and compounds - many of them harmful to human health - present in samples. Such discoveries underscored both the complexity of urban wildfire emissions and the limits of existing monitoring frameworks.

Another persistent gap, researchers acknowledged, was data on indoor exposures - both during and after the fires. That topic became one of the day's recurring questions, given the challenges of obtaining this kind of data retroactively.

UCLA researchers, co-led by Yifang Zhu, a professor at the Fielding School, conducted some of the first peer-reviewed studies of indoor air quality as part of the LA Fire HEALTH initiative and found that even after the fires were extinguished, levels of carcinogens from indoor smoke damage remained high and frequently even increased.

UCLA's Yifang Zhu discusses how, in the wake of the 2025 Los Angeles fires, smoke-damaged indoor items like pillows and stuffed animals can continue to emit toxic chemicals - and what residents can do to remain safe (Jan. 2, 2026).

As climate change drives hotter, drier conditions and more extreme weather, researchers warned that urban wildfires are likely to become more frequent, making unanswered questions increasingly urgent.

"Exposure continues," said Zhu, a who moderated a panel on environmental contamination. "It cuts across different environmental media and changes over time, which means post-fire response has to be collaborative across those media."

Zhu's conference panel brought together researchers from multiple institutions to discuss efforts to reconstruct who was exposed to smoke - including when and to what degree - and how exposure varied across neighborhoods, workplaces and indoor environments.

"I'm hoping that everyone here will want to work together and synthesize some of this knowledge that we learned from air, soil and water - and also from the health team - to get ahead of the next disaster," Zhu said. "We know LA will not be the last city to have this mega-level urban wildfire."

Gathering data and turning knowledge into decisions

Throughout the day, conference programming prioritized synthesis over siloed discussions. UCLA faculty moderated panels that connected exposure science, environmental monitoring and community experience, with an emphasis on translating data into information people can actually use.

Across panels, a central theme emerged. The bottleneck is no longer collecting data but interpreting it quickly enough to make a difference.

UCLA's Sudipto Banerjee, a professor in the Fielding School's department of biostatistics and senior associate dean, noted that exposure models not only have to be scientifically credible to inform policy - they also have to be timely.

"Speed matters when communities are waiting for information that can guide immediate decisions about safety, cleanup and recovery," Banerjee said.

Meeting that challenge, he added, requires integrating data across many sources, from satellite imagery and remote sensing to GPS, cell phone data and artificial intelligence.

"We are only as good as the information that we can analyze to be able to help the problem and help policymakers," said Kari Nadeau, a consortium leader and professor at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

How research can serve the needs of the community

For community members, the issue was not just what data exists but how it is communicated.

"So much of the time, we're just being told, 'Here's what's scary, here's what's dangerous,' and we're left to deal with the information as it trickles out," said panelist Andrew King, who lost his home in the Eaton fire. King, a longtime educator in Los Angeles and former charter school principal, is a member of Department of Angels, a survivor-led community group formed after the fires to advocate for policy change and support recovery research.

"There are two problems that happen in a fire environment," King said. "You have the firehose of information, and then you have no access to information at all. What this [conference] work does is to allow us to figure out what was most important to triage for our community."

Consortium researchers offered immediately actionable examples of how information gaps might be narrowed. Jacqueline Zdebski, a University of Washington research scientist, described her efforts to capture high-resolution drone and street-level imagery of fire-affected neighborhoods immediately after the fires and again months later, creating a detailed visual record before cleanup altered conditions on the ground.

Unlike satellite imagery, which is useful for regional patterns, the data allows researchers to examine damage at the scale of individual buildings - critical for exposure and recovery research.

"If you have a research question that's hitting a bottleneck because there's just too much imagery to analyze, let us know," Zdebski said. "We'd love to use that as a test case for these tools. The drone imagery itself is already available. I spent weeks flying that thing around. Please use it."

Michael Jerrett, a professor of environmental health sciences at the Fielding School and a co-author with Zhu on the indoor air research, served as emcee for the conference from start to finish, repeatedly underscoring the importance of collective effort.

"We worked together - academics, community members and volunteers - to bring a collective force that would never have happened otherwise," said Jerrett, who holds the Jonathan Fielding Chair in Climate Change and Public Health.

At the close of each session, Jerrett invited the audience to stand and applaud the panelists, a request the crowd readily obliged.

Beyond the panels, the conference emphasized action in other creative ways. A 45-minute poster session featured dozens of studies and early-stage projects presented by undergraduates, physicians and senior researchers across the consortium. In the science fair-like setting, a sea of eager faces stood by their posters, ready to discuss their work. While a judging of the posters was to take place at the end of the day, it was clear that the motivation went far beyond winning an award. The desire to help was palpable, even among researchers based thousands of miles away.

From those conversations, and many others, researchers appeared to leave the conference with a clearer view of how to work towards their shared fire-response playbook designed to help agencies and communities act faster, coordinate better and avoid the data gaps that followed the LA fires.

For UCLA leaders, the work ahead extends beyond any single conference or disaster.

"Sustaining this work - by staying connected to one another and to the people we serve -will be essential to ensuring recovery that is equitable and enduring," said Frenk. "This is what great universities do."