With wildfires raging throughout California, San Jose State students and faculty members now have a chance to thoroughly study advanced wildfire research after the university established the largest academic Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center in the U.S.
Now officially open as of Tuesday, the research center will serve as the leading institution in California, providing modern knowledge about wildfire science and management, SJSU media relations specialist Robin McElhatton said in a Sept. 1 news release.
“The goal is to bring together researchers from different disciplines to work together with one goal of furthering wildfire science,” Craig Clements, director of the research center, said in an email to the Spartan Daily on Friday.
The research center will be housed in the SJSU College of Science and will work through an interdisciplinary model with the College of Social Sciences and the Charles W. Davidson College of Engineering, McElhatton said in the Sept. 1 news release.
“We think it is important to open the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center because wildfires have such a large impact on society, and because of their frequency and intensity have been increasing over the last several decades,” Patrick Brown, meteorology and climate science professor, said in an email to the Spartan Daily on Friday.
The eight professors who make up the research center’s academic team all specialize in fire ecology, fire and fluid dynamics, wildfire behavior modeling and wildfire meteorology, wildfire remote sensing and wildfire management and policy, McElhatton said in the Sept. 1 news release.
“I have been developing the plan for hiring these positions for a few years now, and the process takes a while to get all faculty hired,” Clements said. “We have student paid-research assistantships for both [undergraduate] and Master of Science students.”
Moreover, the research center will use SJSU wildfire meteorology professor Adam Kochanski’s advanced forecasting model on wildfires for both research for the center, and as a teaching model to help students learn how wildfires create their own weather.
“We will be running advanced simulations of wildfires to better understand what kind of weather drives fire spread behavior, we hope that this will help firefighting efforts,” Brown said.
He said the research center already has various projects that students are working on, such as studying the best ways to predict fire occurrences in advance. This will help inform utility companies of situations where they might need to shut off power to certain transmissions to avoid fires.
Clements said one of the projects the team is working on right now is a wildfire forecasting system that would help predict select fires in California, with the end goal of forecasting wildfires for the entire state.
“Expanding research capability in wildfire sciences at SJSU is needed to help mitigate California’s destructive wildfires,” Clements said.
Deciding on the location of the center was also an important aspect for the team.
“It is important for the center to be located in Northern California because much of the research will be conducted at the locations of the wildfires themselves,” Brown said.
He added that the research center will be open for students of all majors, but will be focusing on graduate students from biology, mechanical engineering, meteorology and climate science and environmental studies.
The research center will pay graduate students full out-of-state tuition, plus a $30,000 salary for the year Clements said.
He also added that the funds for faculty member positions are allocated from the individual departments’ faculty hiring requests based on needs.
Brown said that funds for the research center are provided by external agencies through the form of grants given to professors for their research.
“Professors receive grants forms . . . and that will certainly be the case in the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center as well,” Brown said.
