Beginning in the first hours after the 2025 Los Angeles County wildfires, faculty, staff, and students from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health began responding to the crisis. Their efforts included launching studies on how the fires affected public health and examining ways to address risks of similar events in the future.
The school’s work has included conducting what is described as the largest ongoing study into the fire’s public health impact. Other activities have involved monitoring firefighter health, training recovery and construction workers on safety procedures, and providing free health and safety testing in communities most affected by the Altadena and Palisades fires.
The January 2025 wildfires impacted areas including Pacific Palisades-Malibu near the Santa Monica Mountains and Altadena-Pasadena in the San Gabriel Mountains foothills. According to Los Angeles County officials, at least 31 people died and more than 18,000 structures were damaged or destroyed.
Dr. David Eisenman, a physician and professor at UCLA Fielding’s Department of Community Health Sciences who also directs the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters, said that their immediate focus was both on campus safety for staff and students at Westwood as well as support for those displaced by the fires.
“In some ways, our immediate response was similar to what we had to do, over a much longer period, when it came to crisis management during the COVID-19 pandemic – making certain our people were safe, supporting those who needed assistance, and keeping the school functioning and responsive to the shifting needs of the recovery effort,” Eisenman said. “But a huge element of public health as a discipline is emergency management, and our faculty are experts in just that; we study and practice, so we were ready – it’s simply that the fires just occurred very quickly in comparison to the pandemic.”
UCLA has a long history of excellence in research across disciplines such as scholarship, arts, athletics, diversity initiatives, and inclusive environments through its academic programs (https://www.ucla.edu/). The university operates within a 419-acre campus as part of the University of California system (https://www.ucla.edu/), with national recognition including associations with Nobel laureates and MacArthur Fellows (https://www.ucla.edu/).
Further information about UCLA Fielding’s research activities related to disaster response can be found on their website.
