NAMED NATIONAL FOUR-YEAR DAILY NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR FOR 2020-21 IN THE COLLEGE MEDIA ASSOCIATION’S PINNACLE AWARDS
Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2022
Volume 159 No. 19 SERVING SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY SINCE 1934
WWW.SJSUNEWS.COM/SPARTAN_DAILY
SJSU center leads US research Cutting-edge wildfire technology earns millions in federal grant funding By Rainier de Fort-Menares STAFF WRITER
San Jose State is home to the largest academic Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center in the U.S., garnering $6.1 million in federal funding this year. The Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center was established in 2020, after a cluster hire of five tenure-track faculty members. Craig Clements, meteorology professor and Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center director, said that was the largest cluster hire in wildfire science in U.S. history. “There is a need for interdisciplinary
approaches to wildfire science and so bringing an interdisciplinary team of faculty to SJSU addressed this need,” Clements said in an email. “We have the best wildfire modelers at SJSU and a leading wildfire social scientist.” SJSU stated the center gained national recognition for its role and expertise in understanding and mitigating near-term wildfire risks in its July 13 news release. Clements said the state and government funding, which was requested by Ash Kalra, Santa Clara County city councilmember, that the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center received is being used to purchase and advance its research facilities.
PHOTO COURTESY OF CRAIG CLEMENTS
Justin Haw (left), Kiera Malarkey (center) and Kate Forrest, graduate students with SJSU’s Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center, observe the Dixie Fire in the summer of 2021 in Milford, California.
He said with the multi-million dollars in funding for the center, he plans on building out a fire lab in the engineering building, setting up advanced fire weather wind profiling networks, buying new infrared cameras and expanding the center’s high performance computing. Robert McElhatton, assistant director of media relations, said in a Sept. 1 university blog post that the five professors hired by Clements specialize in fire ecology, fire and fluid dynamics, wildfire behavior modeling, wildfire remote sensing and wildfire management and policy. Those professors each focus on their own research within the center,
which includes: how people interact with messages around wildfire safety; mathematical modeling of how fires send out embers that start new fires; how the ecosystems change and how it affects the climatology of fires; and working with drones that go over fires to see how the spread changes at high resolutions. Angel Farguell, a postdoctoral research associate at the Wildfire Interdisciplinary Research Center, said the goal of the center is to take people from different disciplines and put them together with the same objective: researching wildfires. WILDFIRES | Page 2