Fired up for the future

As another potentially devastating wildfire season begins, California is facing a shortage of wildland firefighters. To meet this challenge, the Marin County Fire Department and UC Berkeley have partnered to form FIRE Foundry (Fire, Innovation, Recruitment and Education), a program that recruits young adults from underrepresented communities for a career in fire service and trains them on…

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Visiting Students Use Data to Create a Machine Learning Model to Better Predict California Wildfires

Visiting Students Sarthak Arora and Sai Venkat Ram Mallela are currently working with SCET’s Disaster Lab and the Global Fellows Program to conduct research to help with one of California’s biggest challenges: wildfires. Sarthak and Sai are currently enrolled in a Postgraduate program in Machine Learning and Leadership at Plaksha University in Northern India.

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UC Berkeley Society of Women Engineers on Project Vesta at JIFX: Technologies for Wildfire Mitigation

The UC Berkeley Society of Women Engineers (SWE) participated in the Naval Postgraduate School Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) demonstration that took place this past February at Camp Roberts. Phoebe Chang and Renee Francisco are both Cal students and currently serve as co-leads for this year’s SWE Team Tech, a collegiate competition team. With Disaster…

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Tackling Language Gaps in Wildfire Emergency Communication

In the Fall of 2019, Abby Yue Gao’s first semester in UC Berkeley’s Master of Architecture program, her classes had to repeatedly pause due to another severe California wildfire season. Berkeley was spared the flames, but still suffered power shut offs and dreadful air quality thanks to that year’s worst blaze, Sonoma County’s Kincade Fire.…

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Disaster Lab launches the FIRE Foundry program to establish a tech-savvy wildfire prevention workforce

Disaster Lab has launched the FIRE Foundry program with 19 recruits in partnership with Marin County, Marin Fire Dept, and the College of Marin. The Fire Foundry program’s objective is to establish a science and technology-savvy, community-oriented wildfire prevention workforce, by providing job training and skills development for underserved, underrepresented, and underfunded community members in…

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