After the Los Angeles County wildfires, UCLA leads the fight for a safer future

Work by UCLA Fielding's Dr. Michael Jerrett and Dr. Yifang Zhu, and by alum Dr. Kristen Ochoa (MPH, '11), was referenced by UCLA Magazine in a summary of how the university has responded to the 2025 Los Angeles County wildfires.

".... Another abiding issue is air quality. In March, Professor Michael Jerrett of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health warned that some people would return to homes engulfed in “toxic soup.” His research found that wildfire smoke caused more than 50,000 premature deaths in California between 2008 and 2020. Professor Yifang Zhu Ph.D. ’03, Jerrett’s colleague at the Fielding School, says that air pollution peaked on January 8 and 9 during the fires, with southern Los Angeles County hit the hardest. Although air quality outside the burn areas quickly returned to pre-fire levels once the flames were extinguished, further testing near the burn sites is essential to fully understand potential health risks for nearby communities.

In July, Zhu’s team of UCLA researchers completed installation of 20 air-quality monitoring stations in West Los Angeles so residents will know at the hyperlocal level whether the air is safe during debris cleanup or future fires. A similar effort is now underway in the Altadena-Pasadena area."

and:

"... Kristen Ochoa M.P.H. ’11, health sciences associate clinical professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, has seen many friends suffering from the emotional loss of spaces — something experts call “solastalgia,” the distress caused by the destruction of beloved natural spaces.

The summer before the fires, Ochoa set up five motion-activated still and video cameras in Altadena, sharing the images of mountain lions, owls and coyotes on social media. The cameras burned, but there was such a public thirst for a speedy restoration of those glimpses of nature that Ochoa replaced them within a month and began seeing animals coming back to the area."

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