NPR | "The long-term health impacts from the LA wildfires are just becoming clear"
UCLA Fielding's Dr. David Eisenman and Dr. Yifang Zhu were interviewed by NPR about their work studying the impacts of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.
UCLA Fielding's Dr. David Eisenman and Dr. Yifang Zhu were interviewed by NPR about their work studying the public health impacts of the 2025 Los Angeles County wildfires. Eisenman, professor in the Department of Community Health Sciences, and Zhu, professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, are both lead researchers for the LA Fire HEALTH Consortium, a decade-long study of the blazes. UCLA hosted the effort's inaugural research conference on Jan. 14, 2026.
"Scientists from Los Angeles and around the country quickly scrambled into action as fires burned through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. The priority, says UCLA physician and disaster researcher David Eisenman, was keeping people safe in the short term. But the fires also presented a moment to learn crucial missing information about the health effects of wildfires to help those affected and to better protect people's health from the inevitable next ones.
'This won't be the last wildfire that Los Angeles sees,' says Eisenman. 'Part of the community recovery process is to learn from what we experienced.' "
