A team of university researchers has launched a planned 10-year project to examine pollution from Los Angeles' recent wildfires and study its long-term impacts on health.
The researchers, including those from UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, say they want to look at what exposure to pollution from thousands of burned structures does to people over time. Specifically, they say, they’ll look at how Angelenos’ respiratory, neurological, cardiovascular, immune and reproductive systems may be affected.
In an unprecedented collective scientific effort to understand the short- and long-term health impacts of wildfires, researchers from four universities have launched a 10-year study of the Los Angeles fires. The wildfires that began in early January 2025 killed 29 people, destroyed more than 16,000 structures, and exposed millions to toxic smoke.
The research aims to evaluate which pollutants are present, at what levels, and where, and to assess the respiratory, neurological, cardiovascular, reproductive, and immune system impacts of the wildfires.
Falco J. Bargagli Stoffi, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Fielding School of Public Health. Previously, he was a researcher at Harvard University. His research interests are primarily in methodological and applied (bio)statistics with a focus on applications of causal inference and machine learning in public health and medicine.
Education
- Postdoctoral Fellowship, Biostatistics, Harvard University (Cambridge, USA)
- (Joint) Ph.D., Data Science & Economics, IMT School for Advanced Studies (Lucca, Italy) and KU Leuven (Leuven, Belgium)
- M.Sc., Statistics, University of Florence (Florence, Italy)
- B.Sc., Sociology and Social Policies, University of Florence (Florence, Italy)
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