2026 Double Header Guest Speakers

Leading off Stanford University's Mitchell Hung will present High-severity fire now dominant in California forests Batting cleanup is University of California, Irvine's Somnath Bar will present Explaining building damage from wildfires in California What makes this a great doubleheader is that Mitchell, who was the lead author along with A. Park Williams, will cover how California wildfires are becoming more severe, moving faster, creating greater damage and destroying more forests. Somnath will follow by discussing his predictive model, where he was the lead author along with Shu Li and Tirtha Banerjee, showing what homes will most likely burn in a WUI built environment, how they burn, and what specific mitigations you can take to limit or prevent damage. His model has an 88% accuracy rate.