University of Buffalo is leading a new $2 million research project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop tools that help communities better understand and prepare for the cascading disasters that wildfires can unleash on people and critical infrastructure. The project brings together multidisciplinary researchers from three partner institutions: the University of California, Berkeley, Northeastern University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The award is part of NSF’s Fire Science Innovations through Research and Education (FIRE) program and runs from September 2026 through August 2029. Over the next three years, the team will examine communities in the wildland‑urban interface (WUI), where human development such as housing and power lines meets or mixes with forests, grasslands and other natural vegetation. The study is titled “Collaborative Research: FIRE‑WUI: REKINDLE: Resilient Engineering through Knowledge Integration for NetworkeD Lifelines and Ecosystem.”