Fiery Twin

If you have ever been near a wildfire, you might know how ash can float down from the sky, like a postapocalyptic snowfall. For Stanford PhD student Daniel Neamati, who grew up in fire-prone Orange County, he recalls at least one childhood birthday party that ended with an evacuation. 

“I had actually seen ash fall before I had seen snowfall,” he says. “Like many Californians, fire had made an impact on me since the beginning.”

With the fire season expanding by months at a time, it’s perhaps natural that wildfire is what lit up Neamati’s curiosity when he began his doctoral studies in Stanford’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2021. 

The year before, the Lightning Complex fires had raged across Northern California, blanketing the Bay Area in smoke. Four years later, the Palisades and Eaton fires would go on to decimate more than 23,000 acres in Los Angeles County[1], claiming 29 lives, displacing tens of thousands of residents, and destroying at least $28 billion in property[2]—from the charred wreckage of beachside mansions to suburban neighborhoods burned to chimneys.

One maxim that Neamati believes to be true across geographies: Wildfire is a political unifier. Maybe it’s that old saying that nothing draws people together faster than a common enemy.  

“Regardless of whether people believe in climate change, they do not want their houses to burn down. So, across voting lines, they do fire management,” he says. 

Today, he is developing tools for the carefully controlled burns that land managers and firefighters use to ward off the out-of-control wildfires that are becoming all too familiar across California and the American West, but also in less expected places like New Jersey. 

“There is a need for this technology, for this monitoring.”  

Return to the blue planet

Before Stanford, Neamati’s academic career had focused on distant moons of Jupiter; as an undergraduate at California Institute of Technology, he studied mechanical engineering and planetary science. When he joined Stanford’s Navigation and Autonomous Vehicles Laboratory, the NAV Lab, he wondered how else he could use his doctoral research.

“Instead of training satellites into space, I wanted to point them back toward us. How could we improve life on Earth and make sure that we’re able to sustain it going forward?” 

Last year, Neamati became the graduate student lead of a Stanford team that designed the SMesh project, a portable smoke sensor to monitor air quality in nearly real time. The project is a collaboration between the Stanford Radio Club and the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. 

He says it’s a challenging year to conduct this research, let alone to fund it. Yet with support from the TomKat Center’s Graduate Fellowship in Translational Research, Neamati also has been able to construct detailed digital models of landscapes before and after controlled burns. These digital replicas are so exacting, so carefully hewn to reality, that he calls them digital twins. 

“The way you can tell this is an actual 3D model and that it’s not faking it, is that you can both rotate and pan,” he says, demonstrating on a laptop how to angle toward the sky or down toward a seedling in the soil. “If you can rotate, pan, and zoom, then it has to be 3D.”

This twin captures a snapshot—really, a mosaic of snapshots—of the ecosystem as it looked in the minutes or hours it took to capture the approximately 200 photos needed to create the model. Meanwhile, the smoke monitoring records the chemical composition of the flames over days, providing running levels of particulate matter being released into the air. 

Of particular concern is PM2.5, particulate matter that measures 2.5 micrometers or smaller—about 1/30th the diameter of a single hair from your head—because this is the size of air pollution that can cross the blood-brain barrier in humans, contributing to a host of health concerns. 

These digital tools give land managers and scientists the power of specificity. They can research what happens to air quality when a certain species, such as yerba santa, is burned. The tools also inform with broader strokes. Are the flames petering out, or fanning bigger? 

“Combining what I’ve been doing on the 3D models with the smoke information is quite impactful for the decisions these stakeholders have to make,” he says. “They’re very hand in hand.” 

Neamati hopes his contributions can better inform fire management practices—much like how medical researchers must understand the intricacies of a disease pathway before pinpointing the best intervention. 

“Many researchers work on their PhD and they’re like, okay, great. Done. Move on. Whereas this fellowship has really made me think about how am I going to get this out into the world after I finish?”

Fire’s double edge

Wildfire is terrifying, destructive, a phantom that steals in the night. It is also generative, the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes. And for better or worse, California’s ecology is designed for fire. 

Take, for example, the case of the missing bushmallow (Malacothamnus arcuatus var. arcuatus). It’s a California native plant so rare that it only grows on the San Francisco Peninsula. Scientists at Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve had not seen it within the park boundaries for decades. 

But after a recent pile burn in the preserve, this rare bushmallow has returned to the foothills above Stanford. Their hypothesis is that the fire “woke up” seeds that had sat dormant in the soil; fire-stimulated seed germination is an adaptation of numerous California species. 

The bushmallow is one instance of how Western science is catching up with what traditional wisdom has taught for millennia, that fire is necessary for preserving balance and biodiversity in these ecosystems. Another name for Jasper Ridge is ’Ootchamin ’Ooyakma, translating to red ridge or mountain in the Muwekma Ohlone Chochenyo dialect. Local tribes on the Peninsula, as well as Indigenous communities from Alaska to Australia, historically have used small-scale fires to rejuvenate the land—a practice now called cultural burning. 

Letting fire run its course has gotten more complicated, however. At Jasper Ridge, prescribed burns are happening within view of Portola Valley estates, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Stanford University itself. 

“They have a very pressing interest in doing this carefully,” Neamati says, of local land managers, but also to anyone with ties to fire country. 

“Hopefully, we’re able to give them the tools they need to protect people’s lives and livelihoods in a way that is also mutually beneficial for the ecosystem.” 

This article is part of the TomKat Center Spotlight series designed to highlight the impact and trajectory of the work of faculty and students who received funding through our Innovation Transfer Program, TomKat Solutions, and Graduate Fellowships. Stanford University does not endorse any non-Stanford entities, programs, products, or services listed in the article. 

[1]Source: World Resources Institute
[2]Source: Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation