$14 million grant awarded to UC Davis program studying health concerns resulting from wildfire smoke
UC Davis leads multi-institutional collaboration in four projects addressing gaps in environmental exposure research
By ESHA KANNAN— science@theaggie.org
In September 2026, UC Davis received a $14 million grant to launch the Wildfire Exposure: Cardiovascular and Airway Inflammation Research (WE-CAIR) program to understand the immediate and chronic health effects caused by exposure to wildfire smoke.
The five-year grant was awarded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, a subdivision of the National Institutes of Health; approximately $9 million of the awarded funds are to be allocated for direct costs of the program.
Keith Bein is an associate professional researcher at the Air Quality Research Center. Bein explained the necessity of starting WE-CAIR after continuous observation of wildfire behavior.
“We started noticing that wildfire was becoming the main driver of air in California specifically,” Bein said. “As the years went on […] we saw the impact of certain polar boreal forests in Canada, on the mid-Atlantic states and the Eastern Seaboard and [saw] the frequency of severity of that start to increase. People started to come together, to understand what is the global impact, what is the national impact of these wildfires on air quality.”
WE-CAIR is multidisciplinary, with researchers coming from various scientific backgrounds. Currently, there are 22 principal investigators from multiple institutes and centers such as the UC Davis Center for Health and the Environment, the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and the UC San Diego School of Medicine.
Currently, little is known about the long-term health effects of wildfire smoke. To fill that gap, WE-CAIR is organized around four distinct projects: three examine how smoke triggers inflammation in the airways and cardiovascular system through immune cells and genetic regulators, and a fourth studies how stress and social vulnerability may make some people more susceptible.
In these projects, WE-CAIR combines biological and molecular techniques with bioinformatics and analysis of data collected over multiple years. Health effects are traced in patients from the time of initial exposure to wildfire smoke to the time of epigenetic transformations.
Angela Haczku is the director of the UC Davis Lung Center and program director of WE-CAIR. Haczku explains how the funding is beneficial for conducting both human studies and simulations.
“The funds are dramatic and support humans as well as small exposure simulators,” Haczku said. “We are investigating patients who are already suffering from shock, pulmonary disease or COPD [Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease] and the mouse simulation exposure studies investigate the effects of fires that go with [this].”
Bein shared how the funding propels the center’s research.
“[The grant] is going to perhaps position UC Davis as a leader, institution, in terms of wildfire, health effects research and these P01 centers [that] are extremely hard to get,” Bein said.
Securing the research grant was not easy, according to Bein. He explained that there was a lot of research, development and risk involved in developing the program and grant proposals.
“This was a high risk,” Bein said. “We all put a lot of unpaid time into this, and it was a high risk gamble and it paid off […] it really puts UC Davis kind of at the forefront of wildfire health effects research.”
As more data is collected and analyzed over the next five years, the center hopes to publish its results to benefit researchers and clinicians alike. For more information about WE-CAIR’s current research projects, visit the lab webpages of project leaders Haczku, Vogel, Ji, Cannon and Silverman.
Written by: Esha Kannan— science@theaggie.org