CSU civil and environmental engineering Professor Hussam Mahmoud, who has gained international attention for his work predicting how wildfires behave where neighborhoods and wildlands meet, has been awarded a three-year, $2.7 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Mahmoud started research on his wildfire resilience model seven years ago with just a computer and grad student Akshat Chulahwat, working on the first model to predict how a fire would progress through a community. They used historical data from the 1991 Tunnel Fire in California to test their new model of wildfire propagation. There wasn’t enough data to work from, and only small amounts of resources and time.

“I started with my graduate student, who’s now a postdoc,” Hussam said. “Over the years it was just me and him, on our own dime and our own time.”