After the LA Fires, Scientists Study the Toxic Hazards Left Behind

As Azimi and Keshavarz drove off, Landskroner made her way over to introduce herself to Bartlett and Mnoian. Landskroner, 26, a Ph.D candidate at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, works in the lab of Candice Tsai, whose nanoparticle research relies on the use of a sampler she invented that must run for a full week to collect reliable results.

“Now there’s some interesting studies that everything we’re seeing here is likely comparable to the same particulates and exposures that happened during the World Trade Center.”

— Emma Landskroner, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health

For Landskroner, exposure science is personal. When, despite no family history of the disease, Landskroner’s father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in her senior year of college, it motivated her to look more deeply at a future in public health and preventive medicine research.

Between working on experiments for her dissertation and the other research Landskroner does as part of the Tsai Lab, she barely got six hours of sleep a night even before the LA fires forced the evacuation of UCLA. Since the fires, she calls it a win when she gets four hours a night.

Landskroner does a good job of hiding her exhaustion, the only sign a quickly stifled yawn as she zips up her Bruins hoodie. Tall and athletic with her thick dark hair pulled up in a high ponytail to avoid snagging it on the respirator straps, she offered a quick yet warm smile as she double checked her mask before heading into the house.

“People deserve to know what they are being exposed to, and I have the tools to help them find out,” she said. “We saw after 9/11, even those who weren’t immediately exposed during the building collapse, but months after, the people who just lived in the area during the cleanup, there was heightened cancer mortality among them… Now there’s some interesting studies that everything we’re seeing here is likely comparable to the same particulates and exposures that happened during the World Trade Center.”