Antero Garcia
Stanford University, CA·Education Research
When a disaster upends daily life, families must quickly make sense of new scientific information. Which air is safe to breathe?
- Fields
Education Research
Social Science
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
wildfire
Palisades Fire
Eaton Fire
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Identify the learning opportunities and science-based resources that schools and community organizations gave Los Angeles families after the January 2025 wildfires, and how parents extended them for their children.
- Examine how families develop new environmental literacy practices as wildfire-related health and safety risks change, including how they use digital and social learning resources.
- Run a linked remote multimodal diary study with about 100 parents of K-5 children across the Los Angeles region alongside face-to-face ethnographic interviews and observations.
- Characterize the current, emerging and ongoing learning opportunities that families face as a result of environmental disaster, to build theory on family-centered climate adaptation.
More about the research
When can children go back to school? What risks remain at home? These everyday choices are a kind of science learning that happens outside classrooms. Families are on the front line of coping with climate-related disruptions, yet policy and research often overlook them. Studies that look back after the fact can also miss how people adapt step by step, including the barriers they hit and the creative ways they get around them.
Why it matters
Wildfires and other climate disasters are becoming more frequent. Knowing how families find, interpret and act on science information during recovery could help schools, community organizations and public health efforts design resources that families actually use. The project aims to provide actionable insights into how informal STEM learning can support resilience, creative problem-solving and collective well-being after crises.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mark Schuller
Northern Illinois University, IL·Social Science
Test whether disaster resilience models developed in one community can be adapted to others across different scales. Compare outcomes at multiple sites.
Christopher Shuler
University of Hawaii at Manoa, HI·Earth & Environmental Science
Develop methods to predict the extent and spread of wildfire-related contamination in municipal drinking water systems on Maui, especially for utilities that lack hydraulic models.
Morteza Dehghani
University of Southern California, CA·Computer Science
Develop video language models, AI that jointly interprets video and speech, to produce accurate and explainable summaries of officer-driver communication in body-worn camera footage of traffic stops.
The school
Stanford University: 87 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 739 research doctorates a year.
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