In a few weeks, I will celebrate my one-year anniversary with the SFPE Foundation as their inaugural Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Program Manager. As I detailed in SFPE’s Fire Protection Engineering magazine, The World of WUI Work at the SFPE Foundation, 2025 was a whirlwind of WUI activity. There will be no slowing down in 2026, as the Foundation continues to expand its footprint in research and education. Building on the 2025 AI in Fire Engineering Summit, the SFPE Foundation is organizing two events in 2026; The WUI Fire Engineering Summit and the Emerging Energy Technologies Summit.
The WUI Summit is supported by the Climate Change Working Group and the WUI Working Group and cohosted by the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park and UL’s Fire Safety Research Institute. We hope you will join us August 10-12 in Maryland.
The Emerging Energy Technologies Summit is cohosted by National Research Council Canada and will occur December 3-5 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The Energy & Infrastructure Working Group is supporting the event. Additional information about the Emerging Energy Technologies Summit will be shared soon. In the meantime, please save the date and make plans to join us in Canada.
2026 WUI FIRE ENGINEERING SUMMIT
Leading up to the WUI Fire Engineering Summit, the Foundation will present a series of free educational webinars, the first of which is on March 3rd. Pascale Vacca of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and co-leader of the WUI Working Group, will present Research in Fire Engineering: Integrating WUI Fire Risk Management into the Fire Safety Engineering Practice - Challenges & Opportunities.
A large and diverse Program Committee is finalizing the agenda and will notify potential speakers in early March. Meanwhile, Poster Abstracts will continue to be accepted until June 1st or until space is full. Unique to the WUI Summit is the opportunity for student teams to compete for $20,000 in research funding in a Student Pitch Competition. The top three teams will present their proposed research during the WUI Summit on August 10th. The audience and judges will vote to determine the Grand Prize winners, which will be announced on Day 2 of the WUI Fire Engineering Summit. Student teams must submit their proposals by May 1st.
If you would like join us in Maryland for what will be an engaging and informative WUI Fire Engineering event, registration is open until July 24th. No large event is possible without the support of sponsors and exhibitors. We thank the companies and organizations who are supporting the WUI Fire Engineering Summit. If your organization is interested in supporting the event, there are a wealth of opportunities available.
Hope to see you in College Park or Ottawa in 2026!