We are excited to announce the 2026 WUI Fire Engineering Summit! Join the SFPE Foundation and our co-hosting partners, the University of Maryland Fire Protection Engineering Department and Fire Safety Research Institute, on August 10-12, 2026, to explore the intersection of wildland-urban interface fires and fire engineering. There will be pre-conference activities on August 10, and two full days of conference presentations on August 11 and 12.
The Call for Abstracts will be announced in late 2025, with submissions invited from researchers and practitioners. Registration will open in 2026. Sponsorship opportunities are currently available. Contact Rose Portera at rportera@sfpe.org for more information.
The WUI Fire Engineering Summit will be convened with the support of the WUI Working Group, as well as the Climate Change Working Group of SFPE Foundation’s Grand Challenges Initiative, which acknowledges the negative impact of a changing climate on wildfire and wildland fire season length, fire frequency, intensity, and size.
The focus of this event will be on interdisciplinary engineering research on emerging technologies and solutions to better assess WUI fire risks and develop mitigation strategies that lead to more resilient WUI communities. WUI fires are complex phenomena, and better preparing our communities to prevent, respond, and recover from them requires the most creative, innovative, wide-ranging set of engineering solutions from all disciplines.
We’re partnering with Springer Nature, the publisher of the journal Fire Technology, a leading journal in the field of fire protection engineering, to produce a special issue based on presentations made at the 2026 WUI Summit. We will also offer opportunities to have poster PDFs, slides, and/or handouts published after the event as part of a post-WUI Summit summary of proceedings hosted on the SFPE Foundation website.
The two-day event will include a hands-on workshop for attendees to contribute to identifying a range of research, education, and outreach priorities that should be the focus of future interdisciplinary investment. The SFPE Foundation is committed to using any net revenue from this event to fund research and educational projects stemming from the workshop prioritization exercise. We will take the ideas generated from this event back to our WUI and Climate Change Working Groups and work together to implement those deemed to have the greatest potential impact.
Attendees are invited to continue their engagement on WUI Fire Engineering topics by participating in the SFPE Foundation’s WUI Working Group or Grand Challenges Initiative.