I’m a dragon wrangler. Although that might sound like something straight out of Harry Potter or Game of Thrones, this isn’t fantasy—it’s serious science.

As a fire researcher, or more colloquially, a dragon wrangler, my job is to help protect people and property from fire’s devastating effects. My area of expertise is wildfires, and in particular wildfires that threaten whole communities, which we call wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires. In the United States alone there are more than 80,000 wildfires every year. A little more than 2 percent of those fires threaten populated areas, putting 46 million structures and more than 120 million people at risk. Every year, we lose about 3,000 homes to these kinds of fires.

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