Did you know that bushfire is a real risk in every Australian community? With climate change, population growth and urban expansion, such risk is ever increasing, more uncontrollable and catastrophic. My mission is to make communities more resilient to bushfires in the long term. I do this by conducting fieldwork in remote regions to collect vegetation data, fusing the data with remote sensing data to produce vegetation maps across the landscape. The maps are used to support government's land use planning decisions. For example, if an area is currently or will be prone to bushfires, we now decide not to develop the land into residential land. The maps can also be used to support policy makers' decisions on increasing the safety distance between people's assets and bushfire hazard zones. Tomorrow's risk is being built today. By identifying the hazard zones and not putting people at risk in the first place, I bring in the most effective way to protect communities from bushfires.

Lulu graduated with her PhD from University of Queensland in 2020. She has worked at the Natural Hazards Research Group led by Professor Holger Maier at University of Adelaide. In 2023, Lulu joined Queensland Fire Department where she holds a position as Principal Scientist of the Bushfire Resilient Communities (BRC) Unit. She works with Executive Manager Robert Preston leading Bushfire and Vegetation Hazard Mapping Projects.