Mitchell Kirby, Class of 2026
Mitchell Kirby comes from a family of firefighters. Now, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a master’s in mechanical engineering from USC Viterbi, you might assume that he’s chosen a different vocation. But that depends on how you define firefighting.
Since joining the Sonny Astani Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, Kirby has gained a reputation as a serial entrepreneur, launching initiatives from new student organizations, to ambitious event programming, to competition-winning startups. His next business venture, Ember Corps, is a drone-based wildfire response system designed to buy time before the fire trucks and helicopters arrive.
It’s an idea characterized by an engineer’s common sense: if you can use drones to fight wars, you can use them to fight fires. “The goal is to slow the advancement of the wildfire from the onset,” Kirby explained, “Remotely controlled by human operators, the aerial units are specifically positioned to target hard-to-reach areas. When a caller reports a fire to 911, the nearest fire station is alerted and the drones are launched – each unit delivers approximately 50-100-pound loads of fire retardant, which can make a significant impact in the early stages of a fire.”
