SURF Mentoring

Potential projects/topics: Health disparities across communities are driven by both chemical stressors (like pollution) and non-chemical stressors (like poverty and violence). Most public health surveillance systems measure either potential exposures (e.g., air monitoring) or downstream outcomes (e.g., disease reports), but they often miss how communities are responding in real time. Wastewater-based epidemiology offers a promising and unique way to measure community-level signals of both exposure and physiological response to stressors by tracking human health biomarkers in wastewater. This project aims to make biomarker monitoring in wastewater more scalable and cost-effective by developing and optimizing methods to measure general health biomarkers and exposure-specific biomarkers using cheaper, higher-throughput workflows with the long-term goal of supporting routine wastewater monitoring that can help identify and track community health patterns over time.

Potential skills gained: Environmental sampling, environmental chemistry

Required qualifications: Environmental and public health interest

Direct mentor: Graduate Student

OR

Potential projects/topics: Environmental phage isolation and testing for microbiome engineering and alternatives for antibiotics

Potential skills gained: Environmental sampling, bioinformatics, culturing, phage isolation and culturing

Required qualifications: Microbiology and molecular biology experience preferred but not required

Direct mentor: Graduate Student

Student Project Titles List

Treatment Quality and the Fate of Antibiotic Resistance Genes in an Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactor