“WASTEWATER SURVEILLANCE IN HOUSTON, TEXAS: NAVIGATING SCIENCE, PUBLIC HEALTH AND ETHICS IN THE ERA OF ENVIRONMENTAL MONITORING”

Wastewater represents a pooled sample of everyone who contributes to the waste stream and can be collected and analyzed to reveal information about a community’s health and habits. The City of Houston’s system has become one of the most advanced citywide wastewater surveillance systems in the U.S. The system includes over 100 sampling sites ranging from wastewater treatment plants to facilities such as pre-K-12 schools, nursing homes, shelters and a jail. We monitor for numerous pathogens, including respiratory viruses, bacteria and fungal pathogens. Our results show that pathogen levels in wastewater are strongly associated with cases in the community at sewer-shed, zip code and building levels. The wastewater data is used to inform public health interventions in real time. In this talk, Stadler will describe the Houston Wastewater Epidemiology system, how the data is shared and used by public health officials, and ethical considerations that we are navigating in our environmental surveillance system.

Biography
Lauren Stadler is an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University. She earned a B.S. in engineering from Swarthmore College and an M.S.E. and Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Stadler is an environmental engineer whose research focuses on wastewater-based epidemiology, environmental antibiotic resistance, wastewater and resource recovery, and environmental synthetic biology. She was named a “New Engineer to Watch” by the Water Environment Federation; a Gulf Research Program Early-Career Research Fellow by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine; a Johnson & Johnson WiSTEM2D Engineering Scholar; and an NSF CAREER awardee.