Wastewater Disease Surveillance Roundtable Discussion
In this Forum, you will learn about:
- Assisting wastewater disease surveillance practices and methodologies
- Identifying community struggles and areas of innovation and development
- Creating channels of communication to ensure the value of wastewater data is known
Summary
The wastewater disease surveillance community still faces many challenges today including expanding the reach of testing implementation, creating communication channels to relay information to proper stakeholders, and ensuring the data are understood. In this Forum several expert panelists will discuss these challenges and discuss best practices and methodologies.
Panel of Experts
Edwin Oh, PhD
Associate Professor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Dr. Edwin Oh received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, he served as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology at Duke University. Dr. Oh is currently an Associate Professor in the UNLV School of Medicine and the Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine. He is driven by a desire to understand how genetic and structural variants contribute to human health and disease and how we use this understanding to better diagnose genetic diseases and develop therapeutic programs for treatment. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the lab together with community partners such as SNWA and SNHD have used molecular tools to study the spread of COVID-19 in Southern Nevada using wastewater and clinical samples. His lab is funded currently through grants from NIH and CDC.
Bradley Schmitz, PhD
Senior Environmental Scientist
Loudoun Water
Bradley Schmitz is an Environmental Scientist at Loudoun Water in the Water Resources Department, leading the utility’s research program. He is also an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Arizona, leading wastewater-based epidemiology programs in communities along the Arizona-Mexico border in collaboration with the Arizona Department of Health Services. Bradley has been studying the intersection of wastewater and public health for over 10 years, previously completing two postdocs at the National University of Singapore and Johns Hopkins University.
Bina Nayak, PhD
Water Research Project Manager
Pinellas County Utilities
Dr. Bina Nayak is the Water Research Project Manager for Pinellas County Utilities in Florida and manages drinking water, wastewater, and reclaimed water related research. She has a doctoral degree in Biology from the University of South Florida in Tampa. Bina actively participates in promoting water related education and outreach by serving as Chair of the Florida Section AWWA Technical & Education Council and Chair of the AWWA Organisms in Water Committee.
Kayley Janssen, PhD
Scientist
Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene, UW-Madison
Dr. Kayley Janssen completed her B.S. in Molecular Biology from the University of Wyoming and continued with post-baccalaureate training in genomic technologies with the National Institutes of Health at Rocky Mountain Laboratories. Dr. Janssen went on to complete her Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Iowa where she studied post-transcriptional regulation in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. She currently is a Scientist at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene (WSLH) where she researches and develops molecular testing for environmental waters and pathogens. Her primary research interests are in wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), microbial source tracking, and genomics, with an aim to integrate the environmental surveillance and testing with clinical data for public health. The WSLH for the state of Wisconsin was one of the first states to pilot WBE for Covid with the National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) under Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Daniel Gerrity, PhD
Principal Research Microbiologist in Water Quality R&D
Southern Nevada Water Authority
Dr. Daniel Gerrity is the Principal Research Microbiologist in Water Quality R&D at the Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA). Through recent appointments in academia and industry, he has become a leader in quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA), even contributing to the development of direct potable reuse regulations in California and Arizona. His QMRA work serves as the foundation of two EPA-funded research projects focused on broadening implementation of water reuse in the U.S. Since March 2020, his research group has collaborated with academic, industry, and public health partners to better understand links between wastewater and clinical surveillance data, specifically in the context of SARS-CoV-2, Candida auris, enteric viruses, and illicit drugs. Dr. Gerrity is currently the Vice Chair of the Water Environment Federation (WEF) Utilities Community of Practice Advisory Council (CoPAC).