Environmental Microbiology

CeZAP Thematic Group

Amy Pruden and a student working with samples as part of the Pruden Lab's Antibiotic Resistance Research.

Amy Pruden and a student outdoors transferring water samples as part of the Pruden Lab's Antibiotic Resistance Research.

Natural and anthropogenic environments can serve as reservoirs and vectors for infectious agents of human disease. Rapid changes in the environmental landscape to support the food, energy, and water needs of a growing global population continually exert new pressures on microbial ecology and create potential new mechanisms for disease transfer. Scientists in the Environmental Microbiology thematic area aim to detect and quantify the dissemination of infectious organisms and sentinel markers of disease risk in water, air, and soil in order to design strategies to promote public health.

Highlight Research relating to the specific thematic area:

Faculty:

Linsey Marr's expertise on airborne pathogenic viruses helped shape national and global policies during the COVID-19 pandemic
Amy Pruden leads the National Science Foundation Research Traineeship grant called "Convergence at the Interfaces of Policy, Data Science, and Environmental Science and Engineering to Combat the Spread of Antibiotic Resistance.”
David Schmale developed technologies with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones) to study the transport of microorganisms in the atmosphere
Jingqiu Liao uses (meta)genomics combined with computational models and experimental manipulation to understand ecological mechanisms underlying the persistence, dissemination, and evolution of AMR and foodborne pathogens in the environment.
Luis Escobar focuses on the application of ecology and biogeography to the study distribution and emergence of infectious diseases. The laboratory explores classic and new theoretical frameworks and methods for investigating the linkages between environmental change and disease dynamics.

Students:

Ying-Xian Goh in the Liao Lab studies the ecology and evolution of Listeria and AMR in soils through an interdisciplinary approach combining bacterial isolation, high-throughput sequencing, and population genomics.
Doctoral student Clayton Markham (CEE) has traveled to three continents to examine the incidence of antimicrobial resistance via wastewater and surveillance and epidemiology strategies. Clayton is part of an interdisciplinary NRT at Virginia Tech and was recently awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to support his research.