Disease early warning: A rapid approach for wastewater-based epidemiology

Wastewater-based epidemiology can monitor population-level infection, provide early warnings about outbreaks, and help control disease spread. However, current methods to identify bacteria are slow, costly, and not suitable for high-throughput screening of diverse bacterial species. This project will develop a new platform combined with machine learning models to detect a wide range of pathogenic bacteria in wastewater and identify their antibiotic susceptibility. The approach could be expanded to correlate bacterial pathogens with other infectious diseases and environmental contaminants, and scaled to detect bacterial pathogens in a broader range of environmental samples.