Our Mission

We monitor infectious diseases through municipal wastewater systems to inform public health responses at a local, regional, and national level. Our goal is to show that a national wastewater monitoring system is a valuable part of our public health infrastructure, can inform public health responses, and will help us prepare for future pandemics.

WastewaterSCAN is based at Stanford University, in partnership with Emory University, and funded through philanthropy. We are committed to transparency, scientific rigor, and open science. We make our methods public and publish our research in scholarly journals to subject them to peer review.

Our Mission

Methods

Wastewater-based epidemiology has been used by public health for decades, but in a limited way. In spring 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, scientists at Stanford University had a question: Can we measure the virus that causes COVID in wastewater? The answer – yes – led to WastewaterSCAN.

We developed an innovative testing method using wastewater solids that was put into practice at 8 wastewater treatment plants in November 2020. Since then, the program has expanded across the country and uses this method to rapidly more than a dozen infectious diseases.

Pathogens We Monitor

Anonymous

Community-Level, Not Individual

Wastewater monitoring generates community-wide data on seasonal and emerging infectious diseases. It does not identify individuals or households.

Inclusive

Serving All Using a Sewer System

Instead of collecting disease information for just a portion of the population, wastewater monitoring enables communities to gather disease information on everyone who uses the sewer system.

Efficient

Acts as an Early Warning System

Wastewater monitoring can provide information about disease presence quickly, often before people may feel sick or are able to seek clinical testing, and before those test results are aggregated from multiple labs.

Nimble

Tiny Sample, Outsized Impact

With wastewater monitoring, a tiny sample can provide information about many diseases. Our tools can be adapted quickly and easily to test for new diseases when compared to deploying clinical testing across a community.

Our Impact

WastewaterSCAN has advanced the science of wastewater-based epidemiology and simultaneously applied those insights by building a nationwide wastewater monitoring network. We’re demonstrating how public health agencies can use wastewater data effectively to track infectious diseases and better protect public health.

WastewaterSCAN is also investing in training, educating, and empowering communities across the country on how to collect and use local wastewater data effectively. We’re also sharing our methods and data with the CDC National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) program on an ongoing basis. We’ve worked with them to add new diseases to NWSS and expand the information it can include.

How it Works

04How it Works

Collect

Plant employees collect three samples each week, preferably solids from the wastewater plant’s primary clarifier tank. The samples are sent to our lab partner Verily three times a week.

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1 of 4Collect

Plant employees collect three samples each week, preferably solids from the wastewater plant’s primary clarifier tank. The samples are sent to our lab partner Verily three times a week.

Our Team

Program Directors

Led by program directors Alexandria Boehm of Stanford University and Marlene Wolfe of Emory University, the WastewaterSCAN team spans those two higher education institutions and Verily, the program’s lab partner since its inception.

Alexandria Boehm, PhD

Stanford University

Dr. Boehm holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professorship in Environmental Studies on behalf of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the School of Engineering. She is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and a senior fellow at Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Her research is focused on pathogens in the environment, including their sources, how they move through natural and engineered systems, and how they are transmitted to people through contact with contaminated water, solids, and surfaces. Boehm is keen to bring the democratizing power of wastewater monitoring to underserved and under-resourced populations throughout the world.

Marlene Wolfe, PhD

Emory University

Dr. Wolfe is an assistant professor of environmental health in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. As an environmental microbiologist and epidemiologist, Wolfe’s work is focused on characterizing pathogens in the environment to better understand population health, risk of infection, and to support informed public health interventions. Wolfe uses mixed-methods approaches to understand infectious diseases in the environment and bring these insights to the real world to improve health outcomes. Wolfe’s goal is to equip high and low resourced communities alike with the power of wastewater monitoring.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Alessandro Zulli

Postdoctoral Fellow

Alessandro Zulli

Postdoctoral Fellow

Postdoctoral Fellow

Alessandro Zulli

Postdoctoral Fellow