As COVID-19 started spreading across the world, scientists realized they could track the virus by testing sewage water.
With support from a CITRIS COVID-19 Seed Funding award, Colleen Naughton, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Merced, pioneered a global dashboard to aggregate wastewater epidemiology findings.
This fall, Naughton received two significant honors for her wastewater epidemiology work: The American Academy of Environmental Engineers and Scientists (AAEES) awarded her the 2021 Excellence in Environmental Engineering and Science (E3S) Grand Prize in University Research, and Ceres Nanosciences selected her to take part in one of nine Centers of Excellence funded by a National Institutes of Health grant.