Heather N. Bischel

One thing I love about Fall quarter is the launch of projects (professional and personal) and welcoming new students to UC Davis.  This year I was pleased to welcome two new PhD students in the Microbiology Graduate Group (MGG) for a Fall quarter rotation!

Over 5 weeks, Miriam Lepiz and Jack Bartlett worked with postdoctoral researchers, Dr. Camille Wolfe and Dr. Wenting Li, and environmental engineering MS student Eduardo Baptista De Siqueira. The team has been working on our group’s NSF CAREER project to harness microbes in the guts of Black Soldier Fly Larvae to sequester and degrade contaminants.

The incoming MGG students will rotate in four research groups as part of their initial training and finding the right fit for a PhD project.

This year’s UC Davis annual Picnic Day on April 20, 2024 was crawling with curious kids, and insect larvae! Civil & Environmental Engineering Masters Student, Eduardo Siqueira, hosted a stand at the event, and spoke with hundreds of children and parents through the day.

Eduardo highlighted research underway as part of our National Science Foundation CAREER project. Our team is investigating how Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL) can accelerate composting processes and generate valuable products from organic waste. We are studying how microorganisms and enzymes in the insect gut degrade contaminants.

Eduardo was impressed with engagement from kids and parents alike. Many found the BSFL quite amazing and were excited to take some red wrigglers for home composting. “I had brought enough supplies for about 100 ‘giveaways’, but before 1PM it was all gone.”  Next time we’ll prepare double!

Many of the kids wanted to see and touch some of the earthworms, and with parents permission, Eduardo would have the kids see and feel the earthworms.

We celebrated PhD graduations for Madison, Wenting, Olivia and Hannah and MS graduation for Linnea this week! Congratulations to this awesome team 🙂

I’m happy to share Olivia Wrightwood’s manuscript, which was recently published in Environmental Science & Technology – Water! Woodchip bioreactors are designed for nitrate removal from agricultural runoff. Olivia’s work evaluated the potential for pesticide removal in lab and field-scale woodchip reactors and aims more broadly to inform best management practices (BMPs) for in-field pesticide treatment. She used a combination of engineering strategies (designing and programming bioreactor controls), field skills (testing environmental conditions in an agricultural setting), and the scientific process (controlled kinetic batch studies) to investigate pesticide removal mechanisms and to ideate design strategies to improve pesticide removal. She found that removal of imidacloprid and diuron are driven by sorption to the woodchips, with a slight signature of microbial activity. She is now building on this work to promote microbial degradation of pesticides in field reactors by stimulating enzyme activity and enzymatic transformation of pesticides.

You might say that quite a few things have happened since I last posted here nearly two years ago… these are tulmutuous times and COVID-19 has impacted each of us. As a mother of two joyful and energetic young kids, I felt the challenges of the work-life collision that occurred when the pandemic flipped our old normal upside-down in March 2020 (my kids were 2 and 4 years old at the time). Our resilient little people have grown together as siblings and weathered zoom-land like the best of ’em. As an Assistant Professor with a team conducting experimental research in the lab, I experienced the impacts of the  shutdown and the subsequent stages of safety overhalls on our group’s progress. My incredible research team has persisted through these setbacks and continue to be an amazing source of intellectual curiousity and inspiration.

The pandemic also opened up new avenues of collaboration and research for my team. In Summer 2020, we began a project to monitor SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater at UC Davis and subsequently with the City of Davis through the Healthy Davis Together initiative. Our work enables data-driven decision-making using wastewater infrastructure at city, neighborhood, and building scales. We use wastewater as a warning systeem and use geo-targeted community messaging systems to provide rapid and targeted information on COVID-19 trends from wastewater to the public. As a scientist and engineer focused on environmental health challenges (with an emphasis on viruses!), I am proud to be contributing to ongoing efforts to curb this virus and its impacts in our community.

Our wastewater monitoring project includes providing weekly updates to a public website to share results for wastewater monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 (https://healthydavistogether.org/wastewater-testing/), and I’ve spoken at various public and scientific forums like the UC Davis COVID Symposium (1/13/21).

We also developed a step-by-step guidance document for implementing wastewater monitoring in cities (available at: https://healthydavistogether.org/monitoring-wastewater-response/).

I’ve had a stint of interviews with local and national news sources, and our work in wastewater based epidemiology was highlighted in various media outlets. Some spotlights and quotes can be found in:

• Wastewater helps health officials spot COVID-19 warning signs (The Wall Street Journal, 07/25/21)
• Levels of COVID-19 in Davis wastewater continue to rise (The Daily Democrat, 07/14/21)
• ‘A Northern California college city says it excels at monitoring pandemic through poop (San Francisco Chronicle, 04/10/21)
• ‘Increased’ levels of COVID-19 found in Davis neighborhood wastewater (KCRA3, 04/09/21)
• UC Davis researchers develop way to expand COVID-19 detection through wastewater sampling (Fox40, 04/01/21)
• Healthy Davis Together expands wastewater monitoring (Davis Enterprise, 04/01/20)
• The advantages of wastewater epidemiology (KCRW’s Second Opinion on NPR, 12/13/20)
• Arizona city uses wastewater to quarantine those infected with COVID-19 (The Washington Examiner, 11/5/20)
• UC Davis rolls out proactive measures to prevent coronavirus spread on campus (ABC10, 11/02/20)
• How testing sewage could help slow the spread of COVID-19 (KCRA 3, 10/29/20)