We hosted our second Biofilm Course this past July 16-20!
Many participants attended, both from the US and even from abroad!
We went over biofilm microprofilling, from building microsensors to making some oxygen profiles. Also learnt about Biofilm modeling with AQUASIM and COMSOL and went over different types of biofilm reactors and how/when to use each of them. Biofilm imaging was also part of the course, including Confocal and EPI microscopes, and Optical Coherence Tomography.
We had wonderful lecturers: Christian Picioreanu, Erika Espinoa-Ortiz, Caitlin Proctor, Sara Cole, Ignacio Vargas, Marcerlo Aybar, Bumkyu Kim, and Rob Nerenberg.
Emily Clements defended her dissertation entitled “Effect of Demand Stochasticity on Microbial Quality of Premise Plumbing Systems.” Committee members included Caitlin Proctor of Purdue University, Kyle Doudrick, Kyle Bibby, and Rob Nerenberg. She did an outstanding job!
This past March 31th, we hosted the AEESP event with lots of attendees! We had oral presentations from wonderful speakers from Northwestern University, University of Notre Dame, Illinois Institute of Technology and Purdue University.
The distinguished lecturer was Dr. Cliff Davidson from Syracuse University, presenting “The Green Roof as a Complex System”.
The IWA – Biofilms 2022 was held in Phuket, Thailand on 6-8 December 2022, and topics included methods for biofilm characterizations, cell-cell communication, interactions with microplastics and nanoparticles and many others.
Rob was one of the Keynote speakers!
Emily presented two different research projects, one related to temperature effects on MABR reactors and the other about competition between suspended and biofilm bacteria in drinking water.
Erika Espinosa-Ortiz is an Assistant Research Professor working at the Center for Biofilm Engineering (CBE) at Montana State University. She won the NSF EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement (RII) award to join our lab for a semester!
Erika’s work focuses on the use of engineered multi-domain biofilms for water, wastewater and soil remediation. In our group, she will be working with MABRs and microsensors, as well as fungal biofilms characterization.
As part of a collaborative research between Dr. Nerenberg, Dr. Cerrone (ND, CEEES) and Dr. Martins (TCD, Microbiology), Yanina traveled to Dublin to get trained on several methodologies to study bacterial efflux systems when subjected to low frequency ultrasound. She spent two months at the Antimicrobial Resistant and Host Modulation Laboratory, led by Dr. Martins.
Yanina received funds from the Graduate Student Professional Development Awards (GSPDA) and from the Eck Institute for Global Health (EIGH)!
Performing MIC assaysAnalyzing real time efflux systems
Emily presented a poster at the Gordon Research Conference on the Microbiome of the Built Environment, held in New Hampshire this week (June 19-24, 2022). The conference is about microbes at the Interface of water, air and human health in built environments. Emily presented her work on modeling water age in a premise plumbing system.
He is currently finishing is undergraduate degree at the University of Notre Dame and has been doing research with us for the past two years. Welcome back Isaiah!