Anna Mehrotra, PhD, PE is a wastewater specialist with over 20 years of experience as an engineer, researcher, policy analyst, and educator. She recently completed a four-year tenure as Director of the Wastewater Surveillance Program at the Water Environment Federation (WEF), where she led training initiatives, collaborative partnerships, pilot projects, and other efforts aimed at strengthening connections between wastewater utilities and public health agencies. Her team’s work advanced the practice of wastewater surveillance and broadened participation in the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System. Dr. Mehrotra now serves as Senior Advisor for Infrastructure and Public Health at WEF, continuing her leadership at the intersection of public health and water by focusing on protecting the health of water workers and elevating their role as frontline detectors of emerging biological threats. Dr. Mehrotra is a licensed professional engineer and holds a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

João Pedro Matias is an Epidemiologist who graduated from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). In 2004, he joined the European Union Drugs Agency at the Public Health Unit as a Principal Scientific Analyst, responsible for the epidemiological indicator "Prevalence and patterns of drug use", addressing topics such as drug use in nightlife settings, wastewater analysis, and survey epidemiology. He also worked at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna as a drug market analyst.

Herbert Oberacher is a Professor of Metabolomics and Bioanalytical Mass Spectrometry at the Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria. In 2016, he introduced wastewater-based epidemiology to Austria through annual drug monitoring studies. Over the past five years, he has played a key role in establishing and implementing wastewater monitoring programs for pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and measles, at both national and regional levels.

Lokesh Padhye is the Associate Professor of Civil Engineering and SoMAS (joint) at Stony Brook University and Associate Director of Emerging Contaminants Research at the New York State Center for Clean Water Technology. His research focuses on improving water quality by identifying, monitoring, and treating trace contaminants, such as PFAS, microplastics, tire-chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides, in natural and engineered environments. Previously, Padhye was an Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and has held positions at IIT Bombay, Geosyntec Consultants, and MIT as a Visiting Scholar. His work has been recognized with awards from leading scientific and engineering organizations worldwide.

Dr. Rahul Kumar is a Research Scientist at the New York State Center for Clean Water Technology at Stony Brook University. Dr. Kumar earned his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 2020, and completed two years of postdoctoral training at the Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering at Arizona State University. Dr. Kumar's research interests lie broadly in Environmental Chemistry and Environmental Health. His current research lies in wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), a rapidly emerging public health monitoring tool to identify public health threats and understand community health trajectories. His Ph.D. thesis focused on understanding emerging contaminants' occurrence and fate in the environment and developing innovative solutions to treat wastewater.

Dr. Mian Wang is a Research Scientist at the Center for Clean Water Technology and the Department of Civil Engineering at Stony Brook University. Her current research focuses on applying wastewater-based epidemiology to monitor emerging pathogens, developing novel treatment technologies for decentralized wastewater systems, and advancing biological remediation of groundwater impacted by contaminants of emerging concern. Her main goal is to promote water sustainability by leveraging environmental microbiology to reduce health risks, minimize energy consumption, and lower the carbon footprint.

Monica Foote, PhD, is the incoming Director of the Wastewater Processing Laboratory at the Wadsworth Center, NYSDOH. She has spent the past two years as QA Manager for the Laboratory of Viral Diseases at Wadsworth, contributing to the validation of wastewater assays for Flu-RSV and Enterovirus D68. She holds a BS from Cornell University and a PhD from Iowa State University. Her postdoctoral research in immunology and physiology was conducted at Cornell, the University of Miami, and the FDA (CBER). 

Ayaaz Amirali earned his Master’s in Biological Anthropology, Forensic Anthropology from the University of Miami and is currently completing a second Master’s in Marine Archeology at the same institution. He serves as a researcher in the University of Miami’s Department of Environmental Engineering, where his work focuses on wastewater surveillance. His research primarily examines COVID-19 viral levels in wastewater across Miami-Dade County.

Daryl M. Lamson is the Assistant Director of Research and Development in the Laboratory of Viral Diseases at the Wadsworth Center, NYSDOH. His research focuses on the development, implementation, and data integration of new technologies and chemistries into the laboratory. Mr. Lamson's primary focus has been implementation of whole genome sequencing of viral pathogens including SARS-CoV-2, enterovirus, adenovirus and respiratory syncytial virus from both clinical samples and wastewater.

Rafael Schulman is an MD/PhD student at SUNY Upstate Medical University. He is fascinated by the evolution of biological molecules, and the way that biological changes can affect the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases. For his thesis, he is focusing on the rapidly evolving genomes and antigenic proteins of RNA viruses, specifically SARS-CoV-2 and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV). Wastewater-based epidemiology provides a novel way to sample the genomes of these pathogens at a scale that was previously not possible. 

Kirsten St. George is the Director of Virology and Chief of Viral Diseases at the Wadsworth Center, and a Clinical Professor in the Biomedical Science Department at SUNY Albany. At Wadsworth, she oversees a diverse virology team with diagnostic, surveillance, reference, research, training, and regulatory responsibilities. Prior to her 20 years at Wadsworth, she spent 25 years in academic medical centers in Australia and the US, working in basic and applied research programs, and clinical diagnostics. She is also the Lab Lead for the New York State Wastewater program and the current chair of the National Centers of Excellence Laboratory Committee.

Dr. Yinyin Ye is an assistant professor of Environmental Engineering in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering at the University at Buffalo. Her research focuses on pathogen detection and inactivation in engineered systems. She received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2024 to advance proteomic analysis and education for environmental science and engineering.

Dr. Dustin Hill is a postdoctoral researcher at Syracuse University. Dr. Hill is an environmental scientist and epidemiologist. He applies his training in statistics, machine learning, and spatial analysis to support public health research. Dr. Hill has worked on infectious diseases and wastewater surveillance for five years developing data dashboards, analyzing data, and publishing innovative research in this growing field.

Oona Shigeno Risse-Adams is a Ph.D. student in Computational Biology at Weill Cornell Medicine, where her research spans pathogen genomics, environmental surveillance, and statistical genetics. She has worked on wastewater pathogen surveillance via shotgun metagenomics, developing reproducible workflows to track pathogen diversity and community-level health indicators. Her broader research experience includes spatial transcriptomics and gene x environment interaction studies at institutions including Weill Cornell Medicine, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Novo Nordisk, and Genentech. Oona is committed to bridging computational methods with public health applications, advancing early-warning systems for infectious disease and community health. 

Kaitlyn Schaaf is APHL-CDC Public Health Laboratory Fellow working at the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene. She began her fellowship this past June after graduating from Vanderbilt University with a PhD in Biomedical Sciences. So far, her project has focused on harmonizing the wastewater surveillance workflow across targets to minimize sample processing.