Traditionally, virus research examines viruses in a simple model system, looking at individual virus and pathogen particles in a lab setting. Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Professor Yun Shen is shifting the paradigm by pioneering research that looks at viruses as part of complex environments, including their interactions with other particles like bioparticles, bacteria, and microplastics. These interactions can seriously affect how viruses spread to humans and throughout our environment, and understanding these interactions can help us understand how to disinfect viruses effectively.
Prof. Shen has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award to support her proposed research on enteric viruses in wastewater. Her work will explore how enteric viruses, or viruses affecting the human digestive tract, persist in our wastewater. Wastewater treatment plants are unable to remove all bacteria and viruses from the wastewater, so they are often released to the environment and can pose risks to human health and the environment.
Preliminary data, collected by Prof. Shen and her fourth-year PhD student Xiaonan Tang, suggest that when viruses coexist with bacteria, bacteria can promote virus infection and protect viruses from degradation and disinfection. Shen and Tang will collaborate with PhD student Yihan Wang to understand how much this virus-bacteria interaction or complicity impacts the human immune system.
The human immune response is not often considered in environmental engineering research, but as the Principal Investigator (PI), Shen is committed to introducing immunology knowledge and tools into her research and the environmental engineering field as a whole.
“Environmental engineering is a very multidisciplinary field. I hope that from my research, we can build bridges between environmental engineering, microbiology, public health, and immunology,” Shen explained.
In addition to building bridges within and across the research community, Shen will conduct community outreach activities to build bridges between the research community and the public. To Shen, these outreach efforts are critical and will help drive the real-world impact of her research on the local communities.