Team Sars

PhD Student, Civil and Architectural Engineering  | UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
Afeefa Abdool-Ghany is currently a second-year PhD student working with Dr. Solo-Gabriele on environmental microbiology projects.  She has extensive experience in sample collection, filtration, and in molecular methods of analysis.

As part of this project, Afeefa provides training support to students in how to analyze samples for water quality and also provides basic training assistance in how to process samples for microbial measures.

Clinical Research Fellow   |  WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE  Mason Lab
Evan Afshin graduated summa cum laude from the Macaulay Honors College with a B.A. in Environmental Science and Biochemistry. He received his M.D. with Distinctions in Biomedical Research and Medical Education from New York Medical College. He is currently a Clinical Research Fellow at the Mason Lab at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Evan’s research interests focus on the translation of metagenomics approaches and techniques to the clinic.

Ayaaz completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Miami, majoring in Biology, Mathematics, and Anthropology. He completed his first Master’s degree in Applied Biological and Forensic Anthropology, and is currently finishing a second Master’s in Underwater Archaeology, both also at the University of Miami.

Ayaaz’s current role in this project consists of sample acquisition and lab processing.

Infection Control Practitioner, Researcher  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Miller School of Medicine
Sebastian Arenas is an Infection Control Practitioner at the Miller School of Medicine with expertise in hospital epidemiology.  He has experience in mitigating outbreak clusters of multidrug-resistant organisms and works toward the implementation of control measures for the prevention of pathogen transmission in the acute-care setting.

In this application, Sebastian consolidates the hospital infection data at the population level and conducts correlation analyses.  He is supervised by Dr. Shukla and works closely with Dr. Kumar in providing data needed for predictive modeling. He serves as a team member within the Human Population and Clinical Patient Surveillance Group and participates in Aim 3 meetings.

Research Associate I  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

Experienced associate researcher who received her Bachelor’s of Science in Animal Science with a Minor in Biology from Middle Tennessee State University with a focus on animal physiology, disease & medicine. Also received her Master’s of Professional Science in Marine Conservation from the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami where she investigated impacts of increased magnesium loads on the osmoregulatory and renal function of the Gulf toadfish within the Grosell Environmental Physiology & Toxicology Lab. Assistant manager of the weekly and hourly laboratory workflows for the surveillance project at UM and performs various sample processing techniques of collected wastewater samples at the University of Miami BioSpecimen Shared Resource and Center for AIDS Research, University of Miami alongside Dr. Helena Solo-Gabriele and Dr. Mark Sharkey. She has gained hands-on knowledge with animal husbandry and behavior covering a plethora of species throughout her college career, and extensive hands-on experience of a variety of molecular laboratory techniques including viral concentration via electronegative filtration as well as magnetic beads, RNA extraction/purification, cDNA synthesis, gel electrophoresis, PCR, qPCR, RT-qPCR, V2G-qPCR, and LAMP.

Tina also works alongside Dr. Helena Solo-Gabriele to mentor undergraduate students associated with the project, assists in the scientific writing of publications generated by this study, and works closely with the team members of the OncoGenomics Shared Resource to facilitate the weekly transport of samples between the collaborating UM labs and downstream analysis of collected wastewater samples.

Clinical Research Coordinator, Researcher  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
Cynthia Beaver is a Clinical Research Coordinator with over 10 years of experience in clinical and community-based research. She is a Lead Coordinator for several projects related to occupational cancer and has lead efforts in the University’s Human Surveillance and Environmental Sampling program. Cynthia will continue her role as lead coordinator for the University’s COVID-19 Human Surveillance group.

In this application, she assists Drs. Kobetz and Solle in consolidating COVID-19 infection data that is collected as part of the University of Miami 3-T, testing, tracing, and tracking for COVID-19 infections on campus.  She organizes the data such that it can be easily used by team members for the analyses required specific to this application. She participates in the Human Population and Clinical Patient Surveillance Group and in the Aim 3 meetings.

Senior Manager of BSSR, Molecular Biologist  | UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
Ms. Boone is the Senior Manager, Research Support, of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center (SCCC) Biospecimen Shared Resource (BSSR). She has extensive experience in clinical molecular laboratories and with Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) used for biorepository sample annotation and process tracking.

For this proposal, she is responsible for overall annotation and tracking of samples, receipt of samples at the BSSR upon collection, concentration processing via ultra- and electronegative filtration, and interfacing the BSSR with the Onco-Genomics Shared Resource (OGSR) (which is responsible for nucleic acid extraction and detection at UM).  She is also responsible for shipping concentrates to our collaborators at WCM.  In addition, she is responsible for setting up the sample tracking system and data entry protocols, and for training users.  She facilitates the provision of data for the DCC via Aim 1, and participates in the Aim 2 meetings.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY
Juan obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering at Florida International University in 2019. The same year, he started his PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University, where he joined Dr. Erickson’s laboratory to work on Point-Of-Care diagnostics. In the lab, he works in medical diagnostic design, focusing on technology development.

In this project, he is the creator of the MINI device. For the device, he designed the mechanical and electrical elements, programmed all the electronics, and developed the software for processing and analysis of raw data.

Staff Associate   |  WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE
Daniel’s academic background includes a B.A. in Geology from Colorado College. He is currently a staff associate at Weill Cornell Medicine helping with grant and paper writing along with general logistics.

Underwater Archeology

Analyst, Researcher  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC)
Caty Chung is an applications support Software Engineer at IDSC with an academic background in chemistry.  She has experience in the development and implementation of standards and ontologies.  She has worked within multi-university collaborations, facilitating informatics communications.

She assists in the development and implementation of standards and ontologies and required processes. She is supervised by Drs. Schürer and Vidović and is a team member of Aim 1.

Research Support Specialist, Researcher | UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

Sam Comerford is a Research Support Specialist with over 25 years of experience at the University of Miami in clinical and community-based research.  He has a both a BA and MBA from the University of Miami.  Mr. Comerford managed several multimillion-dollar research studies for HIV prevention prior to joining the waste water collection team. He has expertise in research methods and data/biospecimen data.  Mr. Comerford has been a critical team member of the University surveillance program and will expand his responsibilities to assist with wastewater collection for this study and will consolidate population level statistic for the human surveillance work.  He will be supervised by Drs. Kobetz and Solle.  He is a team member of the Human Population and Clinical Patient Surveillance Group and will participate in Aim 2 meetings.

Research Assistant, Department of Public Health Sciences   |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI UHealth
Julio graduated from Florida International University (FIU) with a Bachelors’ degree in biological sciences. On this project, he collects daily wastewater, swab samples, and air samples from the University of Miami Coral Gables campus. He also prepares the gathered samples for analysis and performed bacteria analysis.

CEO   |   DataGrade Solutions, LLC
As an undergraduate student, Daniel worked on highly varied research projects, including studying mutation patterns in Vibrio vulnificus, performing large-scale network and cluster computing, and NMR-based chiral separation of a new pharmaceutical compound.  For his PhD, he studied the roles of DNA Repair and Apoptosis pathways in the lower incidence of stem cell mutation frequency compared to somatic cells, utilizing both dry and wet lab techniques including large-scale NGS analytics, cell culture techniques, PCR, Western Blotting, statistical analyses, and more. As a postdoc, he worked on spinal cord injury studies, differentiating human stem cells to motor neurons for large-scale phenotypic screening of axonal regeneration. In addition, He began working in the FAIR data world, building a literature annotation platform focused on similar neurological injury studies. During his second, and final, postdoc, he dove deeper into data curation, validation, and harmonization, and was in charge of data input for the Library of Network-Based Cellular Signatures (LINCS) and Illuminating the Druggable Genome (IDG) consortia. His primary responsibilities were data standards development, ontological integration, data harmonization and integration, and automating data workflows. He also served as a curator and subject matter expert for the Bioassay Ontology (BAO), Drug Target Ontology (DTO), Cell Line Ontology (CLO), and Ontology for Stem Cell Investigations (OSCI).

For this project, Daniel brings expertise on FAIR data harmonization, standardization, and curation. He is assembling data reporting standards, automated extraction and storage of data, and establishing both machine and human-readable formatting of study reports for the DCC. This includes alignment with the CDC’s National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) standards, automating validation, and improving ease of reporting for field scientists to data repositories.

Clinical Researcher, Microbiologist, Researcher  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
Ms. Cortizas is a Research Coordinator in the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center (SCCC) Biospecimen Shared Resource (BSSR). She has extensive experience in conducting culture-based and molecular-based methods of analysis.

For this project, she processes samples for culture-based quantification of fecal indicator bacteria, which will be used for normalization of COVID and non-COVID microbe measures.  She works with Ms. Boone to facilitate sample tracking, receipt of samples, and concentration of samples via ultra- and electronegative filtration.  She also assists in distributing the concentrates to the Onco-Genomics Shared Resource (OGSR) and to collaborators at WCM. She participates in the Aim 2 meetings.

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
Gabriella is a junior Health Science major on the Pre-Medical Track with minors in Business Law, Chemistry, Biology, and Public Health.

She works in the Oncogenomics Shared Resource where she conducts the magnetic bead extraction of wastewater samples process. She collaborates with Dr. Solo-Gabriele in the Biospecimen Shared Resource on the electronegative filtration of wastewater samples.

Underwater Archeology

Research Specialist   |  WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE
Namita finished her Bachelor’s in Dental Surgery from MUHS, India (B.D.S, 2018), followed by MS in Biomedical Science from Rutgers University Biomedical and Health Sciences, Rutgers School of Graduate Studies, 2021. She previously worked as a Research Assistant at Rutgers.

Namita’s role in the project is as a Research Specialist at The Mason Lab. She works on generating data from sequencing the RNA Wastewater samples, involving cDNA prep, amplicon amplification, ARTIC library prep, and Illumina sequencing protocols.

Researcher |  Biotia

Dr. Danko is a New-York-based Computational Biologist researching how urban microbiomes affect human health. His goals are to develop quantitative molecular measures of human health, unravel changes in the environment from the start of the industrial revolution, and design resources for public health. Dr. Danko is currently the Director of Software Engineering and Bioinformatics at Biotia Inc. He did his Ph.D. research at Weill Cornell under Drs. Chris Mason and Iman Hajirasouliha. Before that Dr. Danko worked at the Kennedy Institute in Oxford under Dr. Fiona Powrie and did his Undergraduate research at MIT with Dr. Bonnie Berger.

Nakul graduated with honors from the University of Southern California, with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Software Engineering. He has over 15 years of experience in developing software systems for government agencies, educational institutions, and private corporations in the fields of life sciences, geospatial visualization, sensor data analysis, and semantic knowledge discovery. Apart from leading software development teams, Nakul has designed and taught courses in Software Engineering and Mobile Computing at the University of Miami. His role in this project is to develop an application to generate Open Specimen forms from metadata templates.

COVID Mini Hardware/Engineering Lead  |  CORNELL UNIVERSITY
David Erickson is the SC Thomas Sze Director and the Sibley College Professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and a joint Professor within the Division of Nutritional Sciences. His research focuses on mobile and global health technology, microfluidics, photonics, and nanotechnology. Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) and he received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto. Research in the Erickson Lab is primarily funded through grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), Office of Naval Research (ONR), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Defense (DOD), and various foundations. Prof. Erickson has helped to found numerous start-up companies commercializing: high-throughput nanoparticle analysis instrumentation, biomedical diagnostics, and energy technologies including Halo Labs, VitaScan, and Dimensional Energy. Dr. Erickson has received the DARPA-MTO Young Faculty Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Department of Energy Early Career Award, among others. In 2011 he was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by President Obama. For his efforts in co-founding the field of optofluidics, Erickson has been named a fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering.

Research Associate   |  WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE
Jonathan Foox is a Research Associate in the Institute for Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. He is developing pipelines to process and visualize the presence and abundance of SARS-CoV-2 strains in wastewater sequence data. He received his PhD in Comparative Biology at the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History.

Bioethics Director, Key Personnel  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Miller School of Medicine
Dr. Goodman is the Director of the Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy, possessing over 30 years of experience in international bioethics, general bioethics, public health /epidemiology ethics and ethics and information technology.

For this proposal, he provides ethics oversight and provide guidance regarding surveillance, consent and privacy.  He also assists in developing a community communication strategy and data exchange between the institution and community at large. Dr. Goodman participates in the meetings of the Human Population and Clinical Patient Surveillance Group.

Co-Investigator  |   UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
George Grills, as an Associate Director of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center (SCCC), is responsible for oversight for shared resources that offer support for genomics, flow cytometry, imaging, biorepository, cancer modeling, molecular therapeutics, behavioral and community-based research, and biostatistics and bioinformatics.

His primary responsibility in this project is in coordinating the extensive shared resources available through the UM SCCC. He facilitates this coordination through the Administrative Leads group (see Multiple PI/PD Leadership Plan) for organization. Specifically, he coordinates the efforts of the SCCC Behavioral and Community-Based Research, Biospecimen, Onco-Genomics, Molecular Therapeutics, and Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Shared Resources.  He has experience with consortium efforts to standardize best practices for DNA and RNA sequencing (FDA SEQC, NIST Genome in a Bottle, and is a leader of the ABRF Next-Generation Sequencing Study). He facilitates the evaluation and application of existing and new genomics technologies for Aim 2, and participates in the Administrative Leads meetings and Aim 2 meetings.

Senior Associate Director, Housing Operations and Facilities, Division of Student Affairs Housing & Residential Life and
Director, Conference Services  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
Richard received his Master of Science degree from Florida State University (FSU), and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In this project, he provides disaggregated data for surveillance testing to match against wastewater data. Additionally,  he supports the project by navigating University resources as needed.

Co-Investigator |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Miller School of Medicine
Dr. Kobetz, as Professor of Medicine and Public Health Sciences, focuses efforts on studies that evaluate disparities among communities and methods of intervention.  Through her research, she evaluates multilevel determinants of disease risk and brings innovative technology to medically underserved settings to improve screening uptake and disease prevention. She is currently leading the University of Miami 3-T testing, tracing, and tracking efforts for COVID-19. She is responsible for the design and implementation of the program, working directly with the President and Provost of the University to advise and facilitate decisions about how to manage COVID-19 in the University community. In addition to leading COVID-19 surveillance for the University, Dr. Kobetz is also the Associate Director for Population Science and Cancer Disparity at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center (SCCC).  Moreover, Dr. Kobetz is also the Vice Provost for Research for the entire University of Miami.  Through these multiple roles, Dr. Kobetz facilitates access to COVID-19 surveillance data at the population level and facilitates University-level collaboration for wastewater sampling.  Dr, Kobetz has already played a critical role in facilitating the pilot-level wastewater sampling efforts on campus by initiating contacts throughout the University, including the full support of the University President, University Facilities, and Environmental Health and Safety offices.  Dr. Kobetz participates in the meetings of the Human Population and Clinical Patient Surveillance Group.

Senior Software Engineer, Researcher  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC)
Mr. Koleti is a Senior Software Engineer with IDSC.  He has extensive experience in the development of biomedical informatics software and Semantic Web technologies, with a background in biotechnology and bioinformatics.  He is the main developer of the LINCS Data Portal (LDP) and implemented the LINCS data processing pipelines and LINCS publication services APIs.  In addition, Mr. Koleti developed and deployed the IDG (Illuminating the Druggable Genome) Resource Submission System (RSS), and implemented the resource management infrastructure.  As outlined in Aim 1, both LDP and RSS will be leveraged in the proposed project.  Mr. Koleti leverages previous work to implement operational software components for data standardization and processing and storage and access of metadata and datasets via relational and document storage and an API to access the data.  He is a team member of Aim 1 supervised by Chris Mader with coordination by Drs. Schürer and Vidović.

Co-Investigator  | UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Miller School of Medicine  Department of Public Health Sciences
Dr. Kumar is Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Environmental Health. He leads efforts for air monitoring of infectious agents, including COVID-19 and risk prediction in Miami-Dade and Baltimore and at UM sites.

In this project, he works with Drs. Solo-Gabriele and Mason, and assists in the integration of wastewater samples, demographic and environmental data sets, and community levels COVID-19 surveillance data to assess the efficacy of COVID-19 surveillance in the wastewater for early detection of community level infection at different geographic scales and, develop and validate a model for early prediction of COVID-19 outbreak at UM campuses and in Miami-Dade. Dr. Kumar is assisted by a PhD student in Public Health to gather and consolidate the data and conduct initial exploratory model runs. As part of this application he, along with Dr. Chris Mason, co-leads Aim 3.

Clinical Research Assistant I   |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Miller School of Medicine  Department of Public Health Sciences (DPHS)
Dr. Shelja Kumar is a dentist from India currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Public Health from the University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine, Department of Public Health and Sciences. She is a Clinical Research Assistant I, at DPH, Secretary for the Graduate Student Association, and Secretary for the Public Health Student Association.

Dr. Kumar works with the RADx-Rad project as a clinical research assistant and conducted environmental surveillance and monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 virus in air, on surfaces, and in wastewater.

Co-Investigator  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Miller School of Medicine
Dr. Lamar is the Executive Director of Facilities Safety, Compliance, and Continuity.  His area of research training is in evaluating environmental factors that lead to the transmission of communicable diseases.  He is a Certified Healthcare Safety Professional (CHSP) with over 10 years of emergency response and environmental sampling experience.

He serves as the Environmental Specialist within this project, and is responsible for evaluating the safety of the sampling program as part of Aim 2, in conjunction with Dr. Solo-Gabriele and the University’s Office of Environmental Health and Safety.  He also facilitates the process of getting sampling equipment calibrated and installed, and trains PhD students and staff in sampling procedures.

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Miller School of Medicine
Erik Lamm is a Sophomore at the University of Miami. He is currently studying Civil Engineering but also plans to get a minor in Philosophy.

In this project, he acts as a research assistant and helper for various parts of the project, including weekly sampling, equipment installation, and multiple 2

Jennifer Laine has a Doctorate of Public Health, with a major in Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and minors in Leadership and Public Health Preparedness from the University of Texas School of Public Health, Houston, TX. Dr. Laine also has Certificate of Industrial Hygiene from Tulane University, as well as her Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan, where she also completed her Bachelor of Literature, Science and Arts degree.

Dr. Laine and her team of from the Environmental Health and Safety department of the University of Miami have supported these efforts with sampling, safety and PPE participation and guidance.

4-hour experiments.

Executive Director, EHS, Facilities Management |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Miller School of Medicine

Jennifer Laine has a Doctorate of Public Health, with a major in Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and minors in Leadership and Public Health Preparedness from the University of Texas School of Public Health, Houston, TX.  Dr. Laine also has Certificate of Industrial Hygiene from Tulane University, as well as her Master of Public Health from the University of Michigan, where she also completed her Bachelor of Literature, Science and Arts degree.

Dr. Laine and her team of from the Environmental Health and Safety department of the University of Miami have supported these efforts with sampling, safety and PPE participation and guidance.

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
Danni is a junior Environmental Engineering major with a minor in Chemistry. She has a large passion for Public Health, which is why she has such a large interest in this project.

She assists in the lab, and with data entry and data analysis.

Director, Software Engineering, Researcher  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC)
Mr. Mader is the Director of the IDSC Software Engineering group.  He has over 25 years of experience implementing software systems in the life sciences, industry and academia.  He has contributed to many national research programs.  His expertise includes working with electronic health records and other clinical information.  He has a keen understanding of the need (and knowledge of how) to protect personal health information as part research projects.

As part of this project, Mr. Mader provides software design and consulting expertise to the project team and works closely with Drs. Vidovic and Schürer. He is a team member of Aim 1.

Biostatistician, Key Personnel   |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI
Dr. Mantero, as the Lead Research Analyst for the Clinical & Translational Science Institute (CTSI) Biostatistics Collaboration and Consulting Core (BCCC), provides biostatistics support to University researchers.  His academic training includes work in statistical programming with biomedical applications.

For this application, he provides biostatistics support for the analysis of COVID-19 infection rates and wastewater water quality and SARS-CoV-2 quantification. He interacts directly with the researchers collecting population-level data about human COVID-19 cases in both the general community and within the UM hospital.  He is also a member of Aim 3, where he works with Dr. Kumar to provide additional biostatistics support as he develops the predictive model relating wastewater SARS-CoV-2 measures to COVID-19 infections. Dr. Mantero participates in the meetings of the Human Population and Clinical Patient Surveillance Group and Aim 3 meetings.

Principal Investigator   |  WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE
Dr. Mason directs the overall project at WCM and, specifically leads the genomics and computational aspects of this proposal, including the creation of the NGS libraries, data sets, and as-needed validation experiments for LAMP and COVID-19 testing methods and standards. Dr. Mason is one of the multiple PIs on this grant, along with Dra. Solo-Gabriele and Shürer. Dr. Mason co-leads Aim 2, with Dr. Solo-Gabriele, and co-leads Aim 3, with Dr. Kumar.  He also participates in the Administrative Leads group.

Dr. Mason’s laboratory has extensive, published expertise in the optimization of genomic assays for metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, exome-sequencing, RNA-sequencing, and targeted genomic analysis, as well as their computational analyses. Dr. Mason leads several consortium efforts to standardize best practices for DNA and RNA-sequencing (FDA SEQC, FDA Epigenomics QC Group, NIST Genome in a Bottle clinical WGS and metagenomics standards with IMMSA (International Microbiome and Multi’omics Standards Alliance), and a leader of the ABRF Next-Generation Sequencing Study). 

Researcher  |  CORNELL UNIVERSITY Biomedical Engineering
Originally from Long Island, New York, Duncan is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University. He received his M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Cornell, and a B.S. in Nanoscale Engineering from the University at Albany (State University of New York). Duncan’s research involves point-of-care devices for enabling nucleic acid diagnosis and innovations in sample processing methods. His future career interests include medical science liaison/field medical affairs position in the biotechnology or pharmaceutical industry.

Duncan’s role in this project focuses on the technology—manufacturing the TINY devices, co-designing and building the prototype MINI device, as well as troubleshooting problems with hardware, software, or assay development.

Senior Research Associate, Researcher   |  WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE
Dr. Meydan is a highly experienced and well-published Computational Biologist, in genomics, comparative genomics, and gene regulation. He is a co-first author on several metagenomics and metranscriptomics papers and is a Senior Staff Scientist in the lab with 8 years of tenure. He has developed and is lead author for several tools in high-throughput genomics, and he has experience in developing several machine-learning algorithms for the analysis of expression, next-generation sequencing (NGS), and metagenomics data.

He works directly with Dr. Mason and the grant team to develop any new code or supplement scripts for genomics analysis in C++ or Python, and he is responsible for the algorithm development and integrated analysis in this grant. Dr. Meydan participates in the meetings of Aim 1 to facilitate the transfer of information between WCM and UM and in meetings of Aim 3 to facilitate informatics analysis of data generated at WCM.

Research Technician, Researcher   |  WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE  MetaSUB Consortium
As a Research Technician for the Mason Lab and Coordinator for MetaSUB, Chris Mozsary is extensively familiar with the protocols for collection, annotation, extraction, sequencing, and analysis for shotgun sequence and genomics data.

He assists Krist Ryon with the app rollout (KoboToolbox) for collecting samples and metadata for all the samples in this grant. He participates as a group member within Aims 2 and 3 to facilitate discussions about molecular approaches between UM and WCM.

Johnathan is a first year in the Master’s in Science of Climate and Health at the Miller School of Medicine. He graduated from the University of Miami with a bachelor’s in biology.

His role is RNA extraction and some data cleaning in Dr. Kumar’s lab.

Senior Software Engineer, Researcher  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Institue for Data Science and Computing (IDSC)
Julio Cesar Perez Baez received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1989 from Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra in the Dominican Republic. He joined IDSC (formerly the “Center for Computational Science”) in 2014, and is part of the RegenBase Team. Julio has extensive experience in all stages of software development life cycle and project management within organizations ranging from entrepreneurial to Fortune 500, such as PepsiCo and Sony.

Infection Control Practitioner, Researcher, UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI UHealth

Mr. Pronty is a Clinical Laboratory Technologist and Infection Control Practitioner who currently works at the University of Miami Health System in surveillance of hospital-acquired infection and developing strategies to prevent their spread.

In this application, he works with Mr. Arenas to prepare the inpatient clinical data for its standardization and communication through Aim 1, led by Dr. Schürer.  He is supervised by Dr. Shukla in terms of transferring this data in a form that can be properly archived and transferred to the DCC.  He also serves as a team member within the Human Population and Clinical Patient Surveillance Group and participates in Aim 1 meetings.

Office Manager, Personnel  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI College of Engineering
Maria has extensive experience supporting various departments at the University for over 20 years. She handles the project’s day to day administrative duties of tracking expenditures, placing orders, scheduling meetings, coordinating events and overseeing the budget.

Matthew is a student pursuing a B.A. in Geology at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. He is a student researcher under Dr. Solo-Gabriele at the dept. of chemical, environmental, and materials engineering. He is passionate about photograpgy, mineralogy & sedimentology, with interest in microscopy/SEM imaging. 

His role in the project is to collect wastewater samples every week at both the Coral Gables and Medical campuses. He also assists the team back at the laboratory in preparing the wastewater samples for further analyses.

Research Technician, Researcher   | WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE  MetaSUB Consortium. 

As a Research Technician in the Mason Lab and as the Executive Director for the MetaSUB Consortium, Krista Ryon is extensively familiar with the protocols for collection, annotation, extraction, sequencing, and analysis for shotgun sequence and genomics data.

She leads the app rollout (KoboToolbox) for collecting samples and metadata for all the samples in this grant. Krista participates in Aim 2 group meetings as the transfer of samples will occur from the Sylvester Biospecimen Shared Resource at UM, which is where the wastewater samples are concentrated and through which biobanked human specimens will be split. Through the Aim 2 group, she is responsible for coordinating for WCM.

Principal Investigator  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC)

Dr. Schürer is a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at the University of Miami, and Program Director of Drug Discovery at IDSC.  Dr. Schürer has over 15 years of management experience in industry and academic institutions and has been involved in several large interdisciplinary, geographically distributed research and development projects, and has been PI and co-PI of several NIH funded projects.  Dr. Schürer is an expert in data standards, integration and modeling.  His work includes software development and chemo- and bio-informatics.

In this proposal, he is involved in the scientific leadership for all aspects of the proposal and leads Aim 1, which focuses on developing and implementing data standards and quality metrics, and establishing the operational informatics infrastructure to manage SARS-CoV-2 wastewater-based surveillance datasets and metadata, and ensuring the data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).  He, along with Dr. Vidović, supervises Aim 1 team members, is part of the Administrative Leads group, and is responsible, along with Dr. Solo-Gabriele, for communications with the DCC.

Research Assistant Professor, Researcher  |   UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI Miller School of Medicine

Dr. Sharkey developed a keen interest in Biology and Chemistry at a young age and always wanted to have a career in science.  He earned a PhD in Molecular Biology in 1993 from Clark University and received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Lalor Foundation to study the expression of matrix metalloproteinase genes in the mouse.  Shortly thereafter, he focused on HIV/AIDS research and have continued in the HIV field since then.  He is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and an active research scientist in an exceptional environment that includes the Miami Center for AIDS Research and the University of Miami HIV/AIDS Institute. Dr. Sharkey’s research interests include the role of HIV accessory proteins, HIV reservoirs and persistence, antivirals targeting Vif and development of diagnostic PCR-based assays.  His most recent work has focused on refining a platform technology that can be used to detect HIV resistance mutations or to detect pathogens, such as ZIKV.  This platform technology has been modified for the quantitation of CoV-2 RNA and detection of point mutations in the spike gene.

Dr. Sharkey’s primary role on the project is to monitor weekly samples collected on UM campuses and hospital by quantitative PCR amplification of extracted RNA.  This information is then reported to university leadership so that appropriate action can be taken to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

Co-Investigator  |   UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Jackson Memorial Hospital

Dr. Shukla, an Assistant Professor of Medicine, focuses efforts on infection control, hospital epidemiology, and antimicrobial stewardship.  At UM, he is charged with the COVID-19 pandemic response for the University health care system and thus has access to biobanked COVID-19 samples (for both UM community surveillance and for hospital patients) and to hospital population records in terms of numbers and severity of disease for COVID-19 patients.

For this project, he is responsible for providing inpatient population data to researchers utilizing data for integration with wastewater results (e.g., Drs. Kumar, Mantero, and Mason for metagenomics comparisons).  Dr. Shukla is also responsible for supervising researchers Darryl Pronty and Sebastian Arenas. Dr. Shukla participates in the meetings of the Human Population and Clinical Patient Surveillance Group.

Co-Investigator  | UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center

Dr. Solle, as a Research Professor of Medicine, focuses efforts on occupational risks. At UM, she has been coordinating COVID-19 human surveillance efforts for UM students, faculty, and staff.  She has been focusing on consolidating the symptom tracking/testing data from the University’s surveillance systems.

For this project, she consolidates county-level and University-level COVID-19 surveillance data.  She is assisted by Thomas Stone (researcher) and a half-time PhD student in public health.  She is responsible for interfacing with researchers utilizing the data for integration with wastewater results (e.g., Drs. Kumar, Mantero, and Mason for metagenomics comparisons). Dr. Solle participates in the meetings of the Human Population and Clinical Patient Surveillance Group.

Principal Investigator  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

Dr. Helena Solo-Gabriele is a Professor of Civil/Environmental Engineering (tenured) at the College of Engineering.  She has over 25 years of research experience leading large networks of researchers through implementation of programs to promote interdisciplinary research for College of Engineering faculty.  She has lead multi-institutional environmental monitoring efforts as part of her work through the UM NSF-NIEHS funded Center in Oceans and Human Health, through her multi-decadal research focused on arsenic, and most recently through her efforts as part of the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI), where she led her own research team of 3 Universities and is currently wrapping up her leadership responsibilities for a subset (Core 7B) of GoMRI synthesis and legacy efforts that have involved 27 institutions.

As PI, she is responsible for coordinating project activities, including interfacing with the RADx-rad Data Coordination Center (DCC) and participating in DCC-organized activities, including regular progress meeting and twice annual meetings with the RADx-rad awardees.  She is responsible for oversight on research publications and is responsible for the completion and submission of interim and final reports. She provides oversight for all aspects of the study and leads the sample collection and concentration portion of Aim 2.

Research Support Specialist, Researcher  |   UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI UHealth

Mr. Stone is a Research Support Specialist with over 7 years of experience in clinical and community-based research. He has technical expertise in environmental sampling and biospecimen collection. Mr. Stone has been a critical team member of the University surveillance program and will expand his responsibilities to assist with wastewater collection for this study, and to consolidate population level statistics for the human surveillance work. He is upervised by Drs. Kobetz and Solle. He is a team member of the Human Population and Clinical Patient Surveillance Group and participates in Aim 2 meetings.

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Miller School of Medicine

Collette Thomas is currently a junior studying Biomedical Engineering with an electrical concentration at the University of Miami.

Her responsibilities in the COVID-19 Wastewater Surveillance Project include prepping the lab for experimentation, assisting with Electronegative Filtration, and conducting bacterial analysis with team members. In addition, she processes and analyzes data in Excel for weekly reports and tracking, prepares data for transfer to Open Specimen, and assists the data standardization team in compiling data for submission to DCC.

UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

Tori is currently a junior studying biomedical engineering.

She helps in the lab for both the Covid and Dust project. Additionally, she works on gathering information about Covid mitigation on campus.

Software Engineer, Researcher |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC)

Mr. Venkatapuram is a Java software engineer at IDSC.  He has a degree in Computer Science and over 12 years of experience in all stages of the software development life cycle.  Mr. Venkatapuram has extensive experience in working on projects in the biomedical domain, including Semantic Web technologies, and he also has expertise in information technology and geographic information systems.  He developed the COVID tracker eXperimental Situational Awareness Tool (XSAT) App, which will be leveraged to make wastewater-derived data accessible to end users (see Aim 1). He is a team member of Aim 1 supervised by Mr. Mader, in coordination with Drs. Schürer and Vidović .

Co-Investigator  | UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  Miller School of Medicine

Dr. Vidović is a Research Scientist in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology and at IDSC. She has been working with Dr. Schürer in various projects for nine years, including LINCS, BD2K and IDG, where she played a critical role coordinating operations and scientific projects across different centers that are part of the research consortia.  Dr. Vidović has a project management certification and has more than 15 years of experience in chemoinformatics, bioinformatics, high-throughput data analysis, and data standards.

Dr. Vidović co-leads Aim 1 with Dr. Schürer and has responsibilities in developing and implementing data standards and quality metrics and establishing the operational informatics infrastructure to manage SARS-CoV-2 wastewater-based surveillance datasets.  She assists in coordinating the Aim 1 team members that include Caty Chung, David Danker, Chris Mader, Amar Koleti, Darryl Pronty, Sreeharsha Venkatapuram, and Benjamin Young.

Director of the OGSR, Molecular Biologist, Key Personnel  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

Dr. Williams, as the Director of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center (SCCC) Onco-Genomics Shared Resource (OGSR), is responsible for facilitating molecular processing of samples at UM.  His team receives sample concentrates from the SCCC Biospecimen Shared Resource (BSSR).  These concentrates are extracted and analyzed at the OGSR.  Dr. Williamsis responsible for quality control and for developing sample spiking plans to quantify recoveries.  He participates in regular coordination meetings to assure that workflows (and data reporting) are operating as expected.  Dr. Williams also will participates in Aim 2 meetings.

Senior Project Coordinator, Researcher  |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI  College of Engineering

Dr. Sherry Yin is a Senior Project Coordinator of Civil and Architectural Engineering at the College of Engineering. She obtained her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from University of Miami (UM) and B.S. (summa cum laude) in Bioengineering from George Mason University. She also holds B.S. in Pharmaceutical Science from China. While at UM, her research efforts focused on exploring the therapeutical potential for intervertebral disc (IVD) regeneration, which included examining nutrition’s impact on ATP metabolism of intervertebral disc (IVD) cells, developing a 3D finite element human IVD model to predict extracellular ATP distribution, and designing a targeted drug system for its sustained delivery. During her stay in the stem cell and mechano-biology lab, she was appointed as the lab manager and supervised more than 20 undergraduate senior design projects and master research projects. She has authored and co-authored many articles in high-impact journals. Apart from being actively involved in various research projects at the interface of biology, engineering, and medicine, she also worked as a teaching assistant over the course of her academic life and taught lab classes in the Department of Biology and Chemistry at Miami Dade College. She was also a content writer, reporting cutting-edge medical news and technology in the fields of pharmaceutical and medical science. She became a project manager in both pharma company and CRO upon graduation and, has experience leading the development and manufacturing of monoclonal antibody products.

As a Senior Project Coordinator on this project, she assists Dr. Helena Solo-Gabriele in coordinating internal project activities and interfacing with external partners.

Molecular Biologist, Research Technician, Researcher   |  WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE MetaSUB Consortium

Benjamin Young is a highly experienced and well-established molecular biologist, with work spanning comparative genomics, metagenomics, RNA-sequencing, NGS-sample preparation, and evolutionary analysis of NGS data. He is also the Executive Director of the MetaSUB Consortium.

On this project, he performs the library preparation, sample organization, and preliminary NGS QC analysis of the metagenomics and metatranscriptomics data, and he helps upload files to the sequence read archive (SRA) and confirmatory PCR validation of any specific targets. As the WCM project coordinator, Benjamin is involved in the regular meetings for all three Aims to facilitate cross Aim and cross WCM/UM discussions.

Researcher |  UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

Wei Zhang double majored in Actuarial Math and Economics at the State University of New York at Binghamton from 2014 to 2017.  She received an MS degree in Statistics at the George Washington University in 2019. She is currently a PhD student in Biostatistics at University of Miami (since 2019).