Research

What is living in this water, where did it come from, and will the treatment remove it?

Wastewater-based epidemiology

Reading community infection from what arrives at the treatment plant, and where that inference breaks.

Virus removal and water reuse

Membrane filtration, disinfection, and log removal verification, including whether membranes can replace chlorine.

Prophage ecology

Phages integrated in bacterial genomes, what induces them, and what they carry when they move.

Source tracking and transport

Attributing contamination to sources and modelling where it travels, with watershed simulation and global sensitivity analysis.

Biofilms and particles

How communities form on surfaces, and how viruses associate with microplastics and other particles that shelter them from treatment.

Environmental bioinformatics

Long-read and short-read sequencing, metagenome assembly, and pipelines another person can check.

Current projects

Spokane. Membrane filtration as a replacement for chlorine disinfection at a regional water reclamation facility, with the City of Spokane and Spokane County.
Water Research Foundation. Ultrafiltration for virus removal.

Selected papers

Full list on Google Scholar.

Sun, Zhang, Han, Zhu, Tang, Wu, Aw, et al. Discovery of emerging vesicle-associated viruses in wastewater. Nature Water, 2026. DOI
Wu, Brighton, Chen, Shuai, and Aw. Quantification of particle-associated viruses in secondary treated wastewater effluent. Food and Environmental Virology, 2025.
Wu, Juel, Eytcheson, Aw, Munir, and Molina. crAssphage and enteric pathogens in North Carolina wastewater. Water Research, 2023. DOI