Dr. Rose is the Homer Nowlin Endowed Chair in Water Research at MSU. She is an international authority on water microbiology, water quality, and public health safety, and she co-directs both MSU’s Center for Advancing Microbial Risk Assessment and its Center for Water Sciences. Dr. Rose is interviewed by Meseret Negash, Director of Development at the Graduate School at MSU.
Dr. Joan Rose
Dr. Rose, share with us a bit about your background, and the journey that brought you to MSU.
I'm a public health water microbiologist and have been at MSU since 2003. I grew up in the high desert in Southern California and went off to the University of Arizona where, right off the bat, I realized I really liked microbiology. So I moved into the microbiology department which has a strong link, of course, to health, medicine, infectious disease, environment, and so on.
At my first job as an undergraduate, I worked at a USDA Bee Lab (and studied bee diseases) in Arizona. As a result of my experience and my interaction with my mentor there, I did my master's degree at the University Wyoming. At the time, a new disease had come into the United States, and I was able to study its transmission into bee populations. Though I got my degree actually in microbiology, I did my research over in the Botany department because the disease I was studying was a fungus and I worked with mycologist. So I got this interesting experience of interdisciplinary work. When I came back to Arizona, I got a job at a wastewater plant. I worked in the lab for the utility looking at how we test the wastewater so it can be discharged safely and set up new methods for water quality testing.
I did my PhD at the University of Arizona and I guess my career sort of evolved at this intersection of technology, environment, microbiology, and health. I had one foot in environmental engineering and one foot in public health. I think it was unusual too that I worked a lot at full scale facilities both drinking water and wastewater plants. I would go to the treatment plant itself and take samples or go to the beach or go to the river and then bring them back to the lab. There was a lot of field work involved.
When we think about it, alongside the evolution of my career there’s been the development of this idea of ‘One Water’ and ‘One Health’. That is, when we talk about water, we don't talk about the natural water cycle anymore. It's really a coupled system. We have humans using water for irrigation and our food systems; we're managing storm waters and trying to get new resources for drinking purposes. And of course, we want to manage our ecosystems. That's particularly important in the Great Lakes.
“Alongside the evolution of my career there’s been the development of this idea of ‘One Water’ and ‘One Health’”
Can you elaborate on what led you to your work protecting our water supplies from disease?
I found the invertebrate pathology arena very interesting, including the disease of bees, and some of the same diseases were seen in shrimp, and other types of animals. But I came back to my roots to human disease when I decided to do my PhD at the University of Arizona in water microbiology. Since I'd been working on wastewater, all of the sudden there was more and more attention being paid to some of the waterborne outbreaks that were occurring in the United States caused by fecal pollution.
One particular pathogen, Giardia, was showing up in drinking waters and causing these large outbreaks. It was coming from feces – from either human waste or from animals. I got very interested in Giardia, particularly because in Arizona, we didn't have much water and were promoting wastewater reuse. The final thing that we look at is efficiency, for candidates as well as for hiring managers and recruiters. When you are hiring – I actually think it was 500,000 people last year – and you're getting tens of millions of applications, you have to find a way to be really efficient about process; be respectful of candidates time and conscious of the cost and effort it takes to review candidates and give each one a really fair evaluation.
You see, humans are very intimate with water but we also use water to move our waste away from our community and out of our pipes. Water is very good at all this. We use water-based approaches to sanitation, but as we do that, it carries all these pathogens with it. So whatever the community is infected with, it ends up in their wastewater.
“humans are very intimate with water but we also use water to move our waste away from our community and out of our pipes. Water is very good at all this. We use water-based approaches to sanitation, but as we do that, it carries all these pathogens with it.”
Then a protozoan called Cryptosporidium showed up on the scene, which had never been seen before and was suddenly causing waterborne outbreaks. I started studying that particular parasite in water. It came from both animal and human feces (and hence wastewater), and it caused horrendous waterborne disease. It was particularly a problem for aids patients at that time; they got very, very sick. So it was a big emerging public health problem all over the US.
My first faculty position was actually in a school public health in Florida where I studied environmental health including water quality issues. People joke about my moving from Florida, where I was for 13 years, to Michigan – usually people only move in the opposite direction! But there's so many similarities between Michigan and Florida. Both states have these long coastlines that are so important to the economy and well-being of each state and water quality is really valued. The sources of pollution were similar for each state. For example, I worked on septic tanks in Florida and septic tanks have become a known problem now in Michigan. In fact, in Michigan, we are unique and are leaders in the study of water quality in the Great Lakes as we're completely immersed in this large international basin.
What did your dissertation research focus on?
I did my PhD dissertation work at a full-scale drinking water plant in Mexico, where they used a fairly polluted water source. We examined whether we could remove viruses to a point where we thought it was safe enough to consume. Then the question became “what’s safe enough?” This work was funded by EPA because they recognized although we had an indicator system for polluted water it did not address other pathogens such as viruses. E. coli is a global bacterial indicator for fecal pollution – but it's got its limitations. One of the things it doesn't work very well for is viruses, because viruses are whole different category of microbes. So the whole idea was about the removal of viruses from drinking water to meet EPA standards. We found out that we needed to beef up our drinking water treatment to remove these viral pathogens. I had a lot of training in what we call environmental virology - so the study of hepatitis, polio, and such types of viruses in water and how we remove them by water treatment. That also led me into environmental engineering.
Tell us about how climate influences and informs your research.
In our studies, I always say contaminants are associated with what we do on the land; that's their origin. But climate is the driver of the contamination, climate is what moves things. We’re really starting to think about, going from one (small) scale, like one beach, to asking what we are doing at the much larger scale? For example, we’re seeing problems with beaches all around us because of floodwaters and high intensity storm events. So climate is a big deal and to address water issues, you’ll have water microbiologists working with climatologists, working with land use planners, etc. You're always learning something new depending on the scientific question and of course the scale.
Is there a central collective data source, that scientists such as yourselves have access to track and analyze and inform public policy?
That’s an important question. We do need more places where we can put our data. Normally, we published paper, or it might be summarized and it may get picked up by the media so that the public knows about what is going on. A lot depends on who it was funded by and who picks up the science and says this is useful for policy. It takes a long time for science to find its way into an application for specific changes to public policy. Often it is the disasters that lead to funding efforts and eventually develop enough data to affect our environmental protection rules.
What would you say is the big news in your field as of late? And how has the pandemic impacted your work?
There's definitely been a paradigm shift because when we monitored wastewater before, we were always looking downstream, at the treatment and removal processes. When we discharge the effluent or we reuse wastewater, we're looking to see that we're maintaining high water quality and protecting public health. Now we're monitoring wastewater to look upstream, into the community, at the building level, at hospitals level, and asking what’s happening in the community in terms of disease. Can our data which monitors the wastewater of a population help inform public health decisions, such as a better allocation of resources, improving risk communication, providing more testing, examining breakthrough infections? All of this is happening around SARS, for example, but it also has implications for antibiotic resistance for other pathogens and other diseases that are plaguing certain communities. So it's not just been this rapid explosion of science, but a shift in how we're monitoring and using that information for public health.
Would you describe MSU as a leader in your field, and in combatting the pandemic in the arena of water?
We're fortunate. We have Dr. Gertjan Medema from the Netherlands, who was one of the first to publish on the relationship between SARS in wastewater and community disease. He's actually a visiting scholar at MSU and he's been coming here for several years. We've been colleagues for a long, long time. If you look back at how thigs unfolded, by early January, WHO had named the disease and declared COVID-19 a pandemic. We saw the first cases in Michigan and by March the governor had issued a lockdown ‘We're closing down. We've got a problem here and we want to try to manage how fast this spreads.’ We were developing the methodology to test for the virus in sewage and suddenly there was an interest in the data. And we took our first samples in April 2020, in fact, because of a student’s initiative and energy. One of my students actually said, “I really want to look for SARS in wastewater.”
We've been working with the state on setting up advanced laboratories for the state of Michigan to use PCR for beach monitoring so that you could get a rapid assessment of the water quality at the beach. Traditional methods were much slower and there was a lot of interest in getting methods that were faster for more timely decision-making at the beaches. A colleague, Dr. Shannon Briggs, has been the leader of this effort and got funding for the labs to obtain PCR machines to work on beach health and do rapid testing. We had 15 labs, and we have been working with these labs since 2014. So when SARS happened, we already had a network that was able to get funding for digital PCR machines thus all the labs all got upgraded instruments.
We were monitoring our campus, but we also worked with other wastewater utilities. I was able to work with the Department of Health in the State of Michigan and initiate a pilot program at the end of 2020. We have 19 labs now that are monitoring across the state of Michigan for SARS in various communities. It's a partnership between the Department of Health and Community Health. It's been fantastic and I think Michigan is probably one of the few states that has a network like this.
Outside of your work in the Great Lakes, what else have you been working on?
We've got a lot of work on SARS right now. We have a data management project, which is very global. And then we have the state project in which we're doing our own monitoring on campus and working with a couple of utilities. Part of our role, however is also to serve as a laboratory that helps the network. And what we've found is that if you have a team that helps the network get their supplies, test the quality control, and do training, you have better quality of data in your state. We're still doing microbial source tracking studies in various watersheds around the Great Lakes. We just finished a big storm water project. And you probably heard about the Salmonella outbreak caused by onions? Well, we've been monitoring the system for a while and we saw a lot of Salmonella in the wastewater during this outbreak. It was quite interesting to see the data because we've been monitoring this system for almost 10 years. we've got another project that's just started on wastewater reuse. It's really to understand how viruses attach to particles in a various wastewater treatment processes. Working with utilities nationally we are studying routine wastewater treatment, combined storm water treatment and treatment of wastewater for reuse for agriculture and potable reuse (for drinking water). So we're doing the whole gamut.
Your work is striking for its interdisciplinarity and global footprint. Tell us about the importance of collaborative networks in your line of work.
I always think that when you work in water and in the field, you never really just have your own little program, right? It's always collaborative. You're working with hydrologists, water chemists and so on; and as soon as you go out in the field to take a sample, somebody wants to know what you're doing because you're taking a sample from their river, beach, or water supply. So I recognize that a lot of what I did was engaged research – where I was going out people's backyard or my own backyard to study the water environment and, in the process, recognizing how important water quality was to people.
“A lot of what I did was engaged research – where I was going out people's backyard or my own backyard to study the water environment and, in the process, recognizing how important water quality was to people.”
Also, one of the things that helped me in my career was joining the International Water Association, which I joined before I got my degree. And every other year I'd go to the international meeting and see a core group of scientists from all over the world. We became colleagues and friends. And, for example, when Cryptosporidium arrived on the scene, people knew that I was working on it. There was a handful of us that knew a lot about this protozoan and had done water work. So we started going around to other places and working with our colleagues on this pathogen. So, as and when new things happen, this international group share their methods, their concerns, their results. Some of my colleagues worked for water utilities, some for government agencies, some for universities; it’s a very broad group.
I think that finding that organization you can join where you can go year after year, where you grow with the group that you're working with, is so important. You develop ways to share your science. I think it's funny because with information technology, it appears to be easier and faster to share things. But there's still the challenge of building trust, the ability to look at quality of the work, and get the constructive criticism that you might need. The interdisciplinary nature of the work we do necessitates it.
“I think that finding that organization you can join where you can go year after year, where you grow with the group that you're working with, is so important. You develop ways to share your science. I think it's funny because with information technology, it appears to be easier and faster to share things. But there's still the challenge of building trust, the ability to look at quality of the work, and get the constructive criticism that you might need. The interdisciplinary nature of the work we do necessitates it.”
How did your honorary citizenship of Singapore come about?
It was a huge honor! Supporting individuals’ work in another country or work with a team in that country for many years is what makes the impact. It's not that I get a grant, I go in and then I come back, and I’m done. No. It’s year after year after year. You're going back and forth, they come to you, you go to them. It's that consistency that matters.
With Singapore, I just started in advisory role. In fact, it's a funny story. I did consulting with environmental engineering groups there. Some of it was advisory in nature, where you just get asked to sit on committees. So engineering firms were vying for this new project in Singapore and one came to me and said, ‘We want you to be on our team.’ First they said, ‘Would you be exclusive?’ and I said that, usually, I'm not exclusive but I will this time. And then a second group asked me to be on their team and I said no, I'm already committed. Well, it was the second team that won the bid. As part of the project, they wanted an external independent advisor. Even though I wasn't part of their team, they invited me to join the project an independent advisor. So that's actually how I became involved. At the time, it was five-year, huge international project.
When you start working with industry on water projects, whether they are small or large, global or local it opens doors. They want to bring in scientists they trust. So I started on this five-year journey and when it was done, they asked me to stay on and chair the Singapore Public Utilities Board’s independent advisory panel. I did this for 12 years. Singapore is a small country and water was and is very important to them. That's how it all happened really. After about eight to nine years of chairing that panel, and going there twice a year to review the work they were doing. I was recommended for the honorary citizenship. It was a wonderful honor.
Could you say more about how graduate students play a role in your work?
They're central to the team. They're the ones really in many cases that bring the new ideas to the team, and especially the new technologies. Because we have our own training in certain methods but instruments and new techniques evolve and we try to keep up on all those technologies as we're moving through our career. Learning new methods and how to use new instruments and things like that. I got a lot of my training using traditional methodologies where you study the organism using culture. The molecular evolution and the revolution of instrumentation just expanded what we know about disease and microbiology. Just as the human genome work evolved this impacted everything we were able to sequence in the water environment. It's really the students and postdocs that come in and say, “here's a new approach for finding a virus. Let's go, let's go try it.” I really think it's the students and all their enthusiasm and interest in new technology and new science that helps us advance our programs.
“It's really the students and postdocs that come in and say, “here's a new approach for finding a virus. Let's go, let's go try it.” I really think it's the students and all their enthusiasm and interest in new technology and new science that helps us advance our programs.”
You’re a philanthropist, among other things. Could you talk about the Clifford Humphreys Fellowship for Preservation of Water Quality in the Great Lakes and what philanthropy can do to support work in your field?
Giving I think is fundamental to what we do. Even if it's not a lot of money, it means something to these students to be able to do something they couldn't do without that funding. This was such a generous gift. The first time we gave out the Clifford Humphreys Fellowship we were able to have a face-to-face lunch with the donors and to hear from the students, I was really touched by this. (Of course, COVID kind of changed that approach and we'll try to get back together again soon.) But just reading their letters was moving.
I would like to do more – like have a consortium of students who move through their water studies together, so they get to see each other more often, get together, exchange knowledge, and present what they do to the community – both the MSU community as well as outside MSU. I think that's going to be the future – these interdisciplinary platforms where you can share. We need to go in this direction philanthropically to support students in the field.
As we wrap up, I wanted to touch on the theme of creativity. Could you share with us how creativity and innovation has impacted your work and your field?
I think it's in that space at the intersection of technology, the scientific question, and the protection of public health, where you start doing your science in innovative ways. And I think that you get inspiration when you work with other fields. You start engaging in interdisciplinary discussions and have that conversation where you get inspiration to try something like a new model or a new technology or new instrument.
And I'm a big believer that if we gather enough information and data and, like I said before, put it somewhere where people can see it and analyze it, and ask these interesting questions that we couldn't answer before, that’s going to help us ultimately define policy in important ways and solve big societal problems.
Finally, what can regular citizens do to support your work?
Well, I always encourage individuals to know more about their own water and their own system and what goes on in their state. Interestingly enough, when you do a survey of a general audience and ask where does your tap water come from, while people that are on their own wells usually know, the rest don't know if it's groundwater or surface water, or how it’s treated, etc. They just know they turn on the tap and it comes out. And they don't know where the wastewater goes when they flush.
There's information out there so that if you do think you have a problem, there's a way to get your water tested. If there’s a problem, there’s a way to address it. And we don't want a problem to escalate, like in Flint or these other communities where we have this legacy pollution problem that has not been addressed. We haven't done the proper monitoring and now we have a severe public health crisis.
I think that those of us in the water business do need to talk more about what we do and share more about what we're doing too.
The more you know, the more you're likely to support different kinds of bills or water projects, for example. You may be want to get involved, and have a voice on how we meet the future, ultimately protecting our water quality and our health.
Thank you!
