Yan Luo
University of Massachusetts-Lowell, MA·Engineering
Disease-causing microbes in water cost billions of dollars a year in the United States and worldwide, through healthcare bills and losses on fish and shellfish farms. Farmers and environmental agencies need a way to spot these pathogens early, trace where they come from, and act before an outbreak.
- Fields
Engineering
Public Health & Epidemiology
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
biosensor
waterborne pathogens
aquaculture
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Evaluate the sensitivity, specificity and stability of a patented biosensor for aquatic pathogens when deployed across varied coastal and aquaculture environments.
- Optimize biosensor performance through field tests in real water conditions to enable real-time detection and quantification of waterborne pathogens.
- Integrate machine learning methods to interpret biosensor data and maintain measurement accuracy in challenging aquatic environments, and to forecast pathogen outbreak risk.
More about the research
Existing testing is often slow, expensive, or tied to a laboratory. This project develops a portable, low-cost biosensor platform, paired with data analysis, to detect and count waterborne pathogens in coastal waters and aquaculture operations in close to real time.
Why it matters
Continuous, inexpensive pathogen surveillance could give local and state agencies early warning when contaminated coastal water poses a risk, helping prevent human exposure and disease spread. Shellfish and fish farmers could detect pathogens before outbreaks, limiting economic losses and supporting more sustainable aquaculture, while the same monitoring data would track coastal ecosystem health.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Nikaela Flournoy
Miles College, AL·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify the sources of fecal pollution entering surface waters of a coastal Alabama watershed using Microbial Source Tracking, which detects genetic markers specific to human or animal waste.
Tan Le
Hampton University, VA·Engineering
Design a biogeochemical sensor-robot network that combines static water sensors with mobile aquatic robots, together with intelligent data sampling and analysis, for large-scale monitoring of the Hampton River.
Scott Berry
University of Kentucky, KY·Public Health & Epidemiology
Design portable, easy-to-use environmental surveillance devices that detect pathogens in environmental samples, so that monitoring can be deployed cheaply across many settings.
The school
University of Massachusetts-Lowell: 7 labs on PI Pages, $121M a year on research, 149 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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