Fuqing Wu
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Public Health & Epidemiology
Viruses spread through communities faster than clinical testing can track them. Testing mostly reaches people who feel sick, it misses silent infections, and it is slow to notice new variants.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Mathematics & Statistics
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
wastewater-based epidemiology
wastewater surveillance
SARS-CoV-2
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2030
What they work on
- Build models that connect how virus levels change inside one infected person with how the virus passes between people, so that SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater can be read as measures of community transmission.
- Use genomic sequencing of wastewater samples to study how one SARS-CoV-2 variant replaces another, using the Delta-to-Omicron shift as a case study.
- Analyze SARS-CoV-2 variants in wastewater from multiple cities as an ecological community, measuring their diversity and succession patterns to predict which new variant will become dominant.
- Develop an early-warning system for outbreaks that combines wastewater surveillance with digital and social behavior data, such as movements, online searches and social media posts.
- Model how pandemic fatigue, the change in public behavior during a long health crisis, and immune factors shape COVID-19 transmission and the effectiveness of pharmaceutical interventions.
More about the research
Sewage offers another view, because everyone who is infected, with or without symptoms, sheds viral genetic material into it. The central question here is how to turn wastewater measurements into reliable estimates of how a virus is spreading, changing and competing at the scale of a whole city. Two projects combine wastewater surveillance with computational modeling. One adds genomic sequencing. The other adds data on human behavior.
Why it matters
Health departments could use these tools to spot outbreaks earlier and to forecast spread without testing individual people. Sewage-based monitoring catches infections that clinical testing misses, including people without symptoms, and it can flag new variants before they take over. Through a partnership with a Texas public health institute, the models may guide decisions on interventions and pandemic preparedness. They are also designed to work for viruses beyond SARS-CoV-2.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marco Salemi
University of Florida, FL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether SARS-CoV-2 evolves faster within immunocompromised people with HIV by using phylodynamic analysis, which reconstructs viral family trees from genetic sequences, to track variants that arise inside one person.
Akihiro Nishi
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology·Early-career
Build psychological and behavioral processes into COVID-19 epidemic models and estimate how links among emotions, behavior, policies and infections changed over time, using data from 20 U.S. metro areas, including Reddit conversations.
Amy Wesolowski
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Public Health & Epidemiology
Collect and standardize many human mobility datasets gathered by different methods, and statistically describe how movement varies at individual, household, community and larger scales.
The school
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston: 25 labs on PI Pages, $419M a year on research, 340 research doctorates a year.
More about University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
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