Erica Hartmann
Northwestern University, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Wastewater treatment plants rely on complex communities of microbes to strip pollutants from water before it returns to the environment. When those communities become unstable, plants use more energy, treat less reliably, and cost more to run.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
bacteriophage
phage therapy
wastewater treatment
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Develop and validate methods to genetically manipulate and reboot bacteriophages infecting Gordonia, the filamentous bacteria behind sludge bulking, and test phage-based control of them in laboratory-scale bioreactors.
- Characterize phage-enriched metagenomes from wastewater treatment systems with short- and long-read sequencing, proximity ligation and bioinformatics to establish which phages infect which hosts, including difficult-to-culture nitrite-oxidizing bacteria.
- Assemble fully synthetic phage genomes from metagenomic DNA using synthetic biology techniques, then reboot these phages in microbial hosts or enrichment cultures to show that phages can be built from sequence data alone.
More about the research
Engineers have few precise tools to steer them and instead lean on energy-hungry adjustments such as aeration. This project asks whether bacteriophages, or "phages" — viruses that naturally infect and kill specific bacteria — can serve as precision tools to stabilize treatment.
Why it matters
More controllable wastewater microbial communities could mean lower energy use, more reliable treatment and less nutrient pollution reaching rivers and lakes, benefiting utilities and the communities they serve. The same methods for building phages from environmental DNA could support recovery of nutrients from waste streams and manufacture of other value-added products.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
James Moberly
University of Idaho, ID·Engineering
Develop an encapsulated biological material in which phosphorus accumulating organisms, microbes that store large amounts of phosphorus, are immobilized within a polymer structure for use in wastewater treatment.
Olivia Mason
Florida State University, FL·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether SUP05 sulfur-oxidizing bacteria include distinct cell types that perform different nitrogen-respiring steps in oxygen minimum zone fjords, using DNA and RNA sequencing, cultivation and isotope rate measurements.
Sarah Preheim
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Earth & Environmental Science
Test how the abundance of denitrification genes, measured by quantitative PCR, relates to denitrification rates in controlled bioreactor experiments, and whether disturbance frequency changes that relationship.
The school
Northwestern University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 536 research doctorates a year.
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