In science, we have family trees, where a mentor begets a mentee who then becomes a mentor of someone else. Each person in my academic family tree is important, but I’ve decided to highlight my first microbiology mentor, Dr. Valerie (Jody) Harwood, in this blog post.
How I met Dr. Harwood
I worked for Dr. Harwood during my undergrad at the University of South Florida. She was so kind to let me do undergrad research in her lab. I say “let” because my situation was less than ideal. I had been doing undergrad research at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute for a few months when my mentor left without telling me. I guess the undergrad (me) who had been working for him for only a few months was the last thing on his mind. I don’t know. But when I returned after our holiday break, I discovered I was mentorless and I needed to find a lab ASAP. To make matters worse, I was signed up for undergraduate research credit hours with no lab to do it in. Yikes!
When Dr. Harwood found out I was a “stray” undergrad without a research lab, she kindly took me in. So, yes, she “let” me do research in her lab for which I am forever thankful. It turned out to be the perfect experience because the research in her lab introduced me to microbial ecology—the study of how microbes interact with each other and their environment—which I grew to love. We tested the water quality of the beaches, rivers, and lakes in Florida. I even collected poop from around the duck pond for someone’s research project, which always made for a funny story.
I recently had the chance to catch up with Dr. Harwood about her research and how she traveled to Costa Rica to start an exciting research project.
Research in the Harwood lab
Dr. Harwood’s research focuses on water quality. When fecal (poop) bacteria get into our water, people can get gastrointestinal illnesses such as diarrhea. Her lab tracks specific bacterial species that serve as indicators of fecal contamination and tries to determine the source(s) of that contamination (hence, I collected duck—a possible source—poop).
New Research on water quality in Costa Rica
As I mentioned, her research recently took her lab all the way to Costa Rica, a beautiful country! The National Science Foundation (NSF) had a call for proposals for the Coastal SEES Program. “The program was calling for work to help us understand how people use coastal resources and how they benefit from those resources,” says Dr. Harwood. So, her lab was awarded a grant to conduct research in Costa Rica to look at the water quality in the rivers and beaches. But here’s the cool part: the research is interdisciplinary, meaning that it involves not only microbiologists, but also anthropologists (who study people), and epidemiologists (who study disease patterns among human populations). The project is called MERA.
How was the MERA project in Costa Rica initiated?
“Dr. Erin M. Symonds, a postdoc in my lab, spearheaded the project,” says Dr. Harwood. “While she was working on her PhD, she went to Costa Rica on a US Student Research Fulbright Fellowship.” Dr. Symonds knew an anthropologist, Dr. Maryann Cairns, Assistant Professor, Southern Methodist University (SMU) Anthropology, and so, they wrote this grant that integrated cultural behavior and perceptions and microbiology. Dr. Symonds also connected with the drinking water and wastewater compliance regulatory organization , AYA, that does the water sampling to look for fecal indicator bacteria.
A ground-breaking study
“The project is fun because of its interdisciplinary nature, involving microbiology, epidemiology, and anthropology,” says Dr. Harwood. They plan to integrate the cultural aspects of how people use, value, and view the beaches in Costa Rica with the biological data they collect. They plan to ask people what they think about bad water quality and pair that information with the actual water quality data. These different ideas haven’t been merged before, so it is a ground-breaking study.
Coming soon! The first paper from the project!
The Harwood lab is super excited because they have started writing their first paper on the first year of the microbiology sampling in Costa Rica with the MERA project. Here are a couple of interesting things they found so far:
1. Norovirus (aka the “stomach bug” that causes vomiting) was only detected in the dry season, not in wet season.
2. Almost immediately, they lose the trace of really polluted water that is delivered from rivers into the ocean. “This happens more quickly than you would think. We find low levels of fecal indicator bacteria and rarely get pathogens,” says Dr. Harwood. “We were surprised how rapidly the water is diluted. It is probably this way anywhere the beaches are well-flushed, where waves, tides, and currents can disperse the contaminated water rapidly.”
If you want to know more about the project, you can visit the MERA project’s website. And if you’d like to know more about Dr. Harwood, her webpage is here.
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