Join us to kick off the series in this conversation with Dr. Sarah Philo, a recent PhD graduate working in wastewater-based epidemiology to track SARS-CoV-2 and antimicrobial resistance. We talk about the science, the joys of working with sewage samples, pandemic-era academics, career development, and more!
Visit the Absolute Gene-ius page to learn more about the guest, the hosts, and the Applied Biosystems QuantStudio Absolute Q Digital PCR System.
Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has been around for a while and has been used to track drugs of abuse, chemical waste, and pathogens alike. It may not be the most glorious of samples to work with, but wastewater has proven to be a valuable way to do community-wide monitoring. The COVID pandemic brought new attention and focus to WBE once it was shown it could be used to detect the SARS-CoV-2 virus to alert public health officials to outbreaks, often before clinical symptoms presented.
Our Gene-ius guest for this inaugural episode is Dr. Sarah Philo, a postdoctoral research associate with the Wastewater Surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 and Emerging Public Health Threats Research Coordination Network at the University of Notre Dame. In her conversation with Jordan and Cassie, Sarah talks about how she found this area of research and the “joys” of working with wastewater samples. We learn about how she and her team have used both qPCR and dPCR to detect and quantify SARS-CoV-2 and antimicrobial resistance genes in wastewater.
The conversation also touches on several other interesting and informative topics that include a ‘one health’ approach to public health, the importance of team and teamwork in academics, considerations when selecting a graduate research program, the importance of passion in science, and how science is the ‘punk rock’ discipline within academia. Join us for this fun start of the series and this first season!
Cassie McCreary00:00
I love our intro more than I love anything else, honestly.
Jordan Ruggieri00:03
Ah, that music rocks I could dance all day.
Cassie McCreary00:06
Okay, except you wouldn't dance all day. You wouldn't even line dance when we went to the saloon, Professor Jordie.
Jordan Ruggieri00:10
I line dance for about 30 seconds. Okay? I did 30 seconds of line dancing.
Cassie McCreary00:17
30 seconds is never enough.
Jordan Ruggieri00:30
Welcome to Absolute Gene-ius, a new podcast series from Thermo Fisher Scientific. I'm Jordan Ruggieri.
Cassie McCreary00:36
And I'm Cassie McCreary. And our Gene-ius for today's episode is Sarah Philo, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Washington.
Jordan Ruggieri00:43
Sarah specializes in wastewater surveillance and epidemiology and has used her work to learn about SARS-CoV-2 and how it travels through communities. In this episode, we talked about PCR, life as a PhD student, and a little bit about feces. Actually, a lot about feces.
Cassie McCreary01:00
A lot about feces. Heavy on the feces.
I love it.
Jordan Ruggieri01:09
Well, Sarah, thank you so much for joining us on Absolute Gene-ius. It's an absolute privilege to have you here. And we're really excited. I know, you know, we've talked offline and dove into the amazing world of wastewater epidemiology and talking about especially SARS- CoV-2 surveillance in wastewater. You know at this point, a lot of people have definitely heard about the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but I feel like there's still some room to learn about what wastewater surveillance is, what that looks like. Can you give us you know, a little bit of background? What do you do? What does that world look like?
Sarah Philo, PhD 01:47
So I actually just finished my PhD in environmental health at University of Washington-Seattle. My dissertation was a lot about wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2, and then also some antimicrobial resistance. What the world looks like, that is a huge, huge question. I mean, people are, historically I've been looking for things like poliovirus in wastewater for decades. Now, it's sort of transitioning into a lot of different infectious diseases. People have been looking for, like drug residues for a while. So, it's just there's a lot of different things that you could do with wastewater, and what you can look for.
Jordan Ruggieri02:25
Describe that process a little bit. So wastewater, you know, it's a collection of sewage. And what is that actually, what is, what does that look like?
Cassie McCreary02:35
Do you want to ask what that looks like?
Sarah Philo, PhD 02:36
Maybe I won't say exactly what it looks like, that might not be appropriate for soft stomachs. There's a couple of different places that you can collect samples. So, one thing that was implemented a lot during the pandemic was actually collecting either at like dorm effluent on college campuses. So the pipe that comes right out of a dorm, or from like a manhole on campus that collected from a few dorms, and that would give you an idea of like a smaller community. And that was for colleges that were doing a lot of like regular testing of their students. And then they could actually isolate students who are sick. You can also collect at like, the effluent from hospitals. So if you're looking for what's going on in that hospital. A lot of the work that I did in my dissertation was actually collecting at the beginning of the wastewater treatment plant, or the influent as we call it, and that gave us an idea of like the entire wastewater catchment area, everything that is collected by that treatment plant.
Cassie McCreary03:39
I hardly know anything about this. So this might be a very ignorant question. But you guys literally you just like somebody goes in there, and they just they scoop a sample. And there it is. That's, I mean…
Sarah Philo, PhD 03:49
So a lot of my samples were literally just like somebody took a Nalgene bottle, like, you know, the liter size water bottles, dip a bucket, and then you fill up that bottle. And that's called like a ‘grab sample’ where it's just like a one time you just grab it, you go. There are also things called autosamplers, which like it's a machine that you hook up at the pipe level. Every 15 minutes, it will collect some of the wastewater and you can do that over the course of 24 hours, 12 hours, so it will give you like a composite sample of like all of the wastewater over the course of 24 hours usually is what those are.
Jordan Ruggieri04:30
Automated definitely sounds a little bit cleaner.
Sarah Philo, PhD 04:33
Yes. Also much more expensive.
Cassie McCreary04:34
We've got expensive taste, what can we say?
Jordan Ruggieri04:39
So, what happens after you get that sample? Let's say you've detected some levels of SARS-CoV-2 in the wastewater. Has your research led to maybe some policy implementation or, or how does it help guide you know what's going on out there?
Sarah Philo, PhD 04:58
I wish I could say that my research directly guided policy, you know, that's what we hope for. But my work definitely focused more on the like research side. So, we were never necessarily collecting samples to guide public health. It all sort of comes back to this, like use case question of like, what is the goal? Early on in the pandemic, there was a lot of lofty goals, of thinking like, oh, we can estimate the number of people who are sick. That's pretty difficult, depending on which catchment area you're looking at. So a lot of the work now has transitioned to looking at trends. So, is SARS-CoV-2 rising or falling, or is it staying stable, and then also looking for those variants. And then there's a lot of push now also to look at, like, you know, presence absence in long term care facilities. So like, if you have a retirement home, you could test the wastewater there. It really sort of depends on like, what the goal is of what actually happens with that data?
Jordan Ruggieri05:58
That makes sense. Uh, diving into, you know, looking at maybe how many people were sick, was there, what was kind of that indicator? Or was there an indicator that something might like that might be doable? Is that something that's still actively being looked at as a way to kind of translate that you know, those different trends that you're seeing? Or is that something that's mostly, you know, it's mostly more on the surveillance end, and not really looking at predicting population outbreaks?
Sarah Philo, PhD 06:29
Some people are doing it. I think in certain water catchment areas, it would be more feasible. My context for a lot of this is Seattle, which gets a lot of rain in the winter. And the Seattle wastewater is a combined sewer system, which means that we get road runoff as well as the sewers. So in the winter, when we saw a lot of COVID cases, you know, we're also getting a lot of rainwater. So, I think in some places, it is much more feasible, potentially. And it is something that's still being looked at. But the big problem with being able to estimate actually how many people are sick is, there isn't necessarily the best like SARS-CoV-2 fecal shedding data. So that's like how much SARS-CoV-2 virus is actually in feces. And there was some good data from like, early in the pandemic, but you know, we're on variant five, or six. So how do those variants affect fecal shedding? And once that data gets filled in and improved upon, there is the potential to actually understand more about how many people might be infected. But that's a huge question right now, is this like fecal shedding piece of like, how much virus are people actually releasing into the systems?
Jordan Ruggieri07:44
And you mentioned about rainwater and kind of the runoff there? Does that impact any of your results? Or does that dilute out, you know, the virus and make it harder to detect or quantify?
Sarah Philo, PhD 07:56
Yeah, so the thing with the Seattle area wastewater is these treatment plants, on average process like 70 to 80 million gallons of wastewater a day. So then when you get flow of rain on top of that, you know, you can get over 100 million gallons a day. Even at the peak of the pandemic, there's a few thousand people, 10,000 people, who are sick at once, like, the world is huge, and there are so many different situations. I can't really generalize but more with like our data, it was definitely we were able to detect SARS-CoV-2 pretty consistently. That quantification piece was a little tough, because we were frequently detecting it basically, like at our limit of detection, where it's like, “Okay, we know it's here.” We just have no confidence and like, being able to put a number of virus copies on this number. You know, we could have done a lot of estimating of like, okay, if we apply this number to what we could have estimated if we had sampled the whole thing, but then you're just getting like so much uncertainty that we were more focused on, like, is it here? Is it not here? Rather than putting like hard numbers on it, but again, that's just a function of like, how it worked for us.
Jordan Ruggieri09:09
I didn't actually think about, you know, when you're talking huge volumes like that how much that virus itself could get diluted, I guess, just depending on what's going on in the population, right? So, if you have a smaller outbreak, it's even harder than then it's you get even more people. How do you actually go about detecting the virus? What did the methods look like there?
Sarah Philo, PhD 09:29
So there were also, people were doing various forms of digital PCR, which tends to be less affected by environmental inhibitors. We decided to keep with the qPCR just because it's what we had done the whole time, and then we could have like this big cohesive dataset, knowing that it probably wasn't as sensitive as something like a digital PCR would be. Some people are trying to work with different like rapid PCR protocols. So there's a lot of stuff that has been developed and is being developed right now for SARS-CoV-2 and wastewater specifically, but most of the work I would say, is qPCR, and then various forms of digital PCR. And then there's a lot of sequencing that goes on top of that, to figure out what variants might be there.
Jordan Ruggieri10:15
And I can imagine just thinking about, you know, a nasal swab, and you get a lot of viral load from that particular nasal swab, and then comparing that to the millions of gallons of wastewater. You can kind of put in perspective, the challenges that come with SARS-CoV-2 surveillance in wastewater. It makes it a lot more apparent on how hard it is just to detect and then utilize and quantify that particular data. Kind of going into the methods a little bit more you mentioned, you know, differences of qPCR, and digital PCR. Did you utilize digital PCR? And what did that look like for your research?
Sarah Philo, PhD 10:55
We didn't get a digital PCR system until about halfway through some of the work. So a lot of the like digital work that I did with SARS was involved with like comparing detection between qPCR and dPCR.And then we did, whenever we would get a new positive control, we would quantify that on the digital PCR just so that we knew like, what it was like instead of just going by whatever the lot number was that they gave us. Just to make sure that those numbers lined up and everything. But we, again, just for consistency, I didn't do a lot of like the SARS work on digital PCR. So most of that is just qPCR data.
Jordan Ruggieri11:34
Based on your knowledge, or what else is going on in your lab, are there other ways you're utilizing digital PCR in terms of SARS-CoV-2 surveillance? Or in other organisms, are you looking at possible other organisms to, you know, take a look at, and try to bring up surveillance programs for those?
Sarah Philo, PhD 11:53
That's the big question right now with wastewater surveillance is like, how do we take all of this expanded capacity and interest beyond to the next thing, right? Like SARS-CoV-2 is basically everywhere at this point. But how can we use a lot of this to look for other things. And one of the big pushes has been to look for like antimicrobial resistance in bacteria. You know that has been a problem for medicine for a while, and it's only going to become a bigger problem. I did another piece of my dissertation actually looking at antimicrobial resistance. One piece was looking at if those resistance genes increased, along with the first, like late 2020 COVID peak. You know doctors prescribed antibiotics because they didn't have a lot else at that point for COVID. And for people who are hospitalized, it was to stop them from getting secondary infections. So we were asking, do any resistance genes increase along with that time period? And then I also did a little bit of a comparison between digital PCR and qPCR.
Jordan Ruggieri12:59
What did some of your results show when you actually were to compare those methods?
Sarah Philo, PhD 13:04
Like I mentioned, we tested for some different antimicrobial resistance genes with qPCR and dPCR. And pretty much all of them had a higher quantification with dPCR than with qPCR. Which makes sense, at least, knowing all of the inhibitors in wastewater and environmental samples tend to make qPCR a little bit less efficient. The one thing that I would say for anyone working with environmental samples is that I found it was really helpful to like test them in qPCR first to kind of get a general idea of how much was there. Because with digital PCR, you know, each reaction is more expensive. And if it's very easy to like to overload the compartments or dilute it past beyond what can be detected. So just kind of having an idea of like, roughly how much is in your sample before, whether you do like one every 10 or whatever. So I found that was really helpful actually knowing like, okay, I think there's roughly this many gene copies in this sample, I'm going to dilute it out this much. So that it should be within that like band of like optimizing the digital PCR.
Jordan Ruggieri14:20
You are able to actually, you know, determine maybe a little bit more precisely the, the gene copies that were there using digital PCR over qPCR after kind of looking at that optimization, kind of between the two?
Sarah Philo, PhD 14:53
Yes, I didn't do a lot of like, variability testing, I guess. It's like what is the standard deviation around these. I will say that the gene copies that we detected in digital PCR were higher than what we detected with qPCR. So this is a big problem with wastewater, it's just like, when you extract everything, a lot of times the inhibitors are also still present. Just because there's a lot of things in wastewater that can be kind of hard to clean up. It's pretty well established that like, PCR and qPCR do have some effects from those inhibitors. But with digital PCR that tends to be less of an issue. So like I said, I didn't do any, like, variance work of how much with a, not variant with a SARR-CoV-2 variant, but variance with a C. Are we more confident, like what is the confidence intervals on these, but I did see that the numbers were higher with digital PCR.
Jordan Ruggieri15:34
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Where do you see the future of wastewater epidemiology, when it comes to digital PCR and implementing digital PCR as a as a method for different surveillance programs?
Sarah Philo, PhD 15:45
Wastewater surveillance is talking about its future and like where it's trying to go. But I think digital PCR has a really good place at having higher efficiency of those reactions. So a better idea of like, what is actually here, and how many numbers are here, compared to qPCR. And I think it could really help with finding some of those more rare targets. On like a presence absence basis, because if something in your wastewater is at the limit of detection of your qPCR assay, and then you throw in all of that inhibition on top of it, it's just going to be a lot harder to find. Whereas if, with digital PCR, if you get rid of some of those inhibition effects, you're probably more likely to find a lot of those rare targets than you would be otherwise.
Cassie McCreary16:36
Taking a quick break from our conversation to tell you about Applied Biosystems™ QuantStudio™ Absolute Q™ dPCR system. This instrument enables quantification of your targets without the need for standard curves in only 90 minutes. Digital PCR can be as simple as preparing your samples, loading onto the plate, and running the instrument.
Jordan Ruggieri16:56
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Cassie McCreary17:17
And Thermo Fisher Scientific has a suite of dPCR assays for applications like AAV viral titer quantification, liquid biopsy analysis, and wastewater surveillance. You can learn more at www.thermofisher.com/absoluteq or visit the Absolute Gene-ius webpage. Again, that's www.thermofisher.com/absoluteq or visit the Absolute Gene-ius webpage.
Jordan Ruggieri17:44
The Applied Biosystems™ QuantStudio™ Absolute Q™ dPCR system is for Research Use Only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.
Jordan Ruggieri17:53
Let's get back to our conversation.
Cassie McCreary17:56
I think for a lot of the people who are maybe listening who are fresher in their careers, and still may be deciding what paths they want to go down or even people who are looking towards grad school or even that type of thing. As your career gone the route that you would have expected Have you always been interested in sort of maybe, I guess, like a public health lens? In in terms of that, have you always been interested in science? I know. Like for me even still today, sometimes I don't know what I want to be when I grow up.
Sarah Philo, PhD 18:22
Oh, gosh. So I have had, I've been interested in science forever. Like, as long as I can remember, I always thought science was like my favorite class. And then I did my undergrad in biology, just because my university didn't have like 45 Science degrees. And I was like, I like natural sciences and life sciences. So I was like, “Okay, I'll do biology.” And then I was able to do a track in infectious diseases. And I was considering going into medicine, but thought I would get frustrated with like, how many medical problems are preventable. There are so many things that it's like, oh, well, you wouldn't have this problem if you didn't grow up next to a highway, and now you have asthma, because you inhaled car fumes all day. So, then I was like, “Okay, maybe let's try public health.” So then I did a master's in global health. And my master's research project focused on zoonotic diseases, which is when infectious diseases jump from animals to people. And I ended up really liking that. And my master's advisor, he worked a lot in one health, which is this idea that animal, human, and environmental health are like, completely intertwined, and you can't study one or fix one without thinking about the other pieces. And one thing I found with that was that the environmental piece was kind of always missing. People tended to study animal health and then also human health with the people who worked with those animals. But they didn't always think about this environment piece. So then I decided to do a PhD in environmental health to better understand some of that. If you had asked me in high school or in undergrad, if I would be here studying wastewater, I wouldn't believe you. Like it was just more little pieces, and then little suggestions by professors along the way who were like, “Oh, you're talking about this thing? Have you considered looking at this, or this piece?” So just like small conversations with, you know, different people along the way, but I, I would not have thought that I would have ended up here, especially let alone with a PhD. I don't even think I knew what a PhD was in high school.
Cassie McCreary20:37
If you were to go back, or if you were to give somebody who's either just starting their career or just moving towards grad school, or if you could go back and tell yourself any piece of advice along the way, what would you say?
Sarah Philo, PhD 20:49
One thing I would say is like, everyone around you has this like idea of what their path is. It can be really stressful, of like, “Oh my gosh, everyone I know, wants to do this thing. And they know that they want to do this thing.” And like, a lot of the time, they're just saying that because they feel like they have to. Like most people, kind of just like figure stuff out and like not to be stressed when you don't always know. Because like a lot of people don't know. And just to like, be open to new opportunities and to have questions and to seek out people who are like willing to answer those questions. I really got lucky by talking with people along the way of like, “You know, I don't know if I want to do this, but I'm interested in these things.” And it was just people suggesting things to me of like, “Oh, I think you would be a good fit for this class or this program.” And yeah, just, you know, being open to everything. And there are classes that I wish I had paid attention more than an undergrad because I was like, “Oh, this isn't like what I'm interested in.” And now I'm like, “Oh, I really wish that I had like, spent more time understanding that because now it would be relevant.” So just taking advantage of all the opportunities.
Cassie McCreary22:03
Yeah, that's excellent advice. And I think you've hit on something really important, which is kind of like that stress and being surrounded by people who seemingly know exactly what they want, and things like that, and seemingly know exactly, you know, what to do all the time, and things like that. Which leads me to my next question because we love a segue. Do you have any like "Oops" lab moments, or like funny lab moments, because I think it might be like very comforting to our listeners to hear maybe about some of those moments where you're like, oh, maybe I shouldn't have done this.
Sarah Philo, PhD 22:35
Oh, I mean, there's always the like, oops, I autoclaved the wrong type of thing and now our autoclave is a puddle of plastic. That is always everyone who's worked with an autoclave, I think has that as an example. Yeah, we melted something once in the autoclave. And it was like one of the huge giants, like, 10-liter bottles, I think, and a huge, huge plastic bottle. And we ended up like putting it on the wall with the sign that says like, “feces happen.” Just ah, you know, sort of like a pun.
Cassie McCreary23:15
I want a t shirt that says that.
Sarah Philo, PhD 23:18
I know.
Cassie McCreary23:21
I love that.
Sarah Philo, PhD 23:23
You know, I've gotten to like the end of a PCR run and then been like, “Oh, I didn't add the primer. Oh, that's three hours of my life.” You just like small mistakes, big mistakes. Accidental like, “Oh, sewage, like spilled on the counter.” Like, got to stop everything and clean that up. Yeah, so it's nothing, nothing that was ever catastrophic, I don't think.
Cassie McCreary23:46
I just wanted to also ask like your best lab moment. Like a big contrast to that, I mean, what was probably maybe your proudest moment, or just like something happened and you're like, “God, yes. Finally!”
Sarah Philo, PhD 23:56
I have I've two examples. So the first is like, early on in my PhD, we were trying to, like insert a plasmid into a bacteria and I had been working for like a year on this project, could not get the gene to go in and then finally, it worked. And it was just like, I don't know what happened. I don't know what I did differently. That was just exciting, because it was something that I had been working on for a really long time. But honestly, I think like the best thing about my lab work, it's just the people. Like, you know, we spend hours and hours together. And we like it because of the people that we get to work with. Like, you know, there's this popular image of a scientist like slaving away alone for long hours in a lab, when it's like you're never alone. There are always people who are there with you and really make it worth it. You know, like I have a PhD, I did a PhD project, but I would not have gotten there without dozens of people in the lab and around the lab who helped and facilitated and supported all of that.
Cassie McCreary25:03
A great team can make all the difference in a lot of ways. So yeah, that's, that's awesome.
Jordan Ruggieri25:11
You're not alone in the lab cave, right?
Sarah Philo, PhD 25:12
No, no.
Jordan Ruggieri25:14
I actually want to go back to one thing. You just completed a PhD. What was that process like? Can you give some insight into that process? What did you think of it? Anything you struggled with or loved doing as part of that?
Sarah Philo, PhD 25:30
I liked it, which I know is not common for a lot of people who get to the end of a PhD. Yeah, like I said, the people made it worth it. It was a lot of work. Each school has its own very different PhD process. They all kind of have like similar structures where you know, sometime in the first year or second year you take like a qualifying exam. So that's kind of that one step to make sure that you like, know that you want to keep going and are prepared to keep going. And then, within the next like, year or so, we call it a general exam, it generally involves like writing your project proposal for the PhD. And then you defend that proposal to your PhD Committee, which is faculty, in the department and at the university. And then at the end, is when you do the like dissertation defense, which is you've collected your data, you've analyzed it, you've written about it, and now you're going to present it to your peers and faculty and your committee and defend your work and why you did what you did. And along that process, like they're your committee and your PhD advisor, and your research group members, like they're all helping you along the way. So usually, by the time you get to that dissertation defense, it's kind of like, “Oh, you're going to pass.” Because they've all approved everything up until this point, it's just like, “Oh, can you analyze the data this way? Like, instead of the way you did it before?” Like small changes, but by the end, hopefully, the dissertation is like, mostly complete.
Jordan Ruggieri27:02
That would be the most nerve wracking, I think, for me is you're standing up there and trying to defend your, your data, and you get this, you know, impression of this mean group of people that just picks apart everything and throws things at you while you're up there on stage. But it doesn't sound like that's, that's really what it's like.
Sarah Philo, PhD 27:19
Yeah, well, luckily, I was able to pick my own committee. So, I was able to pick people who I knew would not try and pin me into a corner with something I don't know. Which is something to think about, too, when you're picking, if you are choosing to go into grad school, the culture around that. Like is your department going to be more supportive and more collegial and like making sure that you learn? Or are they trying to make you defend your knowledge? And like so it that's, that's a cultural thing, like we, by the time you get to the dissertation, it's much more of a like, celebration of like, here's this, here's my 45 minute to an hour presentation of everything I did, and like celebrating all of that, while also making sure that you like know what you did and I can talk about what you did intelligently. But again, like that's, it could be totally different. I've only done this once. I don't plan on doing it again. So maybe different places have different options of like how they do that. But that's a big, big cultural question if people are looking at grad school. Like how does this process go? Like? Are they more collegial? Or do they tend to be a lot stricter and harder on the students?
Cassie McCreary28:25
I mean, according to Jordan, the way he was describing what he was picturing, it sounds like it's like a medieval Times Square.
Sarah Philo, PhD 28:30
I have heard some of the like European systems I've heard tend to be a little bit more like that. Where they are like grilling you on your knowledge, and you have to answer correctly. And it's like four or five hours long. My experience and most people I've talked to, it tends to be the dissertation is more of a celebration, because all of the hard work went into it before then.
Cassie McCreary28:50
And this is totally me speaking with no PhD at all, so whatever. But I just feel like as an outsider listening to a lot of this, I think there's it's probably pretty important to like, there's a good degree that you're passionate, not just about science, or whatever, you know, PhD you're going for, but like your topic, and I mean, you've got to have that passion there. What is it about either your topic or just like science as a whole, or whatever it like, excites you that makes you passionate about it? I mean, I always argue that science is like the coolest. It's like the punk rock of academic, like, disciplines that you can study. It is the definition of screw around and find out. It's, the backbone of it is curiosity. It's the coolest.
Sarah Philo, PhD 29:32
You know, I've never heard science described as punk rock. But I might, I might start using that. The passion is like super important. And that's one thing I tell people, like, if they're deciding to do a PhD, and they're kind of on the fence about it, I'm like, you can't be on the fence, you have to want it. And you have to know why you want it. Because it's a lot of time of your life with very, very low pay. I'm lucky that I was funded the whole time. But like, some people have to scramble a lot more to find money. And even then, it's like, you're getting paid for 20 hours a week when you work a lot more than that. And you have to remember like, why you did it. In terms of like, why I picked public health and sort of what the passion is, I really think it was just seeing so many problems that we could solve better if we just worked at prevention instead of treatment. Especially with environmental health. There are a lot of things that we just don't have necessarily the best data on. So it's like, okay, we know this is a problem, but we don't have a good idea of like the scope of the problem. Wastewater surveillance can hopefully help shed some light on a lot of those pieces. And it was really easy in the pandemic to be like this is important. This is a new virus that is all over the world. How can we better understand where this virus is? How much of it's a problem? And just knowing that, like, you can produce the data that, you know, public health might use one day? Yeah, the pandemic was kind of a little. It was it was a very, it was a very…a PhD in a pandemic is not something I would recommend to anyone. But it made it easy to know why. Right, like, everyone cared. And suddenly everyone cared about wastewater. Because everyone's like, “Oh, I saw that thing on the news about wastewater.” And it was like, “Yeah, I know, this is what I've been saying for years.” And now everybody suddenly cares, like, so that helped a lot as well.
Cassie McCreary31:27
I mean, we touched on this a little bit when Jordan was talking to you about, like, the process and everything, but grad school as a whole at the different levels and everything else, like it's a grueling process. And even if you are really passionate, I would wager at one point or another everybody kind of like, wavers, you know, you know. So like, what's your advice maybe to somebody that's like, questioning? Well, do I want to move forward with this? This is like, this is a lot like, whatever. I mean, is it just to remember your why? Is it to figure out exactly what your why is? Like, what would you suggest?
Sarah Philo, PhD 31:57
Yeah, I mean, everyone wavers. Right, like, it's, it's exhausting. You come home sometimes, and you're like, “What am I doing?” Like, why am I, and you have to, you have to keep that, like, why piece there? Why did I want to do this in the first place? And you have to, like, remember that. Like, I liked, I love the research piece, I was really interested in understanding a lot of this, and, you know, pushing the field forward. Because if you don't have a good why, and you don't, if it's just, “I'm going to grad school, because I don't know what to do next.” Like that's not going to get you through, it has to there has to be like, you have to want a specific outcome. So with like a master's degree, that could be more like a specific skill building of like, “I want to learn this, these skills in this project.” Or like a master's in public health, like “I want to do more public health practical practice type thing. So that's why I'm doing this.” Whereas with a PhD, it is a research degree. So it has to be like “I am doing this for the research because I want to develop those skills and push the field forward and whatever that field is.”
Cassie McCreary33:16
That was Dr. Sarah Philo. Thanks so much for joining us for our first episode of Absolute Gene-ius. Stay curious, and we'll see you next time!
Cassie McCreary33:26
That recording session was a fever dream.
Cassie McCreary33:32
Us? Off the rails? Unheard of.
Jordan Ruggieri33:36
Yeah. Unheard of for sure.