Dr. Thomas Maere received his Master's degree in Bioengineering (Forest, Soil and Water Management) from Ghent University (Belgium) in 2006. In 2007, he was a research assistant at the BIOMATH research unit at Ghent University, working on model-based optimization of conventional wastewater treatment plants. He started work on his PhD in the same department on the modeling of membrane bioreactors in 2008, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in 2012 on various membrane topics. Upon his move to Quebec City (Canada) in 2014, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the modelEAU research unit at Laval University and was mainly involved in the InnovaReg project on nutrient regulation for water resource recovery facilities.
Dr. Stephanie Katharine Loeb is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at McGill University. Before joining McGill, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University where she studied the sunlight inactivation of human norovirus. She received her PhD from Yale University with a focus on the environmental applications of light-activated and fluorescent nanomaterials. She has a MASc from the University of Toronto in Civil Engineering and completed her bachelor's degree in Physics and Nanoscience jointly between UofT and the National University of Singapore. Prof. Loeb's research interests encompass materials science and environmental engineering, with particular expertise in the areas of nanotechnology, photonics, and environmental virology.
Dr. Peter Vanrolleghem has an MSc in Bio-engineering (1987) and a PhD in Applied Biological Sciences – Environmental Technology (1994), both from Ghent University (Belgium). His PhD dealt with the monitoring, modelling, and control of activated sludge wastewater treatment processes, with special emphasis on model calibration and experimental design. He became an associate professor at Ghent University in 1997, initiating the BIOMATH research team that by 2006 had grown to 25 researchers focusing on modelling methodologies for bioprocesses, mainly in environmental systems. Since 2006, he has held the Canada Research Chair on Water Quality Modeling, allowing him to start up the modelEAU research team at Université Laval in Quebec City (Canada). This group focuses on the modelling, monitoring, and control of water systems. The modelEAU quickly built momentum with numerous research assistants, post-docs, PhD students, and master's students. He is very active within IWA (IWA Fellow and member of IWA’s Board of Directors), is getting increasingly involved in WEF (as chairman of MEGA, the Modelling Expert Group of the Americas), and is also active within Réseau Environnement and the Canadian Association on Water Quality (CAWQ).
Robert Delatolla is a Full Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Ottawa. He is the Director of the national CoVaRR-Net Wastewater Surveillance Research Group, co-chair of the Ontario Wastewater Surveillance Consortium, Director of the Ottawa-Carleton Institute for Environmental Engineering, and Graduate Coordinator of the University of Ottawa Environmental Engineering Graduate Program. Professor Delatolla was recently awarded the 2022-2023 Ontario Society of Professional Engineers Engineering Excellence Medal for his contributions to Ontario during the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Robert Delatolla’s research focuses on advancing the detection and quantification of the biological targets of population and public health importance in waters and wastewater. He has a particular interest in developing protocols and best practices to translate water- and wastewater-derived biological target data into population and public health responses and decision-making. Professor Delatolla’s research group is also currently interested in the application of wastewater-based surveillance as an early warning system for future pandemic preparedness and to improve health equity in Canada. In addition, his research group is interested in leveraging modern analytical methods to advance our understanding of wastewater technologies and to optimize wastewater treatment technologies to protect natural waters.
Dr. B. Jesse Shapiro did his undergrad in Biology at McGill University, followed by an MSc in Integrative Bioscience at Oxford. He then completed a PhD in Computational and Systems Biology at MIT with Eric Alm, where he developed methods to detect signatures of natural selection, recombination, and speciation in bacterial genomes. He went on to a postdoc with Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute and Harvard University, where he studied the evolutionary genomics of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Lassa virus. After seven years as Canada Research Chair in Microbial Evolutionary Genomics at Université de Montréal, he returned to McGill as an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the Genome Centre. His research uses genomics to understand the ecology and evolution of microbes, ranging from freshwater bacterioplankton to the human gut microbiome. His work has helped elucidate the origins of bacterial species, leading to a more unified species concept across domains of life and has developed genome-wide association study (GWAS) methods tailored for bacteria. He is particularly interested in pathogen evolution and their evolution within patients and interactions with members of the resident microbiome. His laboratory currently has projects on the ecology and evolution of toxic cyanobacterial blooms, cholera infections, and antimicrobial resistance, among others.
Dominic Frigon is an Associate Professor of environmental engineering in the Civil Engineering Dept. at McGill University
(Montreal, Canada). He holds BSc and MSc degrees in Microbiology from McGill (Montréal)
and a PhD in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).
He specializes in the microbial ecology of wastewater systems using
metagenomics and mathematical modelling. His work applies to wastewater-based
epidemiology, biological water resource recovery, the control of antimicrobial
resistance dispersal, and biosolids safety. Between 2020 and 2024, he
coordinated COVID-19-related and other wastewater-based epidemiology projects.
These projects assembled more than 20 Quebec principal investigators to develop the
monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater to follow the evolution of the COVID pandemic
in Quebec and other infectious diseases.
Jiannis Ragoussis studied Biochemistry at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, where he obtained his PhD. He did his postdoctoral studies as an EMBO fellow with J. Trowsdale at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Laboratories in London, UK. Subsequently, he became a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Reader at the Division of Medical and Molecular Genetics at Guy’s Hospital, then Guy’s and now King’s Medical School. In 2001, he moved to the University of Oxford as Head of Genomics and in 2013 to McGill University where he is Head of Genome Sciences at the McGill University Genome Center and Professor in Human Genetics at the Department of Human Genetics. He is also affiliated with the Department of Bioengineering and a Visiting Professor at the University of Thessaly, Greece. He is Associate Director at The Canadian Genome Enterprise, a Canadian Foundation for Innovation-Funded Major Strategic Initiative. He has developed expertise in all fields of genomics and functional genomics. His main interest is developing state-of-the-art NGS-based approaches to disease gene identification, as well as functional genomics approaches for the identification of prognostic markers and associated pathways in gynaecological cancers and brain cancer. He leads the genomics and virus sequencing pillar of the CIHR-funded CoVARR-Net, the Canadian COVID-19 Variant Rapid Response Network.
Dr. Terrance P. Snutch is a Professor in the Michael Smith Laboratories and Director of Translational Neuroscience at the Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Professor Snutch was previously the Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Neuromed Pharmaceuticals Inc., a Vancouver-based biopharmaceutical company developing drugs for chronic pain, epilepsy, and tremor that merged with CombinatoRx to form Zalicus Pharmaceuticals. Professor Snutch obtained his PhD from Simon Fraser University and conducted postdoctoral research in Molecular Neurobiology at the California Institute of Technology with professors Norman Davidson and Henry Lester. Dr. Snutch’s seminal contributions to neurobiology have been recognized through prestigious accolades, including the International Albrecht Fleckenstein Award from Bayer, the Killam Research Prize, and the Steacie Prize, as the BC Biotech Researcher of the Year, and with induction as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the Academy of Inventors (USA). In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, in March 2020, Dr. Snutch co-founded the Canadian COVID-19 Genomics Network (VirusSeq). Throughout the pandemic, VirusSeq genomic and variant data were shared nationally and internationally to best inform health authorities concerning the implementation of real-time policies aimed at best protecting Canadians.
