Jessica Schlueter received her BS in genetics from Texas A&M and her PhD in genetics at Iowa State University. Before arriving at UNC Charlotte in 2009, she was a postdoc at Purdue University. Her research focus is plant genome sequencing and understanding how genome structure and complexity can be used to improve crops. She has worked on the soybean and oat genomes as part of the PanOat Consortium, miRNA profiling, and developing genetic tools for Yaupon, a native North American tea plant. She is also a part of the Environmental Monitoring Lab (EML) and is currently co-managing the UNC Charlotte SARS-CoV-2 Wastewater Surveillance program as well as the SARS-CoV-2 Surveillance sequencing program. As part of the EML, she is working to develop protocols and methods to surveil not only SARS-CoV-2 but also emerging pathogens.
Cynthia Gibas is a professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics at UNC Charlotte. Her research is in the area of microbial genomics. She is currently leading the university’s COVID-19 wastewater monitoring effort, which has been a cost-effective method for preventing COVID-19 outbreaks among students living on campus since the Fall of 2020. She is also co-director of the university’s viral surveillance sequencing lab, which provides information about the spread of viral variants for Mecklenburg County and NC-DHHS and informs the international pandemic monitoring effort. With researchers in the Departments of Biology, Geography and Earth Science, and Civil and Environmental Engineering, she has previously studied the impact of treated wastewater release on urban streams in the Charlotte area. She is the founder of the North Carolina Urban Microbiome Project.
