Meet the Ken Kennedy Institute's March Member of the Month: Lauren Stadler, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Research Faculty, NEWT

Lauren Stadler is an environmental engineer with 13 years of experience whose research focuses on wastewater-based epidemiology, environmental antibiotic resistance, wastewater treatment and resource recovery, and environmental synthetic biology. She works closely with the city of Houston to monitor wastewater for pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) to inform public health decisions and advance safe and sustainable wastewater systems.

How does your work impact the community at large?
"I develop and implement methods for monitoring disease targets in wastewater that can be used for public health surveillance and response. Wastewater represents a sample of everyone in the community who contributed to the waste stream, and thus understanding which microbes are present in a wastewater sample can tell us about what’s circulating in the community. It’s a resource-efficient and effective means to characterize and track diverse diseases, ranging from antibiotic resistant bacteria to respiratory viruses."

Register for a Ken Kennedy Institute Distinguished Lecture with Dr. Adam Phillippy, Senior Investigator at National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Phillippy's lab develops computational methods for the analysis of DNA sequences, including genome sequencing, comparative genomics, forensics, and metagenomics. He has developed foundational methods for mapping and comparing whole genomes and pioneered the use of single-molecule sequencing for the reconstruction of complete genomes. He is a co-founder of the Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium and led the team that finished the last remaining regions of the human genome. For this work, he was named by TIME magazine as one of 2022’s most influential people.

• Date: Tuesday, April 25, 2023 at 4:00 PM CST | Reception to Follow
• Location: BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) Auditorium at Rice University
• Talk: What’s New in the First Truly Complete Sequence of a Human Genome?

RSVP and view the talk abstract at the link below.

The 2023 Machine Learning Boot Camp is coming up this May!

This two-day boot camp will provide a broad introduction to machine learning for executives and beginners. Our goal is to give a manager or a CEO in a field such as medicine, finance, manufacturing, or energy an introduction to the essential concepts behind ML. Additionally, this boot camp is great for non-practicing beginners looking to learn, as it will integrate lectures describing the basic concepts to state-of-the-art machine learning.

• Date: Thursday, May 11 - Friday, May 12
• Location: BRC at Rice University

Registration is now open. Share with faculty, students, staff, and friends that may be interested!

Check out our 2023 Energy High Performance Computing Conference recap to learn more about the event, including where to watch the recorded sessions.

Read about the keynote and invited speakers, session topics, and post-conference workshops that made this conference one of our largest events yet, attended by over 550 leaders in HPC, academia, and the energy industry.

You can also mark your calendars for March 5-7, 2024 for the 17th annual Energy HPC Conference, happening at the BRC in Houston, TX.