The Houston Health Department and Rice University hosted a 2025 summer internship program designed to mentor undergraduate and graduate students as they gain work experience in public health and wastewater-based epidemiology.
The internship involves collaborators that comprise Houston Wastewater Epidemiology, a CDC National Wastewater Surveillance System (NWSS) Center of Excellence.
Working at the Houston Health Department’s Data Science Division, interns are mentored by Loren Hopkins, chief environmental science officer and bureau chief of the division; Kaavya Domakonda, senior analyst; and Rebecca Schneider, analyst.
Rice University students selected for the 2025 summer internship included Brandon Fantine, an undergraduate student majoring in statistics with a minor in data science, and Tina C. Li, a graduate student seeking a professional master’s in electrical and computer engineering with a specialization in AI and data science. Both students expect to receive their degrees in the spring of 2026.
The focus of Li’s internship involved testing a nonlinear, first-difference state-space model using historical wastewater data for respiratory viruses and then customizing the model to capture the first difference twice for weekly pathogen trend detection. The project was a continuation of the multivariate nonlinear hierarchical state-space model developed by Katherine Ensor, Rice’s Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics.
Fantine’s internship focus put his coding skills to work as he optimized and automated data libraries for statistical analysis. He also incorporated data visualization tools that display viral levels, facilitating weekly reporting of actionable information that supports public health.
“The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the value of wastewater monitoring in the public health system and its critical role in safeguarding populations from communicable diseases,” said Schneider, who has worked at the Houston Health Department since earning her professional master’s in statistics from Rice in 2020.
“We are proud of the work we have accomplished in establishing a system to protect and promote human health and inform Houston’s response to prominent viral outbreaks. Offering internship opportunities is another step forward to making wastewater-based epidemiology sustainable,” said Hopkins.
Since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Houston Health Department, Houston Public Works, and Rice University have collaborated to develop and implement a citywide wastewater surveillance and reporting system for infectious disease outbreaks.
The science and innovation behind wastewater-based epidemiology is currently being scaled to monitor for up to 29 potential pathogens.
Wastewater contains a mixture of organic matter, inorganic substances, and a diverse array of microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Houston’s statistical system analyzes laboratory data that has extracted and quantified pathogenic genes from 24-hour influent wastewater samples strategically taken from treatment plants, lift stations, and manholes associated with facilities such as jails, nursing homes, and schools.
Schneider mentored the students as they completed their main projects, updated codebases, optimized and automated data processing and analysis for weekly reporting, and developed interactive maps of wastewater treatment plants and manhole locations.
“Tina and Brandon’s work was extremely valuable in testing the first-difference twice-state-space model, and bringing it into production mode,” said Schneider, who oversees the day-to-day analysis and reporting of the health department’s wastewater-based epidemiology system.
A significant amount of Li’s and Fantine’s work went into organizing the different pathogen data to produce quantile and level graphs, each assigned a color scale representing viral levels as either very low, low, medium, high, or very high.
“The viral level plots provide quick summaries of the current wastewater viral levels based on historical levels across the city,” said Schneider.
Collaborators at the Houston Health Department and Rice hope to offer more internship opportunities in the future.
- Shawn Hutchins, Communications Specialist