Thanh Huong “Helen” Nguyen remembers her sewer-diving days, when she’d descend into cities’ underbellies to collect wastewater. “You can learn a lot about community health without having to invade people’s privacy,” she said.
Today Nguyen is still passionate about how the stuff we flush can inform public health. But she and her colleagues now send remotely operated pumps into sewers to collect samples.
Nguyen is an environmental engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She studies biological contaminants in the environment. Samples of drinking water, compost, soil, and wastewater routinely show up in her laboratory.
She and her colleagues are currently looking for antibiotic-resistant bacteria in wastewater near hospitals. Because antibiotic resistance makes bacterial infections difficult to treat, “it has the potential to erase a lot of the progress we’ve made in medicine,” she said. Nguyen and her colleagues believe it might be possible to detect antibiotic-resistant bacteria in wastewater before they start making hospital patients sick. “We want to inform medical doctors so that they can prepare,” she said.
“I actually wanted to solve problems, not study problems.”
Nguyen grew up in Vietnam and won a scholarship to complete her undergraduate degree in Ukraine. She initially chose to study geology, inspired by her father’s Ph.D. in the same field. But when Nguyen decided to pursue graduate studies, she applied to programs in the United States focused on Earth and environmental science and engineering. It was appealing to think about addressing environmental issues head-on, she said. “I actually wanted to solve problems, not study problems.”
Earlier this year, Nguyen took over as editor in chief of the AGU journal GeoHealth. She said that she looks forward to spotlighting studies at the intersection of environmental science and public health, such as investigations of how green spaces in urban areas can benefit human health.
When she’s not working, Nguyen can often be found in a dance studio. She picked up ballet in graduate school and has stuck with it ever since. Her classmates tend to be several decades her junior, but Nguyen doesn’t mind. She finds dancing rejuvenating and aims to practice 2 hours each day after which “I feel mentally and physically refreshed,” she said.
—Katherine Kornei(@KatherineKornei), Science Writer
This profile is part of a special series in our August 2024 issue on science careers.
Citation: Kornei, K. (2024), Thanh Huong “Helen” Nguyen: Chasing down pathogens, Eos, 105, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EO240327. Published on 25 July 2024.
Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.
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