CEE Seminar – Developing sensor technologies for expanding water pollution monitoring in rural communities

Low-income and dispersed communities are disproportionally burdened by water pollution due to factors such as residential proximity to point sources of contamination and inadequate access to clean water and sanitation infrastructure. Early detection of water pollutants is critical to preventing community exposures and the subsequent onset of environmentally linked diseases. However, pollution assessment in economically challenged communities is hampered by the difficulty and high cost associated with laboratory testing. In this seminar, I will provide some examples of field-deployable sensors developed by our group for detecting various water pollutants of significance to rural communities in Colombia (South America), such as agricultural pesticide residues and fecal coliforms. I will further discuss the pollution and health risk assessments associated with water consumption in the studied communities and draw some lessons for future work in this domain.