Dr Julia Sobolik
Visiting Research Fellow
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
London
United Kingdom
I am an environmental health scientist with over 10 years experience at the intersection of enteric disease laboratory sciences and risk modeling within the food, water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector. I completed my PhD in environmental health sciences at Emory University with USDA NIFA predoctoral funding, and hold an MS in microbiology and MPH in global health and infectious diseases.
As the 2023 Marshall Sherfield Fellow, I am completing a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the environmental health group at LSHTM working closely with Dr. Jackie Knee and colleagues. As part of the SaniVac trial, my work focuses on characterizing enteric pathogen exposures and identifying important environmental transmission pathways among young children within Mozambican households. Here, we leverage paired clinical and environmental samples and novel molecular biology tools to identify enteric pathogens. These data will be used in epidemiological and quantitative microbial risk assessment frameworks to identify how children in domestic settings are likely exposed to enteric pathogens by linking the pathogen data in the environment (hands, soil, surfaces, food, water) with exposure pathways and clinical data in children. Ultimately this work aims to inform the evidence-base for effective interventions and to improve child health.
Affiliations
Research
My research interests include the following areas:
1. Food safety: detection, quantification, and risk assessment associated with consumption of contaminated foods. This includes empirical sample collection, laboratory methods to detect enteric pathogens, and exposure modeling to estimate risk to individuals.
2. Infectious disease exposure assessment: leveraging empirically derived data, as well as from the peer-reviewed literature, to characterize infectious disease exposures and infection risks in a given context or setting. Complex exposure dynamics (via hands, water, food, surface-mediated, soil, animals) within the household setting for children in LMICs is of particular interest.
3. Investigating the infectivity of human noroviruses in environmental samples using innovative laboratory methods to improve our understanding of this health hazard and refine risk estimates.
4. Farmworker health and access to hand hygiene and sanitation resources while working and the implications this has on worker and food safety.
Selected Publications
