A/Prof Janelle Thompson

PI, Environmental Engineering cluster, SCELSE
Associate Professor, Asian School of Environment, NTU

Email: janelle.thompson@ntu.edu.sg

As an environmental microbiologist with degrees in biology, environmental engineering, and oceanography, I have a diverse academic background with strength in both science and engineering. My research uses tools of modern molecular ecology, environmental genomics, and systems biology to investigate the roles and applications of microorganisms in natural and engineered environments.

Major themes that I’ve established in my career include:
1. Using DNA and RNA of water microbiomes as indicators to protect public health,
2. Understanding the ecology and virulence of pathogens in the marine environment, and
3. Developing technology for efficient bioproduction and sustainable energy using extremophiles.

The diversity of projects I have worked on reflects my goal as a scientist and environmental microbiologist to contribute to society, and my enthusiasm for working on collaborative multidisciplinary projects to advance knowledge at the interface of fields.

Since joining SCELSE-NTU in 2019, I have developed a research group focused primarily on environmental pathogen surveillance with key research contributions in the past three years including:

• Established methods for tracking SARS-CoV-2 in sewage through wastewater surveillance, including publication of one of the first studies to demonstrate detection of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater (Wu et al., 2020). This article is highly cited with >700 citations according to Google scholar (July 2023).
• Proposed an integrated approach to wastewater surveillance combining “upstream” locations to monitor small populations for the spatial distribution of the virus with “downstream” monitoring at wastewater treatment plants to reveal the wider dynamics and temporal trends in the community with consideration of ethical and societal implications (Thompson et al., 2020). This article was cited by the New York Times magazine (Nov. 24, 2020). Our recent study on ethics rights and obligations for wastewater surveillance has recently been published in Water Research (Nainani et al., 2024).
• Led a team that supported Singapore’s National Environmental Agency (NEA) in establishing its nationwide programme for wastewater surveillance and developed and managed a 46 site wastewater surveillance network for NTU with NEA. This work was recognised in 2022 by a Singapore National Public Administration Medal (Bronze).
• Jointly supervised a team at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and SCELSE to rapidly develop and deploy open-source assays for quantification of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern resulting in three manuscripts (Lee et al., 2021, 2022; Chua et al., 2023).
• Led a collaborative team to develop protocols for tracking arboviruses in wastewater, expanding the potential of wastewater surveillance beyond COVID-19 to address the OneHealth issues of vector-borne disease. Work resulted in four manuscripts and one book chapter (Chandra et al. 2021, 2023; Lee et al., 2022; Leifels et al., 2023a,b).
• In addition, I supervise three NTU PhD students whose projects extend our view of environmental microorganisms beyond wastewater to natural systems. These PhD projects focus on surveillance of marine ecosystems and development of biotechnologies from extreme environments including fundamental research that builds upon my recently patented technology for integrated biofuels synthesis and purification using supercritical CO₂ as an extractive solvent (US Patent 10,941,379).