Farming might not have been in Michelle Soupir’s childhood, but it’s definitely in her bloodlines: both her parents were farm kids, and her father fostered in his daughter a deep respect for nature as she grew up on their acreage near Wichita.
“I was influenced to be concerned about sustainability and the environment by my father,” Soupir recalls. “He was always very green in the way we did things.”
Composting, solar panels, cultivating native grasses—Soupir learned to walk the walk at home. But it was her talent for math and science that later inspired her to seek a career as an environmental engineer dedicated to protecting water resources from the pathogens created by industrial agriculture.
A clear choice for the future
After earning a BS at Kansas State and her MS and PhD in biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, Soupir responded to openings in her field at Iowa State and the University of Illinois. But though offered positions at both schools, for Soupir the choice was clear: “I felt the tools to be successful were more in place here,” she says.
Not that the choice was simple. Soupir originally applied for a position in agricultural and biosystems engineering but was asked if she would consider as well one of the college’s first interdisciplinary “cluster” appointments between ABE and civil engineering. She’d had civil engineers on her committee at Virginia Tech, after all, and, given her research interests, the pairing seemed natural.
The ultimate objective of her work today, says Soupir, is to design systems to prevent pathogens from moving into water bodies. But to do that, she adds, she must first understand how they move.
“It’s worked out well having a courtesy appointment in civil engineering,” Soupir notes. “Chris Rehmann, my mentor, helps significantly. On hydro-epidemiology, for instance, I’m more focused on the fate and transport of pathogens; he’s a modeler of mixing in streams and lakes. So the two of us have been able to combine our research interests very well.”
Beyond the usual suspects
A relatively recent concept, “hydro-epidemiology” combines the microbiology of pathogens, including determining their origins, growth, and ultimate disposition in water bodies—Soupir’s expertise—with understanding the dynamics of the hydrological systems by which those pathogens are dispersed throughout watersheds.
Yet while runoff and manure spills from large-scale agricultural operations are routinely cited as sources of water-borne pathogens, Soupir stresses that tracing the precise origins of pollutants is considerably more complicated than simply fingering “the usual suspects.” Effective remediation, she says, involves painstaking detective work.
“There are so many different factors,” Soupir says. “How does it get on the land? Is it interacting with manures? With soils? Is it surface supplied? Chisel plowed? Does it rain right away or three weeks later? Is there tile drainage? Does it move through the soil or with surface runoff?
“And then,” she continues, “what kind of management practices can reduce the transport? From a policy view, it’s been very reactive—regulation of nonpoint sources has been a challenge.”
An appeal to community
Yet beyond detection and modeling, effective remediation involves solutions based at least as much in community and consensus building as in more stringent regulation. The ability to enjoy healthy lakes, streams, and rivers, Soupir insists, will motivate people to change their ways and work together as stakeholders in a watershed.
In the meantime, Soupir and her colleagues look forward to developing new models to improve their understanding of the many factors affecting the persistence on land and movement to water of fecal indicators, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and other pathogens, then using those relationships to predict their fate and transport on a watershed scale. With that information, she says, engineers can better work with communities to develop policies and best practices that strike the optimal balance between economic viability and environmental sustainability to protect and preserve this most precious of natural resources.
“There are more and more demands on water from agriculture, from industry, and for human consumption,” Soupir reflects. “So we want to keep it clean so we can use it.”