Faculty Spotlight - Dr. Yaqi You

Assistant Professor - Department of Environmental Resources Engineering
10/22/2021

Meet Dr. Yaqi You! Dr. You arrived at ESF in February 2020 as a visiting assistant professor and joined the full-time faculty as an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Resources Engineering in the fall of 2020.

You completed her Ph.D. in environmental engineering at Johns Hopkins University and received postdoctoral training in environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Before joining ESF, she served as a visiting assistant professor at Idaho State University, where she started to study aquatic intermittency effects on microbiomes in streams.

You's research targets interactions between microbial communities and emerging contaminants in both natural and engineered systems with the goal of developing innovative solutions for resource recovery and reuse, ecosystem sustainability and public health improvement. The You lab employs multi-omics — the analysis of total DNA (genomics), RNA (transcriptomics), protein (proteomics) and metabolites (metabolomics) of a microbial community — analytical chemistry, and fundamentals of microbiology and environmental engineering. Her long-term goal is to harness the environmental microbiome for a sustainable food-energy-water nexus.

Since arriving at ESF, You has taught an undergraduate course in contaminant fate and transport, and a new graduate course in systems microbiology and biotechnology. She is engaged in undergraduate research mentoring, including mentoring an honors thesis for a May 2021 graduate and is a participating faculty member for the biotechnology major in the Department of Environmental Biology. She also hosts undergraduate researchers for Syracuse University Interactive Biomaterials REU program.

You said the best thing about ESF is that the College is so dedicated to sustainability and environments; her favorite spot on campus is the Roosevelt Wild Life Collection in the Gateway Center.