We’re taking giving a shit quite literally this week! 

Our guest is Newsha Ghaeli, the president and co-founder at Biobot Analytics. If you read our newsletter, you’ll have heard me go on and on about Biobot, whose mission is to transform wastewater infrastructure into public health observatories.

As an architect turned urban studies researcher, Newsha met her co-founder, Dr. Mariana Matus, at MIT almost a decade ago. Their work on the MIT Underworlds Project led to a dissertation, scientific publications, and coverage by dozens of local and national media outlets, and places in the DeltaV, DesignX, and Y Combinator accelerators.

Obviously, Biobot’s work couldn’t have come along at a better time.

Public health data in the US is fractured and difficult to aggregate, much less on the fly.

Three years into the pandemic, most COVID testing is done at home and unreported, and most states have stopped reporting the data they do get.

Building a baseline understanding of what’s quite literally floating around in our towns and cities will help us be better prepared when new threats like COVID, or old threats like polio come to town.

Like a weather report, wastewater data can make our day-to-day lives safer and less surprising when things go to shit.

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INI Book Club:

• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Check out Biobot's data
• Get started with Biobot in your community
• Keep up with Biobot and Newsha on Twitter

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• Edited by Anthony Luciani
• Produced by Willow Beck
• Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

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