Erica Fuhrmeister

Dr. Erica Fuhrmeister serves as Assistant Professor in both the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences within the University of Washington's School of Public Health and the Civil and Environmental Engineering department in the School of Engineering. She holds a PhD and MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from UC Berkeley and a BS in Environmental Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. Her research bridges environmental engineering and public health, focusing on pathogen transmission pathways and antimicrobial resistance in diverse settings.

• PhD, Civil and Environmental Engineering - University of California, Berkeley
• MS, Civil and Environmental Engineering - University of California, Berkeley
• BS, Environmental Engineering - Johns Hopkins University

Dr. Fuhrmeister's research interests center on understanding environmental transmission pathways of pathogens, particularly enteric pathogens and antibiotic resistance in low- and middle-income countries. She employs next-generation metagenomic tools to investigate waterborne pathogen transmission and develop effective engineered water and sanitation interventions. Her work spans laboratory and field settings with significant international components in Kenya and Bangladesh. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, she has evaluated fomite transmission through community-level SARS-CoV-2 RNA monitoring on high-touch surfaces.

Her publication record demonstrates consistent focus on antimicrobial resistance surveillance, wastewater-based epidemiology, and environmental transmission of pathogens. Recent work emphasizes targeted sequencing methods for antibiotic resistance genes in wastewater, antimicrobial stewardship in veterinary medicine, and One Health approaches to combat antimicrobial resistance. She has developed innovative educational programs including PARE-Seq, a virtual short course on antimicrobial resistance identification.

• NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, 2019
• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2014
• One of ES&T Letters Best Papers of 2021

Dr. Fuhrmeister actively mentors graduate and undergraduate students, with several completed MS theses on antimicrobial usage in veterinary medicine and wastewater surveillance. She collaborates with the UW Center for One Health Research and Washington State Department of Health to understand antibiotic usage patterns in agriculture. Her lab develops targeted sequencing methods for antibiotic resistance genes in wastewater and creates educational modules for high school teachers about antimicrobial resistance.

The Fuhrmeister Lab fosters an inclusive research environment focused on understanding how enteric pathogens and antimicrobial resistance transfer between humans and animals through environmental pathways. Current projects include investigating antibiotic resistance gene diversity in wastewater, developing highly multiplexed detection assays for pathogen surveillance, and building community partnerships to address antimicrobial resistance through One Health approaches.