We have a lot of heroes. Our customers who are changing the world, scientists that are helping us make better decisions for the environment, all of our impact partners and, of course, Olivia Coleman.
But then we met Dr. Juliet Johnston. She’s an engineer who works to protect the environment by studying microbial communities in wastewater treatment centres. She’s friends with the bugs who live in our wee!
Ok, Juliet says it’s a bit more complicated than that, so maybe we should just let her explain it.
In the simplest terms, what do you do?
I am an environmental engineer who focuses on microbiology. I try to understand how microbes are going to change due to different weather or climate change. I also look at other seasonal impacts, especially the ones in the built environment.
What do you mean by built environment?
Like wastewater treatment plants or just things that we've constructed. Not the natural world.
On microbes
So the idea is that you study the way microbes and waste interact, to make sure the microbes are doing their little microbe jobs.
Microbes can eat contaminants for us and we want them to keep doing that. They do a lot of really beneficial things, but if the weather or climate changes so significantly they might not do the jobs that we want them to. We need to make sure that we understand what do these microbes need to be successful for us.
Ah, so you’re just trying to help the microbes to live their best life.
Yes, yes. They stop eating the things we want them too when the temperature gets too hot or cold. I usually use milkshakes as an example. Whenever it gets cold out, people will stop drinking milkshakes. They want hot chocolate instead. Microbes are kind of the same way, when the temperature changes it changes their preference in food.
And we want to make sure that the microbes are happy because they help us keep our planet healthy?
Yes. In the case of wastewater treatment, it cleans our waters. They remove excessive nutrients – it cleans our dirty poo water.
What happens when the dirty poo water isn't cleaned properly by microbes?
When it's not cleaned properly, it’s discharged into our lakes, rivers and streams. Those excessive nutrients then create algal blooms. As the algal blooms grow, they deplete the oxygen in the water which can kill the fish who live there. This happens all the time in the Gulf of Mexico. Right now there’s an algal bloom the size of Connecticut and all those fish end up dying.
So it impacts an entire ecosystem?
Yes. All those small contaminants add up rather. If you're ever walking by your local lakes, you might see a sign in the middle of the summer that you can't go swimming because this lake has bacterial contamination. That's all just from various lawns and water systems having too many contaminants, leaching into waters and creating really harmful bacteria. All because at the places where we could use good bacteria to clean it, we didn't.
Because we might not have had the right conditions for microbes!
Right, the wastewater treatment plant is just a party for microbes and I’m trying to throw the best party. Or maybe it’s more of a cafeteria and I'm just trying to make sure that the lunchroom is great. That's probably a more apt description.
You’re like that really cool lunch lady.
Sort of. I just want them to eat as much food as they can, they've got to come in, they've got to eat, get out.
Can you talk to me more about the personality of a microbe?
The personality of a microbe. They all have very different personalities because there are some that are really nice and easy to work with. They'll eat whatever's on the table, especially carbon sources, they're not fussy. They have a wider temperature range that they're comfortable with, whereas some of the microbes that I work with have a very small range of PHs that they like, they want the perfect temperature. It can't be too hot. It can't be too cold.
There's such diversity among microbes. You start learning that they all have the same personalities you'd see in a classroom. Some that get along with everyone and some that become bullies and create problems.
Do you have a favourite? Is there a teacher's pet?
Wow, you ask me hard questions. I am going to go with... Nitrosospira Winogradsky. There was a really famous scientist, Sergei Winogradsky. His daughter, Helene Winogradsky started showing up in his research lab in the 1930s and she's the one who discovered this organism specifically. It does ammonia oxidation, which means it eats ammonia and it converts it to other things in our wastewater. She seems to be one of the first women in wastewater microbial ecology that I think tracked down.
I mean, she definitely has a leg up on everyone because her dad is literally known as the father of soil microbiology. Sergei is the big name, but every time when you say this organism, Winogradsky, everyone assumes it's Sergei. But, no, no, he had a daughter, Helene. Then her name kind of gets written out of the history books.
On representation
That’s actually the perfect segue into role models in science. Why do you think that there are so few women, even today, in STEM?
Women have been systematically pushed out. It's ironic because most of the biologies tend to actually have a lot more women who are graduating with PhDs – they just don't stay in the field. Academia has so many problems, for example, parental rights. Some of the women who I know weren't able to publish as much because they spent a year being mothers and trying to keep their lab open...and surviving through that while raising a child. That's not an equal pressure that we also put on our male academics.
I'm curious also about trans women in STEM. I mean trans women, as we know, are underrepresented in most places.
Yeah. It's been really challenging to find the right balance of how outspoken I want to be versus playing it safe, just trying to survive. I'm usually advocating for myself and there aren’t a lot of other people to rally around and take some of that burden off.
Can you talk about a time when you really felt that tension of advocacy and self care?
There's so many. I had this one professor when I was an undergrad, when I was first coming out. I was sitting in his office, just explaining who I am, and his first words to me were, "You're very lucky because ten years ago I would've had you thrown out of office by now." That was his way of welcoming me as a trans person and he never spoke to me again after that. So it just became really hard for me to succeed in his classroom because I couldn't ask questions, I couldn't do anything.
Of course, there are other professors who have been really cool. where the one who I was working for, he not only stood up for me but he set the tone. Like the first day that I was presenting as myself, he made sure to call on me as soon as my hand was raised. He said my name, my pronouns and he set the tone for the rest of the class.
So when you talk about not knowing how to disclose or how to care for yourself in certain spaces, it can be about safety, but also about the opportunities you may miss.
Sometimes, yes. I made sure that when I was applying for graduate school, I was out on pretty much every application within the first paragraph. They had the ability to immediately reject me, so I never even risked going to somewhere that wouldn't be safe or affirming.
There are not that many trans women, or just trans folks in general, who make it to high level academia. Thankfully, there are a lot of places like Twitter right now, or just social media in general, that enable us to connect to one another.
Has anyone called you their role model yet?
Oh, yes. I've had a lot of high school students who’ve said some really adorable things. One of them sent me their college application which talked about me and I just sobbed. I'm super uncomfortable with compliments in general, so I just squirm. But yes, they said some very lovely things about what my work has meant to them.
That makes sense! When you were growing up, what would've seeing someone like you succeed meant to you?
I didn’t have a trans role model until I was maybe 23 or so. We don't have a lot of visibility, and certainly not in my specific niche of a field. When I had questions, I was emailing Doctor Lynn Conway, who was one of the few out trans women in engineering. She’s not even really in my field.
On the future of wastewater
People are going to read this and think, "I want to help do something, I want to support Dr. Johnston and her amazing work, I want to protect the environment, the Gulf of Mexico, etc." What recommendations would you have?
We, as a society, need to be more comfortable with the idea of taking our wastewater and immediately converting that back to drinkable water, and not having it go back into the environment.
Oftentimes when we discharge our wastewater into a lake, the wastewater that we are discharging is cleaner than the lake itself. Then we have another water treatment plant that's going to suck up that lake water and put in more energy just to clean the water that we already cleaned!
What a waste of… wastewater
That’s been totally sanitised! It's also a complete waste of energy when we could just be taking the same water that we flushed down the toilet, clean it out once, but do it really thoroughly, and then send it right back to your tap.
That seems really sensible.
You’d think, but it wigs people out. People are really opposed to drinking their own pee.
But, we're still drinking our own pee, it's just mixed with lake stuff.
We don't see it as directly, so out of sight, out of mind. We can think about taking the lake water and making it clean and that feels better than to use our wastewater.
People are just really uncomfortable with the idea of crap to tap.
You did not just say “crap to tap.” Did you make that up??
I don’t think so.
Well, if you did, you just coined a movement.
I should put it on a tote bag or something.
This whole feature is a part of our International Women's Day campaign, spotlighting women who are doing really cool stuff – women like you. What advice do you have for young people who want to follow in your footsteps?
This is the hardest question. I don’t want to say the same thing everyone does, "Be creative, ask questions," although that is good advice. I mean Ms. Frizzle already nailed it with “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy,” but that’s not very specific.
Ok, my big words of encouragement for a little kid who loves science is to just go have fun. Everything can be explored and looked at as a scientist or as an engineer – it just means you’re trying to build things or make them better. If you've got a little radio or something like that, or an RC car, take it apart and just put it back together. Try and figure out how it works. I want to encourage everyone to just piss off their parents at least once with some of their own science nonsense. Be a tinkerer!
Honestly, I’m inspired right now. Like I’m ready to go and build something.
That’s great!
But before we go, can you share your favourite toilet joke?
Sure. It's not really a toilet joke, it's a wastewater treatment plant joke. But whenever we're wrapping things up, I like to say, let's make like a coagulant and get the flock out of here.
That's a toilet water cycle pun at least.
Okay, you know what? I love it, and I've never heard it before. And I thought I’d heard every toilet joke under the sun.
If you want to learn more about Dr. Johnston and her work, you can follow her Twitter and the organisation she founded, Queer Science.