Jennifer Jay, Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California Los Angeles.
Water UCI Colloquium Series: From cattle farms to surfers, environmental antibiotic resistance in California and role of environmental education in the carbon footprint of student dietary choices
This talk will cover two research areas in the Jay Lab: the environmental fate of antibiotic resistance genes and the role of education on the carbon footprint of dietary choices.
Rising levels of antibiotic resistance pose a serious global health concern. The role of the environment in spreading antibiotic resistance is currently not well understood. Antibiotic resistance genes are now considered emerging contaminants, and their levels can even increase to selective pressures in the environment. Levels of antibiotic resistance genes and antibiotic resistant pathogens in various environments in California, including sites neighboring livestock facilities, manure fertilizer, wastewater treatment plants, and ocean water will be presented. Dr. Jay shared preliminary results of a study on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in the ocean and its impact on the nasal microbiome of surfers at Venice Beach and El Porto.
The second part of this talk will present results from a UCLA study of how the the carbon footprint of dietary choices changed for students enrolled in a course covering food and the environment. While the intervention and control groups were statistically indistinguishable at baseline, throughout the period of the study, intervention students decreased the beef component of their dietary carbon footprint by 19% (p=0.024), and their reported ruminant consumption by 28% (p<0.001). In the intervention group, both genders decreased their reported ruminant meat consumption by about a serving per week, while reported ruminant meat consumption increased for males in the control group. Modest, voluntary dietary changes such as those observed in this study could play an important role in mitigating climate change. Extrapolated across the entire U.S. population, the difference in dietary carbon footprint observed between the Food cluster and control group would amount to 31% of the reduction required for the 2013 President’s Climate Action Plan (2013).
For the last seventeen years, Jennifer Jay has been a Professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at the University of California Los Angeles. She specializes in the fate and transport of chemical and microbial contaminants in the environment. Her research addresses a wide range of topics including coastal water quality, environmental proliferation of antibiotic resistance, and the role of environmental education in the carbon footprint of diets. She teaches classes in Aquatic Chemistry, Statistics, Chemical Fate and Transport, and Food: A Lens for Environment and Sustainability. She was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, and an engineering school-wide award for excellence in teaching. In addition, she was the Pritzker Fellow for Environmental Sustainability and a Carnegie Fellow for Civic Engagement in Higher Education. Jennifer also directs the Center for Environmental Research and Community Engagement (CERCE), a UCLA Center that addresses community-based environmental research questions in under-served communities in Los Angeles. Jennifer earned her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.