Thanh H. (Helen) Nguyen

About

Helen Nguyen holds a B.S. with Honors in Geology from Ivan Franko National University of L'viv, Ukraine, an M.S. in Earth and Environmental Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Johns Hopkins University. She joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in November 2006, where she is currently the Ivan Racheff Professor of Environmental Engineering and a faculty member. Her teaching encompasses graduate and undergraduate courses in environmental engineering, with a focus on physico-chemical processes for water and wastewater treatments. Dr. Nguyen's research interests include pathogens and biofilms in drinking water distribution systems, environmental surveillance of pathogens, and water and food safety. She is actively involved in advising undergraduate students on pathogen removal research and has contributed significantly to the field through her research, which emphasizes societal risk and hazard mitigation in environmental engineering.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Biology
• Virology
• Computer Security
• Engineering
• Optics
• Risk analysis (engineering)
• Geography
• Environmental health

Selected publications

• Rethinking wastewater risks and monitoring in light of the COVID-19 pandemic

  Nature Sustainability · 2020 · 318 citations

  DOI

• Label-free SARS-CoV-2 detection and classification using phase imaging with computational specificity

  Light Science & Applications · 2021 · 64 citations

  Efforts to mitigate the COVID-19 crisis revealed that fast, accurate, and scalable testing is crucial for curbing the current impact and that of future pandemics. We propose an optical method for directly imaging unlabeled viral particles and using deep learning for detection and classification. An ultrasensitive interferometric method was used to image four virus types with nanoscale optical path-length sensitivity. Pairing these data with fluorescence images for ground truth, we trained semant…

  DOI

• Mechanism and efficacy of virus inactivation by a microplasma UV lamp generating monochromatic UV irradiation at 222 nm

  Water Research · 2020 · 58 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Identification of Thresholds on Population Density for Understanding Transmission of COVID‐19

  GeoHealth · 2022 · 21 citations

  Pathways of transmission of coronavirus (COVID-19) disease in the human population are still emerging. However, empirical observations suggest that dense human settlements are the most adversely impacted, corroborating a broad consensus that human-to-human transmission is a key mechanism for the rapid spread of this disease. Here, using logistic regression techniques, estimates of threshold levels of population density were computed corresponding to the incidence (case counts) in the human popul…

  PublisherDOI

• Quantification of pathogens and antibiotic resistance genes in backyard and commercial composts

  The Science of The Total Environment · 2021 · 20 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Horizontal Gene Transfer in Porous Media: Experiments and Modeling

  NSF · $238k · 2011–2015

• IRES Water Quality and Household Energy in Post-Earthquake Nepal: Long Term Protection of Community Health

  NSF · $250k · 2016–2020

• Collaborative Research: Plant-based Pathogen Filters

  NSF · $141k · 2020–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Andrew W. Taylor‐Robinson

  University of Pennsylvania

  37 shared

• Phong V. V. Le

  Oak Ridge National Laboratory

  36 shared

• Praveen Kumar

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  36 shared

• Brian F. Allan

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  36 shared

• Lei Zhao

  36 shared

• Jinhui Yan

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  36 shared

• Joanna L. Shisler

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  34 shared

• Chamteut Oh

  University of Florida

  32 shared

Labs

• Helen Nguyen LabPI

Education

• PHD, Geography and Environmental Engineering

  Johns Hopkins University

  2005

Awards & honors

• 2006 AEESP/CH2M Hill Outstanding Dissertation Award
• 2010 NSF CAREER award
• EPA P3 (People, Prosperity and the Planet) phase I and II aw…
• ASCE-EWB Sustainable Development Award (2010)

Similar researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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• Timothy Strathmannh-61
• Benito J. Mariñash-50