Overview
Dr. Jeseth Delgado Vela joined Duke University as an Assistant Professor in August 2023. Her work focuses on leveraging environmental biotechnology to improve urban water infrastructure. She integrates molecular tools and modeling to understand how microbial community interactions and dynamics affect engineered water treatment systems. Dr. Delgado Vela earned a Ph.D. and M.S. in Environmental Engineering from the University of Michigan, and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to joining Duke, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Howard University. She was a recipient of the Ford Foundation Dissertation Award (2016), was named an Early Career Research Fellow by the Gulf Research Program (2022), and was awarded an NSF CAREER Award (2022).
An updated CV is available here: https://duke.box.com/v/jdv-cv-webversion
Current Duke Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Scholarly Works
Plasmid–Host Networks Reveal Persistent Mobile Elements Across Wastewater Treatment
Journal article Nature Communications · September 7, 2026 Full text CiteAssessing resistome host range across water reclamation in three geographically distinct communities using Hi-C sequencing.
Journal article Applied and environmental microbiology · August 2026 Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a growing problem, with annual deaths set to pass 10 million by 2050 if current trends continue. Sequencing untreated wastewater has been proposed as a strategy to understand population-level resistance, and water reclamat ... Full text Open Access CiteQuantifying Resilience and Sustainability of Different Plant Operations at a Wastewater Plant Experiencing Wet Weather
Journal article ACS Es and T Engineering · June 12, 2026 Water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs) face growing challenges maintaining stable nutrient removal under variable wet weather conditions. This study evaluates those challenges using data from a five-stage Bardenpho plant (7.5 MGD design capacity). Dyna ... Full text CiteRecent Grants
Duke University Program in Environmental Health
Inst. Training Prgm or CMEMentor · Awarded by National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences · 2019 - 2029Phage Anti-Biofouling Coatings (PhAB-Co) for marine applications
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Office of Naval Research · 2026 - 2028NSF Engineering Research Center for Precision Microbiome Engineering (PreMiEr)
ResearchInvestigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2022 - 2027View All Grants