Scholars@Duke
Jeseth Delgado Vela

Jeseth Delgado Vela

Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Civil and Environmental Engineering
jeseth.delgadovela@duke.edu
Wilkinson 203, Box 90287, Durham, NC 27708
121 Hudson Hall, Durham, NC 27708

Scholarly Works - Journal articles

Assessing resistome host range across water reclamation in three geographically distinct communities using Hi-C sequencing.

Journal article Applied and environmental microbiology · July 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 Cite

Quantifying 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 Cite

Assessing normalization methods in wastewater based epidemiology: a systematic review

Journal article Environmental Science Water Research and Technology · May 1, 2026 Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has emerged as a powerful tool for monitoring community level infectious disease trends. However, there is a lack of consistent normalization and control practices across studies that limits data interpretability and com ... Full text Open Access Cite

Data-Driven Framework to Quantify Nitrogen Process Resilience at Wastewater Treatment Plants

Journal article ACS Es and T Water · February 13, 2026 Wastewater treatment plants are routinely and increasingly impacted by abnormal influent flow variations, driven by extreme weather and aging infrastructure. This study introduces a data-driven framework that integrates statistical process control (SPC) wi ... Full text Cite

Charting the future of wastewater-based epidemiology for vector-borne diseases: opportunities, challenges, and climate-driven needs

Journal article Environmental Science Water Research and Technology · February 1, 2026 Vector-borne diseases (VBDs) pose a growing public health threat globally, driven by climate change, urbanization, and increasing human mobility. Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), which has proven valuable for monitoring enteric and respiratory pathogen ... Full text Open Access Cite

Optimizing models for the prediction of one step ahead extreme flows to wastewater treatment plants using different synthetic sampling methods.

Journal article Journal of environmental management · September 2025 High-flow events that significantly impact Water Resource Recovery Facility (WRRF) operations are rare, but accurately predicting these flows could improve treatment operations. Data-driven modeling approaches could be used; however, high flow events that ... Full text Open Access Cite

Advancing Wastewater-Based Epidemiology through Curricular Innovation

Journal article ACS Es and T Water · August 8, 2025 Full text Cite

Modeling the Resilience Performance of Houston's Wastewater Treatment Plant under Wet Weather Conditions

Journal article Journal of Sustainable Water in the Built Environment · May 1, 2025 With increasing severity of wet weather events due to a changing climate, many municipal wastewater treatment plants are grappling with challenges in maintaining effective flow and effluent management. Compounded by aging wastewater infrastructure, it is i ... Full text Cite

Evaluation of biofilm scouring methods on the nitrification efficiency in a pilot-scale membrane-aerated biofilm reactor

Journal article Water Environment Research · February 27, 2025 Membrane-aerated biofilm reactors (MABRs) are being increasingly being implemented at full-scale for domestic wastewater treatment and effective biofilm control is critical to their performance. This study investigated the impact of three biofilm scouring ... Full text Link to item Cite

Resilience in Function, Microbial Community Structure, and Nitrifier Composition of Bench-Scale Biofilm Reactors during Wet Weather Disturbances

Journal article ACS Es and T Water · February 14, 2025 Wet weather events, such as hurricanes and tropical storms, are on the rise globally due to climate change. Activated sludge systems are vulnerable to wet weather, as hydraulic overloading can cause a washout of biomass. Biofilm-based treatment technologie ... Full text Cite

Phage phylogeny, molecular signaling, and auxiliary antimicrobial resistance in aerobic and anaerobic membrane bioreactors.

Journal article Water research · June 2024 Phage emit communication signals that inform their lytic and lysogenic life cycles. However, little is known regarding the abundance and diversity of the genes associated with phage communication systems in wastewater treatment microbial communities. This ... Full text Cite

Wastewater surveillance for bacterial targets: current challenges and future goals.

Journal article Applied and environmental microbiology · January 2024 Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) expanded rapidly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the public health emergency has ended, researchers and practitioners are looking to shift the focus of existing wastewater surveillance programs to other targets, ... Full text Open Access Cite

Metagenomic Analysis of the Antibiotic Resistance Risk between an Aerobic and Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactor

Journal article ACS Es and T Water · July 14, 2023 Membrane bioreactors are advanced treatment technologies that, compared to conventional treatment processes, are expected to reduce antibiotic resistance spread in the environment due to their superior biomass retention. In this study, metagenomic sequenci ... Full text Cite

Emerging investigator series: the role of phage lifestyle in wastewater microbial community structures and functions: insights into diverse microbial environments

Journal article Environmental Science Water Research and Technology · June 2, 2023 For over a century, environmental engineers have attempted to control the prokaryotic community biological wastewater treatment processes, but there is growing interest in both understanding and harnessing the activity of phages in wastewater bioprocesses. ... Full text Open Access Cite

Innovations in Process Engineering.

Journal article Water environment research : a research publication of the Water Environment Federation · May 2023 Full text Cite

Robustness of partial denitrification-anammox (PdNA) in filters with methanol and glycerol as carbon sources

Journal article Environmental Science Water Research and Technology · January 24, 2023 Partial denitrification-anammox (PdNA) has a significant application potential for retrofitting plants for more intensified and cost-effective nitrogen removal. Therefore, demonstrating the reliability and robustness of PdNA in polishing filters will advan ... Full text Cite

Integrated Modeling and Lab-Scale Investigations Demonstrate the Impact of Sulfide on a Membrane Aerated Biofilm Reactor

Journal article ACS Es and T Water · December 9, 2022 An emerging innovation in the wastewater treatment field is the application of membrane aerated biofilm reactors (MABRs) as low-energy and small-footprint nitrogen removal technologies. MABRs use membranes supplied with oxygen to grow mixed-redox counter-d ... Full text Cite

Comparing Rates of Change in SARS-CoV-2 Wastewater Load and Clinical Cases in 19 Sewersheds Across Four Major Metropolitan Areas in the United States

Journal article ACS Es and T Water · November 11, 2022 There is no standard approach to interoperate the multiple SARS-CoV-2 wastewater surveillance data sets generated during the pandemic. We tested several data processing approaches on wastewater surveillance data sets generated from 19 sewersheds across fou ... Full text Cite

Erratum: Media selection for anammox-based polishing filters: Balancing anammox enrichment and retention with filtration function.

Journal article Water environment research : a research publication of the Water Environment Federation · June 2022 Full text Cite

Mainstream partial denitrification-anammox in sand and expanded clay deep-bed polishing filters under practical loading rates and backwashing conditions.

Journal article Water environment research : a research publication of the Water Environment Federation · May 2022 This study focused on evaluating the feasibility of expanded clay and sand as media types for mainstream partial denitrification-anammox (PdNA) in deep-bed single-media polishing filters under nitrogen and solids loading rates as well as backwash condition ... Full text Cite

Media selection for anammox-based polishing filters: Balancing anammox enrichment and retention with filtration function.

Journal article Water environment research : a research publication of the Water Environment Federation · May 2022 Retrofitting conventional denitrification filters into partial denitrification-anammox (PdNA)- or anammox (AnAOB)-based filters will reduce the needs for external carbon addition. The success of AnAOB-based filters depends on anammox growth and retention w ... Full text Cite

Preventing Scientific and Ethical Misuse of Wastewater Surveillance Data.

Journal article Environmental science & technology · September 2021 Full text Cite

Sulfide alters microbial functional potential in a methane and nitrogen cycling biofilm reactor.

Journal article Environmental microbiology · March 2021 Cross-feeding of metabolites between coexisting cells leads to complex and interconnected elemental cycling and microbial interactions. These relationships influence overall community function and can be altered by changes in substrate availability. Here, ... Full text Cite

Standardizing data reporting in the research community to enhance the utility of open data for SARS-CoV-2 wastewater surveillance.

Journal article Environmental science : water research & technology · January 2021 SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection in wastewater is being rapidly developed and adopted as a public health monitoring tool worldwide. With wastewater surveillance programs being implemented across many different scales and by many different stakeholders, it is criti ... Full text Open Access Cite

Sensor-mediated granular sludge reactor for nitrogen removal and reduced aeration demand using a dilute wastewater.

Journal article Water environment research : a research publication of the Water Environment Federation · July 2020 A sensor-mediated strategy was applied to a laboratory-scale granular sludge reactor (GSR) to demonstrate that energy-efficient inorganic nitrogen removal is possible with a dilute mainstream wastewater. The GSR was fed a dilute wastewater designed to simu ... Full text Open Access Cite

Current State of and Future Opportunities for Prediction in Microbiome Research: Report from the Mid-Atlantic Microbiome Meet-up in Baltimore on 9 January 2019.

Journal article mSystems · October 2019 Accurate predictions across multiple fields of microbiome research have far-reaching benefits to society, but there are few widely accepted quantitative tools to make accurate predictions about microbial communities and their functions. More discussion is ... Full text Open Access Cite

Elucidating the impact of microbial community biodiversity on pharmaceutical biotransformation during wastewater treatment.

Journal article Microbial biotechnology · November 2018 In addition to removing organics and other nutrients, the microorganisms in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) biotransform many pharmaceuticals present in wastewater. The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between pharmaceutical biot ... Full text Open Access Cite

Sulfide inhibition of nitrite oxidation in activated sludge depends on microbial community composition.

Journal article Water research · July 2018 Increasingly, technologies that use sulfide as an electron donor are being considered for nitrogen removal; however, our understanding of how sulfide affects microbial communities in nitrifying treatment processes is limited. In this study, we used batch e ... Full text Cite

Prospects for biological nitrogen removal from anaerobic effluents during mainstream wastewater treatment

Journal article Environmental Science and Technology Letters · September 8, 2015 Growing interest in the anaerobic treatment of domestic wastewater requires a parallel focus on developing downstream technologies that address nitrogen pollution, especially for treatment systems located in eutrophication-impacted watersheds. Anaerobic ef ... Full text Cite