Amy Sapkota

Dr. Sapkota is an MPower Professor of Environmental Health Sciences and the Chair of the Department of Global, Environmental, and Occupational Health (GEOH). She is also the Director of CONSERVE: A Center of Excellence at the Nexus of Sustainable Water Reuse, Food & Health, the Director of the UMD Global STEWARDS (STEM Training at the Nexus of Energy, Water Reuse and Food Systems), NSF Research Traineeship (NRT), and the Global FEWture Alliance. 

The mission of CONSERVE is to facilitate the adoption of transformative on‐farm water treatment solutions that enable the safe use of recyled irrigation water on food crops. The overarching goal of the UMD Global STEWARDS NSF NRT is for graduate trainees to become adept at working and communicating across food-energy-water (FEW) disciplines, enabling transformative discoveries that can only be realized through transdisciplinary approaches and systems-based thinking. The mission of the Global FEWture Alliance is to alleviate food, energy, and water insecurity, to advance environmental and global public health, and to bolster community resilience in a changing climate.

Dr. Sapkota received a PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, an MPH in Environmental Health Sciences from the Yale School of Public Health and a BS in Biology from the University of Maryland College Park. After completing her doctorate, she engaged in post-doctoral fellowships at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Environmental Microbial Genomics Group at Ecole Centrale de Lyon in Lyon, France. 

Several notable awards that Dr. Sapkota has received include the 2023 Woman of Influence Award, the 2022 MPower Professorship, the 2019 Leda Amick Wilson Mentoring Award, the 2018 Research and Development Award, the 2015 Jerry P. Wrenn Outstanding Service Award, and the 2012 Eric Mood New Professional Award. In 2017, she represented the Core Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program and the United States as a Fulbright Senior Researcher in Chitwan, Nepal. 

Dr. Sapkota's research interests lie in the areas of environmental microbiology, environmental microbial genomics, exposure assessment and environmental epidemiology, and she has published over 95 journal articles in these areas. Her research group evaluates the complex relationships between environmental microbial exposures and human infectious diseases, with a special focus on assessing the public health impacts associated with water reuse. 

Much of her group's work seeks to 1) characterize the microbiome of recycled water sources; 2) understand how direct and indirect exposures to these sources can impact the human microbiome and infectious disease risk; and 3) advance water treatment and reuse solutions that advance climate resilience and protect public health.

Research Interests: Microbial water quality; impacts of water reuse on environmental and public health; impacts of environmental exposures on the human microbiome and infectious disease risks

Areas of Expertise: Exposure assessment; environmental microbiology; environmental microbial genomics; environmental epidemiology