Mohammed Rafi Arefin

As a Wall Scholar, Prof. Arefin plans to begin work on his new project examining how the relationship between waste, health, and urban governance is shifting in light of developments in fields of wastewater epidemiology and microbiology of the built environment. These established but now rapidly expanding fields have reframed sewage from a dirty incidental of urban life to an untapped river of biomedical information. From detecting polio outbreaks in the Middle East, to identifying opioid overdose hotspots in the United States and Canada, to now locating COVID-19 infections across the world, wastewater epidemiology is ushering in a dramatic shift in how waste and human health are governed in urban settings. These shifts have important but underexplored implications for governance, public health, surveillance, privacy, and urban inequality which Prof. Arefin hopes to delve into during the tenure of the Wall Scholars program.