The Stadler Research Group

The Stadler Lab is dedicated to advancing safe, sustainable, and resilient water systems through innovative research and technology, with the goal of safeguarding both human and environmental health.

Meet the Team

Our team conducts cutting-edge research primarily in: (1) wastewater-based epidemiology for monitoring and mitigating the spread of infectious diseases, and (2) horizontal gene transfer in environmental microbial communities. We develop and apply knowledge from environmental microbiology, microbial ecology, synthetic biology, metagenomics, and process engineering to protect human and ecological health.

Meet the team

April 2025

Rice researchers partnering with Houston Health Department on wastewater surveillance to stay ahead of measles outbreak: Our wastewater monitoring team developed novel detection tools for measles which can distinguish between wild-type and vaccine-derived measles strains, enabling accurate detection and response to rising measles cases amid declining vaccination rates in Texas.

March 2025

Thrilled to share our recent publication in Nature Biotechnology where we developed a synthetic biology tool for tracking gene transfer in microbial communities! We applied it to study plasmid transfer and host range in a wastewater microbiome. Awesome collaboration with James Chappell and Jonathan Silberg and a team of incredible students!

February 2025

Congrats to Priyanka Ali, PhD, our recent lab PhD graduate, on publishing another chapter of her thesis! This chapter provides practical insights on the impact of different biofilm scouring strategies on nitrogen removal performance of a pilot-scale Membrane‐aerated biofilm reactors (MABRs) operated in Houston, TX.

January 2025

Congrats to Tessa Crosby on successfully defending her PhD dissertation on January 14th! Her research focused on advancing genetic bioaugmentation for PAH bioremediation in contaminated soils by exploring plasmid-host interactions, biological synergy, and selective pressures affecting gene transfer and stability. The findings from her work contribute new insights and tools to enhance environmental engineering strategies for soil PAH remediation.