Julia  Sobolik

Julia Sobolik is the 2023 Marshall Sherfield Fellow and is currently a Research Fellow in the Environmental Health Group at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. She recently completed a short-term postdoc with Dr. Juan Leon in the Hubert Department of Global Health. In Spring 2023, Julia completed her PhD in Environmental Health Sciences in the Gangarosa Department of Environmental Health at Emory University. She is a recipient of the competitive USDA NIFA Predoctoral Fellowship and is a Research Fellow with Emory's Center for Global Safe WASH  and Molecules to Mankind Doctoral Pathways Program. Her research interests are in the areas of food safety, occupational exposures, enteric and respiratory diseases, and environmental microbiology in both domestic and international settings. As part of her dissertation research, she focused on:

1. Microbial exposure assessment and risk modeling

2. Laboratory methods for pathogen detection from environmental samples

3. Field study design and sample collection.

Using applied norovirus risk modeling techniques, Julia characterized human norovirus transmission pathways and infection risk to produce consumers in a fresh produce agriculture environment. Her work focused on the impact of human behavioral interventions (e.g. hand hygiene, worker furlough) on norovirus contamination levels of raw commodities during harvest and production activities with the goal of identifying the best single and combined interventions to mitigate risk to consumers. She also investigated SARS-CoV-2 exposure pathways and infection risk among essential workers within an indoor food manufacturing setting. In this context, the objective was to assess the optimal strategies to reducing risk through PPE, engineering/built, and disinfection protocols. This work was recently expanded to characterize risks to workers associated with contacting contaminated surfaces (fomites) under cold-chain conditions. In the laboratory, Julia focused on evaluating methods for isolating and assessing the infectivity of norovirus from complex environmental matrices (fresh produce rinses, farmworker hands, irrigation water). Recently Julia is focusing on characterizing norovirus prevalence among farmworkers and exploring transmission pathways from hands to produce using matched hand rinse samples.