 I'm in the microbial ecology and water engineering specialist group of the International Water Association and our goal is to promote rational design and effective engineering of open microbial systems for the purposes of water engineering. Now what we try to do is try to connect researchers with expertise in microbiology and ecology with engineers and expertise in design of water engineering systems to try to bring them together to target some of the pressing challenges we have in the future. So one of the most exciting developments that happened over the last decade is things like DNA sequencing have become extremely inexpensive and the tools and the methods that we use to analyze them have become accessible. So for instance we can use DNA sequencing to try to understand whether specific microorganisms that help us deal with nitrogen pollution are present in the bioreactor that we are designing to remove nitrogen pollutants. On the other hand we are also trying to understand the safety of drinking water where we would have to wait for two to four days to understand whether there are pathogens in our drinking water supply. Some of these methods are now allowing us to do real-time monitoring of drinking water microorganisms. There is a lot going on in this exciting field and we are drawing from diverse disciplines from computer sciences to microbiology and integrating that water engineering.