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Thomas Maere received his master’s degree in Bioscience Engineering (forestry, soil and water management) at Ghent University (Belgium) in 2006. In 2007 he became a research assistant at the BIOMATH research unit at Ghent University, working on the model-based optimization of conventional wastewater treatment plants. His PhD mandate started in 2008 at the same department, on the subject of membrane bioreactor modelling, followed by a postdoctorate in 2012 on various membrane-related subjects. Upon moving to Quebec City (Canada) in 2014, he became a postdoctoral fellow at the modelEAU research unit at Université Laval and was mainly involved in the InnovaReg project on nutrient regulations for water resource recovery facilities.
COVID-19: wastewater-based epidemiology back-calculation using hybrid modeling methods. NSERC Alliance Grant, in collaboration with Thales Digital Solutions Inc. and Ville de Québec, to develop modeling tools to simulate the fate of COVID-19 in wastewater in order to adjust for unwanted influences in the observed trends in the viral signal measured at the entrance to wastewater treatment plants. The monitoring of the level of infection in the population served by the treatment plant under study can thus be improved and the corrected analytical results can better support crisis management. The corrections that need to be considered include the effect of wastewater dilution by rainfall and melting, the residence time in the sewer system, the effect of temperature, and the interaction with particles contained in the wastewater. The analysis of classical epidemiology data with artificial intelligence methods ("machine learning") could provide additional information to further improve the obtained viral signal.