Sarmila Tandukar is an environmental engineer from Nepal whose research bridges the gap between environmental microbiology and public health and helps to improve infectious disease preparedness, build public health infrastructure, and advance global health security. Her research mostly focuses on environmental monitoring, wastewater surveillance, and public health microbiology, with a particular focus on detecting and identifying pathogens in water systems. She tracks disease-causing microorganisms and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) genes to identify emerging health threats in wastewater, sewage, river water, and drinking water sources, using molecular techniques like genomics, metagenomics, and qPCR-based detection methods. Her work is highly interdisciplinary, bridging microbiology, environmental science, epidemiology, and public health to provide critical insights into disease transmission dynamics and waterborne health risks. Her work ensures early detection of emerging infectious diseases and mitigation techniques to reduce disease burden by producing high-resolution epidemiological data, which enables evidence-based decision-making for public health actions. Furthermore, her research provides scientific evidence for policymakers, contributing to the development of water safety regulations, wastewater treatment guidelines, and disease control strategies at both national and global levels.

Dr. Prasai Joshi’s work is dedicated to creating more environmentally friendly and economic techniques for water treatment, through the development of novel metal oxide adsorbents that can remove harmful organic and inorganic arsenic compounds efficiently from water. Her work has had a significant impact on public awareness and accountability of drinking
water suppliers in Kathmandu. Organic arsenic-based compounds are extensively used as feed additives in poultry farming, and upon entering the environment, these compounds tend to
transform into more toxic inorganic arsenic through microbial activity, which can spread to surface and ground water sources and cause serious harm to human health. Dr. Prasai Joshi has made significant contributions to understanding the interactions of the organic arsenic compounds with iron- and manganese-based adsorbents in order to optimize the adsorbents’ efficiency and prevent the arsenic compounds from reaching the environment. She has a registered patent in China for her novel method of treating organic arsenic-containing wastewater.

Dr. Prasai Joshi was born in Nepal. She received her PhD in Environmental Engineering in 2017 from the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, for which she was awarded a medal by the President of Nepal. Her work has been published in many leading international and national journals, and she also writes about science awareness in Nepal. Dr. Prasai Joshi actively mentors post-graduate students (the majority of them women) and lectures at universities. She has served as a member of several governmental committees in Nepal dedicated to public and environmental health, and is engaged in promoting drinking water quality in Nepal through public lectures and demonstrations. Dr. Prasai Joshi also organizes environmental awareness campaigns which are particularly focused on women and school teachers in remote mountainous areas of Nepal.