The Hegarty Lab’s work bridges the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Case Western Reserve University’s focus on the environment and on the planning, design and construction of infrastructure that meet the needs of modern society.

Broadly, our mission is to understand and engineer microbiomes to preserve human and environmental health. Interdisciplinary and collaborative research is essential to tackle these problems; our lab brings together expertise in engineering, microbiology, data science, chemistry, environmental science, and bioinformatics.

From left to right: Prof. Bridget Hegarty; Songchen (Lee) Li; Delphine Clatanoff; Mary Harten, Christopher Thomas

Open Science

To increase access to our work, we support sharing our research as openly as possible. This includes making our manuscripts available as preprints, publishing in open access journals, as well as sharing our sequence data and code. We believe this increases the impact of our work, by ensuring that others can build upon and learn from it. 

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

In natural microbial communities, diversity is essential to community fitness; likewise, our research communities are stronger when we embrace our diversity. We fundamentally believe that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are essential for generating cutting-edge scientific and engineering discoveries. Our lab’s ongoing DEI efforts both complement and enhance our research.