Orin Shanks

US Environmental Protection Agency

Orin Shanks is a geneticist at the United States Environmental Protection Agency in the Office of Research and Development. Dr. Shanks’s research focuses on applied environmental microbiology with an emphasis on the identification of fecal pollution in ambient waters.

His work includes extensive laboratory-based research designed to develop and evaluate molecular detection methods with subsequent application of these methods in field-based investigations. He holds a Ph.D. in the field of genetics from Oregon State University. In the past three years, he has published more than 15 peer-reviewed manuscripts on the application of PCR-based methods for environmental microbiology. Dr. Shanks’s current research projects involve improving environmental detection methods for host-associated Bacteroidales genetic markers of fecal pollution by integrating real-time quantitative PCR, biostatistics, geographic information system data, and pyrosequencing. He is also participating in three epidemiology studies in collaboration with the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project and the School of Public Health, University of California to investigate links between the detection of human-associated genetic markers of fecal pollution and public health risk. In addition, his research group is characterizing the fate and transport of general fecal indicators, pathogens, and host-associated genetic markers of fecal pollution from several agricultural facilities in collaboration with the USDA and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Clarkson University.