NextDrop Question | Ameet Pinto

In this episode of The NextDrop Question, I speak with Ameet Pinto, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech, during the Great Lakes Water Authority Innovation Forum in Detroit.

Ameet works on the microbiology of engineered water systems, including drinking water, wastewater, microbial ecology, and the tools needed to monitor biological systems.

A lot of water conversations focus on chemicals, treatment units, and regulations. But biology is always present: in pipes, filters, biofilms, wastewater systems, and the microbial communities that can help a process work or make it harder to control.

This conversation focused on a shift that matters for the future of water monitoring.

For many years, the technical challenge was identifying which microorganisms were present. Ameet describes how advances in nucleic-acid methods, optical sensing, and portable monitoring have made that question increasingly tractable.

The harder frontier is different: can we understand what microorganisms are doing, and can we do that quickly enough to support engineering decisions?

Ameet also discusses the challenge of knowns and unknowns in complex environmental systems. Some organisms or signals are familiar. Some are expected but poorly understood. Others are true unknown unknowns: things that appear in the data, but have not been anticipated, named, or built into the model.

That is where microbial monitoring, AI, and human judgment meet.

His lab is developing low-cost, portable optical sensing platforms that can examine objects under a microscope and make predictions about what they are and how much is present. But when the system sees something unfamiliar, confidence matters. A model should not only classify an object. It should communicate how sure it is, so a human operator can decide when the data needs closer review.

This is a useful reminder that the future of water monitoring is not only more automation. It is better collaboration between sensing, data quality, AI tools, and human expertise.

A focused question. A practical takeaway. See you next time.