Courtney Victor graduated with her PhD in Environmental Health Sciences from Emory University in December 2024. The Atlanta ARCS Scholar is now a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University. During her graduate program, Victor’s research focused on understanding water quality's impact on children's health in low-resource settings.

Victor graduated with her master’s in public health from Emory University and stayed on to work for Karen Levy, a lab manager at the university at the time. During her master’s program, Victor received a certificate in water, sanitation, and hygiene research (WASH).

“It stuck with me after that, and Emory has some of the most renowned WASH researchers and facilities,” Victor says. “During my time under Dr. Levy, I began working on a project in Mozambique that eventually became my dissertation research.”

The overall Mozambique study researched the effects of a piped water intervention in a low-income area.

“The intervention was installing a piped water network, which was a new upgrade to the water system in this area,” Victor says. “We looked at the gut microbiome of children who received the intervention and those who did not. We also wanted to look at additional outcomes, such as how much water the children received, the microbiological quality of the water, and other things that individually impacted the developing gut, such as enteric pathogens.”

Victor’s project was a subset of the overall study in Mozambique, and she focused on using bioinformatics to examine the gut microbiome.

“As part of my doctoral training, I learned how to process this type of genetic data and turn it into something interpretable,” Victor says. “We wanted to be able to use it to test our hypotheses about the different exposures that impact the gut microbiome during childhood, specifically the impact of water quality. We know that diet has a huge impact, but people don’t often consider drinking water as part of the diet.”

The study determined that the intervention did improve the quality of water. However, the impact on the gut microbiome was less clear.

“It tells us there are other things that these children are exposed to that were more influential on their gut microbiomes than drinking water,” Victor says. “Even though we didn’t see a solid connection between water quality and the gut microbiome, it is gratifying to see that safe water access was improved among families that received the water intervention.”

She says the water invention could increase the quality of life since these individuals would often have to walk long distances to collect water. This responsibility would normally be given to women, and Victor notes that changing this increases their mental and social well-being.

“These aren’t the results we were necessarily looking for in this study, but these are things that would be presumably improved,” Victor says. “This piece of it is really interesting and would require more study to fully understand.”

After Victor completes her fellowship at Emory, she will join the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Epidemic Intelligence Service.

“I will be in the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities on the emerging threats team for two years to work on protecting the health of pregnant women and babies,” Victor says. “The work that I’ll be doing will be in direct response to public health emergencies, and I feel like my academic education has prepared me for this role. I will have to learn how to collect data efficiently and make decisions quickly.”

The ARCS funding allowed Victor to focus on balancing her education and becoming a new mother.

“The additional stipend support from ARCS allowed me to focus on my dissertation research without having to pick up extra work,” Victor says. “Last year, the funding greatly eased the financial burden of having my daughter, Nora. It certainly was not easy balancing new motherhood and being a graduate student, but the additional funds relieved a lot of stress around paying for childcare and other necessities. I will always be incredibly grateful for that!”