Rashne Vakharia

Rashne joined the Servos Lab as an undergraduate co-op student in January 2022, where she completed multiple co-op terms working on a variety of projects. She contributed to an eDNA project surveying McKenzie Creek in collaboration with Six Nations, which included fish community surveys using backpack electrofishing, eDNA sampling, and water quality measurements. She also supported SARS-CoV-2 wastewater surveillance across Ontario and on the University of Waterloo campus, helping to track infection trends and inform public health decision-making. In addition, she worked on the analytical chemistry side of the lab, carrying out extraction and LC-MS/MS analysis of pharmaceuticals, hormones, and drugs of abuse in river water, wastewater, and fish, contributing to the generation of high-quality data for these studies.

She continued in the lab through an undergraduate research project focused on developing a chiral LC-MS/MS method for the analysis of pharmaceuticals in fish tissue. A key challenge in this work was resolving tramadol and O-desmethylvenlafaxine, two chiral compounds that can co-elute in chiral separations and are both commonly present in wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) samples. Her work improved the ability to distinguish and quantify enantiomers of contaminants in complex biological matrices. She presented this research at the Canadian Ecotoxicity Workshop (CEW) in 2024, where she was awarded 2nd place for the Arthur J. Niimi Outstanding Student Poster Presentation Award.

Rashne began her MSc in Chemistry in September 2025, co-supervised by Prof. Scott Hopkins in the Department of Chemistry. Her current research uses high-resolution mass spectrometry (LC-HRMS), including travelling wave ion mobility spectrometry (TWIMS), to support wastewater-based drug surveillance. Her work focuses on improving the identification and quantification of drugs of abuse in complex wastewater samples, helping to strengthen the reliability of wastewater-based approaches for monitoring community-level drug use. By refining analytical workflows and increasing confidence in the data generated, her research contributes to more accurate estimates of drug consumption trends, which can inform public health decision-making and support responses to emerging substance use patterns.