Wastewater Bioreactors using Spent Mushroom Substrate

I am using a waste product from the mushroom farming industry, spent mushroom substrate, to culture and grow microbial communities that clean domestic wastewater. To perform these experiments, it involves frequent trips to the Amherst Wastewater Treatment Facility to collect wastewater, maintaining and operating bioreactors, learning some microbial culturing and molecular techniques, and performing some large dataset analysis in RStudio. Because of the multifaceted nature of this, you can discuss with me best ways to engage with this project to suit your learning goals from 1) engineering- maintaining reactors and running smaller microbial kinetics experiments 2) microbiology- culturing, DNA extraction, qPCR, and some fluorescent microscopy work and 3) bioinformatics- learning how to use RStudio to perform statistical analysis of a dataset (this won't be until the end of the semester).