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Ben Yaffe, 42, of San Francisco has had a lot of interesting jobs. From designing robots that perform surgery to developing balloons that bring the internet to remote areas, the mechanical engineer has been involved in some intense challenges.

Most recently, he’s been working on monitoring wastewater to pinpoint which illnesses are spreading across the U.S., including Covid-19, rotavirus, Hepatitis A and bird flu. In addition to that, he and his wife have a newborn baby and sometimes even makes his own bagels.

J. spoke to Yaffe, who is the head of special projects at Verily, Google’s life-sciences research arm, about his work.

J.: How does this project work? How can you look at wastewater to find out how many people are sick?

Ben Yaffe: We are not tracking the actual pathogens in wastewater. We are tracking evidence that people in the sewersheds, represented by that poop water, have whatever disease it is that we’re looking for.

[When the pandemic started in 2020,] Covid was the obvious one to scale. We worked with Stanford and with some philanthropic money to build out a national program called WastewaterSCAN that is run by Stanford and Emory. We are the lab services provider and operations provider.

It covers about 14% of the U.S. population and covers 14 different disease targets that are changing on a month-by-month or quarterly basis as the diseases in the population change.

It was not truly understood [before Covid] that respiratory disease could be tracked through wastewater. That was largely done with stomach-related diseases because the stomach-to-butt distance is closer than the lung-to-butt pathway.

Now we were recently able to track, with the CDC’s cooperation, a bird flu outbreak, an H5N1 influenza outbreak, in Texas that led them to realize that it wasn’t just cattle farms that were spreading H5N1, but also raw-milk processing plants.

I think there’s a lot more to do in wastewater. It’s a very new field.

How did you end up in this field?

I started doing work for Google X [its innovation lab in 2014] in Mountain View. I started as a mechanical engineer by background. I was in a group that was doing medical device development for autonomous robotic surgery. 

I went back out into the real world, then came back into the fold. The life sciences programs from Google X had been coalesced into a program called Verily, which became an independent company. Then we started working with the California Department of Public Health, at the request of the governor’s office, to launch the first public Covid drive-through test site.

That seems like a switch!

One of the directors here called me to say, “Hey, you used to do search and rescue. Do you want to physically build the Covid site over the weekend so that it can open on Monday and then you can go back to your job?” And I said yes because my weekend was free.

We went to Home Depot and bought a bunch of cones and tape and tables and pop-up tents and wrote a study plan and rented some walkie-talkies and came up with job roles for the day, and then rehearsed it on Sunday.

We also simultaneously opened one in Santa Clara County, and then the governor’s office said, “That’s great. Can we contract with you to launch 40 more of them?” And thus that became my job.

Around 2022, I came off of that project and moved into pathogen monitoring via wastewater.

Search and rescue? How did that come about?

I got involved in search and rescue with a group called Bay Area Mountain Rescue Unit, which is part of San Mateo Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services. I had just moved out here and didn’t know too many people and wanted to meet other people who liked playing in the woods.

I found a mountain rescue team that was a collection of nerds, largely based out of Stanford or focused around Stanford, and found that it was an outdoor skill that we could spend a lot of time practicing. And when we did it well, we got to do things like return lost kids to their parents.

So it’s not something you grew up with. Where are you from?

I grew up in New York City. I grew up going to Hebrew school at Temple Shaaray Tefila and was the communications officer of our NFTY youth group. 

I didn’t really play in the woods much until going to summer camp. Like a good Jewish boy from Manhattan, I went to Jewish summer camp in upstate New York and then worked there and ran the outdoors program for a couple of years.

For what I do now, that was a more formative experience than most of the engineering learning that I’ve done. Especially with search and rescue, a lot of it is seeing a bigger picture and having the confidence to declare what the plan is, even if it’s not the perfect plan. Then having the ability to explain that to a group with enough confidence that they believe you and start doing the thing, so that you can then gather more information, refine the plan and communicate that.

And that’s very much a summer camp counselor skill.