Elena Tiis is a Master’s student in Ecotoxicology and Environmental Management at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Vienna. She received an Austrian Marshall Plan scholarship to spend 4 months, April-July 2024, as a visiting scholar at the Brown lab. Together with Megan Lott and Abby Boyer and with the assistance of the Mass Spectrometry Facility at the Chemistry Department of UNC, we developed a method for the analysis of cortisol and cortisone in wastewater samples. Our research involved looking at the possibility of applying wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE), which usually focuses on viral residue or agents of infectious disease, to the monitoring of glucocorticoid hormones, and by extension to the potential to monitor stress response at a population level.