NEVBD-TEC Summer Internship Program

 During my seventh and eighth week at the Suffolk County Arthropod Borne Disease Laboratory, I worked all around Long Island going to different county parks to collect ticks for state evaluation and testing. I have had amazing experiences traveling to different parks, I found it very interesting that some sites on different parts of the island would have different numbers of each species. I also got familiar with recognizing larval ticks, rabbit ticks, and Asian Longhorned ticks. I spent much of my time at the microscope, which I found to be my favorite part of the job. I feel fully confident in my ability to ID ticks without the use of a microscope, but if I am ever confused my colleagues are always there to help me. I also advanced my research on tick expansion into the northeast due to climate change, with a focus on northeastern areas and public health implications. I also analyzed 2026 email data to track the increase in Lone Star tick abundance, and performed more research on...

This internship has been an absolute blast so far! Since starting this internship I have grown very fascinated about ticks and not only how to control them, but what can be done to help the general public feel safer as well. Over the course of the last few weeks, we have been to multiple outreach events, ranging from five years old's in a 4-H camp to anyone at the Delaware State Fair.  While participating in outreach for younger kids, we developed a ‘Tick Bagel’ that was covered in poppy seeds and ticks to show their size comparison. The activity worked as a fun eye-spy game for kids to help get them interested in what a tick looked like, and how to identify them. We also played a fun tag game where some kids could act as a tick and others would be host animals. This allowed them to understand host-parasite relationships, and how some ticks prefer different species over others. Overall, they seemed to enjoy it and many had already known quite a bit about tick safety and identificat...

 Hi everyone! A little introduction about myself: My name is Defne Gumus and I am a rising senior at Bucknell University. I study biology on the pre-med track (and am also doing a theatre minor)! For the past 8 weeks I have spent my summer NEVBD internship with Vector Control Services at the Department of Public Health in Philadelphia. It has been an insanely insightful past 2 months and I never knew working with mosquitos could have taught me this much about field work, data collection, or working well with a team! I feel I could best explain the duties of the internship in three different categories. First, is the setting of mosquito traps (whether it be gravid or BG-sentinel), second is dipping for larval mosquito, and third is the laboratory work. I learned so much beyond these three general avenues, including how to do bacterial larvicides, handling complaints, community outreach, and even tick collection, but for the purposes of these blogs I will talk about what I spent the ...

 Weeks 3 & 4: These past two weeks I have gotten a lot of experience collecting ticks. When going out to the core sites I have gotten more comfortable being able to point out the different nymphs, the blacklegged nymphs were harder to point out but I feel like I got the hang of them now! I am still continuing to read literature to decide on a project, I have been reading a lot about climate and its impact on tick population, but I will see what I write my project on. I have also been able to sort ticks from other core sites. I’ve been really enjoying looking through and seeing the types of ticks that we find and visualize even further the tick populations present on Long Island. One of my favorite things we have done in the past week was attend a council regarding ticks. At this meeting there are all different types of people from entomologist to doctors to directors of businesses regarding tick control. This experience was very cool as I got to see how people from all fields w...

The summer has been flying by, and it's hard to believe I'm already past the halfway point of my internship! I've enjoyed strengthening my mosquito identification skills and observing how the diversity of mosquito species shifts across the season here in upstate NY. As the summer weather has heated up, we've been collecting a noticeably greater number and variety of mosquitoes. Busier traps mean longer sorting sessions and many more species to learn, but they've also helped me become faster and more confident at sorting!  One of my new favorite species to spot has been Aedes japonicus , an invasive mosquito with a distinctive pattern of white banding on its legs and silver patches on its abdomen. The bold black-and-white pattern stands out immediately under the microscope and makes the species easy to identify. I've included a photo below! While most of my time has been spent on mosquito surveillance (trapping, sorting, and identifying), we've also set aside...

  Hello fellow interns and supervisors! I am a rising Junior at St. John’s University pursuing a bachelors in biology. I couldn’t be more grateful to be afforded this opportunity through the NEVBD-TEC Summer Internship Program and look forward to sharing my experience with this side of research! One of the first things that came from this internship was an acute consciousness of weather patterns and natural cycles, as they’ve been much more involved in deciding the kind of days I have. I hadn’t realized how regulated and indoors my life was until my day to day tasks depended on being outside longer than a 10 minute walk from transportation to destination. Working with the tides, the insects, the sky, you really just have to go with the flow nature dictates day by day.   Our job as a unit is to maintain a stable control over the vectors and habitats within our county to ensure public and environmental health and safety. We surveil our areas, input the data, and devise a plan to...