NEVBD-TEC Summer Internship Program

 I just finished my sixth week at the Vermont Agency of Agriculture! Time has flown by, and I can't believe I only have a month left. In the past few weeks, I have been administering the Aedes Albopictus surveillance efforts through fieldwork every Tuesday and Wednesday. During my fieldwork, I am refilling and taking samples back from OVI-position and BG-GAT traps. On the other days (Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays), I am usually doing mosquito identification and organizing mosquitoes from other traps, as well as counting eggs and mosquitoes from the traps that I set up. I have also been using computer programs to track and digitize data from the Aedes Albopictus traps. In the past few weeks, mosquito numbers have definitely started to pick up, which is something we have been monitoring and is interesting to see as I compare egg and adult mosquito numbers to previous weeks and previous years. It has been such a great experience so far, and I have already learned and grown so much t...

Here's my update on Weeks 4–6 working at the Virginia Department of Health under the supervision of the Epidemiology team! Week 4: Now that I have gotten the hang of conducting tick drags and have completed multiple drags on my own at the site I selected, I had the amazing opportunity to conduct a drag with the local health department's Epidemiology lead for the county where my site is located. The experience was incredibly informative because I was able to learn more about the relationship between the VDH and local health departments, as well as how responsibilities are divided between the two. Week 5: While I have continued conducting tick drags, my mentor also set up informational sessions to teach us how to organize our data using R so our findings are easier to visualize and analyze. We also had the opportunity to meet with the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity for Prevention and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases (ELC) grant team to learn more about the grants t...

      Roughly four weeks have passed since my last post here! Most of them have gone by relatively quick and smoothly!     Our routine hasn't changed much besides the fact that our team has one new intern now, which is exciting! :D My day is still pretty evenly split in half, with my mornings being spent outside at out collection sites checking and bringing in the CDC, gravid, and DRB traps, and my afternoons looking under the microscope in the lab to identify the mosquitos we collect down to their exact species with very careful practice. I've gotten very confident in my identification skills, having to use our dichotomous key very little at this point with specific species! I get really zoned in during the process and it honestly clears my mind and I find it all quite relaxing! It's been really rewarding looking back and seeing how much I've improved since my first few weeks with the team. At the beginning of the internship, I had to often ask someone to doubl...

 The first trimester of my internship at Garrett County Health Department: Environmental Services has been very exciting and extremely insightful. On my first day I went to help give presentation to elementary school classes and learned how to sample. After that it was off to the races, going out every day and collecting ticks for testing. There were plenty of cool things to see that weren't just ticks as well, spiders, moths, butterflies, and a bunch of other bugs. With probably the coolest I found was a state endangered Baltimore Checkerspot. Which was a really, really cool sight to see. That being said that doesn't mean I was diverting time from finding ticks as well. With the two typical ticks for me to find being Ixodes scapularis and Dermacentor variabilis , those unfortunately weren't the only two species I found in the area. I had also found invasive Haemaphysalis longicornis (Asian long-horned tick)   and more notably Amblyomma americanum  (the lone star tick). U...

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve officially finished the first half of my internship with DNREC! The past few weeks have been packed with traveling across Delaware, collecting ticks, and identifying tick species. We even had an "arts and crafts" day where we made a tick bagel (an everything bagel with a few hidden ticks) and created resin ticks for outreach events to help show people just how tiny ticks really are.                                                         A photo of my team and me working on the resin ticks!        An example of our resin ticks!  I also spent time working with the mosquito crew, taking the Argo out into the marsh for mosquito surveillance and helping set up light traps. Over the course of one day, we visited fourteen different sites to place mosquito traps for...

I've just wrapped up my first three weeks interning with the St. Lawrence County Department of Health at SUNY Potsdam, working on mosquito-borne disease surveillance through NEVBD. I've settled into my role and everyday tasks quickly, and have picked up a variety of new skills over the past few weeks. My time so far has been split between mornings in the field, learning our mosquito surveillance methods, and afternoons in the lab, learning to ID and sort our captured specimens. We set and check several types of traps, each designed to capture mosquitoes engaged in a different behavior: CDC CO2 light traps, which use light and dry ice to attract host-seeking females overnight; gravid traps, which draw in egg-laying females with pans of stagnant water; and black resting boxes, which we check for mosquitoes sheltering after a blood meal. To collect from the resting boxes, we use aspirators, handheld vacuums, built for the job. A couple of photos of our aspirator and a gravid trap ...