We had a great meeting today on the UMass Amherst campus. Congratulations to everyone on a successful four years of NEWVEC. Left to right: Me, Tom Mather, Andrew Lover and Neeta Connally. Looking forward to year 5!

This paper describes a New England Wide survey to understand attitudes and prevalence of peridomestic vector control across New England, and to identify factors associated with self-reported residential vector control uptake. Congratulations Fatma, Johanna and Andrew!

Congratulations to Maya for winning the Biology award and Michael on his graduation. Thanks Samantha, Toby, Maya and Michael for all of your hard work this year in the lab!

Another poster presentation for Maya and Samantha, this time at the Vermont Biomedical Research Network Career Day. Thanks to Robert Franklin and Dr. Andrea Corcoran for the photos!

While attending the Entomology meeting, we took a quick trip to Lester Park to check out 490 million year old fossils of Stromatolites, structures created by cyanobacteria (embedded in the black rocks)!

Maya and Samantha delivered a poster presentation at the Entomological Society of America's annual meeting in Saratoga Springs, NY (and did an amazing job!). The poster was titled "Operation BOOT&S: Borrelia burgdorferi OspC Variants Over Time & Space". Here they are with their poster and with Fran Tick, a friendly blacklegged tick who infected the conference with joy (thanks to Neeta Connally for the photo).

I delivered a research talk titled "Associations between understory plant community composition and blacklegged tick populations in southern Vermont forests", describing our ongoing study into the role of invasive plant species in maintaining blacklegged ticks and pathogen transmission in Rutland county, Vermont. Kristen Ross, a Biology professor on the VTSU Castleton campus, was a co-author on this talk.

Today our Cell Biology class (BIO-3130) visited the Proteomics Lab of the Vermont Biomedical Research Network (VBRN) to learn about protein sequencing. Earlier in the semester the class extracted proteins from black-legged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) and submitted our purified protein samples for analysis. Thanks to Dr. Wai Lam and Sydney Cohn-Guthrie for the tour of the lab, explaining how protein sequencing works and for some inspiring stories!

Today I delivered a presentation at ESA's Annual Meeting in Portland, OR on our research into the role of invasive plant species in tick-borne disease in Vermont. This presentation was part of a Symposium titled "Invasive Plants and Public Health: Unraveling the Connections to Vector-Borne Diseases", organized by Dr. Brian Allan of the University of Illinois.

Figure 1. Detection of PCR amplification products by agarose gel electrophoresis (left), DETECTR using a fluorescence plate reader (middle) and DETECTR using lateral flow test strips (right). The same eight samples were tested by each method.