Posted 1/21/25 | Written by Bob Proehl

Lauren Singh was interested in tickborne diseases before she applied to Cornell Public Health. “I remember coming across Dr. Goodman’s lab and her work with ticks while researching different public health programs,” she says, “and it immediately caught my attention.” Singh joined the lab this summer and began working on an effort known as the New York State Tick Blitz.

Supported by the Northeast Regional Center for Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases (NEVBD) and USDA, the goal of the Tick Blitz is to identify and track the expansion of different tick species throughout the state due to climate change and urbanization. The project is led by Dr. Laura Harrington, Dr. Laura Goodman, and Dr. Ana Bento, and relies on a widespread, concerted effort—or a ‘blitz’—where community members gather tick samples during a two-week period in June. With support from a Cornell Public Health Atkinson Impact Award, this year the focus of collection and outreach efforts was rural and indigenous communities for which almost no information is available. Once collected, samples were mailed to Cornell’s Harrington lab where species were identified and mapped by Aine Lehane, then handed off to the Goodman lab, where Singh and MPH alumna Xiyu Wang ’24 work as part of the lab’s Tick Team to trace the spread of pathogens.

Wang is focused on co-infections with diseases that are often misdiagnosed and treated as Lyme disease. “I’m trying to determine what pathogens are carried by ticks provided by our citizen science volunteers,” adds Wang. “The healthcare system is mainly treating Lyme disease, but there are other tick-borne diseases we need to pay attention to, like anaplasmosis & babesiosis.”

Since the State Health Department already has strong surveillance programs in place for the blacklegged tick, which is known to carry Lyme disease, this year’s Blitz focused on the Asian Longhorned tick and the Lone Star tick, which have become prevalent in southern counties but have not made much headway into upstate New York—at least, not yet.

“As a public health student and practitioner, I’m drawn to this project because tick-borne diseases are on the rise in New York due to growing tick populations, warming temperatures, and increasing humidity,” says Singh. Using samples collected by Tick Blitz volunteers, Singh is now investigating the possibility that West Nile virus, long considered an exclusively mosquito-borne pathogen, may also be carried by ticks.

Climate change is expanding the range of different ticks, through changes in temperature, rainfall, and landscapes. Warmer winters also allow opportunities for “overwintering,” when ticks remain active year-round and are more likely to acquire infections. “Longhorned ticks are the stuff of nightmares,” says Dr. Goodman, Assistant Professor and Chief of the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Concentration for Cornell Public Health. “The good thing right now is that they have relatively few pathogens, but they do reproduce very quickly, without the need for males, and their numbers can just explode.”

Although Singh and Wang are working mainly at the lab bench for this project, they understand the importance of connecting their research to the outside world. “It’s exciting to report our findings to public health agencies, knowing they can use this data to improve people’s lives,” says Wang.

“Working on the Tick Blitz made me appreciate the value of large-scale, community-driven research,” adds Singh, whose research on ticks is part of her work towards completing her MPH degree on an accelerated schedule. “It fosters collaboration between scientists and the public and has the potential to significantly impact population health”