Skip to main content

Welcome To My Summer 2024 NEVBD Internship Blog!

Thank you for taking the time to check out my blog for summer 2024, I am excited to begin to share my experiences as a Northeast Regional Center for Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases (NEVBD) and Cornell University intern. 

For a little background on myself, my name is Sam, and I am a recent graduate of Southern New Hampshire University completing a Bachelor's of Science in Biology, with a minor in Public Health. I grew up in Lewiston, Maine where I have lived the majority of my life, and now have relocated to Old Orchard Beach, Maine. While at SNHU I was also a 4-year member of the Men's Lacrosse Team. 

As I was completing my undergraduate degree I found myself incredibly fascinated in public health and epidemiological concepts which has led me to this opportunity today. In addition to having a background academically in public health, I have also taken Zoology, Invertebrate Morphology, and Field Ornithology while at SNHU. This has influenced my desire to work with and animals, but in particular, tick and mosquito species were always some of my favorites. 
 
In the fall I will begin the next step in my academic journey, as I pursue a Master of Public Health concentrating in Epidemiology at East Carolina University. Before graduate school, I am hopeful to gain the necessary knowledge and skills in vector biology throughout this program, that will open up opportunities for myself to build a career in this field. 
 
Throughout the summer I will be reporting on the experiences and skills I will have learned as a vector surveillance intern hosted at Maine Health’s Lyme and Vector Borne Disease Laboratory. Working under the advising of my primary research mentor, Charles Lubelczyk, I will participate in a variety of field/lab experiments. As I progress further through the summer I will share these activities to you all, but at this point, I know that I will be participating in collection, surveillance, and identification of tick and mosquito species that have public health and animal health relevance in Maine.
 
I am excited to start this incredible opportunity and inform those who find their way to my blog on, what is going on this week in Vector Biology!




Labels:
Location: Scarborough, ME, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 1! Surveillance, Identification, and Much More

  This post marks the completion of my first week working as an Intern at MaineHealth’s Lyme & Vector-Borne Disease Laboratory. Through this week I was exposed to a variety of methods and data preparation processes. On my first day here I was made aware that, accessioning is everything! What this boils down to is, properly matching samples collected in the field, with corresponding paperwork that will later be entered into a data base. While I have not been introduced to data entry, I have been shown the many ways that if prepared incorrectly or missing information, there may be confusion. Additionally, much of this week has been dedicated to learning how to identify species of mosquitos. I have received a dichotomous key that helps narrow down the identification from genus to species. However, what is most exciting to write about is my week as it pertains to surveillance. This post will dive into my day-to-day experiences touching on both tick and mosquito surveillance, a litt...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 2! Flagging, Flagging, and More Flagging

  Welcome back and thank you for returning to my summer internship blog, to read about what I have been busy with in week 2. If you have been following along you would have noticed that last week’s post was very long and broad detailing my day-to-day tasks. I thought that laying the groundwork in the week 1 post would be beneficial to the rest of the blog, as now I will attempt to dive deeper into some topics, while still explaining what my week was like. I hope you enjoy!   As a quick intro, this week was very heavily centered on Maine state tick surveillance. I went into detail last week on how exactly I have been participating in this, but in case you may have forgot, I have been flagging for ticks! In fact I was fortunate enough to go into the field flagging on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Each of these days I visited different sites and on Thursday I made it a double effort. This week I went to Runaround Pond in Durham, ME, Wells Reserve in Wells, ME, Range Pond in Po...
Post a Comment
Read more