Dr. Thomas Bartlett attended the 2026 conference for the American Society of Microbiology’s premier annual meeting held in Washington, DC, from June 3-7.

The Wadsworth Center Bacteriology Laboratory, in collaboration with the New York State Department of Health Bureau of Communicable Disease Control (BCDC), the Bureau of Community Environmental Health and Food Protection, and the Broome County Department of Public Health, is assisting in the investigation of a large foodborne outbreak of Salmonella enterica associated with the Broome County Correctional Facility.

Dr. Jiada Li of the Wadsworth Center’s Bioinformatics Core attended the 90th Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Symposium on Quantitative Biology, AI in Biology, held in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, from May 26-31, 2026. During the symposium, Dr. Li presented a poster titled “Leveraging a Fine-Tuned Vision Foundation Model for Precise Mycobacterial Cell Segmentation and Fluorescence Event Classification in Multi-Channel Time-Lapse Microscopy Images.” The work, co-authored with Tayler Farrington, Dr. Spencer Bruce, and Dr.

Scientists in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Wadsworth Center have made several important discoveries towards the development of a Lyme disease vaccine. Lyme disease is a tick-borne infection that afflicts thousands of New Yorkers each year. The disease is caused by the bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, which proliferates in skin tissues at the site of a tick bite before spreading to other organs.

Supervisory and leadership level roles in the public health laboratory have seen a generational transition as more senior staff have retired in recent years. In response, Wadsworth Center: Community. Advancement. Recruitment. Engagement. (CARE) launched the first-ever Wadsworth Center’s “Leadership Academy”. The inaugural cohort of the Leadership Academy concluded their program recently, covering topics focused on managing people and communication strategies with practical assignments throughout the year. 

In a study to be published in the Tuberculosis journal, Drs. Keith Derbyshire and Todd Gray at the Wadsworth Center’s Division of Genetics identify targets for fighting infections by a dangerous and rising pathogen.

For the second year, the Wadsworth Center hosted a table at the Albany Tulip Festival. Despite the rainy weather, the table saw steady foot traffic, discussing the Center with approximately 65 individuals. Many people were surprised to hear that their Public Health Laboratory is located in the Capital Region, and that we are celebrating 125 years of working to keep them healthy and safe! Multiple people stopped just to say “thank you” for our efforts, and one individual that, even though there is a lot of complicated health news, we were one of their most trusted sources of information.

The Wadsworth Center has been educating undergraduate students for several decades through the Research Experience for Undergraduates Program. Over the last three years we have been building on that experience to launch and expand the summer Public Health Laboratory Academy – an applied research internship experience funded in partnership with the Association of Public Health Laboratories. This year, we have 16 synchronous-track students and three asynchronous-track interns across infectious disease, environmental health, and genetics.

University at Albany PhD student Ryan Gainor was recognized for his poster presentation at the University at Albany Showcase 2026. Ryan is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences within the Center for Integrated Health Sciences and conducts research in the Division of Environmental Health Sciences at the Wadsworth Center. 

Two New York birth hospitals have been selected to partner with the Wadsworth Center as recruitment sites for BEACONSNBS (Building Evidence and Collaboration for GenOmics in Nationwide Newborn Screening), a national research study evaluating the use of genome sequencing in newborn screening.