Laura Bashor, who graduated from Middlebury in 2017 and worked for this lab in the 2016 summer, is the coauthor of a recent paper on how the blacklegged tick blood meal host affects the ticks bacterial microbiome. It is a very cool paper whose results may have implications for identifying the larval blood-meal species of questing nymphal blacklegged ticks. This would have tremendous ecological and epidemiological consequences. Laura contributed to this research while working as a lab tech in Bill Landesman’s lab at Green Mountain College. Congrats to Laura and Bill on the great publication.