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.

I had a great time at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting in Portland, OR. I presented work I have been doing with Albert Kim of Smith College titled, “Estimating species-specific competition coefficients with a Bayesian hierarchical model of the neighborhood effect of competition on tree growth.” If you would like a copy of slides from the talk please contact me!

My student, Laura Bashor, gave a poster titled, “The effect of elevation on ecological determinants of Lyme disease risk in central Vermont.” Great work Laura! While there we met up with Bill Landesman, a fellow VT tick researcher, and some of his students.