The University of Miami Miller School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases, with support from the Mycoses Study Group Education and Research Consortium and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hosted a 2025 Scientific Meeting on Candida auris in Miami, Florida from June 5-6, 2025.  

The Wadsworth Center’s Newborn Screening Program published their 2024 annual report, which provides an overview of screening results for each of the mandated conditions on the New York State panel. The 2024 panel included more than 50 conditions. In 2024, 246,895 specimens from 206,728 infants were screened, corresponding to an average of nearly 1,000 specimens for 50 conditions each day (50,000 screens performed daily). A total of 1,866 infants screened positive for one of the conditions on the panel and were referred for diagnostic testing, evaluation, follow-up and treatment.

Drs. Rajendra Agrawal and Soneya Majumdar represented the Wadsworth Center at Ribosomes 2025, the Triennial Ribosome Meeting held June 22–27 in Asilomar, Pacific Grove, California.  

Wadsworth Center received the 2025 APHL Award for Excellence in Applied Research on Infectious Diseases, recognizing outstanding contributions to the field of infectious disease laboratory research, with a particular focus on public health laboratory impact. The award acknowledges the important work of public health laboratorians that bridges scientific discovery and innovation with practical application.

On June 25, 2025, Dr. Sherry Faye, Technical Director of the Wadsworth Center’s Nuclear Chemistry Laboratory (NCL), served as an invited guest speaker at the U.S. Department of Energy and American Chemical Society-sponsored Nuclear Chemistry Summer School (NCSS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.  This highly selective six-week program is designed to introduce undergraduate students to careers in nuclear science.  Dr. Faye presented an overview of the NCL’s mission and capabilities, including:

On June 25–26, the Newborn Screening Mass Spectrometry Laboratories at the Wadsworth Center hosted Dr. Naija Cottingham, a Fellow from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.  Dr. Cottingham is the first participant in this new Fellowship Program, initiated by Dr. Jaya Ganesh, Interim Program Director of the Medical Residency Training Program and Director of the Newborn Screening Inherited Metabolic Disease Specialty Care Center at Mount Sinai.  

The Wadsworth Center proudly hosted a Light Microscopy Imaging Workshop from June 9-13, 2025, focused on advancing research and collaboration in biomedical imaging.  Organized by Rich Cole and Danielle Hunt from the Center’s Advanced Light Microscopy and Image Analysis Core, the event welcomed 43 participants from institutions across the region, including the University at Albany, Albany Medical College, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Rochester, and the Neural Stem Cell Institute. 

Dr. Thomas Bartlett and Dr. Siân Owen from the Wadsworth Center’s Division of Genetics attended the 2025 Boston Bacterial Meeting (BBM) in Cambridge, MA – one of the nation’s premier microbiology conferences, drawing over 500 experts annually.  

Dr. Patrick Parsons, Director of the Division of Environmental Health Sciences at the Wadsworth Center, was invited to present at the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) Community of Practice Food Chemistry meeting.  

Read more about the Wadsworth Center's academic engagement in the Summer 2025 issue of the Association of Public Health Laboratories' Lab Matters.

The global challenge of antibiotic resistance continues to drive innovative research into bacterial growth and division. Dr. Thomas Bartlett, a newly appointed principal investigator in the Division of Genetics at the Wadsworth Center, chaired the Cell Division session at the prestigious Gordon Research Conference on Bacterial Cell Biology and Development, held in Manchester, NH. Dr.

In June 2025, the Wadsworth Center’s Division of Environmental Health Sciences (DEHS) participated in Operation Mohawk Arrow, a multiday, full-scale emergency preparedness exercise coordinated with the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Energy, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. 

  Members of the Bacteriology and Parasitology Laboratories participated in “Wellness Day” at Tesago Elementary School in Clifton Park, engaging students in an exciting and educational public health experience. The outreach team included Ashley Alderman, Kate Wahl, Ashley Marcinkiewicz, Lynn Leach, Paris Strong, John Jurczynski, Majie Foster, and John Kelly, and was led by Kara Mitchell and James Chithalen.  

A recent case from New York’s Newborn Screening Program (NBSP) highlights the essential partnership between state and county health departments in ensuring timely diagnosis and treatment for newborns with rare but serious conditions.

Raman spectroscopy, a widely used technique for qualitative chemical analysis, has taken a significant step forward into the realm of quantitative applications thanks to a new method co-developed by Dr. George Donati of the Wadsworth Center’s Division of Environmental Health Sciences, in collaboration with research partners in Brazil. 

Dr. Susan Madison-Antenucci, Chief of Bloodborne & Parasitic Diseases at the Wadsworth Center, spoke at the New York Medical College symposium titled “Vector borne Infections in the Hudson Valley – There’s More Than Just Lyme Out There.”The goal of the event was to raise awareness of the broader spectrum of tickborne diseases, supporting faster diagnosis and appropriate treatment for patients throughout the state.

Ms. Beverly Rauch, Clinical Laboratory Evaluation Program (CLEP) Director at the NYS DOH’s Wadsworth Center, delivered a featured presentation at the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Blood Banks Association of New York (BBANYS). 

The Obstacle Imagine the 35th Waste-Management and Education Research Conference (WERC), a national engineering competition, is rapidly approaching. Your team, Mycosorb Environmental, is using fungi to absorb metals from mining waters, but culture after culture gets contaminated and doesn’t grow well due to temperature and humidity issues. You finally get your mycoremediation columns up and running, and now you can’t find an instrument to identify and quantitate the metals. When you finally find one, it isn’t working!

New York State Department of Health Press Release Related links:

Five-Year Contract Enables Department to Advance Understanding of the Bacterium Causing Lyme DiseaseRead the New York State Department of Health press release.