Ben McKenzie has been awarded Outstanding Graduate Student Oral Presentation for the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences at the Auburn University Student Symposium.

Congrats again for your many presentation awards!

Today, PhD student, Kayleigh Chalkowski’s paper showing that indoor only cats are healthier and less likely to share parasites with their owners came out. Congratulations Kayleigh! Read it here:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2018.0840

Congratulations to undergraduate student, Abigail Morgan for receiving an Auburn University Undergraduate Research Fellowship! Abby has been a stellar student in the lab for the last year and this award is well-deserved! Stay tuned for some of her preliminary results on lemur parasites!

Such a pleasure being a part of the Malaria March Madness conference at the University of Florida in Gainesville this week. Beautiful venue and a great group of colleagues and friends interested in malaria prevention research and vector surveillance and control!

Master’s student Ben McKenzie presented on his statewide Aedes and arbovirus surveillance work at AVMS this week! Great work, Ben!

PhD student Kayleigh Chalkowski recently visited the new BSL2 infectious disease lab in Antananarivo, Madagascar at Mahaliana.  

Mahaliana is an organization dedicated to training the next generation of Malagasy scientists in molecular biology, advancing conservation biology and research. The word “Mahaliana” means “It all starts with a question”. Incredible initiative led by some incredible human beings who also happen to be disease ecologists. Check them out!

https://www.mahaliana.org

This week six students from the lab presented at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene meeting in New Orleans! Their projects range from tungiasis and climate change to invasive zoonotic chicken trematodes. In between talking about tungiasis in Madagascar, Nina Finley made sketch notes of the conference presentations, so if you weren’t able to attend, she shares some highlights in beautiful watercolor!

Read more about them here

See some samples here:

Janet Roberts, recent graduate from Auburn University is leading some new exciting activities for Project MEEM (Mosquitoes to Educate and Empower Malagasy kids) this field season. This year participants get to make mosquito models out of pipecleaners, use Abuzz to record mosquito wingbeats to identify species, and use aspirators to do collections! Check out this awesome video! Bzzzzzz!

We were really fortunate to have an incredible team of field technicians this summer who put together a blog and did great work. We will miss you!

Check out the team’s final thoughts and goodbye blog post here

Our summer mosquito surveillance team recently reached a major milestone. As of the end of June, our amazing team has sampled all 67 counties in the state of Alabama for Aedes larvae and adults!

Our summer research technicians have been spectacular and without their hard work we could not have met such a major goal. The summer mosquito team put together a blog to help teach citizens about mosquito ecology and to allow readers to follow along with their sampling efforts. Jaclyn Everly has made posts that can help citizens identify mosquitoes and larvae and she’s even included a quiz to test your knowledge.

If you are interested in working with us, we have some ways to get involved listed in this pamphlet- AU Mosquitoes Pamphlet Summer 18 PDF, which you are free to print and distribute.