Dr. Kurunthachalam Kannan of the Wadsworth Center’s Division of Environmental Health Sciences (DEHS) serves on the working group of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to evaluate the carcinogenicity of butyl benzyl phthalate (BBzP), dibutyl phthalate (DBP), and diisononyl phthalate (DINP).  

The New York State was the first state to initiate newborn screening for Krabbe disease thanks to the Newborn Screening Program at the Wadsworth Center. Krabbe disease is a rare and often fatal leukodystrophy affecting the white matter of the brain and the central and peripheral nervous systems. 

Dr. Siân Owen, a Principal Investigator and Research Scientist at the Wadsworth Center, has been awarded a highly competitive five-year, $1.97 million Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

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.