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.

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.  

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.  

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:

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.  

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. 

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.