Welcome to the Schwartz Laboratory

Research activities in our laboratory focus on emerging tick-borne infectious diseases, primarily Lyme disease and human granulocytic ehrlichiosis. Projects include development of molecular diagnostics, determination of pathogen prevalence in natural tick and wildlife populations, characterization of heterogeneous populations of B. burgdorferi in nature and Lyme disease patients and mechanisms of B. burgdorferi pathogenesis. Studies conducted in our laboratory demonstrated that the infectious agent of human granulocytic ehrlichiosis was present in ticks collected from nature in 1984, a full 10 years prior to the first description of the clinical cases, and the first description of human co-infection with B. burgdorferi and the agent of HGE. Most recently, the laboratory has reported on Lyme disease risk from an individual tick bite in the six lower Hudson Valley, New York counties and the identification of a B. burgdorferi subtype that is more frequently associated with disseminated infection in early Lyme disease patients. Presently, functional genomic approaches are being employed to identify genes and proteins that are involved in B. burgdorferi pathogenesis.

The Schwartz Laboratory
Department of Microbiology and Immunology
New York Medical College
Valhalla, NY 10595