Summertime in New England can mean getting outdoors to hike, garden, and head to the beach, but that can all come with a challenge — avoiding tick bites and tick-borne diseases like Lyme disease. Thanks to an $8 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a new initiative led by the University of New Hampshire could help provide more insight. The project is bringing together scientists from across the Granite State to launch an ambitious statewide research and education initiative focused on one of the region’s fastest-growing public health concerns: ticks and the diseases they carry and their impact on people, wildlife, outdoor recreation, and the environment.
The initiative, known as EMBEDDEd-NH (Endeavor for Multi-Omics-Based Exploration, Data-Driven Modeling, and Education in New Hampshire), comes at a critical time since New Hampshire consistently ranks among the states with the highest incidence of Lyme disease in the nation — often ranking in the top ten.
“Ticks are an issue that touches nearly every community in New Hampshire,” said Dr. David Needle, clinical professor of molecular, cellular and biomedical Sciences and senior veterinary pathologist of the New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory at UNH. “By combining cutting-edge science with statewide collaboration and education, we have an opportunity to build knowledge that benefits both our state and the broader scientific community.”
Needle is leading the four-year initiative that includes experts in the fields of genomics, ecology, and artificial intelligence, as well as an opportunity for undergraduate involvement, to better understand tick-borne disease risks. Researchers plan to investigate how ticks survive, spread, and transmit disease by using advanced genomic sequencing, microbiome analysis, environmental monitoring, ecological modeling, and machine learning. They will examine how climate, habitat, wildlife hosts, and microbial communities influence tick biology and pathogen transmission across New Hampshire’s diverse ecosystems.
The project will focus on three important tick species found in New Hampshire:
• The blacklegged tick (Ixodes scapularis), the primary vector of Lyme disease,
• The American dog tick (Dermacentor variabilis),
• The winter tick (Dermacentor albipictus), which has major impacts on moose and wildlife health.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, emergency room visits have been higher than normal in many parts of the U.S. and in April, the rate of ER visits for tick bites was the highest for that time of year since 2017. Health officials and researchers are increasingly concerned not only about established tick-borne diseases, but also about the emergence of new pathogens and the spread of additional tick species into the region.
Tick populations and tick-borne illnesses, including Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, babesiosis, Powassan virus, and other emerging infections, continue to expand across the Northeast. Recent research shows that ticks are also showing up more in cities along the East Coast, not just in wooded areas. Warmer winters, changing land use, shifting wildlife populations, and expanding human development have all contributed to rising tick encounters and disease risk.
“Ticks are more than just disease vectors,” Needle said. “They have wide roles as parasites, prey, and hosts of diverse microbes. Their varied lifecycles, wide and increasing dispersal, and status linking ecosystems and ecological scales make ticks a powerful system for studying how genomes, microbes, hosts, and environments interact in a rapidly changing world.”
The researchers, students, and community partners come from the University of New Hampshire, Keene State College, Plymouth State University, state agencies, and industry collaborators to study the ecology and evolution of ticks across New Hampshire.
The initiative also places a major emphasis on education and workforce development. Undergraduate students across the state will participate directly in research through course-based research experiences, summer research programs, internships, and fellowships. Students will gain hands-on experience in genomics, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, ecology, and data science — fields that are increasingly important to the state’s scientific and technology workforce. Along with potential scientific discoveries, EMBEDDEd-NH hopes to inspire more students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and public health.
The project builds on existing investments in New Hampshire’s research infrastructure, including UNH’s Hubbard Center for Genome Studies, statewide data science resources, and collaborations with public health and environmental agencies.
Researchers say the work of the new EMBEDDEd-NH initiative could ultimately help improve disease surveillance, inform public health responses, support wildlife management, and guide future environmental decision-making.
UNH also offers tick testing to the public through UNH Extension. The service can detect the presence of a pathogen in a tick in as little as three days. For more information go to unh.how/tick.
EMBEDDed-NH is supported by funding from the National Science Foundation’s EPSCoR E-RISE program, which supports statewide research infrastructure, workforce development, and collaborative scientific innovation in emerging research areas.
The University of New Hampshire inspires innovation and transforms lives in our state, nation and world. More than 15,000 students from 50 states and 87 countries engage with an award-winning faculty in top-ranked programs in business, engineering, law, health and human services, liberal arts and the sciences across more than 200 programs of study. A Carnegie Classification R1, land, sea and space grant institution, UNH has FY25 research expenditures of more than $188 million, to further explore and define the frontiers of our world.