New Faces, New Adventures! Summer 2025
Exciting New Arrivals
We welcome a PhD student and an intern to the Tisza Lab as of May 2025!
Camille Mazurek, PhD Candidate
Camille joins the lab in pursuit of her PhD, bringing several years of experience working with pathogenic viruses and crunching data using Rlang. The thing that impresses me the most is her courage to unflinchingly tackle difficult challenges. She brightens up the lab (though usually likes to work with most of the lights off), and is on her way to becoming a genomics guru.
Fun Fact: Camille’s favorite movie is Fantasia 2000
Ashleigh Crawford, Research Intern
Ashleigh is a talented intern with a passion for phages. She’s dedicated to learning bioinformatics and will contribute to phage metagenomics projects this summer.
Fun Fact: Ashleigh races sailboats! How cool is that?
The Measles Cometh
As has been reported in mulitple news outlets, West Texas has been the epicenter of a large outbreak of measles moribillivirus in early 2025. The Tisza Lab is part of TEPHI’s TexWEB wastewater virome sequencing effort, and we’ve helped keep track of measles virus in municipal wastewater as this situation has unfolded.
In January, independently of the West Texas outbreak, a small number of international travelers returned to Houston after contracting measles. The TexWEB team, via routine virome sequencing, detected measles virus (genotype B3) from wastewater samples collected before a clinical diagnosis of measles was made on these travelers. These detections were confirmed with ddPCR and reported in the academic journal AJPH. Collaborators from BCM, UT-School of Public Health, Houston Health, and Rice University contributed.
Shortly thereafter, measles virus (genotype D8) was detected repeatedly in Lubbock and El Paso, concurrent with or ahead of clinical diagnoses. These detections are reported in the public TexWEB Dashboard. Wastewater virome sequencing helps communities prepare for and manage unexpected disease outbreaks.
