a career in a science related field. It also gives us a chance to
educate families on the importance of good hygiene and the
microbial world around us.
Presenter: Jamie Yeadon-Fabohun, Indiana State Department
of Health Laboratories, Indianapolis, IN, [email protected]
What Can a Postdoctoral Fellow Do For Your Public Health
Laboratory? Examples from Two Postdocs at the New York
City Public Health Lab
S. LaVoie, C. Harrison and J. Rakeman, New York City Public Health
Laboratory
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene Public
Health Laboratory (PHL) began a two year postdoctoral fellowship
program in the fall of 2016 and is currently hosting its second and
third fellows. This program is designed to address the national
shortage of qualified individuals needed to fulfill future leadership
roles at public health laboratories. The first year of the fellowship is
structured around rotations through all laboratory sections at PHL
and hospital clinical laboratories in order to gain experience and
technical skills in each area of the lab. Fellows are also expected
to take on leadership projects of interest that address lab needs
during rotations and more significant leadership roles in the second
year in order to gain laboratory management experience. These
projects allow fellows to learn laboratory operations and regulations,
while gaining valuable experience working with laboratory staff,
quality management, biosafety officers, laboratory information
management systems, financial management, and public health
collaborators outside of PHL.
Some of the projects currently being worked on by PHL fellows
involve validation and implementation of new assays, updating
current laboratory workflows to improve efficiency and safety,
reviewing laboratory data to assess best practices, and participating
in responses to public health emergencies. New assays being
validated at PHL include detection of active botulinum neurotoxin
direct from human specimen using MALDI-TOF MS, Mycobacteria
species identification using MALDI-TOF MS, and the Qiagen
QuantiFERON-TB Gold Plus assay using the Dynex Agility automated
platform for latent tuberculosis infection screening. In addition to
validations, new workflows are being implemented into the general
bacteriology laboratory to improve specimen processing efficiency
and select agent rule-out screening of isolates before proceeding
to identification workup to improve lab safety. The fellows are
also reviewing laboratory data to look for ways to optimize TB lab
workflows and investigating incidence of discrepant results between
conventional biochemical methods and MALDI-TOF MS identification
in the general bacteriology lab to determine best practices for
reporting and potential effects on treatment outcomes as a result.
The goal of this poster is to provide an overview of projects taken
on by the two PHL postdoc fellows and to invite discussion and
feedback on these projects and the fellowship program overall.
Presenter: Stephen LaVoie, New York City Public Health Laboratory,
New York, NY, [email protected]
PublicHealthLabs
@APHL
APHL.org
Summer 2019 LAB MATTERS
85