Victoria Ruiz spent most of the pandemic last year teaching science to undergraduates at St. Francis College—via Zoom. In between lessons on microbiology, virology, and immunology, she watched the coronavirus ravage her neighborhood of Bensonhurst, where she grew up.
The fallout was unequal, and she spoke about this reality to her students. The experience bred a longing to be in a lab studying pathogens, and she felt an urgency to help investigate the scourge behind COVID-19.
“I felt like I needed to do something more to really support understanding the disease,” the 35-year-old said.
Three months ago, she joined the NYC Health Department’s public health lab—where she and a battalion of scientists typically use genetics to track germs like legionella, salmonella, and potential biosafety threats. But these days, their focus has intensified on the work to untangle the coronavirus variants.
Victoria Ruiz, 35, oversees a molecular diagnostic testing and extraction team at the health department's lab.
On Tuesday, the health department reported just over 7,000 cases from city residents had been sequenced, with 1,800 tied to the New York City mutant named B.1.526. This variant along with ones from South Africa (B.1.351) and Brazil (P.1) are thought to weaken our antibody defenses, though scientists expect the vaccines to still neutralize them for an undetermined amount of time thanks in part to our immune system’s T-cells. The U.K. variant (B.1.1.7) is now known to increase transmission and mortality by about 50%.
The New York and U.K. variants continue to make up about 40-60% of the cases surveyed by the city’s pandemic response lab each week. Elected officials and public health experts worry these variants might reverse the boroughs’ progress against the virus and lead to a new coronavirus surge.
Read More: As New COVID Variants Spread, Concerned NYC Officials Call For A Pause On Reopening
Ruiz leads a molecular diagnostic testing and extraction team at the city’s public health lab, where the coronavirus’s genetic material is collected from COVID-positive nose swabs to eventually be prepped, sequenced, and deposited into a global database called GISAID.
“Hopefully, I’m playing a little part in this big picture of understanding how the virus actually is able to mutate,” she said. “I'm in this to try to bring us back to some sort of normalcy—some level of normalcy.”
Ruiz is among the city’s legion of disease detectives—many millennial or Gen Z—going through the lengthy process of tracing the mutations as they emerge. Their endeavors will determine the next few months of the pandemic as the race between vaccine and variant continues to unfold.
Many have been studying these mutations since the early stanza of the pandemic, when most New Yorkers were still figuring out whether to sanitize grocery bags or go jogging with a mask on. Their job titles—lab techs, postdocs, lab managers, and supervisors—expose a diverse but overlooked culture of scientific minds, who are all fighting to keep their fellow citizens alive. Here are their stories:
Moin Chowdhury, 33, Astoria
Moin Chowdhury, 33, works as a supervisor at the NYC Health Department's Public Health Laboratory to sequence coronavirus cases.
Before starting at the public health lab two years ago, Chowdhury served in a research lab on DNA damage—a basic process commonly seen during cell replication or diseases like cancer.
But he yearned to explore a field that he felt would have a more immediate influence on public health.
“There's an actual patient at the other end of the result,” said Chowdhury, who is now a supervisor. “The work you do helps them either get the right treatment or helps us find out more about what's going on at the city level.”
Little did he know a pandemic would hit the city within a year of joining. His team preps samples for sequencing and expeditious data retrieval—which ultimately helps the bioinformaticians on the team determine how concerned people should be about particular variants and whether certain parts of the city are more affected than others.
“It’s been a very exciting and interesting experience—not one that I would have expected at all,” he said. “But I'm glad to be a part of the team here and helping out where I can.”
Marlyn Gonzalez, 48, Forest Hills
Marlyn Gonzalez, 48, oversees the sequencing of coronavirus samples after the genetic material has been prepared at the health department's lab.
Gonzalez has been at the city lab for five years, a witness through legionnaires and measles outbreaks.
Now she uses high-tech equipment to determine genome sequences of the coronavirus.
“One beauty of reading the genome of a pathogen is that it’s a technology that’s universal,” she said.
She hopes her efforts encourage young people to go into scientific fields.
“I have younger friends who tend to shy away from science because they think it is too rigorous or it’s gonna take too long,” Gonzalez said. “But I think they should not be discouraged and always seek to find a way to do science.”
Medini Annavajhala, 30, Morningside Heights
Medini Annavajhala, 30, is a postdoctoral researcher who has been undertaking genomic sequencing of coronavirus since last spring at Columbia University.
Annavajhala is a postdoctoral fellow at a Columbia University lab run by Anne-Catrin Uhlemann—the lead researcher whose team identified the New York City variant that’s been spreading since November.
The rapid rise in cases—and by extension, specimens for sequencing—since late last year has been “hectic,” Annavajhala said.
Since the first wave, she’s been analyzing these COVID samples when the team sequenced around 150 cases over three months. Now, their workload has ballooned to 100 to 200 a week.
The Uhlemann lab’s study on the new variant sparked a wave of headlines and scrutiny in February. The attention added pressure, but it was a reminder of why the research matters, Annavajhala said.
While her colleagues, who are physicians, took extra shifts treating patients, she buried her head in storing COVID samples at a biobank and running her sequencer.
“In a weird way, it was what kept me sane for the pandemic,” she said.
Anne Kelley, 22, Chelsea
Lab technician Anne Kelley, 22, prepares the genetic material of coronavirus samples in a step called incubation at a Columbia University research lab.
Kelley joined Uhlemann’s lab a month ago—her first job out of college after graduating last summer from the University of Chicago.
As a lab technician, she was hired for a new project tracking coronavirus in wastewater samples.
While in college, she thought her next step would eventually be medical school but was quickly drawn to lab research.
“People are like, ‘Really? You’re going to go into the pipetting,” Kelley said. “Pre-med is a little bit more stylish.”
But for Kelley, the lab bench is more fun.
“One month in, and they’re letting me play with the robots,” she joked, just as she sped off to place a set of samples onto a machine to heat them up. It’s a step of coronavirus sequencing prep called incubation.
Dacia Dimartino, 31, Lenox Hill
Dacia Dimartino, 31, is a molecular biologist at NYU Langone's Genome Technology Center.
Dimartino, a molecular biologist at NYU Langone’s Genome Technology Center, watched the virus shut down her home country, Italy, from afar before the city shut down.
“We were like, ‘In Italy, the situation is already a shitstorm,’” Dimartino said. “And here, we had a feeling that we weren’t doing enough.”
Adriana Heguy, the director of the lab, remembers yelling at the TV in frustration in the weeks leading up to when New York was finally placed on “PAUSE.”
Many labs shifted to remote work, but their team decided to sequence coronavirus cases voluntarily, so the lab never closed.
Dimartino hopes the nation takes a second chance to learn from Europe, where variants have led leaders in parts of Europe to shut down entire countries yet again.
“We have to act and start thinking, ‘We have variants too,’” Dimartino said.
Robert Furatero, 28, Mill Basin
Associate scientist Robert Furatero, 28, at the New York Genome Center
Furatero, a 28-year-old associate scientist at the New York Genome Center, commutes an hour by train from Mill Basin to prepare COVID-19 specimens—and others for non-coronavirus diseases—that will be sequenced at the non-profit research organization.
“The work that we’re doing with COVID, especially recently, has really bolstered my excitement,” said Furatero, who studied biochemistry and has been at the center since 2016 after he finished graduate school.
The center has sequenced around 400 cases in the past couple of weeks, a fraction of the 1,000-a-day the center could do, according to the senior vice-president of genome technologies at the center, Soren Germer.
“It's actually quite refreshing to see so many new technologies rise over just the past year,” Furatero said.
Atit Raval, 32, Clifton, New Jersey
Atit Raval, 32, prepares genetic materials from coronavirus samples to be sequenced for possible mutations.
On a recent Wednesday at the genome center, Raval spent the afternoon placing collected specimens onto glass slides called flow cells by hand.
He meticulously added reagents—chemical cocktails—onto the flow cells, which a sequencing machine would later use to read the genetic makeup of some 200 coronavirus case samples.
The Clifton, New Jersey resident, has always been intrigued by the “behind the scenes” machinations involved in the study of overlooked features of pathogens.
“We’re hearing all these things about COVID, but it’s the little details about how the virus originates, how it infects [the] body, how it multiplies in the body,” he said. “Those minor details get missed.”
Dina Manaa, 32, Astoria
Dina Manaa, 32, at her workspace in the New York Genome Center, where she's a lab manager.
Manaa, a lab manager at the genome center, handles incoming batches of swabs and makes sure they go through the proper quality control checks.
She set up the extraction workflow for the virus’s genetic material, RNA.
“We had to install biosafety cabinets, and that’s where all of the COVID work actually happens,” she said.
The attention on genomic sequencing has been encouraging as more people learn about how the technology works.
“It’s exciting to see people talk about our work,” she said. “With everything being in the spotlight now, and people are just learning more about what genomic sequencing is, and understanding the work that we do...it's, really, an exciting thing.”
Zharko Daniloski, 30, West Village
Postdoctoral fellow Zharko Daniloski, 30, at a cell culture lab in the New York Genome Center.
Born in Macedonia, Daniloski grew up in a family of scientists before moving to the U.S. for his Ph.D.
Now he is a postdoctoral fellow at the genome center, where he studies how mutations of the coronavirus influence its spread.
At the beginning of the pandemic, he worked from home for a month, eager to return to the lab to study the emerging disease.
“I couldn’t just be at home and sit and do nothing,” he said.
In February, he co-authored a study finding a mutation found in the U.K., South African, and Brazilian variants that makes the virus eight times more infectious in human cells.
“I have to use my knowledge and expertise and go back to the lab and try to really help.”
