Even as a doctoral student, Baylor associate biology professor Dr. Jason Pitts wrote off the danger of mosquitoes — just as most people do. Although for over a decade the Center for Disease Control has promoted the pest as the world’s deadliest animal due to its ability to transmit diseases, it’s more commonly associated with its short-lived, itchy bite than its extraordinarily high fatality count.
It wasn’t until he joined the Zwiebel Lab at Vanderbilt University (a lab dedicated to the molecular genetics and neurobiology of smell in mosquitoes) as a lab manager that Pitts was introduced to mosquito biology, vector-borne diseases, and the danger behind nature’s most annoying pest.
“I just became completely fascinated by mosquitoes and vector-borne disease as a human problem,” Pitts said. “I really just became entrenched in that area of research and decided that it was going to be my career direction.”
Pitts’ passion for studying the insect began with an interest in the transmission of malaria, a life-threatening disease spread by mosquitoes that kills some 610,000 people primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa each year. The disease disproportionately affects certain populations based on geography and socioeconomic status: according to the World Health Organization, nearly one third of the world’s deaths due to malaria occur in Nigeria, while the CDC reports the United States averages nearly seven deaths per year.
“The impact of malaria on human flourishing across the globe was so profound — and still is — that I really felt called to study that and to try to understand as much about the mosquito as I could,” Pitts said.
After receiving his Ph.D. and serving as a faculty member at Vanderbilt, Pitts searched for an opportunity to branch out on his own, and the opportunity to work at Baylor University fell into his lap. After interviewing and touring with his family, Pitts fell in love with the Baylor community, the opportunity the school offered as a university vying for R1 status, and the idea of asking unexplored questions in vector biology.
“That was one of the unique aspects of the research that I was proposing to bring here — that it was something that could be used to promote human flourishing, that studied a global health problem, and the idea we were using the tools of microbiology to study how mosquitoes and other insects sense chemical cues,” Pitts said.
At Baylor, Pitts created the Arthropod Sensory Biology & Neuroethology Laboratory, with his team of undergraduate, graduate, post-baccalaureate, and post-doctoral researchers following the yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti) and investigating how mosquitoes use their senses to guide their behavior how mosquitoes use the chemical information in the world around them to survive and reproduce.
Toward the beginning of Pitts’ career, much less was known about how mosquitoes’ chemical receptors worked, and Pitts attributes his timing in the field to simply being at the right place at the right time.
For example, mosquitoes find food, mates, and hosts largely by using smell, specialized proteins called chemoreceptors on their antennae, and other sensory organs. By asking about and identifying the genes that code for those receptors and comparing which ones are active in males versus females, Pitts and his colleagues began to understand how each sex detects the chemical signals around it, and why they respond differently.
“Once we discovered the genes that allowed mosquitoes, both sexes, to find resources, we became really interested in the question of blood feeding,” Pitts said. “That’s been the focus of the kinds of research that we did at Vanderbilt and now here at Baylor as well.”
Through topics ranging from the study of mosquitoes’ anatomical structures to how environmental chemical cues are transmitted into the brain, Pitts’ lab at Baylor has asked countless questions about the yellow fever mosquito. The lab hopes to understand the spread of arboviruses, such as dengue, Zika, West Nile, and yellow fever.
“There are still, of course, a huge number of questions that remain unresolved, but we’ve made strides, and that’s what we’ll continue to do with the ultimate goal of not only learning as much as we can about these mosquito vectors of disease, but somehow using that information to block the transmission of human pathogens,” Pitts said.
Dhivya Rajamanickam, a doctoral student in Pitts’ lab, conducted seasonal studies between 2023 and 2025, visiting Waco’s Cameron Park Zoo every day from May to November to collect data. By using different types of traps to identify mosquito species and determine which animals they fed on, the study aimed to understand how mosquitoes interact with zoo animals, local wildlife, zoo employees, and visitors, connecting these hosts through disease-transmission cycles.
“When you look at the history of the United States, the first West Nile outbreak of 1999 was identified at the Bronx Zoo, New York,” Rajamanickam said. “That happened in the wild birds and then it was transmitted to all the captive birds inside the zoo, and then it spilled over to the community.”
With a variety of readily available blood meals and still-water habitats to function as breeding grounds, Zoos provide the perfect habitat for mosquitoes to thrive in. If mosquitoes are provided captive, ready-to-eat hosts, they tend to stay within the safety of the habitat rather than branch out to find different hosts to feed on.
“Mosquitoes make their habitats there and breed inside the zoo very easily, and they can immediately emerge and feed on animals around the zoo,” Rajamanickam said.
In fact, some mosquitoes within the zoo have a preference for which hosts they feed on. Rajamanickam found multiple examples of mosquitoes who fed on specific hosts or went out of their way to feed on hosts, even though they were difficult to access within the zoo.
“They are so fond of particular host species, so hundreds of them will specifically go and feed on them, and there are specific reasons behind this based on their habitat preferences and also their behavioral activities,” Rajamanickam said.
For Rajamanickam, the zoo is only one half of the research. The mosquitoes she collects there eventually make their way back to Baylor, where the work shifts from observing mosquitoes in their natural environment to examining them under a microscope and, when necessary, analyzing their DNA.
“It is really messy, and you have to take them individually and then see under the microscope to do morphological identification,” Rajamanickam said. “If you can’t identify them, you have to do a DNA extraction, and this is all only for the blood-fed mosquito.”
Each specimen carries another piece of information that can help researchers understand where mosquitoes are feeding and how they interact with the animals around them. The process is repetitive and difficult, and the field work doesn’t stop for the weather, but Rajamanickam is grateful to have the opportunity to go out into the field and conduct her research.
“It’s a huge process,’ Rajamanikam said. “It’s time consuming, but I’m so happy that my work is balanced between field work and molecular work because going outside and seeing the real-world implications of your research is very important.”
For Rajamanickam, the work offers a chance to see the questions she studies in the laboratory play out in the field. For undergraduate researcher Manav Kapadia that same connection has become one of the most rewarding parts of the experience.
“It definitely takes a little bit of learning, and a little bit of time to get used to working in a lab,” said Kapadia, who learned about the lab after taking Pitts’ biology classes. “It’s a completely different environment from school, but it’s been really rewarding.”
Pitts attributes the lab’s success to great students and lab personnel like Rajamanickam and Kapadia, who are motivated about what they do and put the lab’s guiding questions into action. Although the turnover rate is high in academic labs, institutional knowledge and growth are key values of the lab.
The lab’s mission continuously draws back to Pitts’ passion to benefit the greater good, with the hopes that the research the lab conducts potentially improves human flourishing overall.
“I wish people understood how great the impact of mosquito-borne illness around the world is,” Pitts said. “Mosquito-borne illness has an outsized impact on the lives of the people around the world.”
Both Kapadia and Rajamanickam echoed Pitt’s sentiment, as the pair both have family living in countries where mosquito borne illnesses continue to impact everyday life.
Rajamanickam, who is from Sri Lanka, originally began studying mosquitos in a collaborative public health and entomology research project. In Sri Lanka, mosquito-borne illness continues to be a leading problem, with thousands contracting illnesses from mosquitoes this year alone.
Kapadia, who has family in India and Africa echoed a similar sentiment, stating that his personal investment in the research is another aspect of what attracted him to it.
“In each of those places, vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue virus are a really big problem,” Kapadia said. “I’ve had family members that have had some of these illnesses, and mosquitoes kill probably the most people out of any animal in the world, so I think controlling them is very important.”
For the researchers in the Pitts lab, that concern extends beyond understanding mosquitoes for the sake of understanding them. Their work is rooted in the hope that learning more about how mosquitoes behave can help researchers stay ahead of the diseases they carry.
“I think we have a responsibility to work toward the betterment of the lives of other people,” Rajamanickam said. “And if we’re not out in front of this and learning more about the mosquito vectors, then we’ll be behind when they do come.”
