Vogue.com, May 16, 2018

by Ginny Graves

Nine years ago, when Deanna Needell was in grad school at UC Davis, she was beset by stomach pain after a bull’s-eye rash swelled around a bug bite—a telltale sign of Lyme disease.

“Because I live in California, where Lyme is less common, none of the doctors I saw early on even mentioned it,” she says.

The lapse was costly: Needell developed migraines so impervious to medication that she often wound up in the ER….A friend finally floated the possibility of Lyme, and Needell got tested. After a diagnosis and intermittent courses of antibiotics, most of her symptoms have abated.

Now a mathematician at UCLA with a Ph.D., Needell, 37, is seeking answers in big data. Since receiving a National Science Foundation grant in 2017, she and her colleagues have come up with new ways to comb through LymeDisease.org’s registry [MyLymeData], which houses more than two million data points from 9,000 patient surveys. READ MORE.