Andrea Love, Ph.D. ’14 Navigates the Intersection of Science and Misinformation
Dr. Love’s Journey in Science and Public Education
When she was eight years old, Andrea Love, Ph.D. ’14, absorbed herself in some unusual reading material for a child her age. “I went to the library with my mother one day and checked out The Physician’s Guide to Arthropods of Medical Importance, she says. “It was about disease vectors that can cause all sorts of unpleasant reactions in humans. I walked around reading sections to people and I totally enjoyed making them uncomfortable.”
A child who loved roaming the woods near her Connecticut home and collecting and cataloguing the bugs she found, Dr. Love was encouraged by teachers throughout elementary and high school to explore and experiment. “They encouraged me to be my weird self,” she says. At Norwich Free Academy, she took advanced biology courses, completed independent studies, and graduated knowing that she wanted to study infectious diseases. In the honors college at Stony Brook University, she majored in biology with concentration in biochemistry and cell biology.
When the time came to choose a graduate program, she was intrigued by the Lyme disease research conducted at New York Medical College (NYMC) under the guidance of Ira Schwartz, Ph.D., former chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, now professor emeritus. “I grew up near the epicenter of Lyme disease,” she says, “I thought, ‘This is my niche.’” She immersed herself in researching Lyme—and also confronted the world of Lyme misinformation. “I knew I had a knack for scientific work,” she says, “but I also realized that I liked educating. I received exceptional training at NYMC, not only in doing and presenting research, but in how to be a good steward of science.”
Deciding that she did not want to stay in academia—“I really did not want to write grants,” she says—Dr. Love became an applications scientist for Revvity, a biotechnology company that develops tools to advance biomedical research in areas including vaccinology, virology, immunology, immunotherapy, cell and gene therapy, and therapeutic protein production. She is now their Northeast North American business director for cell assay and analysis technologies, serving as subject-matter expert for immunology, immuno-oncology, cell and gene therapy, and vaccine-related assays, and she oversees a team that works closely with leaders in academia and industry who use these tools for their research.
But she never abandoned her interest in Lyme disease and in combatting science misinformation. Now, the selfdescribed “lifelong nerd,” who read disease descriptions to anyone who would sit still long enough, has millions of people listening to her—voluntarily. With Jessica Steier, Dr.P.H., PMP, a public health scientist and former undergraduate classmate, Dr. Love launched Unbiased Science—a science communications brand that, since its inception in 2020, has garnered more than 400,000 followers across social media channels and more than one million podcast episode downloads. “When COVID-19 hit,” she says, “we were both aghast at the amount of science and medical misinformation floating around—some of it just confusing but some of it truly dangerous.”
When members of the board of the American Lyme Disease Foundation saw her work with Unbiased Science, they asked last year if she would become the foundation’s new executive director. “Of course, I said, ‘yes.’ What we learn about Lyme disease has implications for so much else in medicine,” Dr. Love says, “including the work of the immune system, the nature of zoonotic diseases, and vaccine technologies. This position gives me another great platform for public and clinical education.”
