A mobile app that provides real-time, local risk information about disease-carrying arthropods took 1st Place in the 2025 ESA Antlion Pit, an innovation competition for entomology-related products and services. Here, meet Ellie Fausett, creator of Vector Guard, and learn what’s next for the app’s development. (Photo courtesy of Ellie Fausett)

At Entomology 2025 in November, ESA hosted the Antlion Pit, an innovation competition for entomology-related products and services. Five teams were selected to compete out, with “Vector Guard” earning 1st Place and a $5,000 prize to invest in advancing its product, a mobile app that gives users real-time, hyperlocal risk information about disease-carrying insects and arachnids.

Vector Guard was created by Ellie Fausett, MPH, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution at the University of California, San Diego. She works in the lab of David Holway, Ph.D., where her research focuses on ant behavior. She earned a master of public health degree in environmental health at Emory University and has gained experience developing educational material on zoonotic diseases with the Georgia Department of Public Health.

Entomology Today connected with Fausett for a Q&A to learn more about Vector Guard and its development.

Entomology Today: How did you get started on developing Vector Guard? What inspired this pursuit?

Ellie Fausett, MPH

Fausett: I was an inside child. I never got dirty, and I screamed at bugs. So the fact that I now run a mosquito and tick education app while pursuing my Ph.D. in biology with an insect focus is not lost on me.

After 18 years of avoiding going outside, I went to Emory University as a psychology major. At Emory, you need a faculty member to register you for your classes. When I met with my faculty advisor, Dr. John Wegner, we spent our entire meeting talking about the two books I read that summer, Silent Spring and Braiding Sweetgrass, and he asked me if I wanted to take an environmental science class. I said I was bad at science, and he kindly told me that the purpose of class is to learn. When we decided to register me for an intro ecology class it was full. So, instead, he put me into his upper-level field ecology lab class. Twelve students. Hands in the dirt. I got to learn about the world I was used to only seeing. I only knew of biology as the human body and not the world around me. But Dr. Wegner taught me that curiosity is the foundation of science, not memorization. This was dramatically different from my high school experience. I found that I love science and am just squeamish around blood.

After that, I kept on the environmental science focus and decided to join a lab. I joined Dr. Gonzalo Vazquez-Prokopec’s mosquito and tick lab, telling myself I would leave after six months because I just needed any lab experience. I ended up staying for four years, three as an undergraduate and one during my master’s, because I realized how much I loved it. I never expected to fall in love with insects and arthropods, but mosquitoes and ticks pulled me in. They feel like tiny aliens living among us, with foraging behaviors that shape entire ecosystems. The more I learned about insects, the more I realized that the erratic behavior I once found frightening was simply survival in action, and that shift in perspective drew me deeper into the field.

What really kept me there was the environment. Every day I learned something new and was surrounded by people who made curiosity feel brave. I was encouraged to read papers, develop my own experiments on insect behavior, and then execute my own protocols. My first few experiments failed pretty badly, and instead of getting frustrated, Dr. Prokopec would laugh and tell me to think about what went wrong and try again. That is how I learned that failure is not the opposite of progress; it is part of it. No question was too small, and curiosity was never embarrassing. For the first time, I felt like I could think out loud in a scientific space and had the freedom to explore anything I found interesting. That freed my curiosity and made me realize that learning about science and doing science are two different things.

By my senior year, I was coordinating tick field work and regularly interacting with the public, where I quickly discovered a staggering amount of tick and mosquito misinformation. I started sharing my phone number and email to answer questions and soon found myself a widely circulated resource among strangers. A “what is this bug?” or “should I be worried?” text from an unknown number became almost a daily occurrence.

I wanted to find a way to scale that help without giving my number to the entire internet. Existing resources are fragmented across multiple websites, cluttered with ads, and require you to start the research process over every time you visit somewhere new. I looked for existing apps and found most of them clunky, fragmented, or buried in jargon that doesn’t serve someone who just found something crawling on their kid. So, I built Vector Guard, an app that says what people actually need: Is this bug near me, is it dangerous, and what do I do now?

Can you give readers a summary of what Vector Guard does and how it works?

Vector Guard is a mobile app that gives users real-time, hyperlocal risk information about disease-carrying insects and arachnids, covering five “vectors”: ticks, mosquitoes, biting flies, midges, and bed bugs. (Photo courtesy of Ellie Fausett)

Vector Guard is a mobile app that gives users real-time, hyperlocal risk information about disease-carrying insects and arachnids, covering five “vectors”: ticks, mosquitoes, biting flies, midges, and bed bugs.

For each vector, the app provides an ecological profile with identification guidelines, behavioral notes, and protection tips. It also pulls disease-specific data from county and state health departments, so users know which diseases are of concern and how the symptoms manifest in both humans and pets.

A user near black-legged ticks, for instance, would see both a detection alert and the current Lyme disease case rate for their county. All users receive alerts for unexpected disease cases or if an invasive species is detected in their region. It also offers real-time prevention tips; for example, after it rains, the app sends alerts prompting users to check for standing water and has tips for spotting mosquito larvae and pupae.

Risk maps are built by layering observational data from iNaturalist, GBIF, and GPS-tagged peer-reviewed research with disease incidence data reported at the county or ZIP code level.

Users can also submit photos for instant insect identification with clinician-reviewed guidance on what to do next. The goal is to give someone with no entomology background genuine situational awareness about the vectors and disease risks in their own backyard.

What are the intended or likely applications for Vector Guard? Who do you see as the primary users?

Vector Guard is designed for anyone who spends time outside. Our user onboarding data has three groups showing up most consistently: parents and families, pet owners, and hikers or outdoor enthusiasts.

Parents are primarily looking for reassurance before heading to parks or trails with their kids. They want to know if a location has high vector activity and how to protect their children, and they tend to gravitate toward the tick removal and mosquito protection sections of the app.

Pet owners are already investing in flea and tick preventatives, and Vector Guard gives them the location-specific context to understand why those precautions matter. The app also accounts for the fact that vector-borne illnesses present differently in pets than in people, helping owners recognize risks specific to their animals.

Hikers tend to be risk-aware already but have lacked a reliable, real-time tool to consult before hitting the trail. That gap becomes especially clear for people who hike across different regions. I met a hiker from San Diego at a farmers market event who had never thought much about ticks. The trails she grew up on didn’t demand it. She downloaded Vector Guard after we talked, and last September she headed to Maine. Within her first day she was pulling ticks off her gear and her dog. She told me it was the first time she felt like she actually knew what she was dealing with and that she checked the tick removal section more times on that trip than she ever expected to. She came home and submitted feedback saying the app had genuinely changed how she approached an unfamiliar environment. She’s now a beta tester for Vector Guard Pet, our upcoming launch focused on protecting animals on and off the trail.

Ellie Fausett (center, standing), creator of the Vector Guard mobile app, is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution at the University of California, San Diego. Here, she is joined by colleagues on a day of tick-sampling field work while an undergraduate at Emory University. From left to right: Stephanie Bellman, Ph.D., Josie Pilchik, Fausett, and Audrey Long. (Photo courtesy of Ellie Fausett)

Meanwhile, as an entomologist, it’s easy to assume you don’t need an app to tell you about vectors. I thought the same thing. After four years of field work and over 10,000 ticks collected, I had never once been bitten. When I moved to California, I did my research, felt confident in what I knew, and let my guard down. On my second day of ant field work, I got my first tick bite. I was focused on the job and simply forgot to protect myself. Vector Guard would have flagged that my new field site had a high number of recent tick reports, reminding me to do a midday check and probably saving me the bite.

How was Vector Guard developed, and what is the business model you hope will sustain it?

Vector Guard is a team effort built in close collaboration with my co-founder, Weston Bell Geddes, a freelance developer with experience at NASA and TikTok. Weston’s expertise transforms ideas into fully functional features, enabling frequent updates and seamless implementation of new capabilities. His background in app development ensures that user experience remains the top priority throughout every stage of Vector Guard’s growth. Weston and I are the only people who work on Vector Guard.

As for the business model, Vector Guard keeps most of its features free, but pet-specific data and some species maps sit behind a Premium paywall. Apps cost real money to run, and subscriptions allow us to compensate collaborators and invest in better features over time. The way we structured that revenue model is something I’m genuinely proud of, as it allows most of our features to be free.

For every Premium subscription purchased ($2.99 a month), Vector Guard automatically gifts 50 free premium subscriptions to people in low-income, high-risk communities. We call it the 1:50 Justice Model. There are no applications, no waitlists, and no ads. Selection is based on a county-level index that weighs disease case rates against median income, so if you live in a high-risk, under-resourced area, a free premium subscription finds you. One paying user creates access for 50 people who need it most.

The model was designed around a simple observation: Vector-borne diseases disproportionately affect communities with the least access to prevention resources. A subscription app that only serves people who can afford it would be solving half the problem. The 1:50 model lets Vector Guard operate without ads, fairly compensate the people building it, and still reach the communities who need this tool the most.

What stage are you in now in developing and improving Vector Guard? What challenges do you currently face?

Vector Guard launched on the Apple App Store in August 2025, right as peak mosquito and tick season was winding down. This summer will be the first full peak season with the app, and there are a lot of users about to encounter it for the first time.

This spring, Vector Guard is expanding on two fronts. An Android version arrives late spring, making the app accessible to a much wider audience. Pet owners also have something to look forward to, with Vector Guard Pet coming soon, designed specifically for animal owners who want to protect their pets from vector borne illness. Vector Guard Pet includes vector-borne disease data specific to common household pets, along with detailed guidance on how symptoms manifest differently in animals than in humans.

The primary challenge right now is getting discovered. The app is built. The science is solid, the user experience is clean, but awareness is everything. That’s part of why the Antlion Pit win was so meaningful—not just the funding, but the visibility.

A mobile app that provides real-time, local risk information about disease-carrying arthropods took 1st Place in the 2025 ESA Antlion Pit, an innovation competition for entomology-related products and services. Here, Ellie Fausett (right), creator of Vector Guard, discusses the app with attendees in the Exhibit Hall at Entomology 2025 on November 10, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by James Palczewski, Entomological Society of America)

A mobile app that provides real-time, local risk information about disease-carrying arthropods took 1st Place in the 2025 ESA Antlion Pit, an innovation competition for entomology-related products and services. Here, Ellie Fausett, creator of Vector Guard, presents the app to Antlion Pit judges at Entomology 2025 on November 10, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by James Palczewski, Entomological Society of America)

A mobile app that provides real-time, local risk information about disease-carrying arthropods took 1st Place in the 2025 ESA Antlion Pit, an innovation competition for entomology-related products and services. Here, Ellie Fausett (left), creator of Vector Guard, is congratulated by Antlion Pit moderator and ESA past president Marianne Alleyne, Ph.D., at Entomology 2025 on November 10, 2025, in Portland, Oregon. (Photo by James Palczewski, Entomological Society of America)

How did competing in and taking 1st Place in the Antlion Pit competition advance your work on Vector Guard?

Winning the Antlion Pit was a genuine turning point. The most immediate impact is the funding to build the Android app and translating the app into Spanish. Without it, I’d be facing the daunting task of raising capital independently on top of my day-to-day work as a Ph.D. student. Expanding the reach of Vector Guard is important since more people need to have access to clear, easy-to-use public health data.

Beyond the funding, competing forced me to distill what Vector Guard is and why it matters to people outside my field. The vision is clear to me. Making sure it lands the same way for users and investors is the next challenge.

For those interested in Vector Guard, where can they learn more, and what should we be on the lookout for next from you?

The best way to experience Vector Guard is to download it on the Apple App Store. If you have an Android device, the app launches in May, so please stay tuned. If you are a public health or vector-based researcher and would like to provide feedback on the user experience of Vector Guard, please email me at [email protected].

As for what’s next from me personally, I’m a third-year Ph.D. student at UC San Diego, where my research focuses on ant behavior. I have two main projects. The first is to develop an environmental DNA-based methodology to detect the invasive Argentine ant on Santa Cruz Island. The second is to study aspects of ant foraging behavior with the goal of understanding when ants act as predators and when they act as scavengers. I am currently focusing on finishing up my Ph.D. and exploring potential postdoctoral opportunities in vector-related research labs.