If you attended this year’s GLA Gala, hopefully you got a chance to meet Brett Kristoff, the new Co-Chair of GLA’ s Board of Directors. She and her husband Mark were honored with the Visionary Leadership Award for their longstanding support and leadership at GLA as well as their perseverance as caregivers of a child with Lyme. Despite their incredible generosity and dedication, they view the honor humbly, with gratitude for what the organization has also given them. “There’s a nice point of stepping back and saying thank you for all the support that we’ve gotten from GLA over the years, which was incredibly helpful at very dark times of our Lyme journey,” says Brett.
Lyme disease has been part of the Kristoff family’s life from the beginning; at their rehearsal dinner in 1990, Mark’s mother had a bullseye rash on the back of her calf. Brett’s mother then got a tick bite a couple years later, and their daughter Natalie was diagnosed with Lyme and co-infections at age 16. All three family members wrestled the frustration, invalidation, and debilitating symptoms that come with delayed diagnosis. “We’ve been associated with Lyme and other tick-borne diseases on a first-hand basis for over 30 years,” notes Mark.
It was Natalie’s health journey that really catapulted the family into the world of Lyme, as the Kristoffs watched their daughter’s “very bright, shiny life begin to crumble” as Lyme caused neurological and behavioral manifestations in addition to intense physical suffering. “Suddenly we were just under siege from this disease, not knowing what was happening.”
Thankfully, the Kristoffs found Time for Lyme, which later became the Lyme Research Alliance that merged with the Tick-Borne Disease Alliance to become Global Lyme Alliance. The Kristoffs have been with GLA since its inception and before, joining a community of care and resources first to receive support and later to provide it. “We found a community that all of us relied on in those early days in a huge way, and many of those people are still right there with us in the fabric of it all,” says Brett.
Mark is especially grateful for the way the community provided an understanding of common experiences. “You can explain Lyme to people, but they just don’t get it if they haven’t lived it, and everybody in the GLA community has lived it to some extent, either as a patient, a caregiver, a doctor, or a scientist who’s doing the research work. You have a very strong community of shared concern, value, and experiences, which is very empowering.”
The Kristoffs’ involvement naturally turned toward advocacy. Over the time that they have worked with GLA, there’s been a paradigm shift around chronic Lyme. “We were up against something big,” Brett explains, “and this quiet work we did with excellent, university-based researchers really changed the paradigm of what chronic Lyme is. That’s one of the things I’m proudest of, is that consistent, persistent work to move the needle so all the naysayers couldn’t just crush us down…we’re sitting in a much different place now, in 2026.”
Still, there’s work to be done, especially around improvement in diagnostics and treatment. We need an accurate test for both acute and chronic Lyme disease, and we need treatment that can work for every patient. Standard, timely treatment still leaves 10-20% of Lyme patients suffering with persistent symptoms. “With almost 500,000 people diagnosed and treated in the U.S. each year, that’s 100,000 people being left out,” Mark observes.
Brett is ready to take on the challenge along with fellow Board Co-Chair Charles Balducci. She has served on every GLA committee and has been on the Executive Board for years, so she brings to her new role “a very big depth of knowledge of how we work, where our strengths are, and what we need now.”
Standing on the shoulders of the incredible work done by her chair predecessors including Rob Kobre, Paul Ross, and Nancy Del Genio—all of whom, Brett notes, “arrived at a time when their particular skill set was just what we needed”—Brett and Charles hope that the next research phase of work at GLA will be, as Brett describes, “to generate some more fuel for what is now a very incredible machine. We’re an incubator for the best ideas. GLA's Board, grantees, staff, supporters, and ambassadors are teed up.”
Brett is proud of the patient support currently being offered by GLA and hopes that new research steps will “build a bridge between the science and the answers that we’re going for, and our support of the patient community that’s burgeoning and waiting for this.” In addition to backing much-needed research, GLA matches patients with Lyme-literate medical professionals, offers a Peer-to-Peer Mentor program and an Ambassador Program, helps people find support groups, provides financial assistance resources, and offers patient perspectives and experiences through blogs like my own and many other writers.
“I want more patients to be able to take advantage of all that we offer,” Brett says. “No patient is alone.”
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