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Daniel Dunaief

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From left, Juan Jimenez and Sanjaya Senanayake in front of CO2 and Methane Conversion Reactor Units in the Chemistry Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

If we had carbon dioxide glasses, we would see the gas everywhere, from the air we, our pets, and our farm animals exhale to the plumes propelled through the smokestacks of factories and the tail pipes of gas-powered cars.

Juan Jimenez. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/BNL

A waste product that scientists are trying to reduce and remove, carbon dioxide is not only a part of the photosynthesis that allows plants to convert light to energy, but it also can be a raw material to create usable and useful products.

Juan Jimenez, a postdoctoral researcher and Goldhaber Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been working with carbon dioxide for the last 10 years, in his undergraduate work at CUNY City College of New York, for his PhD at the University of South Carolina and since he arrived at BNL in 2020. 

Jimenez contributed to a team led by engineers at the University of Cincinnati to create a way to improve the electrochemical conversion of this greenhouse gas into ethylene, which is an important ingredient in making plastics as well as in manufacturing textiles and other products.

University of Cincinnati Associate Professor Jingjie Wu recently published work in the journal Nature Chemical Engineering in which they used a modified copper catalyst to improve the electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide into ethylene.

“I’m always looking out to collaborate with groups doing cutting edge research,” explained Jimenez, who spearheaded the research at the National Synchrotron Lightsource II. “Since the work on CO2 is a global concern we require a global team” to approach solutions.

Jimenez is fascinated with carbon dioxide in part because it is such a stable molecule, which makes reacting it with other elements to transform it into something useful energy intensive.

A modified copper catalyst helped convert more carbon dioxide, which breaks down into two primary carbon-based products through electrocatalysis, into ethylene, which has been called the “world’s most important chemical.”

“Our research offers essential insights into the divergence between ethylene and ethanol during electrochemical CO2 reduction and proposes a viable approach to directing selectivity toward ethylene,” UC graduate student Zhengyuan Li and lead author on the paper, said in a statement.

A previous graduate student of Wu, Li helped conduct some of the experiments at BNL.

This modified process increases the selective production of ethylene by 50 percent, Wu added.

The process of producing ethylene not only increases the production of ethylene, but it also provides a way to recycle carbon dioxide.

In a statement, Wu suggested this process could one day produce ethylene through green energy instead of fossil fuels.

Jimenez’s role

Scientists who want to use the high-tech equipment at the NSLS-II need to apply for time through a highly competitive process before experimental runs.

Jimenez led the proposal to conduct the research on site at the QAS and ISS beamlines.

Several of the elements involved in this reaction are expensive, including platinum, iridium, silver and gold, which makes them prohibitively expensive if they are used inefficiently. By using single atoms of the metal as the sites, these scientists achieved record high rates of reaction using the least possible amount of material.

The scientists at BNL were able to see the chemistry happening in real time, which validated the prediction for the state of the copper.

Jimenez’s first reaction to this discovery was excitement and the second was that “you can actually take a nap. Once you get the data you’re looking for, you can relax and you could shut your eyes.”

Working at NSLS-II, which is one of only three or four similar such facilities in the United States and one of only about a dozen in the world, inspires Jimenez, where he appreciates the opportunity to do “cutting edge” research.

“These experiments are only done a few times in the career of the average scientist,” Jimenez explained. “Having continuous access to cutting edge techniques inspires us to tackle bigger, more complicated problems.”

In the carbon dioxide research, the scientists drilled down on the subject, combining the scope of what could have been two or three publications into a single paper.

Indeed, Nature Chemical Engineering, which is an online only publication in the Nature family of scientific journals, just started providing scientific papers in the beginning of this year.

“Being part of the inaugural editions is exciting, specifically coming from a Chemical Engineering background” as this work was published along with some of the “leading scientists in the field,” said Jimenez.

New York state of mind

Born in Manhattan, Jimenez lived in Queens near Jamaica until he was 11. His family moved into Nassau County near the current site of the UBS Arena.

During his PhD at the University of South Carolina, Jimenez spent almost a year in Japan as a visiting doctoral student, where he learned x-ray absorption spectroscopy from one of the leading scientists in the field, Professor Kiyotaka Asakura. Based in Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, Jimenez enjoyed touring much of the country.

A resident of Middle Island, Jimenez likes to run and swim. He enjoys cooking food from all over the world, including Spanish, Indian and Japanese cuisines.

As a scientist, he has the “unique luxury” of working with an international audience, he said. “If you are having lunch and you see someone eating amazing Indian food, you can talk to them, learn a bit about their culture, how they make their food, and then you can make it.”

As for his work, Jimenez explains that he is drawn to study carbon dioxide not just for the sake of science, but also because it creates a “pressing environmental need.”

He has also been looking more at methane, which is another potent greenhouse gas that is challenging to activate.

Ideally, at some point, he’d like to contribute to work that leads to processes that produce negative carbon dioxide use.

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Stony Brook University Hospital launches meal-ordering app. Photo courtesy Stony Brook Medicine/Rob Tannenbaum

By Daniel Dunaief

From soup to nuts – along with pictures and descriptions – patients at Stony Brook University Hospital can use a new mobile app to order meals during their stays that are consistent with medical advice and that is sensitive to their diets.

With this app, patients can choose the times they want meals, within the 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. schedule, and the specific foods that suit their interests and restrictions.

The response among patients at the hospital, which serves more than 1,500 patient meals a day, has been “very positive,” said Nicole Rossol, Chief Patient Experience Officer at Stony Brook University Hospital. “It’s giving patients more day-to-day control in a hospital setting.”

That empowers patients who can otherwise be confined to their rooms or to the hospital as medical staff monitors their health and brings them for a variety of tests.

The cbord patient app, which allows patients to order food for the same or the next day, provides choices that are consistent with the approach the hospital takes as a part of a patient’s care. Additionally, the app can adjust for a range of allergies and patient dietary needs.

Once patients create a dietary profile, the app can filter food options that include halal, kosher, gluten-restricted, vegetarian, cardiac, carbohydrate-controlled and more.

The app “is not replacing anything,” said Kathleen Logsdon Carrozza, Assistant Director of Food and Retail Services and Registered Dietitian at the Faculty Student Association of Stony Brook University Hospital. “It gives patients another option.” Patients who are tech savvy can use their own mobile devices to order food or, on some floors, they can use a shared mobile device.

Those who prefer can still order food through a call center or by speaking with a dining service worker.

At this point, the hospital has about 45 patients who are using the app, said Alexandra Bush, Nutrition Software Systems Administrator at the Faculty Student Association of Stony Brook University.

App origin

About a year ago, members of SBU attended a conference where they learned about this way of ordering food as an option.

“We wanted to do something that was user friendly,” said Logsdon. “The administration was on board.”

Each food and drink option includes a photograph, which gives patients a chance to consider their choices the way they might at a restaurant.

Last summer, two Stony Brook University students took pictures of each item.

At this point, the app is only available in English, although the hospital has interpreters who can help with patient needs and answer questions.

The app is evolving on almost a daily basis. Bush, who receives daily post it notes with suggestions, recently received a request from a pediatric nurse to add pasta with butter, which is now on the menu.

While the hospital doesn’t have the equivalent of a Yelp review for each dish, volunteers solicit feedback from patients from survey data.

In putting together the menu and developing the app, Stony Brook received considerable guidance from a patient and family advisory council, who teamed up with Logsdon and Bush. The app can be accessed on any app store compatible with Apple and Andriod products.

The council “helped with the education that would be going out to patients,” said Rossol. “It’s really important that we have patients that partner with us to make some of these changes and decisions. They gave us great input and feedback.”

The ability to order meals at a particular time allows patients to dine with their visitors.

“This enables us to offer things to patients in a way we haven’t been able to do in the past,” said Rossol.

By ordering food that better suit patient tastes and interests, the hospital can also reduce the amount of food it discards at waste.

When patients order food at a time when they are out of the room for medical testing, the hospital staff can update the dining crew and revise the schedule.

The person delivering the meal can speak with the nursing staff, who can advise them to hold the food or to repeat the order at a later time, depending on the length of any schedule change.

“We’re looking at ways to enhance the patient experience using technology,” said Rossol. “We are really trying to make the experience the best it can be.”

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Pixabay photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

I hope my television is well rested.

Sure, we’ve watched movies here and there. We’ve gone through all the episodes of “Succession.” We’re also looking forward to the next chapters in the Keri Russell political drama “The Diplomat.”

My television, however, gets a different kind of attention during the upcoming baseball season. No, I don’t watch every Yankees game, even though, if I had the time and access, I probably would catch some of each game.

As a passionate Yankee fan, I have glared at the TV, barked at it (well, and the players on the screen at any given time) and even threatened to pick it up and throw it out the window once in a while.

Incidentally, I’ve never damaged a TV during a baseball season, no matter how frustrated I might get at the number of runners left on base, at the manager for taking someone out or at the players for not driving in a runner from third with fewer than two outs.

Long ago, I watched Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, when the Mets came back from a seemingly insurmountable deficit in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Boston Red Sox for a win that sent the series to a final game. Surrounded by gloating Red Sox fans, I watched as the game unraveled.

With my roommate in tow — we were both rooting for the Mets because he had placed a bet he couldn’t afford to lose and, as a Yankees fan, I had to support any team that played the Red Sox — we walked silently out of a room filled with furious fans.

Just before we opened the door to leave the apartment, the TV we had been watching crash-landed at our feet, exploding into numerous pieces. That night, we joined a small band of New Yorkers cheering “let’s go Mets,” while we stayed far from TV projectile range.

In this millennium, of course, the Red Sox have faired far better than both New York teams, winning four titles compared with one for the Yankees and none for the Mets.

Returning to this season, I’m sure I’ll watch the slow motion replay of a pitch that dives well outside the strike zone that will cause one of the monster hitters on the Yankees to look like they are swinging a fly swatter at an evasive insect.

At that point, I’ll tell the TV how I had told the hitter not to swing and that he should have listened to me.

Yes, I will blame the TV for not communicating somehow with the batter that I knew it.

Fortunately for me, the TV will never remind me of the times I instructed the hitter not to swing at a pitch, only to celebrate when that player crushed a game winning hit into the gap in left center field, scoring the runner sprinting home from first.

The TV will undoubtedly also hear me affix blame at its electronic feet when the channel suddenly doesn’t come in, becomes pixelated or freezes just as a critical full count pitch reaches the plate.

I could check online to see what happened, but I’d rather watch it unfold live, excruciating as the result may be when the Yankees lose yet another winnable game.

The TV knows baseball is a wonderful, miserable experience for me on some days, while it’s a miserable, wonderful one on others.

As I watch an enormous Yankees lead dissolve slowly, the TV and I both know that any opponent – even, gasp!, the Red Sox – can still win.

On the other hand, the Yankees can take a few hard punches to their solar plexus and do the same, setting a comeback record.

If you could ask my TV, he’d tell you that I’m nervous about this season. We have a few important parts, but not enough depth, particularly among our pitchers.

My TV knows that the marathon baseball season will be filled with numerous dramatic rises and falls. It also knows my tendency to turn the channel as soon as the other team records the final out against the Yankees.

Fortunately, my TV gets a break during All Star weekend and in November. The TV should fasten its seatbelt. It’s a long and likely bumpy ride between now and then.

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From left, Mikala Egeblad and Xue-Yan He. Photo from Constance Brukin

By Daniel Dunaief

They both have left Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, but the innovative research they did on Long Island and that they continue to do, is leaving its mark.

From left, Mikala Egeblad and Xue-Yan He at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2022. Photo from Xue-Yan He

When Xue-Yan He was a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Mikala Egeblad, who was Associate Professor at CSHL, the tandem, along with collaborators, performed innovative research on mice to examine how stress affected the recurrence and spread of cancer in a mouse model.

In a paper published in late February in the journal Cancer Cell, He, who is currently Assistant Professor of Cell Biology & Physiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, discovered that stress-induced neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), which typically trap and kill bacteria, trigger the spread of cancer.

“The purpose of our study is to find out what stress does to the body” of an animal model of cancer, said He.

The data in mice demonstrated that targeting NETs in stressed animals significantly reduced the risk for metastases, He explained, suggesting that reducing stress should help cancer treatment and prevention. The researchers speculate that drugs preventing NET formation can be developed and used as new treatments to slow or stop cancer’s spread.

To be sure, this finding, which is encouraging and has generated interest among cancer scientists and neurobiologists, involved a mouse model. Any potential application of this research to the diagnosis and treatment of people will take considerably more effort.

“I want to stress that the evidence for the link between stress, NETs, and cancer is from mouse studies,” Egeblad explained. “We will need to design human studies to know for sure whether the link also exists for humans.”

Still, Egeblad hopes that eventually reducing stress or targeting NETs could be options to prevent metastatic recurrence in cancer survivors. “One major challenge is that a cancer diagnosis by itself is incredibly stressful,” she explained. The results of these experiments have attracted considerable attention in the scientific community, where “there is a lot more to learn!” 

Three part confirmation

When she was a postdoctoral researcher, He removed neutrophils from the mice using antibodies. Neutrophils, which are cells in the immune system, produce the NETs when they are triggered by the glucocorticoid stress hormone.

She also injected an enzyme called DNAse to destroy NETs in the test mice. The former CSHL postdoctoral researcher also used genetically engineered mice that didn’t respond to glucocorticoids.

With these approaches, the test mice developed metastasis at a much lower rate than those that had intact NETs. In addition, chronically stressed mice who didn’t have cancer had NETs that modified their lung tissue.

“Stress is doing something to prepare the organs for metastasis,” said He.

Linda Van Aelst, CSHL Professor and a collaborator on the study, suggested that this work validates efforts to approach mental health in the context of cancer.

“Reducing stress should be a component of cancer treatment and prevention,” Van Aelst said in a statement.

After He removed the primary tumor in the mouse models, the stressed mice developed metastatic cancer at a four-fold higher rate than the mice who weren’t stressed but who also previously had cancer.

The CSHL scientists primarily studied breast cancer for this work.

He appreciated the help and support from her colleagues at CSHL. “To really understand the mechanism” involved in the connection between stress and cancer, “you need a mouse model in the lab, an expert in neuroscience and an expert in the cancer field,” she said.

As a neuroscientist, Van Aelst offered suggestions and comments and helped He conduct behavioral tests to determine a mouse’s stress level. The work for this project formed the focus ofHe’s postdoctoral research, which started in 2016 and ended in 2023.

The link between stress and cancer is receiving increasing attention in the scientific community and has attracted attention on social media, He said.

CSHL “provided a great environment to perform all these experiments,” said He. The numerous meetings CSHL hosts and the willingness of principal investigators across departments made the lab “one of the best places” for a postdoctoral scientist.

“If you need anything from a neural perspective or a technical perspective, you can always find a collaborator” at CSHL, He added.

Born and raised in Nanjing, China, He enjoyed living on Long Island, visiting vineyards and trying to explore every state park. In the harbor, He caught blue crabs while her husband Chen Chen, who was a postdoctoral researcher at CSHL in the lab of Camila dos Santos, went fly fishing at Jones Beach.

In her current research, where she manages a lab that includes a senior scientist, a postdoctoral researcher and an undergraduate, He is extending the work she did at CSHL to colorectal cancer, where she is also analyzing how stress affects the spread of cancer.

“When you’re stressed, you can develop gastrointestinal problems, which is why I wanted to switch from breast cancer to colorectal cancer,” she said.

Extensions of the work

As for context for the research at CSHL, Egeblad wrote that doctors treating patients where the known risk of recurrence is high might use NETs in the blood as a biomarker.

The scientists think cancers that tend to metastasize to the liver, lung or spleen are the strongest candidates to determine the effect of NETs and stress on cancer.

“We have not seen any effects of targeting NETs for metastasis to the bone or the brain in our mouse model and similarly, the studies that have linked NETs to metastasis in human patients have mostly been cancer that has spread to the liver or the lung,” Egeblad said.

Egeblad appreciated the “fantastic job” He did on the work and described her former researcher as being “fearless.”

“She found that stress increased metastasis early in her project but it was a lot of work to discover it was the NETs that were responsible and to conduct studies to ensure that the results were applicable to different types of cancer,” Egeblad explained.

While the two researchers have gone to different institutions and are leading other lab efforts, Egeblad said she’d be happy to collaborate with her former student, who shares the same sense of humor.

Egeblad recalled how He ended her talks by telling the audience that her results showed that Egeblad should give her a “long vacation.”

“I think indeed that she has deserved one after all this work!” Egeblad offered.

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Salvatore Capotosto hugs his wife Federica Bove at Stony Brook Medicine Match Day 2024. Kristy Leibowitz

 

By Daniel Dunaief

A former professional soccer player from Italy, Salvatore Capotosto recently experienced a different kind of pressure, this time in front of his wife and her parents.

Joining the rest of the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University class of 2024, Capotosto awaited the countdown for Match Day to learn where he would serve his residency. 

Capotosto, who already knew he’d matched with one of the hospitals on his list for an orthopedic surgery residency, opened the same kind of envelopes medical students around the country were opening at noon Eastern Standard Time.

After the countdown, Capotosto learned he matched with his first choice, Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City.

“It’s a very great dream for us,” said Capotosto, referring both to the opportunity for him and his wife Federica Bove to live in the city and to the excitement his extended family in the small town of Itri felt. Reading where he was going was “an explosion of emotion.”

Capotosto and Bove shed tears of happiness as they pondered the next step in an American journey that began eight years ago when they started college at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. While Capotosto received medical training at Stony Brook, Bove earned her Master of Business Administration at Pace University.

The first member of his family to become a physician,  Capotosto said he spent considerable time explaining the lengthy residency and matching process to his family.

“It doesn’t matter how many millions of times” he shared the medical steps with them, he said, “they will still ask” about the next steps.

Humble origins

The son of cafe owner Luigi, the future orthopedic surgery resident didn’t always set his sights on either a high-powered athletic career or on becoming an American doctor.

“I used to walk to school and stop at my dad’s cafe and eat a croissant and drink cappuccino for breakfast and I would scream that I didn’t want to go to school and that I wanted to work at the cafe,”  Capotosto said. His father kicked him out of the cafe and told him to “go study.”

The Capotosto son said he learned his work ethic from his extended family, for whom work is a responsibility and a passion. Watching his father put time and effort into his work helped him put in 100 or more hours some weeks to meeting his responsibilities and mastering medical material.

Capotosto hasn’t been able to convince his father visit him in New York since he arrived on campus. This year, however, his parents booked a trip to see their son graduate.

Packages from home supported him through school and helped reduce the distance from his close family, who sent olives and olive oil every few months that were made from the 200 olive trees on his grandfather Pietro Mancini’s property.

A rising soccer star

Capotosto developed a passion for soccer when he first started playing the game at the age of six. He poured considerable energy into developing as a goalie.

He achieved considerable success, playing in front of crowds of over 4,000 people for professional and semi professional teams. In Naples, he trained with his idol, goalkeeper Morgan De Sanctis.

Capotosto was in the academy of the professional Napoli team for four years, including training with the first team.

When he played soccer, Capotosto suggested he was a “perfectionist,” honing his technique through hard work and preparation.

During his playing days, Capotosto sustained several injuries that took him off the field, including a scaphoid bone injury that ended his career.

Unsure of the next steps in his life, Capotosto appreciated not only the help and support of the doctors who came to his aid on the field, but also the career inspiration.

“I like to say that orthopedics saved my life,” Capotosto said. “Without the flame to push me to stand up and find a new purpose, I would have taken wrong turns in those dark moments. I’m really grateful to this field.”

Some of Capotosto’s mentors at Stony Brook, in turn, appreciate the considerable positive energy the former goalie brings to medicine and the way he relates to everyone from hospital staff to patients.

“He’s immediately disarming,” said Dr. James Penna, orthopedic surgeon and Chief of Sports Medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. “Even patients who are scared or who are dealing with pain” relax when they are around him.

Dr. Edward Wang, Chief of Shoulder/Elbow Surgery and Clinical Professor in the Department of Orthopedics at the Renaissance School of Medicine, recalled that he offered Capotosto the opportunity to shadow him in the operating room early in his medical school career.

Capotosto picked up the do’s and don’ts of the operating room quickly, while the members of the team recognized his dedication and commitment.

“The staff took a real liking to him immediately,” Dr. Wang said. “Orthopedics is lucky he chose” the field.

In the last few months, Capotosto, who is 29 years old, has reached several milestones. He and Bove received green cards in February, which allow them to live and work permanently in the United States. The couple, who met when Capotosto was 18, also got married on April 22 in Central Park. They are planning a religious ceremony in Italy in May at Bove’s childhood church.

Sports and medicine

The field of orthopedics has attracted athletes from numerous sports, as former competitors have turned their focus and dedication towards preparing for games to the challenging world of helping people recover from injuries.

“A large percentage of applicants have some sorts of sports background,” with numerous doctors sharing stories about injuries such as a torn anterior cruciate ligament or about a relative who received knee replacement surgery, said Dr. Penna, who was not a college athlete.

“We have a lot of former athletes in our program,” added Dr. Wang, who swam competitively in a Division 1 program at the University of Miami. “Athletes like orthopedics because of the physicality and definitive nature and the exposure in the past.”

While Dr. Wang suggested that a range of character-defining elements helped shape Capotosto, he added that the former soccer star’s injuries enhanced his ability to connect.

“Being on the other side [as a patient] gives you empathy,” said Dr. Wang.

While Capotosto enjoyed his time in soccer, he is pleased with the current chapter in his life.

“Playing was a great opportunity, but, I think being an orthopedic surgeon is way better from my standpoint right now,” he said. “I believe in the mission.”

The Stony Brook medical staff, meanwhile, believes in him. 

“There will be a lot of disappointed attendees” when Capotosto leaves the school, said Dr. Penna. “The janitors knew who he was.”

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Pixabay photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

I was in between that state when I’m focused on how tired I am at the gym and when the endorphins kick in, enabling my body to push harder and for longer in the interests of physical fitness and mental health.

When my cell phone rang, I wasn’t sure whether to pick it up. I’ve been getting numerous annoying robocalls from pseudo-people who want to sell me something I don’t want or need. When I ask them to take my name off their lists, they hang up and someone else from the same organization calls me back the next day.

Unless I recognize the number or am expecting an important call, I tend to let voicemail pick up while I disconnect from everything but the rhythm of checking the number of calories I’ve burned and the distance I’ve traveled during each five minute segment on the elliptical machine.

This time, however, the name looked vaguely familiar, so I stopped moving, took out the airpods that don’t work too well and picked up the phone.

“Hi, this is Dan,” I said, trying to control my breathing.

“Who is this?” the person asked.

“Dan, why, who is this?” I thought, as I considered disconnecting and returning to my routine.

“I have a number that my wife wrote down on my desk and I wanted to know who this was,” he said.

That’s when it hit me. The name was familiar because I had written a story a few weeks ago and had reached out to the couple for a comment.

He understood my explanation and asked if I were related to several other Dunaiefs he knew.

“Yup, that’s my mother,” I said proudly, awaiting words of appreciation and praise for what she’s done since she started the newspapers over 47 years ago and become a visible presence in the community.

“And Ivan?” he asked, “That’s your father?”

“Indeed,” I said.

“Well, I knew him many years ago,” he offered. “We worked together.”

I nodded and looked around the room to see if anyone were waiting to use the elliptical machine. Fortunately, no one was hovering.

“So, how is he?” he asked.

“Excuse me?” I replied, not sure I heard him correctly.

“How is Ivan doing?”

I hadn’t been asked this question in decades.

“He died in 1987,” I said, flatly.

“Oh,” he said, “1987?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, we all have to go sometime,” he offered. “Some sooner than others, I suppose.”

After we ended the call, I resumed my exercise. That seemed like a surprisingly flippant thing to say. The older, current version of me was annoyed, while the younger version felt vulnerable.

Once I built up a solid sweat, a broad smile filled my face, leading at least one person to ponder why I looked unusually pleased during physical exertion.

While I knew the man was processing the not-so-new news, I also decided that the person who would have taken particular delight in this slightly absurd conversation was my father.

With my legs pumping away, I shared a laugh with my father, who could make me smile no matter how frustrated or annoyed I was as a teenager.

Over time, I have enjoyed any number of opportunities to connect with people I’ve had the privilege of knowing who have died, sometimes through dreams or by watching, hearing or experiencing something I know they’d appreciate.

Recently, after my mother-in-law died, my wife received a set of wind chimes with her mother’s name inscribed on them. Before we placed the chimes, we rarely had much wind. Now, amid a steady flow of unusual breezes that bring pleasant sounds to our backyard, my wife and I smile at each other.

If we look for it, we can take comfort in the things that help us feel connected to those we’ve lost.

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Georgios Moutsanidis, Photo by Ram Telikicherla

By Daniel Dunaief

In the best of times, water provides a serene background, offers an escape from searing summer heat, serves as a livelihood for the fishing industry, and supports a range of aquatic life that shimmers just below the surface.

In the worst of times, that same water can threaten communities that line coasts, bringing a powerful surge of destructive force that takes lives and destroys homes, buildings and infrastructure.

Recently, Georgios Moutsanidis, Stony Brook University Assistant Professor in the department of Civil Engineering, received a $500,000, five-year Faculty Early Career Development grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct research that could increase the resilience of coastal structures.

Rigoberto Burgueño, who is the chairman of the Civil Engineering department and who helped recruit Moutsanidis to Stony Brook in 2020, is pleased with the recognition from the NSF.

It is “one of the highest achievements for an individual investigator in terms of their potential as future leaders in their field and future mentors and teachers,” Burgueño said. The prestige from the award “will provide opportunities and bigger audiences to communicate his findings and his work.”

Amid climate change, the need for efforts to improve resilience from a range of water-driven forces increases, as rising sea levels encroach on coastlines and stronger storms driven by higher ocean temperatures threaten buildings and infrastructure.

“What we are trying to do with this project is to develop state-of-the-art computational tools that engineers and other researchers will use to incorporate in their work and study the resilience of structures against extreme hydrodynamic events” such as storm surges and tsunamis, said Moutsanidis.

Engineers, city planners and builders have used what Moutsanidis described as mostly outdated empirical models to test the resilience of structures. Moutsanidis, however, hopes to enhance those models by taking a physics-based numerical approach to understanding the damage a surge of water could do to various structures.

Moutsanidis is using established and well-known equations. He will contribute to solving them more accurately and efficiently.

Other models “could simulate water hitting a structure, but they were unable to capture the detailed response of the structure, with cracks, fractures, fragmentation and collapse,” Moutsanidis said. He hopes the new computational methods he will develop will predict the type and extent of damage more accurately.

The model he plans to create, with the help of graduate students he will hire who will use new high-performance computers he expects to use the funds to purchase, can address site-specific features of an area that would affect the likely speed, amount and force of any water surge.

Burgueño described Moutsanidis as being “at the forefront of very advanced computational simulations that take into account interactions of water with a structure.”  

By generating better estimates of the actual loads imposed on a structure, “we will be better prepared as engineers to either strengthen existing structures or to design future ones better,” Burgueño said.

Checking his work

While the information he’s using to construct these models relies on physics and deploys established equations, the Stony Brook Assistant Professor and his students will perform verification and validation. They will compare their results with existing experimental data and other computational approaches.

In addition, Moutsanidis’s lab will conduct experiments in a flume, which is a water tank in which he can vary the amount and speed of water approaching models of coastal communities. With a high-speed camera, he can evaluate how these simulated structures respond. In buildings that might collapse or fracture, he can test a slightly different fortified design, run a similar analysis and determine if the modifications led to a better outcome.

At this point, Moutsanidis has completed a proof of concept article in the journal Engineering with Computers, where he demonstrated the idea and the equations he’s solving. He hopes to produce a useful package that engineers and the public can use within the next four to five years, which he will release through an open source platform such as GitHub.

Moutsanidis is “very eager to start this work” as storm surges, flooding and tsunamis threaten coastal communities every year.

Larger context and other projects

In the bigger picture, Moutsanidis seeks to use computational methods and software to solve problems of engineering driven by physics. He has also worked in the aerospace community, studying the interaction of solids with hypersonic flow.

The goal is to “design more efficient aerospace vessels” that can withstand high temperatures and pressure as they travel five times the speed of sound or more, he said. The temperature is so high that the air undergoes a chemical reaction.

Moutsanidis has also worked with the impact of blast waves on structures, simulating the response to the shock wave or blast.

The goal is to make structures “more resilient or resistant to extreme events” such as a terrorist attack or an accident that triggers an explosion.

From Karditsa to Queens

Born and raised in a small town in the center of Greece called Karditsa, Moutsanidis is the son of two engineers. “In my early childhood, I was influenced by them, but I chose a different engineering path,” he said.

Moutsanidis, who completed postdoctoral research at Brown University before joining Stony Brook, lives in Queens. 

Moutsanidis is impressed with the students at Stony Brook, whom he described as “very engaged.” As for his work, he explained that his field is “quite competitive” and he was surprised and pleased to receive this award.

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METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

When we are born, the experience is passive, as we don’t suddenly decide, despite what our families might tell us later about how we couldn’t wait to see the world, that it’s time to leave the womb.

Similarly, once we’re outside, we don’t make many choices. We can’t say, “Milk? Again? You don’t have orange juice or maybe a chocolate milkshake?”

The people around us, the customs that define our days and years, the languages we speak and many other factors that shape who we are remain outside our control.

Definitions of normal vary by our circumstances. People who share a single room and one bathroom with four siblings and those with four dogs, three cats, and two parakeets typically accept the conditions around them.

“Everyone has a crazy Uncle Allen and a chatty Aunt Dorothy,” they think. Or, perhaps, “everyone shops for a new wardrobe each year before the start of a school year” or “doesn’t everyone run three miles before breakfast every morning?”

And then, in the journey through life, we get a window into the lives of other people.

When our daughter was about four years old, she visited a friend, who, our daughter reported, drank soda with breakfast and ate candy as a post breakfast snack. “I like soda,” our daughter declared after the playdate. “Why can’t I have it with breakfast, too?”

It’s not just visits to other homes that become eye-opening experiences: we read about people, watch dramas about their lives, and get a sense of what we think we might strive for or reject in our expanding world.

We and our children see our families in a completely different light when we have the opportunity to compare them to the world outside. Sometimes, we not only measure up, but we exceed the limitations of other people’s lives. Our children might, for example, spend time with parents who pay little to no attention to their sons and daughters, barely aware of their comings and goings.

At that point, our helicopter parenting, which made them gnash their teeth every time we asked for more details about the events of their day, upcoming tests, school dances, or tryouts for school plays, might seem considerably less unbearable or even, dare I say it, charming.

Other times, we fall short in ways that even our children recognize is well outside the experience of most people. Some of their friends’ parents might own private jets, have a spare house on the lake, or have season tickets near the front row to watch one of their favorite teams.

Despite the id-driven desire to have similar life amenities, our children, sooner or later, recognize that they shouldn’t expect such lavish luxuries, even if they secretly, or, perhaps, not so secretly, hope to attain them.

And then there are the times when the world outside the family seems like the kind of easy-going, light-hearted, jovial tv show in which they’d like to star as the plucky but successful child.

During those moments, we can ask some questions about what they want or wish for that they don’t have, or that, perhaps, they find too cumbersome. Yes, we tell them, we really are related to that wacky Uncle Allen, but that doesn’t mean our children are going to become like him or that he has no redeeming qualities. Indeed, the search for redeeming qualities in everyone, starting with our own extended family, may help re-inflate our disappointed children.

If the head-to-head match up leaves them wanting something else, we have other options. We can suggest that no one will ever love or appreciate them as much as we do.

We can also suggest that they can use their desire for something more or different to inspire them to work hard for it and to find it for themselves and, if they choose to have one, for their own families.

Hopefully, our children can recognize that, on balance, the things that they considered givens — material, cultural, ethical and otherwise — didn’t drop from the sky, but came from hard work and the best of intentions.

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Tadanori Koga is the third from the right, Maya Endoh is the fourth from the right (all in the front row). Photo courtesy Elena Stephanie.

By Daniel Dunaief

Hoping to take a page out of nature’s playbook, a married couple in the Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering at Stony Brook University is studying a structure that could prevent the spread of pathogens on the surface.

Before the pandemic started, Research Professor Maya Endoh and Associate Professor Tadanori Koga were exploring how anti microbial coatings controlled pathogens on the molecular scale. With the pandemic, they became more focused on ways to prevent pathogens from causing infections after people came into contact with contaminated surfaces.

Working with researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, the team received $12 million over three years as a part of the Department of Energy’s Biopreparedness Research Virtual Experiment initiative, which supports multidisciplinary research efforts designed to strengthen precautionary measures against infectious disease outbreaks. Koga and Endoh received a subcontract of $1.2 million from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory which runs until December 2026.

This kind of study, along with other funded research on the spread of pathogens, could be “important to prevent the next pandemic,” said Endoh. She added that this kind of work could not only help reduce the danger from another potential pandemic, but could also help cut down infections from other common health threats.

The research plans to explore the physical and chemical interactions that occur when bacteria come in contact with a material surface.

To develop surface coatings that might resist the spread of disease-carrying pathogens, Koga and Endoh are turning to an insect that will be even more abundant than usual this year. For the first time since 1803, the 13-year and 17-year cicadas will emerge at the same time.

Koga and Endoh, however, are less focused on their prevalence or their loud noises than they are on their wings, which resist bacteria and may also provide protection against viruses and fungi, as something about their nanostructure disables these pathogens.

“We want to learn from nature,” said Endoh. “As material scientists, we want to mimic this structure.”

Their method of killing bacteria is to facilitate bacterial attachment to nanopattern surfaces. They are targeting surfaces that are constantly and directly exposed to pathogens, such as medical devices, tools and sensors.

Their computational results suggest that a nanopatterned surface can puncture a bacterial outer membrane. These scientists can not specify the time range clearly, which is something they are pursuing with the awarded project.

“We are targeting the surfaces which are constantly and directly exposed to pathogens, such as medical devices, tools and sensors,” Koga and Endoh explained in an email.

Structural defense

The structure of the cicada wings have nanopillars that are about 100 nanometers tall and that are separated by about 100 nanometers from each other. The nanopillars they plan to use have a height of 10 nanometers, a diameter of 50 nanometers and a space between adjacent cylinders of 70 nanometers.

By creating a similar structure with polymers, the Stony Brook scientists will attempt to manufacture materials that provide the same resistance.

They will optimize the geometric parameters of the nanostructure, especially its height and interpillar spacing, to create different nano topographies, including nanopillars, nanowalls, nanospikes and nanodomes.

They are starting their work with the bacteria E. coli and will use computational approaches to optimize surface geometric parameters, bacteria-substrate interactions and bacterial wall stiffness to create a robust structure-guided antimicrobial surface.

They will use polystyrene block polymers and are planning to use different ingredients such as biopolymers. They believe the ingredients can be varied.

According to their recent molecular dynamics simulations mimicking experimental conditions, attractive interactions promote additional membrane attachment, pulling the membrane taut against the pillars and creating tension that ruptures the cell wall. The rupture occurs at the high curvature regions near the edge of the pillars.

Surfaces coated by polymers would likely require periodic coating applications. The scientists treat those polymers with a three-dimensional link to improve the mechanical property. They also apply atomic-thin scale metal layers to make the surface more durable.

In collaboration with Brookhaven National Laboratory, they are trying to determine how to make this kind of pattern with different substances.

“We don’t know what shape is the best [for various pathogens], what size is the best and what spacing is the best,” said Koga.

Benefits of collaboration

Koga and Endoh appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with a range of talented scientists at other institutions.

“Luckily, we have a lot of collaborators,” Endoh said.

Koga and Endoh became a part of a bigger collaboration when they worked with Jan-Michael Carrillo and Bobby Sumpter at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who started this project.

“This is a nice step, but it’s not the end,” said Koga. The next step is to “create a real material.”

Lifelong collaboration

Koga and Endoh met in their native Japan. Koga is from Kyushu, while Endoh grew up in Sendai, which was the epicenter of the Tōhoku earthquake in 2011, which created the tsunami at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

They came to the United States when Koga wanted to become a postdoctoral researcher for a two year assignment at Stony Brook. Over 27 years, and four children later, they are still at Stony Brook.

Over the years, Endoh juggled motherhood and a postponed PhD, which she eventually received from Kyoto University.

Koga enjoys watching Japanese players in Major League Baseball and is a fan of Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani. A “soccer mom,” Endoh enjoys cooking and playing the violin. The couple hikes in the summer and skis in the winter.

As for their own protective measures during the pandemic, Koga and Endoh regularly washed their hands, although they didn’t use Purell or other special wipes to clean any surfaces. 

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Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory neuroscientist Arkarup Banerjee is using singing mice, like the one shown here, to understand how our brains control timing and communication. Photo by Christopher Auger-Dominguez

By Daniel Dunaief

Animals don’t have clocks, telling them when and for how long to run on a treadmill, to eat whatever they catch or to call to each other from the tops of trees or the bottom of a forest.

Arkarup Banerjee

The Alston’s singing mouse, which lives in Costa Rica, has a distinctive call that people can hear and that, more importantly, conveys meaning to other members of the species.

Using equipment to monitor neurons when a mouse offers songs of different length, Cold Spring Harbor Assistant Professor Arkarup Banerjee showed that these unusual rodents exhibit a form a temporal scaling that is akin to stretching or relaxing a rubber band. This scaling suggests that their brains are bending their processing of time to produce songs of different lengths.

“People have shown this kind of time stretching phenomenon in monkeys,” said Banerjee. It was unexpected and surprising that the same algorithm was used in the rodent motor cortex to control the flexibility of a motor pattern and action during vocalization.

Using recordings of neuronal activity over many weeks, Banerjee focused on a part of the mouse brain called the orofacial motor cortex (or OMC). He searched for differences in songs with particular durations and tempo.

Banerjee had set up a system in which he played back the recordings of Alston’s singing mice to his test subjects, who then responded to those songs. Mice generally respond with songs that are variable durations compared to when they sing alone.

These mice can adjust duration and tempo of these 10-second long songs while engaged in social communication.

People “do that all the time,” said Banerjee. “We change the volume of how loud we are speaking and we can change the tempo.”

The mice showed some vocal flexibility similar to other animals, including people.

These mice are singing the same song, with varying rhythms over shorter or longer periods of time. It is as if the same person were to sing “Happy Birthday” in 10 seconds or in 15 seconds.

Banerjee would like to know what is it in the mouse’s brain that allows for such flexibility. He had previously shown that the motor cortex is involved in vocal behavior, which meant he knew of at least one region where he could look for clues about how these rodents were controlling the flexibility of their songs.

By tracking the firing pattern of neurons in the OMC, he was able to relate neural activity to what the mice were doing in real time.

Neural activity expands or contracts in time, almost as if time is running faster or slower. These animals are experiencing relative time when it comes to producing their songs as they change their songs through a wide range of durations.

Pre-song activity

Even before an animal sings, Banerjee speculates its brain could be preparing for the sounds it’s going to make, much as we think of the words we want to say in a conversation or our response to a question before we move our mouths to reply or type on a keyboard to respond.

Songs also track with intruder status. An animal in a home cage sings a shorter song than an animal brought into a new cage.

Vocalizations may scale with social rank, which might help attract mates or serve other social purposes.

Females in the lab, which presumably reflect similar trends in the wild, tend to prefer the male that produces a longer song with a higher tempo, which could reflect their physical fitness and their position in the social hierarchy, according to research from Steve Phelps, Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Integrative Biology.

Applications

While it’s a long way from the research he’s conducting to any potential human application, Banerjee could envision ways for these studies to shed light on communication processes and disorders.

The motor cortex in humans and primate is a larger region. Problems in these areas, from strokes or injuries, can result in aphasia, or the inability to articulate words properly. Banerjee plans to look at stroke models to see if the Alston’s singing mouse might provide clues about potential diagnostic or therapeutic clues.

“There are ways we can use this particular system to study cognitive deficits that show up” during articulation deficits such as those caused by strokes, said Banerjee.  While he said scientists know the parts list of the brain regions involved in speaking, they don’t yet know how they all interact.

“If we did, we’d have a much better chance of knowing where it fails,” Banerjee  explained. A challenge along this long process is learning how to generalize any finding in mice to humans. While difficult, this is not an impossible extrapolation, he suggested.

An effective model

Banerjee built a model prior to these experiments to connect neural activity with behavior.

“We had an extremely clear hypothesis about what should happen in the neural domain,” he said. “It was pretty gratifying to see that neurons change the way we predicted given the modeling.”

When the paper first came out about eight months ago in the scientific preprint bioRxiv, it received considerable attention from Banerjee’s colleagues working in similar fields. He went to India to give three talks and gave a recent talk at Emory University.

Outside of the lab, Banerjee and his wife Sanchari Ghosh, who live in Mineola, are enjoying watching the growth and development of their son Ahir, who was born a year and a half ago.

“It’s fascinating as a neuroscientist to watch his development and to see how a tiny human being learns about the world,” Banerjee said.

As for his work with this compelling mouse, Banerjee credited Phelps and his post doctoral advisor at New York University, Michael Long for doing important work on this mouse and for encouraging him to pursue research with this species. Long is a co-corresponding author on the paper. “It’s very gratifying to see that the expectation of what we can do with this species is starting to get fulfilled,” said Banerjee. “We can do these interesting and complex experiments and learn something about vocal interactions. I’m excited about the future.”

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SCIENCE ON SCREEN

The Cinema Arts Centre, 423 Park Ave., Huntington continues its Science on Screen series with a mind-expanding exploration of the mysteries of language and communication, featuring a lecture and Q&A with neuroscientist Arkarup Banerjee, of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and a rare big-screen showing of Denis Villeneuve’s profound 2016 drama ARRIVAL on Tuesday, March 26 at 7 p.m..

Dr. Banerjee’s work explores the theme of decoding messages and touches on the fundamental assumptions of reality which are unpacked in the film. Discover how every species and culture’s unique symbols and codes shape our understanding of the world around us, and uncover the intriguing ways in which our brains navigate the limits and possibilities of language.

Tickets are $16, $10 members. To purchase in advance, visit www.cinemaartscentre.org. 

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