He grew up in Greece and has explored how water moves around everything from fish to river beds to the supporting columns of bridges.

The dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University, Fotis Sotiropoulos has found plenty of opportunities to discuss topics that interest him in the six months since he arrived from the University of Minnesota.

Sotiropoulos recently had a storm surge meeting in New York City with a number of consultants and stakeholders to share ideas about how to prepare the area for everything from water flow storms like Hurricane Sandy to the potential effects of global warming on low-lying areas in the city and on Long Island.

“We have developed high-fidelity computational models and can recreate virtual flooding events,” Sotiropoulos said. “We can simulate what a flood will do and what its impact will be on the infrastructure.”

By using computers, he can predict the forces on buildings if a Category 5 hurricane strikes. He can help assess the risks and suggest measures to take to reduce the impact of a damaging storm on the area.

In addition to providing insights into potential storms and acting as dean of a program that includes 3,800 undergraduates and more than 1,530 graduate students, Sotiropoulos is developing a computational laboratory in collaboration with the Stony Brook Institute for Advanced Computational Science.

Recently, Sotiropoulos published a paper with University of Minnesota Ph.D. student Aaron Boomsma about a topic in dispute among scientists: Do the denticles on sharks enable them to move more quickly through the water or do they slow them down?

In the journal Physics of Fluids, Boomsma and Sotiropoulos explored how these denticles, which are made of the same material as teeth, affected the flow of water around them.

“A lot of experiments gave conflicting results” about these denticles, said Sotiropoulos. Using a computational model and denticles from a mako shark that were collected by George Lauder, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, Boomsma and Sotiropoulos applied numerical simulations to study the details of turbulent water flow around sheets of these denticles.

“We were able to show pretty conclusively that for a specific arrangement of shark denticles in these conditions that it has a detrimental effect,” Sotiropoulos said. That comes as something of a surprise because these denticles are the natural structures that companies have copied to design riblets on ship hulls and swimsuits for Olympic competitors that enable them to move more rapidly through the water.

“What was cool is that [people] have tried to imitate and get inspired by nature, even though nature may not have evolved to do what we thought it was doing,” Sotiropoulos said.

To be sure, while this study demonstrates that these denticles increase drag, they didn’t conclusively end the discussion The testing didn’t include real-life shark situations, Sotiropoulos said, such as high-speed swimming and body repositioning through the water.

Other scientists shared their appreciation for Sotiropoulos’ research. “He has produced seminal research results in a range of fields from civil engineering hydraulics to human and fish biology,” Robert Street, the Campbell Professor (emeritus) in the School of Engineering at Stanford University and who served with Sotiropoulos as a member of the external review board for the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory explained in an email. Sotiropoulos “and his team have demonstrated before that if you do the calculations properly, you learn new things about the physics. For example, they have recently elucidated the complete details of the physics of the generation of sand dunes.”

Street expects Sotiropoulos to attract more talent to Stony Brook because he is “a natural magnet” who “exudes excitement.” Stony Brook staff have appreciated the energy, insight and determination he brings to the university.

Christine Cesaria, who is assisting Sotiropoulos with broader communication initiatives through the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, said she was exchanging emails with him while he was driving with his wife Chrisa Arcan and her mother from Minnesota. “He wanted to make sure his dean’s message was right,” she said. “He was going back and forth about his mission” while in transit.

As the new dean on the block, Sotiropoulos said his goal is to facilitate major research initiatives. He applauds the university for hiring “terrific faculty. The people I found here are just as good or even better than at the University of Minnesota.”

Sotiropoulos is looking to strengthen the collaboration with Brookhaven National Laboratory, particularly in the area of energy sustainability. He cited cyber security, ecosystem management and the future of transportation as some of the many areas in which society is undergoing changes and for which Stony Brook can play an important role. Engineering-driven medicine with an emphasis on cancer is another “major thrust in which we are uniquely positioned to lead.”

As a child, Sotiropoulos was fascinated by surface boils in which water bubbled up for no apparent reason, even when no bridge peers were nearby. Only recently did he understand that sediment moves on river beds created this bubbling. “I remember looking at things like that and becoming fascinated,” he said. “It’s really quite rewarding now to be able to replicate that.”

Sotiropoulos is living in temporary housing in Old Field with Arcan, who is an assistant professor in the Nutrition Division of the Family, Population and Preventive Medicine at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine. Arcan focuses her work on combating childhood obesity and health disparities.

Sotiropoulos, whose son Alexander is a freshman at Purdue in Lafayette, Indiana, studying electrical and computer engineering, said he feels comfortable living near the water. “It’s in my genes,” he said.

As for his work, Sotiropoulos, who plans to add a few graduate students in his lab, feels energized in his new job and said he has “unique opportunities to do some ground-breaking, cutting-edge research that addresses major societal challenges.”

Jason Trelewicz has had a productive return to Stony Brook University. A graduate of Mount Sinai High School, Trelewicz received a bachelor’s degree in engineering from SBU in 2004. After that, he earned a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then worked at St. James-based MesoScribe Technologies. He became an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stony Brook in 2012.

Recently, Trelewicz won a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award, which provides $500,000 over a five-year period. Trelewicz’s research focuses on transforming applications of high-strength metals.

Trelewicz is “tremendously talented. He goes after bold initiatives,” said Fotis Sotiropoulos, the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SBU. “He is also actively involved in pushing forward some of the high-performance computing initiatives we have as a part of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. He has a terrific career ahead of him.”

Trelewicz’s scientific efforts center around amorphous metals. He uses computational modeling and conducts experiments on metals that have a disordered atomic structure that is similar to glass and, as a result, are called metallic glasses.

The metals he works with are different from everyday metals because they do not have a regular atomic structure. The atoms that make up amorphous metals or metallic glasses are in a highly disordered state.

The amorphous metals “require a lot more force or stress to initiate permanent deformation,” Trelewicz said, which makes them higher strength. Instead of deforming like crystalline metals, they become brittle. The likelihood of these types of metals developing a brittle failure is one of two problems with amorphous metals, he said. The other is that it’s difficult to make these metals in large parts like a sheet.

In his work, Trelewicz hopes to overcome these difficulties. He said amorphous metals have applications in industries ranging from automotive to aerospace to consumer electronics.

As a part of this award, Trelewicz is expected to use these funds to further his teaching efforts. “I’m extremely passionate about introducing students to the vast field of materials science and engineering,” he explained.

Jeff Brogan, the CEO of MesoScribe, hired Trelewicz and witnessed his work habits. In a recent email, he described Trelewicz as “very organized and an excellent project manager.” Brogan called Trelewicz a “valuable member of [the] proposal writing team” and suggested he “helped secure a number” of government contracts.

While he was at MesoScribe, Trelewicz was involved in developing new sensors to measure temperature, strain and other properties of interest to MesoScribe’s customers, Brogan said. “His efforts on ice detection and ice mitigation led to a patent application which was approved and is soon to be issued,” Brogan said.

Trelewicz initially became interested in amorphous metals through golf. An enthusiast of the sport, Trelewicz remembers reading about how the golf club industry used these types of metals on the face of golf clubs. Their elastic properties enabled more energy to be transferred to the ball rather than be absorbed as elastic strain energy.

Trelewicz wants to develop new high-strength materials that resist permanent deformation and that are not brittle. He will use simulations that model atomic interactions in a material to build an understanding of deformation physics, which he plans to use to design a more resilient alloy. He hopes to distribute defection initiation and propagation to inhibit crack formation.

Trelewicz said he has been told by a number of people that he respects that it is going to be difficult to make these materials with the proposed manufacturing process. He is encouraged by his understanding of the deformation of metallic glasses and believes the process is capable of creating structural inhomogeneities that will help him achieve his goals.

When he was looking to return to academia, Trelewicz set his sights on Stony Brook, where he was pleased with all the changes the university has gone through since he left in 2004.

“It’s astounding how the campus has evolved,” Trelewicz said. He appreciates the investment the university has made in its faculty members and in students adding, “I feel like I’m part of something huge.”

Trelewicz and his wife Lauren, who teaches global studies at Earl L. Vandermeulen High School in Port Jefferson, live in Miller Place and are expecting their second daughter in May. The couple, who went to the junior and senior prom when they were in high school, appreciate being close to both sets of parents and to the Long Island coastline, where they enjoy summer power boat trips to Orient Point and across the Long Island Sound. “Our family is a very big part of our lives, as is boating in the summers,” Trelewicz said.

As for his work, he relishes interactions with his colleagues. “Passionate discussions are what make being a scientist so exciting. I particularly enjoy collaborating with colleagues across academic, national labs and industry as I think it adds new dimensions to the thought process and promotes innovative ideas.”

If he succeeds, she may see the results of his efforts in her work. As fascinated as she is by her studies in the Antarctic, Heather Lynch knows the stakes are high for her husband Matthew Eisaman’s work.

“These days, ecologists like myself are often just carefully documenting environmental decline, and predicting how quickly or slowly a species will go extinct,” Lynch offered in response to emailed questions. “The work that [Eisaman] does will actually solve the problem.”

Indeed, as a physicist in the Sustainable Energy Technologies Department at BNL and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook University, Eisaman is focused on improving the efficiency of reusable energy sources, particularly solar cells.

It is through this effort that Eisaman made a compelling discovery recently that may have implications outside the world of reusable energy.

Eisaman worked with a team of scientists at BNL and the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at SUNY Polytechnic on a process related to graphene, which is a two-dimensional arrangement of carbon atoms that is one atom thick.

Eisaman was working on a process called doping in which scientists add or take away electrons. Doping is one way to control how graphene behaves at junctions with semiconductors. Eisaman set up an experiment to explore a way to make n-doping, which adds electrons to graphene, more efficient.

The team at SUNY Polytechnic built a product on top of a sodium lime substrate, which is an ingredient in household glass and windows. Eisaman layered graphene on top of that. He had planned to add other chemicals to dope the graphene.

“Before we doped it, we took a baseline measurement,” Eisaman said. “It looked like it was strongly n-doped, which we didn’t expect.” He followed this up with a series of other experiments, using the facilities at BNL including the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, at SUNY Poly and in his lab. “The whole study was really a team effort requiring many different areas of expertise.”

Eisaman believes this discovery was promising for solar cells and other possible technological advances. He plans to explore the fundamentals of the doping mechanism. He would like to understand how the chemical environment of the sodium affects the doping strength. He is also studying how the doping and other electronic properties of the graphene vary with the number of graphene layers.

Eisaman said one challenge to making this doping process work is that most semiconductor properties would change, mostly for the worse, if scientists tried to diffuse sodium through it. A possible solution is to deposit a material on top of the graphene that has a sufficiently high surface density of sodium. While this material would donate electrons to the graphene, it would not diffuse into the semiconductor as long as the temperatures of the deposition process were low enough, Eisaman suggested. He is currently working on this.

Since the paper came out in Scientific Reports in February, Eisaman said he has had inquiries from scientists and from a company that might want to use their discovery. He is “actively looking for funding and partnerships to help push this forward,” he said.

Eisaman has three Ph.D. candidates in his lab and he usually adds two to four undergraduate researchers in the summer. While this group will continue to develop technology that will seek ways to find applications of graphene doping techniques, Eisaman will continue with the bread and butter work in his lab: improving the efficiency of reusable energy alternatives.

In another set of experiments, Eisaman collaborated with Charles Black, a scientist and group leader at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials. Black and Eisaman worked on how to use the same anti-reflective properties in moth eyes to reduce the amount of light that escapes from a solar cell through reflections.

Black constructed structures that mimicked these properties. The structure worked even better than expected.

“Based on our limited knowledge of optics, which is [Eisaman’s] expertise, we couldn’t understand why they seemed to be doing better than we thought they should,” Black said. Eisaman’s complementary ability to model the optical properties of the material on the computer allowed them to see a “subtlety that escaped us. In the end, he figured out what was going on.” Black and Eisaman are continuing to work together to create a better structure.

Eisaman and Lynch, an assistant professor in the Department  of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook, have a 6-year old daughter Avery. They live in Port Jefferson, where they have had solar panels on their house for over a year.

The couple, who met when they were undergraduates at Princeton, discuss their work “constantly,” Lynch noted. “Sometimes, we sit and brainstorm how to solve the world’s energy problems, by which I mean that I throw out crazy ideas and [Eisaman] patiently explains why they wouldn’t work or why they don’t scale well.”

Eisaman, who grew up in Pittsburgh, said he appreciates being close to the water, where he and Lynch have enjoyed kayaking since they moved to Long Island in 2011. Eisaman and Lynch are recreational runners and try to run two marathons each year: the Pineland Farms Trail Race in Maine and the Hamptons Marathon.

As for his work, Eisaman said he feels a sense of urgency. “One of the most pressing problems we’re facing is to meet our energy goals in the next 10 to 20 years.”

More than a decade ago, Dmitri Kharzeev came up with an idea he thought he should find in nature. Many such concepts come and go, with some, like the Higgs boson particle, taking over 50 years to discover.

After working with numerous collaborators over the years, the professor of physics and astronomy at Stony Brook University and a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory found proof.

“This was absolutely amazing,” said Kharzeev. “You think an idea in your head, but whether or not it’s realized in the real world is not at all clear. When you find it in the laboratory on a table top experiment, it’s pretty exciting.”

The discovery triggered a champagne party in Kharzeev’s Port Jefferson home, which included collaborators such as Qiang Li, a physicist and head of the Advanced Energy Materials Group at Brookhaven, and Tonica Valla, a physicist at BNL, among others. “There was a feeling that something new is about to begin,” Kharzeev said.

Kharzeev’s idea was that an imbalance in particles moving with different projections of spin on momentum generates an electric current that flows with resistance. That resistance drops in a magnetic field that the scientists hope can reach zero, which would give their material superconducting properties.

A particle’s projection of spin on momentum is its chirality. The magnetic field aligns the spins of the positive and negative particles in opposite directions. When the scientists applied an electric field, the positive particles moved with it and the negative ones moved against it. This allows the particles to move in a direction consistent with their spin, which creates an imbalance in chirality.

The chiral magnetic effect can enable ultra-fast magnetic switches, sensors, quantum electricity generators and conventional and quantum computers.

Kharzeev had expected this kind of separation for particles at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL, where he figured he might observe the separation for quarks in the quark-gluon plasma.

Instead, he and his colleagues, including co-author Li, discovered this phenomenon with zirconium pentatelluride, which is in a relatively new class of materials called Dirac semimetals, which were created in 2014. Their paper was published in Nature Physics earlier this year.

The particles had to be nearly massless to allow them to move through any obstacles in their path. Particles that collided with something else and changed their direction or chirality would create resistance, which would reduce conductivity.

Genda Gu, who is in the Condensed Matter Physics & Materials Sciences Department at BNL, grew the zirconium pentatelluride crystals in his laboratory. Gu “is one of the best crystal growers in the world and he has managed to grow the cleanest crystals of zirconium pentatelluride currently available,” said Kharzeev.

Gu said he collaborates regularly with Li. This, however, was the first time he worked with Kharzeev. He called the work “fruitful and productive” and said the crystals had “generated a number of exciting scientific results.”

The materials they worked with have a wide range of potential applications. The semimetals strongly interact with light in the terahertz frequency range, which is a useful and unique property, Kharzeev suggested. Terahertz electromagnetic radiation, which is called T-rays, can be used for nondamaging medical imaging, including the diagnosis of cancer and high-speed wireless communications.

To be sure, there are limitations to zirconium pentatelluride. For starters, it only displays this chiral magnetic effect at temperatures below 100 degrees Kelvin, or minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit, which is on par with the best high-temperature semiconductors, but still well below room temperature. Its chirality is also only approximately conserved, so the resistance does not drop all the way to zero.

Another hurdle is that scientists have to improve the technique for growing thin films of this material. While it is possible, it will take considerable research and development, Kharzeev said. He hopes to find a material that will exhibit chiral magnet effects at room temperature.

Kharzeev has received interest from companies and other researchers but said “we have a lot of work to do before we can create practical devices” based on this effect. He hopes scientists will create such products within the next five to ten years.

There are numerous potential uses for zirconium pentatelluride and other similar materials, including in space, where temperatures remain low enough for these quasi-particles.

“You could envision this on space stations to generate electricity from sunlight,” Kharzeev said. When he saw the movie “The Martian,” Kharzeev said he thought about how thermoelectrics could power a station on the Red Planet.

“If we managed to increase the temperature at which the chiral magnetic effect is present just a little, by about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, our thermoelectric would be even more efficient,” he said.

Kharzeev, who grew up in Russia and moved to Long Island in 1997, appreciates the beauty and comforts of the area.

“The combination of Stony Brook, BNL and Cold Spring Harbor Lab makes Long Island one of the best places in the world to do science,” he said. He also loves the beaches and the ocean and plays tennis at the Port Jefferson Country Club.

As for his collaborations, Kharzeev is excited by the work ahead with a material he didn’t envision demonstrating these superconducting properties when he came up with this concept in 2004.

When he learned of the work Li was doing with zirconium pentatelluride, Kharzeev “rushed” into his lab. “It appeared that even though he and his group were not thinking about the chiral magnetic effect at the time, they had already set up an experiment that was perfect for this purpose,” Kharzeev said. They “even had a preliminary result that literally made my heart jump.”

When Eugenia Gold and her husband Josh got their dogs, she wanted to name them. She chose Rex and Maia, which reflects her work. The couple has a history that dates back over 17 years and includes attending the high school senior prom together.

History is at the center of what Gold studies, as she explores the transition from dinosaurs to birds.

Gold, who joined the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University as an instructor in August, recently completed her Ph.D. at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. At the Upper West Side museum, she focused on how the neurobiology of theropod dinosaurs — a group that includes Tyrannosaurus rex — changed as flight evolved. While scientists aren’t suggesting that a version of T. rex developed flight, they do consider birds as living dinosaurs in the same way humans are mammals.

In her research, Gold studied the extinct dodo bird. Using a CT scan of the bird’s skull, she explored the relative size and shape of the brain.

Gold found that the flightless dodo bird was likely not as mentally deficient as legend has it. “We discovered that the dodo has a brain size in proportion to its body size, so it was likely not as stupid as we thought, but rather as intelligent as common pigeons.” She compared it to eight other pigeon species, seven of which are close relatives of the dodo and one of which is the common pigeon, which is a more distant relative.

“It falls right on the line in terms of brain-to-body size,” Gold said. “If we take that as a rough proxy, it’s probably about as smart as a pigeon.”

Dodo birds developed their reputation for lacking intelligence because they weren’t afraid of sailors and because they went extinct so quickly. They didn’t run away or hide when humans came, largely because they didn’t have any experience with them. “They were easily herded onto ships,” said Gold. “That led to a reputation of being stupid.”

In studying the dodo’s brain, Gold also found that these birds had an enlarged olfactory bulb, which they share with its closest relative, the solitaire bird. They used these olfactory bulbs to smell out ripe fruit and find prey buried in the dirt or sand or hiding under leaves.

Gold based her study of the dodo on an individual skull that was in the Natural History Museum in London. The recent development of CT scanning enabled her to conduct this research.

Members of Gold’s department appreciate the skills and expertise she brings to Stony Brook. “We value both her commitment to our teaching mission  as well as her research program,” said Alan Turner, an associate professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences. “Her research background and application of advanced brain imaging like CT and PET are complementary to those of us in the department that use similar techniques for other types of studies of morphology.”

Gold’s work with the dodo bird will be a part of a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History called Dinosaurs Among Us. The exhibit will open to the public on March 21 and will feature the work of several graduate students from the lab of Mark Norell, the Macaulay Curator in the Division of Paleontology at the museum and the division’s chair. The exhibition, which will be in the LeFrak Family Gallery on the fourth floor of the museum, will feature a 23-foot feathered tyrannosaur and a four-winged dromaeosaur with a 22-inch wingspan and patterned plumage. It will also include a fossil cast of a relative of Triceratops that had simple feathers on its body.

Norell said Gold’s work involved a “really long, intensive analysis.” Gold conducted something called “geometric morphometrics” in which she mathematically described brains and parts of brains.

Norell said Gold’s work is one element of the coming exhibition at the museum. “This exhibition is about the biology of dinosaurs,” he said and includes the work of several of his students, including information about dinosaurs’ eggs and nests, brains and flight mechanics.

In addition to conducting her own research at Stony Brook and working to publish other chapters in her thesis, Gold will be teaching a human anatomy course to medical school students. She took a human anatomy class when she was in graduate school.

Gold and her husband live in Ronkonkoma, where they appreciate the quiet neighborhood and the availability of much more space than they had in Manhattan.

Working at the Museum of Natural History was “a constant reminder of how amazing science is,” she said. “It’s refreshing to see so many people enjoying natural history and the fruits of our labor.”

In her earliest memories, Gold said she liked dinosaurs. She especially appreciates the Archaeopteryx because it is a transitional fossil between birds and dinosaurs. She also favors the Velociraptor in part because of the movie “Jurassic Park.” Unlike in the film, however, members of the Velociraptor genera are small and feathered.

Gold appreciated the opportunity to travel to the Gobi dessert on an archeological dig, where she slept out under the stars.

Recently, Gold said she was walking around the museum and was distracted by a conversation she was having with a colleague. She looked up and saw a cast of a new 122-foot long titanosaur fossil, which came to the museum in January. The remains of the dinosaur came from the Patagonian desert region of Argentina. Born in Argentina, Gold said she felt a connection to this fossil.

“The titanosaur is so amazing that it makes you feel small,” she said. “It was one of those moments where I felt like a child again.”

When a successful chef mixes ingredients, he changes the proportions of nutmeg to cinnamon or of parsley to oregano. He’s much more likely to focus on how the final product affects the flavor than he is the way the ingredients mix.

That’s not the case for Jurek (pronounced Yoo rek) Sadowski. Although he’s not a chef, the staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) would like to understand how some of the smallest pieces of organic metal complexes come together when they go through a process called self-assembly.

“I’m not only interested in obtaining the recipe for making these [products], but I’m also interested in understanding how and why things happen in these conditions on a more basic level,” Sadowski said.

Working with the low-energy electron microscope, Sadowski is a part of a team at the CFN that is involved in seeing and interpreting changes that occur on an atomic scale.

Sadowski has collaborated on environmental products that can remove greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from the air. This research helps understand how these self-assembled organic compounds develop pores of different sizes that can trap greenhouse gases.

The size of the pores works like a fishing net designed to catch the equivalent of Goldilocks gases from the air. Some gases pass right through them, while others bounce off without getting trapped. Then there are those, like carbon dioxide, that fit perfectly in the small spaces between the organic pieces.

In putting these products together, Sadowski asks what he needs to do to make the process more efficient and more selective.

The CFN is a user facility, which means that scientists around the world can benefit from the high level of technical expertise Sadowski possesses. He has worked with scientists from Columbia, Yale, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and SUNY facilities as well as visitors from the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Croatia and Japan.

Researchers who have worked with Sadowski suggested that his scientific and technical knowledge make him a particularly effective collaborator.

The low-energy electron microscope is a “very complicated instrument,” said Richard Osgood, the Higgins professor emeritus of electrical engineering and applied physics at Columbia University, who has collaborated for years with Sadowski. “You don’t just go in and turn a dial: it’s much more complicated than that. You have to tune things up.”

Working with Sadowski greatly lowers the cost of research because he can “do something in a couple of days” that might otherwise take a graduate student or other researcher a half a year or more to figure out,” Osgood said.

Sadowski said some of the products that use self-assembly include wearable electronics, such as solar cells or clothing, or wearable medical devices.

Sadowski divides his time about equally between pursuing his own research and working with others at the CFN.

Sadowski runs his own experiments mostly in a vacuum, where he varies the temperature and the density of the molecules he’s using.

Sadowski is planning to give a talk in March at the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore about his work.

“It’s important to understand how the molecules self-assemble themselves on the surface,” he said. “We can utilize self-assembly for further advances.”

For about five years, Sadowski has helped plan the creation of a new beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at BNL. That beamline, which will be called the electron spectro-microscopy beamline, will be completed later this year. The beamline will use a microscope that the CFN is contributing, which will help provide structural, chemical and electronic maps of surfaces with a resolution of a few nanometers.

“We will have a much more extended capability for studying chemical reactions as they happen on the surface and the electronic structure of the materials” by combining information of the surface morphology with the electronic structure and chemistry. This, he said, will provide a “comprehensive picture of the surface, or of a catalyst, or of a reaction” as it’s occurring.

One of the first experiments he might do would be to provide a chemical map of the surface of a material. He plans to determine the oxidation state of metals making up the surface.

Sadowski lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with his wife Adrianna Sadowska (whose name is slightly different to reflect her gender). The couple met in their native Poland where he was taking a class to brush up on Japanese before moving there after he earned his Ph.D. Sadowska, who is now a wine specialist at an auction house in White Plains, was preparing for a trip to Japan as well. The two expatriates lived in Japan for almost a decade. After getting married in Japan, they came to the United States.

As for his work, Sadowski said new questions regularly inspire him. “Every day, there’s a new challenge,” he said. “I really like to solve problems, one by one.”

The work done at Sadowski’s group and at the CFN can and likely will have numerous benefits, Osgood said.

This work could “form new technology that nobody dreamed about before,” said Osgood, who was an associate director at BNL and was directly involved in the creation of the CFN. “Every time I walk out there, I kick up my heels. It’s such a wonderful facility.”

When Patrick Meade was a child, he asked why? The answer often brought the same question: Why? The process continued through his schooling.

“When you do that for your entire life,” Meade explained, the ideal intellectual home for him became theoretical physics. Indeed, Meade, who joined Stony Brook University about six years ago, is now an associate professor at the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook.

Meade’s interests are in physics beyond the Standard Model, which describes how all known matter interacts with three out of the four known forces in the universe and what transmits these forces. He would like to help increase the microscopic understanding of all phenomena including dark matter and dark energy.

As he did when he was growing up, Meade continues to ask “why” questions that the Standard Model can’t yet answer. He would like to know, for example, why particles have the specific masses they do. When searching for the underlying description of the universe, he’d like to think some things were more than random and explore the possibilities for deeper underlying explanations.

As a theoretical physicist, Meade analyzes data that comes from experiments at places like the Atlas Experiment at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He then checks to see if pieces of the data fit within the context of existing frameworks, or if the data suggest a new theoretical direction or, perhaps, an extension of an existing theory.

“Part of a theorist’s job is to interpret data of unexplained things and postulate other ways to look for the consequences of a theory that would explain the data,” he said.

This December, experiments at Atlas, working at a new, unexplored energy level, found a possible particle six times heavier than the Higgs boson that theorists hadn’t predicted. The higher the energy of the collider, which was running at the highest energy ever created for a collision in a lab, the more often a particle with heavier mass can be produced. They discovered a pair of photons of light that seemed to provide a possible signal of a new particle decaying, Meade said.

“The reason this is interesting is that, in the last several decades, we haven’t seen any evidence of a new particle that wasn’t predicted by theorists,” said Meade.

In the short two months since the announcement of this new and unexpected result, over 200 papers written all over the world have come out.

“This is a very interesting possible development and part of our work is to try to explain what this could be,” Meade said.

Indeed, Meade, postdoctoral fellow Sam McDermott and graduate student Harikrishnan Ramani published a potential explanation of what they described as a “diphoton excess” in arXiv, which is an electronic e-print of a scientific paper. The paper has also been accepted for publication in the journal Physics Letters B.

The paper Meade, who was recently promoted to associate professor from assistant professor, and his collaborators wrote has been frequently cited, said George Sterman, a distinguished professor and director at the Yang Institute. “He lays down a plausible set of scenarios and he also shows that it’s not so simple to explain this data.”

Sterman said Meade has written “a number of influential papers since he [arrived], which are completely consistent with a high level of research he was doing before” joining Stony Brook.

In describing this potential particle, Meade and his colleagues relied on a principal called Occam’s razor, which suggests that the simplest explanation is the most likely.

Meade suggested this was like tasting a dish at a restaurant and trying to recreate it at home using familiar ingredients. It may turn out that the home-cooked meal is exactly like the restaurant entree, although it may lack some unfamiliar items. When trying to cook the meal at home, people will start with familiar ingredients, but that may not be enough.

“In the case of this data that came out of Atlas and CMS [compact muon solenoid], the simplest explanation was something that looked like a relative of the Higgs,” he said. This particle, however, even if it was a relative of the Higgs, was wider than expected. To explain the data would require the particle interacting with particles other than those in the Standard Model.

“This could be a harbinger of an entirely new sector of particles in the universe, some of which could be dark matter, and this particle could also decay into this sector. If this particle turns out to be real, it would be the first particle ever discovered beyond the Standard Model.”

To be sure, it’s way too early for any conclusions, in part because it might not even be real. Even if it’s a new particle, “we definitely won’t know what the particle is without more data,” which should come this spring when the Large Hadron Collider starts running again.

When he’s not responding to new particles that may reveal something undiscovered, Meade dedicates his time to working on matter/antimatter asymmetry. In theory, after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have canceled each other out, leaving the universe devoid of things like planets, stars, cell phones and reality TV show hosts turned presidential candidates.

Meade lives in Port Jefferson Station, where, he says, he enjoys the balance of seaside living and small town culture a stone’s throw away from the “best city in the world.”

As for his work, he said what drives him is “trying to understand what are the basic laws of the universe.” Even without the ultimate answers, “partial discoveries along the way can shape our understanding of how we fit in with the rest of the universe.”

Flecks of gray hair appear near the temples, laugh or frown lines deepen and elbows become dry and scaly. These are some of the signs of aging that people see, particularly when they’ve known family and friends for decades.

Adam de Graff, a research assistant at Stony Brook University’s Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology, however, is studying changes that occur well beneath the skin.

Specifically, de Graff, Ken Dill, a distinguished professor of chemistry and physics and director of the Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology and graduate student Michael Hazoglou looked at the proteins that are damaged by free radicals, which are released during oxidation. These free radicals are molecules that have an unpaired electron and a high chemical reactivity that can damage proteins, DNA and lipids.

When people reach 80, about half their proteins are damaged by oxidation. de Graff, Dill and Hazoglou used physics and computer analysis to look closely at protein changes. These Stony Brook scientists recently published their results in the journal Structure.

The researchers studied “how naturally occurring damage to proteins affects their ability,” de Graff said. “Such an understanding is critical, as stability is essential to their function.”

The proteins these scientists identified could become a site for targeted treatment against age-related diseases, de Graff said. Proteins operate with a simple principle: Their shape, structure and flexibility determine their function. Their stability ensures their success in their roles. Proteins have many different functions, from transporting oxygen to providing structure and  hormonal signals.

Each of these protein functions requires a certain type of architecture. Protein structure is needed for a “complete understanding of function,” de Graff said. While other researchers have explored which amino acids are the most susceptible to oxidation, de Graff and his collaborators focused primarily on the charged amino acids.

The creation of free radicals is a universal side effect of respiration. Finding a drug, however, that might make the mitochondria, or the energy producer of the cell, work without causing damage, might increase the longevity of the cell machinery and the organism.

When comparing the life expectancy of birds to rodents, birds win out, living much longer, on average, than mice or rats. Some scientists believe this might be the case because birds have “much cleaner” mitochondria, de Graff said.

Indeed, a drug that makes human mitochondria work without producing as many protein-damaging free radicals might generate human cells that suffer less age-related damage.

Their method of analyzing and studying proteins could indicate which proteins are the most vulnerable to oxidative damage, while also indicating which are the most durable.

De Graff said he and Dill studied these proteins by using a computer code they wrote, which sorts through entire proteomes. They sorted through the proteins to find the proteins most destabilized by damage. They are predicting the degree of stability loss resulting from that damage.

De Graff said he has paid particular attention to studies that demonstrate a link between lifestyle choices and longevity.

Seventh Day Adventists, who have a restricted diet that doesn’t include as much animal protein, live, on average, six to seven years longer than the rest of the population. He suggested that some of what will help people live longer will have less to do with “genetic manipulation” than it will with making better and more informed choices about diet and health. It will be helpful at a protein level to understand “why dietary intervention has an impact on how we age.”

He is also confident that, over time, researchers will develop an enhanced understanding of the interventions that will protect proteins from damage. Equally important, he believes “we will enhance our understanding of interventions that enhance our ability to get rid of this damage as it is occurring or once it has occurred.”

De Graff likened the process of keeping a biological system running over time to managing a city. In the urban setting, the mayor might take the tax dollars and use it to build roads or fix bridges. As time goes on, the available tax dollars might diminish, which increases the importance of understanding the cost of each activity with age.

De Graff, who grew up in Canada and now lives in Stony Brook, said he was interested in math from the age of 5. When he was 6, he was already doing fourth-grade math. De Graff said he practices what he preaches — he has significantly reduced his consumption of animal protein and lives a clean lifestyle.

When he was in high school, he thought he’d become a physicist or engineer. He coupled that natural talent and appreciation with a desire to understand biological systems.

Banu Ozkan, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Arizona State University, praised de Graff’s efforts and his results. De Graff “always finds intriguing questions and is very inquisitive,” said Ozkan. “He’s a very hard worker. Whenever I came [to the lab], during weekends and sometimes at night, I found him working.” Ozkan predicted de Graff had a bright future.

As for his work, de Graff remains excited about the possibility of collaborating on future aging-related research.

“Without an understanding of what it takes to maintain individual proteins in their healthy state,” he said, it’s hard to “understand the interactions and aging processes inside the cell.”

It’s enough to make Dr. Seuss’ Horton the Elephant and the Whos — those brave little folks we would not want to lose — proud.

Gordon Taylor, a professor of Oceanography at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, is taking a spectacularly close look at the micro community of organisms that live, eat, process elements like nitrogen, carbon, oxygen and sulfur, in droplets of ocean water.

In a milliliter of water, there are about a million bacteria, ten million viruses and about 10,000 protozoa, Taylor said. “Their cosmos is pretty much in a droplet of water.” Small though they may be, however, they are “ubiquitous,” with the ocean harboring millions of species or microorganisms.

Taylor is studying something he calls the “marine microbial community” whose composition, activity and ecosystem services vary in space and time. Understanding these communities can help oceanographers get a better grasp on the way these network of creatures affect ocean health, climate, pollution and disease in marine life.

Taylor is exploring the microbial food web in which prey items are creatures like bacteria and single-celled algae and predators are single-celled organisms that are the cousins of paramecium, amoeba and euglena.

These creatures also live with the “proverbial monkey wrench of viruses, which are also a part of this microbial food web. Every known form of life has at least one type of virus that has co-evolved to attack it,” Taylor suggested. Many organisms have multiple viral pathogens that challenge their health. On average, viruses outnumber bacteria by a factor of 10.

Colleagues at Stony Brook suggested that an appreciation for these microbial communities has broader implications.

“Understanding how microorganisms catalyze the cycling of nutrients and their responses to environmental change provides information for predictive models which are useful for informing future policy and management decisions,” explained Josephine Aller, a professor in the SoMAS. “Sometimes this information can help to alter conditions which have caused change and reverse ecological damage.”

The development of technology that can account for and interpret life at these smaller scales has enabled scientists of all kinds to ask a range of new questions about increasingly small parts of life. Physicists, for example, long ago went well past exploring protons, electrons and neutrons, and are studying quarks, gluons and other subatomic particles.

To study the marine microenvironment, Taylor will use confocal Raman microspectrometry and atomic force microscopy at the NAno-RAMAN Molecular Imaging Laboratory. A National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation program grant and matching support from Stony Brook helped establish the lab.

In Raman spectroscopy, researchers shine a laser light through a lens onto the specimen. This technology is used to grade commercial diamonds. When the laser light, which is a single wavelength, hits the specimen, most of the photons are absorbed or scattered at the same wavelength. In about one in a million cases, however, the light loses energy to a molecular bond, with potentially covalently bound elements of all sorts causing Raman scattered photons. The spectra produced are a fingerprint of molecular bonds.

Taylor has coupled this spectroscopic instrument with an atomic force microscope, which can look at the surface topography and structure of small creatures. “I believe that we are the only marine/atmospheric/environmental science program in the U.S. with such a system,” he said.

Even with the technology, the two and three dimensional imaging of what’s happening remains a significant challenge, Taylor said. To explore this, he will flash-freeze seawater containing microbial communities, organic particles, gels and minerals to examine spatial relationships of organisms and processes from as close to their perspective as possible, he said.

He will also conduct tracer experiments where he adds heavy isotopes of elements like carbon and monitors how organisms react. Taylor will start by proving that he can see the organisms and the way the miniature ecosystem works.

The late Carl Sagan, narrator and co-writer of the TV series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” “wondered at the cosmos,” Taylor said. “We are enthralled by the microcosmos.”

Once Taylor can define the ecosystem, he can explore how changes in temperature, pH and other environmental conditions affect life in the water droplets.

He said the structure within this small community is like a spider web. Protein strands and gels give structure to the water. Biologists are becoming increasingly interested in the ecology of small creatures that interact in these spaces, creating micro-communities that, when multiplied exponentially across the ocean, affect the global climate and its ability to react to changes in carbon dioxide or increases in temperature.

Taylor lives in East Setauket with his wife Janice, their Rhodesian ridgeback dog Luca who is five and weighs 111 pounds, and an eight-pound Boston Terrier named Iggy Pup. The Taylors’ daughter Olivia lives in lower Manhattan and will start a master of fine arts program in the fall.

As for his work, Taylor said understanding small scales in biology is critically important. “We can’t fully understand epidemiology within populations, human diseases, immune responses or therapies without comprehending processes at the molecular level,” he said.

Or, as Dr. Seuss might say, a microorganism is an organism, no matter how small.