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Above, microscopic image showing brown, antibody-based staining of keratin 17 (K17) in bladder cancer. Image from Shroyer Lab, Stony Brook University

By Daniel Dunaief

Detectives often look for the smallest clue that links a culprit to a crime. A fingerprint on the frame of a stolen Picasso painting, a shoe print from a outside a window of a house that was robbed or a blood sample can provide the kind of forensic evidence that helps police and, eventually, district attorneys track and convict criminals.

Kenneth Shroyer MD, PhD                  Photo from SBU

The same process holds true in the world of disease detection. Researchers hope to use small and, ideally, noninvasive clues that will provide a diagnosis, enabling scientists and doctors to link symptoms to the molecular markers of a disease and, ultimately, to an effective remedy for these culprits that rob families of precious time with their relatives.

For years, Ken Shroyer, the Marvin Kuschner Professor and Chair of Pathology at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, has been working with a protein called keratin 17.

A part of embryological development, keratin 17 was, at first, like a witness who appeared at the scene of one crime after another. The presence of this specific protein, which is unusual in adults, appeared to be something of a fluke.

Until it wasn’t.

Shroyer and a former member of his lab, Luisa Escobar-Hoyos, who is now an Assistant Professor at Yale, recently published two papers that build on their previous work with this protein. One paper, which was published in Cancer Cytopathology, links the protein to pancreatic cancer. The other, published in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology, provides a potentially easier way to diagnose bladder cancer, or urothelial carcinoma.

Each paper suggests that, like an abundance of suspicious fingerprints at the crime scene, the presence of keratin 17 can, and likely does, have diagnostic relevance.

Pancreatic cancer

A particularly nettlesome disease, pancreatic cancer, which researchers at Stony Brook and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, including CSHL Cancer Center Director David Tuveson, have been studying for years, has a poor prognosis upon diagnosis.

During a process called surgical resection, doctors have been able to determine the virulence of pancreatic cancer by looking at a larger number of cells.

Shroyer and Escobar Hoyos, however, used a needle biopsy, in which they took considerably fewer cells, to see whether they could develop a k17 score that would correlate with the most aggressive subtype of the cancer.

“We took cases that had been evaluated by needle biopsy and then had a subsequent surgical resection to compare the two results,” Shroyer said. They were able to show that the “needle biopsy specimens gave results that were as useful as working with the whole tumor in predicting the survival of the patient.”

A needle biopsy, with a k17 score that reflects the virulence of cancer, could be especially helpful with those cancers for which a patient is not a candidate for a surgical resection.“That makes this type of analysis available to any patient with a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, rather than limiting it to the small subset of cases that are able to undergo surgery,” Shroyer said. 

Ultimately, however, a k17 score is not the goal for the chairman of the pathology department.

Indeed, Shroyer would like to use that score as a biomarker that could differentiate patient subtypes, enabling doctors to determine a therapy that would prove most reliable for different groups of people battling pancreatic cancer.

The recently published report establishes the foundation of whether it’s possible to detect and get meaningful conclusions from a needle biopsy in terms of treatment options.

At this point, Shroyer isn’t sure whether these results increase the potential clinical benefit of a needle biopsy.

“Although this paper supports that hypothesis, we are not prepared yet to use k17 to guide clinical decision making,” Shroyer said.

Bladder cancer

Each year, doctors and hospitals diagnose about 81,000 cases of bladder cancer in the United States. The detection of this cancer can be difficult and expensive and often includes an invasive procedure.

Shroyer, however, developed a k17 protein test that is designed to provide a reliable diagnostic marker that labs can get from a urine sample, which is often part of an annual physical exam.

The problem with bladder cancer cytopathology is that the sensitivity and specificity aren’t high enough. Cells sometimes appear suggestive or indeterminate when the patient doesn’t have cancer.

“There has been interest in finding biomarkers to improve diagnostic accuracy,” Shroyer said. 

Shroyer applied for patent protection for a k17 assay he developed through the Stony Brook Technology Transfer office and is working with KDx Diagnostics. The work builds on “previous observations that k17 detects bladder cancer in biopsies,” Shroyer said. He reported a “high level of sensitivity and specificity” that went beyond that with other biomarkers.

Indeed, in urine tests of 36 cases confirmed by biopsy, 35 showed elevated levels of the protein.

KDx, a start up biotechnology company that has a license with The Research Foundation for The State University of New York, is developing the test commercially.

The Food and Drug Administration gave KDx a breakthrough device designation for its assay test for k17.

Additionally, such a test could reveal whether bladder cancer that appears to be in remission may have recurred.

This type of test could help doctors with the initial diagnosis and with follow up efforts, Shroyer said.“Do patients have bladder cancer, yes or no?” he asked. “The tools are not entirely accurate. We want to be able to give a more accurate answer to that pretty simple question.”

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Fifth grader Grace Rozell
Kindergartener Violet Radonis
First grader Ashleigh Bruno
Second grader Celia Gaeta
Third grader Emerson Gaeta
Fourth grader Matthew Mercorella
Sixth grader Patrick Terzella

Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton hosted a virtual Elementary Science Fair awards ceremony on June 4. Suffolk County students from kindergarten through sixth grade who garnered first place and honorable mentions in the 2021 Elementary Science Fair Competition were honored. 

Volunteer judges considered a total 184 science projects by students in kindergarten through sixth grade. Seven students earned first place in their grade level for stand-out experiments Fifteen students received honorable mentions for their experiments. Students qualify for Brookhaven Lab’s competition by winning science fairs held by their schools.

Students who earned first place in their grade level received medals and ribbons, along with banners to hang at their school to recognize the achievement. Here are the winners and their projects:

Kindergartener Violet Radonis of Pines Elementary, Hauppauge Public Schools, “Which Mask You Ask? I Am on the Task.” 

First grader Ashleigh Bruno, Ocean Avenue Elementary, Northport-East Northport Union Free School District, “Rain, Rain Go Away” 

Second grader Celia Gaeta, Miller Avenue School, Shoreham-Wading River Central School District, “How the Moon Phases Affect Our Feelings”       

Third grader Emerson Gaeta, Fort Salonga Elementary, Kings Park Central School District, “Can You Hear Me Through My Mask?” 

Fourth grader Matthew Mercorella, Sunrise Drive Elementary, Sayville Public Schools, “Shh…I Can’t Hear” 

Fifth grader Grace Rozell, Ocean Avenue School, Northport-East Northport Union Free School District, “Edible Experiments” 

Sixth grader Patrick Terzella, Hauppauge Middle School, Hauppauge Public Schools, “Too Loud or Not Too Loud?”

View all science fair projects: https://flic.kr/p/2kZPtqY

Finding fun in the scientific process

This is the second year that the Office of Educational Programming (OEP) at Brookhaven Lab organized a virtual science fair to ensure that local students had the opportunity to participate safely amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Each year, the competition offers thousands of students a chance to gain experience — and have fun — applying the scientific method. The Brookhaven Lab event recognizes the achievement of the students in winning their school fair and acknowledges the best of these projects.

“The Brookhaven Lab Elementary School Science Fair encourages students to utilize the scientific method and answer a question that they have independently developed,” said Amanda Horn, a Brookhaven Lab educator who coordinated the virtual science fair. 

Students tackled a wide range of questions with their experiments, including exploring how the moon phases affect our feelings to testing different materials, investigating how to improve their at-home internet connection, and finding safe masks for their friends and families.

First grader Ashleigh Bruno, who garnered a top spot for an experiment on acid rain, evaluated the pH levels in local water sources to learn if animals could live safely within them. 

“I was really happy because I learned how to test the water and it was really fun to do with my family,” Bruno said.

Third grader Emerson Gaeta explored whether wearing a frame with different kinds of face masks could improve how we hear people who are speaking while wearing a mask. She used a foam head equipped with a speaker to measure how loud sounds came through the masks.

“I was here once before and I didn’t win,” Gaeta said. “Now I won first place so I’m really happy about that.”

Fourth grader Matthew Mercorella said he was excited to learn of his first-place win for his experiment seeking to find the best sound-proofing material. He found the best part of his project to be the process of testing materials by playing music through a speaker placed inside of them to see which put out the lowest and highest decibels.

“It encourages the students to think like a scientist and share their results with others,” said Horn. “Our goal is to provide students with an opportunity to show off their skills and share what they have learned.”

Honorable Mentions:

Kindergarten
Carmen Pirolo, Bellerose Avenue Elementary, Northport-East Northport Union Free School District, “Egg Shells and Toothpaste Experiment”
Filomena Saporita, Ocean Avenue Elementary, Northport-East Northport Union Free School District, “Rainbow Celery”

First Grade
Evelyn Van Winckel, Fort Salonga Elementary, Kings Park Central School District, “Is Your Mouth Cleaner Than A Dog’s?”
Taran Sathish Kumar, Bretton Woods Elementary, Hauppauge Public School District, “Scratch and Slide”

Second Grade
Luke Dinsman, Dickinson Avenue School, Northport-East Northport Union Free School District, “What Makes a Car Go Fast?”
Adam Dvorkin, Pulaski Road School, Northport-East Northport Union Free School District, “Salty Sourdough”
Lorenzo Favuzzi, Ivy League School, “Prime Time”

Third Grade
Ethan Behrens, Tangier Smith Elementary, William Floyd School District, “Deadliest Catch”
Anna Conrad, Dayton Avenue School, Eastport-South Manor Central School District, “Hello Paper Straws”

Fourth Grade
Michael Boyd, Cherry Avenue Elementary, Sayville Public Schools, “Utility Baby”
Michaela Bruno, Ocean Avenue Elementary, Northport-East Northport Union Free School District, “Weak Wi-Fi, Booster Benefit”

Fifth Grade
Hailey Conrad, Dayton Avenue School, Eastport-South Manor Central School District, “Breathing Plants”
Rebecca Bartha, Raynor Country Day School, “Natural Beauty Makes a Better Buffer”
Colin Pfeiffer, Tamarac Elementary, Sachem Central School District, “Turn Up the Heat”

Sixth Grade
Akhil Grandhi, Hauppauge Middle School, Hauppauge Public School District, “Which Fruit or Vegetable Oxidizes the Most in Varied Temperature?”

For more information, visit www.bnl.gov.

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Matt Damon in a scene from ‘The Martian’

By Daniel Dunaief

One of the seminal, and realistic, scenes from the movie “The Martian” involves astronaut Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, clearing the dust from a solar panel.

The cleaning process not only made it possible for the space station on Mars to continue to generate solar energy, but it also alerted the National Aeronautics and Space Administration staff on Earth to the fact that Watney somehow survived a storm and was alive and stranded on the Red Planet.

Alexander Orlov Photo from SBU

Back in 1967, engineers from NASA proposed a system to remove dust from solar panels, which can deprive space stations of energy and can cause rovers and other distant remotely operated vehicles to stop functioning. Washing these solar cells on dried out planets with water is not an option.

That’s where Alexander Orlov, a Professor of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, his graduate student Shrish Patel, Victor Veerasamy, Research Professor of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering at Stony Brook University, and Jim Smith, Chief Technology Officer at Bison Technologies and a board member at the Clean Energy Business Incubator Program at SBU, come in.

Working at a company Orlov founded called SuperClean Glass, Orlov, Patel and other colleagues tried to make an original effort started by NASA feasible. The particles have an electric charge. An electric field they created on the solar glass lifts the particles and then throws them away.

The process recently became a finalist in the Department of Energy’s American-Made Solar Prize for 2021. The 10 companies who are finalists get a $100,000 prize and $75,000 in vouchers from the Department of Energy to test their technology.

The DOE will announce two winners in September of 2021, who will each get an additional half a million dollars and $75,000 in vouchers to develop and test their prototypes.

Orlov, who was delighted that this effort received the recognition and the funds, said the company would use the money to develop prototypes and verify that ‘this technology works at the National Renewable Energy Lab.”

SuperClean Glass is creating prototypes of larger scale to show that turning on a power supply will cause dust to levitate and be removed within seconds.

At this point, Orlov estimates that companies can recoup the additional cost of using this technology within four to five years. The average lifespan of a solar panel is about 25 years, which means that companies could increase their energy efficiency for the 20 years after the initial investment in the technology.

Orlov said the current state of the art for cleaning solar panels typically involves using either water, getting people to dust off the surface, or deploying robots.

This device used for experiments is a highly transparent electrodynamic shield deposited on glass to repel dust from solar panels. Image courtesy of SuperClean Glass Inc

In Egypt, where labor costs are lower, companies can pay people to remove dust with brushes. While robots reduce the cost of labor, they are not always efficient and can break down.

Some companies put a coating on the panels that allows rainwater to wash the dust away more easily. That, however, relies on rain, which is scarce in desert conditions.

Orlov originally became involved in trying to develop an alternative to these methods when Sam Aronson, the former director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, contacted him following a visit to the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya.

When he visited the archeological site in Kenya, Aronson saw that dust frequently reduced the efficiency and effectiveness of the solar panels. The dust problem is not specific to Kenya or the United States, as many of the most attractive sites for solar panels are in regions with considerable sun and little rainfall. The benefit of minimal precipitation is that it provides access to critical sunlight, which generates energy.

The downside of these sites, however, is that the dry, sunny climates often produce dust.

Orlov researched the NASA technology, where he discovered that it wasn’t efficient and couldn’t be scaled up.

Using $150,000 he received from the New York State energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA, Orlov and Patel started reaching out to solar panel manufacturers to determine the price point at which such a dust cleaning removal service might be viable.

“We conducted interviews with 180 people who use solar panels to find out the particular price point where this technology becomes attractive,” Orlov said. That was the steep curve, to do economic analysis, financial projections and to understand what the market wants. All that is not present in [typical] academic research.”

They reduced the power consumption for electrodes by a factor of five. They also explored commercial methods for scaling up their manufacturing approach.

Dust isn’t the same throughout the world, as it is a different color in various areas and has different mineral contents.

“In the future, depending on where this might be deployed, there needs to be some tweaking of this technology,” Orlov said.

As a part of the technology roadmap for the work they are proposing, the SuperClean effort includes a self-monitoring system that would activate the electrodes on the shield if needed to repel an accumulation of dust.

Orlov described the market for such a self-cleaning and efficient process as “very significant.” He is hoping to provide a field demonstration of this approach later this year. If the process continues to produce commercially viable results, they could license the technology within two to three years.

In the near term, Orlov is focused on producing results that could enhance their positioning for the DOE’s grand prize.

“There are a lot of steps before September to be eligible” to win the $500,000, he said. The biggest hurdle at this point is to get positive results from the National Renewable Energy Lab and demonstrate that the technology is effective and also durable.

“Our expectation is that it should last for 25 years, but the lab, which is going to do the testing, is the gold standard to verify that claim,” he said.

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From left, John Inglis and Richard Sever. Photo from CSHL

By Daniel Dunaief

Scientists rarely have people standing at their lab door, waiting eagerly for the results of their studies the way the public awaits high-profile verdicts.

That, however, changed over the last 16 months, as researchers, public health officials, school administrators and a host of others struggled to understand every aspect of the basic and translational science involved in the Sars-Cov2 virus, which caused the COVID-19 pandemic.

With people becoming infected, hospitalized and dying at an alarming rate, businesses closing and travel, entertainment and sporting events grinding to a halt, society looked to scientists for quick answers. One challenge, particularly in the world of scientific publishing, is that quick and answers don’t often mesh well in the deliberate, careful and complicated world of scientific publishing.

The scientific method involves considerable checking, rechecking and careful statistically relevant analysis, which is not typically designed for the sharing of information until other researchers have reviewed it and questioned the approach, methodology and interpretation.

The pandemic changed that last year, increasing the importance of preprint servers like bioRxiv and medRxiv at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which provide a way for researchers to share unfiltered and unchecked information quicker than a scientific review and publishing process that can take months or even years.

The pandemic increased the importance of these preprint servers, enabling scientists from all over the world to exchange updated research with each other, in the hopes of leading to better basic understanding, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of the spread of the deadly virus.

The importance of these servers left those running them in a bind, as they wanted to balance between honoring their mission of sharing information quickly and remaining responsible about the kinds of information, speculation or data that might prove dangerous to the public.

Richard Sever and John Inglis, Assistant Director and Executive Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, created pandemic-specific criteria for work reporting potential Covid-19 therapies.

“Manuscripts making computational predictions of COVID-19 therapies are accepted only if they also include in vitro [studies in test tubes or with live cells] or in vivo [studies in live subjects] work,” the preprint directors wrote in a recent blog. “This restriction does not apply to non-covid-19 work.”

Inglis and Sever continue to decline research papers that might cause people to behave in ways that compromise public health.

“We are simply doing our best to tread carefully in the early days of clinical preprints, as we gain experience and bias our actions toward doing no harm” the authors wrote in their blog.

In the first few months after the pandemic hit the United States, the pace at which scientists, many of whom pivoted from their primary work to direct their expertise to the public health threat, was the highest bioRxiv, which was founded in November of 2013, and medRxiv, which was started in June of 2019, had ever experienced.

These preprint servers published papers that wound up leading to standards of care for COVID-19, including a June research report that appeared on June 22nd in medRxiv on the use of the steroid dexamethasone, which was one of the treatments former President Donald Trump received when he contracted the virus.

The rush to publish information related to the virus has slowed, although researchers have still posted over 16,000 papers related to the virus through the two pre-print servers. MedRxiv published 12,400 pandemic-related papers since January of 2020, while bioRxiv published over 3,600.

At its peak in late March of 2020, medRxiv’s abstract views reached 10.9 million, while downloads of the articles were close to five million.

Currently, bioRxiv is publishing about 3,500 papers a month, while medRxiv put up about 1,300 during a month. Close to 60 percent of the medRxiv papers continue to cover medical issues related to the pandemic.

The numbers of page views are “not anywhere near the frenzy of last year,” Inglis said in an interview. 

With the volume of papers still high, people can receive alerts from the preprint servers using parameters like their field of interest or word searches.

“The real question is how to sort out the gold from the dross,” Inglis said. While some people have suggested a star system akin to the one shopping services use, Inglis remained skeptical about the benefit of a scientific popularity contest.

“Have you looked at the stuff [with four or five stars] on Amazon? It’s one thing if you’re buying a widget, but it’s different if you’re trying to figure out what’s worthwhile science,” he said.

Other organizations have reviewed preprints, including the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins.

“By sheer diligence, the [Johns Hopkins team] go into medRxiv mostly and simply pick out things they think are striking,” Inglis said. 

At the same time, a team of researchers led by Nicolas Vabret, Robert Samstein, Nicolas Fernandez, and Miriam Merad created the Sinai Immunology Review Project, which provides critical reviews of articles from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory preprint sites. The effort ranks COVID-related preprints according to their immunological relevance. Fernandez created a dedicated website to host and integrate the reviews. The group also worked with Nature Reviews Immunology to publish short weekly summaries of preprints, according to a comment piece in that journal.

BioRxiv and medRxiv were founded on the belief that early sharing of results as preprints would speed progress in biomedical research, better equipping scientists to build on each other’s work.

“My team is proud to have contributed to the response to this worldwide human tragedy,” Inglis said. “We’re also glad we made the decision to set up a separate server for health science, in which the screening requirements are different and more stringent.”

Inglis explained that the pre-print servers have “learned a lot in the past year” about providing information during a crisis like the pandemic. “If another pandemic arose, we’d apply these learnings and respond immediately in the same way.”

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Xiaoning Wu at her recent PhD graduation with Kevin Reed. Photo by Gordon Taylor

By Daniel Dunaief

If they build it, they will understand the hurricanes that will come.

That’s the theory behind the climate model Kevin Reed, Associate Professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, and his graduate student Xiaoning Wu, recently created.

Working with Associate Professor Christopher Wolfe at Stony Brook and National Center for Atmospheric Research scientists, Reed and Wu developed an idealized computer model of the interaction between the oceans and the atmosphere that they hope will, before long, allow them to study weather events such as tropical cyclones, also known as hurricanes.

In his idealized program, Reed is trying to reduce the complexity of models to create a system that doesn’t require as much bandwidth and that can offer directional cues about coming climate change.

“When you’re trying to build a climate model that can accurately project the future, you’re trying to include every process you know is important in the Earth’s system,” Reed said. These programs “can’t be run” with university computers and have to tap into some of the biggest supercomputers in the world.

Reed’s work is designed to “peel back some of these advances that have happened in the field” which will allow him to focus on understanding the connections and processes, particularly between the ocean and the atmosphere. He uses fewer components in his model, reducing the number of equations he uses to represent variables like clouds.

“We see if we can understand the processes, as opposed to understanding the most accurate” representations possible, he said. In the last ten years or so, he took a million lines of code in a climate model and reduced it to 200 lines.

Another way to develop a simpler model is to reduce the complexity of the climate system itself. One way to reduce that is to scale back on the land in the model, making the world look much more like something out of the 1995 Kevin Costner film “Waterworld.”

About 30 percent of the world is covered by land, which has a variety of properties.

In one of the simulations, Reed reduced the complexity of the system by getting rid of the land completely, creating a covered aqua planet, explaining that they are trying to develop a tool that looks somewhat like the Earth.

“If we could understand and quantify that [idealized system], we could develop other ways to look at the real world,” he said.

The amount of energy from the sun remains the same, as do the processes of representing oceans, atmospheres and clouds.

In another version of the model, Reed and Wu represented continents as a single, north-south ribbon strip of land, which is enough to change the ocean flow and to create currents like the Gulf Stream.

The expectation and preliminary research shows that “we should have tropical cyclones popping up in these idealized models,” Reed said. By studying the hurricanes in this model, these Stony Brook scientists can understand how these storms affect the movement of heat from around the equator towards the poles.

The weather patterns in regions further from the poles, like Long Island, come from the flow of heat that starts at the equator and moves to colder regions.

Atlantic hurricanes, which pick up their energy from the warmer waters near Africa and the southern North Atlantic, transfer some of that heat. Over the course of decades, the cycling of that energy, which also reduces the temperature of the warmer oceans, affects models for future storm systems, according to previous studies.

Reed said the scientific community has a wide range of estimates for the effect of hurricanes on energy transport, with some researchers estimating that it’s negligible, while others believing it’s close to 50 percent, which would mean that hurricanes could “play an active role in defining” the climate.

Reed’s hypothesis is that a more rapid warming of the poles will create less of an energy imbalance, which will mean fewer hurricanes. This might differ in various ocean basins. He has been studying the factors that control the number of tropical cyclones.

Reed and Wu’s research was published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems in April.

Wu, who is completing her PhD this summer after five years at Stony Brook, described the model as a major part of her thesis work. She is pleased with the work, which addresses the changing ocean as the “elephant in the room.”

Oftentimes, she said, models focus on the atmosphere without including uncertainties that come from oceans, which provide feedback through hurricanes and larger scale climate events.

Wu started working on the model in the summer of 2019, which involved considerable coding work. She hopes the model will “be used more widely” by the scientific community, as other researchers explore a range of questions about the interaction among various systems.

Wu doesn’t see the model as a crystal ball so much as a magnifying glass that can help clarify what is happening and also might occur in the future.

“We can focus on particular players in the system,” she said.

A native of central China, Wu said the flooding of the Yangtze River in 1998 likely affected her interest in science and weather, as the factors that led to this phenomenon occurred thousands of miles away.

As for her future, Wu is intrigued by the potential to connect models like the one she helped develop with applications for decision making in risk management.

The range of work she has done has enabled her to look at the atmosphere and physical oceanography and computational and science communication, all of which have been “useful for developing my career.”

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Photo from WMHO
WMHO Science Camp

This summer, the Ward Melville Heritage Organization (WMHO)’s Summer of Science returns to in-person programming at the WMHO’s Ernst Marine Conservation Center at West Meadow Creek. Three sessions (each a four day program) will run depending on age group from July 12 to August 13. Registration is required for these programs. Depending on the program, cost per child is $250 to $275. Early Bird registration by June 15 will include a $25 reduction in the program rate.

These open-air outdoors programs emphasize hands-on exploration of plant and animals species along the shoreline, student driven research projects, and scavenger hunts to compare & contrast the marsh and sandy beach habitats. Salt Marsh Explorers (ages 6 to 9) runs from July 13 to 16, Salt Marsh Detectives (ages 10 to 12) runs from August 9 to 13. Both programs are $250 per student, start at 10am and end at 11:30am. Salt Marsh Scientists (ages 13 to 17) runs from July 26 to 30, is $275 per student, starts at 10 a.m. and ends at 1 p.m.

To learn more about WMHO’s Summer of Science programs, call 631-751-2244.

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Chemistry photos for battery press release
A team of researchers led by chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has studied an elusive property in cathode materials, called a valence gradient, to understand its effect on battery performance. The findings, published in Nature Communications, demonstrated that the valence gradient can serve as a new approach for stabilizing the structure of high-nickel-content cathodes against degradation and safety issues.

High-nickel-content cathodes have captured the attention of scientists for their high capacity, a chemical property that could power electric vehicles over much longer distances than current batteries support. Unfortunately, the high nickel content also causes these cathode materials to degrade more quickly, creating cracks and stability issues as the battery cycles.

In search of solutions to these structural problems, scientists have synthesized materials made with a nickel concentration gradient, in which the concentration of nickel gradually changes from the surface of the material to its center, or the bulk. These materials have exhibited greatly enhanced stability, but scientists have not been able to determine if the concentration gradient alone was responsible for the improvements. The concentration gradient has traditionally been inseparable from another effect called the valence gradient, or a gradual change in nickel’s oxidation state from the surface of the material to the bulk.

In the new study led by Brookhaven Lab, chemists at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory synthesized a unique material that isolated the valence gradient from the concentration gradient.

“We used a very unique material that included a nickel valence gradient without a nickel concentration gradient,” said Brookhaven chemist Ruoqian Lin, first author of the study. “The concentration of all three transition metals in the cathode material was the same from the surface to the bulk, but the oxidation state of nickel changed. We obtained these properties by controlling the material’s atmosphere and calcination time during synthesis. With sufficient calcination time, the stronger bond strength between manganese and oxygen promotes the movement of oxygen into the material’s core while maintaining a Ni2+ oxidation state for nickel at the surface, forming the valence gradient.”

Once the chemists successfully synthesized a material with an isolated valence gradient, the Brookhaven researchers then studied its performance using two DOE Office of Science user facilities at Brookhaven Lab—the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN).

At NSLS-II, an ultrabright x-ray light source, the team leveraged two cutting-edge experimental stations, the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe (HXN) beamline and the Full Field X-ray Imaging (FXI) beamline. By combining the capabilities of both beamlines, the researchers were able to visualize the atomic-scale structure and chemical makeup of their sample in 3-D after the battery operated over multiple cycles.

“Both beamlines have world-leading capabilities. You can’t do this research anywhere else,” said Yong Chu, leader of the imaging and microscopy program at NSLS-II and lead beamline scientist at HXN. “FXI is the fastest nanoscale beamline in the world; it’s about ten times faster than any other competitor. HXN is much slower, but it’s much more sensitive—it’s the highest resolution x-ray imaging beamline in the world.”

HXN beamline scientist Xiaojing Huang added, “At HXN, we routinely run measurements in multimodality mode, which means we collect multiple signals simultaneously. In this study, we used a fluorescence signal and a phytography signal to reconstruct a 3-D model of the sample at the nanoscale. The florescence channel provided the elemental distribution, confirming the sample’s composition and uniformity. The phytography channel provided high-resolution structural information, revealing any microcracks in the sample.”

Meanwhile at FXI, “the beamline showed how the valence gradient existed in this material. And because we conducted full-frame imaging at a very high data acquisition rate, we were able to study many regions and increase the statistical reliability of the study,” Lin said.

At the CFN Electron Microscopy Facility, the researchers used an advanced transmission electron microscope (TEM) to visualize the sample with ultrahigh resolution. Compared to the x-ray studies, the TEM can only probe a much smaller area of the sample and is therefore less statistically reliable across the whole sample, but in turn, the data are far more detailed and visually intuitive.

By combining the data collected across all of the different facilities, the researchers were able to confirm the valence gradient played a critical role in battery performance. The valence gradient “hid” the more capacitive but less stable nickel regions in the center of the material, exposing only the more structurally sound nickel at the surface. This important arrangement suppressed the formation of cracks.

The researchers say this work highlights the positive impact concentration gradient materials can have on battery performance while offering a new, complementary approach to stabilize high-nickel-content cathode materials through the valence gradient.

“These findings give us very important guidance for future novel material synthesis and design of cathode materials, which we will apply in our studies going forward,” Lin said.

This study was a collaborative effort among several universities and DOE laboratories, including research teams involved in DOE’s Battery500 Consortium, which aims to make lithium-metal battery cells with an energy density of 500 watt-hours per kilogram, more than double the energy density of today’s state-of-the-art batteries. The research was supported by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Vehicle Technologies Office and DOE’s Office of Science. Additional x-ray experiments were carried out at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) and the Advanced Photon Source (APS), two DOE Office of Science user facilities that are located at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, respectively. Operations at NSLS-II, CFN, ALS, and APS are supported by the Office of Science.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.

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Pixabay photo

By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

While watching the evening news I sat cozied with a quilt to warm my 89-year-old body while sitting on the couch in our cottage at Indiana University’s assisted living community, Meadowood. I took an envelope and calculated what fraction of the known universe I was composed of. 

I began with an approximation of a teaspoon of sugar and estimated it held  about 1023 atoms, using Avogadro’s number as a guide.  I then calculated my body contained 1027 atoms and all of humanity 1036 atoms.  All of humanity could be packed into a cubic mile so that brings it up to 1045 atoms and if we use a formula for the cubic miles of earth that exist it is now 1052 atoms.  If we figured how many earths could fit in the sun this would give us 1056  atoms and if we multiplied that to the number of stars in the Milky Way this brings us to 1064 . The estimated number of galaxies in the universe would give us our final tally of 1073 atoms in the universe.  I am thus one part in 1049  of the totality of the known universe contemplating itself.   

Does this make me feel insignificant? No.  Because I am a tiny bit of the universe capable of contemplating itself. I do so without invoking the supernatural. My contemplation is based on the use of my brain to apply my knowledge of science to make a rough calculation of how much matter I occupy where my sense of self is dependent on a functioning mammalian adult brain using the knowledge won by reason, observation, gathering facts, and using logic and mathematics to make the calculation. Most of the atoms of the universe cannot do this because they are atoms of mostly hydrogen and helium in their suns. 

My estimate is both crude (I am rounding off most measurements) and indeterminate (I don’t know how many atoms per cubic mile of space there is between stars and between galaxies). I also don’t know how much “dark matter” is in the universe and some astronomers consider it to be far greater than the masses of stars and galaxies seen by visible light. 

Also lacking are any supernatural components of the universe (ghosts, souls, gods, and other nonmaterial beings that cannot be seen by most of humanity other than in  dreams or hallucinations).   Unlike dark matter, supernatural things have no detectable mass. 

I can reflect on the atoms I contain and very likely I have at least one atom of every person who has lived on this earth. That is an accomplishment most of the matter of the universe cannot do. My awareness I owe to the inventions of language, writing, printing, and all the trappings of civilization that emerged since humans first emerged as bipedal primates capable of using and making tools for their survival. 

While I feel shame for all the tyrants and evil deeds done by most of the humanity within me, I am proud of those who contributed to the civilizations past and present and that allow me to sit at my computer and prepare this thought for the week.

Elof Axel Carlson is a distinguished teaching professor emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook University.

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Dié Wang

Three scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have been selected by DOE’s Office of Science to receive significant funding through its Early Career Research Program.

The program, now in its 12th year, supports exceptional scientists during the crucial years when many do their most formative work in the agency’s priority research areas. These awards are part of DOE’s longstanding efforts to support critical research at the nation’s universities and National Labs, grow a skilled STEM workforce, and cement America as a global leader in science and innovation.

“Maintaining our nation’s braintrust of world-class scientists and researchers is one of DOE’s top priorities—and that means we need to give them the resources they need to succeed early on in their careers,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “These awardees show exceptional potential to help us tackle America’s toughest challenges and secure our economic competitiveness for decades to come.”

A total of 83 awardees represent 41 universities and 11 DOE National Laboratories in 32 states—including five universities that are receiving funding for the first time under this award. Researchers based at DOE National Labs will receive grants for $500,000 per year. The research grants are distributed over five years and will cover salary and research expenses.

The Early Career Research Program is funded by DOE’s Office of Science, which has awarded millions in funding over the past month to grow a skilled, diverse STEM workforce—including $11.7 million for undergraduate and community college STEM internships and faculty research opportunities, and $2.4 million for graduate student research opportunities.

A list of all 83 awardees, their institutions, and titles of research projects is available on the Early Career Research Program webpage. [https://science.osti.gov/early-career]

This year’s Brookhaven Lab awardees include:

Dié Wang, “Understanding Deep Convective Cloud Kinematic Processes and Their Responses to Aerosols”

Dié Wang

Dié Wang, an assistant atmospheric scientist in Brookhaven Lab’s Environmental and Climate Sciences Department, will receive funding through the DOE’s Office of Science’s Biological and Environmental Research program. Her research project aims to fill knowledge gaps in our understanding of the lifecycle of deep convective clouds (DCCs)–the type of clouds present during thunderstorms–and how aerosols, tiny solid or liquid particles suspended in the atmosphere such as pollutants or sea spray, impact these systems.

Ultimately, the goal is to improve the representation of DCCs in Earth system models and the predictability of the water cycle.

DCCs are an important part of Earth’s water cycle that produce a significant portion of the global precipitation, regulate the global energy cycle, and drive large-scale atmospheric circulation that impacts climate sensitivity. Despite the critical role DDCs play in weather and climate, especially in the tropics and midlatitudes, their accurate simulation in state-of-the-art models remains extremely challenging.

“The interactions between aerosols and deep convection are very poorly understood for a number of reasons, one being that we don’t have a lot of key supporting observations of the processes going inside of the clouds during these interactions,” Wang said.

To overcome uncertainties found in climate models, the project will use advanced ground-based and satellite measurements to better observe cloud properties.

Wang and her team will also use machine learning techniques and high-resolution modeling to identify cause-and-effect links between aerosols, the environment, and convective vigor. They will examine DCCs in four different climate regions: the Southern Great Plains, Gulf Coast, the Amazon, and the mountains of Argentina.

“It means a lot to see this research funded,” Wang said. “I have a lot of responsibilities in managing this project, but it offers a good challenge. This is also a booster to my confidence in the research because it means people loved my ideas for the project. I had lots of support from folks at Brookhaven and other agencies to get to this point.”

Wang first joined Brookhaven Lab as a research associate in 2017. She currently serves as an instrument mentor for the gauges and disdrometers operated by the DOE Atmosphere Radiation Measurement Program.

Wang received her undergraduate degree in atmospheric science in 2010 and an M.S. in meteorology in 2013, both from Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology. She received a PhD in physics from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in 2016.

Gregory Doerk, “Adaptive Synthesis of Nanoporous Membranes by Pathway-Directed Self-Assembly”

Gregory Doerk

Gregory Doerk is a materials scientist in the Electronic Nanomaterials Group of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN)—a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Since joining the CFN in 2015, he has been leveraging the unique ability of some materials to self-assemble into organized molecular patterns and structures. Ultimately, the goal is to use these nanoscale architectures to control material properties for energy applications.

Through the DOE’s Early Career Research Program, Doerk will develop a new, transformative manufacturing strategy—pathway-directed self-assembly—to produce high-performance separation membranes for water purification. This research project is motivated by the global issues of water scarcity and pollution and the energy-intensive nature of current industrial separation processes.

Current membranes exhibit randomly oriented nanopores with a large size distribution, which severely limits their performance. Doerk will adapt spray-based processes, already adopted in industry for other applications, to direct the synthesis of self-assembled polymer membranes with well-aligned and uniformly sized nanopores. At the CFN, he will build an ultrasonic sprayer that uses high-frequency vibrations to deposit materials with controlled compositions on different substrates. As the polymer self-assembles, different spray processing parameters will be tuned to elucidate their effect on critical membrane structural properties, including pore morphology, orientation, and degree of order. To perform this real-time characterization, Doerk will integrate the sprayer with x-ray scattering beamlines at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)—another DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven. Employing a fully autonomous workflow developed at Brookhaven with collab
orators will accelerate the discovery of self-assembly pathways and identify those that provide the desired membrane functionality.

“Membranes are very sensitive to the way they’re made,” said Doerk. “Instead of relying on conventional trial and error, this project aims to introduce adaptive manufacturing processes by characterizing the properties of the synthesized materials in situ and adjusting the spray parameters—such as flow rate and solvent composition—on the fly. Receiving the Early Career award is a great honor and provides a unique opportunity to pursue this research with important technological applications.”

Doerk received a PhD and bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and Case Western University, respectively.

Mengjia Gaowei, “Cathode R&D for High-Intensity Electron Source in Support of EIC”

Mengjia Gaowei

Mengjia Gaowei, an associate scientist in Brookhaven Lab’s Collider-Accelerator Department, will receive Early Career Award funding from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Physics to conduct research and development of a cathode for a high-intensity electron source in support of the future Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). This work will be essential for accelerating a beam of electrons that will be used to cool the ion beam at the EIC, a future nuclear physics research facility to be built at Brookhaven Lab.

As ions travel around the EIC at close to the speed of light they will tend to heat up and spread out. That reduces the chances of collisions between the ions and a counter-circulating beam of electrons. Scientists need to study many electron-ion interactions to learn about the internal building blocks of matter. So they are exploring ways to keep the ions tightly packed.

Gaowei’s work relates to an approach that uses cooling techniques—for example, where a separate accelerated beam of electrons mixes for a brief period with the ion beam to extract the heat from the spreading ions, much like the liquid coolant in a home refrigerator. She’ll conduct research on materials for a photocathode electron gun that will accelerate those cooling electrons. The goal is to find materials that, when activated by a laser, will produce a beam of high-brightness, high-current electrons that can be “bunched” to meet up with the bunches of ions circulating in the EIC. Her project will explore different methods to fabricate large single crystal photocathodes to improve their lifetime and other properties. She’ll use various methods, including x-ray studies at Brookhaven’s National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), to study the materials’ crystal structure, bulk and surface properties, and chemical compositions. The aim is to identify the optimal characteristics f
or producing high-performance cathodes that will have a long lifetime—so they don’t need to be replaced frequently when the EIC is running.

“I’m truly honored to receive the Early Career Award and I’m grateful to be given this unique opportunity,” said Gaowei. “I’m looking forward to making new discoveries in the field of photocathode materials and supporting the electron source R&D for the EIC.”

Gaowei has been working on photocathode development for a low-energy electron cooling application at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—a DOE Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research. “I was delighted to see its success in the world’s first demonstration of bunched-beam electron cooling,” she said. “I believe my experience in that low-energy RHIC electron cooling project will be a great help in fulfilling the tasks in the cathode research for the EIC, and I’m really looking forward to the exciting research that is sure to come out of this new machine.”

Gaowei received her bachelor’s degree in applied physics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2006, a master’s in condensed matter physics from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2009, and her PhD in materials science and engineering from Stony Brook University in 2014. She then joined Brookhaven Lab as a postdoctoral fellow conducting photocathode research, was promoted to assistant scientist in 2018, and associate scientist in 2021. She has more than 10 years of experience in semiconductor photocathode development, including multi-alkali antimonide, cesium telluride, Superlattice-GaAs (SL-GaAs) photocathodes and diamond electron amplifiers. She holds one patent with a second one pending. She was a 2016 R&D 100 Award finalist for work on an ultra-compact diamond x-ray monitor.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://www.energy.gov/science/.

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Dr. Paolo Boffetta

By Daniel Dunaief

Dr. Paolo Boffetta, who joined Stony Brook University as Associate Director for Population Sciences in the Cancer Center in the midst of the pandemic last April, asks the kinds of questions doctors, scientists and non-scientists also raise when they look at illnesses among groups of people.

An epidemiologist who worked for 20 years at the World Health Organization and at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City for 10 years, Boffetta joined Stony Brook because he saw an opportunity to replicate the kind of success he and others had at Mt. Sinai, where he helped the institution earn a National Cancer Institute designation. Cancer centers can apply for NCI designation when they have a well-established portfolio of research.

Dr. Paolo Boffetta

“The idea to try to get the Cancer Center” at Stony Brook “to the NCI level was very appealing,” Boffetta said. Stony Brook was looking to build out its population sciences work.

In addition to the big picture goal of helping Cancer Center Director Yusuf Hannun and other researchers earn that designation, Boffetta has partnered with several scientists at Stony Brook and elsewhere to address questions related to various illnesses.

Boffetta has applied for $12 million in funds over six years from the National Cancer Institute for a new water project.

The research will recruit people who are over 50 years old across several towns, primarily in Suffolk County to explore the link between the potential exposure these residents had to different chemicals in drinking water and types of cancers.

“The main idea is that people may be exposed to carcinogens through drinking water according to where they have been living,” Boffetta said.

The scientists will follow these residents over time to determine the health impact of their town of residency. “If this is funded, this will be a major project that will involve many institutions,” he added.

The chemicals they will study include nitrates, chlorinated solvents, 1,4-dioxane, and perfluoroalkyl substances.

While he awaits word on potential funding for the water effort, Boffetta and others are looking at another project to explore the link between various environmental factors and bladder cancer. This is not limited to drinking water contamination. The group plans to analyze tumor samples to see whether they can detect fingerprint mutations.

World Trade Center Studies

Boffetta also plans to continue and expand on work he’s done at Mt. Sinai with responders of the World Trade Center attacks, a group that has received considerable attention from numerous scientists at Stony Brook.

He has been “doing a number of quite detailed analyses on cancer, including survival of workers and responders to developing cancer,” he said. The WTC survivors are enrolled in a medical monitoring treatment program, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control, which means they “should be getting good cancer care.”

Boffetta has been comparing their survival to the population at large in New York, analyzing how the risk of cancer evolved over the almost 20 years since the attacks.

Boffetta has started to look at one particular new project, in which he studies the prevalence of clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (or CHIP), which is an asymptomatic condition that increases the likelihood of leukemia and cardiovascular disease. He is studying 350 healthy World Trade Center responders and a group of historical controls from the literature.

He plans to use the results of his study to develop strategies to prevent these diseases in WTC responders.

In some of his WTC studies, Boffetta is working with Ben Luft, Director of the Stony Brook WTC Wellness Program at the Renaissance School of Medicine at SBU, who has been involved in providing extensive research and clinical support for WTC responders.

Boffetta is an “internationally renowned cancer epidemiologist” who contributed his “vast experience on the impact of environmental and occupational exposures [that were] seminal in our understanding of how the disaster of 9/11 would eventually lead to increased numbers of cancer cases among responders,” Luft wrote in an email.

Boffetta’s contribution and understanding will “transcend the events of 9/11 and its impact on the responder community to a general understanding of the increased incidence of cancer on Long Island,” said Luft.

While Boffetta has several academic affiliations with institutions including Harvard University, where he teaches a class for a week each year, and Vanderbilt University, his primary focus involves the work he conducts at Stony Brook and at the University of Bologna.

Boffetta plans to keep his research team considerably smaller than the 80 to 100 people who worked with him at the World Health Organization. Indeed, he said he mainly focuses on working with collaborators. He plans to hire his first post doctoral researchers soon.

As for teaching, Boffetta has been working with the program directors of the Masters of Public Health to develop a tract in epidemiology. He plans to start teaching next year.

Boffetta, who spoke with Times Beacon Record News Media through WhatsApp from Italy, said he often works double shifts to remain in contact with his colleagues in the United States and Europe. When he’s in the United States, meetings can start at 6 in the morning to connect with his European counterparts in the middle of their day. When he’s in Italy, his last meetings sometimes end at 11 p.m. or midnight.

Boffetta, however, said he has “a normal life,” which, prior to the pandemic, included trips to the opera and museums. He also enjoys skiing and hiking.

Married to Antonella Greco, who used to teach Italian, Boffetta lives in New York City. He has three daughters, who live in Brooklyn, Italy and Uruguay. He has been vaccinated against COVID-19 and is looking forward to the opportunity to interact with his colleagues in person once restrictions caused by the pandemic ease.

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