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Stony Brook University

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Suffolk County Police, with assistance from Stony Brook State University Police, arrested a Stony Brook University student on more than a dozen drug charges following an extensive narcotics investigation.

Members of the Stony Brook University Police Department contacted Suffolk County Police Narcotics Section detectives last month regarding a student possibly selling drugs on campus.

Suffolk police said that following a joint investigation, it was determined Domingo Zaba, 41, who lived on campus, was allegedly selling drugs through social media. Detectives arrested Zaba on October 28 and then executed a search warrant at Zaba’s dorm room. Investigators seized drugs including fentanyl, cocaine, mushrooms, Xanax, ketamine and marijuana.

Zaba was charged with 15 felonies—three counts each of Criminal Sale of a Controlled Substance 2nd Degree, Criminal Sale of a Controlled Substance 3rdDegree, Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance 3rd Degree, Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance 5th Degree and one count each of Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance 2nd Degree, Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance 4th Degree and Criminal Sale of a Controlled Substance 5thDegree. He was also charged with three counts of Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance 7th Degree, a misdemeanor.

Zaba is scheduled to be arraigned today at First District Court in Central Islip.

A criminal charge is an accusation. A defendant is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty.

 

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Qingyun Li. Photo by Xuecheng Chen

By Daniel Dunaief

Qingyun Li has a plan for carbon dioxide.

The newest hire in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University, Li, who is an assistant professor, is a part of a team exploring carbon capture and storage.

“My work is expected to help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere,” Li said. It will “help people find ways to promote carbon dioxide mineralization for safer carbon dioxide storage” below the ground. While her work will help promote carbon storage, it doesn’t include capturing and transporting the gas.

By selecting sites carefully, researchers can store carbon dioxide for geologically long periods of time.

While carbon sequestration occurs on the scale of kilometers, Li often works on a minuscule level, at the nanometer to centimeter scale. Smaller scale alterations affect properties such as the permeability of the rock formation.

Li is trying to predict nucleation of a certain mineral in her computer models. She has done that for carbonate minerals, which could be what carbon dioxide becomes after it is stored in geologic formations.

A similar process of nucleation occurs in clouds, when fine particles form the nuclei around which gases condense to form water or ice.

Li used a small angle x-ray scattering synchrotron to explore important details about each particle. This technique, which doesn’t look directly at the particles, reveals through data analysis the particle’s shape, size and surface morphology and, eventually, the rate at which nucleation occurs.

For carbon dioxide sequestration, the minerals that provide nucleation start at the nanoscale, which give them a high specific surface area.

“That matters for later reactions to generate carbonate minerals,” Li said. “That’s one reason we care about the nanoscale phenomenon. The bulk minerals are generated starting from the nanoscale.” 

A larger surface area is necessary in the beginning to lead to the next steps.

Li’s work involves exploring how carbonate starts to form. Her earlier efforts looked at how calcium carbonate forms in the aqueous or water phase.

Carl Steefel, Head of the Geochemistry Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, worked with Li during her PhD research at Washington University in St. Louis. Steefel believes her research will prove productive.

“She has an approach to science that combines that one-of-its-kind capabilities for studying nucleation with a deep understanding of modeling and how these open systems involving flow and transport work,” Steefel said. “The combination of these unique capabilities, in nucleating and in understanding reactive transport modeling, will put her a very good position.”

As of now, Li plans to study carbon sequestration in natural gas formations in shale, which has nanometer sized pores. The particles can change the permeability of the rock.

Some companies, like British Petroleum and ExxonMobil, have started to explore this method as a way to reduce their carbon footprint.

While geologic carbon sequestration has shown promising potential, Li believes the process, which she said is still feasible, could be decades away. She said it may need more policy support and economic stimuli to come to fruition.

Part of the challenge is to incorporate such carbon sequestration in the established market.

Scientists working in this field are eager to ensure that the stored carbon dioxide doesn’t somehow return or escape back into the atmosphere.

“People are actively investigating possible leakage possibilities,” Li wrote in an email. “We try to design new materials to build wells that resist” carbon dioxide deterioration.

Controlling pressure and injection rates could prevent various types of leaks.

In her earlier studies, Li explored how cement deteriorates when contacted with carbon dioxide-saturated brine. She hoped to find cracks that had self-healing properties. Other studies investigated this property of concrete.

It’s possible that a mineral could form in a fracture and heal it. In natural shale, scientists sometimes see a fracture filled with a vein of carbonate. Such self healing properties could provide greater reassurance that the carbon dioxide would remain stored in rocks below the surface. Li hopes to manage that to inhibit carbon dioxide leakage.

The assistant professor grew up in Beijing, China, studied chemistry and physics in college. She majored in environmental sciences and is eager to apply what she learned to the real world.

For her PhD, Li conducted research in an engineering department where her advisor Young-Shin Jun at Washington University in St. Louis was working on a project on geologic carbon dioxide sequestration. 

In her post doctoral research at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is operated by Stanford University, Li explored mineral reactions in shale, extending on the work she did on mineral reactions in concrete as a graduate student. She sought to understand what happens after hydraulic fracturing fluids are injected into shale. These reactions can potentially change how easily the mix of gas and oil flow through a formation.

With Stony Brook building a lab she hopes is finished by next spring, Li plans to hire one graduate student and one post doctoral researcher by next fall.

She is teaching a course related to carbon sequestration this semester and is looking for collaborators not only within geoscience but also within material science and environmental engineering.

Li is looking forward to working with other researchers at the National Synchrotron Lightsource 2 at Brookhaven National Laboratory, which provides beamlines that can allow her to build on her earlier research.

Li and her husband Xuecheng Chen, who are renting an apartment in South Setauket and are looking for a home close to campus, have a three-year old son and an 11-month old daughter.

Outside the lab, Li enjoys quality time with her family. A runner, Li also plays the guzheng, which she described as a wooden box with 21 strings.

Steefel, who wrote a letter to Stony Brook supporting Li’s candidacy to join the Geosciences Department, endorsed her approach to science.

“She’s very focused and directed,” Steefel said. “She’s not running the computer codes as black boxes. She’s trying to understand what’s going on and how that relates to her experiments and to reality.”

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Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Inauguration for Maurie McInnis. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Senator Chuck Schumer spoke at the event. Photo by Kimberly Brown
Senator Chuck Schumer spoke at the event. Photo by Kimberly Brown

By Kimberly Brown

Stony Brook University celebrated the inauguration of Maurie McInnis as the university’s sixth president on Saturday, Oct. 23, at the Island Federal Arena, Stony Brook. 

Standing before students, alumni, local officials and representatives from universities across the country as well as family and friends, McInnis was proudly given her title as president. 

Transporting the crowd back to 1962, when Stony Brook University was merely a handful of buildings that has sprouted out of a field where potatoes were farmed, McInnis said the 800 students who first began their journey at the university would know that big plans were in the works. 

“Out of these potato fields and muddy woods on Long Island, an educational powerhouse would soon emerge, and in less than a decade our university grew ten-fold to 8,000 students and ambitiously recruited the faculty and staff that would come to define this institution,” McInnis said.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Chen Ning Yang came to Stony Brook in 1965 and became the university’s first director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics. To which McInnis said he must have sensed the university was making big moves and breaking new ground in areas of science.

“Looking around the arena today, I see that same bold spirit that attracted Yang and legions of other distinguished faculty,” she said. “Thank you for joining me as we celebrate the luminous and ambitious future of Stony Brook University.” 

McInnis thanked the crowd for trusting her to lead the institution.

Also touching on her own family’s heritage, which is rich in careers of education, she mentioned her great-grandparents and grandparents were both teachers. Her parents were also college professors and her husband is a first-generation college graduate.

“I have dedicated my life’s work to this enterprise and I am thrilled and honored to apply my knowledge, experience and energy to Stony Brook University,” she said. “What I have learned is that our institution yesterday, today and tomorrow is a university of dreaming big, of expanding the reach of discovery and creating knowledge for the benefit of society.”

In 1973, the university welcomed Rich Gelfond, who came from a disadvantaged household in Plainview.

Stepping foot onto the campus for the first time as a college student, Gelfond went full force in his academics by working on the school newspaper, designing his own curriculum, winning an election to be the first student on the university council as well as guest teaching at his own sports sociology class.

“He was delivering on his potential, and then some, because he had found a university that valued the promise of first-generation college students,” she said. “He had found a university that wanted to empower its students to be their best.”

McInnis said after college, Gelfond went on to be a successful investment banker, acquiring IMAX Corporation in 1994 where he remains CEO today. 

Touching on the topic of COVID-19, McInnis said she is proud of the way Stony Brook University has succeeded in the past year and a half by providing superior patient care and extending its reach across Long Island to care for new communities.

“The power of a public research university is that it has the ability and the duty to benefit the community around it, as well as foster the groundbreaking discoveries that can impact the world for generations to come,” she said.

As the university’s newest president, McInnis wants to ensure that Stony Brook is leading the way, serving the community and tackling the global challenges that face us in the coming century.

“I look forward to seeing all that we can achieve,” she said. “The moment is upon us. Seawolves, let’s answer this call to greatness.”

As chief executive for Stony Brook, McInnis also oversees Stony Brook Medicine, Long Island’s premier academic medical center, which encompasses five health sciences schools, four hospitals and 200 community-based health care settings. 

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A scene from 'Eurydice'
Matt Aucoin
Liv Redpath

Stony Brook University’s Staller Center for the Arts, 100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook presents a lecture and recital by award-winning composer Matthew Aucoin titled “Primal Loss: Four Hundred Years of Orpheus and Eurydice in Opera” in the Recital Hall on Thursday, Oct. 28 from 8 to 9:30 p.m. Aucoin will discuss his opera Eurydice premiering at the Metropolitan Opera in November 2021, the influences of playwright Sarah Ruhl and the history of Orphic operas. Soprano Liv Redpath will perform selections from the play. Free.

Proof of vaccine or valid exemption required for all attendees.

See stallercenter.com/contact/Covid for details.

Sponsored by the English Department, the Office of the Provost, the Music Department, the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook, The Hellenic Center, the Graduate Student Organization, the Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department, the Walt Whitman Birthplace, and the Walt Whitman Initiative.

For more information, www.stonybrook.edu/hisb

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Above, an AI-Grid prototype that is being built by the research team. Image courtesy of Stony Brook Power Lab

By Daniel Dunaief

The Department of Energy is energized by the possibility of developing and enhancing microgrids.

What are microgrids? They are autonomous local power systems that have small, independent and often decentralized energy sources. Often, they use renewable energy, like wind or solar power, although some use natural gas or diesel.

The DOE’s dedication to developing these microgrids may cut costs, create efficiencies and enhance energy reliability.

Peng Zhang. Photo from SBU

Peng Zhang, SUNY Empire Innovation Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook University, is leading a diverse team of researchers and industry experts who received $5 million of a $50 million investment the DOE recently made to developing, enhancing and improving microgrid technology.

Bringing together these energy experts, Zhang hopes to use artificial intelligence to create a usable, reliable and efficient source of energy, particularly during periods of power outages or disruption to the main source of energy.

“The traditional microgrid operation is based on models and human operators,” Zhang said. “We developed this data-driven or AI-based approach.”

Artificial intelligence can enhance the safety and reliability of microgrids that can receive and transmit power.

One of the objectives of the systems Zhang and his collaborators are developing will include protecting the power supplies against faults, accidents from natural disasters and cyberattacks.

“This project led by Professor Zhang is a great example demonstrating the impact of this novel research on essential infrastructure that we rely on daily,” Richard Reeder, Vice President for Research at Stony Brook University, said in a statement.

Zhang said he has verified the methods for this AI-driven approach in the lab and in a simulation environment.

“Now, it’s time to demonstrate that in more realistic, microgrid settings,” he said. He is working with microgrid representatives in Connecticut, Illinois and New York City. His team will soon work with a few representative microgrids to establish a more realistic testing environment.

The urgency to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach is high. “We need to kick the project off immediately,” said Zhang, whose team is recruiting students, postdocs, administrative staff and technicians to meet a two-year timeline.

The group hopes AI-grids can be used in different microgrids around the country. If the platform is generic enough, it can have wide applications without requiring significant modifications.

While operators of a microgrid might be able to know the ongoing status, they normally are not able to respond to contingencies manually. “It’s impossible for the operator to know the ongoing status” of power sources and power use that can change readily, Zhang explained. “That’s why we had to rely on a data driven approach.”

Additionally, end users of electricity don’t necessarily want their neighbors to know about their power needs. They may not want others who are using the same microgrid system to know what appliances or hardware are in their homes.

Instead, the system will rely on the data collected within each microgrid, which reflects the behavior at different intervals. Those energy needs can change, as people turn on a TV or unplug a wind turbine.

At the same time, the power system load and generation need to remain in balance. Microgrids that produce more energy than the system or end users need can send them to a utility grid or to neighboring microds or communities. If they don’t send that energy to others who might use it, they can lose some of that energy.

Power needs to be balanced between supply and demand. Storage systems can buffer an energy imbalance, although the cost of such storage is still high. Researchers in other departments at Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory are pursuing ways to improve efficiencies and reduce energy storage costs.

Balancing energy is challenging in most microgrids, which rely on intermittent and uncertain renewable energy sources such as sunlight. In this project, Zhang plans to connect several microgrids together into a “mega microgrid system,” that can allow any system with a surplus to push extra energy into one with a deficiency.

Microgrids aren’t currently designed to replace utilities. They may reduce electricity bills during normal operations and can become more useful during emergencies when supplies from utilities are lower.

While artificial intelligence actively runs the system, people are still involved in these programmable microgrids and can override any recommendations.

In addition to having an alarm in the event that a system is unsafe or unstable, the systems have controllers in place who can restore the system to safer functioning. The programming is flexible enough to change to meet any utility needs that differ from the original code.

In terms of cybersecurity, the system will have three lines of defense to protect against hacking.

By scanning, the system can localize an attack and mitigate it. Even if a hacker disabled one controller, the control function would pop up in a different place to replace it, which would increase the cost for the attacker.

Stony Brook created a crypto control system. “If an attacker got into our system, all the information would be useless, because he would not understand what this signal is about,” Zhang said.

While he plans to publish research from his efforts, Zhang said he and others would be careful in what they released to avoid providing hackers with information they could use to corrupt the system.

For Zhang, one of the appeals of coming to Stony Brook, where he arrived two years ago and was promoted last month to Professor from Associate Professor, was that the university has one of the best and best-funded microgrid programs in the country.

Zhang feels like he’s settled into the Stony Brook community, benefiting from interacting with his neighbors at home and with a wide range of colleagues at work. He appreciates how top scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and national labs have proactively approached Stony Brook to establish collaborations.

Zhang is currently discussing a Phase II collaboration on a microgrid project with the Navy, which has funded his research since his arrival. “Given the federal support [from the Navy], I was able to recruit top people in the lab,” he said, including students from Columbia and Tsinghua University.

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Stony Brook Trauma Center, Suffolk County’s only Level I Trauma Center, earns Safe States Alliance's Injury and Violence Prevention Program Achievement Award for 2020.

The Safe States Alliance awarded the Stony Brook Trauma Center, Suffolk County’s only Level I Trauma Center, an Injury and Violence Prevention Program Achievement Award for 2020. The award recognizes Stony Brook’s ability to pivot and make many of its injury prevention programs available to the community despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

James A,. Vosswinkel, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Chief, Trauma, Emergency Surgery, and Surgical Critical Care, Medical Director, Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU), Medical Director, Trauma Center

“This award is a thank you to the team here that works tirelessly to reach the community and provide the care they need no matter the circumstances,” says James A. Vosswinkel, MD, FACS, Trauma Medical Director and Chief of the Division of Trauma, Emergency Surgery, and Surgical Critical Care in the Department of Surgery at Stony Brook Medicine. “This is a reminder that every idea can make an impact. These programs can and will save lives.”

The Stony Brook Trauma Center offers free in-person injury prevention programs to the public, educating local communities on best practices in safety to prevent a trip to the emergency room and help save lives. In March 2020, that came to a halt when in-person injury prevention programs were cancelled due to the pandemic. Kristi Ladowski, MPH, Injury Prevention and Outreach Coordinator at Stony Brook Medicine, together with volunteers, staff, and community partners, quickly pivoted and made sure their programs could still be accessible to the community by moving to virtual programming. 

“The strength of our partnerships, everyone’s willingness to quickly adapt, and our passion for injury prevention ensured that this transition was accomplished quickly and seamlessly,” says Ladowski. “We developed win-win partnerships that harmonize organizational goals, student experiential learning, and most importantly served our community needs.”  

Stony Brook’s highly effective “Tai Chi for Arthritis,” a Fall Prevention workshop, immediately began a virtual schedule that allowed the team to hold more than 40 eight-week workshops, reaching over 1,000 participants. The availability of easily accessible recorded segments helped participants practice longer, more often and helped reduce attrition. Other programs such as “A Matter of Balance and Stepping On” also moved to virtual programming with great success. 

School-based programs were also pivoted to virtual platforms. Programs such as Impact Teen Driver and the extremely popular Teddy Bear Clinic both promote road safety. In an effort to reach even more schools and students, the Stony Brook Injury Prevention team created a Teddy Bear Clinic video utilizing a “Blues Clues” approach to appeal to children and get more classroom participation than ever before possible. The video will reach thousands of students and potentially hundreds of classrooms every year helping keep the community safe, informed and become a great tool for parents and teachers in preventing major trauma injuries in children. 

To make sure clinical students at Stony Brook could still fulfill their learning requirements, the Trauma Center expanded their undergraduate and graduate experiential learning opportunities by offering student participation in virtual programs. Occupational therapy students created multiple one-hour fall prevention workshops that helped fill a need for more accessible, shorter, informational workshops. These workshops were so well received that they are being continued indefinitely along with multiple practicum opportunities for master’s in public health students.  

To learn more about the Injury Prevention Programs offered through the Stony Brook Trauma Center, visit https://trauma.stonybrookmedicine.edu/injury–prevention.

About Stony Brook University Hospital:

Stony Brook University Hospital (SBUH) is Long Island’s premier academic medical center. With 624 beds, SBUH serves as the region’s only tertiary care center and Regional Trauma Center, and is home to the Stony Brook University Heart Institute, Stony Brook University Cancer Center, Stony Brook Children’s Hospital and Stony Brook University Neurosciences Institute. SBUH also encompasses Suffolk County’s only Level 4 Regional Perinatal Center, state-designated AIDS Center, state-designated Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program, state-designated Burn Center, the Christopher Pendergast ALS Center of Excellence, and Kidney Transplant Center. It is home of the nation’s first Pediatric Multiple Sclerosis Center. To learn more, visit www.stonybrookmedicine.edu/sbuh.

About Stony Brook University Trauma Center:

As Suffolk County’s only Level I Trauma Center, Stony Brook provides the highest possible level of adult and pediatric trauma care. We are state designated as the only Regional Trauma Center in Suffolk County, treating 1,800 trauma patients annually, including 200 children. For children, we provide a dedicated 24/7 Pediatric Emergency Department adjacent to the main Emergency Department, staffed by board-certified Pediatric Emergency Medicine physicians. The eight-bed Suffolk County Volunteer Firefighters Burn Center is Suffolk County’s only state-designated regional Burn Center. To learn more, visit www.trauma.stonybrookmedicine.edu.

About Safe States Alliance:

A national non-profit organization formed in 1993, comprised of public health and injury and violence prevention professionals. Their mission, to strengthen the practice of injury and violence prevention. To learn more visit, https://www.safestates.org/page/InnovativeInitiative.

Photos from Stony Brook Medicine

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Dr. Sharon Nachman, chief of Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. Photo from Stony Brook Medicine

Dr. Sunil Dhuper’s actions speak as loudly as his words.

The chief medical officer at Port Jefferson’s St. Charles Hospital is planning to get a booster for the COVID-19 vaccine this Thursday, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention authorized Friday, Sept. 24, the additional shot for a range of adults, including those in jobs that put them at an increased risk of exposure and transmission, such as frontline health care workers.

Earlier, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration announced Sept. 22 that “a single booster dose” was allowed “for certain populations” under the emergency use authorization, although the EUA “applies only to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.” 

Dhuper received his first vaccination in January and would like to raise his immunity.

“I am very eager to get the booster dose,” he said in an interview. “I reviewed scientific data from all over the world — from the United States, Israel, the United Kingdom — and I had reflected that, after six months after the second dose, it’s time to get a third dose.”

While St. Charles and other hospitals haven’t required a booster, Dhuper believes that state and national guidance will likely recommend it before too long.

“Over time, I do anticipate people may begin to get severe infections or get hospitalized” if they haven’t enhanced their immunity with a booster, he said. “It would be prudent to get the booster dose in the arms of those who are fully vaccinated.”

Stony Brook University Hospital is providing boosters to employees and to eligible members of the public.

Meanwhile, Northwell Health and Huntington Hospital are deliberating how to proceed and will announce a decision soon, according to Dr. Adrian Popp, chair of infection control at Huntington Hospital.

While boosters are available for education staff, agriculture and food workers, manufacturing workers, corrections workers, U.S. Postal Service employees, grocery store workers, public transit employees and a host of others, the overall infection rate in Suffolk County has stabilized over the past few weeks.

Decline in infections

As of Sept. 25, the seven-day average rate of positive tests in the county fell below 4% for the first time since Aug. 15, dropping to 3.9%, according to data from the New York State Department of Health.

“We think the numbers might have plateaued,” Dhuper said. That decline coincides with the increasing number of people who are vaccinated. In Suffolk as at Sept. 29, 1,043,478 people (70.7%) have received at least one dose and 950,058 (64.3%) are fully vaccinated, according to Covid Act Now. Anybody who is at least 12 years old is eligible to be vaccinated.

The number of COVID Patients from Huntington Hospital has fallen in the last month, dropping to 20 from about 30, according to Popp. Five patients are in the intensive care unit at the hospital with COVID.

Dr. Sharon Nachman, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital, described the downward trend in the seven-day average as “great news,” but added that such an infection rate is “not close to where we need to be to say we have turned a corner.”

The current infected population includes children, as “more kids are getting infected,” she said, with children currently representing 25.7 percent of all new COVID cases nationwide.

With the FDA and CDC considering approving the emergency use authorization that provides one-third of the dosage of the adult shot for children ages 5 to 11, Nachman urged residents to vaccinate their children whenever the shot is available to them.

“There is no advantage to picking the right age or dose for a child,” she explained in an email. “If they are 12 now, get that dose. If they are 11 and 8 months [and the CDC approves the vaccine for younger children], don’t wait until they are 12 to get a different dose. Get the dose now that is available for that age.”

When younger children are eligible for the lower amount of the vaccine, Dhuper also urged them to get that lower dose, which he feels “offers a good level of protection for the foreseeable future.”

Nachman said she sees the issue of weight or age bands regularly in pediatrics.

“The take-home message is to not play any games and treat the child at the age or weight that they are now and not wait for them to be older or heavier,” she suggested.

As for the next month, Dhuper cautioned that the county may show another peak, particularly with the increase of indoor activities where the spread of the more transmissible Delta variant is more likely. At this point, concerns about the Mu variant, which originated in South America and was much more prevalent in the United States and in Suffolk County in June, has decreased.

“We were seeing 5% of the cases in New York state were Mu variants and the remaining were Delta,” Dhuper said.

Popp estimated that the Mu variant constitutes between 0.1% and 0.3% of cases.

The World Health Organization has urged wealthier nations like the United States not to administer boosters to their populations widely before the rest of the world has an opportunity to vaccinate their residents.

Dhuper said the United States has contributed 500 million doses to the rest of the world this year and plans to donate about 1.1 billion doses to the rest of the world in 2022.

“I hope that other upper and middle income nations can do the same, so we can get [the shots] in the arms of those who need them,” he said.

Popp urged people to recognize that COVID is a global disease.

“We in the U.S. will not be safe until the epidemic is cleared in other parts of the world as well,” he explained in an email. “I believe it is in our national interest to help other countries fight the COVID epidemic.”

 

Popp said the United States has plenty of vaccine, with enough for boosters and to vaccinate those who haven’t gotten a shot.

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The Center for Italian Studies at Stony Brook University will host its annual Robert D. Cess Concorso d’Eleganza XV, an annual Celebration of Italian Vehicle Excellence and Beauty:, on Sunday, Sept. 26 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. A display of “art forms on wheels” as a means of illustrating one form of Italian culture, the event will feature display vehicles on view at the Stony Brook University campus, 100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook  on the lawn adjacent to the Graduate Physics Building and directly across from the Sports Complex off John S. Toll Drive.

Participation and viewing are free and open to the public.

Owners of Italian vehicles interested  in participating in this display,

please contact [email protected] or call 631-632-7444.

See also www.stonybrook.edu/italianstudies

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Ellen Pikitch. Photo from Stony Brook University

By Daniel Dunaief

Preserving the oceans of the world will take more than putting labels on sensitive areas or agreeing on an overall figure for how much area needs protection.

It will require consistent definitions, guidelines and enforcement across regions and a willingness to commit to common goals.

A group of 42 scientists including Ellen Pikitch, Endowed Professor of Ocean Conservation Sciences at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, recently published a new framework developed over more than 10 years in the journal Science to understand, plan, establish, evaluate and monitor ocean protection in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).

“We’ve had MPAs for a long time,” said Pikitch. Some of them are not actively managed, with activities that aren’t allowed, such as fishing or mining, going on in them. “They may not be strongly set up in the first place to protect biodiversity. What this paper does is that it introduces a terminology with a lot of detail on when an MPA qualifies to be at a certain level of establishment and protection.”

These scientists, who work at 38 institutions around the world, created an approach that uses seven factors to derive four designations: fully protected, highly protected, lightly protected, and minimally protected.

If a site includes any mining at all, it is no longer considered a marine protected area.

Fully protected regions have minimal levels of anchoring, infrastructure, aquaculture and non-extractive activities. A minimally protected area, on the other hand, has high levels of anchoring, infrastructure, aquaculture and fishing, with moderate levels of non-extractive activities and dredging and dumping.

Using their own research and evidence from scientific literature, the researchers involved in this broad-based analysis wanted to ensure that MPAs “have quality protection,” Pikitch explained. “The quality is as important, if not moreso, than the quantity.”

The researchers are pleased with the timing of the release of this paper, which comes out just over a month before the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity, which will meet virtually in October. Over 50 countries, including the United States, have already agreed to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030.

Pikitch called this a “critical time to get this information in front of decision makers.” The meeting will occur in two parts, with the second one set for an in-person gathering in China in April.

The point of the paper is to “help clarify what is an MPA, how do we distinguish different types and their outcomes,” Pikitch added.

The people who attend the CBD meeting range from high level government officials all the way up to the president of small countries.

About a decade ago, an earlier convention targeted protecting 10 percent of the oceans by 2020. The world fell short of that goal, with the current protection reaching about 7.7 percent, according to Pikitch.

Indeed, amid discussions during the development of this new outcome-based approach to MPAs, some researchers wondered about the logic of creating a target of 30 percent within the next nine years even as the world fell short of the earlier goal.

Some people at the meetings wondered “should we be pushing these things when a lot of them are failing?” Pikitch recalled of a lively debate during a meeting in Borneo. “Part of the answer is in this paper. These [earlier efforts] are failing because they are not doing the things that need to be done to be effective. It definitely helped us inform what we should be thinking about.”

Enabling conditions for marine protected areas go well beyond setting up an area that prevents fishing. The MPA guidelines in the paper have four components, including stages of establishment, levels of protection, enabling conditions and outcomes.

The benefits of ensuring the quality of protecting marine life extends beyond sustaining biodiversity or making sure an area has larger or more plentiful marine life.

“More often than not, it’s the case that MPAs do double duty” by protecting an environment and providing a sustainable resource for people around the area, Pikitch said. Locally, she points to an effort in Shinnecock Bay that provided the same benefits of these ocean protection regions. 

In the western part of the bay, Pikitch said the program planted over 3.5 million hard clams into two areas. In the last decade, those regions have had an increase in the hard clam population of over 1,000 percent, which has provided numerous other benefits.

“It demonstrates the positive impact of having a no-take area,” Pikitch said.

At the same time, the bay hasn’t had any brown tides for four straight years. These brown tides and algal blooms can otherwise pose a danger to human health.

By filtering the water, the clams also make it easier for eel grass to grow, which was struggling to survive in cloudier waters that reduce their access to light. With four times as much eel grass as a decade ago, younger fish have a place to hide, grow and eat, increasing their abundance.

Being aware of the imperiled oceans and the threats humans and others face from a changing planet has sometimes been a struggle for Pikitch.

The marine researcher recalled a time when four hurricanes were churning at the same time in the Atlantic.

“I went to bed and I have to admit, I was really depressed,” Pikitch said.

When she woke up the next morning, she had to teach a class. She regrouped and decided on a strategic message.

“This is reality,” she told her class. “We have to accept this is the world we made. Everything we do that can make a positive difference, we do.”

Pikitch is encouraged by the work done to develop a new MPA framework.

These protected areas “provide a sustainable pathway to ensure a healthy ocean and to provide a home for future biodiversity,” she said.

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Maurie McInnis speaks at the Three Village Chamber of Commerce. Photo by Rita J. Egan

Stony Brook University’s new president wants to work with the community.

At its Sept. 15 breakfast, the Three Village Chamber of Commerce welcomed SBU President Maurie McInnis. While the members had participated in a Zoom meeting with her last year, this was the first time they had the opportunity to meet her in person. The university president took over the position July 1, 2020, after the departure of Dr. Samuel L. Stanley Jr.

“We have this sort of mutually reinforcing and synergistic positive relationship.”

— Maurie McInnis

McInnis said it was nice to be able to meet everyone during the breakfast instead of just seeing faces on a screen.

“I’m really happy to get a chance to meet with all of you,” she said. “The relationship between the university and its community is so vital, really, to the success of both in an ideal world. We have this sort of mutually reinforcing and synergistic positive relationship, and I’ve heard how much work you all have done to help us get to that place.”

After reviewing the history of SBU, the university president provided the attendees with some updates.

McInnis said the university and hospital have become the largest single site of employment on Long Island. There are 15,000 employees at Stony Brook which serves 26,000 students.

“That means we’re kind of a little city of 40,000 people right here in your backyard,” she said. “And, that means extraordinary opportunities for our community to be a really strong place working closely together.”

McInnis added the majority of students, 12,000, come from Long Island as well as nearly 7,000 from the five boroughs and 2,500 from other parts of New York state. SBU gives out 40% of degrees to STEM students and another 20% who majored in health studies.

“We were founded in many ways on the rise and excitement of science in the 1960s, and that has long been part of what this campus does,” she said.

McInnis said one of the challenges SBU and other universities face is having enough funds to educate students. Institutions have two primary sources, she said, tuition and — if it’s a public university — state support.

For SBU, she said state support has been flat for the last decade and is significantly lower from what New York provided before the 2008 recession.

“It went down, and then it’s been flat ever since,” she said. “And for the most part, our tuition has been flat in that decade as well. So, we continue to face funding challenges and continue to try to work with our partners in Albany to help them understand, for us to be great, we’re going to need additional support.”

During the presentation, McInnis announced that Dr. Harold Paz of Ohio State University has been named as the new executive vice president for Health Sciences and will start Oct. 4. She described him as “one of America’s leading health care experts.”

“He will be a transformational leader for the next chapter of Stony Brook Medicine,” she said.

During the pandemic, McInnis said, “Stony Brook really became the epicenter for COVID care in Suffolk County.” The university has also worked to help get Long Islanders vaccinated.

“We have been all over Long Island trying to make sure that all communities have access to vaccinations,” she said. “Not only did we run for this state one of the mass vaccination sites, which we did on our R&D campus — and in those early days when we still had a lot of people wanting to get vaccinations, we were vaccinating 3,000 people a day at the R&D Park — we’ve given over 350,000 vaccinations all over Long Island.”

She added Stony Brook Medicine also provided pop-up vaccination sites all over the Island to not only help people get vaccinated but to educate them on the importance of vaccines. She said one comment people would bring up is that the COVID-19 vaccine was created quickly.

“The technology for this vaccine had been in research and development at America’s leading research universities for over a decade,” she said.

McInnis said thousands of COVID-19 patients were treated at the hospital, and doctors continue to see people with the virus.

“Unfortunately, it continues to be a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” she said.

McInnis thanked community members who in the last year donated personal protection equipment, meals, iPads and more.

She said on the SBU campus there were no major outbreaks last academic year, partially because fewer students were on campus and due to precautions taken by the school. She added the fall semester is pretty much back to normal but everyone is wearing masks inside. As of Sept. 10, 99% of campus residents and 88% of in-person commuters have been fully vaccinated. The percentage of university employees vaccinated is 70%, while 77% of medical employees have received the full dose.

A few attendees asked McInnis questions at the end of the presentation.

Lee Krauer, chair of Friends of Stony Brook Road and a member of Stony Brook Concerned Homeowners, thanked McInnis for her presentation.

“I think that the university really is a wonderful place and is a tremendous asset to all of Suffolk County,” Krauer said.

She added that residents in her area off Stony Brook Road have had problems with traffic due to the university. In the past, the community groups have also cited issues with students living in houses and not taking care of them properly.

She said residents between Route 347 and 25A haven’t felt heard by past presidents and asked McInnis if she would be open to meet with members of the committees.

“People who live where I live can’t get out of our blocks,” Krauer said.

McInnis told Krauer who to contact to follow up so they could talk about the possibilities.

Earlier in her presentation, McInnis touched on college housing. There are more than 10,500 beds on campus, which is more than other SBU campuses, according to the SBU president. Recently, after Hurricane Ida, two dormitories had 7 feet of water in the basements and 400 students were relocated to other beds on campuses, many in the dining halls.

“I know that we will continue to work with you all to work with our community to make sure that for our students living on campus, that they are good neighbors,” McInnis said, “And, we will continue our partnership with the town and 6th Precinct and community leaders always to address any behavior or landlord issues that come our way.”

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