Ward Melville sophomore Jacob Wong in a butterfly event in an away meet against Brentwood Jan. 15. Photo by Bill Landon
Ward Melville’s Evan Lozeau competes against Brentwood Jan. 15. Bill Landon photo
Ward Melville sophomore Peter Sloniewsky first-year varsity swimmer competes in butterfly and the 200; 500 freestyle events against Brentwood Jan. 15. Bill Landon photo
Ward Melville sophomore Jacob Wong in the 200 freestyle in an away meet against Brentwood Jan. 15. Photo by Bill Landon
First-year swimmer Ethan Timm competes in freestyle in an away meet against Brentwood Jan. 15. Bill Landon photo
Ward Melville in an away meet against Brentwood Jan. 15. Bill Landon photo
Ward Melville High School’s boys swim team members hit the road in a League I matchup against Brentwood Jan. 15, and despite many first-year swimmers, the Patriot’s inked a 67-43 victory.
Ward Melville coach Chris Gordon said his team is very young and inexperienced but likes his team’s efforts in practice and is impressed with their attitude at their meets. Gordon stated that Brentwood has been especially impacted by COVID-19 with a smaller roster size but added they’ve not lost their energy and enthusiasm whenever they face the Patriots, adding that hopefully their numbers will bounce back next year.
The Patriots retake the pool Jan. 19 with an away meet against Half Hollow Hills.
A distinguished teacher from the Middle Country Central School District has shown that a little change makes a big difference. Selden Middle School teacher, Ms. Marrero, organized the district’s Shop with a Cop, a program that rewards children with the opportunity to purchase clothing and other necessities while shopping with a police officer. Several students from the district’s elementary, middle and high schools were paired with a volunteer to shop the aisles of Walmart for 60 minutes.
Stony Brook University has been at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic, as hospital staff has treated and comforted residents stricken with the virus and researchers have worked tirelessly on a range of projects, including manufacturing personal protective equipment. Amid a host of challenges, administrators at Stony Brook have had to do more with less under budgetary pressure. In a two-part series, Interim Provost Fotis Sotiropoulos and President Maurie McInnis share their approaches and solutions, while offering their appreciation for their staff.
Part I: Like many other administrators at universities across the country and world, Fotis Sotiropoulos, Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Interim Provost of Stony Brook University, has been juggling numerous challenges.
Named interim provost in September, Sotiropoulos, who is also a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering, has focused on ways to help President Maurie McInnis keep the campus community safe, keep the university running amid financial stress and strain, and think creatively about ways to enhance the university’s educational programs.
Stony Brook University which is one of two State University of New York programs to earn an Association of American Universities distinction, is in the process of developing new degree programs aimed at combining expertise across at least two colleges.
“We have charged all the deans to work together to come up with this future-of-work initiative,” Sotiropoulos said. “It has to satisfy a number of criteria,” which include involving at least two colleges or schools and it has to be unique. Such programs will “allow us to market the value of a Stony Brook education.”
Sotiropoulos said Stony Brook hoped that the first ideas about new degrees will emerge by the middle of January.
Fotis Sotiropoulos. File photo from SBU
Under financial pressure caused by the pandemic, the university has “undertaken this unprecedented initiative to think of the university as one,” Sotiropoulos said. Looking at the East and West campus together, the university plans to reduce costs and improve efficiency in an organization that is “complex with multiple silos,” he said. At times, Stony Brook has paid double or triple for the same product or service. The university is taking a step back to understand and optimize its expenses, he added.
On the other side of the ledger, Stony Brook is seeking ways to increase its revenue, by creating these new degrees and attracting more students, particularly from outside the state.
Out-of-state students pay more in tuition, which provides financial support for the school and for in-state students as well.
“We have some room to increase out-of-state students,” Sotiropoulos said. “There is some flexibility” as the university attempts to balance between the lower tuition in-state students pay, which benefits socioeconomically challenged students, and the higher tuition from out-of-state students.
While the university has been eager to bring in talented international students as well in what Sotiropoulos described as a “globally-connected world,” the interim provost recognized that this effort has been “extremely challenging right now,” in part because of political tension with China and in part because Chinese universities are also growing.
Stony Brook “recognizes that it needs to diversify right now. The university is considering strategies for trying to really expand in other countries. We need to do a lot more to engage students from African countries,” he said.
Sotiropoulos described Africa as an important part of the future, in part because of the projected quadrupling of the population in coming decades. “We are trying to preserve our Asian base of students,” he said, but, at the same time, “we are thinking of other opportunities to be prepared for the future.”
While the administration at the university continues to focus on cutting costs, generating revenue and attracting students to new programs, officials recognize the need to evaluate the effectiveness of these efforts for students. “Assessment is an integral part,” Sotiropoulos said. The school will explore the jobs students are able to find. “It’s all about the success of our students,” he added. The school plans to assess constantly, while making adjustments to its efforts.
Pandemic Response
Stony Brook University has been at the forefront of reacting to the pandemic on a number of fronts. The hospital treated patients during the heavy first wave of illnesses last spring, while the engineering school developed ways to produce personal protective equipment, hand sanitizer, and even MacGyver-style ventilators. The university has also participated in multi-site studies about the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.
Stony Brook has been involved in more than 200 dedicated research projects across all disciplines, which span 45 academic departments and eight colleges and schools within the university.
Sotiropoulos, whose expertise is in computational fluid mechanics, joined a group of researchers at SBU to conduct experiments on the effectiveness of masks in stopping the way aerosolized viral particles remain in the air, long after patients cough, sneeze, and even leave the room.
“Some of these droplets could stay suspended for many minutes and could take up to half an hour” to dissipate in a room, especially if there’s no ventilation, Sotiropoulos said, and added he was pleased and proud of the scientific community for working together to understand the problem and to find solutions.
“The commitment of scientists at Stony Brook and other universities was quite inspirational,” he said.
According to Sotiropoulos, the biggest danger to combatting the virus comes from the “mistrust” of science, He hopes the effectiveness of the vaccine in turning around the number of people infected and stricken with a variety of difficult and painful symptoms can convince people of the value of the research.
Sotiropoulos said the rules the National Institutes of Health have put in place have also ensured that the vaccine is safe and effective. People who question the validity of the research “don’t understand how strict this process is and how many hurdles you have to go through.”
From left, Pasquale Buffolino, Lorelei Tripp, Rebecca Pashman and Peyton McQuade, pictured on the smartboard. Photo from HCS
Two teams representing Thomas J. Lahey Elementary School in Harborfields Central School District achieved Highest Honors in the 2020-2021 “WordMasters Challenge,” a national vocabulary competition involving nearly 125,000 students annually. The school’s fifth grade team scored an impressive 171 points out of a possible 200 in the first of three meets this year, placing third in the nation. In addition, the fourth grade team scored 186 points to finish fourth nationwide.
Competing in the difficult Blue Division of the challenge were TJL fourth grade students Dylan Basile, Claire Bernstein, Sophie Clayton, Aaron Hardy, Abigail Kelly, Elise Larson, Nora McCloskey, Charlotte Storm, Ariel Tripp and Emma Waldren. Each achieved outstanding results in the meet.
Fifth graders Pasquale Buffolino, Peyton McQuade, Rebecca Pashman and Lorelei Tripp were in the top 2% nationwide. Additionally, fifth graders Ben Cammarota, Olivia Drew, Lucy Meindel, A.J. Mercuri, Michael Palermo, Belen Ramos, Annabelle Saylor and Charlie Smith achieved outstanding results, contributing to the team’s success. The students were coached in preparation for the challenge by TJL Enrichment teacher Christine Mayr.
Each year, the WordMasters Challenge exercises students’ critical thinking skills and encourages contestants to become familiar with a set of interesting new words, considerably harder than their grade level. Participants are then challenged to use those words to complete analogies, expressing various kinds of logical relationships.Working to solve the analogies helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically.
“Having worked with these students before, and knowing full well their commitment to excellence, along with our work in the classroom, they were well prepared,” Ms. Mayr said. “As you can see from the results, they excelled and should be proud of their efforts.”
Both teams have already begun preparing for the second challenge scheduled for Feb. 22 and 26
Congratulations to Elwood-John H. Glenn High School senior Rithika Narayan who has been selected as a 2021 Regeneron Science Talent Search Scholar, with her project titled “Machine Learning on Crowd-Sourced Data to Highlight Coral Disease.” Rithika is among 300 high school seniors who were selected as scholars from 1,760 applications.
The Regeneron Science Talent Search provides students with an opportunity to present their research on a national stage while celebrating the hard work of young scientists.
Rithika researched how machine learning, which focuses on the development of computer programs and artificial intelligence, can be used to address environmental concerns. In this case she modified the Facebook algorithm, Mask R-CNN, to detect the presence of different coral diseases.
Her dedication to the project, which she began researching in summer 2019, has since earned her several noteworthy accolades. She recently won first place in Environmental Science in the 2020 Long Island Science and Engineering Fair, was named a 2020 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair finalist as well as a national delegate to the Junior Science Humanities Symposia Program.
Her project has also been recognized by the Journal of Emerging Investigators.
Rithika hopes that her research, which she is currently expanding upon to recognize other infectious diseases, can lead to industry advancements with the help of institutions like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Forty of the 300 scholars will be chosen as finalists later this month. Finalists will then compete for more than $1.8 million in awards from Regeneron.
Brookhaven Lab Scientist Guobin Hu loaded the samples sent from researchers at Baylor College of Medicine into the new cryo-EM at LBMS. Photo from BNL
On January 8 the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory welcomed the first virtually visiting researchers to the Laboratory for BioMolecular Structure (LBMS), a new cryo-electron microscopy facility. DOE’s Office of Science funds operations at this new national resource, while funding for the initial construction and instrument costs was provided by NY State. This state-of-the-art research center for life sciences imaging offers researchers access to advanced cryo-electron microscopes (cryo-EM) for studying complex proteins as well as the architecture of cells and tissues.
Many modern advances in biology, medicine, and biotechnology were made possible by researchers learning how biological structures such as proteins, tissues, and cells interact with each other. But to truly reveal their function as well as the role they play in diseases, scientists need to visualize these structures at the atomic level. By creating high-resolution images of biological structure using cryo-EMs, researchers can accelerate advances in many fields including drug discovery, biofuel development, and medical treatments.
During the measurement of the samples, the LBMS team interacted with the scientists from Baylor College of Medicine through Zoom to coordinate the research. Photo from BNL
This first group of researchers from Baylor College of Medicine used the high-end instruments at LBMS to investigate the structure of solute transporters. These transporters are proteins that help with many biological functions in humans, such as absorbing nutrients in the digestive system or maintaining excitability of neurons in the nervous system. This makes them critical for drug design since they are validated drug targets and many of them also mediate drug uptake or export. By revealing their structure, the researchers gain more understanding for the functions and mechanisms of the transporters, which can improve drug design. The Baylor College researchers gained access to the cryo-EMs at LBMS through a simple proposal process.
“Our experience at LBMS has been excellent. The facility has been very considerate in minimizing user effort in submission of the applications, scheduling of microscope time, and data collection,” said Ming Zhou, Professor in the Department of Biochemistry of Molecular Biology at Baylor College of Medicine.
All researchers from academia and industry can request free access to the LBMS instruments and collaborate with the LBMS’ expert staff.
“By allowing science-driven use of our instruments, we will meet the urgent need to advance the molecular understanding of biological processes, enabling deeper insight for bio-engineering the properties of plants and microbes or for understanding disease,” said Liguo Wang, Scientific Operations Director of the LBMS. “We are very excited to welcome our first visiting researchers for their remote experiment time. The researchers received time at our instruments through a call for general research proposals at the end of August 2020. Since September, we have been running the instruments only for COVID-19-related work and commissioning.”
LBMS has two cryo-electron microscopes—funded by $15 million from NY State’s Empire State Development—and the facility has space for additional microscopes to enhance its capabilities in the future. In recognition of NY State’s partnership on the project and to bring the spirit of New York to the center, each laboratory room is associated with a different iconic New York State landmark, including the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Stonewall National Monument, and the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. State Office Building.
“By dedicating our different instruments to New York landmarks, we wanted to acknowledge the role the State played in this new national resource and its own unique identity within Brookhaven Lab,” said Sean McSweeney, LBMS Director. “Brookhaven Lab has a number of facilities offering scientific capabilities to researchers from both industry and academia. In our case, we purposefully built our center next to the National Synchrotron Light Source II, which also serves the life science research community. We hope that this co-location will promote interactions and synergy between scientists for exchanging ideas on improving performance of both facilities.”
Brookhaven’s National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) is a DOE Office of Science User Facility and one of the most advanced synchrotron light sources in the world. NSLS-II enables scientists from academia and industry to tackle the most important challenges in quantum materials, energy storage and conversion, condensed matter and materials physics, chemistry, life sciences, and more by offering extremely bright light, ranging from infrared light to x-rays. The vibrant structural biology and bio-imaging community at NSLS-II offers many complementary techniques for studying a wide variety of biological samples.
“At NSLS-II, we build strong partnership with our sister facilities, and we are looking forward to working closely with our colleagues at LBMS. For our users, this partnership will offer them access to expert staff at both facilities as well as to a versatile set of complementary techniques,” said NSLS-II Director John Hill. “NSLS-II has a suite of highly automated x-ray crystallography and solution scattering beamlines as well as imaging beamlines with world-leading spatial resolution. All these beamlines offer comprehensive techniques to further our understanding of biological system. Looking to the future, we expect to combine other x-ray techniques with the cryo-EM data to provide unprecedented information on the structure and dynamics of the engines of life.”
LBMS operations are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. NSLS-II is a DOE Office of Science user facility.
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.
The United States is an outlier in family care policies. It is one of the few wealthy democracies without national provision of paid parental and sick leave. New York has established a better record at protecting working families, from the women’s Equality Agenda to the landmark paid family leave law, to this year’s statewide paid sick time law. During the pandemic, workers who need to care for themselves or a sick loved one have been protected by the family leave and sick time laws. But there is more to be done.
Child care providers across the state have closed, leaving the child care workers without jobs and asking parents to stay home to care for their children. With schools largely virtual, parents have had to use family leave time or leave their jobs to stay home with the children. Women were twice as likely as men to report leaving work due to caregiving duties; a large percentage were low-wage workers, many of whom faced discrimination or might not be eligible for family leave payments. (To be eligible they had to have worked 40 hours a week for at least 26 weeks, or 175 days for the same employer if they were part-time workers.)
Ending this care crisis is a crucial step toward gender equality and racial justice. Workers who are themselves experiencing COVID-19 deserve the same rights. Under the Disability Benefits Law, employees are eligible for benefits of 50 percent of their average week wage but no more than the maximum benefit of $170 per week for a period of 26 weeks. The benefits cap, raised last in 1989, must be raised.
The paid family leave act, which will reach full phase-in in 2021, must be updated to remove exceptions and ensure coverage for all private and public sector employees, including part-time domestic workers. Workers who move between jobs or face unemployment should be covered, and we should expand the definition of family to include all those whom workers consider family.
The New York Human Rights Law should be updated to expand the prohibition on familial status discrimination to encompass all forms of caregiver discrimination. It must ensure that domestic workers, who are predominantly women of color and immigrants, can benefit from all of the law’s protections, and we should fully fund the Division of Human Rights to ensure robust enforcement.
In 2021, the New York State Department of Labor must enact strong regulations for the paid sick time rights. There needs to be outreach and education to ensure all workers know and can use their rights.
New York must also lead the way to insure that workers have meaningful access to alternative work arrangements, including telecommuting and part-time work. Workers, especially in low-wage industries, should know in advance what their schedules will be, and have a say in planning them. Worker-protective legislation on misclassification and fair pay for all New Yorkers is also needed.
The financing of long-term services and supports for older Americans and people with disabilities has come chiefly from Medicaid and private long-term care insurance, neither of which are available to the average middle class person.
Direct care services for the elderly or disabled, either in nursing homes or at home, are among the fastest growing jobs in the economy, but, like child care, have low pay and few protections. Women of color are the most likely to be in this cohort, and are the most likely to leave their jobs to perform uncompensated care at home. Home care, whether by an outsider or a family member, should be paid for and protected.
Funding for family leave and disability pay comes from payroll deductions from employees and employer contributions through insurances held by employers. We need to find ways to assist employers of domestic and part-time workers to comply with regulations or seek help from the Department of Labor in order to guarantee the eligibility of their workers for benefits. More information can be found at https://www.abetterbalance.org/.
Contact New York State Governor Cuomo (www.governor.ny.gov), NYS Senate Majority Leader and Temporary President Andrea Stewart-Cousins ([email protected]) and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie ([email protected]) to let them know you care about worker and family rights.
Nancy Marr is first vice president of the League of Women Voters of Suffolk County, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that encourages the informed and active participation of citizens in government and influences public policy through education and advocacy. For more information, visit www.lwv-suffolkcounty.org or call 631-862-6860.
Ted Lucki, president of Welcome Friends Soup Kitchen, (left) stands with Barbara Ransome, director of operations with the Port Jefferson Chamber. Photo from Barbara Ransome
One group’s extra funds is another group’s treasure.
Barbara Ransome, director of operations with the Greater Port Jefferson Chamber of Commerce, said that leftover money from the chamber’s restaurant/meal program was donated to the Welcome Friends Soup Kitchen.
According to Ransome, a check for $2,000 was given to the local soup kitchen. The program, she said, ended in late July, but helped bring food during this past spring and summer when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit Long Island.
“Besides the hospitals we worked with, we also coordinated meals for the soup kitchen as well as other non-profits,” Ransome said. “We suspended services late July with the thought that the remaining money could stay static and used at a later time. This was the time.”
Ransome said the chamber’s board of directors agreed to give the donation to the soup kitchen, which is still providing meals to the food insecure five days a week.
Ted Lucki, president of Welcome Friends Soup Kitchen, said that for nearly 30 years, the soup kitchen has served the greater Port Jefferson area with a shelter to enjoy a hot meal. Prior to the pandemic, the nonprofit utilized five kitchens in local churches, where food was collected. But things had to change with new guidelines and restrictions to halt the spread of coronavirus.
“Basically, the churches closed down and we couldn’t keep the kitchens open,” Lucki said. “We had to adjust to becoming a distribution service instead of a cooking service.” And instead of making the meals, they’re giving them to those in need in an organized, and safe, way. “Now you show up and we give you the food,” he said.
Restaurants like Port Jefferson’s The Fifth Season and Chick-fil-A in Port Jefferson Station have been donating warm meals and sandwiches that the Welcome Friends can distribute. Stores like Cow Palace in Rocky Point and Trader Joes in Lake Grove also have donated groceries, and fellow nonprofit Island Harvest Food Bank also has been involved.
“All of these people are so giving,” he said.
While other groups and organizations have halted their donations to those in need, this group still vows to handout food Monday through Friday.
“Because of the great effort of reorganizing a delivery meal program again, our board of directors agreed to give an outright donation to the soup kitchen, which is still providing meals five days a week for the underserved and people in need,” Ransome said.
The $2,000 will go a long way, Lucki added. “The chamber helped early on and paid for several meals,” he said. “We’re so grateful.”
Grab and go meals are available Monday through Thursday from 1 to 1:30 p.m. at St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, 309 Route 112, Port Jefferson Station and Fridays at the First Presbyterian Church, Main and 107 South Street in the village from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m.
The world of cinephiles divides between those who think Citizen Kane is one of (if not the) most brilliant films ever made — and those who think it is over-rated. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about the film, dissecting its structure, cinematography, symbolism, background, and place in moviemaking history.
The American Experience produced the documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane (1996). It chronicled the battle between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst over the creation and release of the film. It was followed in 1999 by the historical drama RKO 281, which covered the same material and starred Liev Schreiber as Welles, James Cromwell as Hearst, and John Malkovich as screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz.
Netflix now offers David Fincher’s Mank. Fincher, best known for thrillers (Seven, Panic Room, Alien 3, Fight Club), has directed his late father Jack Fincher’s fascinating screenplay, less exploring Citizen Kane but instead focusing on the man behind the screenplay, Herman Mankiewicz. This is a piece of high style, evoking the noirish films of the 1940s; in essence, it tells the story in the way in which Welles himself would have.
The film alternates between 1940 when Welles is eagerly waiting for Mankiewicz to finish the screenplay, and the early 1930’s where Mankiewicz is struggling to find a foothold. The screenplay, which would become Citizen Kane, is a thinly veiled and vicious take on the life of newspaper mogul Hearst and his relationship with his lover, Marion Davies. Mankiewicz is to receive a large fee for the screenplay but no credit. Laid up with a broken leg, he embarks on meeting Welles’ deadline.
Those looking for an account of the making of Citizen Kane should look elsewhere. Mank is instead an exploration of Hollywood, specifically the politics of show business and show business’ involvement in politics. A good deal focuses on the California gubernatorial election of 1934 and how the Republican MGM hierarchy ran a smear campaign against left-wing author Upton Sinclair.
Presented is a Hollywood of hedonism and an old boys’ network, of backroom deals, demanded loyalty, and the unchecked intersections of film, power, and money. In the midst of this is Mankiewicz who is battling his demons, both in his career and with his alcoholism. It is a story in which the protagonist is Quixote and Cervantes, an intriguing and demanding drama that requires full attention.
If the definition of being a great actor is to lose oneself in the role to the point of being unrecognizable, then there is no finer actor than Gary Oldman. He is a true chameleon. It is hard to measure his performances against each other because no two are alike in any way. His Mankiewicz is unique: charming, insightful, dissipated, conflicted, and inscrutable. It is one of the best performances of 2020.
Amanda Seyfried brings charisma and depth to Marion Davies, in contrast with Citizen Kane’s Suzanne Alexander Kane, a spoiled and unaware gold digger; Seyfried’s Davies has a core of honesty and a surprising self-awareness. Arliss Howard is effective as the volatile studio head Louis B. Mayer, a monster manipulator with no conscience. Charles Dance finds shades in his portrayal of Hearst that humanizes the character but in no way detract from the man’s ability to destroy. Tom Burke’s Orson Welles hovers around the periphery, more seen than heard (which is a good thing as he has successfully recreated Welles’ voice as his resemblance is only passing). Sam Troughton makes for a fussy John Houseman, sent by Welles to watch over Mankiewicz. Tuppence Middleton finds warmth and intelligence in Sara, Mankiewicz’s tolerant wife, as does Lily Collins as Rita Alexander, the willful secretary who assists him. The film is populated with cameos of icons of the era (Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Ben Hecht, George S. Kaufman, etc.) that enhance the epic feel.
The film is shot in rich black-and-white; Erik Messerschmidt’s cinematography deserves high praise. Equally credited should be Kirk Baxter’s spot-on editing. Donald Graham Burt’s production design complements the art direction of Chris Craine and Dan Webster. Trish Summerville’s hundreds of costumes perfectly reflect the era.
Fincher’s collaboration with these artists has resulted in a vision of the darker Hollywood of another era. Mank is not so much a film about a film. It is instead a thoughtful portrait of the construction of art in the face of warring forces.
In the end, Mankiewicz (who did not attend the ceremony) receives the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Mankiewicz’s career would never reach another high of this proportion, and he would die thirteen years later from complications due to alcoholism, a genius dead at the age of fifty-five. This tacit and disturbing ending is an appropriate coda to an introspective and absorbing film.
Unity Drive’s Pre-K/Kindergarten Center in the Middle Country School District warmed more than hearts this holiday season. Inspired by Candace Christiansen’s “The Mitten Tree,” Mrs. Gorwitz and her students organized a drive to collect mittens benefiting those in need through the local organization, Lighthouse Mission.
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