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Authors Posts by Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

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It’s only May and, despite the warm weather, it feels a bit like October around here, at least, if you talk to fans of the Yankees and Red Sox.

The two best teams in baseball, as of earlier this week, were preparing to go head-to-head in a three-game
series that seemed to have more on the line than a typical series between the heated rivals at this point
in spring.

The Red Sox had that incredibly hot start, winning 17 of their first 19 games, tearing up the league and anyone who dared to try to compete with them. The Yankees, meanwhile, started slowly, sputtering to a .500 record.

And then the Yankees seemed to have gotten as hot as the weather, scoring runs in the clutch, pitching with confidence and bringing in rookies like Gleyber Torres and Miguel Andujar, who play more like seasoned veterans.

On a recent evening, my wife and I made a quick stop to the grocery store. As we were walking out, a friend saw me in my Yankees sweatshirt. The friend asked if the team pulled out a win, even though they were losing 4-0 in the eighth inning.

As my wife waited patiently, I recounted nearly every at bat that led to another improbable Yankees comeback. A man who worked at the supermarket came over to listen, put up his hand to high-five me and said he had a feeling they might come back.

While the team measures the success of the season by the ability to win the World Series, the fans, particularly during a season with so much early promise, can bask in the excitement of individual games or series.

The first season, as the incredibly long 162 games from March through October is called, can include
numerous highlights that allow fans to appreciate the journey, as well as the destination.

Nothing is a given in a game or a season. We attend or watch any game knowing that the walk-off home run the rookie hit could just as easily have been an inning ending double play.

Ultimately, the most important part of the season is the recognition that it is a game. You can see that when the players mob each other at the plate or smile through their interviews with the sideline reporters after a tight contest.

Year after year, all these teams with all their fans hope the season ends with a victory parade. They want to be able to say, “I was there.”

Ultimately, in life, that’s what we’re hoping for. Moments to cheer for friends and family, to celebrate victories and to enjoy these contests.

Indeed, the winners often look back on the moments when nothing came easily, when their team, their family or their opportunity seemed to be so elusive. These are occasions when nothing that seems to go right turns into those where everything goes according to plan. They don’t happen because you’ve got the right fortune cookie, put on the right socks or asked for some deity to help your team beat another team full of equally worthy opponents, whose fans utter the same prayers.

They happen because of the hard work and dedication. They also often happen because people are taking great pride in doing their jobs and being a part of a team.

Right now, it feels like these two blood rivals are well-matched, facing off in a May series that can bring the energy of October. And, hey, if you’re looking to connect with someone, put on a Yankees or Red Sox sweatshirt and head to the supermarket.

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Romeil Sandhu with his dog June. Photo courtesy of Romeil Sandhu

By Daniel Dunaief

Romeil Sandhu has had a busy year.

Last fall, the U.S. Air Force awarded him a $450,000 three-year grant, called the Young Investigator Research Program. At the beginning of this year, Sandhu won a $500,000 National Science Foundation Career Award.

The assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Stony Brook University is working in several directions on basic research that could help with everything from network security to autonomous cars.

The awards are a “tremendous accomplishment,” Allen Tannenbaum, a distinguished professor of computer science and applied mathematics/statistics at SBU, explained in an email. Sandhu won the career award on his “first try, which is very unusual. The Air Force award is a very high honor for a young researcher.”

Tannenbaum was Sandhu’s doctoral thesis adviser at Georgia Tech. Tannenbaum recruited Sandhu to join Stony Brook University and described Sandhu’s work as going in a “very promising direction.”

The Air Force funding is a new direction in which Sandhu is developing a theory around how to incorporate user input in three-dimensional autonomous systems that rely on two-dimensional imaging information.

An example of this, Sandhu explained, is where a soldier might make judgments maneuvering a vehicle around potentially deadly situations. His work involves translating three-dimensional interactive feedback controls based on two-dimensional imaging systems.

“When you take a video of a car, it’s in two dimensions,” he explained. The computer link between the collected images and the reality relies on geometric properties.

With most autonomous computer systems, a human is involved in the process, to prepare for what is called the “unknown unknown.” That is a term used to describe situations in which there is no way to predict all possible events.

Through his Air Force work, Sandhu ideally would like to seek greater autonomy for some of these self-directed systems. Removing human input entirely, however, generates a risk that may be too great. That is the case in cancer treatment as well as the systems used to protect soldiers. The work he is doing with the Air Force explores how to fuse human and computer-assisted decision making.

The NSF award, meanwhile, will use the confluence of geometry and control to explore vulnerability in time-varying networks. Sandhu is tackling problems in social systems, communication systems and cancer biology and biomedical informatics.

“We can devise this idea of a network, which is the same way with cancer and proteins,” he said. One protein sends a signal to another, causing a cascade of reactions that often promote cancer.

Sandhu is interested in how microfluctuations can pave the way to larger disruptions. In the social setting, such information may infect individuals or groups and such dynamics may allow it to influence macroscopic audiences.

“The prevailing idea is that there exist several changes that pave the way to a larger catastrophic failure,” he explained in an email. 

The grant is designed to exploit everything that can be modeled as a part of a network, to understand their vulnerability. Viral information and trending stories, Sandhu said, might have one dynamic, while conspiracy theories might have another. He would like to see how such information gains traction and spreads.

The way people interact occurs through multiple networks. Sandhu is studying how models can exploit real-world behavior. Geometry, he suggests, can begin to assist on more complex modeling problems that are time varying and multilayered.

When he describes how he studies systems such as cancer, he likens the process to a waterbed. A drug or therapy may knock out a specific gene, which could limit cancer’s growth. When that gene changes, however, it creates a wave along the bed, enabling another potential genetic process to occur. While it has a more precise definition in control, it is akin to sitting on a waterbed in suppressing one sequence only to give rise to another.

Sandhu, who arrived at Stony Brook University in 2016, grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, and then spent over a decade going to school in Georgia, where he earned his doctorate at Georgia Tech.

In some ways, Sandhu’s Huntsville background, which includes lettering in high school soccer for four years as a center midfielder, is similar to one of the challenges in perception he studies through his work. 

“Think of me as one person in a network,” he said. “In a lot of the research we look at, we want to know how microfluctuations such as myself give way to a larger perception.”

Sandhu explained that the general perception of Huntsville and Alabama is different from his experience.

Most people are surprised that Huntsville has the second largest research park in the nation, at Cummings Research Park. Huntsville also has numerous aerospace companies.

The city generally ranks highly as one of the more educated in the country, he said. This is due in large part to the tech community that supports the government. The town is largely influenced by NASA and the surrounding military aerospace community, which Sandhu believes impacted his worldview, career path and research initiatives.

Indeed, one of the goals Sandhu has for his NSF grant is to help educate the high school students of people serving in the military. He said he appreciated the military families who were such an integral part of his upbringing.

Sandhu has two doctoral students and two master’s students in his lab. He also plans to participate in the Simons Summer Research Program at SBU where he will add a high school student. He is excited about the next phase of his research.

“The best part is the challenges that lie ahead,” he explained in an email. “Whether it is targeted therapy and cancer research, social computing and/or interactive computing, we are just beginning to understand very complex issues. Our hope is that we can make a contribution.”

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Eli Stavitski. Photo by Alena Stavitski

By Daniel Dunaief

Humans learned to fly by studying birds and have learned to edit genes by understanding the molecular battle between bacteria and viruses. Now, we may also learn to take carbon dioxide, a necessary ingredient in photosynthesis, and use it to produce energy.

Eli Stavitski, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, is working with a new form of electrocatalyst to convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, which can become part of an energy process.

Researchers have used noble metal electrocatalysts, such as gold and platinum, to promote this reaction. The problem with this method, however, is that these metals are rare and expensive.

In most of the reactions with other potential electrocatalysts, however, a competing reaction, called water splitting, reduces the amount of carbon monoxide produced.

Single atoms of nickel, however, woven into a lattice of graphene, which is a monolayer of carbon, produces a much higher amount of carbon monoxide, while minimizing the unwanted water splitting side reaction.

Indeed, these single atoms of nickel converted carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide with a maximum selectivity of 97 percent.

“The critical aspect of the work is that they show a change in chemical selectivity” resulting in the production of the desired products, Dario Stacchiola, a group leader in interface science and catalysis at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at BNL, explained in an email. An important part of this study is the “ability to detect single atoms (atomic needles in a carbon-based graphene haystack) which is possible in [Stavitski’s] instrument.”

Stacchiola and Stavitski are collaborating on projects related to heterogeneous catalysis. They synthesize and test materials and then measure them in a state-of-the-art beamline. Carbon monoxide can be used to produce useful chemicals such as hydrogen, which can power fuel cell vehicles. The process can contribute to something called carbon sequestration, in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere.

While carbon monoxide is a deadly gas when it’s breathed in, Stavitski said manufacturing facilities deal with toxic substances regularly and have policies and procedures in place to minimize, monitor and contain any potential dangers. On the scale of toxicity, carbon monoxide isn’t the worst thing by far, he explained.

Indeed, in refining crude oil to fuels and chemicals, refining companies regularly produce highly toxic intermediates that they control during the manufacturing process.

The way researchers create the nickel catalysts is by taking a sheet of graphene and creating defects in it that they then fill with nickel. The defects define whether the atoms are in plane or stick out, which determines the rate of reaction.

Getting the defects at just the right size requires balancing between making them small enough so that it doesn’t disrupt the graphene, but large enough to accommodate the metal atoms.“There is an opportunity to lower the costs by designing conventional supports for single atom nickel,” Stavitski said.

At $6 a pound, nickel is considerably cheaper than platinum, which cost $150 a pound. Still, it is among the more expensive base metals.

“The single atom field is exploding,” he said. “Everyone is trying to develop this unique combination of support and metal that allows for the stabilization of single atoms. It’s very likely that we’re paving the way to a much larger adoption of this material in industry.”

Stavitski suggested that the field of electrocatalysts using nanomaterials has the potential to revolutionize industrial and commercial processes. The work he and his colleagues did with nickel, while compelling in its own right, is more of an evolutionary step, benefiting from some of the work that came before and finding a specific application that may become a part of a process that converts carbon dioxide into the energy-efficient carbon monoxide, while minimizing the production of an unwanted competing reaction.

The next set of experiments is to verify the same concept of graphene as a support for single atom catalyst, which can lead to a whole family of active and selective materials. Stavitski plans to explore combinations of metals, where he could link one metal to another to fine tune its electronic properties to develop metals that can target a wide spectrum of chemical reactions.

The work Stavitski is conducting with electrocatalysts is one of several areas he is exploring in his lab. He is also looking at developing types of batteries that are not based on lithium. 

With increased demand, primarily from electric vehicle manufacturing, lithium prices have “skyrocketed,” he explained in an email. “It’s important to develop batteries that employ sodium, which is cheap and abundant. Technologically, sodium batteries are much more difficult to deal with.”

Stavitski collaborates with a group at BNL led by Xiao-Qing Yang, who is the group leader for electrochemical energy storage.

Stacchiola has known Stavitski since 2010. He described him as “active and innovative” and suggested that this new capability of detecting single atoms in complex materials is “critical and is giving [Stavitski] significant growing exposure in the scientific community.”

Stacchiola appreciates how his colleague gets “fully immersed in every project he associates with.”

Stavitski grew up in the Soviet Union. After college, he moved to Israel and then the Netherlands. He arrived at BNL in 2010.

Currently a resident of South Setauket, Stavitski is married to Alena Stavitski, who works at BNL in the quality management office. The BNL couple have two sons who are 3 and 6 years old.

Stavitski, who speaks Russian, Hebrew and English, enjoys traveling.

As for his work, he is excited by the possibility of using the expanding field of nanomaterials to enhance the efficiency of commercial and energy-related processes.

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This is the season for speeches. We’re about to enter the graduation and wedding time of year, when principals, best men, maids of honor and valedictorians stand in front of a group of people and share their thoughts during these momentous occasions.

For those about to grab the microphone, I’d like to offer my top 10 list of things not to do in a speech — in reverse order.

10. Don’t make inside jokes that no one, outside of your best friend and maybe your sibling, understands. Looking at your friend after you’ve made a joke that no one gets and pointing back and forth between this other person and you only endangers that friendship.

9. Don’t make a speech without practicing. Find someone who can be helpful and not someone who thinks you shouldn’t change anything you do, ever. That honest person might prevent you from saying, “The groom is so lucky. He gets to sleep with Karen — I always wanted to sleep with Karen. I can’t wait to hear about it.”

8. Don’t correct yourself on small details, such as, “Remember when we had that school snowball fight in second grade? No, wait it was first grade, right? No, no, it was second grade. I was right the first time.” Most people won’t care about those details. They’d rather you got it wrong than hear you go play a one person game of memory ping-pong.

7. Don’t forget to thank everyone you should thank. You can acknowledge your friends for helping you get through those tough years, the writers of your favorite movies for giving you a chance to laugh, and the woman at the supermarket for encouraging you to submit an application that got you into a summer program. Never forget to thank your parents, any relatives who are in attendance and the teachers who somehow managed to educate you despite your insistence that their subject was irrelevant.

6. Don’t imagine that alcohol makes you a better singer. It doesn’t. Besides, there’s always an enormous collection of cellphones at any wedding. You can’t erase that horrible rendition of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.” Ever. Strangers will come up to you and screech at you.

5. Don’t quote someone else extensively. Winston Churchill was a tremendous speechmaker, JFK said some memorable things, too, as did Martin Luther King Jr. Audiences can read and have no desire to hear you butcher an extensive collection of words someone else delivered.

4. Don’t try to sell something. You’re there to support the graduate, the bride and groom and numerous families. This isn’t the time to suggest that people moved by your speech can pick up tissues at your store
because you sell the softest tissues in town.

3. Don’t talk about how difficult it is for you to give a speech. Chances are the audience supports you
anyway, so there is no need to tell them, over and over again. If you aren’t particularly good at public speaking, they’ll notice.

2. Don’t look down at your poorly written notes during the entire speech. If you look up once in a while, you won’t sound like you’re muttering anecdotes and advice in your sleep.

1. Don’t give a long speech. The most important part of any speech is to keep it short. Sure, you might be funny and have some words of wisdom that people will remember. And, yes, you might recall an
anecdote that sheds light on the people in your class. People want to eat dessert, go to a party, or throw their ridiculous square hats with tassels into the air for the annual picture of stupid hats in the air. A good rule of thumb for speeches: When in doubt, leave it out.

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BeLocal winners from left, Yuxin Xia, Luke Papazian, Manuela Corcho, Johnny Donza and their thesis advisor Harold Walker. File photo

In its inaugural year of facilitating student engineering projects to improve the quality of life in Madagascar, BeLocal Group had an enviable problem.

The organization, which was founded by husband and wife team Jeff and Mickie Nagel of Laurel Hollow and Eric Bergerson of Forest Hills, had so many high-quality projects with the potential to solve daily challenges in Madagascar that they had trouble selecting the winner of the $2,500 prize.

“We had really robust debates amongst the entire BeLocal team,” Jeff Nagle said, referring to about eight projects that met several important criteria, including an expectation of impact, innovation and quality of engineering.

Luke Papazian, left, and Johnny Donza, two of the members of the winning team, along with a model of their da Vinci bridge. Photo from Mickie Nagel

Indeed, the BeLocal Group is highlighting the winner and seven finalists on its website, BeLocalGrp.com.

“We saw so many good projects,” Bergerson said. “It’s ultimately about the transfer of knowledge and empowerment.”

The nine members of the judging panel awarded the BeLocal Prize for Student Innovation May 2 to a team that worked on a bridge to cross a stream near the village of Mandrivany. Led by Johnny Donza, the team, which includes Yuxin Xia, Luke Papazian and Manuela Corcho, designed a da Vinci bridge, so named after the famed Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched a design for a similar bridge in 1502.

Villagers had been using a log to cross the stream. A broken log was difficult to replace because the island nation is confronting significant deforestation.

Instead of using valuable trees to construct the bridge, the Stony Brook University team turned to the plentiful bamboo.

Donza came up with the idea for the design after watching a video on YouTube of the Rainbow Bridge in China. A few clicks later, he said he stumbled on the da Vinci bridge, which is a simpler concept.

Stony Brook students produced a range of designs. Many homes in Madagascar cook their food inside, where they produce smoke from briquettes. The children who stay inside during cooking time struggle with breathing problems, as the particulates from the briquettes create a hazard.

Jeff Nagel said they don’t have a lot of aeration in their homes. Inhaling the fumes from briquettes made of raw wood or poorly made charcoal causes respiratory disease.

Michael Downey led a team that presses a mash made by another Stony Brook team including Timothy Hart into briquettes using biowaste from rice husks and casaba peels.

“Most people, when [they] graduate, they start working or go into an office and sit behind a computer. This is a chance to go to the opposite side of the world and help people.”

— Johnny Donza

The device, which is made of bamboo, PVC tubing and some nuts and bolts, can produce four briquettes in a minute, Downey said. The other members of Downey’s team were Robert Michael, Adam Smith and Arie Spiel.

“The charcoal burns cleaner than regular wood,” Downey added.

The ideas for specific needs came from a trip BeLocal coordinated last summer in which graduate students Acacia Leakey and Leila Esmailzada traveled with Mickie Nagel to Madagascar with video cameras to learn about local needs.

This summer, BeLocal will send a larger contingent of students to Madagascar. Hart, Donza and Downey will travel with Sean Peters, Sunny Cheng and Robert Myrick. The team will build four prototypes of various designs. Donza and Downey were excited about their postgraduation trip to the island of lemurs.

“Most people, when [they] graduate, they start working or go into an office and sit behind a computer,” Donza said. “This is a chance to go to the opposite side of the world and help people.”

Downey added that the “whole point of becoming an engineer is to change the world.”

While the students are exploring new areas with their designs, BeLocal is also planning to broaden out its work. The organization is looking to gather information and foster innovation in other countries next year. It has also spoken with faculty at several other universities, as well as with nongovernmental organizations.

“It is the goal of BeLocal to provide the leverage of global innovation to challenges sourced around the globe,” Bergerson said in an email.

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Annie Laurie W. Shroyer and Thomas Bilfinger

By Daniel Dunaief

Convenience can come at a cost, even in medicine. When it comes to a heart procedure called cardiac artery bypass surgery, that cost could make a difference in the outcome for the patient.

Annie Laurie W. Shroyer, vice chair for research and professor in the Department of Surgery at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, and Thomas Bilfinger, a professor of surgery in the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery at SBU, found that the mortality and major morbidity rates were lower for patients of surgeons performing procedures at a single center compared to those performing procedures at more than one center. 

Among physicians who operated at two or more hospitals, these surgeons performed better at their home hospital than at a secondary center.

They’ve published their findings in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery. The Society of Thoracic Surgeons identified the article as the Continuing Medical Education article for the month. The article will provide a much more in-depth learning experience to a subgroup of the journal’s subscribers who seek Continuing Medical Education credits. This, Shroyer explained, will make it more likely that cardiac surgeons will read it thoroughly and discuss it.

“We believe that, based on the results, particularly complex coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) procedures may have a better outcome at bigger institutions,” Bilfinger explained in an email. Mortality for these procedures overall in the United States is low and the analysis is about differences of a few tenths of a percent, which becomes statistically significant due to the low number.

The central issue, Bilfinger said, is whether “the mother ship does better or worse than the satellite. Decision making about centralizing versus a de-centralized approach seems to be less driven by outcomes and rather by business decisions in many circumstances. The study adds some subjective data to this discussion.”

Using a measure called observed-to-expected mortality ratios based on the health of the patient and risks of the procedure, the ratio for multicenter surgeons was higher for the satellite facilities compared to their home facilities. The ratios were 1.17 for surgeons operating at satellite facilities versus 1.01 for multicenter surgeons performing the procedure at their home hospital.

The volume of surgeries is a complicated issue, Bilfinger cautioned. “There are very well-performing smaller volume places throughout the country,” he explained in an email. “It involves dedication to the procedures from admission to discharge.”

Assuming the surgeon is just as effective in different hospitals, which is “open to discussion,” any observed difference could be attributable to the system, Bilfinger explained. Measuring the effectiveness of the participants in the process, including nurses, anesthesiologists and orderlies, is a question for ongoing research, he continued.

Joseph Carey, a cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon in Torrance, California, conducted a study based on information from California about a decade ago. In an email, Carey suggested that “you pay a price in quality working in unfamiliar conditions and I believe hospital managers do not want their surgeons traveling about.” He added that this paper “is an important reminder” of this.

Carey added that hospital systems and the makeup of the “heart team” may also be important to the outcome of a surgery.

Future research, which Shroyer plans to conduct, will evaluate other factors, such as patient risk, processes and structures of care, that impact cardiac surgical outcomes.

Other researchers could extend this study, which compares the quality of care for surgeons who work at single sites and multisites, to other areas of medical care, enabling hospital networks, insurance companies and patients to make informed risk-based decisions prior to approving difficult procedures.

The challenge, however, with similar studies for other conditions, is in finding national information. “This is the best documented group of procedures there is in the country,” Bilfinger said. For a procedure like back surgery, it might be difficult to come up with a comparable study, although Bilfinger said he “suspects strongly that this is a very similar relationship.”

Shroyer and Bilfinger will extend their work to another cardiothoracic operation. They have submitted a proposal to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons to start a parallel project to look at the difference in risk-adjusted outcomes for mitral valve procedures that compare single-center versus multicenter surgeons. The diversity of procedures may need to be considered in comparing single and multicenter surgeons.

Bilfinger said he recognizes that some doctors and hospital networks may find these conclusions disconcerting. It may give them pause in the internal discussion about value added by new satellites in any system, he explained. “This is worth a public debate. This is one of these aspects of modern health care that the consumer is not aware of.” The average consumer may not put too much emphasis on this, although the sophisticated consumer on Long Island may change or make decisions based on this type of information, he said.

Shroyer and Bilfinger, who have worked on the same floor at the Health Sciences Center since Shroyer arrived from Colorado in 2007, decided to collaborate on this project after a discussion during lunch. The duo were eating at SBU’s Simons Center Café when they were discussing the differences in outcomes for single and multicenter surgical procedures. They submitted a request to access the National Adult Cardiac Surgery Database in 2014 to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons.

For patients who are going to have a cardiac surgical procedure, Shroyer recommends that people choose their surgeon and surgery center “wisely.” She recommends researching the surgeons and their corresponding center’s bypass specific outcomes. She highlights two publicly available resources, which are Adult Cardiac Surgery Database Public Reporting|STS Public Reporting Online and Doctor Ratings — Consumer Reports.

Shroyer cautions that these ratings are somewhat outdated, so she suggests patients ask their surgeons directly about their more recent outcomes. She would also recommend contacting patients.

After conducting this study, Shroyer believes it would likely help patients if they searched for doctors who only perform bypass procedures at a single hospital. She also believes it is important for patients to consider surgeon-specific and center-specific risk-adjusted outcomes.

Ultimately, she said, the decision about a surgeon and a site for surgery is an important one that patients should make based on the likelihood of the best outcome.

“Patients should research their cardiac surgeon-hospital decision even more carefully than if they were buying a new home or a new car,” she explained in an email. “Their future health lies in their cardiac surgeon’s hands.”

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The morning routine for all four of us was slightly off kilter. My daughter, who usually doesn’t have the energy to complain about starting her day, suggested that she really needed a day off. Sorry, but that wasn’t going to happen. Besides, she doesn’t generally want a day at home because she feels as if she would fall behind in her classes and would rather keep pace.

I dropped her off at school as she groaned something to the effect of, “Bye, have a good day, I hate this.”

I returned to pick up my wife and take her to the train. She was also slightly behind schedule. My son came “elephanting” down the stairs. It’s an expression we use that is exactly as it sounds. He throws his feet so heavily and loudly on the steps that the house shakes until he reaches the first floor, turns hard to his right twice and collapses into his chair.

My wife and I raced out of the house two minutes behind our usual departure time. Two minutes? How was I supposed to make it to a train that is only early when we’re late? It’s Murphy’s law of trains. Whatever can go wrong with the commute does go wrong and, often, in conjunction with other problems.

We came to the final light seconds before the train was scheduled to pull in.

We reached the traffic light just as it turned red, in that small window when all the lights are red at the same time. Despite the line to my left waiting for a green light, I made a right on red and pulled into the intersection behind another car waiting to make the immediate left into the train station.

Unfortunately, the cars on the other side of the street hadn’t left an opening for the frantic commuters to reach the station. When their light changed, the traffic immediately started moving, blocking us from making the turn.

My wife considered getting out, racing across the street and trot-running through the parking lot. The cars speeding by near her door made that impossible.

A car behind me honked, moved to our right and slowly passed. A woman in her 60s flipped us the bird.

Do we still do that? Do we still raise our middle finger to strangers? I do it to my computer when it’s frozen and to my phone when it’s not allowing me to respond to an email or text, or when it adds an error to one of my emails because it retyped a name into something potentially problematic.

But this woman, with her tight lips, curled and dyed hair, and menacing eyes, slowly rolled past me, extending the curse finger just in front of her left shoulder. That raised digit was so stiff, long and rigid that it looked it could have just as easily have been a weapon as a gesture.

I was stunned to react immediately. Then a few responses ricocheted around my head as my wife raced out of the car: “Sorry? Right back at you, sweetheart.” … “You know what you can do with that finger.”

It’s possible her day had, or was expected to have, much bigger problems than mine. I am sorry I upset her so much that she needed to express her outrage.

Or maybe I gave her a chance to be angry at something other than herself, her family, her boss or the people who work for her. Could I have done her a favor, providing a target for her anger?

I don’t know her story, but I do know that my day suddenly seemed less problematic.

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A friend recently told me she’s pregnant with her first child. She sounded thrilled and anxious. She is, as I’ve known for years, incredibly organized and efficient. She has been a standout in her job for several years.

“What’s the concern?” I asked.

“Everything,” she giggled.

As my children take one standardized test after another, I thought perhaps I would share a test-format version of what to expect when you’re expecting. No. 2 pencils ready? OK, let’s begin:

Question 1: Before the baby is born, you should:

a. Panic buy everything, including a crib and six months worth of food and clothing. You never know if you’ll be trapped in your house without access to the outside world.

b. Sleep as much as you can because the days of sleeping at your leisure are over.

c. Read everything you can about parenting and the delivery, and then realize that every process, including childbirth, can go off script.

d. Don’t tell anyone because people will write about you.

Question 2: When people give you advice, you should:

a. Write everything down because friends, family and strangers always know better and will enlighten you with wisdom that far exceeds that which you’d get on a fortune cookie.

b. Nod politely, say, “That’s a great idea,” and wonder what to eat for dinner.

c. Pretend your phone is ringing.

d. Ask them how many Nobel prizes their children have won.

Question 3: Taking Lamaze classes can be helpful because:

a. It allows you to meet parents who are older than you.

b. It allows you to practice breathing together because sometimes parents forget to breathe.

c. It’s so relaxing that you can doze off without punishment.

d. It gives you a sense of control that you’re unlikely to have in the actual moment.

Question 4: People generally love other people’s children unless:

a. They are sitting on a plane near them.

b. They have to do something for them.

c. The children are crying constantly and they don’t know why.

d. The children have dropped or broken something.

Question 5: Parents can be so tired in the early stage that they forget:

a. To take pictures of everything.

b. To feed themselves.

c. To go to the bathroom when they need to.

d. To revel in a new baby smell that will change into something much more challenging to the nose within a year.

Question 6: When you have a baby, it’s a great idea to:

a. Change jobs.

b. Move to a new city.

c. Start attending a new and rigorous educational course.

d. All of the above, because you’ll never have a chance to juggle more challenges at the same time than when a baby is born.

Question 7: The families of the father and mother are likely to:

a. Always agree on everything you should do for the child.

b. Never agree on anything you should do for a child.

c. See evidence of their family’s genes in the child.

d. Put small differences aside and enjoy the moment when they share a new relative.

Question 8: Once you have a child, you will:

a. Be thrilled when young children come over to play with your child.

b. Be worried that the young children who come over are sniffling.

c. Want everyone to bathe in Purell sanitizer before coming near your child.

d. Not be like me and will relax when people sneeze across the room.

Question 9: You know you’ve had a great day with your child when:

a. You keep replaying something he or she said or did as you’re preparing to sleep.

b. You actually go to sleep instead of passing out with Oreo cookie crumbs in your mouth.

c. You and your spouse are laughing, quietly, for hours before you go to sleep.

d. You can’t wait to start the next day.

Question 10: Parenting is:

a. Awesome.

b. Terrifying.

c. Exhausting.

d. All of the above.

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Maurizio Del Poeta. File photo from SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

Sometimes, fixing one problem creates another.

People with multiple sclerosis have been taking a medication called fingolimod for a few years. The medicine calms immune systems that attack the myelin around nerve cells. Fingolimid decreases the lymphocyte number in the bloodstream by trapping them in the lymph nodes.

In a few cases, however, the drug can reduce the immune system enough that it allows opportunistic infections to develop. Cryptococcosis, which is a fungal infection often spread through the inhalation of bird droppings or from specific trees such as eucalyptus, is one of these infections, and it can be fatal if it’s not caught or treated properly, especially for people who have weakened immune systems.

Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis contacted Stony Brook University fungal expert Maurizio Del Poeta, a professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics & Microbiology, to understand how this drug opens the door to this opportunistic and problematic infection. He is also exploring other forms of this drug to determine if tweaking it can allow the benefits without opening the door to problematic infections.

Most of the human population has been exposed to this fungus. In a study in the Bronx, over 75 percent of children older than 2 years of age had developed an antibody against Cryptococcus neoformans, which means they have been exposed to it. It is unknown whether these people harbor the fungus or if they have just mounted an immune reaction. Exposure may be continuous, but infections may only occur if a person is immunocompromised.

Fingolimid “inhibits a type of immunity” that involves the movement of lymphocytes from organs into the bloodstream,” Del Poeta said. “Because of this, there are certain infections that can develop.”

Through a spokeswoman, Novartis explained that the company was “happy to have started a scientific collaboration” with Del Poeta to understand the role of a specific pathway in cryptococcus infections.

Cryptococcal meningitis is one of several infections that can develop. Others include herpes meningitis and disseminated varicella zoster. Before starting fingolimid, patients need to receive immunization for varicella zoster virus. At this point, doctors do not have a vaccine for cryptococcosis.

To study the way this drug and its derivatives work, Del Poeta recently received a $2.5 million grant over a five-year period from the National Institutes of Health.

Yusuf Hannun, the director of the Cancer Center at SBU, was confident Del Poeta would continue to be successful in his ongoing research.

Del Poeta “does very important and innovative work on fungal pathogenesis and he is a leader in the field,” Hannun wrote in an email. “His work will enhance our understanding of the molecular mechanisms.”

Fingolimid mimics a natural lipid. Years ago, Del Poeta showed that this sphingolipid, which is on the external surface of the membrane, is important to contain cryptococcosis in the lung. If its level decreases, the fungus can move from the lung to the brain.

While people with multiple sclerosis have developed signs of this infection, it is also prevalent in areas like sub-Saharan Africa, where people with AIDS battle cryptococcosis. About 40 percent of this HIV population develops this fungal infection, Del Poeta said. About 500,000 people die of cryptococcosis every year.

In certain areas of the United States, such as the Pacific Northwest, this fungus is also endemic. On Vancouver Island, about 19 people died from Cryptococcus gattii infections between 1999 and 2007. Most of those patients were immunocompromised.

When the fungus migrates from the lung to the brain, it is “very difficult, if not impossible in most cases, to eradicate,” Del Poeta explained in an email. If the diagnosis is made early enough before the infection spreads to the brain, the recovery rate is high, he suggested. In people whose immune systems are not compromised by drugs or disease, “death is rare.” 

Del Poeta plans to study the interaction between the drug and the fungal infection through a mouse model of the disease. The mouse model mimics the human disease and will provide insights on how to control the infection, particularly when the fungus reaches the brain.

Some of the derivatives Novartis has developed do not cause a fungal infection. Del Poeta is working with Novartis to study other forms of fingolimid that do not reactivate cryptococcosis. Del Poeta said Novartis is currently in Phase III clinical trials for another drug for multiple sclerosis. The new drug acts on a different receptor.

“We think the reason the fingolimid reactivates cryptococcosis is that it is blocking one receptor, which is important for the containment” of the fungus. The other drug doesn’t allow the disease-bearing agent to escape.

“This is a hypothesis,” Del Poeta said. He is waiting to corroborate the cell culture data in animal models.

Del Poeta has been working with Novartis for over three years. The Stony Brook scientist used some preliminary studies on the way fingolimid analogs behave as part of the research grant application to the NIH that led to the current grant.

Del Poeta said he is excited about the possibility of contributing to this area.

“Not only will this work contribute to the field of MS, but it will also have a contribution to the field of cryptococcosis,” he said. “This will have important implications for MS patients [and] for the entire HIV population.” He said he believes patients may have some other defect. If he is able to discover what that is, he may be able to protect them from a cryptococcosis infection.

Ultimately, Del Poeta hopes this work leads to a broader understanding of fungal infections that could apply to other pathogens as well.

“Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes a granuloma very similar to the one caused by the cryptococcosis and we could potentially study whether the same molecular mechanisms involved in the control of the infection in the lung are similar between the two infections,” he explained in an email.

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Hello, my name is Dan and I’m a … journalist.

It’s been a few days since my last meeting and a lot has happened since then.

For starters, I’ve decided to hate myself. I’m coming to grips with the idea that, as a journalist, I am detested and detestable.

I ask questions. All the time. Just ask my wife and kids, although they’re too annoyed with my questions to entertain yours.

I have this insane urge to understand and appreciate the nuance of a word or phrase. I even have a dictionary. Didn’t we burn those long ago? Aren’t we supposed to look for the underlined red words in a document?

My editors and I also change my words. What you see doesn’t just leap from my fingers onto the page. How are you supposed to know what I’m thinking if I let my ideas develop before shouting them at you?

I don’t have a specific character limit. Oh, and I only use hashtags when I’m pushing the button on my phone. Sacrebleu! And I write foreign phrases like “sacrebleu” to express my surprise.

Additionally, I absolutely adore alliteration. I can’t help smiling when I think about the movie “Broadcast News.” I know, I know, we’re supposed to hate everything with the word “news” in it, but I grin when I hear Albert Brooks asking, “Pretty peppy party, isn’t it, pal?”

I frequently read. Sometimes, I’ll be in a room with a television and I’ll have a book or a, gasp, newspaper in my hands with the TV off. How am I supposed to relate to everyone when I’m not watching TV?

And deadlines? They’re so real for me that I sometimes don’t talk to my wife and kids just before they arrive. I used to work for Bloomberg News — the fastest twitch environment I’d ever experienced. An editor once followed me into the bathroom to find out how long I would be in there because I had a story to write. When I was on deadline at Bloomberg, particularly around earnings season, I would give my wife all of five seconds to share whatever she needed to communicate before I raced to the next story.

Oh, and I sometimes make mistakes. That’s horrific, especially when I have to explain how I could have erred. I used to have to write letters reviewing how I blundered; I called them the “I suck because …” letters. I periodically imagined weaseling my way out of trouble by claiming how tired I was from getting up at 4 a.m. when I learned of a story I’d missed in Europe.

That, however, would never fly, because a mistake has no defense; it requires a correction. I also use semi-colons and colons, which have nothing to do with my bathroom habits.

Sure, there are times when someone claimed I made a mistake when, in fact, the mistake was not agreeing with their opinion. That’s not a mistake — a difference of opinion.

But, hey, that’s another reason to hate me. I think about whether something is an opinion or a fact. An opinion lives in a realm where people need to repeat it to make sure everyone agrees. A fact can and should stand on its own.

It’s hard, when we’re all human, to ignore the pleas of people in power who want journalists and their stories to go away. One of my journalism professors said he tried to limit his friendships so they wouldn’t prevent him from doing his job.

That’s tough because I enjoy interacting, even with people who don’t share the same viewpoint. But, wait, I hate that because, ultimately, I’m loathsome and detestable.

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