It’s the ultimate supply truck. It starts out full of products necessary through the system, travels to the equivalent of cities, towns and villages, and returns for another round trip.

Unlike the trucks on the Long Island Expressway, however, these delivery vehicles are considerably smaller. In fact, they are in each of us, traveling through the heart and lungs and visiting everything in our bodies.

A key part of the cardiovascular system, red blood cells pass through a maze of arteries, arterioles, veins and capillaries. When they carry oxygen to their destination and ferry away carbon dioxide, their journey keeps the human body healthy.

When something obstructs blood flow or alters the various pathways, inflammation, diseases  and localized stress can build up.

Molly Frame, a SUNY distinguished service professor in biomedical engineering at Stony Brook University has been intrigued by how the blood flows through her body ever since she read her mother’s nursing anatomy and physiology textbooks in seventh grade. In her research, which she has conducted at Stony Brook since 2002, Frame is seeking to understand the localized signals that can open or close an arteriole.

“How does a red blood cell get from the lung, where it’s filled with oxygen, to the toes, where it empties oxygen, and what route does it take?” Frame asked, describing the route the red blood cells take through the body. “The flow path is altered in identical ways for any inflammatory processes” studied to date.

Frame said the ideal flow of blood through the system is homogeneous, without any misdirection or interruption. When people get sick, the flow appears to be more irregular and heterogeneous and can be more like areas of desert next to areas of flood. The correct amount of blood flow is nearby but is not uniformly spread out, she suggested.

Frame would like to know how blood vessels respond amid competing signals and what strength or concentration of a signal is necessary for a particular type of reaction.

Clinton Rubin, the chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Stony Brook, applauded Frame for her work in her lab on behalf of the school.

Frame does “cutting edge research that helps us understand how red blood cells move through the microenvironment, which is critical for understanding everything from diabetes to wound repair, and she makes major contributions to the educational mission of the university.”

In addition to her research, Frame is the undergraduate program director in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

“She didn’t inherit something and add icing on the cake to it,” Rubin said. “She built it out.”

Rubin said Frame goes “above and beyond the call of duty” and suggested she was a “visionary” and an “implementor.”

Frame has recently dedicated time and effort to understanding how nanoparticles that can enter the body through the skin, lungs or food can affect blood flow. “We have figured out that some particles look like they’re getting through the skin,” she said.

Regulations haven’t caught up with technology, Frame suggests. “This is part of the system” and not the fault of the Food and Drug Administration.

To be sure, Frame isn’t suggesting the immediate cessation of activities involving nanofabrication. Indeed, production using these tiny particles takes place in secure areas where water and air is filtered and waste is contained, as workers are covered from head to toe, she described.

The hazard from nanoparticles is generally presumed to be identical to micron-sized equivalents, which are considerably larger and have less surface area. That, however, may not be the case.

Collaborating with scientists at SUNY Polytechnic Institute and George Washington University School of Medicine, Frame helped develop a way to find nanoparticles in tissues.

The Stony Brook biomedical engineering lab developed a low-volume Franz chamber for exposure to oxides. Franz chambers require large volumes of the material. The biomedical engineering design team, which included undergraduates at Stony Brook, developed a smaller, more economical version of the chamber.

“The biomedical team created something amazing,” Frame said “They took an idea we had on paper and made it into something smaller” and more practical.

Nanoparticles can be in everything from shiny sports drinks, which doesn’t include Gatorade, to toothpaste whiteners. Frame referred readers interested in learning more about nanoparticles to the following website: www.nanotechproject.org/cpi.

Toxic elements are not included in these materials because the FDA has prohibited them. This, however, is a case where the size of the particle might affect their local chemistry in the body.

Frame is married to John McMahon III, a retired police officer. The couple lives in Sag Harbor. They have what she describes as a blenderized family, with 14 children. Many of them have served or are serving in the military, with several also acting as volunteer firefighters or police officers. Their children also include an engineer, a restaurant manager and a manager with a global agency.

The daughter of a mechanical engineer and a nurse, Frame said she and her siblings were encouraged to excel. She said she recalls holding a flashlight for her father, Wilbert Schultejans, while he was working on something. Schultejans, who died in 1998, would call out numbers of dimensions that he used to calculate how many more nails or screws were needed.

Her mother, Nancy Schultejans, demonstrated to her children how to figure out in their heads how much of something was needed, from dosages for her patients, to yardage for fabric, to flour for bigger batches of cookies.

As for her work, Frame said she will continue to focus on nanoparticles.

“More studies are needed to keep up with the technology,” she said.

For the last 25 years, Patricia Wright has traveled back and forth from Stony Brook to Madagascar, studying the island nation’s lemurs. Along the way, she has worn numerous hats.

Within a day of returning recently to Madagascar, a country that honored her with three Legion of Honor medals, Wright received a letter from a mayor who made an unusual request. He wrote to her explaining that “You’ve been talking about trash for a long time,” related Wright, who is a distinguished service professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University and the director of the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments.

He promised to help arrange for its pick up and removal “if you buy us three wheelbarrows.” She wrote back indicating that she’d purchase two wheelbarrows if he bought the last one.

Living and conducting research in Madagascar, other countries around the world or in the United States requires a vast array of skill sets, including negotiation, Wright said.

Indeed, Wright spoke with a scientific colleague she’s known from her work with spiders in Madagascar, Sarah Kariko, recently about a one-day training session Wright’s graduate students could attend at Harvard, so they could learn to work with people with different agendas.

“Having to learn the negotiation fields on your feet is very difficult,” Wright said via Skype from Madagascar. “If you have a skill set you can draw on, you could deal with many of these situations so much easier.”

Kariko, who is a research director at Gossamer Labs and an associate in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, and Gillien Todd, a lecturer on law at Harvard helped lead the training.

The goal of the seminar, Kariko explained, was to teach negotiation skills through role playing, games, lectures, discussion and case studies that participants, which included undergraduates and graduate students from Harvard, among others, could apply to their own life and work.

Wright’s graduate students appreciated the opportunity to hear and consider different scenarios that might require negotiation.

Katherine Kling recently started her Ph.D. in Wright’s lab. She studies lemurs that live in nontraditional environments including rice paddies and farms. “Crossover disciplinary training is important,” Kling said. “We’re not just doing science. We need to consider negotiating techniques.”

Kling is developing a conservation radio program in Madagascar. Every episode will focus on one of the lemur species in the country. To build interest in the stories, she hopes to involve music and musicians and stories from children and researchers.

“Who doesn’t want to listen to the radio?” Kling asked. “We’re hoping to make programs about lemurs, conservation and the environment that are interesting and fun.”

Kling “hopes to inspire people to care and know they can” achieve conservation goals on their own, she suggested.

In her research, Kling hopes to gain a better understanding of why lemurs are moving into these so-called matrix environments. She would like to see how humans altering a landscape affect lemur behavior.

Kling graduated from college in 2013 and took two years off before starting her Ph.D. The anthropologist developed and honed several important skills outside the realm of scientific research, as she worked at Disney World’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park in Florida.

Kling described the experience as “awesome” and explained that she “wanted to learn how people respond to conservation.” She appreciated the chance to work with children and help them forge a connection with animals at the theme park and carried over the skills and approach she used at work into everyday parts of her life.

“We were trained to talk to anyone we saw in the park,” she recalled. She’d go to the grocery store and would “talk to everyone there. You can’t turn yourself off.”

Gena Sbeglia, another Ph.D. student in Wright’s lab who is studying how social behavioral patterns affect disease transmission, suggested that people often feel negotiation starts with conflicts, which isn’t always the case.“There can be a mutual movement towards a good,” Sbeglia said.

Negotiations are a part of the research and life experience for scientists that extend well beyond the realm of their scientific mission.

Sbeglia said she was preparing to do field work in the Tsaranoro Valley and wanted to put identifying colors on ring-tailed lemurs. Any research needs the approval of the local kings. She had already received approval for her work in the forest, but no researcher had put collars on the lemurs before.

She understood that it would be difficult to get permission because the animals are considered sacred. With her guide as an intermediary, she explained how she would bring an experienced darting team that included a vet and that she intended to study these lemurs for a year. Other scientists would also be able to conduct their own field work if they could track and monitor individual animals.

Sbeglia received permission, although she didn’t put collars on the lemurs because the logistics of the site were inappropriate for her research.

Wright suggested that discussions in the conservation world can lead to creative solutions. When she was working to establish Ranomafana National Park, Wright hired Professor Beth Middleton, an expert on cattle damage in rainforests, to determine the effect of the cows on the park. Her work showed that for the population of cattle in the park at the time, the negative impact on the forest was minimal. The village elders had kept the cattle there to protect them from cattle rustlers.

“The elders agreed not to put more cattle in the park,” which was a satisfying solution for the scientists, Wright recounted. “By allowing the cattle to stay inside the forest, it showed that negotiation works both ways, so that both sides can win.”

In 1933, a gathering of scientists took place at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The symposium, which started a tradition that continues today, resulted in the publication of a book.

With that book, CSHL started a publishing arm that now includes eight journals and over 200 books. One of the newer efforts is open to a scientific and worldwide audience for free. Created in 2013, bioRxiv (pronounced “bio-archive”) is a preprint service designed to share cutting edge and unedited biological and scientific information by posting manuscripts on its website.

The service, which has been growing rapidly and is supported by the Lourie Foundation and CSHL, had approximately 400,000 page views and 185,000 downloads in March.

“BioRxiv offers scientists the chance to share their work with colleagues who can make their own, often expert assessment of the work that’s been done without waiting for the often lengthy process of peer review,” said John Inglis, executive director and publisher at CSHL Press and one of the co-founders of bioRxiv, along with Richard Sever, who is the assistant director at CSHL Press.

Indeed, in September 2015, two prominent cardiologists made a public argument, through the New York Times Op-Ed pages, that information in clinical trials, particularly those that may alter the course of treatment for patients, should be made available as soon as possible.

The traditional publication process, which involves preparing data, presenting graphics and sending information to journals for peer review, can take months or more. Eric Topol, a cardiologist at the Scripps Clinic and Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale-New Haven Hospital, suggested that this data should be on a National Institute of Health website or published on a preprint platform, such as bioRxiv.

“A very large number of clinical trials are open and then closed for various reasons,” said Inglis. “They thought it was a good idea and we now have that category.”

BioRxiv, which provides a preprint service for scientists in categories ranging from animal behavior and cognition to biochemistry, biophysics, neuroscience and zoology, also recently developed a section for epidemiology. That, Inglis said, is as far as the CSHL preprint service is prepared to go into clinical medicine at this point.

Modeled after a similar preprinting effort called arXiv that is hosted by Cornell University for physics, math, computer science and related disciplines,  not only can bioRxiv provide scientists with a way to share information more rapidly, but it can also serve as a forum to share incremental pieces of information or a negative result.

In Gholson Lyon’s case, the preprint service, which is housed in the same building where he works, helped him find doctors around the world.

An assistant professor, Lyon had worked with two boys with intellectual disability and who had unusual facial characteristics. After screening their genes, he searched for others who might have the same undiagnosed condition.

Preprinting on bioRxiv helped him find doctors in Colombia, Mexico, France, Germany and the United Kingdom who had patients with similar symptoms. BioRxiv expedited the pace of scientific discovery, Lyon said.

Steven Shea, an associate professor at CSHL, used bioRxiv because of the slow pace of the review process.

“We wanted [the work] to see the light of day,” Shea said. Shea believes more scientists can and should share their results on the website.

While bioRxiv offers a preprinting service, it doesn’t aim to replace peer-reviewed journals, Inglis said. Rather, it is a quicker step between the bench and the scientific community.

BioRxiv has been growing rapidly, particularly in the last few months. According to Inglis, between May and December of 2015, the rate of submissions doubled. The pace of submissions picked up even before a high profile Accelerating Science and Publication in Biology (ASAPbio) meeting in February.

To be sure, the site still posts a small percentage of the scientific information published in its fields.

Early on, Inglis said some journals resisted preprints. Not only has that number dwindled, but eight scientific publications have become a part of a pilot process that allows scientists to submit manuscripts directly through bioRxiv. He expects that number to climb to 20 by the end of April.

Unlike with peer-reviewed journals like Lancet, where Inglis started his scientific publishing career, bioRxiv does not provide editing or content review services. Each post includes a mention at the top that it is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.

CSHL makes sure the posts aren’t spam. Before they share the manuscripts with the public, they put them in a queue, where a group of 40 scientists make sure they really are science.

BioRxiv declines submissions that are out of the scope of its publishing interests or that are term papers, theses or unsubstantiated hypotheses, which is fewer than 5 percent of the submissions, Inglis said.

Authors can revise their manuscripts on the site, which has occurred about 30 percent of the time, Inglis said.

A native of Aberdeen, Scotland, Inglis met with CSHL’s former CEO James Watson, who approached him about joining the institution. A few months before Inglis arrived, CSHL had launched its first journal.

When Inglis arrived in 1987, he and his wife Lesley, who has been teaching English as a second language at CSHL for nine years, said they expected to have “an adventure for a few years” and then return to the United Kingdom with their sons, who were in middle school. Adam now lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife Lizzie and their two sons and Tony and his wife Louise live in Brooklyn.

As for bioRxiv, Inglis sees the preprint offering as an approach consistent with the current cultural environment.

The research community includes numerous “young people who have grown up with the internet and all its possibilities,” Inglis said. “They are very comfortable with sharing in general but also with the embrace of technologies that create community across the boundaries of geography, culture, age and status.”

When he was 11, Bruce Stillman read about spina bifida and wanted to know what was happening and how he might help. By the time he got to college, genetic discoveries moved him away from medicine and toward scientific discovery.

In 1979, he came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from his native Glen Waverley through Sydney, Australia, for what he expected would be just two years. At the time, the lab was led by Nobel-prize-winning scientist James Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA the year Stillman was born.

By the time he was 38, Stillman’s research success led Watson to pick him as his successor to lead an institution with an international reputation.

Now in his 36th year at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and with children and a grandchild born in the United States, Stillman has trained a generation of scientific leaders while maintaining two time- and energy-consuming jobs.

“I spend 80 percent of my time” on being the president and chief executive officer of CSHL and “the other 80 percent running the lab,” he jokes.

Former members of Stillman’s lab and collaborators have marveled at Stillman’s ability to continue to remain so active in his scientific pursuits while raising funds, hiring researchers and overseeing a lab with an endowment of $450 million, up from $32 million in 1994.

Stillman, his colleagues say, has a passion for discovery and a dedication to science that informs both sides of a schedule that often includes discussions, meetings and interactions during what many would consider off hours.

Leemor Joshua-Tor, a professor at CSHL who has collaborated with Stillman for about nine years, has interacted with Stillman as an administrator and as a scientist. She says it’s clear which role wins out.

When Joshua-Tor was the dean of the Watson School of Biological Sciences, she would email him in his capacity as president. She would often get a time slot three or four weeks from her request.

“If I called/emailed and said I would like to speak with him regarding the science, the reply would often be, ‘How’s 4 p.m.?’” Joshua-Tor recounted.

Stillman said that continuing in his role as a scientist helps him make better decisions for CSHL. He has a “connection with what’s going on” scientifically that informs his pursuit of scientific expertise and new technology, he said.

Stillman has also forged numerous connections with the people who work at CSHL. Joshua-Tor said he knows most people by name, from the grounds keepers to the graduate students to the postdoctoral researchers, a skill she said also follows Watson’s legacy.

In his long, storied and award-winning career, Stillman has worked with viruses, yeast and human DNA, making landmark discoveries that include using the Simian Virus 40 to discover human cell DNA replication proteins.

Stillman “covered many areas during his career that make him special,” said Christian Speck, a nonclinical lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine at the Institute of Clinical Sciences at the Imperial College in London who earned his Ph.D. in Stillman’s lab in 2006 and who collaborates with Stillman.

Huilin Li, a biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Stony Brook University, said Stillman’s discovery of the Origin Recognition Complex, abbreviated ORC, “set off an entire research field of eukaryotic DNA replication initiation.”

Indeed, Stillman, Li, Speck, Joshua-Tor and others continue to devote considerable energy to understanding the protein, signals and processes that are a key part of DNA replication, which allows cells to make genetic copies of themselves.

Replication makes it possible for the body to produce red and white blood cells at the rate of 500 million per minute. Spreading the spectacularly thin, tightly wrapped genetic material out over that minute would produce a million kilometers of base pairs, which could wrap around the equator 25 times.

Replication isn’t just important for passing along information, but, as Stillman recognized when he was 11, biological processes don’t always follow the typical code.

Stillman and his collaborators have explored numerous ORCs, which occur once every 50,000 to 100,000 base pairs along the chromosome. His recent studies suggest the ORC is involved in the fundamental decision of whether or not a cell divides.

His recent unpublished findings also show that ORC controls the expression of genes that are overexpressed in cancer by interacting with tumor suppressor genes, he said.

Understanding how DNA replication is regulated has already produced drugs that are in the clinic or are heading that way, Stillman said.

Through his years at CSHL, Stillman has worked with talented scientists. His lab was near that of Barbara McClintoch, who won a Nobel Prize for her work on jumping genes in corn. While Stillman said he enjoyed most of his interactions with her, he did struggle on occasion to return to his own research, which could often take 12 to 14 hours a day, after a long discussion with her.

Avoiding McClintoch during those long research days was no easy task for the six-foot, four-inch scientist, whose tall, trim figure is easy to spot down a hallway or in the picturesque CSHL laboratory setting.

Stillman met his wife Grace, a co-founder of Operation Hearts and Homes, a charity dedicated to improving the lives of orphans around the world, in Huntington. Their son Keith is a commercial real estate appraiser and their daughter Jessica is a fifth-grade teacher specializing in literacy.

Stillman, who has no plans to step away from either role in the near future, suggested that the scientific process, though demanding, has given him numerous rewarding experiences. In the 1980s, he made a hand drawing of how he thought histones, the fundamental building block of chromatin, might get together. About a decade later, X-ray crystallography showed that the drawing was close to accurate.

“It was how I imagined it to be,” he recalled. These discoveries provide “excitement and then with the new insight, [a desire to] get to a full answer quickly.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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