Jason Trelewicz has had a productive return to Stony Brook University. A graduate of Mount Sinai High School, Trelewicz received a bachelor’s degree in engineering from SBU in 2004. After that, he earned a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then worked at St. James-based MesoScribe Technologies. He became an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stony Brook in 2012.

Recently, Trelewicz won a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award, which provides $500,000 over a five-year period. Trelewicz’s research focuses on transforming applications of high-strength metals.

Trelewicz is “tremendously talented. He goes after bold initiatives,” said Fotis Sotiropoulos, the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SBU. “He is also actively involved in pushing forward some of the high-performance computing initiatives we have as a part of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. He has a terrific career ahead of him.”

Trelewicz’s scientific efforts center around amorphous metals. He uses computational modeling and conducts experiments on metals that have a disordered atomic structure that is similar to glass and, as a result, are called metallic glasses.

The metals he works with are different from everyday metals because they do not have a regular atomic structure. The atoms that make up amorphous metals or metallic glasses are in a highly disordered state.

The amorphous metals “require a lot more force or stress to initiate permanent deformation,” Trelewicz said, which makes them higher strength. Instead of deforming like crystalline metals, they become brittle. The likelihood of these types of metals developing a brittle failure is one of two problems with amorphous metals, he said. The other is that it’s difficult to make these metals in large parts like a sheet.

In his work, Trelewicz hopes to overcome these difficulties. He said amorphous metals have applications in industries ranging from automotive to aerospace to consumer electronics.

As a part of this award, Trelewicz is expected to use these funds to further his teaching efforts. “I’m extremely passionate about introducing students to the vast field of materials science and engineering,” he explained.

Jeff Brogan, the CEO of MesoScribe, hired Trelewicz and witnessed his work habits. In a recent email, he described Trelewicz as “very organized and an excellent project manager.” Brogan called Trelewicz a “valuable member of [the] proposal writing team” and suggested he “helped secure a number” of government contracts.

While he was at MesoScribe, Trelewicz was involved in developing new sensors to measure temperature, strain and other properties of interest to MesoScribe’s customers, Brogan said. “His efforts on ice detection and ice mitigation led to a patent application which was approved and is soon to be issued,” Brogan said.

Trelewicz initially became interested in amorphous metals through golf. An enthusiast of the sport, Trelewicz remembers reading about how the golf club industry used these types of metals on the face of golf clubs. Their elastic properties enabled more energy to be transferred to the ball rather than be absorbed as elastic strain energy.

Trelewicz wants to develop new high-strength materials that resist permanent deformation and that are not brittle. He will use simulations that model atomic interactions in a material to build an understanding of deformation physics, which he plans to use to design a more resilient alloy. He hopes to distribute defection initiation and propagation to inhibit crack formation.

Trelewicz said he has been told by a number of people that he respects that it is going to be difficult to make these materials with the proposed manufacturing process. He is encouraged by his understanding of the deformation of metallic glasses and believes the process is capable of creating structural inhomogeneities that will help him achieve his goals.

When he was looking to return to academia, Trelewicz set his sights on Stony Brook, where he was pleased with all the changes the university has gone through since he left in 2004.

“It’s astounding how the campus has evolved,” Trelewicz said. He appreciates the investment the university has made in its faculty members and in students adding, “I feel like I’m part of something huge.”

Trelewicz and his wife Lauren, who teaches global studies at Earl L. Vandermeulen High School in Port Jefferson, live in Miller Place and are expecting their second daughter in May. The couple, who went to the junior and senior prom when they were in high school, appreciate being close to both sets of parents and to the Long Island coastline, where they enjoy summer power boat trips to Orient Point and across the Long Island Sound. “Our family is a very big part of our lives, as is boating in the summers,” Trelewicz said.

As for his work, he relishes interactions with his colleagues. “Passionate discussions are what make being a scientist so exciting. I particularly enjoy collaborating with colleagues across academic, national labs and industry as I think it adds new dimensions to the thought process and promotes innovative ideas.”

If he succeeds, she may see the results of his efforts in her work. As fascinated as she is by her studies in the Antarctic, Heather Lynch knows the stakes are high for her husband Matthew Eisaman’s work.

“These days, ecologists like myself are often just carefully documenting environmental decline, and predicting how quickly or slowly a species will go extinct,” Lynch offered in response to emailed questions. “The work that [Eisaman] does will actually solve the problem.”

Indeed, as a physicist in the Sustainable Energy Technologies Department at BNL and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook University, Eisaman is focused on improving the efficiency of reusable energy sources, particularly solar cells.

It is through this effort that Eisaman made a compelling discovery recently that may have implications outside the world of reusable energy.

Eisaman worked with a team of scientists at BNL and the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at SUNY Polytechnic on a process related to graphene, which is a two-dimensional arrangement of carbon atoms that is one atom thick.

Eisaman was working on a process called doping in which scientists add or take away electrons. Doping is one way to control how graphene behaves at junctions with semiconductors. Eisaman set up an experiment to explore a way to make n-doping, which adds electrons to graphene, more efficient.

The team at SUNY Polytechnic built a product on top of a sodium lime substrate, which is an ingredient in household glass and windows. Eisaman layered graphene on top of that. He had planned to add other chemicals to dope the graphene.

“Before we doped it, we took a baseline measurement,” Eisaman said. “It looked like it was strongly n-doped, which we didn’t expect.” He followed this up with a series of other experiments, using the facilities at BNL including the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, at SUNY Poly and in his lab. “The whole study was really a team effort requiring many different areas of expertise.”

Eisaman believes this discovery was promising for solar cells and other possible technological advances. He plans to explore the fundamentals of the doping mechanism. He would like to understand how the chemical environment of the sodium affects the doping strength. He is also studying how the doping and other electronic properties of the graphene vary with the number of graphene layers.

Eisaman said one challenge to making this doping process work is that most semiconductor properties would change, mostly for the worse, if scientists tried to diffuse sodium through it. A possible solution is to deposit a material on top of the graphene that has a sufficiently high surface density of sodium. While this material would donate electrons to the graphene, it would not diffuse into the semiconductor as long as the temperatures of the deposition process were low enough, Eisaman suggested. He is currently working on this.

Since the paper came out in Scientific Reports in February, Eisaman said he has had inquiries from scientists and from a company that might want to use their discovery. He is “actively looking for funding and partnerships to help push this forward,” he said.

Eisaman has three Ph.D. candidates in his lab and he usually adds two to four undergraduate researchers in the summer. While this group will continue to develop technology that will seek ways to find applications of graphene doping techniques, Eisaman will continue with the bread and butter work in his lab: improving the efficiency of reusable energy alternatives.

In another set of experiments, Eisaman collaborated with Charles Black, a scientist and group leader at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials. Black and Eisaman worked on how to use the same anti-reflective properties in moth eyes to reduce the amount of light that escapes from a solar cell through reflections.

Black constructed structures that mimicked these properties. The structure worked even better than expected.

“Based on our limited knowledge of optics, which is [Eisaman’s] expertise, we couldn’t understand why they seemed to be doing better than we thought they should,” Black said. Eisaman’s complementary ability to model the optical properties of the material on the computer allowed them to see a “subtlety that escaped us. In the end, he figured out what was going on.” Black and Eisaman are continuing to work together to create a better structure.

Eisaman and Lynch, an assistant professor in the Department  of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook, have a 6-year old daughter Avery. They live in Port Jefferson, where they have had solar panels on their house for over a year.

The couple, who met when they were undergraduates at Princeton, discuss their work “constantly,” Lynch noted. “Sometimes, we sit and brainstorm how to solve the world’s energy problems, by which I mean that I throw out crazy ideas and [Eisaman] patiently explains why they wouldn’t work or why they don’t scale well.”

Eisaman, who grew up in Pittsburgh, said he appreciates being close to the water, where he and Lynch have enjoyed kayaking since they moved to Long Island in 2011. Eisaman and Lynch are recreational runners and try to run two marathons each year: the Pineland Farms Trail Race in Maine and the Hamptons Marathon.

As for his work, Eisaman said he feels a sense of urgency. “One of the most pressing problems we’re facing is to meet our energy goals in the next 10 to 20 years.”

More than a decade ago, Dmitri Kharzeev came up with an idea he thought he should find in nature. Many such concepts come and go, with some, like the Higgs boson particle, taking over 50 years to discover.

After working with numerous collaborators over the years, the professor of physics and astronomy at Stony Brook University and a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory found proof.

“This was absolutely amazing,” said Kharzeev. “You think an idea in your head, but whether or not it’s realized in the real world is not at all clear. When you find it in the laboratory on a table top experiment, it’s pretty exciting.”

The discovery triggered a champagne party in Kharzeev’s Port Jefferson home, which included collaborators such as Qiang Li, a physicist and head of the Advanced Energy Materials Group at Brookhaven, and Tonica Valla, a physicist at BNL, among others. “There was a feeling that something new is about to begin,” Kharzeev said.

Kharzeev’s idea was that an imbalance in particles moving with different projections of spin on momentum generates an electric current that flows with resistance. That resistance drops in a magnetic field that the scientists hope can reach zero, which would give their material superconducting properties.

A particle’s projection of spin on momentum is its chirality. The magnetic field aligns the spins of the positive and negative particles in opposite directions. When the scientists applied an electric field, the positive particles moved with it and the negative ones moved against it. This allows the particles to move in a direction consistent with their spin, which creates an imbalance in chirality.

The chiral magnetic effect can enable ultra-fast magnetic switches, sensors, quantum electricity generators and conventional and quantum computers.

Kharzeev had expected this kind of separation for particles at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL, where he figured he might observe the separation for quarks in the quark-gluon plasma.

Instead, he and his colleagues, including co-author Li, discovered this phenomenon with zirconium pentatelluride, which is in a relatively new class of materials called Dirac semimetals, which were created in 2014. Their paper was published in Nature Physics earlier this year.

The particles had to be nearly massless to allow them to move through any obstacles in their path. Particles that collided with something else and changed their direction or chirality would create resistance, which would reduce conductivity.

Genda Gu, who is in the Condensed Matter Physics & Materials Sciences Department at BNL, grew the zirconium pentatelluride crystals in his laboratory. Gu “is one of the best crystal growers in the world and he has managed to grow the cleanest crystals of zirconium pentatelluride currently available,” said Kharzeev.

Gu said he collaborates regularly with Li. This, however, was the first time he worked with Kharzeev. He called the work “fruitful and productive” and said the crystals had “generated a number of exciting scientific results.”

The materials they worked with have a wide range of potential applications. The semimetals strongly interact with light in the terahertz frequency range, which is a useful and unique property, Kharzeev suggested. Terahertz electromagnetic radiation, which is called T-rays, can be used for nondamaging medical imaging, including the diagnosis of cancer and high-speed wireless communications.

To be sure, there are limitations to zirconium pentatelluride. For starters, it only displays this chiral magnetic effect at temperatures below 100 degrees Kelvin, or minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit, which is on par with the best high-temperature semiconductors, but still well below room temperature. Its chirality is also only approximately conserved, so the resistance does not drop all the way to zero.

Another hurdle is that scientists have to improve the technique for growing thin films of this material. While it is possible, it will take considerable research and development, Kharzeev said. He hopes to find a material that will exhibit chiral magnet effects at room temperature.

Kharzeev has received interest from companies and other researchers but said “we have a lot of work to do before we can create practical devices” based on this effect. He hopes scientists will create such products within the next five to ten years.

There are numerous potential uses for zirconium pentatelluride and other similar materials, including in space, where temperatures remain low enough for these quasi-particles.

“You could envision this on space stations to generate electricity from sunlight,” Kharzeev said. When he saw the movie “The Martian,” Kharzeev said he thought about how thermoelectrics could power a station on the Red Planet.

“If we managed to increase the temperature at which the chiral magnetic effect is present just a little, by about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, our thermoelectric would be even more efficient,” he said.

Kharzeev, who grew up in Russia and moved to Long Island in 1997, appreciates the beauty and comforts of the area.

“The combination of Stony Brook, BNL and Cold Spring Harbor Lab makes Long Island one of the best places in the world to do science,” he said. He also loves the beaches and the ocean and plays tennis at the Port Jefferson Country Club.

As for his collaborations, Kharzeev is excited by the work ahead with a material he didn’t envision demonstrating these superconducting properties when he came up with this concept in 2004.

When he learned of the work Li was doing with zirconium pentatelluride, Kharzeev “rushed” into his lab. “It appeared that even though he and his group were not thinking about the chiral magnetic effect at the time, they had already set up an experiment that was perfect for this purpose,” Kharzeev said. They “even had a preliminary result that literally made my heart jump.”

When Eugenia Gold and her husband Josh got their dogs, she wanted to name them. She chose Rex and Maia, which reflects her work. The couple has a history that dates back over 17 years and includes attending the high school senior prom together.

History is at the center of what Gold studies, as she explores the transition from dinosaurs to birds.

Gold, who joined the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University as an instructor in August, recently completed her Ph.D. at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. At the Upper West Side museum, she focused on how the neurobiology of theropod dinosaurs — a group that includes Tyrannosaurus rex — changed as flight evolved. While scientists aren’t suggesting that a version of T. rex developed flight, they do consider birds as living dinosaurs in the same way humans are mammals.

In her research, Gold studied the extinct dodo bird. Using a CT scan of the bird’s skull, she explored the relative size and shape of the brain.

Gold found that the flightless dodo bird was likely not as mentally deficient as legend has it. “We discovered that the dodo has a brain size in proportion to its body size, so it was likely not as stupid as we thought, but rather as intelligent as common pigeons.” She compared it to eight other pigeon species, seven of which are close relatives of the dodo and one of which is the common pigeon, which is a more distant relative.

“It falls right on the line in terms of brain-to-body size,” Gold said. “If we take that as a rough proxy, it’s probably about as smart as a pigeon.”

Dodo birds developed their reputation for lacking intelligence because they weren’t afraid of sailors and because they went extinct so quickly. They didn’t run away or hide when humans came, largely because they didn’t have any experience with them. “They were easily herded onto ships,” said Gold. “That led to a reputation of being stupid.”

In studying the dodo’s brain, Gold also found that these birds had an enlarged olfactory bulb, which they share with its closest relative, the solitaire bird. They used these olfactory bulbs to smell out ripe fruit and find prey buried in the dirt or sand or hiding under leaves.

Gold based her study of the dodo on an individual skull that was in the Natural History Museum in London. The recent development of CT scanning enabled her to conduct this research.

Members of Gold’s department appreciate the skills and expertise she brings to Stony Brook. “We value both her commitment to our teaching mission  as well as her research program,” said Alan Turner, an associate professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences. “Her research background and application of advanced brain imaging like CT and PET are complementary to those of us in the department that use similar techniques for other types of studies of morphology.”

Gold’s work with the dodo bird will be a part of a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History called Dinosaurs Among Us. The exhibit will open to the public on March 21 and will feature the work of several graduate students from the lab of Mark Norell, the Macaulay Curator in the Division of Paleontology at the museum and the division’s chair. The exhibition, which will be in the LeFrak Family Gallery on the fourth floor of the museum, will feature a 23-foot feathered tyrannosaur and a four-winged dromaeosaur with a 22-inch wingspan and patterned plumage. It will also include a fossil cast of a relative of Triceratops that had simple feathers on its body.

Norell said Gold’s work involved a “really long, intensive analysis.” Gold conducted something called “geometric morphometrics” in which she mathematically described brains and parts of brains.

Norell said Gold’s work is one element of the coming exhibition at the museum. “This exhibition is about the biology of dinosaurs,” he said and includes the work of several of his students, including information about dinosaurs’ eggs and nests, brains and flight mechanics.

In addition to conducting her own research at Stony Brook and working to publish other chapters in her thesis, Gold will be teaching a human anatomy course to medical school students. She took a human anatomy class when she was in graduate school.

Gold and her husband live in Ronkonkoma, where they appreciate the quiet neighborhood and the availability of much more space than they had in Manhattan.

Working at the Museum of Natural History was “a constant reminder of how amazing science is,” she said. “It’s refreshing to see so many people enjoying natural history and the fruits of our labor.”

In her earliest memories, Gold said she liked dinosaurs. She especially appreciates the Archaeopteryx because it is a transitional fossil between birds and dinosaurs. She also favors the Velociraptor in part because of the movie “Jurassic Park.” Unlike in the film, however, members of the Velociraptor genera are small and feathered.

Gold appreciated the opportunity to travel to the Gobi dessert on an archeological dig, where she slept out under the stars.

Recently, Gold said she was walking around the museum and was distracted by a conversation she was having with a colleague. She looked up and saw a cast of a new 122-foot long titanosaur fossil, which came to the museum in January. The remains of the dinosaur came from the Patagonian desert region of Argentina. Born in Argentina, Gold said she felt a connection to this fossil.

“The titanosaur is so amazing that it makes you feel small,” she said. “It was one of those moments where I felt like a child again.”

When a successful chef mixes ingredients, he changes the proportions of nutmeg to cinnamon or of parsley to oregano. He’s much more likely to focus on how the final product affects the flavor than he is the way the ingredients mix.

That’s not the case for Jurek (pronounced Yoo rek) Sadowski. Although he’s not a chef, the staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) would like to understand how some of the smallest pieces of organic metal complexes come together when they go through a process called self-assembly.

“I’m not only interested in obtaining the recipe for making these [products], but I’m also interested in understanding how and why things happen in these conditions on a more basic level,” Sadowski said.

Working with the low-energy electron microscope, Sadowski is a part of a team at the CFN that is involved in seeing and interpreting changes that occur on an atomic scale.

Sadowski has collaborated on environmental products that can remove greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from the air. This research helps understand how these self-assembled organic compounds develop pores of different sizes that can trap greenhouse gases.

The size of the pores works like a fishing net designed to catch the equivalent of Goldilocks gases from the air. Some gases pass right through them, while others bounce off without getting trapped. Then there are those, like carbon dioxide, that fit perfectly in the small spaces between the organic pieces.

In putting these products together, Sadowski asks what he needs to do to make the process more efficient and more selective.

The CFN is a user facility, which means that scientists around the world can benefit from the high level of technical expertise Sadowski possesses. He has worked with scientists from Columbia, Yale, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and SUNY facilities as well as visitors from the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Croatia and Japan.

Researchers who have worked with Sadowski suggested that his scientific and technical knowledge make him a particularly effective collaborator.

The low-energy electron microscope is a “very complicated instrument,” said Richard Osgood, the Higgins professor emeritus of electrical engineering and applied physics at Columbia University, who has collaborated for years with Sadowski. “You don’t just go in and turn a dial: it’s much more complicated than that. You have to tune things up.”

Working with Sadowski greatly lowers the cost of research because he can “do something in a couple of days” that might otherwise take a graduate student or other researcher a half a year or more to figure out,” Osgood said.

Sadowski said some of the products that use self-assembly include wearable electronics, such as solar cells or clothing, or wearable medical devices.

Sadowski divides his time about equally between pursuing his own research and working with others at the CFN.

Sadowski runs his own experiments mostly in a vacuum, where he varies the temperature and the density of the molecules he’s using.

Sadowski is planning to give a talk in March at the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore about his work.

“It’s important to understand how the molecules self-assemble themselves on the surface,” he said. “We can utilize self-assembly for further advances.”

For about five years, Sadowski has helped plan the creation of a new beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at BNL. That beamline, which will be called the electron spectro-microscopy beamline, will be completed later this year. The beamline will use a microscope that the CFN is contributing, which will help provide structural, chemical and electronic maps of surfaces with a resolution of a few nanometers.

“We will have a much more extended capability for studying chemical reactions as they happen on the surface and the electronic structure of the materials” by combining information of the surface morphology with the electronic structure and chemistry. This, he said, will provide a “comprehensive picture of the surface, or of a catalyst, or of a reaction” as it’s occurring.

One of the first experiments he might do would be to provide a chemical map of the surface of a material. He plans to determine the oxidation state of metals making up the surface.

Sadowski lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with his wife Adrianna Sadowska (whose name is slightly different to reflect her gender). The couple met in their native Poland where he was taking a class to brush up on Japanese before moving there after he earned his Ph.D. Sadowska, who is now a wine specialist at an auction house in White Plains, was preparing for a trip to Japan as well. The two expatriates lived in Japan for almost a decade. After getting married in Japan, they came to the United States.

As for his work, Sadowski said new questions regularly inspire him. “Every day, there’s a new challenge,” he said. “I really like to solve problems, one by one.”

The work done at Sadowski’s group and at the CFN can and likely will have numerous benefits, Osgood said.

This work could “form new technology that nobody dreamed about before,” said Osgood, who was an associate director at BNL and was directly involved in the creation of the CFN. “Every time I walk out there, I kick up my heels. It’s such a wonderful facility.”