The creation of a freeway in Los Angeles put Michael Bell on the road to his career choice. When Bell was about 12 years old, construction near his home cut through rocks that contained a treasure for him: fossil fish.

“I formed a relationship with the Natural History Museum in LA County and started bringing fossils [to them],” Bell recalled. “I had friends who would do it for a week or two and then they’d had enough. I did it endlessly. In a way, that’s how my career started.”

Indeed, that career led him to Stony Brook University, where he arrived in 1978 and is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution. Bell was co-editor of “The Evolutionary Biology of the Threespine Stickleback” in 1994 with Susan A. Foster.

Recently, the American Association for the Advancement of Science elected Bell as a Ffellow. Bell said he appreciated the “broader recognition of his work.”

Those who have collaborated with him said Bell is a leader and an exceptional scientist.

Bell’s “contribution to the field has been enormous,” explained Windsor Aguirre, a former graduate student who is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at DePaul University who still works with Bell. “Many of the most important papers in the field have been made possible or greatly enhanced [by Bell’s efforts],” he said.

From those early days, Bell has focused on the threespine stickleback, a fish that used to be considerably more prevalent at Flax Pond in Old Field and in the Great South Bay.

This particular fish, whose three sharp spines on the top of its body prevent some predators from swallowing it, appeals to scientists for a host of reasons —  from the variation it exhibits within and among populations to its relatively small size and ease of maintaining in a lab.

Bell has focused on establishing the relationship between traits and environmental factors. These fish can live in the sea ­— where they contend with the usual saltwater dilemma, where the concentration of salt is higher than in body fluids — and in freshwater, where salt is lower than in their body fluids.

Like salmon, they breed in brackish water (water that’s in between fresh and salty) and freshwater. The population of fish that evolve in freshwater can continue to survive despite having marine ancestors.

Indeed, the evolution, through mutations, of these fish is so rapid that they defy Charles Darwin. Coming up with the theory of natural selection when he studied the many unique birds in the Galapagos Islands 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, Darwin believed that evolution occurred on an almost imperceptibly slow time scale.

“Darwin underestimated the potential for rapid evolution,” Bell said. “He believed evolution is slow.” Sticklebacks have traits that evolve at high rates.

Bell has studied stickleback fossils in Nevada and California and modern stickleback in California and Alaska.

He has often studied the armor plates of stickleback, which have a marine and a freshwater version. In the ocean, the freshwater version would theoretically occur only once in about 10,000 young sticklebacks, because it’s a disadvantage to that individual. However, in a different environment, the fish with the freshwater armor plating becomes the natural selection superstar.

In an experiment in Cheney Lake in Anchorage, Alaska, Bell released sea-run stickleback. A year later, none of the fish had the freshwater plates, while fewer than 1 percent had them two years later. Six years after the experiment began, however, one in five fish had these plates.

“When you put the fish in freshwater, it evolves,” he said.

A resident of Stony Brook, Bell chose to live close enough to the university to walk to work. That, he said, was by design because he moved in during the gas crisis in the 1970s and didn’t want to wait in line for gas or struggle to get to work.

Bell and his wife Cynthia Blair travel to farms out east, shop and visit vineyards. Bell enjoys wandering through stores, especially for craft objects, which Blair also likes and makes herself. She designed a pillow of Bell, surrounded by swimming sticklebacks.

After four decades of research, Bell remains as inspired to find fossils and gather evidence about these rapidly evolving and adaptive fish as he was when he was a teenager.

“I won’t ever really retire,” said Bell, although he does expect to cut back so that he can travel with his wife. He appreciates being able to visit the shore of a lake in Alaska and “see what comes up in traps. It’s all still fun — making samples of modern and fossil stickleback, getting results that mean something scientifically and standing in front of a class and explaining biology to them.”

Aguirre, who described Bell as a “great” mentor, suggested that Bell and the stickleback are inextricably intertwined. “The threespine stickleback is truly one of evolutionary biology’s supermodels and [Bell] has played a critical role in bringing the species to the attention of the broader scientific community and the general public.”

It’s a dream team tackling a nightmare scenario. While colorectal and pancreatic cancers are killers across different races, they are considerably worse for African Americans.

African Americans with colorectal cancer are about 40 percent more likely to die from it compared to those from other racial groups, according to recent data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Program. The incidence of pancreatic cancer in African Americans is also 31 to 65 percent higher than in other racial groups.

A Stony Brook University research team led by Ellen Li, a professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, is trying to understand the causes of these variations and, in the process, hopes to provide the kinds of clinical benefits that would help everyone.

“We think there are multiple factors,” Li said. Scientists at Stony Brook, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and SUNY Downstate Health Disparities Center are creating one of “the most comprehensive data sets” that people can analyze.

The team includes Jennie Williams, an associate professor in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine, Joel Saltz, the chair of Bioinformatics at Stony Brook, Richard McCombie, director of the Stanley Institute for Cognitive Genomics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, David Tuveson, the director of the Lustgarten Foundation Pancreatic Research Laboratory at CSHL and several other researchers at  Downstate.

Williams said she began reading up on the response to cancer treatment by various groups in 2004. She understood that African Americans don’t respond to numerous chemotherapy prevention agents and some treatments for colon cancer. “They either don’t respond or they become resistant to chemotherapy,” she said.

When Williams started looking into this in 2008, she focused on microRNAs, which bind to messenger RNA and suppress translation. MicroRNAs are noncoding regulatory RNAs. The dysregulation of these important sequences result in the silencing of tumor suppressor proteins and the overexpression of oncogenes.

Her biggest finding was that the expression of tumor suppressor proteins inversely correlated with the overexpression of a microRNA called miR-182. This microRNA, she said, was significantly higher in tumor samples from African Americans.

With a molecular target and a potential mechanism, Williams thought she was well on her way to digging in. She ran into a significant stumbling block, however. “To do cancer chemotherapeutic studies, you need cell lines to work with,” she said.

Williams went to several companies to find colon cancer cell lines and asked, specifically, for those from African American patients. She found that the only cell lines labeled with race were those from Caucasians.

“To study chemoresponse, one needs a broad spectrum of cell lines,” Williams said.

She started generating cell lines in her lab, with three from African Americans and two from Hispanic patients, as well as some from Caucasians.

While Williams said she loves living in Stony Brook, she has found the lack of diversity among the patient population limiting in addressing cancer racial disparity. With Li’s help, she partnered with Downstate, where 75 percent of the patient population is African American.

She hopes to generate 10 African American, 10 Hispanic American and 10 Caucasian cell lines. Stony Brook and Downstate will collaborate to exchange ideas and personnel.

Williams said part of the challenge in gathering tissue samples from the African American population comes from a history of worrisome interactions with scientists.

Many African Americans have heard of the Tuskegee Institute study of African American men who came to the institute with syphilis between 1932 and 1972 but were not treated with penicillin, even after the drug became an effective and standard treatment in 1947. When the public became aware of the study, it ended and the government established strict informed consent rules about participating in scientific research.

Li said in their study on racial disparities in gastrointestinal cancers, selected staff certified in human research de-identifies everything so no one knows who each participant is. The data collection is a labor-intensive work, Li said, that is designed to provide greater insight into what might be causing these differences.

In terms of explaining the differences, Li and Williams believe it is both “genetic and epigenetic.”

In Africa, colon cancer is rare compared to its occurrence in the United States, Williams said, which suggests that diet and lifestyle contribute to the disease and its progression.

Raised in Savannah, Georgia, Williams said she was always interested in what made things change, from the tadpole in the pond to insects and birds that flew. While her parents didn’t attend college, that wasn’t an option for her: “It was never if” she went to college, “but when.”

Li, who is married to Stony Brook President Sam Stanley and has four children, said health insurance is one of numerous problems that affect individual populations. Numerous other factors could play a role in explaining the racial disparities in cancer outcomes.

Diabetes, which occurs at a higher rate in African Americans, increases the risk of colon cancer, Li said. It is unclear how much the incidence of diabetes in the African American population may contribute to the disparity, Li said.

Countless forks in the road lead to the creatures that swim, crawl, walk, and fly around the Earth. Some of these moments have a significant effect on the fate of the individual, taking it from the early stages when it’s filled with potential into a bone, a muscle or a brain cell.

In some cases, the process goes off track. The signals, pathways and processes take a different turn, sometimes because of a change in a gene or a protein.

Linda Van Aelst, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, explores how changes in intracellular signaling involving enzymes called small GTPases can lead to disease. She and her team of six graduate students and postdoctoral researchers focus on Ras and Rho GTPases and their regulators, which control cellular growth and the kinds of changes that lead to the shapes of cells, organs or tissues.

Alterations in the genes involved with these enzymes can lead to a range of diseases. “Mutations have been linked to cancer-related processes, including metastasis, as well as to neurodevelopmental and neurological disorders,” Van Aelst said.

Bo Li, an associate professor at CSHL, suggested that Van Aelst, who provides guidance and direction as his mentor, is a leader at the 125-year old research facility.

Van Aelst is “well known for her innovative work on signaling molecules in the cell, including Ras and Rho,” Li said. Her work is “really innovative.”

Van Aelst studies these enzymes by taking what she described as a “bottom up” approach, exploring their development and their role in cellular and developmental processes in the context of the brain. She explores how any perturbation can affect behavior and, once she sees a change, looks for differences in the circuitry development.

Van Aelst looks at the process from the beginning, with the genes, through the protein network. She has sought to understand how some changes lead to metastatic cancer that spreads to a single organ, while others spread generally throughout the body.

Because she is exploring mutations at a basic level, Van Aelst can get involved in a range of diseases and abnormalities, from epilepsy to schizophrenia to mental retardation to cancer.

“Clinicians send me information and want to see if maybe I can use the tools in different mutations in my research” to understand what might be happening with some of their patients, Van Aelst said.

She also gets calls from the parents and family members of patients, who would like to know if a cure is available for a genetic condition linked to something she’s studied.

Van Aelst knows she needs to be “cautious” because she doesn’t want to give false hope at a time when the research may not have pointed the way towards a specific therapy.

With any clinical trials, she has to “make it clear that the findings are not yet mature enough for further development,” she said.

While she’s conducting basic research to understand the process and mechanisms involved, Van Aelst is aware and eager to help an audience desperate for more information and, down the road, a novel treatment.

She does “see the urgency. It’s important that the patients and the family of the patients and the scientists communicate and it is clear what we understand, what can be done, and how far we can do it.”

Van Aelst hasn’t become involved in a therapeutic study yet, but she has reached the point where she knows aberrations in some processes. She hopes to get engaged in the near future in the next step.

“We don’t have something now in hand, but we have several hints” from cellular processes and proteins, she said.

Earlier this year, Van Aelst and her lab published results in the journal Cell Reports in which they found two proteins that provide a critical role in creating the structure of something in the nervous system called a chandelier cell.

Named for the way axonal arbors branch out, these chandelier cells play an important role in affecting neurons nearby. Their size and structure give them the ability to affect the function of other nerves, either turning them on or off, depending on the signal.

Changes in chandelier cell cartridges and/ or function have been reported in disease states such as epilepsy and schizophrenia, she said.

Van Aelst helped provide an important piece of information about these cells by uncovering the important role two proteins play in their structure.

When the function of proteins called DOCK7 and ErbB4 were disrupted, the chandelier cells have fewer branches or boutons. She discovered that DOCK7 triggers the activity of ErbB4.

Van Aelst’s research on chandelier cells “offers insight into how diseases like epilepsy might occur,” Li said.

Now a resident of Oyster Bay, Van Aelst grew up in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium and was originally interested in archeology and history.

In biology, however, she was intrigued by how “one gene talks to other genes. How does it work? What does it signal? How does it control this or that function?”

Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings and vacations are all important to her. She’s not talking about her own — she wants her patients, some of whom are locked in a battle with cancer, to make it to these landmark events.

Dr. Alison Stopeck, a professor of medicine and the chief of the Division of Hematology/Oncology at Stony Brook University, treats a wide range of people with breast cancer, from those who don’t have cancer but are at high risk of developing it in the future to women and men with all stages of breast cancer diagnosis.

Stopeck said her approach is to treat the whole patient, because she recognizes that combatting cancer most effectively requires care for the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of her patients. Finding out what is important to a patient is “vital to developing the most impactful treatment plan.”

Around Thanksgiving and Christmas, she asks them about their holiday planning and tries to treat her patients around those plans so they can “live as normally as possible” while still receiving breast cancer treatment.

“I do like treating people with metastatic disease,” said Stopeck, who joined Stony Brook last September after a 20-year career at the University of Arizona Cancer Center. “If they come in with metastatic cancer, you can see [tumors] shrink.”

She can also tell patients they are in remission, that the Stony Brook Cancer Center is offering a clinical trial that may be more effective for them, or that there is a new therapy that might work for their particular cancer.

She sees patients with metastatic cancer more frequently because they receive treatment that Stopeck follows closely, so she “gets to know them and their families better,” she said. “It is an honor to develop deep relationships with my patients and their families.”

Dr. Yusuf Hannun, the director of the Cancer Center and Stopeck’s supervisor, praised Stopeck’s passion for her work.

“She is the model that we want to emulate in the development of our Cancer Center,” Hannun said. When Hannun hired Stopeck last year, he had high expectations and he said “she exceeded” those.

Stopeck said doctors can optimize therapy and side effects at the same time. When her patients qualify, Stopeck asks them to go on clinical trials to improve an understanding of the disease. She sometimes also asks for tissue, blood and urine samples so she can ask more questions about the disease and its progression.

While she’s spent years treating patients, she also conducts research.

Stopeck looks at predictive biomarkers, which may help in selecting the best therapy for a patient, while also offering her an early indication of how a treatment is going, so she can stop it if it’s not working.

She is also looking to bring patients into clinical trials.

At Stony Brook, she said, researchers are working on discovering a wide range of breast cancer challenges, including improving treatment for patients with triple negative, which is the most deadly and aggressive form. Studies are also exploring ways to reduce toxicities, including bone pains, of aromatase inhibitors while giving less chemotherapy to patients who don’t need it.

Hannun said the Cancer Center considers clinical trials as “state of the art practice as this is what pushes the envelope and allows patients to be ahead of the curve in their clinical care,” he said.

As a doctor, Stopeck wants her patients to help make informed decisions about their treatment. “Most people think they want to live to 100, but they don’t want to live to 100 when it feels like 1,000,” she said.

Stopeck described how vaccinations for pneumonia have reduced the numbers of deaths from a disease that used to be the leading cause of death in 1900. She wants to figure out how to prevent a person from going through the pain and trauma of breast cancer.

She also explores how some lifestyle decisions can help. At the moment, there is epidemiological data on the benefits of cruciferous vegetables, but no proven research to support their role in preventing breast cancer, she said, which is why she’s studying it. Eating a low-fat diet, high in vegetables along with consistent exercise and a healthy body weight are the best advice researchers have on decreasing breast cancer recurrences.

As for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, in October, she said the funds raised for research can help the scientific efforts. She used a $30,000 grant to develop an imaging protocol to measure breast density safely, easily and comfortably in women. She has used this technology to obtain larger grants from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health. For every dollar of private donations invested, an additional $25 in funding can be obtained through the NIH, she said.

Stopeck grew up in Plainview in the same house where her parents still live. She moved to Farmingville from Arizona last September. She loves animals and enjoys traveling. The fact that her parents and sister live nearby make her feel as if she’s “coming back home.”

In her research and clinical practice, she has an ambitious and unambiguous focus. “My goal is simple: treat, cure and prevent breast cancer,” she said. “I live it and breathe it every day.”

What if a miniature tornado inside your chest threatened to kill you? What if, instead of waiting for a doctor or emergency worker to shock you with a defibrillator to restart your heart, doctors were able to use a series of lights to control that electric wave?

Emilia Entcheva, a professor of biomedical engineering at Stony Brook University, and Gil Bub from the University of Oxford, are in the early stages of understanding how to take just such an approach.

Working with cells in a lab, they used optogenetics, in which they directed a programmed sequence of lights on altered test cells, to see if they could affect this signal.

“We were able to speed up, twist and otherwise manipulate the electrical waves directly, using a computer-controlled light projector,” Entcheva said. They published their results recently online in the journal Nature Photonics, which will release a print version of the paper in December. “Because of the essential role of these waves in cardiac arrhythmias, this new approach suggests a completely different way of controlling these arrhythmias,” Entcheva said.

While using light to control cells presents a possible alternative some time in the future, the technique is far from any application in a human body, with scientists facing numerous, significant obstacles along the way, including how to get light into the body.

“The clinical translation to humans is not around the corner, but cannot be ruled out,” Entcheva said.

Still, as a concept, the field of optogenetics is showing promise. Thus far, neurologists have studied optogenetics for about a decade, while the field of researchers in cardiology using the same technique is smaller.

“People were taking a wait-and-see approach” with optogenetics and cardiology, said David Christini, a professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, who has known Entcheva for more than a decade and is collaborating on another project with her. “She was pretty bold in going after this and it proved to be a good move.”

Christini called the work Entcheva has done with optogenetics “groundbreaking” and said it was “of great general interest to the field.”

In optogenetics, most cells don’t typically respond to changes in light in their environment. The way scientists have altered this, however, is by inserting the genes that express a light-sensitive protein into the cell. The benefit of light-triggered channels over hormones or drugs is that the researchers can target individual cells or subcellular regions, while controlling the length of time these cells change their property. Researchers can also use different types of proteins to turn light activated switches on and off, potentially giving them additional control over these processes.

Entcheva started working on optogenetics around 2007, with graduate students in her lab. Her current postdoctoral researcher, Christina Ambrosi, and current doctoral students Aleks Klimas and Cookie Yu, as well as former students Harold Bien, Zhiheng Jia, John Williams and others contributed to this effort.

Entcheva, who paints nature scenes when she is not working, and described herself as a visual person, said the waves that determine heart rhythm can form a “spiral” that leads to an arrhythmia. “Like a tornado, such a spiraling wave can be quite destructive and even deadly,” she said.

When waves change from their normal path, they make the heart beat faster or irregularly, Entcheva said, which prevents it from working correctly.

To move these waves around, the scientists projected movies of light patterns using a technology that is common in projectors, called a digital micromirror device. A computer controls mirrors to affect the light they reflect at each point.

The light-sensitive proteins used in these experiments come from algae. Human cells don’t have them. Entcheva and her colleagues developed viruses that make cardiac cells start producing these proteins. Heart cells that express these proteins seem to act normally, other than developing a desired sensitivity to light, she said.

Entcheva and Bub had nightly Skype sessions while they conducted their transcontinental experiments. Bub said Entcheva was one of the “pioneers of the use of bioengineered cardiac tissues for the investigation of cardiac arrhythmia.”

Entcheva’s lab “did all the ground work developing ontogenetic constructs that made these experiments possible,” said Bub.

While Entcheva has been at Stony Brook since 2001, she plans to move to George Washington University at the beginning of 2016. “Stony Brook has been good to me, professionally and personally,” she said. “It helped me launch my academic career.”

She came to the United States 21 years ago from Bulgaria, after the Cold War ended. With a suitcase and $700 in her possession, she left her 10-year old daughter and husband at home. They joined her half a year after she arrived in Memphis. They couldn’t afford a car for a year, so they walked with their backpacks to Piggly Wiggly to buy groceries.

Her daughter, Anna Konova, followed in her mother’s scientific footsteps and is now a neuroscientist who studies the human brain in addiction. She works as a postdoctoral researcher at NYU.

As for the work Entcheva and Bub have done on optogenetics, Christini said they are “pushing the field forward in terms of implementing a tool that is of great value to biologists and experimentalists in illuminating and uncovering mechanisms of arrhythmias.”