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.”

For film makers, a sudden change in weather conditions can provide a metaphor for a shift in the plot or a change in the relationship among central characters. For Meng Yue, however, the appearance of heavy, thick clouds or a sudden stoppage in wind can disrupt energy flow to a utility.

An electrical engineer in the Department of Sustainable Energy Technology at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Yue explores how the changes in production from renewable energy sources can disrupt the grid, adding either too much energy to the system or not enough.

“The major issue with wind and solar energy is that they are changing all the time,” said Yue. “Because they are intermittent and variable, it creates issues with the grid. We want to keep the grid stable.”

His research, he said, explores how the grid balances between unpredictable supply and demand, both of which can be affected by the same changes. A cold wind, for example, might help generate power while it could also increase the need for heat in homes and offices.

The uncertainties between energy production and consumption might “cancel each other out, but they may also add together,” Yue said. “We have to balance” the supply and use of energy all the time “because we do not want to have any interruption of electricity delivery.”

While he works with the Northeast Solar Energy Research Center at BNL, he spends more of his time using systems analytical models.

In his work, he builds a model for a grid, using solar and wind.

Working with energy is similar to providing any product to consumers, trying to balance between supply and demand.

“If I’m operating my grid, I don’t want to have too much generation or too little,” he said. “Both will cause grid issues.”

As electric grids are designed now, they are capable of sudden fluctuations in demand. When a train from the Long Island Railroad pulls into a station, the system is prepared for this surge although, as Yue describes it, that change is relatively small for the grid, which can withstand some variation.

One of the challenges with renewable energy is that the cost of storing the energy is too high, he said. In the future, as the country continues to increase the amount of energy derived from wind and solar, there may be other storage challenges.

Most of Yue’s work, he said, is computer model based. Running these tests provides some basic information, but it also leads to suggestions and analysis that Yue shares with utilities. He recommends where to put mitigation systems in and how much a utility might need to correct any kinds of problems.

Robert Lofaro, who as the Group Leader in the Renewable Energy Group at BNL is Yue’s supervisor, said Yue has developed and employed a high level of expertise.

“He has a background in electrical power engineering and probabilistic techniques which makes him an excellent smart grid researcher,” Lofaro said. Yue is “very well respected in the smart grid community.”

Yue takes a probabilistic approach to try to capture uncertainties in his studies so that they can be accounted for in decision making. He also reduces uncertainties through a more precise model.

Yue is “quickly becoming known for his work on power system modeling and application of probabilistic techniques to grid operation and planning,” Lofaro said.

Yue has worked closely with meteorologists for years, trying to collect the kinds of forecasts that would inform decision making at utilities. Not only does that help infuse ideas about how to prepare for changes in the amount of energy generated, but it also can aid utilities as they prepare for the likely damage from an approaching storm.

A resident of Miller Place, Yue lives with his wife Qiong Yang, an engineer at a communication company, and their sons Alan, nine, and Clarence, who is five years old. A native of China, Yue has been at BNL for 12 years.

When he travels, he said it’s hard to turn off the part of his brain that is thinking about electric grids and systems.

“No matter where you can go, you can’t avoid seeing the infrastructure like transmission lines,” Yue said. He thinks about how much energy the lines can carry, while he also notices solar or wind farms.

The one who grew up in Greece specializes in working on computers, where he plugs numbers into a model, runs simulated tests and generates information. His collaborator, who was raised near Boston, works with physical models, testing, tinkering and changing objects in real life.

Together, these two mechanical engineers who work at Stony Brook, recently won a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop and test a patented design they hope improves the efficiency and reduces the emissions of car engines.

“The heart of what we do,” said Benjamin Lawler, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering, speaking broadly about his research interests, “is to look at the way our society works, look for inefficiencies and look for ways we can improve upon them.”

With a proposal to work with an onboard fuel reformer, Lawler, who is originally from Swampscott, Massachusetts, and Sotirios Mamalis, who was raised in Athens, Greece, won one of eight DOE grants awarded to research teams around the country that are exploring similar ways to improve vehicle technology.

The two engineers met when they were Ph.D. students at the University of Michigan. They had the same advisor, Dennis Assanis, who is now the provost at Stony Brook and a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Assanis said these engineers faced stiff competition against people with similar backgrounds from around the world. “They prevailed over a pool of talented applicants,” Assanis said, adding that he has “tremendous confidence in their abilities.”

Stony Brook has been building its mechanical engineering department, among others at the campus, and hopes to nearly double the number of faculty within the next five years, Assanis said. He would like mechanical engineering to be “one of our strong pillars” for academic research.

Lawler and Mamalis are looking at improving the practical application of an existing technology called Reactivity Controlled Compression Ignition. These type of engines require two different types of fuel, which limits their use.

“Concepts that use two fuels haven’t worked out well,” Assanis said.

Lawler and Mamalis are hoping to improve on the use of an onboard fuel reform system that will change the chemical composition of one type of gas into two, enabling more consumer vehicles to benefit from the RCCI technology.

An onboard fuel reformer will “take a fuel and partially react it, changing its chemical composition into a different mixture,” Lawler said.

Using funds from the grant for the next three years, Lawler and Mamalis will test conventional gas, diesel and natural gas to see if their approach to the fuel reformer can expand the application of this technology.

Mamalis said he expects, based on the literature and the properties of the parent fuels, that conventional gas will be the best candidate for the process.

Lawler and Mamalis said they face a number of hurdles to make their approach viable.

“One of the personal concerns I have is whether there’s enough difference between the parent fuel and what it gets reformed into,” Lawler said.

Assanis, who is a co-principal investigator on the grant, said there’s “very good potential” for this fuel reformer, although he, too, recognized the difficulties along the way.

“We can’t have a reformer that takes too much space and we need to keep the weight low,” Assanis said. Still, this kind of research could lead to advances in the technology. “We need to walk before we drive,” said Assanis.

If the work on this project shows some promise, and Lawler and Mamalis generate improved efficiency and lower emissions, they would likely submit more grants and, down the road, look to attract a commercial partner.

Stony Brook “wants to give back to the community” with its innovations, Assanis said. If this proves effective, the researchers could license it to others or they might form a start-up company with university investors.

In addition to the internal combustion engine work, the duo is working on a study funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy that relates to stationary electrical power generation.

Assanis said this is one of four ARPA-E awards Stony Brook faculty have received recently, that total a combined $6.5 million.

“It’s hard to get these grants,” Assanis said. “We’ve gotten four awards at the same time in different areas. This shows you where we want to go.”

Lawler and Mamalis said they are working to learn each other’s domains, as Mamalis has improved Lawler’s knowledge of computer modeling and Mamalis is spending more time working with the machine parts in the lab.

A resident of Stony Brook, Lawler said Long Island is similar to where he grew up. The differences are more dramatic for Mamalis, who speaks Greek, English and German. Mamalis said he has a “professional opportunity to grow that he wouldn’t have in Greece,” and he appreciates the proximity to New York City.

The two assistant professors worked with one graduate student in their lab last semester. This semester, they have five graduate students.

Assanis expressed confidence in the professional collaborations of these two mechanical engineers. “They are a good partnership,” Assanis said and he sees how “well they complement each other.”