While the United States was celebrating Independence Day two years ago, a group of people were cheering the discovery of something they had spent almost half a century seeking. Physicists around the world were convinced the so-called Higgs boson particle existed, but no one had found clear-cut evidence of it.

At a well-attended press conference, scientists hailed the discovery, while recognizing the start of a new set of experiments and questions.

As a part of the ATLAS team, Marc-Andre Pleier knew what the group was set to announce. He was very excited “to see the signal confirmed by an independent measurement.” Two years later, Pleier, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a part of a group of more than 3,000 scientists from around the world, are tackling the next set of questions.

The discovery “points to the Standard Model [of particle physics] being correct, but to know this we need to understand this new particle and its properties a lot better than we do now.”

According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the Big Bang beginning to the universe should have created equal parts matter and antimatter. If it did, the two opposite energies would have annihilated each other into light. An imbalance, however, resulted in a small fraction of matter surviving, forming the visible universe. The origin of this imbalance, however, is unknown, Pleier said.

“We know the Standard Models is incomplete,” he said, because there are observations of dark matter, dark energy and the antimatter/matter asymmetry in the universe that can’t be explained by this model. “We can test this” next chapter.

The process Pleier studies allows him to test whether the particle is doing its job as expected. In addition to analyzing data, Pleier also has “major responsibility in upgrading the detector,” said Hong Ma, a group leader in the Physics Department at BNL who recruited Pleier to join BNL in 2009.

Scientists at the Hadron Collider in Switzerland and at BNL and elsewhere are studying interactions that are incredibly rare among particles.

Pleier is searching for interactions of vector bosons, which have spin values of one and are extremely large in the world of bosons. He is looking for cases where two W bosons interact with each other.

“Only one event out of a hundred trillion events will be of interest to me,” said Pleier. Comparing those numbers to the world of biology, Pleier likened that to finding a single cell in an entire human body.

In 2012, the Hadron Collider produced 34 such interactions. The collider produces about 40 million pictures per second. To find the ones that might hold promising information, scientists like Pleier need to use a computing grid. BNL is one of only 10 tier 1 centers for ATLAS and the only one in the United States. Thus far, scientists have been able to look at these collisions from energies at 8 trillion electron volts. They hope to measure similar data at 13 trillion electron volts next year.

Ma said the increased energy of the collider will “put the Standard Model to an unprecedented level of tests,” allowing scientists to “measure the properties of Higgs boson to a higher precision.”

Growing up in Germany, Pleier said he loved playing with Legos to see how things worked. He helped fix his own toys. When he was older, he worked to repair a motor bike his uncle had.

What he’s doing now, he said, is exploring the fundamental building blocks of matter and their interactions. He likened it to examining the “construction kit” for the universe. While he’s a physicist, Pleier explained that he’s a Christian. “Some people think it has to be in conflict, but, for me, it clearly is not,” he said. “Each discovery adds to my admiration for God’s creation.”

A resident of Middle Island, Pleier lives with his wife Heather, an English teacher who is staying home for now to take care of their three children.

Pleier and Ma emphasized that the work at the collider is a collaborative effort involving scientists from institutions around the world.

Michael Kobel, a professor at TU Dresden, head of the Institute for Particle Physics and Dean of Studies in the Department of Physics who has known Pleier for about nine years, likened the process of studying the high energy particles to exploring a cave, where scientists “get more light to look deeper” into areas that were in the dark before. Researchers, he said, are just entering this cave of knowledge, with “a lot of corners yet to be explored.”

Human mistakes occur everywhere, from a driver who runs a red light to a professional athlete who literally drops a ball, to an accountant who adds the wrong numbers. Even scientists, with their lab coats, their scientific method and their careful review process make errors.

So it was, in 2013, when scientists in Switzerland published a research paper suggesting that boron could exhibit a similar behavior to a topological insulator. If true, that could have implications for nanotechnology.

Recently, however, postdoctoral student Xiang-Feng Zhou at Stony Brook University, working with his lab director Artem Oganov, discovered that their fellow researchers had made a mistake. The Swiss scientists had “suggested metallicity for boron’s surface and this turned out to be an incorrect suggestion,” said Oganov.

Typically, topological insulators are made up of heavier elements. The Swiss scientists believed that the surface atom rearrangements in boron would enable the lighter element to exhibit the same conducting properties.

Zhou was able to test this theory by using a high-powered computer system created by Oganov and his colleagues. Called USPEX, for Universal Structure Predictor: Evolutionary Xtallogaraphy, the prediction code uses a set of principals driven by quantum mechanics.

Zhou and Oganov, who is a professor of theoretical crystallography at Stony Brook University, published their results recently in the journal Physical Review Letters, a journal of the American Physical Society.

“Topological insulators must include heavy elements and metallicity of their surfaces does not come from structural reconstructions,” Oganov said. “For boron, a similar effect was predicted (as we now know, incorrectly) due to the reconstruction of the surface.”

The Swiss scientists knew that breaking a solid causes a cleaving of many bonds, Oganov said. Atoms near the surface try to compensate for the lost bonds. Often, this results in unusual chemistry, he continued. The Swiss scientists thought this would lead to metallicity, he said.

Using their computer model, Zhou and Oganov found that boron would have a much more stable structure if it avoided a metallic state. Instead, it forms a semiconducting surface.

When Zhou, who is also an associate professor of physics at Nankai University in Tianjin, China, and Oganov sent their results for publication, the editors at Physical Review Letters did what they always do: they sent the paper to several experts in the field for review. One of the groups overseeing the analysis of the Stony Brook scientists’ results was the original team from Switzerland. Oganov wasn’t sure how they’d react.

“Usually, people are upset when their results are disproven,” Oganov said. “They checked our calculations and found that our result is correct. They gracefully admitted a mistake. Often, people would fight even knowing they are wrong.”

The Swiss scientists said they didn’t find the right surface because they didn’t have enough computing power, Oganov said. They suggested to Oganov that they finished their calculations “too soon.”

Another reviewer confirmed the result was correct, while a third one suggested the result might not even be worth publishing because it was something a scientist might be able to come up with using a pencil and paper.

“I take this as a compliment,” said Oganov. “Simple and beautiful are sometimes hard to come by. Heavy computations like the ones we have done are often the best way to find the simple reality. Reality is not always simple.”

Oganov credits Zhou, whom he met over five years ago and recruited to join his lab on one of his annual trips to China, with pursuing this work.

What Zhou found was “absolutely surprising and unexpected. I couldn’t expect the Swiss paper would be so far from the solution. I give [Zhou] credit for his inquisitiveness. It is hard and beautiful work.” Zhou said he met Oganov when he was a Ph.D. student. He found that the two of them had similar interests. “I love predicting crystal structures,” Zhou said.

Oganov was born in the Ukraine and raised and educated in Russia. He has worked in the UK, Switzerland and the United States. While science has a discipline and approach that keeps researchers from making unsupported claims, scientists still make mistakes. “Nobody,” he offered, “is insured from making mistakes.”

Picture a child on a bike circling the neighborhood. If the bike path has hills and valleys, the child needs to pedal harder to climb the hills, and can coast down to the valleys. When the child stops pedaling and lets the bike stop on its own, it is likely to rest at the bottom of a valley, the way an apple that falls from a tree at the top of a hill will come to a stop after rolling to the bottom.

Jin Wang applies the same logic to cells and cancer. A faculty member in the Chemistry Department and an adjunct faculty member in Physics at Stony Brook University, Wang said the interaction between the contours of a landscape and the energy to move around that space affects a cell’s fate.

“We have been looking at the underlying gene regulatory networks of cancer,” Wang said. “The normal cell, a cancer state, and apoptosis (or cell death) are all represented by valleys.”

Wang has been looking at the influence on the driving force from individual genes and gene regulations, or links between genes. He is planning to consider multiple genes and gene regulations.

“The way the genes are connected influences the shape of the underlying landscape, making it more or less likely to enter a particular phase,” he said. A deeper cancer valley could make it easier to get into that state and tougher to get out.

A physicist by training, Wang doesn’t have a lab where he does experiments at a bench. He collaborates with other researchers, develops mathematical models and analyzes the results.

Wang and his post doctoral student, Chunhe Li, recently published a paper on the hills and valleys in cancer in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

Wang said the cancer state is already present in many people’s genes, but they don’t necessarily get there because it is shallower with a lower probability, the barrier is too high or the force pushing in that direction is not enough. A mutation or the environment can change the shape of the landscape, tilting it towards cancer.

Wang also published work he’s done on something basic to the life of a cell, called the cell cycle. Cancer corrupts the speed of the cell cycle, often causing cells to grow and divide at a rate that is faster than normal.

In the cell cycle, a cell goes through several well-documented stages before it divides in two. During the interphase, the cell has a G1 period, where it prepares to copy its genes, or DNA. In the S phase, it builds a genetic twin, and in the G2 period, it goes through a stage where it checks to make sure the process worked correctly. At the end of G2, it goes into the M stage, where it divides.

Wang, Li and collaborators in China explored the landscape as the cell moves from one period to another. “We have a three dimensional shape of the cell cycle,” he said.

What drives the cell through these stages is a combination of the depth of the valleys and the nutrition in the cell. “The underlying landscape for the cell cycle for cancer and the normal state is different,” he said. “The hills between valleys for cancer may be lower so that traveling through the different valleys is easier.”Wang and Li published their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Li, who has worked with Wang since 2012, called the approach Wang has taken with landscape and flux “original.”

“The landscape shape can be used as a potential way to design anti-cancer strategies, by targeting multiple genes and gene regulation patterns,” Li explained. “These findings shed light on the understanding of cancer mechanisms and provide some insight on cancer treatment.”

Wang explained that his framework for understanding the combination of a driving force and a contoured environment could also have applications in other arenas, such as psychology, where people have natural steady-state valleys which require different levels of energy to change.

Wang grew up in China, where both of his parents were chemists. He has been on Long Island for a decade. He has an appreciation for something many residents take for granted. “I like to watch the clouds moving,” he said. “Because Long Island is in a special geographic location, the water keeps vaporizing and going out” to form clouds of different shapes and speeds.

Wang sees other arenas to apply his framework, including in psychology and decision making. Future questions could include, he said, “How do you make a decision from an undecided valley to a decided valley?”

Seeing isn’t just believing — it can also lead to understanding. David Jackson of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has developed a way to see just what’s happening with important signals inside the cells of maize, a crop plant that is used in everything from cattle feed to corn syrup to oil, and even glue.

“We want to figure out what’s going on inside the cell: how they respond to treatment or processes,” said Jackson, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor.

Jackson and his collaborators use fluorescence to see proteins and hormones in action. They are not the first to use this technique in living cells, but they are the first to apply it to maize.

Labeling molecules can allow scientists to see where they go “during growth and development,” said Anne Sylvester, a professor in the Molecular Biology department at the University of Wyoming, who worked with Jackson to develop this technique. This allows researchers to see how a protein is regulated, what it’s doing and even suggest ideas on how to control it.

Jackson and Sylvester have made a large collection of these reporter lines and have sent them out to “hundreds of labs,” so other researchers can “use the tools we’ve generated,” Jackson added.

In his lab, Jackson is focused on how the plant establishes and maintains stem cells — which are like blank pieces of biological clay that genes and other molecules can mold into anything in a plant.

At the same time, Jackson and the six post doctoral students in his lab are working on several other projects. In collaboration with Doreen Ware’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor, Jackson has been taking huge amounts of data to explore how genes work together.

“We found connections between different genes we’ve been studying for a long time,” he said. “We didn’t suspect” that link before, but, “in hindsight, it makes perfect sense.”

In a paper published in March in Genome Research, Jackson, Ware, and Andrea Eveland, an assistant member of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, among others, showed that the transcription factor Ramosa1 and Knotted1, a regulator of stem cell maintenance, were teaming up to control branching. This, the authors explained in their paper, is an important factor in crop yield, affecting seed number and harvesting ability.

Jackson has “been making great strides in discovery of novel components of stem cell signaling, and translating these findings directly to crop improvement, which really is the ultimate goal of our research as plant scientists,” said Eveland, who worked as a post doctoral student in Jackson’s lab for more than five years.

In addition to analyzing data on genes, Jackson and his lab use Crispr, a tool that is the DNA equivalent of the game Jenga, which can knock out individual pieces, allowing them to see the effect on the plant.

“Many genes are redundant,” he said, so knocking one out doesn’t necessarily change anything because, like a car navigating along a detour, the plant can take an alternate genetic route to arrive at the same destination.

Jackson has won fans among his collaborators. Sarah Hake, the center director of the USDA Plant Gene Expression Center at the University of California at Berkeley, and Jackson’s post doctoral mentor, called him “a superstar.” He has “brilliant ideas” and is “well known in maize genetics and developmental biology.”

He also requires precision and accuracy among his fellow scientists.“When someone showed data at a lab meeting that was poorly done, he would politely call it rubbish,” Hake recalled. “He set a high standard that kept our lab at the top.”

At the same time, Jackson has been an “incredible teacher” and role model to scientists in training. He has contributed to Sylvester’s outreach programs in Montana to help teach genetics and cell biology at a tribal college for Native Americans.

While Jackson doesn’t do any lab bench-work anymore, he conducts field work at a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory farm during the summer and in Puerto Vallarta in the winter.

Jackson and his wife Kiyomi Tanigawa, an interior designer, live in Brooklyn with their six year-old son, Toma.

Originally from the north of England, Jackson has been at Cold Spring Harbor for 17 years.

In his work, Jackson said he is thrilled with the advances in technology.

“There is a revolution in biology,” he said, adding that Crispr, and other tools, will “open up so many different areas we can address.”

For Annie Heroux, it was love at first sight, at least as far as her career was concerned. During her days of studying at the Universite de Montreal, she took a course in crystallography — the study of the structure of small objects by looking at a crystallized arrangement of their atoms.

Even before the class began, she read the entire book. When she saw the professor, Francois Brisse, she said, “This is what I want to do” in graduate school. And so she did.

“I never planned for it,” she said. “It just happened.”

For her graduate work, Heroux performed crystallography work on polymers like kevlar. Eventually, her interest took her to Brookhaven National Laboratory, where she’s been for the last 13 years.

A beamline scientist, Heroux provides a supporting role to many of the users from around the world who come to BNL to see if they can make a link between the structure of something small that often happens inside a cell and its function.

“It is like knowing the shape of the tiny gears in a watch — OK, an antique watch with gears — and then desiring to know how the gears move each other to count down time, or move a muscle or have a thought,” explained BNL colleague and fellow Beamline Scientist Howard Robinson.

Recently, Heroux worked with Scott Bailey, an associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Bailey explored how bacteria were able to recognize and destroy viruses.

Heroux helped provide the first picture of the RNA and DNA of a molecular tool called Cascade, which protects the bacteria.

Cascade, an 11-protein genetic security system that can only function if each part is working correctly, uses short strands of bacterial RNA to scan its DNA to see if the genetic blueprints come from something else that might be trying to corrupt its system. If the RNA recognizes something other than its own code, it breaks down the DNA.

Heroux helped explore more conditions to get better crystals with better diffraction qualities — or ways that light bends.

In this research, which was published in August in the journal Science, Bailey and his collaborators found that the RNA scans the DNA in a way similar to how we look through text for a single word. The Cascade has a template to find its compatible counterpart.

In general, Heroux said her role is to make sure that everything works the way it should at the beamline. She “goes through the steps to figure out all the things that can go wrong during an experiment.”

After she helps with experiments, she returns to “crunch the numbers on the computer.”

While she doesn’t have her own lab or pursue her own research agenda, she does have an opportunity to try to figure out new ways to solve the structure of a molecule in a different way.

Heroux is looking forward to the opportunities presented by the NSLS II, the second generation of synchrotron that will open officially in 2015. The beam, which is 10,000 times brighter than the original, will create new opportunities and new challenges.

“The beamline will be so bright that we will modify the way we do experiments,” she said. The X-rays have the potential to destroy the crystals. The experiments will have to occur at a faster speed and may require more crystals to get a full data set.

Heroux enjoys the process of collaborating with scientists on their projects.

“Most scientists are pretty centered over what they want to do,” she said. “What I find interesting is that, by collaborating with all kinds of different groups, I get to see all kinds of different problems. It’s never the same thing.”

A resident of Shirley, which is only seven minutes from the lab, Heroux lives with her partner, Matt Cowan, a computer expert. Heroux, who is originally from Montreal, met Cowan through her work.

The couple have three children: Viviane Trudel, 21, Florence Trudel, 18 and Ethan Cowan, 10.

Heroux enjoys walking through parks with a mycology club, which searches for and identifies mushrooms. She calls cooking her “big relaxation,” and has tried her hand at Indian and Mexican food. She has also made her own sushi.

As for her work, she still is excited about seeing the structure of objects.“You collect data, which are spots on your detector and, if you’re lucky, a couple of hours later, you see the structure popping up,” she said. “That is always exciting, no matter what the structure is.”

Ominous forecasts start a cascade of reactions, from a race through the supermarket for canned goods and water to trips to the hardware store for batteries and flashlights to a rush to the gas station to fill up before the possibility of an interruption in the supply line.

Stephanie Hamilton is determined to turn predictions of an approaching storm into a new kind of action plan for utilities.

A Smarter Grid R&D Manager at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Hamilton recently received a $336,000 grant from the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority to work with two utilities in upstate New York, Orange and Rockland Utilities and Central Hudson Gas and Electric. She would like to help these utilities gain a better understanding of how to interpret and use weather data to develop a plan for approaching storms.

The elements of new information in the BNL study will include streaming radar that offers forecasts in a range of 1.5 kilometers.

“What this will tell them is where we think the storm is going to be, the volume of the precipitation and how long that might continue,” Hamilton said.

That kind of specific knowledge of a storm will aid companies in understanding where to put reserves in place by reaching out to other companies through a mutual aid assistance program in states that might not be as affected by a storm.

When Hurricane Sandy hit, for example, Orange and Rockland Utilities had over 4,000 workers come to help restore power. Wisconsin Gas and Electric sent crews to Long Island to aid in the storm recovery.

Hamilton and her colleagues are working on building a toolkit that will help utility personnel use weather information they currently don’t have.

“Our expectation is that by having the information and new tools,” these companies will be able to understand “how severe weather will impact their systems.”

— Stephanie Hamilton

Hamilton said she herself isn’t the weather expert: she is relying on the meteorological expertise of BNL scientists Michael Jensen and Scott Giangrande. She is hoping to bring together the skills at understanding severe atmospheric conditions with an awareness of the vulnerable points on an electric grid.

Hamilton’s former supervisor, Gerald Stokes, who is now a visiting professor in the Department of Technology and Society at Stony Brook University, praised her work and her approach. Hamilton is “well regarded in the smart grid and utility community and is seen as one of the pioneers in that area,” he said.

The BNL study is one of seven such efforts NYSERDA is sponsoring with a total of $3.3 million to help utilities prepare for and react to severe weather events.

“As we continue to witness the impacts of extreme weather, it is more important than ever to invest in making our energy infrastructure stronger and smarter,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a statement.

Hamilton hopes this is among the first steps in what could be a lengthy and productive local analysis of the vulnerabilities of the system to various disruptions. Some utility poles might be in areas where the ground becomes saturated with only a few inches of rain, depending on the local conditions and the ability of the vegetation in the area to soak up any accumulations.

When this project ends, the BNL team will try to demonstrate the tool at the utility with their existing procedures to validate the model and see how it can be used, she said.

Down the road, the utilities could integrate this kind of analysis with a pole-by-pole understanding of vulnerabilities to specific weather conditions.

The utilities have a financial incentive to bring systems damaged by a storm back online. Hamilton said a one hour reduction in storm response could save Orange and Rockland Utilities about $100,000 to $200,000.

A resident of Manorville, Hamilton lives with her partner John York, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and an IT expert working with TIAA-CREF in New Jersey as a business analyst for computing systems. Hamilton has enjoyed her three and a half years at BNL after growing up in south Georgia and spending much of her career in western states, including California, Washington and Wyoming.

As for her work, she feels at home at BNL.

“This is really a culmination of all the things I’ve ever wanted to do,” she said. She relishes the opportunity to “move the industry ahead. Making [utilities] more reliable and resilient is the key to our economy.”

In the 1970s, when he was in graduate school at New York University, Thomas Gingeras said his late mother, Barbara Lammons, described him as a vet for flies. While earning his Ph.D., Gingeras brought home bottles of one of the more common scientific test subject, the fruit fly, and stored them in a bathroom.

Almost four decades later, Gingeras, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, still works with flies, although he doesn’t need to bring any of them to his home on the campus at the laboratory. Instead, he is one of the leaders in a group called Encode, for the encyclopedia of DNA elements.

The Encode project includes scientists from around the world and provides a detailed catalog of genetic elements.

The latest version, called modEncode, for the Model Organism Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, compares genetic elements of humans to those of flies and the roundworm, two of the more actively studied by science.

Using billions of pieces of information including DNA base pairs and messenger RNA, scientists were able to explore the overlap in genetic machinery among members of species with considerably different lives.

“What we see,” Gingeras said, “are patches of things where the sequences that are known to carry out specific functions relate to one another.” These results were recently published in the journal Nature.

He likened the study to an examination of paintings. Looked at from a distance, the way a fly, worm and human might be seen, the end product appears different. “When you look at small areas, you can see” similarities among the paintings.

By finding overlap, scientists can hone in on ways to repair damage and provide additional genetic targets to cure human disease. “This points us in the direction of setting these at the top of the priority list,” said Gingeras. One of the primary paths pharmaceutical companies pursue is that “they look to find a disease state that is closely mimicking what is happening in humans. They look to see if the cause is similar, in their genes and regulatory regions.”

In his lab, Gingeras has five people who do benchwork, producing genetic data. Another five dedicate their time to making sense of that information, plugging bits of data into computers and looking for meaningful overlaps. Gingeras divides his time between analyzing and interpreting the data, writing for grant money and summarizing results in research papers.

Gingeras said the Encode group has been through some battles in the scientific community, especially when they first proposed the idea that the genes that don’t code for a specific element still might have a function for the organism and for the cell.

“The predominant idea when the human genome sequence was deciphered is that only a small fraction of the genome was functional,” about 2 percent, Roderic Guigo Serra, coordinator of the Bioinformatics and Genomics Program at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona explained in an email. “Gingeras “demonstrated that the fraction of the genome that is transcribed is much larger,” closer to 60 percent or more. Initially, Gingeras’s results were viewed with skepticism; they are now “widely accepted.”

Gingeras admitted that the early criticism bothered him.

“I took it very personally,” he said. “Not too long into this process, it dawned on me that it doesn’t make any difference what anybody thinks. If it’s right, [other scientists] will see it for themselves.”

Serra, who started collaborating with Gingeras more than a decade ago, said his colleague has “amazing energy,” and can call him to discuss their work at almost any hour of the day. This, he said, has been challenging but also motivating for Serra. Gingeras “has the insight to anticipate the questions that will become important before others,” he said.

Gingeras and his wife Hillary Sussman, who is the executive editor of the journal Genome Research at CSHL, have a 12-year-old daughter, Noa Sussman and a 5-year-old, Arie Anna Gingeras.

As for his work, Gingeras said the next steps in the analysis of genomes could include other organisms.

“The intention has been, all along, to provide a blueprint of what you could do on any organism to understand better what the component parts of the organism are,” he said. “This effort is meant to be a model case of what you could do for all organisms. The next step is to do the same thing for other organisms or study systems.”

Robert Lofaro drives a Prius, recycles his trash, and uses the air conditioning sparingly during the summer. These decisions reflect not just who he is, but also what he does.

The group leader of the Renewable Energy Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lofaro leads the development of the applied research programs for solar energy. He also was the project manager for the development of the Northeast Solar Energy Research Center, a source of solar energy to the BNL campus that provides field testing and research.

Lofaro’s research addresses questions such as how to deal with the variability in power that comes from the sun due to cloud cover during the day and darkness at night. When solar energy comes to the electrical grid, this inconsistent production can cause problems with controlling the power quality on the grid, which has to supply power at a stable voltage and frequency.

This summer, BNL awarded Lofaro an annual engineering prize. The award, which includes a $10,000 prize, is the highest distinction given to members of the staff at BNL.

“It was quite an honor,” Lofaro said.

Researchers in Lofaro’s group will study energy storage systems, which could provide a buffer between the solar panels and the grid, and the use of “smart inverters,” which can control the grid voltage and frequency. BNL will test these system at NSERC.

“We’re interested in increasing the use of renewable energy throughout the country and in the Northeast,” Lofaro said. The uncertainty in the amount of power can cause problems with control of the grid, he said.

Once any new system is installed and operating, Lofaro seeks to explore how long the system can last.

“That goes towards the cost- effectiveness of installing the technology,” he said. “We’re doing field tests to understand how well they perform.”

Many states have targets for increasing the use of renewable energy. New York plans to increase solar, hydroelectric and wind energy sources to 30 percent of electric generation by next year, up from 22 percent in 2010.

As the cost of solar panels has dropped, the bigger expenses for utilities have been installation, labor, permitting, site preparation, and installation hardware, among others. Researchers are looking to reduce these costs and make solar energy more cost-competitive.

The staff in Lofaro’s department is “focused on grid integration,” he said. “There’s a lot of work to do in helping develop technologies that would enable the next generation” for a system that would enable real-time interactions between pieces of equipment in the grid, coupled with automatic controls, to provide a more efficient, reliable and resilient power delivery system.

Most grids are designed to send energy one way, from a central power station to customers. When some of their customers produce their own solar energy and sell it back to the utility, these two-way energy flows can trigger protective relays that interpret the flow of energy back from the customer as a fault, causing the grids to open the circuit to shut off the power.

New smart grids will need new monitoring, control and communication technologies to operate properly, Lofaro said.

Through automated switching, areas that have lost power through severe weather events, like Superstorm Sandy, might re-establish power more quickly.

Utilities could take portions of the grid and operate them as small parts of the network, with their own supply of power that would operate on its own if necessary, or as an integrated part of the larger grid.

“You’d need a number of control technologies and they’d have to be able to have special switching – through smart switches – that could synchronize” the smaller units with the larger energy source, Lofaro said. He said the grid today will require years to update.

Michael Villaran, who has known Lofaro since they started a month apart at BNL in 1987, describes his group leader as a “hands-on manager” who is “very involved” in the details of his work.

Lofaro is “well thought of in the solar energy research community,” Villaran said. “Getting the NSERC funded and constructed” is a “major accomplishment.”

Lofaro and his wife Nancy, who works in business operations at BNL, live in East Moriches. Lofaro plays on BNL’s golf league. He describes his golf game as “mediocre.”

As for his work, Lofaro is a firm believer of solar energy,

“Renewable energy will play an important part of meeting the nation’s energy needs for many years to come,” he said.

Yusuf Hannun is building a team where he firmly believes the whole has to be greater than the sum of the parts. The director of the Cancer Center at Stony Brook, Hannun is tackling the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a disease that is the second highest killer of Americans each year in a way that unites a wide range of expertise, some in relatively new and unexpected areas.

“A team of us is working to bring to the cancer center what may, for most people, look like previously poorly explored areas,” Hannun said, who has been conducting cancer research for over 30 years and became the director of the center at Stony Brook over two years ago.

That includes areas such as applied math and physics, computer science and artificial intelligence. Stony Brook is building a program in cancer metabolism and hopes to extend that to nutrition.

“We want to exploit every resource we can in our battles against cancer,” he said. “We’re building on Stony Brook’s strength in chemistry, drug biology, drug delivery, math and engineering.”

The modern study of cancer involves an analysis of reams of genetic information that is significantly larger than any one clinician can analyze and study, even on a single patient.

“One generates billions of points of data per patient,” Hannun said. “There is an immense need to probe these data sets, simplify them and extract what’s meaningful versus what’s noise” in studying mutations and genetic variants.

With all of the data available, scientists can explore multiple comparisons that might lead to a better understanding of the genetic underpinnings of cancer. They are moving toward an analysis of different types of cancer cells in any one patient, and they also will compare cancer cells in a patient to normal, healthy cells.

They are also heading toward understand the differences between patients with similar cancers, to see if there are genetic patterns that contribute to the onset of a particular type of cancer. When it strikes, cancer is a complex disease, Hannun said, which makes the “task of finding what’s real and what’s noise” challenging. “We have to do multiple analyses.” Each cancer includes a dozen different subtypes, if not more, and each one, he said, has to be treated and defeated differently.

Hannun dedicates a majority of his time working at the Cancer Center. He said he still “protects some parts of the week for lab work,” which includes the weekly Thursday meeting between his team and that of his wife, Lina Obeid, the dean of research at the Medical School.

In his lab, he has new targets for different cancers and is trying to develop inhibitors. He is working to understanding the mechanism by which enzymes regulate tumors.

At the Cancer Center, Hannun has distilled research into several major directions: cancer metabolism and lipids, experimental therapeutics and metastasis, informatics and imaging.

Hannun is focused on the interface between research and the clinical world, where the results of research at Stony Brook and other institutions will help drive clinical cancer medicine for the next few decades.

The Lebanon-born and educated Hannun has set a specific goal for the center as well. He’d like to receive a National Cancer Institute designation. Currently, that is given to only 60 cancer centers across the country.

That designation would not only be a recognition of success and achievement for the Long Island team, but would also enable them to bid for funding for special programs that only those centers can obtain.

The process to receive that designation is “very rigorous and extremely competitive and requires a significant breadth and depth of cancer research and a coordination of clinical research at any one center,” he said.

As a whole, cancer research probably gets about 10 percent of the resources needed to fight the disease, Hannun estimates.

Hannun said the center has hired about eight faculty members over the previous two years and hopes to add more.

The center has made some inroads with three or four promising new targets, he said.

When they can break free from their laboratory and administrative responsibilities, Hannun and Obeid, who live in Setauket, have enjoyed the move to Long Island, where they kayak and bicycle, visit the vineyards and head to the Hamptons.

As for working so closely with his wife, Hannun said, “We share not just family, but we share our professional life.” Their work often comes up when they’re outside the lab, which Obeid said offers another connection for two people whose social circles overlapped starting in high school.

“Sometimes, we say, ‘Let’s not talk about work.’ Inevitably, we come back to the excitement. It’s really unique if you’re able to share something you’re so excited about in your everyday life with your best friend.”

Multitasking has been a necessity for Lina Obeid. The dean for research at the Stony Brook Medical School, Obeid runs a laboratory that focuses on cancer research, advocates for greater resources for other scientists, helps recruit staff members to join the university’s research department, and sees geriatric patients at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northport.

“I’m very efficient,” she said, as she spoke on a car phone on the way back from seeing patients to her lab. She is also ambitious, for herself and for the university.

Currently, Stony Brook ranks about 70th in money directed by the National Institute of Health, one of the main funding agencies for research.

“I would like us to move up to the top 50 and maybe to the top 25 at some point,” said Obeid.

Obeid said she watches over common resources. Recently, she went to bat for a new super-resolution microscope. The NIH had agreed to support 60 percent of the cost, so she asked Stony Brook to step up for the other half.

The microscope, she argued, “would really put us on the map if we had it,” she said.

Ken-Ichi Takemaru, an associate professor at Stony Brook, had led a group of 10 investigators in applying for the microscope.

Obeid “was highly supportive of our grant application from the beginning and immediately acted to secure a matching fund,” he said. “Her generous support was also recognized at NIH and helped our application to receive a high score.”

Obeid and Hannun, who have worked in their labs together for years, created a grant-seminar series two years ago that is designed to improve the approach of Stony Brook staff to finding funding.

The seminars are designed to “get their grants better,” she said. She will be starting a program to provide access to outside experts who can read and evaluate grant proposals.

These efforts help scientists “dot their I’s and cross their T’s to make the grants look tight and clean,” she said.

Obeid is also involved in recruiting scientists to join the university. She chaired the search and advocated strongly for the recruitment of Joel Saltz to become the chair of a new biomedical informatics department last year.

“We were very successful,” Obeid recalled. “Everyone was on board as he is the best possible recruit for this new department.” When she’s tried to lure other scientists to the school, she said she highlights the health sciences and physical mathematics sciences.

To tackle new frontiers in medicine, Stony Brook also has a strong engineering and computer sciences department, which “allows us to do unique things other universities can’t do for cancer and other illnesses. We can really break new ground.”

In her daily responsibilities, Obeid believes her research remains her top priority, where, as is characteristic of her approach to her work and life, she moves in several directions at the same time. She is exploring the role of enzymes that control two molecules that are instrumental for a cell: one of them controls growth and proliferation while the other enhances cell death and differentiation.

“When you have this yin and yang, it’s important to understand the enzymes that make and break them,” Obeid said. These enzymes can become drug targets, turning on or off critical cell signals.

She is also studying how some cancers have mutations that cause them to have an inflammatory response when treated with chemotherapy, instead of dying or going into remission. She is exploring lipids, which were originally thought only to store fat, but, instead, may have a signaling role.

Obeid believes her clinical work with geriatric patients helps inform and direct some of her research, while also allowing her to do something that comes naturally to her. “It’s important for me to be in touch with clinical care,” she said. “I like taking care of people.”

Obeid appreciates the opportunity to work with World War II veterans at the hospital.

The daughter of a retired academic surgeon, Obeid said her father Sami Obeid, whose 90th birthday she and her three brothers recently celebrated in California, has been an inspiration to her.

He is “superb with his hands, very efficient and the kindest person I know,” she said. He was known for walking into a room and lighting it up with his smile. Obeid said she tries to emulate that when she walks around campus.

As for the decision to join Stony Brook, Hannun said he deferred to his wife. “I got engaged by the possibilities here,” Obeid said. “It was a big decision. I said, ‘Let’s do something different.’ He was surprised by my saying that.”