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.”

Like a pit orchestra hidden beneath the stage during a musical, a collection of often unheralded people work for years to make it possible for astronauts to dazzle the world with their journeys further from home than anyone has ever gone.

A physicist at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory, Michael Sivertz is one of the researchers working behind the scenes to help make those majestic launches that carry astronauts deep into space safer.

Along with other physicists, biologists, and a host of others, Sivertz helps run, maintain and prepare the equipment NASA built in 2003 to test the effects of cosmic radiation on everything from different systems in the human body to the electronics that make space flight possible.

While he doesn’t test the cells themselves, Sivertz helps create and understand the kinds of radiation that enable other scientists to see how these DNA-altering and cell-altering ions might affect people who spend prolonged periods in space. He studies mitigation efforts that include shielding.

“When a proton goes through your DNA, it dislodges an occasional base pair,” Sivertz said. That’s like knocking a piece out of a jigsaw puzzle. The human body then looks for a part that fits in the empty space. “The repair happens trivially.”

When an ion of iron, however, goes through DNA, “it’s like a bomb going off. It quite frequently breaks both legs of DNA, and much damage is done. There is no simple recipe for putting those pieces of DNA back together in a foolproof way. That’s what makes space radiation so different,” he said. Sivertz’s role, he explained, is to develop the instrumentation that makes tests of cellular reactions to different kinds of radiation possible.

Peter Guida, a biologist at BNL who provides a similar expertise at using the NSRL, appreciates his colleague’s work. Sivertz “was chosen in particular because of his background, expertise and work ethic to become part of the NSRL program,” said Guida, who has known Sivertz for more than a decade. “That’s proven to be an extremely wise choice.”

Sivertz is working to understand the beam, its energy, its fragmentation, the way it loses energy and its stopping range — how far it goes through a material before it stops. He recently conducted a series of measurements to study the scattering cross section and charge-changing cross section for a variety of ions, including oxygen, carbon, and helium 3 and helium 4, which are isotopes of helium. “BNL is one of the only places in the world that can accelerate helium ions to produce an ion beam,” he said, while NSRL is the only facility designed to simulate the entire cosmic ray spectrum.

Sivertz also helps make it possible for scientists to test the effect of radiation on electronic devices. “As the characteristic size of electronic devices has shrunk, they have approached the size of cells, and their activation energies are similar to that of cells,” he explained. “Models for electronic behavior are sharing understanding with models for cellular behavior.”

Sivertz recognizes the need to understand how the environment in space might affect expensive systems. “If you’re going to send up a $1 billion satellite, you want to make sure some $5 memory chip doesn’t bring it down when it gets hit” by radiation, he said.

About a quarter of the time, Sivertz gets to pursue his own research, which includes a more precise understanding of the nature of the beams he’s directing toward test samples. Ion beams delivered at NSRL begin as a pure beam. As that beam moves through the air and equipment along the way, some of those ions hit atoms in the air, scatter or break into fragments, he described. For some experiments, researchers need to know exactly what happens to the beam and how it changes.

He is also working with people on helping to build better proton therapy treatment for cancer. Proton therapy may be more targeted toward tumors because the protons move at a slower speed, causing them to distribute all their energy at the site of a tumor rather than in healthy layers of tissue before and after the tumor.

Like members of a pit orchestra, Sivertz and Guida both play the same instrument: the guitar. Guida said Sivertz keeps his nylon-stringed guitar near the beam line, to strum some classical strains during the unusual moments when the beam line isn’t functioning.

In addition to being a talented scientist, Guida said, Sivertz is “a pretty good guitar player.”

Grigori Enikolopov — or Grisha to his colleagues — is involved in pushing limits. The associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and member of the graduate program at Stony Brook University is developing ways to refine state-of-the-art imaging to see the creation of new brain cells in adults.

The cells he’s seeking to observe are stem cells located primarily in the hippocampus. In animal models, these stem cells have the potential to restore memory after an injury or disease, enhance mood or improve the ability to learn.

“His latest work is very bold in trying to refine imaging” to be able to observe in real time “the generation of new brain cells,” said Dennis Steindler, the Joseph J. Bagnor/Shands Professor of Medical Research in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Florida. Steindler, who has known Enikolopov for over a decade, said his Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory colleague is “pushing the limitations of imaging. We’re at the point where we’re going to see what the resolution limit of noninvasive imaging of a brain is, anatomically and molecularly.”

Enikolopov and Steindler also led a study that will help prepare astronauts push the limits of space travel on potential future trips to Mars. The scientists explored the effects of cosmic radiation on these same important stem cells. They discovered that inactive stem cells are vulnerable to the effect of prolonged periods in space.

Working with Marcelo Vazquez at Brookhaven National Laboratory among others, the group discovered that these neural stem cells were sensitive to cosmic radiation. This finding, which was published in 2008, will help NASA with future missions that could involve prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation.

“Space travel in the future will use the data that [Enikolopov] and my collaborators helped develop to provide better protection methods for astronauts taking long space trips,” Steindler said. “It speaks to the breadth and scope of [Enikolopov’s] research” that he could become an instrumental part of this team.

Indeed, Enikolopov is interested in a broad range of areas related to stem cells, including understanding the signals that activate these powerful cells that can become neurons or glial cells, which are critical for the functioning of neurons in the brain.

Up until about 20 years ago, scientists didn’t even know stem cells were located in the hippocampus. Only recently were researchers like Enikolopov able to demonstrate the connection between stem cells and new neurons, learning, memory and mood.

“The idea that new neurons may be important for new memories was a natural and intuitive one, but it took a while to prove that,” Enikolopov said.

Steindler called Enikolopov “a rare scientist who has a grasp on many different complex technological approaches,” and said his Cold Spring Harbor collaborator has helped make important discoveries.

Enikolopov said stem cells are often involved in helping recover from damage to the brain. He and other scientists don’t yet know how these stem cells assess and repair the damage. As people age, the number of new neurons produced decreases, which means each of the stem cells adults have becomes more important at warding off age-related cognitive declines.

“Preventing the birth of new neurons from stem cells in the adult brain causes problems with memory; conversely, increasing production of new neurons enhances memory,” he said.

In animal models, running and living in an enriched environment increases production of new neurons. With humans, scientists still have to prove that, although Enikolopov believes that people should also benefit from exercise and experiencing new environments and ideas.

If Enikolopov and Steindler are effective, they may some day help “make 80 the new 40,” Steindler said.

While Steindler is an enthusiastic supporter and collaborator, he isn’t the first American scientist to appreciate the talents of the Russian-born Enikolopov. James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning former director of CSHL, was visiting the institute in Moscow where Enikolopov worked. Watson invited him to become a visiting scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Enikolopov understood his appointment would last around a year. “We thought this would be temporary” when he and his wife, Natalia Peunova, an independent research investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, left Russia. That was a quarter of a century ago, as the couple raised three children on Long Island and have two grandchildren.

Enikolopov enjoys driving along the North Shore, where he marvels at the water views.

As for his work, Enikolopov is hoping to unlock the stem cell code. The primary focus is on “understanding how stem cells produce new neurons and how they talk to other types of stem cells,” he explained.

Israel Kleinberg believes he’s found a weapon that will help the teeth of a child for whom sweets are both a reward and an evening entitlement. The distinguished professor and director of the Division of Translational Oral Biology at Stony Brook has developed a way to tip the scales in favor of the healthy bacteria in the mouth, while making life harder for the bacteria that eats sugars and produces acids that wear away minerals on teeth.

Kleinberg, who has been at Stony Brook for 41 years and is the founding chairman of the Department of Oral Biology and Pathology, discovered that the amino acid arginine, which is present in saliva, reduces acid in the mouth.

At the same time, he searched for a way to rebuild the calcium lost from the acid-producing bacteria. He combined these two ingredients into a product called BasicBites that is available on the Internet.

With two of these small, square chews a day, children can use their body’s own good bacteria to win the battle for teeth health, Kleinberg said.

Mitchell Goldberg, president of Ortek Therapeutics, a Roslyn-based company that is marketing and selling these chews, described the product as “prebiotic,” because it neither kills bacteria like an antibiotic, nor introduces additional bacteria, like a probiotic.

Kleinberg has distinguished himself at Stony Brook in translational research, Maria Ryan, the chair of the Department of Oral Biology and Pathology said.

Indeed, when he first arrived at Stony Brook, Kleinberg worked with Sen. Ken LaValle to create the patent policies for the entire SUNY system, which would help in the discovery of therapies outside the realm of his own research, including Reopro and Xiaflex, according to Ryan, who has known Kleinberg for about three decades.

Earlier this summer in South Africa, Kleinberg received the International Association for Dental Research Distinguished Scientist Award in Research in Dental Caries.

“This is one of the highest honors bestowed by the association to stimulate and recognize outstanding and innovative achievements that have contributed to the basic understanding of the causes and/or prevention of dental caries, commonly known as decay or cavities,” said Ryan. The award is “well-deserved recognition of his work.”

As for his latest creation, Kleinberg, an 84-year-old professor who continues to work five days per week, said BasicBites raise the pH in the mouth. A higher pH is considered more basic, while a lower pH is acidic.

Kleinberg recommends eating these chews slowly and gently twice a day, once before bed and once after breakfast. He suggests spreading it around the teeth with the tongue to push it into areas where cavities might otherwise form. “We picked vulnerable times based on people’s habits, especially kids,” he said.

When people go to bed, their saliva production drops. With less saliva, the bacteria that are getting fed, especially after meals that include carbohydrates and often conclude with sugars, are the acid-producing ones.

The BasicBites, which are chocolate flavored even though they don’t contain actual chocolate, make it tough for the acid-producing bacteria to eat the food leftovers stuck to or around the teeth.

“It’ll give you an extra weapon and an easy thing for you to do,” Kleinberg said. The BasicBites “are part of a program we have where we’re tackling different microflora,” he said.

In the morning after breakfast, the BasicBites, which are manufactured in North Carolina, can help maintain a higher pH for several hours, which means children will only need two a day. If a child has too many of these teeth-protecting chews, Kleinberg said he or she may get diarrhea.

A resident of Smithtown, Kleinberg has been married for 59 years to Constance. The couple have four children and eight grandchildren. Kleinberg shows no signs of slowing down.

“When people know my age, they say, ‘Are you retired?’” Kleinberg laughs. He said he asks them what they do in retirement and they say they do what pleases them. “I happen to be doing stuff that I’m crazy about,” he said.

Kleinberg’s chairman Ryan described him as a “committed academician” who is “extremely productive with his ongoing research.”

Ryan said her 9-year-old son Peter is a big fan of BasicBites and their inventor. Her son “insists on stopping in to Dr. Kleinberg’s office to try his latest flavor of BasicBites.”

One of the leaders on a high-powered team, Joel Hurowitz recently helped win a $1.4 million bid to build something that will eventually take a one-way journey far from home. Their device will need to withstand temperatures as low as 200 degrees below Fahrenheit.

Hurowitz, a research associate professor at Stony Brook, and a team that includes members from Stony Brook and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, are creating one of seven instruments that will journey aboard the Mars 2020 rover mission. The group beat out 57 other proposals to win a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to construct their Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, which will be bolted onto the turret at the end of the rover’s arm.

“The thing that we’re really excited about is that, for the first time, we can link the texture of a rock to its geochemistry,” said Hurowitz, who is the deputy principal investigator on the project.

Up to now, the equipment NASA has sent to Mars has analyzed rocks by looking at pieces in a 4- or 5-centimeter circle, which is about the size of the top of a soda can. Such a large field of view, even from an average distance of 140 million miles away, makes it difficult to determine “which ingredients go with which parts of the rock,” Hurowitz said.

Their new instrument will scan the rock in hundred micron steps, which is about the width of a human hair. This is also the size of clues at which small living organisms, or microbes, might leave their mark on rocks. This will allow for a more complete analysis of Martian rocks, helping NASA choose which rocks to bring back to Earth in the late 2020s.

The rock analysis will also likely give scientists a better understanding of the history of conditions on Mars over the last three or four billion years. Scientists generally believe that Mars had an early period ­— four billion years or so ago — when it had water on its surface, although some researchers believe that water was more like ice, while others suspect it may have had oceans, lakes and rivers.

Something changed dramatically, causing Mars to dry out, become nearly water free and get much colder. “While this big picture model is generally true, we’re finding deposits of water-born sediments in places that are younger than we might have predicted,” Hurowitz said, which is “out of sequence in general with this framework.”

When NASA sought designs for this instrument, Hurowitz and a team led by Abigail Allwood at Jet Propulsion Laboratory built two prototypes, one of which was used to gather data in the Pilbara region, which is in the northwestern part of Australia.

The Mars 2020 mission will include several other instruments, including: SHERLOC, which will seek evidence of organic compounds in rocks and soils, and MOXIE, which will attempt to produce oxygen from Martian carbon dioxide.

While Hurowitz is developing a device that will never return, he himself has come back to a place he called home when he was a graduate student in Stony Brook in Scott McLennan’s lab. After a seven year absence in which he worked at JPL, Hurowitz rejoined Stony Brook last year.

McLennan appreciates the talents of his former Ph.D. student. Hurowitz “has all the attributes of an outstanding scientist and educator,” McLennan said. He has “exceptional laboratory skills, having designed and built experimental labs at Stony Brook and JPL.” McLennan said Hurowitz is recognized in the field for research that combined lab and Mars mission data to gain a better understanding of how the surface of Mars weathered over geological time.

A professor in the Department of Geosciences, McLennan believes Hurowitz, who will become an assistant professor in a few weeks, is a considerable asset.

He “will create really unique and great opportunities for training Stony Brook graduate and undergraduate students to be the next generation of planetary scientists,” McLennan said.

Hurowitz and his wife Tanya, an assistant principal at an elementary school on the South Shore, recently bought a home in Stony Brook, where they plan to raise their two young sons.

As Hurowitz and Allwood prepared their NASA bid, Hurowitz felt that “this will all be worth it when we’re standing on a sunny beach in Florida, watching the rocket lift off with our families next to us and the instrument team beside us.”