When Justine Haupt was a teenager, her mother had a camera that wasn’t working. “I can fix it,” Justine said. Her mother, Lorraine Labate, who recently became a substitute teacher’s assistant for BOCES, was skeptical. “It doesn’t work anyway,” she urged. “Can I have it?” Her mother found that logic hard to refute, so she gave the camera she didn’t expect to work again to her daughter.

Haupt discovered an electrical problem that prevented the film-advance motor from functioning and fixed it. That early curiosity came in handy for Haupt, who started out as an intern five years ago and is now a design engineer in the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory. She is working on a camera that will have the largest lens and the largest sensor/detector array ever built.

Haupt is a part of a team that is developing the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will allow astronomers to study dark matter, dark energy and asteroids that threaten to collide with Earth.

The LSST is a long-term project that includes numerous scientists at BNL, as well as other parts of the world. Ultimately, the camera for the LSST, which will find a home in Cerro Pachon in Chile at 8,800 feet, is expected to open its shutters for the first time in 2019 and will start its scientific survey around 2022.

Haupt earned distinction for her work this year, as Mouser Electronics and Design News named her the 2014 Rising Engineering Star. “She is exceptional in her engineering talent,” said Paul O’Connor, who is the head of the Instrumentation Group. “She also has a lot of outside interests, which I thought would be appealing” to the magazine.

Those interests include serving as a director-at-large for the Custer Institute in Southold, which is the oldest public observatory on Long Island. Haupt “did a lot of work with the instrumentation there,” O’Connor said. Her background in optics has been “very helpful” to his department at BNL, O’Connor said.

Haupt works with software she taught herself to use that allows her to print out three-dimensional images of her designs, O’Connor said. She can start with a concept in the morning and provide a finished product by the end of the day and has kept the department’s two three dimensional printers “running practically 24/7,” he added.

Haupt is specifically involved with optical, mechanical and thermal design for testing and prototyping a raft tower module. When 21 of these RTMs come together, that will form the final sensor array in the camera ­— or, as she puts it, the film.

There are portions of this raft that require precise mechanical alignment to preserve the image quality. The entire object lives in a vacuum because the sensors require low temperatures. The electronics, however, generate heat, so the thermal and mechanics have to be stable for the digital film part of the telescope to function without wearing down. Haupt said anything that’s put in the vacuum with the sensors has to be cleaned meticulously and handled carefully.

While Haupt’s role is in the creation of the telescope, she, like O’Connor, plans to follow the discoveries this tool will enable scientists to make in the world of astronomy and physics. “That’s part of why I look forward to coming to work,” she said. “I’m working on the instrument that we think will lead to the discovery of the mystery of dark matter. I will definitely be watching it closely.”

A Rocky Point High School graduate and current Rocky Point resident, Haupt has not only spent time thinking about the stars and helping create an instrument that will enable their study, but has also logged hours closer to them than many of her neighbors on the land-locked Long Island.

Until the last few years, she owned a 1947 Stinson Voyager, a single engine plane. She worked on the avionics for the plane.

Haupt’s grandfather, Daniel Labate, was a welder and had a machine shop in his basement. When Haupt was 5 or 6, her grandfather taught her how to use a lathe. He also showed her how to solder and got her involved with model railroads.

After they saw her success with a camera, Haupt’s parents gave her electronics that were no longer functioning, like VCRs. “I built up a big camera collection,” she recalled.

Calling them as she sees them has stirred up some trouble for Heather Lynch. An ecologist at Stony Brook, Lynch recently shared her estimate of the global population of the Adelie penguin, which waddles, feeds, and raises its young in the Antarctic.

The Adelie – pronounced ah deli – are considerably more numerous than previous estimates. Considered an indicator of climate change in the Antarctic because they respond to local conditions around the colony, the two and a half foot flightless water fowl number about 3.79 million breeding pairs, which is 53% higher than earlier figures.

“The losses” in some penguin populations “are more than offset by the gains we’re picking up on the continental part,” Lynch said.

Lynch has received some frustrated emails from conservationists that suggest the results may not be consistent with the messages they are sending.

“Our willingness to report on these findings makes some conservationists uncomfortable because there is a tendency in the media and with readers to conflate population gains with a rejection of climate change, or even as a benefit of climate change,” she said. The evidence, and the use of that information, doesn’t invalidate the notion of global warming or make the penguin, an animated hero in movies and an attraction to families at the Central Park Zoo, any less important or worth studying.

“Climate change is occurring in Antarctica: the shifts we have documented in the Adelie populations speaks to the ecological changes now under way due to climate change,” she said.

Looking closely at the numbers, Lynch said the population of this type of penguin, which has a white ring around the eye, long black tail and white chest that gives the bird its tuxedo appearance, has decreased on the Antarctic peninsula, amid a reduction in the population of one of their primary food sources, krill, in the Western Antarctic Peninsula. Those declines, however, have been more than counterbalanced by greater penguin population on the continent, where these birds may have found more places to breed and where there has been a decline in the toothfish, a competitor that also eats krill.

Lynch said the study of the Adelie penguins is a “complex story” and will require further study to identify the causes of these changes.

Indeed, Lynch and her collaborator on the penguin population project, Michelle LaRue, a research associate at the University of Minnesota in the Earth Sciences Department, surveyed these birds to provide information that might help policy makers with fisheries management. They didn’t intend their study to ruffle feathers in the conservation community.

“Pinning down the distribution [of Adelie penguins] is one piece of a larger puzzle to determine sustainable krill catch limits,” Lynch said. LaRue and Lynch spent about 10 months pouring over satellite images. The satellites were not able to pick up the image of these waddling birds, but they were able to provide a map of their guano, or droppings. The color of their droppings is usually reddish.

Since this was the first time researchers used satellite images, the comparison to earlier data, providing the 53% increase, creates some room for interpretation.“We were using published information,” said LaRue, which included “the information on hand at the time,” but didn’t tap into the views afforded by satellite images.

Indeed, Lynch and LaRue plan to revisit this number in about five years, using the same method to compare the change in the number of penguins.

“We could have caught them on a high year,” LaRue said. “The next time, it could be lower or vice versa. This represents a base line from which we can make better and more accurate management decisions and learn about the species.”

Lynch and LaRue have collaborated for close to four years. Lynch is a “brilliant quantitative ecologist,” LaRue said. “When you’re in the field, you go, go, go.”

After a full day of trudging through three feet of snow to collect information about penguins, Lynch took more pictures of the colonies all the way up until the last call to return to the ship, LaRue described.

Lynch said she sees her role as providing data regardless of the result. “I want to be the trusted umpire,” she said. “I limit my comments to what the data are telling us.” At this point, she said, the data are telling her what is happening. The next step is to figure out why.

Molly Hammell had her head way beyond the clouds when she met Victor Ambros. At the time, she was a graduate student studying how models of dark matter and dark energy contribute to the distribution of galaxies seen in the sky. Through friends, she met Ambros and asked him about his work in molecular biology.

An amateur astronomer who took photographs of the night sky with a small telescope in his backyard, Ambros brought his family to public observations sessions Hammell ran at the Dartmouth College observatory. Speaking with Ambros helped give her the “biology bug,” she said.

Instead of looking at the remnants of dead stars like Cassiopeia A, which exploded around 1670, Hammell decided to focus her attention on events happening inside cells. Hammell handled the transition from astrophysics to biology incredibly well, said Ambros.

“In less than two years in my lab, [her] breadth and depth of biological knowledge had become comparable to that of any other postdoc at the same stage,” Ambros, the co-director of the RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, said.

She also shared her skill sets with the lab. Her lab meeting presentations were “exceptionally lucid and especially appreciated … as she could often make it almost effortless for the rest of us to understand what had been for us unfamiliar mathematical concepts,” Ambros said.

Now an assistant professor of genomics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Hammell studies transposons, or jumping genes. These bits of DNA can cut themselves out of one place in the genome and insert themselves into another spot. Another type of transposon makes an RNA copy of itself and then uses that copy to insert new DNA in another spot.

Transposons transcripts can become misregulated in neurodegenerative diseases, including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and frontotemporal lobar degeneration.

Her work with transposons has not only generated results, but has also distinguished her as a Rita Allen Scholar, an honor she received at the beginning of July. The award supports promising early career investigators and provides up to $110,000 annually for five years.

Hammell and her collaborators “have made one of the first connections between transposon activity and the function of a protein associated with neurodegenerative disease,” Ambros said.

“The possibility that transposon activation could contribute to the causes and/or progression of neurodegenerative disease is an extraordinarily important question.”

Hammell said she has looked for clues about the link between transposons and these diseases. It’s unclear yet whether the transposons are a causal factor in these diseases or whether they are a byproduct. Working with others at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, including Joshua Dubnau and Marja Timmermans, Hammell is hoping the team can gain a better understanding of the way transposons affect neurodegenerative diseases.

In one line of experiments, the researchers are looking to take animal models of these diseases and inhibit transposon activity. “If we can slow down or stop the symptoms in those models, that would be a fabulous clue,” she said.

Hammell is using computational analysis to differentiate between the effects of a protein called TDP-43 that is implicated in these diseases and the transposons themselves. Studies at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory indicate that TDP-43 might normally keep transposons in check. If TDP-43, however, doesn’t work the way it should, these transposons can become more active, which may lead to diseases.

Some transposons, Hammell said, are closely related to retroviruses in the way they are copied in the cell. Drugs like AZT that is used as a treatment for AIDS might also be effective in controlling transposon activity in patients with ALS and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Hammell lives in lab-provided housing with her 10-year-old daughter Anna and her 4-year-old son Max in a converted firehouse on the shores of the harbor. The previous exit door for fire engines is now a huge glass window overlooking Cold Spring Harbor.

As for her work, Hammell appreciates the opportunity to contribute to research that may help people suffering with disease. Hammell’s grandmother succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease when she was a postdoctoral student. “If the work I do helps understand the progression of that disease,” she said, “that would make my family proud.”

Ralph James has surpassed Derek Jeter. Working with a team of scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory, James, a prolific scientific innovator, has now won the prestigious R and D 100 Award, described as the “Oscars of Invention,” six times, topping the retiring Yankee shortstop’s five World Series rings.

James, who is a senior scientist and group leader in the Nonproliferation and National Security Department at BNL, has led a group that has developed and improved a wide range of technologies that have applications in everything from detecting signature radiation from weapons to finding more efficient ways to detect tumors inside the human body.

The R and D 100 Awards have been given out annually by R and D magazine since the 1960s and include inventions like the halogen lamp and HDTV. James credited colleagues, including Aleksey Bolotnikov, with collaborating to produce the latest award.
BNL and James’ department have benefited from the scientist’s awards and from his vision for a department that has been able to recruit talented scientists.

“James creates conditions where we can attract the best people from all over the world,” said Bolotnikov, who is originally from Russia and who has colleagues from China and India. “All these awards convince our sponsors that we propose good ideas.”

Bolotnikov called James “visionary,” “an expert manager” and a “supporter of good ideas.” Bolotnikov, who shared in three of the R and D 100 awards, said he is “glad [James] directed me in the right direction.”

The latest award involves improving the performance of detectors produced from lower-quality and cheaper crystals, making them more effective at looking for the signature of a particular kind of radiation.

James helped develop cadmium zinc telluride, or CZT, crystals, which enable scientists, medical researchers, and homeland security experts to collect information about a radiation source at room temperature.

Prior to the creation of CZT, scientists used germanium to detect radiation. The biggest problem with germanium, which is, as James said, “the most pure material that exists today,” is that it had to be cooled to minus 200 degrees Celsius or minus 328 degrees Fahrenheit. These germanium detectors, which are still used in some places today, needed several hours to cool down and required considerable maintenance.

The discovery of CZT, however, enabled technicians to get specific isotope information at room temperature. Isotopes are variations of the same element with different number of neutrons. Uranium, for example, has several isotopes, including the more common Uranium 238. The lighter U 235, which occurs in natural uranium but at a very low concentration, however, can be used in nuclear reactions when it is enriched and is an isotope officials from Homeland Security, among other organizations, monitor closely.

Early in his career, Zach Foda, who graduated from Ward Melville High School in 2005, has done something his father, Hussein Foda, an award-winning pulmonologist and medical researcher, hasn’t accomplished in a medical and research career that spans over three decades.

An M.D.-Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook, the younger Foda recently participated in a research project on diabetes that was published in the prestigious journal Nature. The study, led by David Liu, a Harvard professor of chemistry and chemical biology, found a new possible treatment approach for diabetes, inhibiting something called the insulin-degrading enzyme.

“The Journal Nature is one of the very highest-impact journals in the country and actually in the world,” said the pulmonologist father, who is a professor of medicine in the pulmonology critical care division at Stony Brook. Everything after this, he laughed, may be “downhill.” As a member of Markus Seeliger’s lab in the Department of Pharmacology, Zach Foda helped determine the three-dimensional structure of the inhibitor compound and showed how it was bound to the insulin-degrading enzyme.

Over 20 million people in the United States live with type II diabetes, a problem in which the body can’t make enough of the hormone insulin. The IDE removes insulin from the blood. People with diabetes typically inject insulin, take medicine to increase their sensitivity to the hormone or take other drugs to increase the insulin their bodies produce. Inhibiting the effect of this enzyme may enable insulin to remain active in the blood for a longer time.

Testing their compound in mice, Liu and his Harvard colleagues showed that the inhibitor increased insulin levels, which in turn lowered blood sugar. While this study is encouraging, scientists caution it could be some time before this approach goes through all of the screening steps to become an approved treatment for diabetes.

Seeliger and Foda became involved in this collaboration at the request of Liu. An expert in determining the structure of molecules, Seeliger studies the structure of inhibitors of enzymes called protein kinases, some of which are involved in cancer.

When Liu reached out to Seeliger in the fall of 2011, the Stony Brook researcher didn’t hesitate to join the latest collaboration. Liu is “a total rock star in the field,” Seeliger offered. “I was delighted when he contacted me out of the blue initially. It was a no-brainer to say, ‘Sure, we’d be interested.’” Liu praised his Stony Brook collaborator. Seeliger is “a highly talented, dedicated and scholarly biochemist and structural biologist,” Liu offered in an email. “He is a superb collaborator and an asset to our community.”

While Seeliger contributed an important element to the diabetes study, he focuses more of his work on other areas, including studying the structural nature of kinases and the drugs used to affect them. Kinases are “important drug targets,” Seeliger said.

“There are a lot of potential compounds out there that could become drugs for kinases, but most of them don’t work well enough. We want to help understand why they don’t work.”

Kinases are signaling molecules inside the cell. If they send an incorrect signal, a cell could die or develop cancer, Seeliger explained. The problem in targeting these kinases is that there are many similar signaling molecules and it’s “difficult to turn off one without turning another one off. We need a high specificity of kinase inhibitors.”

The “Holy Grail” for Seeliger in his research would be to find out how a drug binds to a receptor, and not just what the final configuration of the drug and the receptor are. Seeliger, who considers himself a visual person, said he is humbled by people who bake professionally. Being able to manipulate yeast, flour and other ingredients to create a moist and spongy bread is something that “impresses me.”

Seeliger, who lives in Stony Brook, is married to Jessica Seeliger, an assistant professor who is also in the pharmacology department at Stony Brook. The couple enjoy going to the beach and visiting Stony Brook Village. Seeliger is a scuba diver who has explored the waters around Long Island.

Seeliger credits Foda with doing much of the hands-on and computational work on the structural part of the diabetes study.

Foda recently married equine veterinarian Kiara Barr and is going back and forth between Long Island and Westchester, where his wife will work with and show horses until she moves to the University of Pennsylvania next year.

The elder Foda said he is “very excited” for his son’s early success and, as someone who chose to combine medicine and research, is also pleased with his son’s career choice. “I’m very proud of him.”

Life depends on taking a set of instructions and copying them over and over. That’s how the code that builds everything from aardvarks to kangaroos to zebras works. Inside each cell, a set of blueprints provides a twisting, ladder-like key that enables plants, animals and yeast to survive, grow and produce the next generation.

While the way that code is copied in creatures like bacteria is well known, the key structural changes that lead from the beginning of the copying process to a full-fledged new set of instructions for so-called eukaryotic organisms, or those with a true nucleus, remains a mystery for organisms like fruit flies, elephants, kangaroos and humans.

“In eukaryotes, the machine performs a similar function” as it does for bacteria, said Huilin Li, a biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Stony Brook, “but it’s more complicated. When it’s larger, it’s difficult to deal with and it’s difficult to study its structure.”

The concept of replication, or copying, is known. Li is studying the steps to get from the beginning of a copy to another model with the same important genetic information embedded in it. “Life has evolved this powerful copy machine and we want to know how the copy machine is assembled from scratch and how it works,” said Li.

Li likens his work to studying a car. “If you never saw a car and you suddenly see it running, you would wonder how it can move,” he said. Many of the protein complexes he studies can literally be called nanomachines, he said. Seeing the structure will help determine the function, he said. Quoting Albert Einstein, Li said, “If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.”

Li uses an electron microscope to magnify these parts up to a few million times. When he takes a picture, he explained, he controls the number of electrons to keep what he is looking at intact. Because he can’t use that many electrons, however, the picture is not fully exposed, leaving the image blurry or noisy. He takes many of these pictures and uses a computer to average them to get a sharper image.

Li’s work with electron microscopy has “definitely made a splash,” said Christian Speck, a nonclinical lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine at the Institute of Clinical Science at the Imperial College in London, who has collaborated with Li for over a decade. “I still remember when we saw the first structure of a large replication complex in 2004, we all realized that [Li’s] approach was a game changer. We had to think about DNA replication from a completely different perspective, as we could see for the first time the proteins that we have been working on for such a long time.”

Over the years, Li has determined the structure of a genetic machine called the Origin Recognition Complex. The ORC, which is comprised of six proteins, finds the special stretches of DNA, called replication origins, in the sea of a genome. Like a car that consumes gas, the ORC burns a form of chemical energy called adenosine triphosphate.
The ORC recruits a secondary machine, called a helicase, that splits up the DNA. “We recently captured a picture of the recruitment process,” said Li.

Working with Speck, who was at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory when he started collaborating with Li, the tandem figured out the structure of this 14-protein, two-machine system. When these machines aren’t closely regulated, they can overduplicate DNA, leading to uncontrolled cell growth and proliferation. “A hallmark of cancer is the regulation of replication,” Li said. “They don’t stop replicating” when normal cells would.

Li is also trying to understand how a protein machine called proteasome helps the tuberculosis-causing bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, survive inside the host immune system.

Li and his wife, Hong Wang, who works in the microbiology and immunology department at Stony Brook, live in Miller Place. They have two sons, Paul, who finished his first year at the University of Miami and Calvin, who just completed his junior year at Miller Place High School.

Li grew up in China and came to the United States in 1994. He enjoys walking in the Pine Barrens at the Rocky Point Preserve.

In his approach to his work, he has a “deep appreciation of what’s under the surface,” he said. “As a scientist, part of the job is learning and, for that, it is really a privilege.”

Defeating a deadly enemy requires preventing that killer from traveling to key areas and wreaking irreversible damage. Stony Brook’s Jian Cao, an associate professor in the Department of Medicine, is seeking ways to prevent the enemy, in this case cancer, from making its deadly journey through the body.

Recognized for ground-breaking work he did in Japan, Cao has focused on understanding how to stop a tissue-degrading enzyme called matrix mettalloproteinases, or MMP.

“Understanding the scientific basis for metastasis has been the most challenging aspect of cancer research,” said Stanley Zucker, a professor emeritus in the Department of Medicine at Stony Brook who has collaborated with Cao for close to two decades. “No one has yet figured out a treatment that specifically interferes with the metastatic process.”

Cao, who was born in China and trained with a renowned Japanese biologist, Motoharu Seiki, explained that scientists have focused their attention on disrupting the catalytic site, the place where the MMP breaks apart cell-cell adhesion molecules.

Clinical trials of an inhibitor or blocker for that site failed because of a lack of selectivity. He now focuses on a different area, called a hemopexin domain, that is required for enhanced cell migration. He has developed inhibitors targeting different MMPs.

“We have identified the region that is required for MMP-mediated cell migration, then, we developed inhibitors to target this region,” he said. “We found or developed regions that specifically interfere” with their signaling pathway that leads to enhanced cell migration.

He uses a small protein and synthetic compounds that don’t destroy the enzyme, but rather render it ineffective in spreading cancer.

There are 25 forms of MMP. For breast cancer, for example, MMP-14 activates MMP-2, which activates MMP-9. Based on other research, all these MMP’s play an important role in breast cancer metastasis, Cao said. “We identified regions that are required for enhanced cell migration that are specific and selective for each MMP,” he said.

Cao said his work has generated attention from pharmaceutical companies that are hoping to develop treatments for metastatic forms of cancer. A company reached out to him recently because they “want to collaborate to license our inhibitors,” he said.

Cao’s scientific peers lauded his results and his approach. “Many top investigators in the field consider Dr. Cao to be the best scientist to have entered the rapidly expanding field of MMPs in the past 20 years,” said Zucker. “Dr. Cao gained worldwide recognition for his research contributions to Dr. Seiki’s laboratory in Japan.”

In addition to working with these MMP inhibitors, Cao also has a three-dimensional drug screening test. Cao looks to see whether drugs that might be approved for other uses might have anti-cancer properties. The National Institute of Health’s National Center for Advanced Translational Sciences created a program aimed at repurposing old drugs for new uses. He has seen some benefit from a psychiatric drug that can interfere with cell migration and can inhibit cancer invasion.

At the recent 2014 Gloria and Mark Snyder Symposium for Cancer Medicine, Cao presented his research on a gene he cloned, called CeMIP, that is normally expressed in the central nervous system.

After analyzing thousands of patients, he found that people who have a high level of this gene have a shorter survival period with breast cancer. Those with less of this gene survive longer.
Knocking out this gene in highly aggressive breast cancer in animal models causes cancers to become less invasive.

He is studying a promoter region of this gene that selectively hits the on switch. He hopes to develop a compound that interferes with the CeMIP protein.

A resident of South Setauket, Cao lives with his wife, Qiang Zhao, who is also a scientist working on cancer at Stony Brook, and their 16-year-old son Kevin.

His work often includes going to the lab seven days a week. Cao is “the hardest working scientist I’ve ever encountered,” said Zucker.

“His productivity is outstanding in terms of publication and new research grants.”

Cao believes he is on the right track to develop possible treatments to battle cancer as it spreads. “If you can stop the invasion,” he said, “you can prevent metastasis.”

Bo Li looks closely at red and green colors. He is not preparing Christmas decorations, but rather is looking at the way different neurons in a region of the brain light up in response to an increase or decrease in fear.

An associate professor in the Neuroscience Department at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Li is studying a small area in the mouse brain called the amygdala. His results may help guide pharmaceutical companies and other researchers as they look for ways to help people suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the central amygdala, he found two cell populations that likely play some role with fear. One of those cell populations promotes fear. He believes the other suppresses fear. Ongoing studies, he said, will provide answers about the other cells soon. Once he understands both, he will look for ways to affect their activity.

Understanding fear responses is just one of the areas where Li studies neurons in the brain. He also does research on animal models of depression and schizophrenia, hoping to find differences researchers can exploit to provide early detection, treatment and prevention.

Fritz Henn, a visiting professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who collaborated with Li when Li was a post-doctoral fellow, said he is a “rising star in neuroscience research.”

In post-traumatic stress disorder, people who witness or experience stressful and potentially life-threatening experiences develop a sustained level of fear, even after removed from stresses like the life-and-death struggles of war. This trauma can diminish the quality of life as people struggle with emotional scars that don’t seem to heal.

By looking at the neurons of mice, Li is able to use genetic technology to explore an area that contains about 10,000 neurons. He uses scientific advances that enable him to separate neurons in different categories. These different types of neurons are labeled by a marker, which glows in green, yellow or red. He can also use viruses that specifically recognize these neurons and enable him to see a higher or reduced activity level for these neurons in a fear response.

Using an optical fiber that is about 150 microns, which is about the thickness of a human hair, Li can shine a light on the amygdala to see signals that are then collected through a computer. His analysis allows him to record changes in the signals sent by these different types of cells. Henn called Li’s research “state of the art.”

By collaborating with other scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to do gene sequencing, Li can look at what other proteins are expressed by these different cells.

“It’s just a matter of time to gather the data and come to conclusions,” he said. He believes this research will make substantial scientific progress in the next five years. The clinical applications will likely take longer, he predicted.

The amygdala is an area that scientists have known for a long time controls emotion and emotional memory. As a result, researchers on Long Island and elsewhere in the world are putting considerable energy and time into understanding the specific cellular functions in this region.

His work on schizophrenia presents other challenges because it’s difficult to mimic the kind of symptoms humans exhibit, including hallucinations and reasoning problems.
Li is looking at the genes linked to schizophrenia and finding similar genes in mice.

“Going from genes to behavior is a big gap,” he said. “We need to fill that in.” He is working on genes in his lab that he knows cause problems in some brain circuits to understand depression as well.

“We know a particular circuit in the brain [called the lateral habenula circuit] is important for reward, learning and punishment,” he said. “When this circuit is impaired, it can cause depression.”

Li lives on campus at Cold Spring Harbor with his wife, Shirley Guo, who is also a scientist and works for Kadmon, a biotechnology company in New York City that is developing medicines for a range of diseases and provides treatment of hepatitis C. The couple have an 11-year-old daughter, Serena, who is an avid tennis player.

Li called Cold Spring Harbor a “fantastic environment” and said it is “one of the best in the world for doing science.”

Getting a wallet out of a back pocket, reaching up to put luggage in an overhead bin on an airplane, or waving across a parking lot to a friend are all motions that can become almost impossible for people who have frozen shoulder.

A painful and motion-limiting problem, frozen shoulder occurs mostly in women between the ages of 40 and 60. The problem is that the body is depositing extra collagen, a binding material, over the shoulder capsule, limiting motion around the joint. Typically, treatment includes a corticosteroid injection and considerable amounts of physical therapy, to loosen up the joint. If that doesn’t work, patients have gone through a surgical procedure that includes months of physical therapy afterwards.

Edward Wang, associate professor of orthopedics who treats numerous cases of frozen shoulder each year at Stony Brook Orthopaedic Associates, and Marie Badalemente, a professor in the Department of Orthopaedics who has worked to develop an enzyme cocktail to relieve the pain of a disfiguring hand disease, have teamed up to create an injection that targets that extra collagen.

The treatment uses injections of an enzyme called clostridial collagenase. The tandem have patented the treatment and are entering phase 2b of the Food and Drug Administration’s clinical trials, which are ongoing at 25 facilities throughout the United States and five in Australia. Stony Brook is still looking for volunteers to participate in the drug trial.

Kim Russo of Holbrook had surgery for one of her shoulders when she noticed an ad for the study. The treatment she’d already received included four months of physical therapy, surgery and then another four months of therapy.

When she received her first treatment, she noticed a change almost immediately. “I could tell after my first [shot] that there was something just a little different,” she said. After the second shot, she was doing so well that she didn’t need a third one, she said.

Badalemente helped develop the treatment, called Xiaflex, for a condition that also involves the build up of collagen in the hand. In Dupuytren’s contracture, people struggle with limited finger mobility. The enzyme breaks down the collagen, restoring function and flexibility to the fingers.

Like a philosopher, Marshall Newton ponders the journey and the destination. Except that what he’s pondering often has to do with the movement of energy rather than the circuitous path through life.

A professor emeritus of chemistry at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Newton retired on January 1, 2009, but, by several accounts, that hasn’t slowed him down. He said retiring freed him up from the “important but time-consuming departmental and lab-wide committee meetings,” enabling him to “get back in depth to some scientific issues which I never had time to fully pursue in the past,” he explained.

Newton tries to understand how energy moves from one place — often at the start of photosynthesis — to a form of energy stored or used in another place. “What I do,” he explained, “is formulate mechanisms for a key process that typically occurs in almost all energy conversion processes.”

Theorists like Newton want to assess the possible pathways “for the efficient capture and conversion of energy.” Part of this conversion involves electronic transfer, which is usually coupled to heavy atoms that must go over a hill or energy barrier as part of the overall transfer process. That process represents something of an energy cost, the way a local diner might incur costs paying for electricity or gas.

Newton develops quantum mechanical models to analyze the efficiency of such processes. He has investigated molecular processes that may serve as components of new artificial photosynthesis schemes, either photochemical or electrochemical.

In artificial photosynthesis, researchers try to mimic the energy generated by plants from carbon dioxide, water and the sun.
Newton is “recognized worldwide for his scientific contributions combining his knowledge of electronic structure, electrochemistry and a wide range of other chemistry,” said James Muckerman, a senior chemist at BNL who has known Newton for close to half a century.

Newton, who started working at BNL in 1969, said that chemists used to be “in the dark ages” about calculating what happened on an incredibly small time scale. Theory and experiment have “bootstrapped” each other in achieving finer and finer distance and time scale, he said.

The benefit of all the theoretical work with computer simulations and models is that it can help guide future design ideas for solar cells or other energy capturing and transferring processes.

Theorists can “turn over [their results] to engineers and say, ‘This is what you should do to make optimal energy material,’” Newton offered. That, he added, is easier said than done.

When scientists try to move energy or charge, the standard problem is the dissipation or loss of that energy along the way. It’s akin to carrying a bag of groceries home from the store and bumping into walls along the way. Each time you bumped into a wall, you’d lose something from your bags. Specifically, relatively high-electronic energy from photons runs the danger of being degraded to heat and transferring charge or excitations can get trapped by “defects.”

Newton said retirement has given him more freedom to indulge his intellectual obsessions, including theoretical chemistry and other fields — both scientific and non-scientific. He hasn’t had any urge to take refuge in fishing or golf.

“The beauty of today’s life is that retirement is whatever you want to make of it,” he said. “It’s much more common now to be active retired. For the last five years, I’m doing more or less than the same things as the first 40, due to the generosity of my department and my department head, Alex Harris.”

Raised in Boston, Newton, who prides himself on not having a regional accent, lives in Strongs Neck with his wife Natika, a philosopher who until last year was also a professor at Nassau Community College. In the fall, she will teach a course in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Stony Brook.

His daughter, Erika Newton, is a staff physician at the Stony Brook Medical Center. Her husband, John Hover, is leader of the grid group at BNL, which is part of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider ATLAS computing facility.

Son Joel, who lives in Nyack, New York, is a guitarist who plays jazz and fusion with the Joel Newton Situation. The benefit of the collaboration between theoretical and applied chemistry becomes clearer over time.

“The interplay of theory and experiment is grist for historians and philosophers of science,” Newton said.