When it spreads, it becomes more difficult to treat. Understanding metastatic cancer presents significant challenges to doctors and scientists in part because the disease is different in the liver than it is in the lungs.

Lloyd Trotman, an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has created a mouse model of prostate cancer that becomes metastatic. By exploring what happens to cells in different areas, Trotman hopes to get a better understanding of cancer as it spreads.

“New technology allows us to tag cells when they are at the metastatic site,” he said. He can look at “how they differ from where they started.”

When prostate cancer becomes metastatic, the cells “forget about their identity,” Trotman said. They become more like cells that are developing, which means they are not as dependent on male hormones for their survival. This change in their identity makes them difficult to treat with hormone therapy.

By developing these metastatic models of prostate cancer, Trotman has been able to do preclinical studies of drugs designed to treat the original disease and its metastatic form. He has worked with scientists from Cornell University, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

“We can ask if a drug specifically is beneficial against metastatic cancer and especially against the hormone-refractory kind,” he said.
Trotman’s research also explores how cancers that were in remission become active again. “Most [treatments] will not be curative,” he said. “Why? If it works, but then the disease comes back, what is driving the disease? What is it that the drug is doing wrong at the point that it was looking good? What limit does the drug need to push to be curative?”

With his model of the disease, he can track the changes in a living animal. He can see how the cancerous cells are glowing in areas including the liver, lymph nodes, lungs, and bone. “Our hope is that by making these things visible at a very primitive level, we can see it first, then harvest it, and read the sequencing,” he said.

Trotman’s approach has won him the admiration of other scientists. “For an early career scientist, his work stands out as particularly innovative,” said Scott Lowe, a cancer biologist and chairman of the Geoffrey Beene Cancer Research Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Lowe was deputy director of the cancer center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was involved in recruiting Trotman to join CSHL. “His research on an important cancer gene caught our attention,” Lowe said. He described Trotman as an “enthusiastic scientist who strives to address the most important questions in his field.”

Trotman explained that his goal isn’t just to understand how the genome works to cause cancer, but to figure out how to cure metastatic prostate disease. He wants to see where potentially effective drugs fail and to figure out what they should be doing differently. If he develops the kind of data he hopes to explore with the mouse, he would then argue that the same kind of analysis is necessary in humans, to make sure the model and the reality in humans are aligned.

While he’s focused on prostate cancer, Trotman said he would like to find a methodology that allows him to combat and understand cancer on a broader scale.

Born in the United States, Trotman moved to Switzerland when he was 2 years old. He attended high school and received his doctorate in Switzerland. He returned to New York to do his postdoctoral work at Sloan Kettering. He became a faculty member at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2007. Trotman’s Swiss background enabled him to become fluent in English, German, French and Swedish.

A resident of Oyster Bay, Trotman lives with his wife Eva Frosch, who runs the gallery Frosch & Portmann in New York City, and their sons Liam, 8, and Finn, 5.

Trotman loves summers on Long Island, where he can surf on the south shore and head to the beaches on the North Shore.
Trotman said he hopes his mouse model of prostate cancer can help uncover how cancer progresses, becomes metastatic, and resists drug treatment.

“There are many theories about how diseases like cancer evolve,” he said. His model can “help bring [the research] down to a level where everybody can see it.”

Paul Bingham and Zuzana Zachar, a husband-and-wife team at Stony Brook University, have spent the better part of a decade exploring a way to disrupt cancer’s energy supply line.

They have developed a compound that takes advantage of the different way cancer cells produce energy. With the help of other scientists at Stony Brook, including James Marecek in the Chemistry Department, they created another form of lipoate, called CPI-613, that doesn’t foster cancer growth.

“It’s like a Trojan horse,” explained Zachar, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology. “It has no catalytic ability,” which means that it looks like a key molecule for a cancer pathway in mitochondria, but doesn’t act like it.

By shutting down tumor cell mitochondria, the researchers are able to trigger several cell-death pathways selectively, explained Bingham, who is an associate professor in the same department. The scientists anticipate lower vulnerability to evolved resistance because the CPI-613 attacks two enzyme targets at the same time.

The Stony Brook team are in Phase II trials of this drug at Wake Forest University with patients who have leukemia and lymphoma.

“We saw a 38 percent response rate [among patients who were not responding to other therapies] in the first Phase I trial we completed” said Timothy Pardee, an assistant professor who conducted those trials and is performing a similar function in Phase II. While he believes the treatment has extended people’s lives, he cautioned that “it’s important to remember that these are very early results.”

The scientists have to generate significant evidence to be confident in their approach, both for basic science and for use with patients, Bingham said.

Even though the treatment has shown promise, it’s possible that cancers may respond to this approach the way they have to so many other treatments, by finding another way to avoid selective eradication. While the treatment the couple has worked on is designed to minimize this risk, they will only know whether they have been successful after extensive testing.

“Until we get more clinical experience, we can’t know that natural selection operating on cancer cells doesn’t have a diabolical trick we haven’t thought about,” Bingham said.

Robert Haltiwanger, the chairman of the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, said scientists had known since the 1930’s that the metabolism of cancer cells is different from that of normal cells. Bingham and Zachar have developed a compound that “seems to have an effect,” which means it has potential in a “wide variety of cancers.” In addition to contributing to cancer research, Bingham is also a “very popular lecturer,” said Haltiwanger.

Bingham and Zachar, who had done extensive work on the fruit fly Drosophila, began looking at cancer metabolism in the late 1990’s as a “side project.” That showed enough promise for them to transform it into a full-time pursuit.

Bingham grew up in the rural Midwest, attending high school in a small town in a farming area of central Illinois that produces corn and soybeans. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Zachar was born in what is now the Czech Republic. She moved to Ghana, West Africa when she was 10 and emigrated to the United States in 1968, settling near Chicago, Ill. She was at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Bingham was at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina when they met.

“We didn’t grow up as clinical researchers,” Bingham said. “We came up as basic, fundamental” scientists who were “drawn later in our careers into clinical work. When I was told we were going to work with people, my first reaction was anxiety for fear of doing harm.”

The researchers, who are residents of South Setauket and have lived on Long Island for 32 years, love the hiking trails.

They expressed satisfaction at the prospect of contributing to an effort that might aid in cancer treatment. Bingham said the research has particular meaning for him.

His mother, Doris Rorhman Bingham, died of cancer when he was 16. “Had she lived another 10 or 20 years, my life would have been completely different,” he said. “I still think of her almost every day.”

Zachar said the couple feel fortunate to be able to do this kind of work., “Saving other families from what [Bingham’s] family went through would be supremely fulfilling,” she said.

The human body not only defends itself against bacteria and viruses, but it also has a system to suppress or prevent tumors. Cancers, however, weaken this defense.

Sumita Bhaduri-McIntosh, an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics and in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Stony Brook University, has recently discovered a step cells take to weaken the cell’s defenses and become cancerous.

Using the Epstein-Barr virus, which causes mononucleosis and which more than 90 percent of people carry, Bhaduri-McIntosh has been able to turn healthy cells into those that divide and grow uncontrollably.

“If we take B cells (a part of the immune system) from healthy individuals and isolate those cells, we can infect them with EBV in the lab, where the virus expresses its own cancer,” she said. “This allows us to systematically examine a variety of cellular events, from minute one until we have these proliferating cells.”

Human cells have a defense called DNA damage response. This system is a set of mechanisms operating in every dividing cell that finds damage or defects in the genetic code and slows down or pauses the process of copying DNA and promotes repair of the damaged code, Bhaduri-McIntosh explained.

The virus she inserted triggered the activation and increased production of the cellular protein STAT3. Scientists knew this protein could drive gene expression and was an important ingredient in many human cancers. What they didn’t know, however, was that it also muted DNA damage response.

The results of these experiments were recently published in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

This finding “reveals a novel mechanism for development of cancer,” said Ayman El-Guindy, an assistant professor in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Yale School of Medicine, where Bhaduri-McIntosh was a postdoctoral fellow and an assistant professor. Disruption of these pathways can “lead to accumulation of mutations in our genome that can ultimately cause cancer.”

El-Guindy suggested the kind of work Bhaduri-McIntosh is doing, while filled with the potential to help people, faces financial obstacles.

“While it is unfortunate that basic research is increasingly underfunded and has suffered multiple budget cuts in recent years, Dr. Bhaduri-Mcintosh’s discovery highlights the importance of basic research to develop new remedies against cancer,” El-Guindy said.

While a majority of people have the EBV, Bhaduri-McIntosh reassured people that it is extremely rare for it to become cancerous, especially in North America.

“There are EBV-related cancers that occur and are quite prevalent in other parts of the world,” including endemic Burkitt lymphoma in equatorial Africa, nasopharyngeal cell carcinoma in Southeast Asia and AIDS lymphomas.

Cancers caused by EBV can occur in as many as one in five solid-organ transplant recipients, triggered by the immunity-suppressing drugs that keep the recipient from rejecting the new organ.

A native of India, Bhaduri-McIntosh has a medical degree and a Ph.D. She sees patients as an attending physician at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital, although she spends most of her time doing research.

“When I was going through medical school in India, infectious disease is an even bigger scourge than in the western world,” she said. “You see it all around you, with tuberculosis, leprosy and parasitic diseases.” Studying infectious disease was “a very natural connection.”

Becoming an infectious disease expert “fed the detective urge,” she said, as symptoms don’t necessarily point to a specific diagnosis.

In one case when she was at Yale, she worked with a 10-year-old boy with multiorgan failure, while his bone marrow was making blood cells that were being destroyed. In an investigation of family members, she helped discover that some of them had a mutation.

The boy had a bone marrow transplant and, from the last she heard, “is doing rather well.”

Bhaduri-McIntosh credits her success to her parents in India and to her Wading River-based family. She and her husband, Michael McIntosh, the science adviser to the Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory on Plum Island, have a 14-year-old son, Rohin, and a 12-year-old daughter, Uma. She called the three of them “absolutely, veritable rocks.” She is also grateful for the support of the Pediatrics and Molecular Genetics departments.

When she’s not in the lab or helping patients, Bhaduri-McIntosh likes to sing. She was trained in Indian classical music. Nowadays, she sings Indian contemporary, as well as Western, music.

As for her career, working with patients and in research makes her better in both arenas, she said.

They know it works, but they’re not exactly sure how. They mix ingredients with something that helps make everything happen and, like a magician, wave their wand and get the rabbit, or in this case, the clean hydrogen, they were trying to produce. Except that, in their world, nature is the one whose slight of hand remains a mystery.

That’s where Argentinian-born Dario Stacchiola and his Brookhaven National Laboratory team of two postdoctoral researchers and one graduate student come in. An associate chemist, Stacchiola is trying to figure out the small steps in between the beginning of a reaction and the creation of this form of hydrogen, which is suitable for fuel cells in cars and industrial chemical processing.

While Stacchiola recognizes the possibility of a commercial use of his analysis down the road, he emphasizes that he is on a basic scientific mission. “Our end goal is not to get a commercial catalyst,” he said. “We are a step removed from that transition. We are really trying to look at the atomic level.”

Stacchiola’s curiosity about catalysts has earned him the admiration of his colleagues and coworkers. He is “well-respected not only across the lab, but also in our field,” said Ashleigh Baber, a postdoctoral researcher who has worked in his lab for three years.

His “knowledge of catalysis, coupled with his strength in experimental physical chemistry give him a unique perspective on how to approach and tackle important issues and holes in the field.”
Indeed, one of those many holes is understanding the intermediate reactions in the water-gas shift reaction, which is used to purify hydrogen and remove carbon monoxide.

“There are at least four different mechanisms proposed” for that reaction, Stacchiola said, with each one involving between five and 10 steps. His experiments helped to “narrow it down to two probable mechanisms.”

One of the big problems for scientists looking for these intermediate steps is that these reactions are easiest to see under cold, high-vacuum conditions, where the scientists don’t have to worry about interactions between the reactions they’re testing and atoms in the air. In those conditions, some of the intermediate chemicals generated during the reaction don’t form.

Using the latest technology, including near-ambient X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, near-ambient pressure infrared reflection absorption spectroscopy, density functional theory computational analysis and scanning tunneling microscope, they were able to look behind the curtain in some of these steps at more everyday temperatures and pressures.

“We are now starting to see processes happen that we couldn’t see at lower pressures,” he said. He sees the stabilization of weak intermediates at the interface of oxide and metal nanoparticles in catalysts.

Scientists had predicted that the reactions Stacchiola studies would involve a carboxyl group, which is present in most organic acids and is made up of carbon, two oxygen atoms and hydrogen. These groups hadn’t been found on metal or oxide surfaces in this process. His research detected a product derived from the carboxyl group that was attached to the metal oxide interface of nanoparticles.

Scientists had predicted the likelihood of this carboxyl group for about a decade. The discovery of this combination of atoms was the closest thing to a “Eureka” moment he has had, Stacchiola said.

At conferences, Stacchiola has met with people who are trying to improve the efficiency of these reactions and who are looking to optimize the perimeter of oxide-metal interfaces.

Baber explained that “even small increases in catalytic efficiency extrapolate to huge savings in large-scale industrial processes.”
A resident of South Setauket, Stacchiola lives with his wife, Zulema Cabail, who does research and teaches microbiology at Stony Brook, and their 11-year-old daughter, Sofia, whose name, he said, is easy to reproduce in any language, which is helpful for a couple from Argentina who have lived in South America, Europe and North America.

As for his work, Stacchiola said he is driven by some of the same curiosities he had as a child, where he needed to understand how things worked. “I never felt very comfortable with black boxes,” he said.

Warren Stern is helping win business for a department he just joined a year ago. A senior advisor in the Nonproliferation and National Security Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stern is working on a domestic program through the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative that seeks to enhance security and response capabilities at facilities in the United States that use highly radioactive materials.

As a part of the Response Experts Group, he helps the program “ensure an effective response if there ever is an incident,” he said.

The work with the Office of Global Threat Reduction is “our first work in years” with that office, explained Carol Kessler, the chairwoman of the department where Stern works. Stern, who has helped the BNL group increase its business, “is an excellent proposal ideas person and writer, an important combination for success in this area.”

On a broader level, Stern’s work encompasses deterring potential diversion of nuclear energy into nuclear weapons, ensuring an effective response to any catastrophe, and finding the best use of technology to monitor nuclear sites. “We succeed when we deter others from taking steps,” he said. “The goal is to deter diversions by enhancing the chances of detection.”

Governments and the private sector acquire technology in a variety of ways, Stern said. He and experts at BNL and other national laboratories help these governments acquire the best technology. “When you’re thinking about something as broad as inspections and verifications” of nuclear material, it’s “not as straightforward as going to Consumer Reports,” he said.

Stern also works with a team at BNL to create a course that helps international inspectors prepare for certain types of monitoring. As the course director, he put the exercises together, which includes simulations where he plays the role of a state. The course, which is focused on hands-on work, is designed to train international inspectors related to nonproliferation.

When other countries come to the International Atomic Energy Association, the IAEA sometimes calls on experts like Stern and others at BNL to travel to other regions to compare these country’s laws, regulations and activities in the context of international standards.

Stern journeyed to Lithuania and Jordan to “examine and evaluate” their regulations. Each visit lasted about two weeks. He toured their facilities, had broad access to a range of government officials and emergency response teams.

“Often,” he said, “failures in response have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with basic lines of communication and responsibilities given to a variety of organizations. There is a false understanding of how things would work.”

Experts like Stern try to be aware of the politics of any international situation. If, for example, a nuclear facility is on the border of two countries that don’t have good international relations, he and the advisory team still encourage the need for a unified emergency response approach. “While that may not be feasible politically, it doesn’t keep us from recommending” that as a course of action, he said.

Stern is a “role model” for many people in the department “as a leader on how to think up new ideas for work that will help our customers achieve their goals,” Kessler said.

Stern spends much of his time in Washington, D.C., where many of the government agencies, such as the Department of Energy and the State Department, are headquartered.

Up until he joined BNL, Stern was a long-standing member of the government, where he worked at the State Department, directing the office responsible for developing and implementing U.S. nuclear safety and radiological security policies.

He also worked at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he acted as intelligence officer for the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research. He served as former Sen. Hillary Clinton’s nuclear fellow and adviser in 2002 and 2003, where he offered advice on nuclear energy, waste and safety and security. He was appointed by President Obama to lead the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office at the Department of Homeland Security.
Stern has two children, Benjamin, who is at Virginia Tech, and Matthew, who is in high school.
Stern prides himself on having relied on human energy to commute to his high-powered jobs in Washington, biking the five to seven miles to work each day. He has brought his two-wheeled ride to Long Island, where he enjoys pedaling along the North Shore.

As for what keeps him up at night, Stern said, “We have a long way to go to have an effective emergency response system for nuclear threats.”

Despite the back pain, foot problems, and other stresses and strains humans feel when walking, we’re pretty good at it. That’s especially true when you compare humans to chimpanzees or other primates.

“Chimpanzees, our closest primate relative, use a lot of energy to walk around,” explained Matthew O’Neill, an instructor in the Anatomical Sciences Department at Stony Brook. “Their cost of walking is 75 percent higher than human walking.”

O’Neill is broadly interested in understanding what role energy use played in human evolutionary history. He believes part of what makes humans unique is the low energy we expend when we walk.

“The energy cost of walking is largely determined by the mechanics of how our pelvis and hind limbs work,” he said. He explores what is different about the way humans walk. If energy were the equivalent of a financial budget, spending less on walking and getting around would allow humans to use those resources in other areas.

“The less we have to use in a given day for locomotion, the more we can allocate to things like maintaining tissue health or on other aspects of living our lives,” O’Neill said.

O’Neill is interested in understanding when and why the human body began to look and work the way it does. Fossils, he said, tell him when humans might have changed the way they walked from our ancestors, while studying humans and chimpanzees may help explain why.

He looks at the forces humans and chimps apply to the ground and the way their limbs move. He uses musculoskeletal models to calculate how bones, muscles and tendons work while walking. He can then try to understand how these different tissues work. One of the areas where he’s collecting data is in how much energy individual muscles consume.

O’Neill’s colleague at Stony Brook, anatomical sciences professor Susan Larson, who has worked with him for five years, called his work “ground-breaking.” For many years, she said, “researchers have been compiling observations characterizing how primates walk, but we didn’t really have much in the way of mechanical explanations for why they display many of these characteristics.”

Larson said O’Neill’s work moves beyond simple descriptive studies to explore “potential underlying mechanical reasons governing their manner of walking.”

O’Neill was recently a collaborator on a broader study on energy use in humans compared with other primates. The main result from that study showed that humans, chimps and other primates use about half as much energy in a 24 hour period as do other mammals, such as mice, antelopes and sea lions. That, O’Neill said, may be information for understanding why primates seem to live longer than other mammals.“There’s simply less wear and tear on our bodies” because of the lower energy lifestyle than other animals have.”

In that study, O’Neill contributed data from research he had done in North Carolina when he was at Duke University on ring-tailed lemurs. There, he had measured daily energy use for these primates, who normally live in Madagascar.

O’Neill is involved in other collaborations as well, including one with Larson, two other Stony Brook faculty members and a researcher from the University of Massachusetts, on a project to develop a computational model of an ape walking on two legs. Once completed, they can use the model to run simulation studies to explore different suggested characteristics of the earliest form of bipedal locomotion, Larson said.

O’Neill is “one of a handful of a new generation of biological anthropologists who are bringing new rigor in the analytical methods applied to studying our own evolution,” Larson added.

O’Neill said he would like to know more about how walking and human walking capabilities evolved. “What I want to do is take information that’s available now and combine it with what we know of living species and get reliable predictions about how a [taxon] might have walked,” he said.

A resident of St. James, O’Neill lives with his wife, Karen Baab, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook, and their infant daughter. The snow has kept them from enjoying rides out on the North Fork, which they hope to resume this spring.

As for looking out at how walking might change in humans, O’Neill, who described his own walk as “slow and lumbering,” said humans don’t need to walk the way we used to, when our “survivorship depended on walking.” As a result, he doesn’t see “a lot changing” in the foreseeable future in the way humans walk.

What humans, or any other animals, think about the world can be seen in pathways that flash around in the brain, forming connections that inform a view of anything from the smell of steaming hot pizza to directions to a rink for a roller-skating party.

Combining behavioral electrophysiology with quantitative psychophysics and optogenetics, Adam Kepecs, an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, is specifically looking at how rats report confidence in their decisions.

Looking at the frontal cortex in the brain, Kepecs studies the kinds of neurons that fire as the rat is weighing its options in the face of uncertainty. He likens the process to receiving directions to a restaurant and then following a route until there is no sign of the dining establishment.

“At some point, you will wonder, ‘Is the restaurant coming up or should I turn around?’” he said. “Presumably, the more confident you are, the longer you will keep driving. That’s exactly what we can do with rats. We can repeat [this experiment] hundreds of times a day by manipulating the instructions.”

To further the restaurant search analogy, that would be the equivalent of receiving instructions that were slightly garbled through a cell phone or where foliage obscured a sign a driver was expecting to see.
The directions the rat receives, Kepecs said, come from olfactory or auditory cues rather than visual ones. “We’re testing how you could turn this initial confidence into a choice,” he said. “We want to see how long do [they] wait.”

The analysis of the data he and his team of eight people collect comes from comparing a statistical evaluation of neurons that are within tens of microns of each other and the decisions that come from a rat that is faced with a choice about staying the course.

“This is a great statistical evaluation of how likely a decision was correct,” Kepecs said. Kepecs said these kinds of experiments enable him to study basic behaviors that get to the heart of how the rats process information and weigh that against what’s happening around them. “We’re trying to ask a big psychological question and we need to reduce it to an elemental behavior and turn it into something we can study as neuroscientists,” he said.

While Kepecs isn’t yet ready to extend his research to humans, he said the implications and applications of this research could include helping people who struggle with problems such as obsessive compulsive disorder. “If you lose confidence about your actions, you might repeat them,” he said. “This is the kind of thing [his research] is moving towards.”

Kepecs’ colleagues appreciate his approach to his research. “He is an outstanding scientist,” said Anthony Zador, the program chair of neuroscience at CSHL. He has a “well-earned reputation for being creative and innovative.”

In a separate line of experiments, Kepecs is also working with a region deep within the brain, called the nucleus basalis. Degeneration in this area has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s dementia and age-related cognitive declines.

Indeed, Kepecs recently received the 2014 Memory and Cognitive Disorders Award from the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience, which provides $100,000 a year for three years. The award supports research designed to solve problems of neurological and psychiatric diseases, with an emphasis on those that affect cognition and memory.

“This area has been a puzzle,” said Kepecs. “It’s made up of many cell types. Until now, there was no way of recording identified cells. What we’re trying to do is record from identified cholinergic neurons, to figure out what they’re telling the rest of the brain.”

Kepecs studied computer science in his native Budapest, Hungary. He was fascinated with the way the mind works. “I have a deep interest in the mind and computer science was my route,” he explained. A resident of Huntington, Kepecs is married with two children.

Kepecs said he is excited to take the next steps in linking activity in neural circuits to confidence. “How can you study anything that’s internal to your brain?” he asked. That is what his experiments on neurons and behavior are designed to examine.

His previous passport had close to 100 extra pages. His current passport, which he started using in 2010, may well exceed that. “My passport is a source of never-ending amusement for my friends,” said Russell Mittermeier, an adjunct professor at Stony Brook.

What drives the 64-year-old scientist to travel to places like Brazil, Madagascar and Suriname is the need to monitor the health of ecosystems where rare, threatened or endangered animals, including many non-human primates, live.

Mittermeier, who is the president and one of the leaders of Conservation International, encourages local communities to rally around the animals that live in their areas, meets with the leaders of national governments, and seeks donors who will support efforts to preserve hot spots — important regions where the density of threatened species is high. At these hot spots, 2.3 percent of Earth’s land surface contains more than half of all plant species and over 40 percent of all vertebrates, he said.

He helps develop “primate ecotourism, which is based on the model of bird-watching, to help get more people to see primates and get excited about them,” Mittermeier said. Ecotourism generates revenue for the communities living close to priority areas for primates, he explained. “Species are not evenly distributed across the planet,” Mittermeier said from an airport in Miami on his way to Suriname. “They are heavily concentrated in some areas. Many of those areas are severely impacted by human activities.”

Conservation International Funds, including the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund and the Global Conservation Fund “have been instrumental in funding conservation in these hot spots,” he said.

Mittermeier’s research and conservation efforts recently earned him a second nomination as a finalist for the Indianapolis Prize, a highly prestigious award given every two years to someone who contributed to conservation of a species or species. The winner receives a $250,000 cash award. Mittermeier said he is honored to be a finalist and called the award “the premier prize in wildlife conservation.”

Patricia Wright, a professor in the Anthropology Department at Stony Brook, said Mittermeier “has a reputation of being a conservation leader, putting together the big picture on conservation policy.”

Wright said the books “Lemurs of Madagascar” (2010) and last year’s “Handbook of the Mammals of the World,” in which Mittermeier was the lead editor, are a “life’s work in themselves. These field guides and references are treasures for spurring conservation awareness.”

Mittermeier’s career has taken him to places where he has been the first to see or recognize a new species of animal.

In 1974, as a graduate student at Harvard, Mittermeier was in the Northern Peruvian Andes, looking for a yellow-tailed woolly monkey when he found a small brown frog. A few days later, he collected a lizard.

About 15 years later, an expert in frogs studied some of the individual brown frogs Mittermeier had brought back with him and determined it was an unknown species. He named it after Mittermeier. Some time later, the lizard he found from that trip took his name, too. Mittermeier has had seven species, including two lemurs and an ant, named after him, while he has been the first to describe 14 species.

On his journeys around the world, Mittermeier has created some amusing, and hair-raising, memories. He has come face-to-face with tigers and jaguars. In 2010, Mittermeier was on a trip in Suriname with his two sons, John, now 28, and Mickey, now 21. He was traveling with the U.S. ambassador to that country, John Nay. On the way back from climbing a mountain, their boat turned over. The group lost sight of Nay, who was wearing a life vest, for a few moments.

“About 200 meters over, he had floated to another pile of rocks,” Mittermeier recalled. “He had a great story to tell” after his return.

Mittermeier’s children have followed in his world-traveling footsteps. An ornithologist, John, who saw over 2,000 bird species in the past year, is working towards his doctorate at Louisiana State University. A junior at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla, Mickey is doing a term abroad in Australia, where he studies reptiles and is also interested in anthropology. His daughter Juliana is a senior in high school.

Mittermeier has no intention of slowing down in his conservation efforts and remains optimistic about his work. He said he “wont be stopped by anything.” He either “runs over an obstacle or moves around it.” His passport is proof of that.

Stephen Nash’s world is populated by the bushiness of eyebrows, the length of tails, and the exact color of skin or fur. An award-winning illustrator, Nash has spent over 30 years at Stony Brook, where he has honed his craft of creating artistic renderings of gibbons, monkeys, apes, gorillas, and numerous others.

British-born and trained, Nash, who is a visiting research associate in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook, came to Long Island in 1982 at the request of Russell Mittermeier, the president of Conservation International. The combination has become a force in conservation, raising awareness of, and potential threats to, numerous primates, as well as other species, such as tree kangaroos in Papua, New Guinea and baobab trees in Madagascar.

Nash provided illustrations, compiled over the course of his career, for a book published last spring called “Mammals of the World: Primates.” At 10.5 pounds, the hard-cover book, which Mittermeier and others edited, is equal to the weight of about 67 mouse lemurs.

Animals are often not cooperative when it comes to posing for pictures, especially when a scientist would like to take a photo that reflects something unique about its physical appearance.

Illustrators like Nash, whose wife Lucille Betti-Nash shares the same profession and works at Stony Brook, use a combination of photos and videos, descriptions from available literature and discussions with current scientists to create images that most closely resemble animals that sometimes rely on staying away from human, and other mammalian, eyes to survive.

He starts by sending an email sketch to scientists all around the world. These researchers appreciate the attention Nash pays to details to make sure he creates an image that illustrates the unique differences among species.

“His care in the posing and portrayal of nonhuman primates communicates the beauty and splendor” of these animals, explained Jeffrey French, a psychology professor at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. French said Nash’s work is “unexcelled by anyone else in the business,” and scientists and conservationists “value the opportunity to have [him] produce artwork for their books, articles and press releases.”

Nash said his job is to be a “servant of science.” If, for example, one gibbon species looks different from another by the bushiness of its eyebrows, he will “do my best to produce illustrations of that.”

Technology has enabled the process to become more efficient. In the earlier days, after he graduated from the Royal College of Art in London, where he studied natural history illustration, he might have started with a preliminary version of a gorilla that needed a longer neck or a darker back. “That might have required starting a new drawing,” he said. “Nowadays, I can make changes and send back a new version, virtually within minutes.”

Nash said he loves working with colored pencils. He appreciates how he can buy colored pencils that have hundreds of colors, although he still finds he has to apply some color alchemy to create an exact visual match. He wets a paintbrush and brushes over the pencil strokes, uniting the colors.

“All sorts of special structures in nature — the iridescence of a butterfly’s wing or the special shine on a snake’s scale — might require special blending or a special treatment,” he said.

Nash has a favorite primate: the cotton-top tamarin, which was one of the first he drew. The matamata turtle is his favorite animal, while the fern is his favorite plant, and Darwin’s frog is his favorite reptile.

“Everyone should have these favorite natural phenomena,” he suggested. “Ideally, you get involved and you find out all you can about them.”

Residents of Stony Brook, Nash and his wife have a few of their illustrations on the walls of their home. They also have images of primates from the 1800s and early 1900s on their walls. The couple has dug ponds and planted native plants to maximize biodiversity in their backyard.

Nash’s wife, a birdwatcher who gets up at 4 am each year as a part of the Christmas Bird Count, has seen more than 100 bird species in their yard. “Our house and garden is an expression of us,” he said.

The couple hasn’t done illustrations of each other. While that might be something they’d consider if and when they retire, Nash doesn’t expect to slow down any time soon, especially since his longtime colleague Mittermeier remains active. “While [Mittermeier] is working, he’ll be doing wonderful things I want to illustrate.”

Stony Brook doesn’t just use bacteria, viruses, and DNA in its research. The university also seeks human volunteers, for studies in areas ranging from cancer and HIV to sociology.

Currently, the university has about 1,000 active projects that involve volunteers, including a study on obese individuals who are insulin-resistant and are prone to developing type 2 diabetes.

The human subjects are people, not data, and “without them, we don’t have advances in medicine at this campus,” said Judy Matuk, the assistant vice president for research compliance at Stony Brook. “There’s a big respect issue on this campus.”

Indeed, for 26 years, Matuk has been in charge of human subject compliance, assuring that the process of including people in studies meets various standards and includes informed participants. “We want to have the community know research goes on,” she said. Her office also wants to make sure “folks are aware of their rights.”

Matuk said humans don’t waive any right as test subjects. She also emphasized that the consent process requires scientists to spell out exactly what’s involved in each experiment.

“At the end of a discussion” about the research, “if the potential subject says, ‘What do you think I should do?’ then that process failed. The process should have all the information they need to make a decision on their own.”

When she speaks to researchers who are planning to use humans in their studies, she emphasizes that each person is “somebody’s somebody” whether that’s an aunt, a mother, a sister, or a brother. She wants to make sure people aren’t data points, the way temperature and humidity readings might be for someone studying the weather.

Stony Brook is well aware of research horror stories. One of the most famous was the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, in which the U.S. Public Health Service studied syphilis in African-American men between 1932 and 1972. During the study, people who had syphilis did not receive treatment that had become available during that time.

After that study, the National Research Act passed, Matuk said, which established the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. This group, which met in the Belmont Conference Center of the Smithsonian Institute, created a code, called the Belmont Report, that outlined a set of ethical principles that guides research involving human subjects.

The research review process in place at Stony Brook meets and exceeds federal requirements by using best practices. Colleagues at Stony Brook consider Matuk “tough but fair,” said Harold Carlson, a professor of medicine and chairman of one of the two institutional review boards at Stony Brook.

Carlson, who has known Matuk for 26 years, described her as an “extremely effective” leader, as an educator of the faculty and an enforcer of the rules and regulations with human subjects in research.

Researchers, who receive approval for a maximum of one year, are required to notify a review board if something unanticipated happens. With all the safeguards in place, Matuk said she is proud of the contributions Stony Brook has made to research fields. That includes work with drug trials on the human immunodeficiency virus.

At the same time, Matuk wants anyone participating in these studies, especially of drugs that might help treat a chronic condition or illness, to understand that “this is not clinical care. This is research. We don’t know the answer” about whether the treatment will prove more effective than the current standard of care.
Members of the Long Island community can help out with research, even if they don’t have a chronic condition.

A resident of Miller Place, Matuk lives with her husband, Jay Matuk, the principal of Cold Spring Harbor Junior/Senior High School. The couple have three children: Katie, 27, Zachary, 22 and Paige, 18.
Aside from family, Matuk said she is an active member of her temple, Beth Emeth in Mount Sinai, where she was president for five and a half years.

“When you talk about people volunteering, you always think the next guy will do it,” she said. ‘That’s a dangerous attitude to have. You want to know you can make a difference.”