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.”

Many of his colleagues are focused on the instructions the factory has to follow. Chang-Jun Liu, however, is more concerned with the on and off switch. The factory, in this case, is a plant cell’s genes, and the on and off switch are the signals that indicate when to start and stop production of a class of chemicals called phenols that are used in everything from flavoring foods to promoting cardiovascular health.

Liu, a scientist in the Department of Biosciences at Brookhaven National Laboratory and an adjunct professor in biochemistry and cell biology at Stony Brook, looked at a process in which a key enzyme, called phenylalanine ammonia lyase, gets removed or broken down, slowing or even stopping the process of producing phenols. He and his research group are exploring ways to fine-tune the concentration and activity of PAL. With less PAL, plants, in this case an Arabidopsis plant that is widely found in backyards around Long Island, produces less phenol.

“You can enhance the final production or reduce the final production” depending on “the application” scientists or industry are seeking, Liu said. “We know how this process works. We can turn down those kinds of proteins, and prevent the degradation of a key enzyme or we can increase the activity.”

How much phenol scientists or businesses desire in plants depends on the application. Phenols are a part of a large class of compounds that are made of both small molecule chemicals and larger polymers. The smaller phenolics are used in foods, beverages and cosmetics, providing fragrances and flavors. The typical example of this is vanillin.

Most phenolics have antioxidant properties and can potentially prevent cardiovascular disease, treat cancer or prevent obesity, Liu said.

Other scientists praised Liu’s ability to apply his basic research into a range of other arenas. “What’s really remarkable about his work is he does a lot of things that have fundamental basic importance in science and takes them to translational situations,” said Brenda Winkel, professor and head of biological sciences at Virginia Tech. “He’s able to take [his research] and find the practical uses of these new insights. That is really unusual.”

Liu, who worked with postdoctoral research associates Xuebin Zhang and Mingyue Gou, said other researchers have exerted considerably more energy in developing a gene regulation approach. Liu, however, worked at the protein level, exploring how to use the cell’s own recycling system, either to keep a protein that encourages the production of phenols in place, or encouraging its removal, and decreasing the manufacture of phenols.

Plants use these phenols for a variety of purposes, most notably to react to changes in its environment, either from variation in its habitat or an attack by a fungus or bacteria. “If you manipulate those phenolic compounds” Liu said, “it will increase the resistance of a plant to environmental stress and therefore increase the ability of plants to live” in harsh conditions.

Liu’s next steps are to apply this understanding of how to alter phenol synthesis to other plants, including in horticulture. Increasing phenols can increase coloration intensity among different flowering plants, he said, which might be a desirable trait for people looking for a particular hue.

He also wants to expand his study to other crops like poplar trees. Taking lignin out of poplar trees to generate paper currently requires “harsh chemicals that are bad for the environment,” said Winkel.
Winkel said Liu’s work with biofuels is a crowded field and “big deal folks have been in it forever” but Liu is “right in there with the giants of the field, making unique contributions.”

A resident of Rocky Point, Liu lives with his wife, Yang Chen, a teacher’s aid at Rocky Point Middle School, and their two children, 14-year-old Allen and 12-year-old Bryant. Liu, who grew up in China, said he has gradually started to learn to ski.

He’s been to Blue Mountain and Shawnee in the last few years and calls himself “still a learner” on skis. “It is extremely exciting when you challenge yourself and do something a bit beyond your ability,” he said.
As for his work, Liu said he feels a satisfaction about his findings. “I’m pretty excited,” he said. “We continually want to look for more potential applications.”

Michael Villaran has been able to maintain his own energy levels while he’s running long distances. The 64-year-old electric power engineer and principal engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory has completed 10 marathons.

Villaran, who has been at BNL for 27 years, knows a thing or two about other forms of energy as well: the kind that heats houses and provides electricity.

He is a staff engineer in the Sustainable Energy Technology Department, a group that started in 2010. BNL created the group when the campus became a host site for the Long Island Solar Farm, which delivers about 32 megawatts of peak alternating-current power to the Long Island Power Authority substation.

Some of the research at the station has included looking at how changes in weather affect the plant. Additionally, researchers are exploring the long-term effects the area climate has on the plant parts and system.

As a part of the solar farm agreements, BNL is building the Northeast Solar Energy Research Center. Construction of the first portion of the NSERC is expected to be completed by the middle of this month. The NSERC will support research on grid integration, energy storage and distributed energy, among other areas.
For the Long Island Solar Farm, Villaran “came up with the concept of the electric power instrument monitoring system,” he said. He has also contributed to a design with the new research facility that uses a similar electric power instrument monitoring system.

Villaran’s colleagues appreciate his contribution. He is “absolutely essential in this capacity because he can manage from a business and engineering perspective simultaneously,” said Paul Giannotti, a senior electrical engineer at BNL.

Giannotti said he has been assisting Villaran in working on the NSERC, which is “a very exciting project because it will answer many questions on the future viability of solar power stations, especially in the more cloudy regions of the northeast.”

Electrical engineers often work closely with meteorologists, hoping to get a better read on when a significant change in the weather might knock out parts of the system. An upstate partner of BNL has successfully used historical data to predict the outcome of an approaching storm on their power grid.

When he worked for Lilco, Villaran said everyone needed to provide an emergency response, because “it’s not a question of are we going to have ice storms and hurricanes,” it’s a matter of when.

Indeed, recently, BNL organized a series of utility workshops, one of which focused on applying risk techniques to utility planning, which included weather effects. That was postponed twice, once for Hurricane Sandy and again for Winter Storm Nemo.

“By looking at historical data and where and when and how severely it affects the system, they can get resources in place that could minimize the number of outages,” he said.

Villaran said BNL is working with a partner to create a high-speed monitoring system for the grids that would come at a low price, which would greatly improve the operation of the system by telling utilities when the system is in trouble and by reducing inefficiencies.

Villaran and his wife, Denise, who works in the administrative office at the Rocky Point School District, live in Rocky Point. Villaran has three sons from a previous marriage: Michael, 35, Tim, 34, and Kevin, who will be 30 this year.

After his divorce from his first wife, Villaran had sole custody of his children for several years, which meant he “had to be a wiz at scheduling. There were some days when three people were playing in three different sports in three different locations.” One Saturday, he said, he was in and out of the car 30 times. He appreciates the support of his parents, who pitched in regularly.

Villaran has been an active participant since around 1999 in a mentoring program for the Longwood School District for children with various difficulties and hardships. “Now that I have no children around, it’s fun to work with these kids,” he said.

Villaran said his team, and utilities experts, are excited about the creation of the new NSERC. “Electric utilities are interested in trying out ideas for the operation of their distribution systems,” he said. “They’ll try some ideas in a setting like we’ll make available here, before deploying [them] in the field.”

They often refuse to stop, go away, or even shut down for long. That’s what makes them such powerful killers. Cancer has an ability to work around temporary solutions doctors and scientists discover, going with backup plans to take over cells and damage organs, systems and endanger lives.

Looking specifically to alter a group of receptors, which are like docking stations for cellular signals, Sabine Brouxhon, clinical associate professor of emergency medicine at Stony Brook, has found an antibody that doesn’t just knock out one route for the development and spread of cancer, but may disable several such options. At the same time, her approach causes cancer cells to die.

The antibody she’s working with targets a specific protein, called a shed protein, in the area around a tumor. The antibody causes growth factor receptors to become internalized in a cell, where they get degraded. “We have an antibody-based therapy that downregulates” these receptors, said Brouxhon.

The receptors she’s targeting are the ones that have become the site of several treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration and are involved in breast cancer, colorectal cancer, pancreatic cancer and skin cancer.

Four of the receptors are called human epidermal growth factor receptor and are abbreviated HER1 through 4. Her antibody also works to downregulate another receptor tyrosine kinase called the insulin-like growth factor receptor.

With some of the treatments that knock out one specific HER receptor, cancers sometimes develop resistance to that therapy, using another receptor to continue in its destructive path.

“Since her therapy down-regulates many of the resistance pathways used by cancer cells, this treatment could be useful [with] certain drug resistant cancers,” said Sean Boykevisch, senior licensing associate in the Office of Technology Licensing and Industry Relations.

By attaching to this shed protein, the antibody has become effective at killing cancer in lab dishes and in preclinical mouse models of some human diseases.

The next step for Brouxhon is converting the antibody into a version that will work for humans. She estimates the timetable for this process at about two years.

Brouxhon has presented her promising results to several possible funding partners, including venture capital firms and pharmaceutical companies. Once she creates a human form of the antibody, Brouxhon will look for a specific group or patients for whom this treatment might be effective.

“We need to find that patient population that is amenable to this treatment,” she said. A possibility, she added, is a population of patients who develop resistance to cancer treatment.

Brouxhon has been at Stony Brook for five years. Previously, she had worked at the University of Rochester. She believes the support she received at Stony Brook has enabled her to advance her research. “There’s a lot of interest” in her research and she “couldn’t ask to be so lucky,” she said.

Some of Brouxhon’s colleagues praised her work and her approach. She is “charting new ground with her recent discoveries,” said Boykevisch, whose office is working with her to find a partner to take this innovation to the marketplace. She said her pursuit of a treatment for cancers is professional and personal. Her grandfather died of pancreatic cancer and that “hit home” with her.

When she was growing up, Brouxhon traveled all over the world with her family, living in New Guinea, Belgium, Australia, South Africa and Brazil, as her father worked for the United Nations and as an independent consultant. She used to hate all of the travel, but when she grew up, she realized her father “gave me a lot. I got to see a lot of different cultures. That made me stronger.”

Brouxhon and her husband, Stephanos Kyrkanides, the chair of the Department of Orthodontics and Pediatric Dentistry at Stony Brook, live in East Setauket with their 15-year-old son, James, and their 12-year-old daughter, Nicole.

They met in Rochester when she was working for Dave Felten and Kyrkanides was working for Felten’s wife, Susan. Kyrkanides had asked Brouxhon for help with an experiment.

Brouxhon puts many hours into her work. Boykevisch described her as “one of the most driven people I know.

As a scientist and medical doctor, she is eager to see her discoveries help the lives of those afflicted with cancer.”

The work “requires a lot of time,” she said. “I really want to see this go forward.”

A man walked into the emergency room at Stony Brook recently with chest pain. At first, the doctors thought he might have a pulmonary embolism, or a blockage of the main artery in the lungs. It could also have been heart disease.

Unsure of the diagnosis from his symptoms, the doctors performed a procedure called coronary computed tomography angiography. Quickly, they realized the man had 90 percent obstruction of the coronary artery.
“He had a stent put in and he was fixed,” said Mark Henry, a professor and chairman of the Emergency Medicine Department at Stony Brook.

The CCTA test allowed the doctors to perform a procedure that likely kept him from having a heat attack that might have killed him.

Michael Poon, a professor of radiology, medicine and emergency medicine and director of advanced cardiovascular imaging at Stony Brook, helps make this test available seven days a week at the school.

“Dr. Poon deserves a lot of credit,” Henry said. “We’re really happy to be able to offer that to our population.”
Henry estimates that Stony Brook does more CCTAs than any other hospital in the country. Poon advanced the state of the art at the school in terms of imaging, Henry said, while also reducing the amount of radiation exposure to “the lowest possible level.”

Poon published a paper in 2013 showing that this technique saves money and cuts down on time in the emergency room.

“Nine out of 10 times, [chest pain] is a false alarm,” Poon said. “We didn’t have an accurate test to screen out that one out of 10. We ended up admitting everybody because we can’t afford to miss one.”

This test cuts down the length of stay in the ER dramatically, Poon said. Once patients get a clear diagnosis, they don’t tend to return with the same uncertainty to the ER with the same symptoms, Poon said.

Poon’s paper on this method recently won a Minnies award for Scientific Paper of the Year. The Minnies awards provide a way for radiology experts to recognize the contributions of their peers in medical imaging. Poon said he was honored to receive the recognition.

In 2002, Poon became intrigued by the possibilities of this imaging technique when he was at Mount Sinai Hospital. He was involved with research into noninvasive imaging of the coronary artery, the tube that supplies blood to the heart.

“When I saw the early images from Germany using CCTA, I said ‘I have to learn this,’” Poon recalled. He invited the University of Munich team to spend a year with him, during which he learned about the procedure.

The beauty of this test, Poon said, is that it gives a clear diagnosis with the highest negative predictive value among all noninvasive tests. This method is also a way of detecting plaque in the heart, which can be an early indication of heart disease.

In addition to conducting research, Poon sees patients three days a week. “I’m constantly looking for newer and better ways of doing things,” Poon said.

One of the areas he’s currently working on is called enhanced external counter pulsation. He calls the system “exercising without exercising.” It makes it easier to pump blood through the body at the same time that it sends blood back to the heart while it’s resting. “It’s all done automatically,” he said. “You lay there on the bed and the machine does all the work for you.”

This treatment is approved for angina and heart failure, but Poon believes it could improve the health of people who aren’t in cardiac stress. He uses it himself once or twice a week.

Poon suggests that this system enables blood to flow to other areas farther from the heart more easily.
Poon, who maintains an active lifestyle that includes snowboarding, lives in Harrington Park, N.J., with his wife, Mei. The couple have four children, who range in age from 16 to 27. Poon spends four days a week at university housing.

Poon said he believes a combination of early diagnosis, with tools like CCTA, and early intervention is the best way to help his patients.

“Making early diagnosis without offering some help is not that useful,” he said. “Using pills isn’t ideal, either. The best way is lifestyle modification. We can use really good science to do it.”

While wines are his passion, it was the martinis that changed James Muckerman’s life. Ten years ago, the senior chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory attended a memorial symposium for the former chairman in his department, Richard Dodson.

Muckerman was at a table with Cal Tech’s Harry Gray, who was the keynote speaker. The waiters had mixed up some of the water pitchers with the martinis, a favorite drink of the late chemistry chairman. As Muckerman described it, a “well-lubricated (Gray) explained the plan to sell the Bush administration on the importance of solar energy.” Gray suggested that everyone in the scientific community ought to get behind this effort.

“By the time he was finished,” Muckerman recalled, “I was ready to sign on the dotted line.”

Muckerman said he didn’t want to continue to burn hydrocarbon reserves, adding to the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A goal of artificial photosynthesis that appealed to him was that it recycles the greenhouse gas.

Muckerman and his colleagues investigate new basic photo- and electrochemistry for carrying out the various steps in artificial photosynthesis, which include light absorption, charge separation, water oxidation, hydrogen production and carbon dioxide reduction.

The change in career direction had its risks. Muckerman had become an expert in his field and already had a regular stream of funding for his studies. It was as if he had a long-running show on television and he had to go back to the pilot stage, waiting to see if the early results merited more money.

Fortunately, following his passion and interest in this new area worked out for Muckerman, who dedicates his professional energy to working on artificial photosynthesis as a theoretical chemist.

That means he uses quantum chemistry to figure out the critical but often unknown intermediate steps in between the beginning and end of a chemical reaction.

He works in close collaboration with others in the department who do hands-on laboratory research, including Etsuko Fujita, who is the leader of the artificial photosynthesis group.

The connection between the theoretical and the practical chemistry has “a history of using basic understanding of how chemistry processes work to design better molecules for artificial photosynthesis,” said Alex Harris, the chairman of the chemistry department.

Muckerman and Fujita aren’t just scientific collaborators, but are also partners in life.

Harris said Muckerman and Fujita have an “extremely productive collaboration.” Muckerman developed theories to help explain her results, while also predicting ways to improve her performance. He also was able to learn a new field by working closely with an established experimentalist, Harris added.

Wei-Fu Chen, a research associate at BNL who has worked with both of them, described the team as “solid and highly united and has become the most pioneering in the field of artificial photosynthesis.” On top of that, Chen felt the tandem served as “wonderful supervisors and friends.”

The couple, who live in Port Jefferson, have been together since 1985. Each of them have children from previous marriages, which means all the children “regard us as their parents,” he said. Muckerman said the two of them have an unofficial game of chicken, where the first to leave the lab has to cook dinner.

“I always lose,” Muckerman laughed, although Fujita does the cooking on the weekends.

Muckerman said the couple, whose work travels have allowed them to pursue their shared interest in wine tasting (his favorite is a red burgundy, while she expressed a preference for champagne and Japanese sake), complement each other’s professional interests.

Muckerman praised Fujita’s work ethic. That incredible focus enabled Fujita to earn her doctorate from Georgia Tech in an astoundingly quick two-year period.

In addition to contributing his theoretical chemistry and weekday culinary skills to their partnership, Muckerman also offers editing advice to Fujita and the rest of the artificial intelligence group. “I’ve been correcting the same mistakes in (Fujita’s) English for 30 years,” he said.

Fujita and Muckerman realize what’s at stake in the work they’re doing. Alternative energy, including the use of artificial photosynthesis, is an area that has to succeed, Muckerman said.

“The energy problem,” offered Fujita, who has worked on artificial photosynthesis for 25 years, “is the most important issue in this century.”

Muckerman shared similar sentiments. “I firmly believe that our survival depends on developing new ways to harness clean energy,” he said, “but it’s not going to be easy.”

Frustration was mounting as the rejections poured in. His finding could potentially force a rewriting of textbooks and a rethinking of conventional wisdom on something near and dear to people: human evolution.

Sergio Almécija, a researcher in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook Medical School, had used state-of-the-art three-dimensional imaging to look at the femur (the thick thigh bone) of so-called Millennial Man, a fossil that was discovered in 2000. His finding was sufficiently different from what other scientists believed that some of them probably figured he was wrong, he said.

The bone was from an ape that lived about six million years ago, during the end of the Miocene period. These extinct apes haven’t exactly commanded the spotlight, especially in human evolution. Chimpanzees, who are the most closely linked to humans in DNA resemblance, are considered the most likely human cousins.

An analysis of this femur, however, suggests that human ancestors may have looked less like an earlier version of chimpanzees and more like a version of a fossil ape that doesn’t exist today.

Millennial Man, who was bipedal, is widely accepted as an early member of the human lineage, Almécija said. In the past, it was considered human-like in this femur bone. It has also been considered more similar to Australopithicus, like Lucy, and in between living apes and modern humans.

This study, however, shows that the femur is intermediate in time and shape between Lucy and previous apes that lived in the Miocene period, but not to chimpanzees.

“Our study shows that we should focus more attention on and understand those ancient fossil apes,” Almécija said.

He compared the femur of Millennial Man, known by its scientific name as Orrorin tugenensis, to all the living apes — gibbons, siamangs, orangutans, gorillas and chimps, as well as to modern humans, fossil humans and fossil apes. “I believe Orrorin represents a very good model of how the earliest bipeds would look,” he said.

The research paper has been translated into several languages, with people from the United States, Spain and France contacting the Stony Brook professor to discuss the implications of his finding.

Almécija came up with this idea about the apes back in 2010, but it took almost three years to find a publication that would share his work. “We tried to publish this in other journals, but some wouldn’t even allow us to share this with reviewers,” he said.

In some ways, what didn’t kill the idea made it stronger, Almécija suggested. Each rejection created an opportunity to improve the work and clarify the message. The paper has evolved and the researchers have learned a great deal along the way, he said.

Almécija received the support of department chair William Jungers, a distinguished teaching professor in Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook Medical School. Jungers discussed the results and encouraged Almécija to continue to move forward, despite the roadblocks.
Calling Almécija’s data, methods and results “novel, refreshing and profound,” Jungers said he “offered encouragement and some suggestions to improve his message because I was confident that reason and good science would ultimately prevail. And it did.”

Jungers suggested that textbooks will need to move away from the idea that living apes are the best window into early human evolution. Living apes, he continued, are specialized because they’ve been evolving for millions of years.

The chimpanzee is not a time machine that allows humans to look at a living ancestor. Miocene apes are much better candidates for what human ancestors likely looked like, Jungers said.

When the paper finally moved closer to publication, Almécija celebrated with members of his department, including his girlfriend Ashley Hammond, who is a research instructor. “She knows how hard it was for me to get this thing through,” Almécija said of Hammond, who lives with him in Port Jefferson. When the couple met two years ago while they were both working at the American Museum of Natural History, Almécija was already conducting an analysis of the femur.

The couple, who enjoy the beaches and being close to water, is thrilled to be a part of the Anatomical Sciences Department at Stony Brook, which Almécija described as the “top department in the world in functional morphology and human evolution.”

As for the next step with his research, Almécija said he wants to “understand the evolutionary changes in the skeleton of fossil apes and early hominins. Connecting the dots between a chimp and a human is not going to tell us most of the story, but only the last chapter of the book.”

They both compete in triathlons. They live three blocks from each other in Poquott and work at Stony Brook University. And thanks to a chance meeting in a park near their home, they have worked together to gather information about a medical problem that is likely to become more common as the baby boomer generation ages: Alzheimer’s disease.

A professor in the departments of neurosurgery and medicine at Stony Brook Medical School, William Van Nostrand created a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. Realizing, however, that he needed someone with an expertise in behavior, he turned to his longtime collaborator John Robinson, a professor in integrative neuroscience in the psychology department at Stony Brook.

Recently, the physically fit tandem showed how the collection of a protein called amyloid beta around small capillaries in their model of Alzheimer’s results in signs of the disease, even before the typical collection of amyloid plaques in the brain resulted in the cognitive decline associated with the disease.

The study shows, Van Nostrand said, that a small amount of amyloid buildup in the blood vessels is “very potent at driving impairment.” That could be a result of inflammation or inflammatory pathways or changes in the blood flow, he speculated.

While scientists and doctors had known about the build up of amyloid proteins in the vessels and in plaques, they hadn’t compared the changes in the affected region in a side-by-side way while monitoring a deterioration in behavior.

Van Nostrand was cautious about extending the results of this study to humans. He suggested that this result might be “an earlier indicator” or even a “potential contributor” to the disease and impairment later on.
“A lot more work needs to be done in looking at how this translates into humans,” Van Nostrand said.

Additionally, the amyloid accumulation is not the whole story, as defects in tau proteins, which are responsible for stabilizing polymers that contribute to maintaining cell structure, also play a role in Alzheimer’s symptoms. Most recent work, Van Nostrand explained, suggests that amyloid is likely an important initiator of other problems.

A complex disease, Alzheimer’s can vary from patient to patient. Indeed, there are people who show no signs of any deterioration in their intellectual abilities who have “lots of pathology, but they haven’t hit that tipping point yet,” where the disease progresses from the physical stage to mental impairment, Van Nostrand said.

As for what’s next for the productive collaboration, Robinson suggested they are interested in how lifestyle factors, such as diet, exercise and lifelong learning, help or hurt the chances of developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

The two scientist/athletes recognize, Robinson said, that their own athletic pursuits may help their health over the longer term, although the connection with Alzheimer’s or any other disease is difficult to make.

“If you ask Bill and me, ‘Do you think we’ll live longer because of this?’ We’d both say, yes. That’s a bias we recognize,” Robinson said. Robinson said he has collaborated with many researchers since he started working at Stony Brook in 1994 and called the connection with Van Nostrand one of his longest standing scientific partnerships.

As for their athletic training, the duo have traveled together to triathlons in Montauk and in New Jersey. Van Nostrand often competes in longer races (like Ironman competitions).

The two sometimes compete in the same triathlon, where Robinson sees his colleague’s feet amid the churned bubbles at the beginning of a race, while Van Nostrand listens over his shoulder for Robinson during the run.

While Van Nostrand has had a successful collaboration with Robinson, he has another collaboration even closer to home. His wife, Judianne Davis, who has been working with him for over 20 years, is his lab manager.

A swimmer, Davis has an interest in her family that is unique: she enters sheepherding competitions with her border collie. Van Nostrand has two sons from a previous marriage (26-year-old Joffrey and 21-year-old Kellen). The couple has an eight-year-old daughter, Waela, who is also a swimmer.

Robinson met his wife, Alice Cialella, a group leader of the Scientific Information Systems Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, on a college track team and the couple still trains together. The Poquott pair have a 16-year-old daughter Zoe, who, naturally, runs cross country and track at Ward Melville High School.

One of Davis’ dogs helped facilitate a meeting between the two researchers. Davis was walking her dog in a park near their homes when she met Robinson.

It’s a “strong collaboration,” Van Nostrand said, and has “worked out really well.”