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.”

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.”