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.”

Some Chinese herbal remedies have had it right for many years, even if no one could point to a specific reason. Now, however, researchers at Stony Brook have figured out why some remedies taken as a tea for arthritis and pain work.

A chemical in the brain, and elsewhere, can send a signal that relieves pain, inflammation and stress. The reason pain sometimes continues, causing ongoing aches and discomfort, is that the body also has a system for breaking down or putting away its own pain-easing solution.

The Chinese remedy has an active chemical in the herb that is a truxillic acid compound. This is similar to a chemical Stony Brook scientists found that allows a pain relieving neurotransmitter, called endocannabinoid anandamide (or AEA) to remain active.

The body has a “natural marijuana system,” explained Dale Deutsch, a professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Stony Brook. Deutsch has locked onto one of the key players in the breakdown of that system.

Deutsch recently received a $3.8 million, five-year grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop new drugs for pain, inflammation, and drug addiction. The research involves scientists from the Biochemistry and Cell Biology departments, Chemistry, Applied Mathematics and Anesthesiology. The research also involves the Institute for Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery, and the Laufer Center for Physical Biology.

Deutsch and his team are looking to block a protein called fatty acid binding protein. The scientists are trying to figure out if preventing these FABPs from becoming active allows AEA to continue to provide pain relief.

In drug addiction, interfering with these FABPs might reduce the pain and perhaps cravings associated with removing drugs, Deutsch said.

“In theory, if you can increase the AEA when people are coming off drugs, you may be able to help them with withdrawal, and diminish drug-seeking behavior,” Deutsch said.

The drug addiction component to this system is still at the early stages, cautioned Deutsch.

Martin Kaczocha, who identified the FABP’s role with AEA as a graduate student in Deutsch’s lab and is now an assistant professor in the Anesthesiology Department, is studying how the neurotransmitter reduces pain.

The potential upside to finding inhibitors that block the breakdown of AEA is that they work off the body’s own systems and may not have the same negative side effects as the drugs currently on the market, like NSAIDs, which, while effective can also cause stomach problems.

Tapping into this natural pain-relieving system may enable patients to feel the kind of physical relief from neuropathic pain that they might get from marijuana, without having the same psychotropic effects of the drug, he explained.

Deutsch has been studying AEA for over 20 years. In fact, towards the beginning of his work with the neurotransmitter, he discovered an enzyme that is involved in breaking down AEA. Some companies are working on drugs even now that are moving into Phase 2 trials that inhibit that enzyme, Deutsch said.

What excites Deutsch about this new FABP target, however, is that it is organ specific. That means that the transporters in the brain are different from those in the liver or other areas of the body.

The studies with the enzyme, while effective, may wind up inhibiting AEA breakdown throughout the body.

With this grant, Deutsch and colleagues, including Iwao Ojima, distinguished professor of Chemistry, Kaczocha and Robert Rizzo, associate professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics and a member of the Laufer Center, can screen for additional compounds that might work on FABPs. So far, they’ve looked through a million possible options and expect to screen for an additional four to five million compounds within the next few years to get more potent inhibitors of the FABPs.

Deutsch credited the work of undergraduate student Brian Ralph, graduate students Bill Berger and Trent Balius and research assistant Liqun Wang as providing instrumental contributions.

Within the next few years, Deutsch and his team hope to partner with pharmaceutical companies that may develop drugs with them.

A resident of Stony Brook, Deutsch lives with his wife Lou Charnon Deutsch, an author and professor of Hispanic languages and literature at Stony Brook. Deutsch has been sailing for 20 years and especially enjoys heading to the Great South Bay.

Deutsch became fascinated with science when he received a chemistry set from his mother when he was 12.

As for his most recent efforts with FABP inhibitors, Deutsch said it “works in animals,” so he “knows we’re on the right track.”

Worms are fine. Mice and rats? Sure. Dogs and monkeys also have their value, especially to basic research. But what really interests Gholson Lyon are people. “I study humans because that’s what I’m interested in,” said Lyon, a child, adolescent and adult psychiatrist and researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. “Humans are an incredibly complex species.”

An assistant professor at CSHL since March 2012, Lyon is establishing connections with Stony Brook as he builds a research and clinical team that benefits from an understanding of human genetics. “Part of the reason to partner with Stony Brook is that it’d be nice to work with clinicians who have done a lot of work with families,” he said.

Indeed, Lyon worked closely with a close-knit family in Utah in which some of their sons were born with unusual symptoms and died at young ages. Starting in 1979, five boys that were born in that family over a three-decade period got some aspect of the disease.

Looking closely at the family’s genes, Lyon found a mutation that, as he put it, has a “high expression.” He named the disorder Ogden Syndrome, after the town where the first family lives. While it would be hard to develop a treatment for Ogden Syndrome, “It’s about knowledge,” Lyon said. “Giving the family knowledge that it has this mutation helps to bring awareness.”

Indeed, knowing that a child is born with this genetic change can help alert parents to find ways to avoid various symptoms for their children.

In Ogden Syndrome, boys sometimes have trouble when food goes down the wrong tube, causing lung infections. In the future, with the family more aware of this problem, parents can work with doctors to prevent sending food to the lungs with the type of food choices or with earlier placement of a feeding tube, he said.

Lyon’s medical mission is to provide and encourage other doctors to offer individualized care. “There are lots of people who want to develop drugs,” he said. “I firmly believe that identifying illness before it begins and then working to prevent or decrease the severity of the illness is far easier than trying to fix a full-blown illness with drugs after the fact.”

He said he understood actress Angelina Jolie’s informed decision to have a double mastectomy based on her genetic predisposition to breast cancer.

“Every individual has their own risk-benefit analysis,” Lyon said. Lyon derives considerable satisfaction from working with the family with Ogden Syndrome. He found it similarly rewarding to work with someone who had such a severe obsessive compulsive disorder that he struggled to function.

For many months, Lyon treated this patient with Prozac, without any effect. After doing a full genetic analysis of his patient, he realized his patient had a gene that affects the metabolism of fluoxetine, the ingredient in Prozac. If he had known that upfront, he would have chosen a different drug.

Lyon used deep brain stimulation with this patient. The effort completely changed his life, enabling him to function at a higher level and even to date. His patient got married this past summer.

Deep brain stimulation is not the current standard of care, has potential side effects and is a more expensive treatment, costing tens of thousands of dollars. Lyon, however, believes the technique — in which a machine sends regular, controlled electrical signals into the brain — will prove useful for other patients.

It shows promise not only for treating severe obsessive compulsive disorder, but also for helping with other illnesses like Tourette Syndrome.

“Now is the time to be putting a lot of effort into advancing deep brain and precision medicine,” Lyon said.

The Cold Spring Harbor researcher said he has had patients for whom even individualized approaches haven’t improved the quality of life. “Medical doctors try their best to provide individualized care to each person,” he explained. “I have certainly had many times in which I could not help certain people due to the severity of their illness and the limited resource at hand.”

Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute and the chief academic officer at Scripps Health, called Lyon a “rising star” who is not afraid to “tell it like it is.” He said Lyon, whom he asked to give a talk on the future of genomic medicine last year, is making “major contributions to get the field moving forward.”

Many expectant parents live their lives somewhere between hope and prayer. The big question, and fear, often isn’t whether the child will be a boy or girl, but whether he or she will develop in a healthy way.

The agony and ecstasy of the process was exponentially more dramatic for Gerald Thomsen and his wife Julia Todorov-Thomsen during three pregnancies that produced healthy children. Scientists who met at Stony Brook, the couple knew each phase of development for the skin, muscles, heart, brain, and everything in between.

“I tried to push out of my mind all the scenarios where things could go wrong,” Thomsen said. “There are so many complicated circuits and events.”

Indeed, Thomsen has considerably more than textbook knowledge about development, albeit with other organisms. The Stony Brook professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology has dedicated much of the last 20 years to understanding some of the signals and processes that help animals, in his case, mostly frogs, develop.

The big picture question he explores in his lab is, “How does an embryo put itself together? How do cells with different specialties — nerve cells, skin cells — emerge from a single egg cell?”

Thomsen is interested in exploring this question at the whole animal, cellular and molecular level. In his lab, he is studying a process called induction, in which cells respond to signals from neighboring cells.

When a signal, often in the form of a protein or polypeptide, binds to a cell, it often sends a signal from the cell membrane to the nucleus, where it might start or stop a genetic process.

He’s currently working on how an understudied gene, which seems to regulate cell differentiation, might affect growth. When this gene is taken away, the frog embryo doesn’t develop tissues and organs critical for its survival.

Thomsen said many scientists in the world of developmental biology look specifically at what is new about a cell as it moves from one state to another. They want to know what genes are turning on or off. To explore that, the researchers often block them or make those genes more active, to see how that influences what a cell does.

In the late 1990s, Thomsen and a student of his, Haitao Zhu, observed a protein that interacts with a set of signals that go from the cell membrane to the nucleus, where the frog’s genetic machinery resides. When Thomsen and Zhu put the gene for that protein into the frog embryo, it generated another backbone and nervous system.

“It was really dramatic,” Thomsen recalled. The gene turned out to be a key regulator in a signaling pathway, called TGF beta.

Thomsen’s work in this arena is “a major contribution to our understanding of how embryos develop,” said Amy Sater, a professor at the University of Houston in the Biology and Biochemistry Department. “It’s had applicability across all vertebrate systems.”

Sater and Thomsen have taught the Cell and Developmental Biology of Xenopus course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for the last three years. Sater has appreciated Thomsen’s sense of humor and said, “The community has a lot of confidence in [his] work.”

Thomsen has a grant right now from the Stony Brook Medical School to look at a protein to see whether it might be operating in breast or other cancers. His lab, which includes eight people, is also focused on understanding the signals that lead to regeneration. In this arena, he is studying frog and sea anemone embryos.

Adult anemones can regenerate a complex body part from a stump of tissue, he said, the same way starfish can. Frogs have a limited ability to regenerate, so he could potentially test the lab’s findings with sea anemones in frogs.

A resident of Port Jefferson, Thomsen brings special guests to his children’s classes, introducing them to adult frogs, embryos and tadpoles. His children are Liam, 7, Isabella, 5, and Luca, who is almost 3.

Initially interested in oceanography, a specialty his wife pursued, Thomsen was fascinated by biochemistry and gene regulation in the context of differentiating cells. His particular field “always has something new.”

As he felt when his children were developing, Thomsen said the process is “amazing. Even though we know a lot of detail, we also appreciate that we know these details in a spotty way.”

Katherine Bachner speaks Russian, regularly spends a week in Kazakhstan and understands Russian culture. That is why she recently decided it was time someone worked on a project that would help her colleagues connect with their Russian counterparts without committing any cultural faux pas.

Back when she was starting to work with a Russian program, she went on a trip with an American team who attended an enormous banquet arranged by their hosts. The head of the American group didn’t give a toast.

“If you’re the leader of a delegation, it’s incredibly rude” not to give a toast, even if it’s through an interpreter, she said. “That’s Russia 101 and they weren’t doing it. I thought that was very strange.”

At Brookhaven National Laboratory, where she has worked since 2011, Bachner is a part of the Nonproliferation and National Security Department. That means she works with people in numerous countries to provide safeguards for their nuclear power plants and to help detect undeclared nuclear activities and procurement networks.

In Kazakhstan, for example, she’s been helping a nuclear facility upgrade its measurement procedures to improve the accuracy of data that the International Atomic Energy Agency collects when they conduct inspections. The BNL team works with executives at the plant, with the IAEA and with a national company in Kazakhstan.

It’s a multilateral effort to “assist a partner country to improve their safeguards,” she explained.

A cornerstone of her work is “helping the U.S. government develop policies that will make the Nonproliferation Treaty more effective and viable in the long term,” she said. Much of her work is with the IAEA, which “helps implement nuclear safeguards and creates a better regime of safeguards in [other] countries.”

A self-described idealist, Bachner got into the world of nuclear safeguards because she said she hopes some day that the world can be free of nuclear weapons. “I have a passion for trying to make the world a better place,” she said. “I think the field is doing that slowly and sometimes invisibly. We need more young people working on it. It needs to be demystified.”

Indeed, other experts in the nonproliferation world believe Bachner is among a key group of professionals who will ensure a world of nuclear accountability and safety. Bachner “is part of the next generation of nonproliferation experts,” said Susan Burk, a former special representative of the president for nuclear nonproliferation and currently a consultant who has worked with Bachner at BNL. Bachner can be “an important role model for other young people who can look at her and her accomplishments and appreciate how gratifying working on these issues can be.” Burk said she is confident Bachner is an “excellent U.S. representative who is sensitive to the unique cultures of those countries.”

Bachner, who has a master’s degree in cultural anthropology from Columbia as well as a master’s degree in international policy studies from Monterey Institute of International Studies, said the results of her work on enhancing an understanding for scientists and regulators of cultural differences is unlikely to be a simple checklist for each country.

“If you’re working in Russia, the first thing the person would need to do is take a class or course in basic concepts that there are these international differences,” she said. “You need to try to learn some specific things about the culture you’ll be a part of.”

She is hoping to produce a paper that will explain the need for intercultural empathy and training, even for people with expertise in traveling and foreign languages. “If you improve your relationships with your counterparts, you improve the likelihood that the project will be effective,” she said.

Bachner, who grew up in Washington, D.C., and upstate New York, said she loves being near the water. She and her husband Eric live in East Moriches, where she swims, kayaks and bikes. She’s working on a “hilarious, fantastical book” that is in its first draft. An animal lover, Bachner has experience on two continents milking goats. She worked in Hawaii and in Mongolia, where she was performing anthropological field work.

“Central Asian goat milking is really different,” she said. “Our goats give more milk and are better fed. They don’t have to range as far. It’s kind of shocking when I came back from Mongolia to notice how plentiful our lives are.”

As for her work on nuclear safety, Bachner said she is working toward disarmament in part because “there is little that could threaten so much of the world at once.”

Doreen Ware brings her work home with her. Then again, her work is everywhere. An adjunct associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Ware studies large sections of plant genes and the way those genes affect what a plant becomes.

With the world’s population continuing to increase and the type of land for farming crops that will provide food under various conditions of stress, the urgency to find and harness the best combination of plant genes is building. “In the U.S. right now,” she said, “more than 50% of the agricultural land has been under drought conditions.”

Ware, a computational biologist in the Department of Agriculture, is involved in her own experiments with plants and helps create tools to understand the wealth of information coming from other people’s basic genetic research.

Her group is focused on understanding regulatory networks, or the genes that control the level of expression of other genes. Specifically, she studies microRNAs and transcription factors, which are protein-coding genes that bind to DNA to promote or repress gene expression. She described part of her work as “setting up resources that other people can use to do their own work. I’m a firm believer that supporting many people will bring out more product than my group can do.”

Ware is a co-principal investigator on iPlant, which is as an entity that is by, for and of the community, according to its website. She is also the administrative lead for the Cold Spring Harbor effort on iPlant.

Part of the original iPlant Collaborative grant that started in 2008, Ware and her lab members “provide scientific support for several of our collaborations in genome-wide studies,” said Steve Goff, the project director and principal investigator for iPlant.Ware said comparing genes across different plants helps scientists understand which code is responsible for a plant’s responses to changes in its environment.

Ware likened the process of understanding how to optimize different genes in her work to designing a bicycle. Bikes all use the same underlying parts, although some work better in mountains while others, like tricycles, are designed for stability.

“My group is focused on understanding which sets of parts might be important in developmental outcomes, which parts are important to environmental outcomes and which contribute to both,” she said. The conditions she examines range from less potable water to limited supplies of nitrogen and phosphorus. Unlike mammals, plants make their parts as they go through their lifestyle, in response to sunlight or other cues, signaling cells to flower or to go into dormancy or die.

In her lab, Ware has seen some results that surprised her. She was looking at two maize plants that looked identical. The regions in between the genes didn’t look similar when she looked at their exact location. “The DNA between the genes in many cases are different,” she explained. “This DNA may be regulatory” and will introduce “flexibility” differences in how and when the genes will be expressed. “When you see that they are this different, it’s pretty amazing,” she said.

Her colleagues have offered a similar adjective to describe Ware herself. “Understanding both computational analysis and plant biology is a rare combination that [Ware] and her team bring to the iPlant Collaborative,” Goff explained. “Many people in the agricultural research fields, both applied and academic, seek to benefit from [her] knowledge and reputation.”

Ware and her husband, Joseph Lanzone, a software quality engineer, live in Melville. She has a 21-year-old son, William, and an 8-year-old son, Marc. Long Island appeals to her because she likes “all water activity,” which includes sailing and heading to beaches.

At home, she has trees and flowers that bloom all year-round, giving her “something beautiful to look at” during each season. Ware also regularly attends services at her church, St. Elizabeth of Hungary.

As for her work, she turns to an old saying: You can give people a fish and feed them for a day or you can teach people to catch fish and feed them for a lifetime.

“From my perspective, I want to teach them to farm the fish,” she said.

John Tranquada, the great grandson of a Portuguese stowaway on a ship to Honolulu, was in junior high school in California when the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” came out. The iconic cover image, with John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, walking over a crosswalk stayed with him over four decades later.

In recent months, when a group of scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory were preparing to announce the results of their latest finding, Tranquada suggested that the image of the four Beatles walking across that striped crosswalk all those years ago and thousands of miles from the original location might be worth copying. Their recent experiments, after all, detected through an indirect method the fluctuating stripes in a model compound designed to study superconducting materials.

They readily agreed and the stage was set to borrow an iconic musical image to illustrate their research.

Superconductivity holds promise for future technology and innovation because superconductors allow the transfer of energy without any resistance. The cost of manufacturing superconducting cable has been prohibitive.

Tranquada has been studying the magnetic stripes in superconductors for over 18 years.

The electrons, or negatively charged particles, tend to spread out uniformly in space in a superconductor. An analogy, Tranquada offered, is water in a flat bottomed pan. It will spread out to uniform depth. If the water formed a ripple pattern that stayed in the same place, “We would be shocked,” he said. This, however, is just the sort of thing that happens to the electrons in certain superconducting materials.

While copper-oxides are superconductors, the scientists replaced the copper with nickel to create a model compound that could be easier to study. Tranquada knew from previous work that stripes form in nickel-oxide when cooled.

In recent research, he warmed up a nickel-oxide compound, causing the ordered stripes to disappear. The measurements of the team, however, indicated that the stripes still had to be present. Since they knew the stripes weren’t present in a static fashion, they inferred the stripes had to be fluctuating dynamically — or moving.

“This model system teaches us what diffraction-scattering signature to look for in copper-based semiconductors to see if these fluctuations exist,” Emil Bozin, a co-author on the study and member of the X-Ray Scattering Group at BNL, said in a statement.

That search, the researchers suggested, should lead to a better understanding of the role of stripes in superconductivity and, down the road, to new approaches to create superconductors in the energy arena.

Tranquada said his role in the band of scientists was to provide a history and understanding of the materials. “I’ve been studying these nickel oxides for 20 years,” he said.

Tranquada’s colleagues at BNL praised his contribution to the department. He is “a great colleague to have around,” said Peter Johnson, the chair of BNL’s Condensed Matter Physics & Materials Science Department. “He has a really deep and wide-ranging understanding of the field of superconductivity. He’s the guy I go to when I want to get insight into newly published results.”

Tranquada’s discoveries have “provided inspiration to the larger community for more than two decades,” Johnson said. Tranquada said scientists are looking for a convincing explanation for what makes materials superconducting.

Tranquada is excited to be a part of a team that is providing evidence that these stripes can coexist with superconductors. The experiments on superconductors “often reveal behavior that theorists have not anticipated, so it’s like exploring an unknown world,” he said.

Tranquada lives in Stony Brook with his wife Lisa, who is retired after a career that included working at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle and doing administrative work at BNL for 20 years. Their daughter Jessica, 23, graduated from Cornell last year and is revitalizing a riding stable as a “one-person design and construction team,” Tranquada said.

Their son Matthew, 27, is in Washington, D.C., where he has cleared the first few hurdles in the process of applying for a job in the State Department.

Tranquada enjoys jogging in the area and sea kayaking. His family bought a couple of kayaks last summer.

As for the picture of the stripes from Abbey Road, Tranquada said he proposed the idea initially almost as a joke, but his collaborators, which include lead author and BNL X-Ray Scattering Group member Milinda Abeykoon, liked it. They even asked the facilities and operations staff to park a red cart where the Volkswagen car was in the original album.

In the 1970s, Tranquada said he knew he wanted to be a scientist and, for about “two seconds” thought about becoming an astronaut, but realized that probably wouldn’t fly because he gets “sick on the tea cup ride in Disneyland.”

John Tranquada, the great grandson of a Portuguese stowaway on a ship to Honolulu, was in junior high school in California when the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” came out. The iconic cover image, with John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and George Harrison, walking over a crosswalk stayed with him over four decades later.

In recent months, when a group of scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory were preparing to announce the results of their latest finding, Tranquada suggested that the image of the four Beatles walking across that striped crosswalk all those years ago and thousands of miles from the original location might be worth copying. Their recent experiments, after all, detected through an indirect method the fluctuating stripes in a model compound designed to study superconducting materials.

They readily agreed and the stage was set to borrow an iconic musical image to illustrate their research.

Superconductivity holds promise for future technology and innovation because superconductors allow the transfer of energy without any resistance. The cost of manufacturing superconducting cable has been prohibitive.

Tranquada has been studying the magnetic stripes in superconductors for over 18 years.

The electrons, or negatively charged particles, tend to spread out uniformly in space in a superconductor. An analogy, Tranquada offered, is water in a flat bottomed pan. It will spread out to uniform depth. If the water formed a ripple pattern that stayed in the same place, “We would be shocked,” he said. This, however, is just the sort of thing that happens to the electrons in certain superconducting materials.

While copper-oxides are superconductors, the scientists replaced the copper with nickel to create a model compound that could be easier to study. Tranquada knew from previous work that stripes form in nickel-oxide when cooled.

In recent research, he warmed up a nickel-oxide compound, causing the ordered stripes to disappear. The measurements of the team, however, indicated that the stripes still had to be present. Since they knew the stripes weren’t present in a static fashion, they inferred the stripes had to be fluctuating dynamically — or moving.

“This model system teaches us what diffraction-scattering signature to look for in copper-based semiconductors to see if these fluctuations exist,” Emil Bozin, a co-author on the study and member of the X-Ray Scattering Group at BNL, said in a statement.

That search, the researchers suggested, should lead to a better understanding of the role of stripes in superconductivity and, down the road, to new approaches to create superconductors in the energy arena.

Tranquada said his role in the band of scientists was to provide a history and understanding of the materials. “I’ve been studying these nickel oxides for 20 years,” he said.

Tranquada’s colleagues at BNL praised his contribution to the department. He is “a great colleague to have around,” said Peter Johnson, the chair of BNL’s Condensed Matter Physics & Materials Science Department. “He has a really deep and wide-ranging understanding of the field of superconductivity. He’s the guy I go to when I want to get insight into newly published results.”

Tranquada’s discoveries have “provided inspiration to the larger community for more than two decades,” Johnson said. Tranquada said scientists are looking for a convincing explanation for what makes materials superconducting.

Tranquada is excited to be a part of a team that is providing evidence that these stripes can coexist with superconductors. The experiments on superconductors “often reveal behavior that theorists have not anticipated, so it’s like exploring an unknown world,” he said.

Tranquada lives in Stony Brook with his wife Lisa, who is retired after a career that included working at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle and doing administrative work at BNL for 20 years. Their daughter Jessica, 23, graduated from Cornell last year and is revitalizing a riding stable as a “one-person design and construction team,” Tranquada said.

Their son Matthew, 27, is in Washington, D.C., where he has cleared the first few hurdles in the process of applying for a job in the State Department.

Tranquada enjoys jogging in the area and sea kayaking. His family bought a couple of kayaks last summer.

As for the picture of the stripes from Abbey Road, Tranquada said he proposed the idea initially almost as a joke, but his collaborators, which include lead author and BNL X-Ray Scattering Group member Milinda Abeykoon, liked it. They even asked the facilities and operations staff to park a red cart where the Volkswagen car was in the original album.

In the 1970s, Tranquada said he knew he wanted to be a scientist and, for about “two seconds” thought about becoming an astronaut, but realized that probably wouldn’t fly because he gets “sick on the tea cup ride in Disneyland.”