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Photo by Lucas Blair Simpson © SOM

When the City of New York and the Trust for Governors Island chose Stony Brook University to lead a collection of institutions to build a new climate solutions center on Governors Island, the moment marked both an ending and a beginning.

For Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which provided a concept-level design for the institution, the announcement brings SOM and the work it will do with the Manhattan-based landscape architecture firm MNLA to a new stage.

“The work we have done is essentially through a concept level of design,” said Keith O’Connor, principal at SOM. “Now that Stony Brook has been selected, we’ll be doing much more detailed work in schematic design and design development.”

While the plans call for the biggest mass timber building in New York City, the developers of the project, which will start in 2025 and is expected to open in 2028, have not gotten into the details about all the materials they will use and where they will purchase them.

As with so many other decisions related to a center dedicated to understanding and combating the effects of climate change, the choices for the materials will reflect the center’s goals.

“It’s not only about how we come up with the best system and most appropriate design,” O’Connor said. “It has to be a holistic picture. It’s all about the full life of the materials — everything from where they originate, how they are processed and how they are transported and shipped.”

The decisions will consider the future and the way the center, which Stony Brook has named the New York Climate Exchange, might reuse or adapt the materials.

In addition, SOM and Stony Brook are committed to executing changes in the construction of the 400,000-square-foot facility, which will include 230,000 square feet of new buildings and 170,000 square feet of refurbished space.

SOM will share information related to the process.

“We need to help other people understand how they, too, can make intelligent choices,” O’Connor said.

SOM plans to implement tried and true technologies and push the envelope in doing things that haven’t been done.

“What we do with the Exchange can help move the market,” said O’Connor.

SOM has been working with mass timber in several projects, including for the Billie Jean King Library in Long Beach, California. SOM will also use mass timber as a part of the High Line-Moynihan Train Hall Connector, a pedestrian path between Moynihan Train Hall, Manhattan West and the High Line.

O’Connor explained that mass timber doesn’t need an additional finish on top of it, which allows builders and designers to use less material.

The design of the buildings will be 18 feet in elevation, which is 10 feet higher than the existing structures. Stony Brook and SOM wanted the buildings to have resilience amid future storm surges.

The goal of the Exchange is to use effective design techniques to enhance resilience.

Part of the proposal involves altering the stone sea wall, a hard-engineered armored edge of the island, and replacing it with a living shoreline that is ecologically and landscape based.

The island will have a variety of plantings to create a terrestrial and diverse habitat, O’Connor added.

Working with MNLA, SOM is coming up with plantings that are appropriate for conditions ranging from elevations of five and eight feet with exposure to salt spray up to 18 feet.

O’Connor explained that the teams involved in the project are eager to start working. The next steps will include design engineering, procurement and construction, which will “take some time.”

O’Connor was pleased to be involved in a project that is “profoundly meaningful to our city and society.” He suggested such work might occur once or twice in a generation or a career.

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H. Andrew Schwartz Photo from SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

Ideally, doctors would like to know about health threats or dangers such as diseases or chronic conditions before they threaten a person’s quality of life or expected lifespan.

On a larger scale, politicians and planners would also like to gauge how people are doing, looking for markers or signs that something may be threatening the health or safety of a community.  

Researchers in computer science at Stony Brook University have been designing artificial intelligence programs that explore the language used in social media posts as gauges of mental health.

Recently, lead author Matthew Matero, a PhD student in Computer Science at Stony Brook; senior author H. Andrew Schwartz, Associate Professor in Computer Science at Stony Brook; National Institute on Drug Abuse data scientist Salvatore Giorgi; Lyle H. Ungar, Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania; and Brenda Curtis, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania published a study in the journal Nature Digital Medicine in which they used the language in social media posts to predict community rates of opioid-related deaths in the next year.

By looking at changes in language from 2011 to 2017 in 357 counties, Schwartz and his colleagues built a model named TrOP (Transformer for Opioid Prediction) with a high degree of accuracy in predicting the community rates of opioid deaths in the following year.

“This is the first time we’ve forecast what’s going to happen next year,” Schwartz said. The model is “much stronger than other information that’s available” such as income, unemployment, education rates, housing, and demographics.

To be sure, Schwartz cautioned that this artificial intelligence model, which uses some of the same underlying techniques as the oft-discussed chatGPT in coming up with a model of ordered data, would still need further testing before planners or politicians could use it to mitigate the opioid crisis.

“We hope to see [this model] replicated in newer years of data before we would want to go to policy makers with it,” he said.

Schwartz also suggested that this research, which looked at the overall language use in a community, wasn’t focused on finding characteristics of individuals at risk, but, rather at the overall opioid death risks to a community.

Schwartz used the self-reported location in Twitter profiles to look at representation of a community.

The data from the model, which required at least 100 active accounts each with at least 30 posts, have proven remarkably effective in their predictions and hold out the potential not only of encouraging enforcement or remediation to help communities, but also of indicating what programs are reducing mortality. Their model forecast the death rates of those communities with about a 3 percent error.

Both directions

Schwartz explained that the program effectively predicted positive and negative changes in opioid deaths.

On the positive side, Schwartz said language that reflected a reduction in opioid mortality included references to future social events, vacation, travel and discussions about the future.

Looking forward to travel can be a “signal of prosperity and having adventures in life,” Schwartz said. Talking about tomorrow was also predictive. Such positive signals could also reflect on community programs designed to counteract the effect of the opioid epidemic, offering a way of predicting how effective different efforts might be in helping various communities.

On the negative side, language patterns that preceded increases in opioid deaths included mentions of despair and boredom.

Within community changes

Other drug and opioid-related studies have involved characterizing what distinguishes people from different backgrounds, such as educational and income levels.

Language use varies in different communities, as words like “great” and phrases like “isn’t that special” can be regional and context specific.

To control for these differences, Schwartz, Matero and Giorgi created an artificial intelligence program that made no assumptions about what language was associated with increases or decreases. It tested whether the AI model could find language that predicted the future reliably, by testing against data the model had never seen before.

By monitoring social media in these specific locales over time, the researchers can search for language changes within the community. 

Scientists can explore the word and phrases communities used relative to the ones used by those same communities in the past.

“We don’t make any assumptions about what words mean” in a local context, Schwartz said. He can control for language differences among communities by focusing on language differences within a community.

Schwartz recognized that fine refinements to the model in various communities could enhance the predictive ability of the program.

“If we could fully account for differences in cultural, ethnic and other variables about a community, we should be able to increase the ability to predict what’s going to happen next year,” he said.

With its dependence on online language data, the model was less effective in communities where the number of social media posts is lower. “We had the largest error in communities with the lowest rates of posting,” Schwartz explained. On the opposite side, “we were the most accurate in communities with the highest amounts” of postings or data.

Broader considerations

While parents, teachers and others sometimes urge friends and their children to limit their time on social media because of concerns about its effects on people, a potential positive is that these postings might offer general data about a community’s mental health. The study didn’t delve into individual level solutions, but these scientists and others have work that suggests this is possible.

As for his future work, Schwartz said he planned to use this technique and paradigm in other contexts. He is focusing on using artificial intelligence for a better understanding of mental health.

“We hope to take this method and apply it to other outcomes, such as depression rates, alcohol use disorder rates,” post traumatic stress disorder and other conditions, Schwartz said. “A big part of the direction in my lab is trying to focus on creating AI methods that focus on time based predictions.”

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Awards Ceremony for Bridge Contest 2023
High school students become model bridge engineers in annual contest

Jacqueline Seifert, a senior at Commack High School, won first place in the 2023 Bridge Building Competition hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory on March 30.

The annual contest puts model bridges constructed by Long Island High School students to the ultimate pressure test. Students apply physics and engineering principles to build basswood structures to a set of specifications. Then, their bridges are judged based on efficiency, which is calculated using the mass of the bridge and the amount of weight it can support before breaking or bending more than one inch.

“This competition is an introduction to the world of engineering,” said Scott Bronson, manager for K–12 programs at the Lab’s Office of Educational Programs (OEP). “At Brookhaven Lab, engineers of all types support our science goals at world-class facilities and the DOE mission. We hope this contest inspires students to explore paths in science, technology, math, and engineering and to return to the Lab as interns and future employees.”

OEP received a total 142 bridges, of which 91 qualified for testing, captured below.

An awards ceremony to honor the winners was held at Brookhaven Lab on April 6. The top two winners in this regional competition qualify to compete in the International Bridge contest on April 29 in Chicago, IL.

Seifert, who earned second place in last year’s local competition and placed 16th in the previous international contest, designed a bridge that weighed 23.47grams and recorded an efficiency of 1342.22. As the testing machine slowly added more and more weight to Seifert’s W truss design, the Science Learning Center erupted in impressed “oohs” as the load hit close to 70 lbs. Retired Brookhaven Lab engineer and longtime competition supporter Marty Woodle noted right away “that’s an international contender.”

Seifert, who will pursue civil engineering at Vanderbilt University, said it was rewarding to watch her design hit that high bridge load. “The most exciting part was the experimentation and seeing what works and what doesn’t, finding the weak points in my bridge so I could continue to make it better,” she said. “I’ll see how it goes in the international competition.”

Katherine Liang, a junior at Ward Melville High School, who garnered first place in two previous contests and 9th and the last international competition, placed second this year with a design that realized an efficiency of 1094.44.

Third-place winner Jonathan Thomas, a junior at Walt Whitman High School, constructed a bridge that recorded an efficiency of 1048.18. After conducting bridge demos in a physics lab at school, Thomas learned his design needed more horizontal support and looked to previous competition winners for potential engineering ideas.“It’s definitely a career path I want to go into,” he said.

Aidan Quinn, a junior at Smithtown High School East won this year’s aesthetic award. Quinn’s double arch design was neat with clean lines, inspired by a photo his father showed him that captured a historical moment when a pilot flew a biplane under a bridge that once crossed the Niagara River.

“I would love to major in biomedical engineering,” Quinn said. “I’m glad I was able to participate in the competition. It was a great experience.” 

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Fanny M. Cornejo. Photo from SBU

Stony Brook University graduate student Fanny M. Cornejo has been named the winner of the newly-created “Emerging Conservationist Award” presented by the Indianapolis Prize. This award recognizes professional wildlife conservationists, biologists and scientists under 40-years of age who are working to make strides in saving animal species from extinction.

Cornejo, a Peruvian primatologist, anthropologist and the executive director of Yunkawasi, an organization that works with Amazonian and Andean communities for the conservation of threatened species through sustainable economic development and protected area management approach, was selected from among 10 finalists. She will receive $50,000 provided by the Kobe Foundation to continue the conservation work of Yunkawasi.

Cornejo is being recognized for her more than 15 years dedicated to the conservation and research of the yellow-tailed woolly monkey, a primate species that only inhabits the montane forests of Peru and is critically endangered due to human unsustainable activities that have generated the loss of over 80% of its population.

Cornejo is a member of the Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences (IDPAS) at Stony Brook University and works in the Pat Wright Lab, where she focuses on the study of primates and big mammals, focusing on diversity, ecological studies as well as conservation activities to protect forests and improve the livelihoods of local and indigenous communities. Cornejo has also conducted research on the black and white ruffed lemurs in Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar. Her graduate mentors are Professors Patricia C. Wright and Liliana Dávalos.

“Fanny lives and breathes conservation. Her energy, her motivation and her success are part of her very being. What a joy to hear that her talents and hard work have been recognized with this inaugural Emerging Conservationist Prize. What an honor for Stony Brook and an honor for Peru!” said Professor Patricia Wright, Distinguished Service Professor and Herrnstein Professor of Conservation Biology.

“Fanny was always a stand-out and it’s fantastic, but not surprising, that her talents and contributions continue to go above and beyond and to be recognized,” said Professor Carl Safina, Holder of the Endowed Chair for Nature and Humanity.

“Fanny is leading the next generation of conservationists to protect nature and inspire people to care for our world. The depth of accomplishments set her apart from the other nominees. I can’t wait to see the impact of her career in conservation,” added Indianapolis Zoological Society President and CEO Dr. Rob Shumaker.

Cornejo will be formally recognized as the 2023 Emerging Conservationist at the Indianapolis Prize Gala presented by Cummins Inc. in downtown Indianapolis on Sept. 30, 2023.

“I am very honored and grateful for this recognition that is not only for me, but also for my entire team, the people we work with, our partners in local communities, governments and our donors. Undoubtedly, being the first winner of the Emerging Conservationist Award and from an organization as important as the Indianapolis Prize is a great recognition for our work in Peru,” said Cornejo.

The Emerging Conservationist finalists were selected through a two-stage selection process, where a review committee evaluated and narrowed the application pool to 10 finalists. Those finalists were then evaluated by a selection committee who chose Cornejo the winner.

The Indianapolis Prize recognizes the world’s leading conservationists whose work provides future generations with replicable and actionable conservation practices. The finalists of the Emerging Conservationists represent the people we can rely on to save species worldwide. Stony Brook University Professors Patricia Wright (2014) and Russ Mittermeier (2018) have both been awarded the Indianapolis Prize.

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About the Indianapolis Prize

The Indianapolis Prize recognizes and rewards conservationists who have achieved major victories in advancing the sustainability of an animal species or group of species. Since 2006, the Indianapolis Prize has given more than $5.6 million in unrestricted cash awards. The Indianapolis Prize is administered by the Indianapolis Zoological Society, Inc.

About Stony Brook University

Stony Brook University — New York’s flagship university and No. 1 public university — is going far beyond the expectations of today’s public universities. It is part of the State University of New York (SUNY) system. With more than 24,000 students, more than 2,800 faculty members, more than 200,000 alumni, a premier academic healthcare system and 18 NCAA Division I athletic programs, Stony Brook is a research-intensive distinguished center of innovation dedicated to addressing the world’s biggest challenges. The university embraces its mission to provide comprehensive undergraduate, graduate and professional education of the highest quality, and is ranked among the top 35 public universities by Forbes and one of the top 80 universities in the nation by the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges listing. Fostering a commitment to academic research and intellectual endeavors, Stony Brook’s membership in the Association of American Universities (AAU) places it among the top 65 research institutions in North America. The university’s distinguished faculty have earned esteemed awards such as the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, Indianapolis Prize for animal conservation, Abel Prize and the inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. Stony Brook has the responsibility of co-managing Brookhaven National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy — one of only eight universities with a role in running a national laboratory. Providing economic growth for neighboring communities and the wider geographic region, the university totals an impressive $7.23 billion in increased economic output on Long Island. Follow us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/stonybrooku/) and Twitter(@stonybrooku).

About Yunkawasi

Yunkawasi is a Peruvian non-profit, dedicated to the sustainable development of the territory and the conservation of its biodiversity to achieve the well-being of different human groups. They have more than 16 years of experience working hand in hand with state, civil and private partners for the design and implementation of conservation projects in key ecosystems. Yunkawasi works in various ecosystems, from coastal to Amazonian landscapes, with a focus on conservation and management of protected natural areas, sustainable socioeconomic development, participatory research, and communication and environmental education. They promote an inclusive society that sustainably manages its natural resources, values the benefits they provide, and defend their natural and cultural heritage.

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Johanna Mitra was part of the rescue team to save the endangered greater bamboo lemur.

By Daniel Dunaief

Johanna Mitra traveled a long way from her childhood home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to join an effort to save the critically endangered greater bamboo lemur.

A graduate of Stony Brook University, Mitra took a class led by Distinguished Professor Patricia Wright that set her on a memorable and extraordinary course.

Mitra “came up to me after class and asked if she could help” with her research and with conservation, Wright recalled.

Johanna Mitra was part of the rescue team to save the endangered greater bamboo lemur.

Mitra started by cataloging photos for about three months twice a week. Wright saw that Mitra had been writing blogs for an environmental nonprofit and had asked Mitra if she’d like to apply for the opening as the Communications Officer at Centre ValBio, a research station Wright created in Madagascar.

“The next thing I knew, a couple of months [and an undergraduate degree in Ecosystems and Human Impact] later, I was packing a bag to go to Madagascar!” Mitra explained in an email.

Mitra sent her parents, Nilo and Ursula Mitra, a group photo where it was “fairly evident that she was the youngest person and only woman,” Nilo Mitra said in an interview.

The Mitra parents felt reassured that the research station had been around for decades and that a large number of foreign researchers use the site, which gave her parents confidence that the team would be able to deal with any safety or health issues that arose during the translocation.

Still, that didn’t completely allay Nilo Mitra’s concerns when he learned about the crocodiles that lived in some of the rivers his daughter would cross.

After watching nature shows, Mitra’s father cautioned her not to stand too close to the shore. While she was away, he also wished he had told her not to go too close to the reeds, as crocodiles hide there before attacking.

Mitra’s trip didn’t involve any hair raising interactions with crocodiles. In fact, she felt disappointed because she “would have liked to see one – from a safe distance,” she said.

Mitra and the translocation team encountered individual zebus, which are a type of cow with a lump behind its head that makes it look like it’s wearing shoulder pads.

Mitra “could sense hesitation and tentativeness in the group when we were hiking” as the group gave the animal, which can be aggressive in defending its turf, a wide berth.

During the two-day trip to translocate the lemurs, Mitra rode in a car, truck, and canoe. When the roads, which were severely damaged by the raging waters and 80 mile per hour winds of Cyclone Freddy, were impossible to navigate, she and the team traversed difficult terrain on foot.

She hiked along rolling hills that “looked very beautiful but were degraded,” Mitra said. She walked up and down hills that had deep patches of mud.

The team also crossed streams, walked through rice paddies and fields and climbed steep, rocky slopes.

Johanna Mitra on a trip to NYC. Photo by Nilo Mitra

Fortunately for Mitra, the group hired porters to carry the equipment and her backpack. She only had responsibility for maneuvering herself and a camera bag. 

During the hike, she was concerned about getting a camera she had borrowed to document the journey wet, particularly when she was traveling in a canoe that sat low in the water.

When she waded through streams, she hoisted the camera on her shoulder or near her head.

Back home in Manhattan, her parents watched three videos about Madagascar, studied local roads and tried to track their daughter’s whereabouts.

When her journey started, they were able to track her phone for about 90 minutes, until the signal “vanished off the face of the Earth,” her father said.

After several days, her mother called Wright to ask if she’d heard anything. Wright assured her that the crew was fine and they had completed their mission of trying to bring back enough greater bamboo lemurs to increase the population from the current number of about 1,000.

“We are extraordinarily proud” of the work she did to get the job and to help in this conservation effort, her father said.

As for the experience, Mitra expressed awe at the opportunity.

“The whole thing felt unreal,” Mitra said. “I felt like I was a part of something incredibly meaningful.” The expedition “made it clear that a lot goes into saving species, but it’s worth it,” she concluded, despite the few rapid heart beats from her proud, concerned and supportive parents.

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Greater bamboo lemurs wait in cages at Centre ValBio before being released into a large quarantine enclosure inside the Ranomafana National Park. Photo by Johanna Mitra
Members of Centre ValBio transfer 10 greater bamboo lemurs.
Members of Centre ValBio transfer 10 greater bamboo lemurs.
Members of Centre ValBio transfer 10 greater bamboo lemurs.
A greater bamboo lemur feeds on bamboo. Photo by Johanna Mitra

By Daniel Dunaief

Patricia Wright
Photo by Sam Levitan, Sam Levitan Photography

Patricia Wright isn’t getting much sleep these days.

Distinguished Professor in Anthropology at Stony Brook University, Wright recently orchestrated the translocation of 10 critically endangered greater bamboo lemurs to Ranomafana National Park, a park in Madagascar that she helped create and which has been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The conservation effort, which Wright had been working on since 2014, is designed to lower the risk that this particular lemur, which weighs about six pounds and has grey brown fur and white ear tufts, will go extinct.

Short on bamboo, which, as their name suggests, is their primary food source, greater bamboo lemurs, which are down to as few as 1,000 individuals, have been eating manioc and raiding farmer’s rice paddies. The people who farm these crops have hunted the greater bamboo lemur and used slingshots to hurl stones at them. 

The lemurs “think the rice is perfectly great,” said Wright. Some of the Malagasy people have injured or killed these lemurs. Two of the translocated lemurs have eye injuries.

Wright, who is teaching at Stony Brook this spring, applied for permits from a number of government officials to get the effort approved. 

From Stony Brook, she has been managing the care of these lemurs, often long after she might otherwise be asleep. During an acclimation period, the lemurs live, eat and interact in a large cage near the research station Centre ValBio and will be released into the wild within the next few weeks.

“I’m up every night texting,” Wright said. “When anything comes up, I give my advice.”

She said the process of watching these lemurs from afar is akin to those early days of parenting.

“You drift off, sleep for a couple of hours then you have to wake up and answer this or that problem,” said Wright, whose work with lemurs has won her numerous awards, including the Indianapolis Zoo Prize. 

Bamboo chefs

Wright has considerable help in working with and protecting the greater bamboo lemurs. While the rare lemurs are guests at Centre ValBio (CVB), about a dozen people are working with them each day, with five people going out daily to collect bamboo to feed them.

When the lemurs first arrived, they fought at night. The caretakers discovered that these primates were searching for food. By providing more bamboo, the staff at CVB ended the evening conflicts.

Johanna Mitra, a recent Stony Brook University graduate and the Communications Officer at CVB, attended the capture of these lemurs and has had the opportunity to observe them interacting in the cage.

She watched as an adult lemur sat facing two juveniles. The adult pulled up the bamboo shoot and the three of them took turns gnawing on it. After eating for about half an hour, the juveniles cuddled with the adult females.

Collaboration efforts

In addition to relying on her past experience working with primates at Duke University in the 1980’s and 1990’s, Wright collaborated with Dr. Mónica Ramírez, IUCN Species Survival Commission-Specialist, who is an expert in the relocation of woolly monkeys in Colombia.

Ramírez urged Wright to transport the monkeys in separate cages to reduce stress and overcrowding during the journey. Ramírez also wanted to ensure that the monkeys could see and hear each other. She recommended constant monitoring during transport. Stress could reduce how much food they ate.

Despite the lengthy journey, the lemurs traveled comfortably and ate along the way. Ramírez said that translocations can and often are emotionally taxing for conservationists.

“When I started working with translocations, it was so difficult for me to maintain calm because there are many factors that one cannot control, mainly after the release,” she explained.  “We do our best to guarantee the welfare of the individuals and the people involved.”

Bigger picture

In addition to the satisfaction of preventing a species on the brink of elimination from disappearing, Wright suggested that saving these lemurs could have numerous benefits. For one thing, these lemurs eat large quantities of bamboo, which contains cyanide. Such bamboo would be toxic to human systems. Learning how these animals tolerate and remove such a dangerous element could prove helpful.

Guides in Madagascar involved with the bio-tourism effort also appealed to Wright to save this species, which has unusual vocalizations that vary according to their circumstance. “It’s an important tourist attraction,” Wright said.

Questions on release

When Wright and her team release these translocated lemurs back into the wild, they recognize the enormous number of unknowns.

Predators such as fossa (pronounced “foo sah), hawks and eagles hunt lemurs. Fossa, which is a relative of the mongoose, hunt cooperatively.

Wright hopes the translocated lemurs “understand what a predator is” and take steps to stay alive.

Even before the release of these lemurs, Ranomafana National Park is home to one adult female greater bamboo lemur named Simone, who joined a social group with the golden bamboo lemur, which is half her size.

Wright doesn’t know how Simone, who grooms golden bamboo lemurs but doesn’t receive grooming from them in return, will react to her own species. “What happens when she finds out her own species are in the neighborhood?” Wright asked. “It’s going to be very exciting.”

She might encourage her new lemur family to attack or might ditch her adopted social group for the well-traveled members of her own species.

Ramirez suggested that recruiting and educating the public in conservation would increase the likelihood of its success.

“Involving the community in the project is essential to guarantee the security of both the people and the animals,” she said.

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Kyle Swentowsky in front of the maize fields at CSHL’s Upland Farm preserve. Photo courtesy of CSHL

By Daniel Dunaief

Farmers typically plant the sweet corn that fills Long Islander’s table some time between late April and June, with flavorful yellow kernels ready to eat about eight weeks later.

But what if corn, which is planted and harvested on a typical annual crop schedule, were perennial? What if farmers could plant a type of corn that might have deeper roots, would become dormant in the winter and then grew back the next year?

Kyle Swentowsky, holding corn on the north fork of Long Island.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory postdoctoral researcher Kyle Swentowsky, working in the lab of  Professor Dave Jackson, is interested in the genetics of perennial grasses, which includes maize, wheat, rice, barley, sorghum and others. He uses maize as a model.

Extending the work he did as part of his PhD research at the University of Georgia, Swentowsky, who arrived at CSHL in July of 2021, is searching for the genes that cause the major differences between annual and perennial grasses.

Kelly Dawe, who was Swentowsky’s PhD advisor, described him as “passionate” “diligent” and “thoughtful.” Dawe explained that perennials have been beneficial in the farming of other crops. Perennial rice has enabled farmers to save 58.1 percent on labor costs and 49.2 percent on input costs with each regrowth cycle, Dawe explained, adding, “The rice work is much farther along, but could have a similar impact on corn.”

Aside from producing crops over several years without requiring replanting, perennial corn also has several other advantages. Perennials, which have deeper roots, can grow in soil conditions that might not be favorable for annual crops, which can help stabilize the soil and expand the range of farmable land.

Recently, people have also considered how scientists or farmers might take some of the sub-properties of perennials and apply them to annual crops without converting them to perennials. Some annuals with perennial traits might stay green for longer, which means they could continue the process of photosynthesis well after annuals typically stop.

A complex challenge

Scientists have been trying to make perennial corn for about 50 years. The perennial process is not as simple as other plant traits.

“We don’t understand all the underlying sub properties of being perennial,” Swentowsky said. “It’s very complicated and involves a lot of regions in the genome. My work aims to get at some of these sub traits and genomic loci that are involved in this process.”

In his work, Swentowsky is interested in the sub traits that the major genes control. He expects that a reliable perennial corn wouldn’t make the annual variety obsolete. Even after researchers develop an effective perennial corn, farmers may still cultivate it as an annual in some environments.

In the bigger picture, Swentowsky, like other plant researchers at CSHL and elsewhere around the world, recognizes the challenge of feeding a population that will continue to increase while climate change threatens the amount of arable land.

Plant breeders need to continue to come up with ways to increase crop yield to boost food production, he suggested. While some people have considered dedicating resources to back up plans like astro-botany — or growing crops in space — Swentowsky suggested this was challenging and urged ongoing efforts to produce more food on Earth.

Impressed with the way Matt Damon’s character in the movie The Martian farms potatoes on the Red Planet, Swentowsky suggested that such an agricultural effort would be challenging on a large scale in part because of the extreme temperature variations.

As for work on Earth, perennial corn may also remove more carbon dioxide from the air, reducing the presence of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Swentowsky cautioned that the idea of carbon farming is still relatively new and researchers don’t know what would make a good carbon farming plant yet. At this point, his work has involved breeding and back crossing corn plants. Once he develops a better idea of what genes are involved in the perennial life cycle, he will consider taking a trans-genetic approach or use the gene editing tool Crispr to test the effects of the involved genes.

Swentowsky expects that several genetic changes may be necessary to develop a perennial plant. He and others have mapped the master regulators of perenniality to three major genes. He believes it’s likely that dozens or even hundreds of other genes scattered throughout the genome play a small role influencing perennial sub-traits.

California roots

A current resident of Long Beach, Swentowsky grew up in Sacramento, California. He earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of California at Santa Barbara. After six years, he was “tired of perfect weather,” he laughed. He would sweat through football games in January, when it was 80 degrees amid a cloudless sky.

As an undergraduate, he took a plant development course and appreciated the elegant way scientists tested plants. His two favorite scientists are Gregor Mendel, whose pioneering pea work led to the field of modern genetics, and Barbara McClintock, a former CSHL scientist whose Nobel Prize winning research on corn led to an understanding of transposable elements, or jumping genes in which genes change position on a chromosome. 

Outside of the lab, Swentowsky enjoys traveling, including camping and backpacking, spending time on the beach, attending reggae, alternative, classic rock, hip hop and electric concerts and going to breweries. During the winter, his favorite beers are stout and porter. In warmer weather, he imbibes sour IPA.

Swentowsky doesn’t just study corn: he also enjoys eating it. One of his favorites is elote, or Mexican street corn. He grills the corn on a barbecue, covers it with mayonnaise and cotija cheese and sprinkles lyme or chili powder on it.

Swentowsky, who is funded through the summer of 2025 at CSHL, appreciates the opportunity to contribute to work that could support future farming efforts. He hopes that studying perenniality in corn could have future applications.

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Ogochukwu Enekwizu with a suite of instruments at Brookhaven National Laboratory to make and study soot-seeded clouds. Photo courtesy of BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

Combining forces to form a three-part team, they strive to understand processes that are as visually stunning and inspirational as they are complex and elusive.

Clouds, which are so important to weather and climate, are challenging to understand and predict, as numerous processes affect properties at a range of scales.

A team from Brookhaven National Laboratory has provided the atmospheric sciences community with a host of information that advances an understanding of clouds.

In the atmospheric sciences community, “we typically talk about the three legs of a stool: modeling/ theory; field measurements; and targeted laboratory studies,” explained Arthur Sedlacek, Chemist in the Environmental and Climate Science Department.

Sedlacek conducts field experiments by collecting air samples from clouds in a range of locations such as flying through wildfire plumes.

In the beginning of 2021, BNL added postdoctoral researcher Ogochukwu Enekwizu to bolster another leg of that stool. Enekwizu conducts the kind of laboratory studies that provide important feedback and data for the work of Sedlacek and cloud modelers like Nicole Riemer, Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.

Enekwizu studies how soot aerosols from wildfires influence the lifetime and formation of clouds. She’s also investigating how soot-cloud interactions affect the absorption and scattering of light by soot particles.

Wildfires provide kindling for the climate, as fires release warming agents that contribute to increases in global temperatures which result in more wildfires. By determining how these smaller scale processes in soot affect clouds, Enekwizu can reduce the so-called error bars or level of uncertainty in the models other scientists create and that rely on the data she develops.

Enekwizu’s collaborators appreciate her contribution. As a modeler, Riemer suggested that Enekwizu’s work provided key information.

“While the microscale processes of soot restructure are incredibly complicated, [Enekwizu] was able to boil it down to a few simple parameters,” Riemer explained. “This makes it feasible to implement this process in a model like ours, which look at aerosol populations, not just a few individual particles. From there, we can come up with ways to implement this knowledge into climate models, which are still much more simplified than the model that we are developing.”

Sedlacek, who is her supervisor, suggested that Enekwizu’s work is “now on the cusp of answering important questions of how aerosols interact with clouds.” He descried her set up as “truly unique” and expects her results to inform the community about wildfire aerosol-cloud interactions and will offer guidance on other necessary field measurements.

In broader research terms, wildfires can be important for the ecosystem, as they remove decaying material, clear out underbrush, release nutrients back into the soil and aid the germination of seedlings

The increasing frequency, duration and intensity of these fires has been important to the scientific community. The general public has become increasingly aware of its importance as well, Enekwizu said.

Collaborations

Recruited to BNL by Sedlacek and Atmospheric Scientist Ernie Lewis, Enekwizu is considering collaborations with other researchers at BNL.

She has started speaking with scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials about exploring soot microstructure in a planned joint collaboration with her New Jersey Institute of Technology PhD advisor Dr. Alexie Khakizov. For this effort, Enekwizu has been in discussions with Dmitri Zakharov, who is in charge of the environmental transmission electron microscope at the CFN.

She hopes to take samples and introduces forces under a controlled environment in the transmission electron microscope to see how that affects the structure of soot in fine detail.

Looking at the news with one wildfire event after another, Enekwizu feels compelled to conduct research in the lab and share data amid “a heightened sense of urgency to get this work done” and to share it with the world at large.

Scientific origins

Born in the southeastern part of Nigeria in Enugu and raised in Enugu, Lagos and Abuja, Enekwizu developed an interest in science at 13. She enjoyed classes in a range of sciences and said chemistry was her favorite.

“I knew I was not going to go into medicine because I was squeamish,” she said.

Chemical engineering fascinated her and also appeared to offer career opportunities.

During a chemical engineering internship, she worked at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation where she learned about flaring practices. It inspired her final year project on biogas as a renewable energy source and sparked her curiosity on the fate of pollutants and particulate matter that arise from legal and illegal flaring activities. 

In flaring, companies burn off excess gas to control pressure variations, increasing the safety of the operation at the expense of burning a potential resource.

When Enekwizu was at NJIT, Lewis, who is a longtime collaborator with Sedlacek, reached out to Khakizov to inquire about someone with a background in carbonaceous aerosols. After interviewing with Lewis, Sedlacek and others, Enekwizu received the job offer and began working in January of 2021.

A resident of Ridge, Enekwizu, who goes by the name “Ogo,” enjoys festivals and events around Long Island. She also appreciates the area’s ubiquitous beaches and has delighted in strawberry picking.

She hopes to explore Montauk later this spring or summer.

Mentoring

Enekwizu is passionate about mentoring students, particularly those who might be under represented in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine.

She served as a graduate student mentor for Divyjot Singh, who was an undergrad at NJIT. Enekwizu taught Singh, who had grown up in Bhopal, India and had only been in the United States for six months when they met, “how to come up with research questions, how to develop hypotheses, how to write a proposal, how to make good presentations for conferences and everything in between,” he explained in an email.

While working with her, Singh found his passion for research and decided to pursue a PhD. 

Enekwizu is also passionate about supporting young women in science. She suggested that young black girls sometimes feel intimidated by STEM classes and careers. She urges a hands on approach to teaching and hopes to be a role model.

“If young girls see people like me thrive in STEM, they’ll be encouraged not to give up,” she said. “That is a huge win, in my opinion.”

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From left, Isabella Colombo, Konstantine Rountos, and Mackenzie Minder with their research paper. Photo from Konstantine Rountos

By Daniel Dunaief

Good news for shellfish eaters on Long Island.

According to a baseline study conducted by recent St. Joseph’s University graduates in the lab of Associate Professor Konstantine Rountos, oysters and hard clams have less microplastics than they do in other areas in the United States and the world.

Caused by the breakdown of larger plastic pieces, pellets used in plastics manufacturing and from micro beads that can be a part of cosmetics, microplastics are found throughout the world and can float around waterways for extended periods of time.

Konstantine Rountos

Filter feeders like clams and oysters, which play a key environmental role in cleaning local water, could accumulate microplastics. Researchers don’t yet know the potential harm to humans from consuming shellfish with microplastics.

“I was optimistic that the concentrations are lower than with shellfish in other countries and definitely in other areas of the United States, so that’s a positive for Long Island shellfish growers,” Rountos said. “It’s good for seafood lovers, too.”

To be sure, Rountos cautioned that more research was necessary to explore the concentrations of smaller microplastics to provide a more complete understanding of the accumulation of these particles. Nonetheless, he described this step in the study as “positive.”

In other areas of the country, previous studies revealed a higher concentration of microplastics in local shellfish. In the lower Chesapeake Bay, researchers found concentrations of 5.6 to 7 microplastics per gram of soft tissue in eastern oysters, while other scientists found concentrations of 0.56 to 2.02 microplastics per gram in soft tissue in oysters and 0.38 to 1.99 microplastics per gram of soft tissue weight in hard clams.

By contrast, Rountos, Mackenzie Minder, who is the first author on the paper, and Isabella Colombo discovered in their study of 48 oysters at four sites on Long Island was 1,000 times lower with eastern oysters. They also discovered no microplastics in hard clams at two sites around the island.

The lower numbers on Long Island may also be a product of the sieve size Rountos and his students used, which may not have captured smaller particles.

In a paper published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, Mackenzie, Colombo and Rountos suggested that one potential explanation for the difference in microplastics concentrations could arise from the potentially lower levels of microplastics in the surrounding water.

Other proposed studies are exploring the concentration of microplastics in local waterways.

Gordon Taylor, Professor and Division Head in Marine Sciences and Director of the NAno-Raman Molecular Imaging Laboratory, has two grant applications pending to sample Long Island waters, including the Long Island Sound, Peconics, Great South Bay and the New York Bight. His plan is to sample true microplastics in the water, through beach surveys and microplastics eaten by zooplankton.

Taylor will combine these observations with physical oceanography to model where these particles originate and where they are going.

Bringing research to the classroom

From left, Isabella Colombo and Mackenzie Minder with their research paper.
Photo from Konstantine Rountos

For Minder and Colombo, both of whom are now teaching on Long Island, publishing their work offered a welcome and exciting conclusion to their college studies, while also giving them ways to inspire their students.

“This allows me to bring real life experience [in research] into the classroom,” said Minder. “It’s important to me to connect to children certain concepts of what they see in everyday life. Pollution could potentially impact our waterways to the point where it could be getting into our food supplies and could affect us physically and mentally.”

Minder said the study “opened my eyes to see how subconsciously we are putting plastics in the environment” through activities like washing synthetic fibers.

A fleece with synthetic fibers has “plastics that you wash and those fibers end up in the water,” Rountos said.

Some cosmetics such as exfoliators used to have microspheres that ended up in the water. Many cosmetic companies are now using bits of coconuts for grittiness.

Undergrad power

Rountos appreciated the reaction from Minder and Colombo, who earned degrees in adolescent biology education, when he suggested they could publish their research. He said his two former students “dove in head first” and the three had regular meetings to draft the manuscript and address reviewer’s revisions and recommendations.

Minder and Colombo are pleased with the paper “It’s shell shocking,” Minder said. 

A resident of Hauppauge, Minder, whose hobbies include crocheting and reading, appreciates how her family has been showing copies of the paper to their friends and enjoys seeing the paper on refrigerators in her parents’ and grandmother’s homes.

A resident of Sayville, Colombo is serving as a building substitute for students who are 10 to 14 years old.

The research experience taught Colombo the value of communication, dedication and responsibility, which she has brought to the classroom. When she tells high school students about the publication, her students ask for signed copies of the paper.

“It’s such an honor and a privilege to be a part” of such a research effort, Colombo said.

Colombo’s family, who is proud of her for her work, is also relieved that she didn’t find the kind of contamination that might cause anxiety about the seafood they eat.

“Considering how many times I eat it for the holidays I was very concerned” about what they’d find, Colombo said.

Despite the trace amount of microplastics, Colombo and her family will continue to eat shellfish. She plans to hang the framed copy of the paper Rountos gave her in a future classroom.

Colombo decided to go into teaching after taking a living environment class with Sayville educator Cindy Giannico. She is grateful to Giannico for captivating “my desire to learn more and appreciate how applicable science is to your everyday life.”

Colombo has since come full circle and has been a student teacher in Giannico’s class. Giannico was thrilled to welcome Colombo, whom she recalled as “hard working” and “helpful” with other students even as a tenth grader, back to the classroom.

Colombo has since taken a job as a science teacher on Long Island. Giannico believes Colombo has forged a strong connection with her students through her caring and consideration and her willingness to work with them.

“Most people feel comfortable around her,” Giannico said. “She’s really mature.”

Colombo’s published work has sparked student interest in conducting their own research studies.

Rountos is proud of Minder and Colombo’s contribution. He described Colombo and Minder as “rare gem” students.

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A rendering of the sauropod known as Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum, which had a 15-meter-long neck, about 10 feet longer than a typical school bus. Credit: Júlia d'Oliveira

NEWS FROM STONY BROOK UNIVERSITY:

With their long necks and formidable bodies, sauropod dinosaurs have captured people’s imaginations since the first relatively complete sauropod fossils were discovered in the United States in the late 1800s. Now an international team led by Stony Brook University paleontologist Andrew J. Moore, PhD, has revealed that a Late Jurassic Chinese sauropod known as Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum sported a 15-meter-long neck. The new analysis of this dinosaur, published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, provides fresh insights on the evolution of the iconic sauropod body.

For sauropods, the long neck was the anatomical key to achieving large body size. To power such a large body, sauropods had to be efficient at gathering foodstuffs, and that’s what a long neck was built for. A sauropod could plant itself in one spot and hoover up surrounding vegetation, conserving energy while taking in tons of food. Having a long neck probably also allowed enormous sauropods to shed excess body heat by increasing their surface area, much like the ears of elephants. This way of life – long neck-fueled, quadrupedal gigantism – is not one that is available to mammals or any other form of life today. The sauropod lifestyle was exceptionally successful: their lineage appeared early in dinosaur evolutionary history and persisted until the final days of the Mesozoic, when an asteroid wiped out all dinosaurs (except birds).

Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum was discovered in approximately 162-million-year-old rocks from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of northwest China in 1987 by the China–Canada Dinosaur Project team, for which it was named in 1993. At approximately 15.1 meters, its neck was more than six times longer than the necks of giraffes, the longest-necked animals alive today, and about 10 feet longer than a typical school bus.

The question of which sauropod had the longest neck is not straightforward. Because of their size, the largest sauropods tend to be some of the most poorly known: it’s very hard to bury such a large animal in sediment and thus safeguard it for fossilization.  Some fragmentary fossils suggest that other sauropod lineages independently evolved necks over 10 meters (32.8 feet) in length. However, poor preservation of these specimens and their closest relatives makes estimates of their neck length speculative.

According to Moore, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, although Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum is known only from a handful of bones from the neck and skull, the research team was able to reconstruct its evolutionary relationships and thus make comparisons to the unusually complete skeletons of its closest relatives. This allowed them to conclude that Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum had a neck approximately 15.1 meters (49.5 feet) long, the longest neck that can be confidently inferred for any known sauropod.

Their research stems from on-going work to comprehensively document the anatomical diversity and evolutionary history of the family Mamenchisauridae, a radiation of particularly long-necked sauropod dinosaurs that roamed East Asia and possibly other parts of the world from the Middle Jurassic to the Early Cretaceous (approximately ­174–114 million years ago).

“All sauropods were big, but jaw-droppingly long necks didn’t evolve just once,” says Moore. “Mamenchisaurids are important because they pushed the limits on how long a neck can be, and were the first lineage of sauropods to do so. With a 15-meter-long neck, it looks like Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum might be a record-holder — at least until something longer is discovered.”

How sauropods managed to evolve such long necks and hulking bodies without collapsing under their own weight remains something of a biomechanical puzzle. Remarkable specimens like Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum provide some clues. For example, like their living cousins, birds, most sauropods had air-filled bones, which would have lightened their skeletons by removing heavy marrow and bone tissue.

Using computed-tomography (CT) scanning, Moore and colleagues found that the vertebrae of Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum were mostly air (about 69–77% of their volume) – comparable to the lightly built skeletons of storks and other birds.

However, such featherweight skeletons would also be more prone to injury. To combat this, Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum had 4-meter-long rod-like cervical ribs, bony extensions of the vertebrae that created overlapping bundles of rods on either side of the neck. These bundles would have stiffened the neck of Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum, increasing its stability and making it possible to build such a lightweight neck.

“Biomechanical studies of the mamenchisaurid neck suggest that it was elevated at only a relatively shallow angle above the horizontal (20-30°). However, even at this relatively shallow angle, the extreme length of the neck would still mean that the animal’s head could reach heights of around 7.5 to 10 m above ground level, facilitating feeding on tree foliage,” says co-author Paul Upchurch, PhD, a Professor of Palaeobiology from the University College London.

“Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum underscores how much we can learn about sauropod evolution even from very incomplete specimens,” adds co-author Ye Yong, director of the Research Center of Jurassic Stratigraphy and Paleontology at the Zigong Dinosaur Museum in China’s Sichuan Province.

The research was funded by numerous organizations including the United States National Science Foundation, The Royal Society of London, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

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