Lawrence Martin and Patricia Wright. Photos courtesy of SBU
Stony Brook University’s Charles B. Wang Center Theater, 100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook will host the university’s February Provost Lecture, featuring distinguished anthropologists Patricia Wright and Lawrence Martin on Tuesday, Feb. 11 from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Each will each give a brief lecture about their work and its significance followed by a reception with light refreshments. The lecture and reception are free and open to the public.
See press release below for more information:
Did you know that Stony Brook University has important African research and scientific discovery centers? The Turkana Basin Institute (TBI) in Kenya and Centre ValBio in Madagascar are both university Institutes and Centers and co-founded by members of university faculty.
Two SUNY Distinguished Service Professors, Anthropology Lawrence Martin, PhD, co-founder and director emeritus of the TBI and Patricia Wright, PhD, founder and executive director of the Centre ValBio will be speaking about their centers and the impact of thir own research to the local and university community at the upcoming Provost’s Lecture Series. The series, hosted by university Provost Carl Lejuez, showcases Stony Brook faculty who have earned the rank of SUNY Distinguished faculty. The distinguished rank is the highest honor available to faculty in the State University of New York 64-campus system.
About Lawrence Martin: Professor Martin is an expert on the evolution of apes and the origin of humans. He worked with the late world-renowned paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey to build a bastion for research on human evolution, Stony Brook’s Turkana Basin Institute, which he directed for 17 years
About Patricia Wright: Professor Wright founded Centre ValBio, the modern research campus in the rainforest of Madagascar where she has combined her research with efforts to preserve the country’s endangered forests and the many species of plants and animals they harbor. She was the driving force behind the creation of Ranomafana National Park, a 106,000-acre World Heritage Site there, which is home to many endangered species, including several species of lemur that she works to save from extinction.
WHEN
Tuesday, February 11, 2025 from 3:30 – 5 p.m., ET (reception to follow lecture)
WHERE
Wang Center Theater, West Campus, Stony Brook University directions
The DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory doesn’t just provide educational opportunities for students; it can also inspire their teachers.
That was the case for PhD graduate Alexandra Nowlan, who worked in the lab of Professor Stephen Shea.
When Nowlan met her required teaching component at the center as a part of the graduation requirement for her doctorate, she found educating the next generation inspiring.
“It’s very rewarding to get kids excited about science,” said Nowlan.
Alexandra Nowlan giving a talk at CSHL. Photo from Constance Brukin
Indeed, Nowlan, who did her postdoctoral work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies, has taken a job as assistant teaching professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the same institution. She is teaching two neuopsychopharmacology classes and is preparing for an advanced molecular pharmacology class in the fall.
“I was really drawn to outreach opportunities and put more of my focus into teaching,” she said. “The opportunity presented itself, so I jumped at it. I’m having a really good time.”
Established in 1988, the DNA Learning Center was the first site to focus on genetic education for the public, offering classes to students in 5th through 12th grades.
The Learning Center, with sites in five different locations in New York, provides classes and labs for 30,000 students each year.
Amanda McBrien, Assistant Director of the DNA Learning Center, observed Nowlan in action.
“She had a magnetic energy about her,” said McBrien. “She came in and was young, enthusiastic and cool all wrapped into one.”
During a Fun with DNA course in the summer offered in conjunction with Women in Science, Nowlan was the “perfect role model,” McBrien added, who proved to be “utterly approachable” and enthusiastic, making her an engaged presenter.
Students can find information about these classes through the DNA Learning Center and can register for summer courses starting this week.
Recent publication
In addition to her professional journey into teaching, Nowlan recently published the results of a study she conducted in the journal Current Biology based on research conducted at CSHL.
Working with Shea and other scientists who followed her in Shea’s lab, Nowlan studied the way the mouse brain processes sensory signals such as odor and sound as a part of a pup retrieval process.
Important in the behavior of mothers and of surrogates who care for the young, pup retrieval helps ensure that developing mice stay closer to their mothers or caretakers.
“Pup retrieval is one of the most important things for mothers or caregivers,” Shea said in a statement. “It requires the ability to smell and hear the pup. If these things are both important, that may mean they merge somewhere in the brain.”
Indeed, during pup retrieval, neurons from an area of the brain called the basal amygdala carry smell signals to the auditory cortex, which is the brain’s hearing center. The basal amygdala is involved in learning and processing social and emotional signals, linking perception with emotion and social learning.
When Nowlan and others blocked the ability of maternal mice to access smell signals, the micedidn’t provide their customary parental pup retrieval.
Shea and his lab suspect that what’s reaching the auditory cortex is being filtered through social-emotional signals from basal amygdala neurons.
“We’ve known that pup odor is important,” said Nowlan. “People have eliminated odors and seen deficits.”
Deficits in vocalizations also can affect this behavior.
“The pathway that would allow olfactory signals to reach the auditory cortex was unknown and we’ve identified a pathway that is functionally capable of linking those two senses,” Nowlan explained.
A winding path
Nowlan, who grew up in Williamstown, Massachusetts, played rugby in college at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. While three concussions encouraged her to search for a non-contact sport, it also piqued her interest in neurology.
After she graduated, she worked for four years in the laboratory of Sandeep Robert Datta at Harvard Medical School, where she learned about the importance of the olfactory system.
At the Datta lab, she worked with then postdoctoral researcher Paul Greer, who let a flier on her desk about Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s graduate program.
“The umbrella program appealed to me,” she said. “You could get an education not only in the subject you’re interested in but you also had an opportunity to learn about cancer biology and plant genetics, which was exciting.”
Nowlan attended courses and meetings, interacting with top scientists across a range of fields.
The first year she lived in a house on campus near the water, where she and her fellow graduate students could see the lights of all the buildings at night.
“My classmates and I felt like we were at Hogwarts, this magical science camp,” she said.
Postdoctoral transition
When she was writing her PhD thesis, Nowlan became interested in motivated behaviors.
She had been following reports about the opioid epidemic and knew it was affecting Berkshire County, where she grew up.
She was curious about how opioid use disrupted noradrenaline signaling, which plays an important role in motivation, rewarding and the body’s stress response.
“I wanted to explore how these motivational circuits can get disrupted in examples where drugs that are commonly misused are involved,” she said.
She and others in the lab of Zoe McElligott at the Bowles Center were trying to understand various brain circuits as people undergo the painful experience of addiction withdrawal.
More information about these processes could reduce the negative experience and lead to better and perhaps more effective treatments.
Born on the same day
Nowlan met her husband Craig Jones, a Long Island native, through a dating app.
“I joked when we first met that the algorithm” from the app that brought them together was lazy, she said. They were both born on the same day, just hours apart.
Jones, who works as a user experience designer for fitness company Zwift, is “older and he won’t let me forget it,” said Nowlan.
As for her current teaching role, Nowlan is hoping to emulate the inspirational approach of Enrique Peacock-López, a college professor at nearby Williams College. In addition to coaching a soccer team with his daughter and Nowlan, Enrique-López took time to share chemistry demonstrations in primary school and to bring high school students into his lab.
Nowlan appreciated how Peacock-López connected with students.
“The way he made science exciting and accessible to members of the community is really inspiring,” said Nowlan.
Peacock-López has known Nowlan for decades.
“There’s a lot of satisfaction that I may have contributed a little bit with my grain of salt in their careers,” said Peacock-López. When he teaches, he seeks ways to motivate students to solve problems.
For younger children as a starter experiment, he works with reagents that reveal considerable color or that has fumes.
“They love to hear sounds or see colors,” he said.
Peacock-López’s advice to future teachers is to “interact with students” and get to know them.
A native of Mexico, he promised himself when he started teaching that he would treat students the way he would want to be treated.
As for Nowlan, she is eager to continue the teaching tradition.
“It makes me want to keep giving back and provide opportunities to educate the public about what we’re doing and why it’s interesting and important,” Nowlan said.
Her goal is to educate the next generation of neuroscientists and curious community members about how discoveries made in the lab are translated into treatments for disease.
Drs. Iwao Ojima, left, and Martin Kaczocha in a Stony Brook University laboratory. Photo by John Griffin, Stony Brook University
A non-opioid investigational drug with promising pre-clinical results in treating neuropathic pain has passed an important hurdle after the study’s safety review committee (SRC) reviewed the data from initial volunteers and recommended to progress into the next dose level in a first-in-human clinical trial.The drug, ART26.12, is being developed by Artelo Biosciences, Inc, based in Solana Beach, Calif.
The compound was discovered and initially developed by Stony Brook University’s Iwao Ojima, PhD, and Martin Kaczocha, PhD. The technology is based on a class of fatty acid binding proteins (FABPs) inhibitors, including what is now ART26.12, and was licensed to Artelo in 2018 by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York.
Neuropathic pain is estimated to affect about eight percent of the U.S. population, which translates to approximately 20 million people. ART26.12 is being developed specifically for chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, which remains a serious adverse problem for patients during cancer therapy and post therapy.
Dr. Ojima and colleagues selected FABPs as drug targets of the body’s endocannabinoid system to modulate lipids within the cell for a potentially promising way to treat pain, inflammation and cancer. According to Artelo, ART26.12 is the lead compound in Artelo’s proprietary FABP platform and is believed to be the first-ever selective FABP5 inhibitor (5 indicates a specific protein) to enter clinical trials.
The SRC completed its initial clinical safety review of ART26.12 in early January for the first cohort of eight volunteers. With that, the phase 1 clinical trial of this drug will advance to the next step, which will include more subjects and an evaluation of higher doses of the investigational drug.
Artelo says that other potential indications with the lead compound and other FABP5s in development include treatments related to cancer, osteoarthritis, psoriasis and anxiety.
Dr. Ojima, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Stony Brook University, and Director of the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery, and Dr. Kaczocha, Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesia in the Renaissance School of Medicine, led the Stony Brook team in its work developing inhibitors to various FABPs.
They continue to consult with Artelo regarding the advancement of these compounds in clinical trials.
For more about the FABP inhibitor story, see this 2024 press release. For more about Artelo’s successful completion of the first cohort in the phase 1 study of ART26.12, see this press release.
Hand-drawn renderings of two of the seven sampled molars from Australopithecus (StW-148 and StW-47), illustrative of teeth frequently exposed to plant eating. Credit: Dom Jack, MPIC
Study published in Science identifies Australopithecus as a plant eater, narrowing the scope on when regular animal consumption increased and brains grew.
An international team of researchers including Dominic Stratford, PhD, of Stony Brook University and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, have discovered that an ancient human ancestor found in deposits at the Sterkfontein Caves, Australopithecus, which lived more than three million years ago in South Africa, primarily ate plant-based foods. The finding, published in the journal Science, stems from an analysis of tooth enamel from seven Australopithecus fossils and is significant because the emergence of meat eating is thought to be a key driver of a large increase in brain size seen in later hominins.
Every human behavior, from abstract thought to the development of complex technology, is a result of the evolution of the brain. According to evolutionary scientists, meat consumption is a primary driver of many aspects of the evolution of our own genus, Homo, including brain size. When hominins started to exploit and consume highly nutritious animal products is a major question in human evolution studies because it represents a turning point in our evolution. However, direct evidence of when meat eating emerged among our earliest ancestors, and how its consumption developed through time, has remained elusive to scientists.
The research team included investigators from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) in Germany and the University of Witwatersrand. They analyzed stable nitrogen isotope data (15N/14N) from tooth enamel of Australopithecus fossils found in the caves, an area known for its rich collection of early hominin fossils.
The ratio of stable nitrogen isotopes accumulated in animals’ tissues has been used to understand its trophic position – place in the food chain – for many years. An enrichment of 15N is generally indicative of a higher position in the food chain and consumption of animal tissue. Conventionally, bone collagen or dentin are sampled to attain enough nitrogen isotopes for analysis. But these tissues typically decay relatively rapidly, limiting the application of nitrogen isotope analysis to about 300,000 years.
The recent development of more sensitive analytical techniques that can measure less nitrogen provided the opportunity to sample enamel, the hardest tissue of the mammalian body that also traps Nitrogen stable isotopes while it is forming. Enamel can potentially preserve the isotopic fingerprint of an animal’s diet for millions of years.
According to Stratford, an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University, and Director of Research at the Sterkfontein Caves, and his colleagues, this advancement in nitrogen isotope analysis enabled the researchers to obtain the first direct evidence of the diet of ancient hominin fossils and explore when meat eating started, the behavior that set hominins on a new evolutionary path.
They compared the isotopic data from those fossils with tooth samples of other coexisting animals at the time, such as monkeys, antelopes, hyenas, jackals and big cats. The comparison revealed that while its possible Australopithecusoccasionally consumed meat, its primary diet was plant-based.
In fact, the isotopic data showed the hominin ate more like a herbivore than a carnivore. One interpretation of this result, explains Stratford, is that changes in behavior known to occur in Australopithecus may not be a result of an increase in meat consumption. It may also suggest that regular meat eating had not yet emerged as a behavior in a hominin this old, implying that it occurred only later in time, or in a different geographic area.
“Overall, this work provides clear evidence that Australopithecus in South Africa did not eat significant amounts of meat three million years ago, and it represents a huge step in extending our ability to better understand diets and trophic level of all animals back into the scale of millions of years,” adds Stratford.
From left, postdoctoral researcher William Thomas, Professor Liliana Dávalos and former undergraduate fellow Maria Alejandra Bedoya Duque. Photo courtesy of William Thomas
By Daniel Dunaief
Captivity causes changes in a brain, at least in the shrew.
Small animals that look like rodents but are related to moles and hedgehogs, shrews have different gene expression in several important areas of their brain during captivity.
In a study led by 2022 Hearst summer Undergraduate Research Fellow Maria Alejandra Bedoya Duque in the lab of Stony Brook Professor Liliana Dávalos, shrews in captivity haddifferent gene expression in the cortex, hippocampus and olfactory bulb. These brain areas are important for cognition, memory and environmental sensing.
“I was very surprised by what we found,” said Dávalos. While she expected that the research might uncover differences between the brains of captive and wild animals, she didn’t expect the changes to be as many or as strong.
The change in brain activity could offer potential alternative explanations for studies that explore the effect of various experiments on animals kept in captivity.
“It could be very useful to find out if these environmental influences could be confounding,” said Dávalos. “We don’t know all the dimensions of what captivity is doing.”
Additionally, brain activity changes in captivity for shrews in terms of the transcripts that are over or under expressed mirror those found in humans who have neurological changes such as major depressive disorder or neuro degenerative disorders.
“How these [changes] influence behavior or cognition is a separate question,” Dávalos added.
To be sure, extrapolating from shrews to humans is different and requires careful analysis, Dávalos explained.
Humans and shrews have distinct life history, ecology, body size and other characteristics. While scientists can study genes they think might have similar functions, more studies are necessary to determine the effects of those genes in expression and how similar they are to those studied in humans or mice.
Dávalos does not expect to find a silver bullet that reorganizes human brains or a gene or pathway that’s going to revolutionize neurodegenerative research.
Nonetheless, in and of itself, the study suggested opportunities for further research and exploration into the effects of captivity on animals in general and, in particular, on their mental processes, which are affected by changes in conditions and needs in their environment.
A foundation for future work
Maria Alejandra Bedoya Duque
The study, which was recently published in the journal Biology Letters, grew out of a two-month internship Bedoya did at Stony Brook in which she studied the brains of four captive shrews and four wild animals. The analysis of the results involved numerous calls and discussions when she returned to Colombia to finish her undergraduate degree.
At the end of the summer, Bedoya was “going to present her work internally at Stony Brook,” explained William Thomas, a postdoctoral researcher in Dávalos’s lab and one of Bedoya’s mentors throughout the project. “Instead, she turned it into a paper.”
Thomas appreciated how Bedoya “put in a lot of work to make sure she got this out,” he said.
The shrew’s brain changed after two months in captivity, which is about 20 percent of their total lifespan, as shrews live an average of one year.
“We don’t know what the limits are,” in terms of the effect of timing on triggering changes in the shrew’s brain, Thomas said. “We don’t know how early the captive effect is.”
Thomas suggested that this paper could “lay the foundation for future studies with larger samples.”
Dávalos was pleased that the study resulted in a meaningful paper after a summer of gathering data and several years of analyzing and presenting the information.
“I’m immensely proud and happy that we had this unexpected finding,” said Dávalos. “It is one of the most gratifying experiences as a mentor.”
A launching pad
Bedoya, who graduated from Universidad Icesi in 2023 and is applying to graduate school after working as an adjunct professor/ lecturer at her alma mater, is pleased her work led to a published paper.
“I was so happy,” said Bedoya. “If it hadn’t been for [Thomas] and [Dávalos] cheering me on the whole time when I came back to Colombia, this study could have ended as my fellowship ended.”
Bedoya believes the experience at Stony Brook provided a launching pad for her career.
“It is a very valuable experience to have conducted this research all the way up to publication,” she said.
Thomas and Dávalos each recalled their own first scientific publication.
“I’m happy and relieved when they come out,” said Thomas. “While internal validation is important, the pleasure comes from providing something that you believe can help society.”
Dávalos’s first publication involved some unusual twists and turns. When she submitted her first paper about deforestation in the Andes, the journal wrote back to her in a letter telling her the paper was too newsy. She submitted it to several other publications, including one that indicated they had a huge backlog and weren’t publishing new research.
When it was published, the paper didn’t receive much attention. That paper, and another on her thoughts about how peace between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels might be worse for the rainforest, have since been cited frequently by other researchers.
Winter brain
At around the same time that Bedoya published her work about the effect of captivity on the shrew brain, Thomas published a study in the journal eLife in which he examined how shrew brains shrank during the winter and then regrew during the spring.
This work could offer genetic clues to neurological and metabolic health in mammals. Thomas focused on the hypothalamus, measuring how gene expression shifts seasonally.
A suite of genes that change across the seasons were involved in the regulation of energy homeostasis as well as genes that regulate cell death that might be associated with reductions in brain size.
Temperature was the driver of these seasonal changes.
The genes involved in maintaining the blood brain barrier and calcium signaling were upregulated in the shrew compared with other mammals.
After the winter, the shrew’s brains recovered their size, although below their pre-winter size.
Originally from Syracuse, Thomas attended SUNY Albany.
When he was younger, he entertained ideas of becoming a doctor, particularly as his grandmother battled ALS. On his first day shadowing a physician, he felt claustrophobic in the exam room and almost passed out.
He wanted to be outside instead of in “the squeaky clean floors” of a doctor’s office, he explained in an email.
As a scientist, he feels he can meld his passion for nature and his desire to help those who suffer from disease.
The past two years in Suffolk County had the warmest average mean temperature and the warmest average low temperature of any two consecutive years on record.
According to data recorded by the Southeast Regional Climate Center (SERCC), January 2023 to January 2025 were the hottest 730 days of the past 42 years.
The data, recorded at a station in Islip, reported the area’s average mean temperature as 55.1 degrees Fahrenheit, making it the third warmest year following 2023 and 2012, which both experienced an average mean temperature of 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
The average low temperature was 47.1 degrees Fahrenheit, tying with 2012 as the warmest average low temperature, followed by 2023 with an average low temp of 47.0, only .1 degrees cooler.
The years 2023 and 2024 rank high in most of the temperature charts, although 2024 was not among the top five highest average temperatures.
Long Island’s higher than normal temperatures are not unique; according to data obtained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the average temperature of the continental U.S. was the warmest to date.
Compared to the baseline–the temperature from 1900 to 2000– the average temp of the U.S. in 2024 was almost 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. The base is 52.01 degrees Fahrenheit while 2024 experienced an average of 54.94.
Dr. Elizabeth Watson, an associate professor at Stony Brook University’s Department of Ecology and Evolution, specializes in climate change and its effects on coastal environments.
According to Watson, global warming is generally felt more intensely in the winter months. As greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane continue to trap heat within our atmosphere, the Earth isn’t releasing heat as rapidly as it has in the past.
The warming Earth doesn’t reach freezing temperatures as often, resulting in less snow to reflect the solar energy away from the Earth’s surface.
“Snow affects the seasonal energy balance, so if you have more snow it reflects the light,” Watson said.
This positive feedback loop has exacerbated warming and explains why there is such a noticeable change of temperature in winter months.
The temperature increase is an indication of a change that is impacting Long Island weather and ecology. Extreme weather events like storm surges impose a threat not only to the coastal environment, but also infrastructure.
In December 2023 and January 2024, Long Island experienced a storm surge–when a storm pushes water inland. Watson observed its effects in Patchogue, as water flowed out from the drains, blocks away from the Patchogue Bay.
“When I think about climate change in this area I think about flooding and high sea levels,” Watson said. “If you have high temperatures that lead to more energetic storms that can lead to more storm surges.” She emphasized the danger flooding would have on Long Island communities, especially coastal towns like Port Jefferson, Northport, and Huntington.
David Ansel, the vice president of the center for water protection at Save the Sound, interpreted the data in the context of what it means for the Long Island Sound.
“As it is getting warmer and warmer, that is negatively impacting a number of things,” Ansel said.”One is water pollution and also the actual warming of the water itself, which makes the water less healthy for biodiversity and plant life.”
A warming climate correlates with severe single-day precipitation events, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Heavy rainfall in itself is cause for alarm–it can erode land and damage crops–but the potential for it to cause flooding is among the most detrimental to our community.
Currently, Watson is studying the causes of forest dieback–a condition that leads trees and plants to weaken or die. Watson said. “Episodic storms seem to play a role. It seems [forest dieback] has accelerated a lot more in the past 10 years. It is not something that has started with Hurricane Sandy.”
Long Island infrastructure is ill-suited to deal with the mass amount of rainfall that data shows is becoming increasingly common as temperature rises. The data secured from SERCC did not reveal abnormal rain in recent years, but national studies suggest an increase.
“When it rains a lot in a short amount of time it overwhelms water treatment and for communities,” said Ansel, who is advocating for the replacement of outdated septic tanks and more efficient wastewater facilities.
The Central and Western Basins of the Long Island Sound are healthy, according to a study released by Save the Sound in 2023 that tested the dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll levels, dissolved organic carbon, and water quality. Port Jefferson, Stony Brook, Old Field, and Nissequogue neighbor border this portion of the sound
The Eastern Narrows, which extend from New York City to Eaton’s Neck, is rated lower.
Increasingly, town officials are approaching Ansel for advice on how to improve their stormwater management and prepare for flooding.
From left, Iwao Ojima, Ashna Garg and Maurizio Del Poeta.
Photo by Kathryn Takemura
By Daniel Dunaief
It worked for mice and now, several years later, has shown promise for cats.
Researchers from Maurizio Del Poeta’s lab, working closely with those from Iwao Ojima’s team at Stony Brook University, have demonstrated that an experimental treatment against a fungus resistant to the current standard of care can work with cats battling a ferocious infection, albeit on a small sample size.
The Stony Brook team, along with scientists and veterinarians in Brazil, used a drug they created in 2018 called D13 to treat 10 cats with severe forms of a fungus that affects cats and humans called sporotrichosis.
With this treatment, which the researchers introduced as a powder into the cat’s food, half of the 10 felines whose skin was under insidious attack from the fungus staged remarkable recoveries, offering a potentially promising development that could one day also offer an alternative care for cats and for people.
“The prevalence in South America is 25 to 20 cases per 100,000 people, which is not low,” explained Del Poeta, Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Immunology. “It affects mostly immunocompromised people and particularly people who have cats or people taking care of infected cats.”
Tis cat presented no improvement of the tumor-like lesion and of an ulcerated lesion on the nasal region upon treatment with ITC. After adding D13, the cat significantly improved, even though clinical cure was not achieved after 4 weeks of treatment with ITC and D13 combination.
Typically, people get superficial infections, but a person who is severely immunocompromised could have an infection that spreads and becomes fatal.
The work taps into the expertise of Ojima, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry. Ojima worked on the structure elucidation, the structure activity relationship and development of efficient synthetic methods for large scale synthesis of the drug.
Recent Stony Brook PhD graduate Ashna Garg contributed to this ongoing effort.
Ojima described the work as “solidly encouraging” and added that the scientists have “even better compounds in the same series for human use” that are more potent and more selective to fungi compared to humans which makes systemic toxicity “very low.”
Del Poeta’s lab has been studying sphingolipids metabolism and signaling in fungal and mammals cells to identify new markers for early diagnosis and microbial enzymes/ molecules essential to cause infections in the attempt to develop new antifungal targets.
To be sure, in the cat research, five out of the 10 cats didn’t complete the study. One of them died, although the cause of death was unknown, and four of the other cats abandoned the study.
Additionally, one of the cats for whom the drug worked showed an elevated level of a liver enzyme, which returned to normal within weeks of the conclusion of the study.
Still, the results were promising and provided encouraging improvements for cats battling an infection that threatened their health.
“I am very pleased with the efficacy of D13 on cats in Brazil,” explained Ojima, adding that it is “a compelling result.”
Additionally, in other preliminary studies, D13 works against various fungal infections, including cryptococcosis, aspergillosis and candidiasis. A new derivative of D13 is more effective for those other infections, the scientists said.
Del Poeta explained that the scientists chose to do the research in Brazil because of the prevalence of sporotrichosis in the area and because he had established collaborations in the country in earlier research.
‘Proud and grateful’
For her part, Garg was thrilled to contribute to research that provided a remedy to a deteriorating condition in an animal some of her friends own as pets.
Cat owners often reacted emotionally when she told them about her work, appreciating the significance of the results.
“I am deeply proud and grateful to have contributed to this work,” said Garg. “Its remarkable effectiveness continues to inspire and motivate me.”
A significant part of her PhD revolved around taking the initial lead compounds and developing second and third generation compounds to enhance their effectiveness and bioavailability.
With three bromine atoms, D13 is an unusual therapeutic treatment.
Bromine is “relatively rare among the top 200 pharmaceuticals,” Garg explained. “Bromine can be toxic or can act as an irritant. Part of my work involved exploring ways to reduce the bromine content” to make the treatment more viable in drug development. The scientists are working to understand why and how this treatment works.
“The exact mechanism of action of D13 is not fully understood yet but we are getting very close,” Garg explained.
With the third generation of D13, the team identified compounds that are highly fungal specific with broad spectrum activity, effectively eradicating 100 percent of the three malignant type of fungi.
“It’s important to note that some first and second generation compounds also demonstrated excellent antifungal activity at very low drug concentrations, even if they did not achieve complete eradication on one of the three fungal strains,” Garg added.
While promising, this study does not indicate a new human treatment will be on the market in the short term.
The scientists are doing toxicology studies and hope a new therapeutic option might be available as soon as five years, Del Poeta estimated.
From Delhi to Stony Brook
Garg, who defended her thesis in December, grew up in Delhi, India, where she pursued her undergraduate studies in Chemistry at Delhi University.
After that, she earned her Master’s in Chemistry at Vellore Institute of Technology in Tamil Nadu, India.
Garg arrived at Stony Brook in 2019 and joined Ojima’s lab in early 2020, just at the start of the pandemic.
“It was indeed a challenging time to start a new position,” Garg acknowledged.
Currently a resident of Poquott, Garg enjoys living on Long Island, where she visits beaches, drives around the area and cooks.
Garg, who attended meetings in the labs of both Professors Ojima and Del Poeta, is grateful for the support of these senior scientists, who were also part of her thesis committee.
Del Poeta described Garg as a “dedicated scientist” with an “impeccable” work ethic.
“Drug synthesis can be very challenging,” Del Poeta described. “She is tirelessly resilient.”
Garg is staying at Stony Brook for another year as a post-doctoral researcher.
Del Poeta is pleased with the productive collaboration he’s had with Ojima, whom he described as “passionate, intellectually stimulating, dedicating, inspiring and hard working.”
If Del Poeta sends an email on Saturday night, Ojima typically replies by Sunday morning.
“It is an honor to collaborate with him,” Del Poeta explained. Ojima’s work “makes these impressive results possible.”
The Vice President for Research at Stony Brook University, who started working on Long Island on the same day as interim President Richard McCormick, is encouraging researchers to pursue interdisciplinary grants.
“We have a very robust office of proposal development,” said Gardner in an interview from Washington, DC when he was meeting on Capitol Hill with the New York delegation prior to the holidays. “Our strategy is to focus on growing larger grants.”
With a team prepared to help faculty across the university, Gardner hopes to drive innovation and discovery while building the university’s research budget.
The total funds from the top 1.6 percent of grants at the university account for 23 percent of the university’s research expenditures, which means that winning additional awards in this top tier could have a material effect on the funds that enable research.
The team that works with Gardner does considerable administrative work, reducing the burden for scientists focused on directing and overseeing research. Stony Brook also provides project management support.
Faculty members “can’t write these giant grants without that kind of support,” Gardner said. Stony Brook wants to get to that rarefied air where universities receive large, ambitious funds for comprehensive interdisciplinary work.
Going after these larger grants predates Gardner’s arrival.
“This is something that has been in the making for a couple of years,” said Gardner. He has seen an uptick in applications for these kinds of projects.
Stony Brook started research town halls this fall, with the first describing and encouraging collaborations between the east and west campuses.
Gardner has renamed his office the Office for Research and Innovation.
“This was done to more formally combine the offices of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development,” he explained. “Innovation speaks to new technologies, new approaches, and we have important roles in helping Long Island businesses innovate and continue to be successful. This is true for startups but equally true for manufacturing companies (through our Manufacturing Extension Program) and through our Small Business Development Center, among others!”
Enhancing an entrepreneurial culture
Hannah Estes
At the same time, the university is building and expanding efforts to encourage entrepreneurial initiatives among students and faculty.
Stony Brook recently hired Hannah Estes to become Director of Student Innovation.
Estes, who previously worked with Gardner at the University of Louisville, officially started at Stony Brook on January 6th.
She is focused on the entire school, as she hopes to help encourage students from a range of disciplines pursue various business ideas.
“Entrepreneurship can be found in any school or department,” said Estes, as she has seen new ideas originate in schools of social work, music and education.
She wants students to recognize problems and find ways to solve them.
Estes plans to reach out to students through newsletters and social media and hopes to spend her first semester at Stony Brook listening to students and getting a sense of their interests and ideas.
In her work at the University of Louisville, she partnered with art school students who were able to get credit and helped coordinate financial aid to get them paid $20 per hour.
“It works and students are able to get away from their desks and get into the community,” Estes said.
As for local students on Long Island who are not members of the Seawolf community, Estes suggested the doors would be open to supporting with them as well.
Working with area high school students can create momentum that can develop into an interest in their business ideas and in joining Stony Brook.
As with the bigger university projects among faculty, the student efforts will also focus on interdisciplinary teams.
“The whole concept is to get out of your bubble and hear new perspectives,” said Estes. “It’s important for students to know that there are different ways of thinking.”
Gardner hopes the student-driven ideas can help engage a culture change among faculty as well.
“It is my sense that students are effective agents of change on a university campus,” Gardner explained. “And beyond that, these types of experiences are incredibly valuable for students during their education. “
In July, Stony Brook hired Dr. Michael Kinch as the inaugural Chief Innovation Officer, who is part of the university’s council and reports to Gardner.
At the same time, Andrew Wooten, the Executive Director of Long Island High Tech Incubator, has been taking inventions and ideas through a proof of concept to launch new companies. Wooten reports to the board of LIHTI.
Computing initiatives
In addition, Stony Brook has started an initiative to create an enclave for a computing environment that provides controlled unclassified information computing.
Such computing power, which is on the road towards classified work, is necessary to apply for funding from the Department of Defense and other agencies.
This effort requires a greater level of security and compliance.
As for high performance computing, the university does not have the level of capacity that the research community needs.
“High performance computing is a challenge at most campuses, particularly now keeping up with needs for AI-related computing,” Gardner explained. Stony Brook has a “very significant level of AI expertise,” which makes keeping up with their computational needs challenging.
Research andDevelopment Park
Stony Brook is looking at how they can make the Research and Development Park an even greater asset to the university and the community.
“Everything we do serves our mission, so we need to make sure our neighbors in [Stony Brook] and our partners across the state share in a vision for how that R&D park can change and serve our mission and our community even better,” Gardner said.
He is energized by the opportunity to work at Stony Brook, where he feels that he has the ongoing support of colleagues who are working well together. As for his visit to Capitol Hill, Gardner travels to meet with the delegation and federal agencies around once a month.
“We want to make sure not just that they are advocates for us (which they most certainly are), but also to make sure we know what we can do for them,” he said. Stony Brook needs to “make sure that we are good partners for them.”
Echoing recent comments from Interim President Richard McCormick, Gardner recognizes the need to add more wastewater treatment to meet the university’s goals for expansion.
The university, which has seen state, national and international interest climb among students as Stony Brook rises in the rankings of universities and attracts major funding, is limited by several factors, including available wastewater facilities.
The university can’t bring in additional students because they don’t have the housing for them and “we can’t have the housing without the wastewater capacity,” Gardner said. “As an environmental engineer, I get it.”
Thieves come in all shapes and sizes, robbing people of valuable possessions or irreplaceable personal keepsakes.
Diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and forms of dementia also rob people, taking away their memories, connections to their past and even their sense of themselves.
At times, however, people who are battling these conditions can emerge from its clutches, offering a fleeting, or even longer, connection to the person their loved ones knew, the passions they shared, and the memories that helped define a life.
In a study published in November in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Stephen Post, Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care and Bioethics at Stony Brook University, gathered information from surveys with 2,000 caregivers who shared their reactions to unexpected lucidity from forgetful people.
“Caregivers can find inspiration in these fleeting moments,” Post wrote in a summary of the conclusions of the study. “The research aims to guide caregivers and enhance the understanding of the enduring self-identify of deeply forgetful people, promoting compassionate care and recognizing the significance of our shared humanity.”
Such moments of clarity and awareness, at levels that can be more engaging than the typical behaviors for people suffering with various levels of forgetfulness, can be rewarding at any point, but can offer a particular gift to caregivers and families around the holidays.
Possible triggers
Post suggested that these moments of lucidity can be purely spontaneous and surprising. Theycan also arise during an intervention, when a caregiver or family member provides some specific stimulation or memory trigger.
“Caregivers can sing a song that their loved ones identify with from earlier in life,” said Post. “We’ve done that here at the Long Island State Veterans Home on the Stony Brook campus.”
Several years ago, Post wrote about a room of 50 veterans, many of whom spent a good part of their days in a haze without acting or interacting with others.
When they heard “The Star Spangled Banner” or other patriotic music, as many as 70 percent reacted and started to sing the song. The duration of participation varied, with some saying a few words or a line, others singing a verse, and still others making it through the entire song,
After the song, people who might have seemed out of reach could react to closed-ended questions. This could include choices such as whether they preferred toast or cereal for breakfast.
“A good half of them were able to respond and sometimes even carry on a brief conversation,” Post said.
Art can also help draw out forgetful relatives. Groups around the country are taking forgetful people and their caregivers to art museums in small groups. Looking at a famous or particularly evocative piece of artwork, people might express appreciation for the magnificence of a painting.
Poetry can also serve as a stimulus. Forgetful people who listen to the poems of Robert Frost or other familiar writers can respond with the next line to words deeply ingrained in their memory.
“Their affect picked up,” said Post. “They were smiling, they were excited and enthusiastic. That’s great stuff.”
These moments can provide a connection and offer joy to caregivers.
Other possible triggers include smells, such as the familiar scent of a kitchen; interactions in nature, such as the feel of snow on someone’s face; or playing with pets.
The forgetful can “respond joyfully to dogs,” said Post. “It can remind them of [a particular] dog from 30 years ago.”
Additional research
Caregivers who help forgetful people through their daily lives sometimes struggle with the question of whether “grandma is still there,” Post said. That metaphor, however, can miss the “hints” of continuing self identity.
The National Institute on Aging has funded Post’s study on what’s happening with the brain during these moments of lucidity.
A challenge in that research, however, resides in doing PET scans or collecting other data when those moments are spontaneous and unpredictable.
The work from Post’s recent study indicates that these periods of clarity are important for the morale of caregivers, with many of them feeling uplifted from the interaction.
Post sees further opportunity for study. In his next project, he hopes to cover how to operationalize this information into an intervention. “It’s very practical, very real and can do a heck of a lot” for the forgetful and their caregivers, he said.
To be sure, some forgetful people may not respond to some or all of these cues, as the damage from their diseases may have made such outreach and actions inaccessible.
When these moments, fleeting though they may be, occur, they can be rewarding for caregivers, family members and the forgetful themselves.
Jean Mueller with her late mother Geraldine and her father Daniel. Photo courtesy of Jean Mueller
Jean Mueller, Assistant Director of Nursing/ Project Manager in the Department of Regulatory Affairs, Patient Safety & Ethics at Stony Brook, recently spent time with her father Daniel, 95. The elder Mueller lost his wife of 74 years Geraldine several weeks ago and is in an assisted living facility.
Taking her father out was too difficult, as it could cause agitation and confusion.
“We went and had Thanksgiving dinner with him there,” Mueller said. “He seemed to really enjoy it, in the moment. He knew the food and he knew it was a holiday. He didn’t ask me where my mom was.”
The interactions can be challenging, as she sometimes feels like she’s pulling “all the strings and you don’t know what you’re going to get” when she interacts with him, she said.
Still, Mueller suggested that it doesn’t matter whether he remembers her visits.
“In the moment, he matters, it matters and he’s still a person,” she said. ‘When you get to the point where everything has been taken away from you, and you lost your independence, even if it’s for a short period of time, you can feel valued again.”
She considers it an honor to be able to share that with her father.
A former inspector in the Suffolk County Police Department and a commander of homicide, Mueller’s father has a well-known sweet tooth.
When she visits, Mueller brings an iced coffee with hazelnut syrup and half and half, a crumb cake, croissant or donut. “He’s in seventh heaven,” she said.
When he sees his family, his face “lights up,” said Mueller.
“Even if the memories of our visit is fleeting, for those moments in time, he’s a devoted father and a valued father and grandfather who still feels our love.”
Lab celebrates a year of scientific successes, from creating the biggest bits of antimatter to improving qubits, catalysts, batteries, and more!
With one-of-a-kind research facilities leveraged by scientists from across the nation and around the world, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory is a veritable city of science. Each year brings discoveries, from the scale of subatomic particles to the vastness of Earth’s atmosphere and the cosmos, that have the potential to power new technologies and provide solutions to major societal challenges. Here, the Lab presents, in no particular order, its top 10 discoveries of 2024 … plus a few major Brookhaven Lab milestones.
Antimatter sounds exotic, but it really does exist — just not for long. This year, scientists studying collisions of atomic nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) — an “atom smasher” that recreates the conditions of the early universe — discovered the heaviest antimatter nucleus ever detected. It’s composed of four antimatter particles: an antiproton, two antineutrons, and a particle called an antihyperon. It lasts only a fraction of a second before decaying into other particles. To find it, physicists from RHIC’s STAR collaboration searched through particles streaming from billions of collisions to find just 16 of the rare “antihyperhydrogen-4” particles. There used to be lots of antimatter, back when the universe first formed, but when antimatter meets ordinary matter, the two self-destruct. The ability to create new antimatter particles today, like these heavy antimatter nuclei, gives scientists new ways to test for matter-antimatter differences that might explain why the universe is made only of matter.
Low-temp, direct conversion of natural gas to liquid fuel
Brookhaven Lab chemists engineered a highly selective catalyst that can convert methane, a major component of natural gas, into methanol, an easily transportable liquid fuel, in a single, one-step reaction. This direct process for methane-to-methanol conversion runs at a temperature lower than required to make tea and exclusively produces methanol without additional byproducts. That’s a big advance over more complex traditional conversions that typically require three separate reactions, each under different conditions, including vastly higher temperatures. The simplicity of the system could make it particularly useful for tapping “stranded” natural gas reserves in isolated rural areas, far from the costly infrastructure of pipelines and chemical refineries, and without the need to transport high-pressure, flammable liquified natural gas. The team made use of tools at two DOE Office of Science user facilities at Brookhaven Lab, the Center for Functional Nanomaterials and the National Synchrotron Light Source II. They are exploring ways to work with entrepreneurial partners to bring the technology to market.
Plants’ sugar-sensing machinery
Proteins are molecular machines, with flexible pieces and moving parts. Understanding how these parts move helps scientists unravel the function that a protein plays in living things — and potentially how to change its effects. This year, a team led by Brookhaven Lab biochemists working with colleagues from DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory discovered how protein machinery in plants controls whether the plants can grow and make energy-intensive products such as oil — or instead put in place a series of steps to conserve precious resources. The researchers showed how the molecular machinery is regulated by a molecule that rises and falls with the level of sugar, the product of photosynthesis and plants’ main energy source. The research could help identify proteins or parts of proteins that scientists could engineer to make plants that produce more oil for use as biofuels or other oil-based products.
Tantalum is a superconducting material that shows great promise for building qubits, the basis of quantum computers. This year, a team that spans multiple Brookhaven departments discovered that adding a thin layer of magnesium improves tantalum by keeping it from oxidizing. The coating also improves tantalum’s purity and raises the temperature at which it operates as a superconductor. All three effects may increase tantalum’s ability to hold onto quantum information in qubits. This work was carried out as part of the Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage, a Brookhaven-led National Quantum Information Science Research Center, and included scientists from the Lab’s Condensed Matter Physics & Materials Science Department, Center for Functional Nanomaterials, and National Synchrotron Light Source II, as well as theorists at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. It built on earlier work that also included scientists from Princeton University.
A team led by Brookhaven Lab atmospheric scientists made the first-ever remote-sensing observations of the cloud-droplet “birth zone” at the base of clouds, where aerosol particles suspended in Earth’s atmosphere give rise to the droplets that ultimately form clouds. The number of droplets formed in this transition zone will affect a cloud’s later stages and properties, including their reflection of sunlight and the likelihood of precipitation. The research was made possible by a high-resolution LIDAR system that sends laser beams into the atmosphere and measures the signals of backscattered light with a resolution of 10 centimeters. This tool, developed by the Brookhaven scientists in collaboration with colleagues from the Stevens Institute of Technology and Raymetrics S.A., will enhance scientists’ understanding of aerosol-cloud interactions and help them gain insight into how changes in atmospheric aerosol levels could affect clouds and climate — without having to fly up into the clouds.
Scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) are experts at using DNA as a tool for “programming” molecules to self-assemble into 3D nanostructures. By directing molecular and nanoscale building blocks toward specific arrangements they’ve designed, the researchers create novel, functional materials that exhibit desirable properties like electrical conductivity, photosensitivity, and chemical activity. This year, a team of researchers from CFN, Columbia University, and Stony Brook University significantly improved this process and expanded its applications. By stacking several material synthesis techniques, the team developed a new method of DNA-directed self-assembly that enables the production of a wide variety of metallic and semiconductor 3D nanostructures — the potential base materials for next-generation semiconductor devices, neuromorphic computing, and advanced energy applications. It is the first method of its kind to produce robust and designed 3D nanostructures from multiple material classes, setting the stage for new breakthroughs in advanced manufacturing at small scales.
Scientists calculate predictions for EIC measurements
Nuclear theorists used supercomputer calculations to accurately predict the distribution of electric charges in mesons, particles made of a quark and an antiquark. These predictions will provide a basis for comparison in future experiments at the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a facility that, among other goals, will explore how quarks, and the gluons that hold them together, are distributed within mesons, protons, and neutrons. The calculations also helped validate “factorization,” a widely used approach for deciphering particle properties. This approach breaks complex physical processes into two components, or factors, and will enable many more EIC predictions and more confident interpretations of experimental results. Calculations like these will help EIC scientists unravel how the fundamental building blocks that make up atoms stick together.
Atomic ‘GPS’ uncovers hidden material phase
Brookhaven scientists created the first-ever atomic movies showing how atoms rearrange locally within a quantum material as it transitions from an insulator to a metal. Their research marked a methodological achievement, as they demonstrated that a materials characterization technique called atomic pair distribution function (PDF) is feasible — and successful — at X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) facilities. PDF is typically used to observe materials that change over minutes to hours at synchrotron light sources, but the bright and short X-ray pulses produced by an XFEL facility enabled the capture of atomic movement on a picosecond time scale. With the new ultrafast PDF technique, which provides atomic routes like a navigation app, the researchers discovered a “hidden” material state, providing new insight into what really happens when certain quantum materials are excited by a laser.
Lithium-metal batteries, which have lithium metal anodes, can store more than twice the energy of lithium-ion batteries with graphite anodes. Yet most battery-operated devices are still powered by lithium-ion batteries. This year, Brookhaven chemists made significant contributions to DOE’s lithium-metal battery efforts by adding a compound called cesium nitrateto the electrolyte separating the battery’s anode and cathode. Their addition ultimately targeted the interphase, a protective layer formed on the battery’s electrodes and closely linked to the number of times a battery can be charged and discharged. The cesium nitrate additive made the batteries recharge faster while maintaining cycle life. However, closer analysis with tools at the National Synchrotron Light Source II and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials revealed two surprises: an unexpected interphase component and the absence of one previously considered essential for good battery performance. Though these findings challenge conventional battery beliefs, they create new opportunities for battery engineering.
Every plant, animal, and person is a complex microcosm of tiny, specialized cells. These cells are like their own worlds, each with unique parts and processes that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Being able to see the inner workings of these microscopic building blocks at nanometer resolution without harming their delicate parts has been a challenge. But this year, Brookhaven Lab biologists and scientists at the National Synchrotron Light Source II used a combination of X-ray methods to see inside cells in a whole new way. By using both hard X-ray computed tomography and X-ray fluorescence microscopy, they can reveal not just the structural details but also the chemical processes inside cells. This multimodal X-ray imaging approach could have significant implications in fields such as medicine, bioenergy, agriculture, and other important areas.
Other major milestones Brookhaven Lab celebrated this year
DOE gave the go-ahead for the purchase of “long-lead” equipment, services, and/or materials needed to build a state-of-the-art Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). This nuclear physics facility will be built at Brookhaven in partnership with DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and a wide range of other partners to explore the inner workings of the building blocks of matter and the strongest force in nature. Purchasing materials and equipment needed for sophisticated components for the EIC accelerator, detector, and supporting infrastructure ensures that the team will be ready when construction begins. It’s an important step toward the ultimate goal of efficiently delivering one of the most challenging and exciting accelerator complexes ever built by the mid 2030s.
Scientific data storage record
The Lab’s Scientific Data and Computing Center now stores more than 300 petabytes of data — the largest compilation of nuclear and particle physics data in the U.S. For comparison, that’s far more data than would be needed to represent everything written in human history plus all the movies ever created. The cache comes from experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Thanks to a combination of relatively economical tape storage and a robot-driven system for mounting data to disks, the cache is easily accessible to collaborators all around the world. The system is set up to meet evolving and expanding data needs for a range of existing experiments at Brookhaven and beyond, including the future Electron-Ion Collider.
NSLS-II celebrates 10 years of light
On Oct. 23, the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) celebrated its 10th anniversary of first light, the moment when its first X-rays were delivered. Over the last decade, this ultrabright light source has grown from six beamlines to 29, ramped up its accelerator current from 50 milliamperes to 500 milliamperes, hosted nearly 6,000 visiting researchers from around the world, and published more than 3,200 research papers. Since 2014, NSLS-II has enabled researchers to study the physical, chemical, and electronic makeup of materials with nanoscale resolution. And with continual advancements over its 10-year history, the facility remains one of the world’s most advanced light sources, accelerating breakthroughs in fields ranging from biology to quantum information science.
Atmospheric observatory opens in Alabama
Brookhaven Lab’s world-leading atmospheric scientists led the plan to install a suite of DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility instruments at a new observatory in the Southeastern U.S. The Bankhead National Forest observatory opened on Oct. 1 and hosted its first scientific workshop and media tours earlier this month. For at least five years, the observatory will provide data for scientists to investigate the complex interactions among clouds, vegetation, and aerosols suspended in the atmosphere. The observatory will contribute valuable insights into aerosol-cloud interactions and feed data to weather and climate models for a more comprehensive understanding of Earth’s atmospheric dynamics.
The research described above was funded primarily by the DOE Office of Science. RHIC, CFN, NSLS-II, and ARM are DOE Office of Science user facilities.
Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.
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