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Memorial to honor late physicist from Stony Brook

by Alex Petroski - June 10, 2015

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Olness remembered as brilliant scientist, education advocate

Olness-John-w — John Olness with his wife Margaret. Photo from Richard Olness

He did what he loved, and was loved for it.

John William Olness, a nuclear physicist and a Long Island resident since 1961, died on Feb. 15 at the age of 85.

Olness is survived by his wife Margaret, their sons Robert, Richard, Frederick and Christopher and their daughter Kristin.

“He was a creative parent,” son Richard said in a phone interview. “I wouldn’t trade him for the world.”

Olness was born in 1929, in Saskatchewan, Canada, while his father was teaching at a junior college. The family returned to their farm in northern Minnesota when John was young, and that is where he grew up.

Olness received a doctorate in nuclear physics from Duke University in 1957 where he met Margaret. He moved to Long Island from Dayton, Ohio, in 1961, then he began his career at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1963 where he stayed until his retirement in 2000 after 37 years of service. John and Margaret married in 1958 and moved to Stony Brook in 1968.

John Olness poses for a photo with his family and family friends. Photo from Richard Olness

“He got to do what he wanted,” Margaret said in a phone interview. “He was one of the lucky people who loved what he did for a living. You can’t beat that.”

“John worked with many of the visiting scientists who came to BNL to use the facilities, including Sir Denys Wilkinson (Oxford University), D. Allan Bromley (Yale and, later, science adviser to President George H.W. Bush) and future Space Shuttle astronaut Joseph Allen,” son Robert said of his father’s time at BNL, in an email.

Margaret identified her husband’s passions as physics first and music second.

In his leisure time Olness was a Little League baseball coach; and a founding member and trombone player with the Memories of Swing, a big band that performed around Long Island. He also served as a vice president of the Three Village school board in 1975-76. Kristin said that his desire to be on the school board was in large part to fight for the budgets of the music, sports and arts programs that are seemingly always the first to go when money gets thin.

Olness loved baseball, tennis and basketball, and often spent hours on the phone discussing the Detroit Tigers baseball team with his father, who lived in Michigan. He also played football in high school and college, Margaret said.

Olness was a supportive father and husband, according to Margaret. Their children have gone on to enjoy rewarding careers in wide-ranging walks of life, thanks in no small part to that parental support.

Frederick is a professor and physics department chair at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas; Robert is a major in the Army Reserve, awaiting his next deployment; Kristin has just finished a year on Broadway in “Cabaret,” and was also a member of the cast in the show’s 1998 revival; Richard is an actuary for the Department of Defense; and Christopher is a professional trombonist on Broadway currently playing in “On the Town,” the hit musical comedy.

“Dad put emphasis on education, and he and Mom supported us in exploring the arts and recreational sports,” Richard said in an email. “And in the later years, he encouraged us each to find a career we would enjoy.”

A memorial service will be held for John Olness on Thursday, July 2, at Setauket Presbyterian Church.

Dinosaur bones leave warm-blooded clues

by Daniel Dunaief - May 28, 2015

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DEmic-Michael-w — Studying parts of dinosaur bones that are smaller than the width of a human hair, Michael D’Emic specializes in sauropods, which includes the long necked Brontosaurus. Photo from SBU

They didn’t mark the wall in crayon or pencil with a date to monitor how they grew, the way parents do in suburban homes with their children. Millions of years ago, however, dinosaurs left clues in their bones about their annual growth.

Dinosaur bones have concentric rings, which are analogous to the ones trees have in their trunks.

A diagram represents the growth rings in dinosaur bones. Image from Michael D’Emic and Scott Hartman

Michael D’Emic, a paleontologist and Research Instructor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook, studied these bones and the size of these rings and concluded that dinosaurs were warm-blooded.

In a paper published in the journal Science, D’Emic demonstrates how the growth rates of these bones indicate dinosaurs were much more like birds than reptiles in their metabolism.

“This supports the idea that dinosaurs were warm-blooded,” said Holly Woodward Ballard, an Assistant Professor of Anatomy in the Center for Health Sciences at Oklahoma State University.

D’Emic re-analyzed data that appeared in a 2014 Science article, in which other scientists had suggested dinosaurs were mesothermic, which is somewhere in between cold blooded organisms, like reptiles, and warm-blooded creatures, like birds, three-toed sloths, and humans.

D’Emic was on a dinosaur dig in Wyoming when the paper came out last June. When he returned to Stony Brook in July, he took a closer look at the results. “When I read the paper, I thought they hadn’t accounted for a couple of factors that would bias the results,” he said. “I was curious how changing some of those factors” would affect the conclusions.

D’Emic studies the smallest parts of bones. Indeed, for creatures that lived millions of years ago and weighed as much as 40 tons, he looked closely at cells that were a fraction of the width of a human hair.

In his approach to the data, D’Emic adjusted for seasonal growth patterns. Typically, dinosaurs grow only half the year. In the other half, when food is scarce or the temperature drops enough, the dinosaurs would have needed that energy to survive. When he accounted for this, he said the rate of growth doubled.

Comparing his estimated growth rate for dinosaurs with the rate for mammals and reptiles of similar size suggested the dinosaurs “fell right in line with mammals,” he said.

Michael D’Emic enjoys a Lord of the Rings moment in Beartooth, Wyoming, near an excavation site in 2010. Photo from D’Emic.

A dinosaur’s metabolism could affect life histories including how the dinosaurs raised their young, as well as elements to their physiology, he said. “Such a fundamental aspect of an organism has implications for the kind of animals we expect them to be,” he said.

D’Emic recognizes that some paleontologists will question his conclusions about dinosaur metabolism. When looking at a broad group of paleontologists, he “still finds a pretty big spectrum of ideas” about metabolism and the “debate is probably still open.” After this recent work, D’Emic reached out to partners from around the world to explore bone growth in other groups of dinosaurs.

Ballard, who studies the growth and development of Maiasaura (duck-billed) dinosaurs from hatchling to adults primarily in Montana, supports D’Emic’s conclusions. She said his analysis will reinforce some of the hypotheses she had about dinosaur metabolism. Ballard said D’Emic was “well thought of” and has“definitely made an impact in the histological field.”

When he was in high school, D’Emic had the opportunity to join a dinosaur dig in New York, where he found a mastodon tusk. He was living in Manhattan at the time and went to Hyde Park with a summer class. After two weeks at the site with the class, he asked if he could come back, and wound up returning regularly for months, until school started.

“I didn’t want to go back to high school when September rolled around,” D’Emic recalled.

D’Emic, who recently left a dig in Utah and was on his way to join other Stony Brook researchers in Madagascar, said he still feels inspired by the opportunity to learn about dinosaurs. When he came to the University of Michigan in 2006 to start his PhD program, he planned to focus on Titanosaurs. By the time he left, the number of species of Titanosaurs scientists had discovered and categorized had doubled.

“It’s a cool time to be a paleontologist,” he said.

BNL’s Morgan May gives telescope passing grades

by Daniel Dunaief - May 26, 2015

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may-lsst-bnl-w — Above, Morgan May at the LSST site in Cerro Pachón, Chile, last month. The dryness of the site is essential for good viewing. Water vapor in the air causes stars to twinkle, or to have blurred images. Only the heartiest small cactus can survive at this elevation and in this low moisture. The LSST site is on the southern edge of the driest desert in the world, in the middle of 85,000 acres of land which is kept undeveloped to avoid light pollution for astronomy. Photo from Morgan May

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … billions of galaxies. Impossible to see with the naked eye, only vaguely visible through good telescopes, these galaxies will come to life in a way never seen before when the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope starts providing images from its mountaintop home in Chile in 2020.

Before this technological wonder is completed, people like Morgan May, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, are testing to make sure this ambitious project provides clear and accurate information.

Recently, May and his colleagues at BNL conducted two tests of the telescope.

The LSST will have 200 individual silicon sensors that are the film in the 3.2 gigapixel digital camera. The process of making the sensors is imperfect, with the sensors starting out as molten mass.

Impurities or variation in the temperature can cause imperfections that look like tree rings around a central circle, which create electric fields that can cause a distortion in the image.

“Because we are trying to measure things at a much higher level of precision, the tree rings were a source of great concern,” said May, who receives funding from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science-Cosmic Frontier Research.

They found that these radial imperfections were much smaller than in previous detectors, which was already a benefit to the project. Looking at the likely actual measurements using these sensors, May and his colleagues found that these tree rings had a small effect on the data, which was a pleasant surprise, but one that took some time to prove.

In another test, May, working with Columbia University graduate student Andrea Petri, examined whether differences in the sizes of the three billion pixels in the camera might also cause problems interpreting the information.

May and Yuki Okura, a postdoctoral fellow from Japan’s RIKEN laboratory who is stationed at the RIKEN-BNL Research Center, measured how much light each pixel picked up in the detector. While the variation was small, they weren’t sure whether it was small enough to keep from causing problems with the data.

The team simulated a night sky. Once they gathered the information they would have collected from these slight pixel differences, they compared their simulated image to their original.

Fortunately for the scientists, this effect also proved manageable and won’t create confusion.

May and Okura’s work “did have a good outcome,” said Sam Aronson, director of the RIKEN BNL Research Center. “They showed that the sensor imperfections measured on the LSST sensors will not affect LSST’s science objectives.”

While May is relieved the telescope passed these two tests, he continues to search for other potential problems with this revolutionary telescope.

“I am confident the LSST is going to be successful in its goals, but we have to work very hard to follow every possible issue and resolve it,” he said.

As a part of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration, May said his primary research goal is to answer the question, “What is dark energy?” May said he will be studying subtle features of enormous amounts of information that will become available. May will be researching a force that causes the universe to expand faster and faster, rather than contract.

Until the 1930s, everyone thought the universe was contracting. Edwin Hubble, for whom the Hubble Space Telescope is named, was the first to observe this expansion. It is as if a ball thrown in the air slows down as expected and then accelerates away from Earth, May said. One well-regarded hypothesis is that the universe is filled with something called dark energy that causes a gravitational force that repels rather than attracts.
Once the telescope goes online, the information will become widely available.

“We’re going to make our data public to the everyone in the United States,” said May. It will be possible for “children in high school or even elementary school to have their own galaxy or supernova.”

Born in Brooklyn, May lives on Long Island with his wife Dana Vermilye. The couple have a 23-year old son, Michael, who is in medical school and a daughter, Julia, who is a high school sophomore.

May sees cosmology and astrophysics as a new frontier in science. “It’s an area where great discoveries are being made,” he said. “If you are interested in science as an observer or a career, I would say [it’s] really in the forefront.”

CSHL’s Fearon works on way to help immune system fight cancer

Science & Technology

by Daniel Dunaief - May 20, 2015

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fearon-cshl-w — Doug Fearon. Photo from CSHL

Determined to help develop better treatments and, perhaps even a cure, Douglas Fearon, a medical doctor, decided to conduct research instead of turning to existing remedies. More than two decades later, Fearon joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and is working on ways to help bodies afflicted with cancer heal themselves.

Fearon is focusing on the battle cancer wages with the T lymphocytes cells of human immune systems. Typically, these cells recognize threats to human health and destroy them. The pancreatic cancer cells he’s studying, however, have a protective mechanism that is almost like a shield. “The cancer is killing the T cells before the T cells can kill the cancer,” said Fearon.

The T cells have a complex signaling pathway on their surface that allows them to link up with other objects to determine whether these cells are friend or foe. In pancreatic cancer, Fearon has focused on a receptor that, when attached to the deadly disease, may disarm the T cell.

Researchers had already developed a small molecule that blocks the receptor on the T lymphocytes from linking up with this protein for another disease: the human immunodeficiency virus. When Fearon applied this molecule to a mouse model of pancreatic cancer, the therapy showed promise. “Within 24 hours, T cells were infiltrating the cancer cells,” he said. “Within 48 hours, the tumors had shrunk by 15 percent. This drug overcame the means by which cancer cells were escaping.”

This month, doctors at the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, where Fearon worked for 20 years, plan to begin Phase I human trials of this treatment for pancreatic cancer. Later this year, doctors at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, where Fearon has a joint appointment, will begin a similar effort.

Scientists are encouraged by the early results from Fearon’s treatment. The Lustgarten Foundation named Fearon one of three inaugural “Distinguished Scholars” last year, awarding him $5 million for his research over the next five years.

The scientific advisory board at the Foundation “expects distinguished scholars to be on the leading edge of breakthrough therapies and understanding for this disease,” said David Tuveson, a professor and director of the Lustgarten Foundation Pancreatic Cancer Center Research Laboratory at CSHL.

During the early stage trials, doctors will increase the dosage to a level HIV patients had received during early experiments with the drug, called AMD 3100 or Plerixafor.

While Fearon is cautiously optimistic about this approach, he recognizes that there are many unknowns in developing this type of therapy. For starters, even if the treatment is effective, he doesn’t know whether the cancer may recur and, if it does, whether it might adapt some way to foil the immune system’s attempt to eradicate it.

Additionally, the receptor the doctors are blocking is required for many other functions in humans and mice. In mice, for example, the receptor on the T cell has a role in the developing nervous system and it also plays a part in a process called chemotaxis, which directs the migration of a cell.

“After giving this drug to HIV patients for 10 days, there were no long-term effects,” Fearon said. Researchers and doctors don’t “know for sure if you continued blocking this receptor what the long-term effects” would be.

Fearon and his wife Clare are renting a cottage in Lloyd Neck and have an apartment on the Upper East Side. Their daughter Elizabeth recently earned her Ph.D. in epidemiology in Cambridge, England while their son Tom, who is working toward a graduate degree in psychology, is interested in a career in counseling.

A native of Park Slope, Brooklyn who was the starting quarterback for Williams College in Massachusetts in his junior and senior years, Fearon feels it’s a “privilege to do something that may have a positive effect” on people’s lives.

Fearon is especially pleased to work at CSHL, where he said he can collaborate with colleagues who often immediately see the benefits of such a partnership. He has worked with Mikala Egeblad on intravital imaging, which is a type of microscope that allows him to look at living tissue. They are sharing the cost of buying a new instrument. Working with her “facilitated my ability to start up a project in my lab using a similar technique,” Fearon said.

Kids get excited about science at Centereach STEM event

by Erika Karp - May 19, 2015

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A pumped-up crowd in the Centereach High School gymnasium cheered, clapped and clamored to see which of the district’s elementary schools would come out victorious at Monday night’s STEM Celebration.

The evening marked the district’s first celebration of science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. Hundreds of students, parents, teachers and administrators flooded the school to see students use their skills to build paper helicopters, newspaper tables and cup towers, and compete against each other to build a spaghetti tower. In addition, students from the district’s eight elementary schools presented their LEGO engineering creations to judges.

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Port Jefferson classrooms tech it out

by Elana Glowatz - May 13, 2015

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Ken-Bossert-051215_Glowatzw — Superintendent Ken Bossert explains the difficulties of measuring how iPads affect student achievement in Port Jefferson. Photo by Elana Glowatz

Port Jefferson schools will put more money toward using modern technology in the classroom next year.

Following a presentation from the staff technology committee at a board of education meeting Tuesday night, the trustees approved a request to spend about $17,000 on iPad tablets and Chromebook computers to assist instruction.

The district began using iPads in elementary classrooms in the 2013-14 school year on a pilot basis. After receiving a positive response to the tablets, the school board tripled the number of tablets in the current school year, to three carts of iPads for the teachers to rotate among their classrooms. The board’s approval will bring the number of carts next school year up to four, which officials said would be the program’s final expansion — moving forward, money would be spent on replacing iPads, not adding more to the supply.

According to Christine Austen, the district’s K-12 assistant principal and a technology committee member, each teacher could potentially have the iPads for five weeks of instructional use with those four carts.

The additional iPads will mean there will roughly be one for every five students, she said.

In classrooms where teachers are using the tablets, Austen said, students are more engaged and there are more opportunities for the kids to collaborate with one another, among other benefits.

Although the school board supported the iPad expansion, President Kathleen Brennan and Trustee Bob Ramus said they wanted to see more data on the technology’s effect on student performance. Ramus pointed out that the board had requested such information during previous presentations on the iPad program.

But Superintendent Ken Bossert said the matter is not so simple.

“When we talked about what a researcher would do to develop a model to measure that impact, it would be to give a class full-time use of the iPads for all initiatives and deny another class any use and then measure the achievement levels between the two. We weren’t comfortable with that model.”

He said the district would work to get more data on student performance, but there are ways to measure how much a student is learning within different educational applications on the iPads “and we saw student growth within the apps.”

There is also a staff development element — Austen said some teachers still need training to effectively use the tablets in their classrooms, as only about 69 percent of the staff is using them this year.

Another piece of the district technology program is using laptops with older students to access Google applications. Some teachers have incorporated those free applications — which are collectively known as Google Classroom and include functions like word processing, survey, slideshow and spreadsheet tools — into their lessons already.

According to the technology committee’s presentation, the Google system makes it easy to create assignments and grade them, encourages collaboration, organizes students’ class materials and reduces the use of paper. It also “provides students an opportunity to engage in an online learning environment prior to attending college.”

Austen said the district would like to start replacing “aging laptops” with Chromebooks, which run on Google software and have the applications built in. They are also less expensive than other laptops and run faster.

Roughly two-thirds of the cost for the Chromebooks, Bossert said, will be covered by state aid.

Explore SBU’s endless opportunities — begin your career today

by TBR Staff - May 12, 2015

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By Lynn Johnson

From its beginnings more than a half-century ago, Stony Brook University has been characterized by innovation, energy and progress, transforming the lives of people who earn degrees, work and make groundbreaking discoveries here. Stony Brook is the largest single-site employer on Long Island, and the diversity of career opportunities available is equaled by the diversity of our employees.

New jobs are being posted daily using innovative software recently implemented on our applicant job site. These enhancements make the process of applying for jobs at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook Medicine and Long State Veterans Home quicker and easier than ever before.

Through the university’s new Talent Management System, you can create your own profile electronically on any device and then apply for multiple jobs at Stony Brook with a few quick clicks online, 24/7. At any time during the search-and-selection process, you can update your profile details, monitor your status and receive customized job alerts based on individual preferences — all while conveniently keeping track of everything in one place.

This system allows for easier access to the tremendous job diversity at Stony Brook. Long Island’s premier research university and academic medical center offers outstanding career potential in health care, research, academia, administration, public safety, food service, maintenance, construction and more. It’s an environment in which you can explore a myriad of career opportunities.

As the university expands, more opportunities for employment and career advancement are becoming available. The new Research and Development Park is home to the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center, the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology and the Small Business Development Center. The 250,000-square-foot Medical and Research Translation (MART) building, scheduled to open in 2016, will have eight floors devoted to imaging, neurosciences and cancer research. New student housing facilities and a dining center, also slated for 2016, will make Stony Brook the largest campus-housing program in SUNY.

The sheer size of the university makes it seem like a small city in itself, with countless amenities, such as on-campus banking, eateries, childcare and transportation via the LIRR and bus services. Employees are immersed in an active, vibrant campus life. You can see world-class live performances at Staller Center, cheer the Seawolves NCAA Division I athletic teams, work out at the Walter J. Hawrys Campus Recreation Center, learn from our renowned faculty or enjoy the tranquility of the Ashley Schiff Nature Preserve.

Stony Brook also offers a rich benefits package with multiple health insurance plans, including retirement health benefits; paid holidays, vacation and sick leave; retirement and college savings plans; flexible spending plans; and employee tuition assistance benefits.

To create an account and start the search for your new career at Stony Brook, visit stonybrook.edu/jobs.

Lynn Johnson is the vice president of human resource services at Stony Brook University.

BNL’s Serbin judges treetops from space

by Daniel Dunaief - May 11, 2015

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serbin-bnl-w — Shawn Serbin. Photo by Bethany Helzer

While judging a book by its cover may be misleading, judging a forest by looking at the top of the canopy can be informative. What’s more, that can be true even from satellite images.

An expert in a field called “remote sensing,” Shawn Serbin, an assistant scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, takes a close look at the spectral qualities of trees, gathering information that generates a better understanding of how an area responds to different precipitation, temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Serbin is “on the cutting edge” of this kind of analysis, said Alistair Rogers, a scientist at BNL who collaborates with and supervises Serbin. “He’s taking this to a new level.” Serbin and Rogers are a part of the BNL team working on a new, decade-long project funded by the Department of Energy called Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments — Tropics.

The multinational study will develop a forest ecosystem model that goes from the bedrock to the top of the forest canopy and aims to include soil and vegetation processes at a considerably stronger resolution than current models.

The NGEE Tropics study follows a similar decade-long, DOE-funded effort called NGEE-Arctic, which is another important biological area. Serbin is also working on that arctic study and ventured to Barrow, Alaska, last summer to collect field data.

Working with Rogers, Serbin, who joined BNL last March, said his group will try to understand the controls on tropical photosynthesis, respiration and allocation of carbon.

Serbin uses field spectrometers and a range of airborne and satellite sensors that measure nitrogen, water, pigment content and the structural compound of leaves to get at a chemical fingerprint. The spectroscopic data works on the idea that the biochemistry, shape and other properties of leaves and plant canopies determine how light energy is absorbed, transmitted and reflected. As the energies and biochemistry of leaves changes, so do their optical properties, Serbin explained.

“Our work is showing that spectroscopic data can detect and quantify the metabolic properties of plants and help us to understand the photosynthetic functioning of plants, remotely, with the ultimate goal to be able to monitor photosynthesis directly from space,” Serbin said.

NGEE-Tropics, which received $100 million in funding from the DOE, brings together an international team of researchers. This project appealed to Serbin when he was seeking an appointment as a postdoctoral student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It’s one of the reasons I was happy to come to BNL,” Serbin said. “To have the opportunity to collaborate closely with so many top-notch researchers on a common goal is incredibly rare.”

The tropics study includes scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest national laboratories and also includes researchers from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NASA and numerous groups from other countries.

In the first phase of this 10-year study, scientists will design pilot studies to couple improvements in computer modeling with observations in the tropics. These early experiments will include work in Manaus, Brazil, to see how forests react to less precipitation. In Puerto Rico, researchers will see how soil fertility impacts the regrowth of forests on abandoned agricultural land.

Serbin expects to work in all three regions. He plans to do some pilot work early on to identify how to deal with the logistics of the experiments.

“These are designed to ‘shake out the bugs’ and figure out exactly how we can do what we need to do,” he said.

Serbin lives in Sound Beach with his partner Bethany Helzer, a freelance photographer whose work includes book covers and who has been featured in Elle Girl Korea and Brava Magazine. The couple has two cats, Bear and Rocky, whom they rescued in Wisconsin. Helzer has joined Serbin on his field expeditions and has been a “trooper,” contributing to work in California in which the couple endured 130-degree heat in the Coachella Valley.

“Having her along has indeed shown that when you are in the field and focused on the work, you can miss some of the beauty that surrounds you,” Serbin said.

Serbin said the NGEE-Tropics work, which has involved regular contact through Skype, email and workshops, will offer a better understanding of a biome that is instrumental in the carbon cycle. “Our work will directly impact future global climate modeling projections,” he said.

Report: Cold Spring Harbor Lab matters to economy

by Daniel Dunaief - May 8, 2015

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demerec-cshl-photo-from-cshlw — A view of the Demerec Laboratory, slated to house a proposed Center for Therapeutics Research. The laboratory, completed in 1953, needs an upgrade. Photo from CSHL

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research center that has produced eight Nobel Prize winners and is stocked with first-class scientists generating reams of data every year, shared some numbers earlier this week on its economic impact on Long Island.

The facility brought in about $140 million in revenue in 2013 to Long Island from federal grants, private philanthropy, numerous scientific educational programs and the commercialization of technology its scientists have developed, according to a report, “Shaping Long Island’s Bioeconomy: The Economic Impact of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,” compiled by Appleseed, a private consulting firm.

At the same time the lab tackles diseases like cancer, autism and Parkinson’s, and employs 1,106 people with 90 percent working full time and 987 living on Long Island.

“We are recognized as being one of the top research institutions throughout the world,” Bruce Stillman, the president and CEO of CSHL said in an interview. The economic impact may help Long Islanders become “aware that such a prestigious institution exists in their backyard.”

Stillman highlighted programs that benefit the community, including public lectures, concerts and the school of education, which includes the DNA Learning Center, a tool to build a greater understanding of genetics.
The financial benefit to the economy extends well beyond Long Island, too.

“The research we do has an enormous impact on the development by others of therapeutics and plant science in agriculture,” Stillman said.

Indeed, Pfizer recently received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for a breast cancer drug called Ibrance that is expected to produce $5 billion in annual sales by 2020. The research that helped lead to that drug was conducted at CSHL in 1994.

In its 125-year history, this is the first time the laboratory has provided a breakdown of its financial benefit.
The impetus for this report occurred a few years ago, when Stillman met with Stony Brook University President Dr. Samuel Stanley Jr. and Sam Aronson, who was then the CEO of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

“We were talking about promoting further interactions and seeking state support,” Stillman said.

This year, CSHL will bring online a preclinical experimental therapeutics facility that will build out the nonprofit group’s research capabilities.

At the same time, CSHL is awaiting word on a $25 million grant it is seeking from New York State to support a proposed Center for Therapeutics Research.

The center would cost about $75 million in total, with CSHL raising money through philanthropic donations, partnerships with industry and federal aid. The center would “fit in well with our affiliation with North Shore-LIJ [Health System],” Stillman said.

CSHL plans to create the center in the Demerec Laboratory, which was completed in 1953 and needs an upgrade. Named after Milislav Demerec, a previous director at CSHL who mass-produced penicillin that was shipped overseas to American troops during World War II, the building has been home to four Nobel Prize-winning scientists: Barbara McClintock, Alfred Hershey, Rich Roberts and Carol Greider.

The renovated lab would house a broad range of research strengths, with candidates including a number of cancer drugs that are in the early stages of clinical trials; a therapeutic effort for spinal muscular atrophy, which is the leading genetic cause of death among infants; diabetes; and obesity.

The revenue from CSHL, as well as that from BNL, SBU and North Shore-LIJ, Stillman said, all have a “huge economic benefit to the Long Island community.”

CSHL’s Churchland shows how we think about numbers

by Daniel Dunaief - May 4, 2015

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churchland-cshl-chocolate-w — Christopher Fetsch (far left) and Anne Churchland (second from right) with a group of neuroscientists at a conference last month. Photo from Anne Churchland

When she’s having trouble understanding something she’s reading, Anne Churchland will sometimes read the text out loud. Seeing and hearing the words often helps.

An associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Churchland recently published research in the Journal of Neurophysiology in which she explored how people use different senses when thinking about numbers.

She asked nine participants in her study to determine whether something they saw had a larger or smaller number of flashes of light, sequences of sounds or both compared to another number.

To see whether her subjects were using just the visual or auditory stimuli, she varied the clarity of the signal, making it harder to decide whether a flash of light or a sound counted.

The people in her study used a combination of the two signals to determine a number compared to a fixed value, rather than relying only on one type of signal. The subjects didn’t just calculate the average of sight and sound clues but took the reliability of that number into account. That suggests they thought of the numbers with each stimuli within a range of numbers, which could be higher or lower depending on other evidence.

Churchland describes this process as the probabilistic method. It would be the equivalent of finding two sources of information online about Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel. In the first one, someone might have posted a brief entry on his personal Web page, offering some potentially interesting information. In the second, a prize-winning biographer might have shared an extensive view of her long life. In a probabilistic strategy, people would weigh the second source more heavily.

Funded by an educational branch of the National Science Foundation, Churchland said this is the kind of study that might help teachers better understand how people’s brains represent numbers.

Young children and people with no formal math training have some ability to estimate numbers, she said. This kind of study might help educators understand how people go from an “innate to the more formalized math.”

This study might have implications for disorders in which people have unusual sensory processing. “By understanding the underlying neural circuitry” doctors can “hopefully develop more effective treatments,” Churchland said.

Churchland is generally interested in neural circuits and in putting together a combination of reliable and unreliable signals. Working with rodents, she is hoping to see a signature of those signals in neural responses.

Churchland runs a blog in which she shares developments at her lab. Last month, she attended a conference in which she and other neuroscientists had a panel discussion of correlation versus causation in experiments.

She cautioned that a correlation — the Knicks lose every time a dog tracks mud in the house — doesn’t imply causation.

The group studied a lighthearted example, viewing the relationship between chocolate consumption and the number of Nobel Prizes in various countries, with Switzerland coming out on top of both categories. “In the chocolate case, correlation does imply causation because I like to eat chocolate and was looking for excuses,” she joked.

Christopher Fetsch, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University, worked with Churchland for several months in 2010. In addition to teaching him how to do electrical microstimulation and serving as a “terrific role model,” Fetsch described Churchland as “an innovator with a high degree of technical skill and boundless energy.” Fetsch, who attended the same conference last month, lauded Churchland’s ability to bring together experts with a range of strengths.

Churchland created a website, www.Anneslist.net, which is a compilation of women in neuroscience. She said it began for her own purposes, as part of an effort to find speakers for a computational and systems neuroscience meeting. The majority of professors in computational neuroscience are men, she said. “It is important to have a field that is open to all,” she said. “That way, the best scientists [can] come in and do the best work.” The list has since gone viral and people from all over the world send her emails.

A resident of the housing at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Churchland lives with her husband, Michael Brodesky, and their two children.

Churchland has collaborated with her brother Mark, an assistant professor at the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University. Her parents, Patricia and Paul, are well-known philosophers. Her mother has appeared on “The Colbert Report.” She said her family members can all be contentious when discussing matters of the mind.

“The dinner table is lively,” she said.

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