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Priya Sridevi with her golden doodle Henry. Photo by Ullas Pedmale

By Daniel Dunaief

Priya Sridevi started out working with plants but has since branched out to study human cancer. Indeed, the research investigator in Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cancer Center Director David Tuveson’s lab recently became the project manager for an ambitious effort coordinating cancer research among labs in three countries.

The National Cancer Institute is funding the creation of a Cancer Model Development Center, which supports the establishment of cancer models for pancreatic, breast, colorectal, lung, liver and other upper-gastrointestinal cancers. The models will be available to other interested researchers. Tuveson is leading the collaboration and CSHL Research Director David Spector is a co-principal investigator.

The team plans to create a biobank of organoids, which are three-dimensional models derived from human cancers and which mirror the genetic and cellular characteristics of tumors. Over the next 18 months, labs in Italy, the Netherlands and the United States, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, expect to produce up to 150 organoid models.

The project officially started in January and the labs have been setting up the process through June. Sridevi is working with Hans Clevers of the Hubrecht Institute, who pioneered the development of organoids, and with Vincenzo Corbo and Aldo Scarpa at the University and Hospital Trust of Verona.

Sridevi’s former doctoral advisor Stephen Alexander, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Missouri, said Sridevi has had responsibilities beyond her own research. She was in charge of day-to-day operations in his lab, like ordering and regulatory reporting on radioactive material storage and usage, while he and his wife Hannah Alexander, who was Sridevi’s co-advisor, were on sabbatical. “She is hard working and determined,” said Alexander. “She knows how to get things done.”

In total, the project will likely include 25 people in the three centers. CSHL will hire an additional two or three scientists, including a postdoctoral researcher and a technician, while the Italian and Netherlands groups will also likely add another few scientists to each of their groups.

Each lab will be responsible for specific organoids. Tuveson’s lab, which has done considerable work in creating pancreatic cancer organoids, will create colorectal tumors and a few pancreatic cancer models, while Spector’s lab will create breast cancer organoids.

Clevers’ lab, meanwhile, will be responsible for creating breast and colorectal organoids, and the Italian team will create pancreatic cancer organoids. In addition, each of the teams will try to create organoids for other model systems, in areas like lung, cholangiocarcinomas, stomach cancer, neuroendocrine tumors and other cancers of the gastrointestinal tract.

For those additional cancers, there are no standard operating procedures, so technicians will need to develop new procedures to generate these models, Sridevi said. “We’ll be learning so much more” through those processes, Sridevi added. They might also learn about the dependencies of these cancers during the process of culturing them.

Sridevi was particularly grateful to the patients who donated their cells to these efforts. These patients are making significant contributions to medical research even though they, themselves, likely won’t benefit from these efforts, she said. In the United States, the patient samples will come from Northwell Health and the Tissue Donation Program of Northwell’s Feinstein Institute of Medical Research. “It’s remarkable that so many people are willing to do this,” Sridevi said. “Without them, there is no cancer model.”

Sridevi also appreciates the support of the philanthropists and foundations that provide funds to back these projects. Sridevi came to Tuveson’s lab last year, when she was seeking opportunities to contribute to translational efforts to help patients. She was involved in making drought and salinity resistant rice and transgenic tomato plants in her native India before earning her doctorate at the University of Missouri in Columbia.

Alexander recalled how Sridevi, who was recruited to join another department at the University of Missouri, showed up in his office unannounced and said she wanted to work in his lab. He said his lab was full and that she would have to be a teaching assistant to earn a stipend. He also suggested this wasn’t the optimal way to conduct research for a doctorate in molecular biology, which is a labor-intensive effort. “She was intelligent and determined,” Alexander marveled, adding that she was a teaching assistant seven times and obtained a wealth of knowledge about cell biology.

Sridevi, who lives on campus at CSHL with her husband Ullas Pedmale, an assistant professor at CSHL who studies the mechanisms involved in the response of plants to the environment, said the transition to Long Island was initially difficult after living for six years in San Diego.

“The weather spoiled us,” she said, although they and their goldendoodle Henry have become accustomed to life on Long Island. She appreciates the “wonderful colleagues” she works with who have made the couple feel welcome.

Sridevi believes the efforts she is involved with will play a role in understanding the biology of cancer and therapeutic opportunities researchers can pursue, which is one of the reasons she shifted her attention from plants. In Tuveson’s lab, she said she “feels more closely connected to patients” and is more “directly impacting their therapy.” She said the lab members don’t get to know the patients, but they hope to be involved in designing personalized therapy for them. In the Cancer Model Development Center, the scientists won a subcontract from Leidos Biomedical Research. If the study progresses as the scientists believe it should, it can be extended for another 18 months.

As for her work, Sridevi doesn’t look back on her decision to shift from plants to people. While she enjoyed her initial studies, she said she is “glad she made this transition” to modeling and understanding cancer.

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By Elof Axel Carlson

Elof Axel Carlson

Science is a way of interpreting the universe in the era in which we live. One of the realities of our lives is that we do not know how much of the world we think we know is really incomplete.

Think of it this way — If you grew up when the American Revolutionary War was being fought, you would not know a lot. You would not know your body is composed of cells. You would not know that heredity is transmitted by genes located on chromosomes present in nuclei of cells because no one knew there were nuclei, chromosomes or genes.

You would also not know there are biochemical pathways that carry out your metabolism in cell organelles because no one then knew there was such a thing as metabolism, biochemical pathways or cell organelles. And you would not know that infectious diseases are associated with bacterial and viral infections nor would you know that your body is regulated by hormones. If you created a time line of scientific findings in the life sciences, the cell theory was introduced in 1838. Cells were named in 1665, but Robert Hooke thought they accounted for the buoyancy of cork bark. He drew them as empty boxes.

When Schleiden and Schwann described cells, they were filled with fluid; and Schwann thought nuclei were crystallizing baby cells being formed in a cell. The cell doctrine (all cells arise from pre-existing cells) did not come until Remak and Virchow presented evidence for it. Mitosis, or cell division, was not worked out until the late 1870s; and meiosis of reproductive cells (sperm and eggs) was not worked out until the 1990s.

Fertilization involving one sperm and one egg was first seen in 1876, while most cell organelles were worked out for their functions and structure after the invention of the electron microscope in the 1930s. There was no organic chemistry before Wöhler synthesized molecules like urea in 1823, and biochemical pathways were not worked out until the 1940s.

DNA was not known to be the chemical composition of genes until 1944, the structure of DNA was worked out in 1953, molecular biology was not named until 1938 and the germ theory was worked out in the 1870s and 1880s by Pasteur and by Koch, who both demonstrated bacteria specific for infectious diseases. Embryology was worked out in 1759 by Wolff, while hormones were first named and found in 1903 by Bayliss and Starling.

What the history of the life sciences reveals is how dependent science is on new tools to investigate life. Microscopes up to 30 power came from Hooke’s efforts in 1665. A better microscope by Leeuwenhoek distinguished living organisms (“animalcules”) at up to 500 power.

It was not until the 1830s that microscopes were able to overcome optical aberrations and not until the 1860s that a stain technology developed to see the contents of cells. This boosted observation to 2000 power. For the mid-20th century, cell fractionation made use of centrifuges and chromatography to separate organelles from their cells and work out their functions.

Experimental biology began in England with Harvey’s study in 1628 of the pumping action of the heart. Harvey was educated in Padua, Italy, where experimental science had been stressed by Galileo and his students who began applying it to the motion of the body relating bones and muscles to their functions. No one alive in 1750 (or earlier) could have predicted DNA, oxidative phosphorylation, the production of oxygen by plants, Mendel’s laws of heredity or the role of insulin in diabetes.

But what about the present? How complete is our knowledge of life processes? Are there major findings in the centuries to come that will make our present understanding look as quaint as reading the scientific literature in the 1700s?

We can describe what we would like to know based on our knowledge of the present and likely to be achievable. We cannot predict what may turn out to be new functions or structures in cells. At best (using what we do know) we can hope to create a synthetic cell that will be indistinguishable from the living cell from which it was chemically constructed. But that assumes the 300 or so genes in a synthetic cell will account for all the activities of the vague cytoplasm in which metabolism takes place.

For the level of viruses there are no such barriers and the polio virus has been synthesized artificially in cell-free test tubes in 2002 (an accomplishment of Eckard Wimmer at Stony Brook University).

Within a few years ongoing studies of bacteria and of yeast cells with artificial chromosomes, may resolve that question for the genome of a eukaryotic cell. I hope that an artificial cytoplasm will be worked out in that effort. That might be more of a challenge than presently assumed.

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Harborfront Park plays host to the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10. Photo by Alex Petroski
An interactive fireball sculpture at the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire in Port Jefferson June 10. Photo by Alex Petroski
An underwater robotic demonstration by SeaPerch during the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10 in Port Jefferson. Photo by Alex Petroski
Honey bees on display at the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire in Port Jefferson June 10. Photo by Alex Petroski
Representatives from the Tesla Science Center entertain attendees of the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire in Port Jefferson June 10. Photo by Alex Petroski
Young attendees play during the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10 in Port Jefferson. Photo by ALex Petroski
Young attendees play during the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10 in Port Jefferson. Photo by ALex Petroski
Harborfront Park plays host to the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10. Photo by Alex Petroski
Attendees of the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire in Port Jefferson pose for a photo with a Transformer. Photo by Alex Petroski
An underwater robotic demonstration by SeaPerch during the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10 in Port Jefferson. Photo by Alex Petroski
Attendees of the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10 in Port Jeff make fossils. Photo by Alex Petroski
A vintage vehicle at the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire in Port Jefferson June 10. Photo by Alex Petroski
Young attendees play during the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10 in Port Jefferson. Photo by ALex Petroski
Harborfront Park plays host to the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10. Photo by Alex Petroski
An underwater robotic demonstration by SeaPerch during the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10 in Port Jefferson. Photo by Alex Petroski
Young attendees play during the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10 in Port Jefferson. Photo from Port Jeff Village
Village Deputy Mayor Larry LaPointe and Mayor Margot Garant during the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10 in Port Jefferson. Photo from Port Jeff Village
Young attendees play during the Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire June 10 in Port Jefferson. Photo from Port Jeff Village

On a sun-splashed Saturday afternoon, members of the community young and old had the chance to get outside and exercise their imagination at the third Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire. The popular event, hosted by the Port Jefferson Maritime Explorium June 10, saw demonstrations using robots, interactive activities, exhibits and performances from various “makers” at the Village Center and outside at Harborfront Park.

The Port Jeff maker faire is a scaled down version of the larger Maker Faire brand, which hosts worldwide events similar to the one in Port Jeff. According to the Maritime Explorium’s website, more than 100 makers and 2,000 participants attended the 2016 Mini Maker Faire, and even more were projected to show up this year, although final totals were not readily available.

Some of the makers on display included Funtown Studios, which brought an interactive fireball sculpture; robotics teams from the Sachem and Smithtown school districts; electricity and magnetism demonstrations by representatives from the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe in Shoreham; an underwater robotic demonstration by SeaPerch; representatives from Stony Brook iCREATE, an innovation facility designed to encourage “innovation and entrepreneurial nature” of the Stony Brook University campus community; and many more.

Before the 2016 faire, Stephanie Buffa, a volunteer board member at the Explorium, explained the importance of the message of the event and the museum as a whole.

“Everything is at our fingertips,” she said in a phone interview. “If you’re sitting at the dinner table and somebody asks a question, you ‘Google’ it. It’s so easy to get answers that way…it’s so easy to get caught up in all of these pre-packaged things that we forget to sort of, do it yourself. You can be creative in so many ways. You don’t have to be a good artist and be able to draw beautiful pictures to be creative and to make things.”

Lauren Hubbard, founding president and former executive director of The Maritime Explorium, who is listed as a producer of the faire, said the day was a success, though attendance numbers are not available as of yet. She said in a phone interview the goal of the event is to show local people of all ages they have the creativity to be makers.

“It’s really about highlighting the entrepreneurial spirit,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity for young people to see how that process happens, how to create something completely new.”

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Gabor Balazsi in his lab. Photo by Aleksandrs Nasonovs

By Daniel Dunaief

It started with a bang. When he was young and living with his parents, Gabor Balazsi’s curiosity sometimes got the better of him, at the expense of his parents’ house.

The future Henry Laufer associate professor of physical and quantitative biology at Stony Brook University was holding bare wires in his native home in Transylvania when he plugged in an appliance. The current surged through his body, preventing him from releasing the wires. Fortunately, his mother came in and “unplugged me.”

These days, Balazsi, is much more focused on the kinds of behavior that turns the instructions for a cell into something more dangerous, like cancer or a drug-resistant strain of a disease.

Balazsi recently received a $1.8 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how gene networks change, often to the detriment of human health, as is the case when they are active in cancer or when they are resisting treatment. The grant is called Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award.

“Cancer cells often don’t look the same in a matter of months and drug-resistant microbes may look the same in a matter of days,” Balazsi said. He would like to know “what causes them to change and how can we prevent them from changing to their advantage and our disadvantage?”

In a way, Balazsi is trying to figure out a code that is akin to the popular 1970s game Simon in which a player has to repeat a growing number of flashing lights and sounds. With each turn, the game increases the number of flashing lights and sounds, going from a single red, to red, green, yellow and green until the player can no longer recall the entire code.

He is looking for a similar key to a sequence of events that transforms a cell, except that in the cancer, there are millions of interacting lights, many of which are invisible. The cancer biologist tries to reconstruct the sequence in which some of these lights turned on by observing visible lights that are currently on.

He is exploring the “pattern that leads to the outcome” through changes of networks in yeast cells, he said. He is also hoping to explore pathogenic fungi. The pattern, he said, will change depending on the circumstances, which include the environment and initial mutations.

Scientists who have collaborated with Balazsi suggested his understanding of several scientific disciplines enables him to conduct innovative research.

“He bridges two fields, biology and biophysics, allowing him not only to describe biological processes but also to model them and make predictions that can then be tested,” Marsha Rosner, the Charles B. Huggins professor at the University of Chicago, wrote in an email.

While Balazsi doesn’t treat patients, he is focused on understanding and controlling the processes that lead a cell or group of cells to change from a uniform function and task to a heterogeneous one, where the cells may follow a different path using a previously inactive network of genes.

By understanding what causes these changes, he hopes to find ways to slow their progress or prevent the kind of deviations that lead to combinations that are destructive to humans, such as when the cellular machinery copies itself uncontrollably.

Balazsi and Rosner collaborated on one paper and are continuing to work together. “Our work demonstrates one mechanism by which cells move from a homogeneous population to a more complex population that contains cells that promote cancer,” Rosner explained. “This mechanism is not based on mutations in genes, but rather on changes in the way that genes interact with each other in cells.”

On a fundamental level, Balazsi explained that researchers have developed considerable understanding, but still not enough, of what happens in normal conditions. He is seeking to discover the logic cells use to survive under stressful conditions.

Balazsi would like to determine if there is “anything we can do to decrease the tendency of cells to deviate from normality,” he said.

Balazsi welcomes this new funding, which will give him the freedom to pursue research questions at a basic level. Instead of supporting a single project, this financial support contributes to multiple projects.

The next step in funding his lab will be to approach the National Cancer Institute. Without much experience in applying for cancer grants, Balazsi plans to attend a think tank workshop in June in Seattle. Attendance at this meeting, which is hosted by Sage Bionetworks and the NCI, required an application and selection of participants.

To some degree, Balazsi may be able to relate to the heterogeneity that he hopes to study in cells. A physicist by training, Balazsi explained that he “wandered into biology.” He would like to steer away from major trends that mobilize many researchers. If many people are working on something, he does not want to be enriching big crowds but would prefer to try new things and test new ideas.

A resident of East Setauket, Balazsi lives with his wife Erika and their daughter Julianna, who is 6. Julianna is already doing some experiments at home and is exploring the yard.

When Balazsi was young, his parents tried to encourage him to become a doctor, which didn’t work because he didn’t like blood or hospitals as a child. In addition to his unexpected electric shock, Balazsi also explored how ethanol burns while flowing, which caused some additional damage to his house. “My parents,” he recalled, “weren’t happy.”

As for his work, Balazsi would like his work with these first steps, in understanding cellular processes, will have a translational element for people some time down the road.

“Whatever we do, hopefully, they can be implemented in actual cancer cells that are coming from patients one day,” he said, or they could have some relevance for people who are attempting to fight off “pathogenic microbes.”

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Fan Ye. Photo from SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

Fan Ye has a vision for the future filled with high service and efficiency that doesn’t involve butlers or personal attendants. The assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University is focused on creating smart environments in which window blinds open as people pull into their driveways, lights turn off in unoccupied rooms and the building guides a new student turn by turn through complex floors and hallways from entrance to the registrar’s office.

“The physical environment would be like a caring mother,” said Ye. It would sense and figure out people’s needs and “take care of the occupants inside the building.”

In Ye’s vision, which he estimates is about one year to decades away from a reality, objects that rely on people to turn them on or off, reposition them or alter their settings would have chips embedded in them, working together to create an environment that anticipates and learns in response to the need around it.

“With sensors, [a smart environment] can sense both physical conditions and human activities and adjust the environment in manners that create/improve comfort, safety, convenience” and the productivity of the occupant, he explained in an email.

Ye recently received a $450,000 award over the next five years from the National Science Foundation for early-career faculty for his study of smart environments. The prestigious award is the highest honor given by the government to scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.

Initially, Ye is developing and testing a security system with the Stony Brook University Police Department and the Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology that grants specific access to buildings or facilities depending on the specifications of an administrator.

Many of the buildings on campus have electric locks, which someone can open with a badge where there’s a badge reader. A badge, however “isn’t that flexible,” Ye said. If an administrator would like to grant someone one-time access to open a door that doesn’t provide ongoing access, that is difficult to do with a badge system.

“What’s lacking in this closed proprietary system is flexible access control, which can determine who has what access based on context factors,” he said. Ye, his team, the police department and the CEWIT are building a system that can enable greater flexibility that allows someone to open an office door for five minutes during a specific hour. “If any of these context factors is not satisfied, they don’t have access,” he said.

Ultimately, he would like to construct a system using modern mobile technology, like smartphones, instead of physical badges. The system would include embedded security that employs modern cryptography so a hacker or attacker can’t trick the system.

By using software and hardware security, Ye is hoping to develop a system that prevents the most common attacks at a reasonable cost, which he hopes would prevent someone from gaining access.

Ye is building real systems and testing them. The cost-benefit of these systems depends on the object. A motor to open and close a window would cost money to manufacture, install and operate. As with any technological innovation, he said, “the question comes down to, How do you invest versus how much do you get in return?”

Looking at the historical trend for computation resources, Ye said computing and storage costs are falling at an exponential rate, while the price for radio and sensing is also falling rapidly, although not at the same pace.

“I believe this trend will continue, especially for a lot of these objects that need small embedded systems” that can be manufactured at a scale with low cost, he continued. The process of turning the environment into an efficient, high-service system isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. Consumers might decide to focus on the air-conditioning or heat use in their homes.

Other researchers are developing ways to harness the vibrational energy of movement or sound, which, conceivably, could power some of these electronics without requiring the delivery and consumption of more energy.

Ye recognizes that these parts can and will break down and require repair, just as dishwashers sometimes stop working and iPhones can lose a list of contacts. So many small electronic parts in a smart environment could seem like an invitation to malfunctions.

He likens the repair process to cloud computing, which allows small to medium-sized companies to rent computing resources from larger companies. “A smart environment, especially for public buildings like a university or office, could potentially run in a similar model,” he said. Individuals might rely on IT support from dedicated personnel who, like a superintendent in a building, could be responsible for a host of smart products.

A native of Hubei Province in China, Ye, who now lives in Setauket, loves to hike in national parks. His favorite is Canyonlands in Utah. Ye had worked at IBM for about 10 years before joining Stony Brook almost three years ago. While he was there, Ye worked on numerous projects, including distributed stream processing, cloud-based queueing and wide-area dependable messaging. “I learned tremendously at IBM,” he said.

Ye is “”well known and respected in the mobile and wireless computing research community,” Hui Lei, an IBM distinguished engineer, wrote in an email. “He conducted pioneering work on scalable message delivery, robust coverage and security in wireless sensor networks, which are well received and highly cited and closely related to the smart environment work he is doing now.”

Lei suggested that Ye’s experience and accomplishments provide him with a solid track record and he is “confident that [Ye] will be able to come up with innovative solutions in this area.”

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Sen. Kenneth LaValle, wearing hat, sits with Brookhaven National Laboratory beamline scientist Dieter Schneider. Looking on from left, BNL Director Doon Gibbs; vice president for development at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Charles Prizzi; NSLS-II director John Hill; and Stony Brook University associate vice president for Brookhaven affairs, Richard Reeder. Photo from Brookhaven National Laboratory

Thanks to the persistent support of state Sen. Ken LaValle (R-Port Jefferson), Brookhaven National Laboratory secured $15 million from New York State to add a state-of-the-art microscope that could contribute to advances in basic science and medicine.

The national laboratory will purchase a new cryo-electron microscope and will use the funds to create a building attached to its National Synchrotron Light Source II.

“Cryo-electron microscopy is an advanced imaging technology that will significantly accelerate scientists’ understanding of molecular structures and processes generally, including many impacts in understanding disease and in aiding drug discovery,” Doon Gibbs, the laboratory director of BNL, said in an email.

BNL will use the funds to purchase the first of what they hope will be four such new microscopes. The lab is finalizing a bid, which is due by June 30 for funds from the National Institutes of Health for three additional microscopes.

“There is an exponentially increasing demand for the type of bio-structural information that such machines provide, and so we are competing to become an East Coast based national facility to serve this rapidly growing community,” James Misewich, the associate director for energy and photon sciences at BNL said in an email.

Having a suite of microscopes would enable BNL to have a spectrum of capabilities to serve the needs of its scientists and of researchers from around the world who flock to the Upton-based lab to conduct their research.

The new facility will create jobs associated with running the cryo-EM, Misewich said. If BNL wins the NIH proposal to become a national cryo-EM facility, it would also employ additional scientists, engineers, technicians and administrators to run the user program.

Misewich said he hopes scientists at nearby Stony Brook University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory will benefit from the opportunity to use a combination of its X-ray and electron microscope probes.

Senior members of the BNL team credit LaValle for helping to secure the funds.

“The $15 million in New York State funding is the culmination of a two-year effort led by the senator to bring a cryo-EM to Brookhaven and jump-start this important effort,” Gibbs said.

LaValle suggested that the funds were well worth the investment.

“It is critically important for government to embrace and support the work of the organizations that make life-altering discoveries and better our lives, health and environment,” LaValle said in an email. “This investment will further establish world-leading prominence in the field of medical research, and position the region for additional major investments by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy.”

Misewich envisions configuring one of the microscopes to allow for electron tomography, which will generate three-dimensional images of cells.

“The approach will be complementary to the X-ray imaging work we can undertake with the NSLS-II beamlines,” Misewich said.

Gibbs explained that the cryo-EM is complementary to X-ray crystallography, which is the traditional method for determining structures, which scientists already do at BNL.

“Few prescription drugs have been approved by the [Food and Drug Administration] for use in the U.S. in the last 20 years without a crystallographic study of their structure by X-rays,” Gibbs continued.

Misewich expects the new microscope could lead to new methods of detection, diagnosis and treatment for diseases like cancer or for medical challenges like antibiotic resistance.

Combining the technological tools of the new cryo-EM with the insights from the NSLS II and the nine-year-old Center for Functional Nanomaterials will enable researchers to “provide much more rapid bio-structure determination in response to needs like the ability to rapidly characterize a virus,” Misewich said.

LaValle sited this effort as a part of his ongoing commitment to build Long Island’s new high-tech economy.

The combination of BNL, SBU and CSHL “will provide a significant boost to the competitiveness of the biosciences and biotechnology communities across Long Island,” LaValle said.

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From left, Christopher Gobler with his research team Andrew Griffith, Theresa Hattenrath-Lehmann and Yoonja Kang. Photo from SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

Christopher Gobler searches the waters around Long Island for signs of trouble, which can appear starting in April. This year, he found it, in Shinnecock Bay. Monitoring for a toxin carried by algae called Alexandrium, Gobler recently discovered levels that were three times the allowable limit from the Food and Drug Administration. His finding, along with measurements from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation of toxins in shellfish in the bay, have caused the recent closure of shellfishing in the bay for the fourth time in seven years.

While Gobler, a marine science professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, watches carefully for the appearance of red tides from these algae locally, he recently completed a much broader study on the spread of these toxins.

Gobler led a team that explored the effect of ocean warming on two types of algae, Alexandrium and Dinophysis. Since 1982, as the oceans have heated up, these algae have become increasingly common, particularly in the northern Atlantic and Pacific oceans, according to a study Gobler and his colleagues recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When they become concentrated in shellfish, these algae can lead to diarrhea, paralysis and even death if people consume enough of them.

Over the course of the study, algae have begun to form “denser populations that are making shellfish toxic,” Gobler said. Temperature is one of many factors that can affect the survival, growth and range of organisms like the algae that can accumulate toxins and create human illness. “As temperatures get higher, they are becoming closer to the ideal for some species and out of the ideal for other species,” Gobler said.

The strongest effect of changing temperatures are at higher latitudes, which were, up until recently, prohibitively cold for these types of algae. The biggest changes over the course of the study came in the Bay of Fundy in Canada, in Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland and Alaska. The toxic algal blooms increased in frequency between 40 and 60 degrees north latitude, according to the study. These are places where toxic algae lived but weren’t as prevalent, but the warming trend has created a more hospitable environment, Gobler said.

Raphael Kudela, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz who wasn’t involved in this research, explained that other papers have suggested a similar link between temperature and the movement of these algae. “We’ve seen the expansion of ciguatera fish poisoning, as the temperature range has moved poleward for those algae,” Kudela wrote in an email. NOAA biological oceanographer Stephanie Moore has documented an expanded window of opportunity for paralytic shellfish poisoning linked to changes in temperature, Kudela said. “While we can point to specific events, and it makes intuitive sense, the Gobler paper actually documented these trends using a long time series, which hasn’t been done before,” Kudela continued.

R. Wayne Litaker, a supervisory ecologist at NOAA’s National Ocean Service, collaborated with Gobler on the project. He said small differences in temperature are significant for the growth rate of these toxic algae. Extending this to other organisms, Litaker explained that fish are also extending their ranges amid a rise in global temperatures. “There’s been a general movement of temperate species toward the poles,” Litaker said. He’s seen tropical fish, such as butterfly fish, off the docks of North Carolina that he hadn’t seen that far north before.

Gobler and his colleagues estimate that the need to close shellfish beds, the increase in fish kills, and the health care damage to people has exceeded a billion dollars since 1982. The largest problem for people in areas like Alaska is their lack of experience with red tides.

“Communities are being exposed to these blooms where they had not been in the past,” Gobler said. “[The blooms] can be most dangerous when they take a community by surprise.” Gobler said this happened in Alaska during the study. In the last decade, shellfish toxins that are 1,000 times more potent than cyanide caused illnesses and were suspected in two deaths in Haines, Alaska.

Litaker said he gave a talk several years ago at a conference. Gobler approached him and asked if they could work together. “One of the wonderful things about these meetings is that you see things that trigger possibilities and whole new projects are born,” Litaker said.

Litaker described Gobler as a “major player in the field” who has done “fantastic work over the years.” Litaker said he was “quite impressed with what he’s done.” Litaker explained that the climate is changing and urged fisheries and shellfish experts to prepare to respond throughout the country. “As we get warmer and more run off of nutrients, toxic cyanobacteria [algal blooms] are causing problems in all 50 states,” Litaker said.

Kudela suggested that the “new records every year for the last several years … will undoubtedly continue to impact the range, duration and toxicity of blooms.”

Locally, Gobler continues to monitor dozens of sites on Long Island, where he suggested that Alexandrium could become less prevalent with warming, while Dinophysis could become more common. Temperature and other factors favorable for algae growth have led to red tides in the past.

In oceans across the world, Kudela said the next logical step would be to explore the interaction of temperature and nutrients. “We know both are changing, and they are likely to have additive or synergistic effects, but we haven’t done the same careful study as the Gobler paper looking at how the trends are interacting,” he explained.

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Student Giancarlos Llanos Romero will be joining the SBU team on a trip to Kenya this summer. Photo by Phoebe Fornof

By Daniel Dunaief

In a region known for the study of fossils left behind millions of years ago, a team of students from Stony Brook University’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences is planning to travel to Kenya this summer to learn about and try to solve the challenges of today.

The university will send eight undergraduates to the Turkana Basin Institute for the engineering department’s first program in Kenya, which will run for over four weeks. In addition to classroom study, the students will seek opportunities to offer solutions to problems ranging from refrigeration, to energy production, to water purification.

The students learned about the opportunity in the spring, only a few months before they would travel to a country where the climate and standard of living for Kenyans present new challenges. “We were skeptical about how many students we would be able to get,” said Fotis Sotiropoulos, the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who “didn’t start marketing this” until after he took a trip to Kenya and the Turkana Basin Institute, which Stony Brook created at the direction of world-renowned anthropologist Richard Leakey.

Giancarlos Llanos Romero, who is interested in robotics and nanotechnology and is finishing his junior year, had originally planned to spend the summer seeking an internship in the Netherlands or Germany. When he learned about this opportunity, he immediately changed his focus. “I need to do this,” Romero said. “This is much more important than anything I could do in an internship.”

On first blush, the trip is anything but ideal for Romero, whose skin is sensitive to extreme heat, which he can expect to encounter in the sub-Saharan African country. He didn’t want that, however, to stop him and is planning to travel with seven other people he met for the first time last week. Romero said his immediate family, which is originally from Colombia, supported the trip.

Sotiropoulos, who is in his first year as dean, embraced the notion of connecting the engineering department with the Turkana Basin Institute. “Before I came here” said Sotiropoulos, “I felt very passionately about making sure that engineering students became familiar with the rest of the world” and that they understood global challenges, including issues like poverty and water scarcity.

Sotiropoulos met with TBI Director Lawrence Martin during one of his interviews prior to his arrival at SBU. Martin invited Sotiropoulos to visit with Richard Leakey, the founder of TBI whose family has been making scientific discoveries in Kenya for three generations.

Women and children in Kenya searching for, and drinking from, water found beneath the dry riverbed. Photo by Lynn Spinnato

This program quickly came together after those meetings. The two courses will teach students about design thinking, said Robert Kukta, the associate dean for undergraduate programs in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Stony Brook would like to help students develop “the ability to think broadly about solutions and boil it down to the essence of the problem,” Kukta said. This, he said, will all occur in the context of a different culture and local resources.

Students will start their summer experience in Nairobi and then they will travel to Princeton University’s Mpala Research Centre, Martin said. “The journey through Kenyan towns opens visitors’ eyes tremendously to how different peoples’ lives are in different parts of the world,” Martin explained by email. “The goal is not so much to contribute immediately but to understand the challenges that people face, the resources available locally and then to improve their ability to think through possible solutions.”

Once students arrive at TBI, they will have an opportunity to see fossils from many time periods, including those from late Cretaceous dinosaurs. “Every visitor I have ever taken to TBI is amazed and in awe of the abundance of fossil evidence for past life on Earth,” Martin said.

A distinguished professor in the Department of Chemistry at SBU, Benjamin Hsiao, who traveled with Sotiropoulos to Kenya in the spring, is a co-founding director of Innovative Global Energy Solutions Center. Hsiao has been developing water filtration systems through IGESC, which brings together TBI with universities, industry, international governments and foundations. He is well acquainted with the challenges the first set of students will face.

“Once we bring technologies over to Kenya, [sometimes] they do not work for reasons we have not thought of,” which include dust or a broken part for which it’s difficult to find a replacement, he said. “Those failed experiments give us tremendous insight about how to design the next-generation systems which will be much more robust and sustainable and easier to operate by local people.”

Acacia Leakey, who grew up in Kenya and is Richard Leakey’s grandniece, recently completed her senior design project as an undergraduate at Stony Brook. Her work is intended to help farmers extend the life of their tomato plants when they bring them to market.

About 32 percent of the tomatoes go to waste from the extreme heat. Acacia and her team developed a vegetable cooler that employs solar panels to reduce the temperature from 32 degrees Celsius to 15 degrees Celsius, which should extend the life of the tomatoes. Her classmates were “surprisingly supportive” of her work, she said, as some of them hadn’t considered applying their skills in a developing country.

Leakey, who will train for her master’s degree at Stony Brook this fall, will continue to provide insights into Madagascar, another developing African nation where the university has an internationally acclaimed research center. This summer, she will produce a video that will record information from villages near Centre ValBio in Madagascar, which she will bring back to Stony Brook in the hopes of encouraging others to use that information to create their own design projects next year.

As for Romero, who is raising money for the trip through a GoFundMe page, he is prepared to discover opportunities amid the challenges of his upcoming trip and is eager “to be able to actually help a community and say I left a mark.”

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Escobar-Hoyos, center, holds her recent award, with Kenneth Shroyer, the chairman of the Department of Pathology at Stony Brook on the left and Steven Leach, the director of the David M. Rubenstein Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research on the right. Photo by Cindy Leiton

By Daniel Dunaief

While winter storm Niko in February closed schools and businesses and brought considerable precipitation to the region, it also coincided with great news for Luisa Escobar-Hoyos, who earned her doctorate from Stony Brook University.

Escobar-Hoyos, who is a part-time research assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at Stony Brook University and a postdoctoral fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, received word that she was the sole researcher selected in the country to receive the prestigious $600,000 Pancreatic Cancer Action Network–American Association for Cancer Research Pathway to Leadership Award.

When she heard the news, Escobar-Hoyos said she was “filled with excitement.” After she spoke with her husband Nicolas Hernandez and her current mentor at MSKCC, Steven Leach, the director of the David M. Rubenstein Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research, she called her parents in her native Colombia.

Her mother, Luz Hoyos, understood her excitement not only as a parent but as a cancer researcher herself. “My interest in cancer research started because of my mom,” Escobar-Hoyos said. Observing her example and “the excitement and the impact she has on her students and young scientists working with her, I could see myself” following in her footsteps.

The researcher said her joy at winning the award has blended with “a sense of responsibility” to the growing community of patients and their families who have developed a deadly disease that is projected to become the second leading cause of cancer-related death by 2020, according to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, moving past colorectal cancer.

The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network has awarded $35 million in funding to 142 scientists across the country from 2003 to 2016, many of whom have continued to improve an understanding of this insidious form of cancer.

David Tuveson, the current director of the Cancer Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, received funds from PanCan to develop the first genetically engineered mouse model that mimics human disease. Jiyoung Ahn, the associate director of the NYU Cancer Institute, used the funds to discover that two species of oral bacteria are associated with an over 50 percent increased risk of pancreatic cancer.

Over the first decade since PanCan started awarding these grants, the recipients have been able to convert each dollar granted into $8.28 in further pancreatic cancer research funding.

In her research, Escobar-Hoyos suggests that alternative splicing, or splitting up messenger RNA at different locations to create different versions of the same protein, plays an important part in the start and progress of pancreatic cancer. “Her preliminary data suggest that alternative splicing could be associated with poorer survival and resistance to treatment,” Lynn Matrisian, the chief science officer at PanCan, explained in an email. “The completion of her project will enhance our understanding of this molecular modification and how it impacts pancreatic cancer cell growth, survival and the progression to more advanced stages of this disease.”

Escobar-Hoyos explained that she will evaluate how mutations in transcriptional regulators and mRNA splicing factors influence gene expression and alternative splicing of mRNAs to promote the disease and aggression of the most common form of pancreatic cancer. Later, she will evaluate how splicing regulators and alternatively spliced genes enriched in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma contribute to tumor maintenance and resistance to therapy.

Escobar-Hoyos will receive $75,000 in each of the first two years of the award to pay for a salary or a technician, during a mentored phase of the award. After those two years, she will receive $150,000 for three years, when PanCan expects her to be in an independent research position.

Escobar-Hoyos said her graduate research at Stony Brook focused on ways to understand the biological differences between patients diagnosed with the same cancer type. She helped discover the way a keratin protein called K17 entered the nucleus and brought another protein into the cytoplasm, making one type of tumor more aggressive.

While Escobar-Hoyos works full time at Memorial Sloan Kettering, she continues to play an active role in Kenneth Shroyer’s lab, where she conducted experiments for her doctorate. She is the co-director of the Pathology Translational Research Laboratory, leading studies that are focused on pancreatic cancer biomarkers. The chair in the Department of Pathology, Shroyer extended an offer for her to continue to address the research questions her work addressed after she started her postdoctoral fellowship.

“When you do research projects and you develop them from the beginning, they are like babies and you really want to see how they evolve,” Escobar-Hoyos said. Numerous projects are devoted to different aspects of K17, she said.

Shroyer said Escobar-Hoyos had already been the first author on two landmark studies related to the discovery and validation of K17 even before her work with pancreatic cancer. “She has also conducted highly significant new research” that she is currently developing “that I believe will transform the field of pancreatic cancer research,” Shroyer wrote in an email.

Shroyer hopes to recruit Escobar-Hoyos to return to Stony Brook when she completes her fellowship to a full-time position as a tenure track assistant professor. “Based on her achievements in basic research and her passion to translate her findings to improve the care of patients with pancreatic cancer, I have no doubt she is one of the most promising young pancreatic cancer research scientists of her generation,” he continued.

Yusuf Hannun, the director of the Stony Brook Cancer Center, said Escobar-Hoyos’s work provided a new and important angle with considerable promise in understanding pancreatic cancer. “She is a tremendous example of success for junior investigators,” Hannun wrote in an email.

Escobar-Hoyos said she is hoping, a year or two from now, to transition to becoming an independent scientist and principal investigator, ideally at an academic institution. “Because of my strong ties with Stony Brook and all the effort the institution is investing in pancreatic research” SBU is currently her first choice.

Escobar-Hoyos is pleased that she was able to give back to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network when she and a team of other friends and family helped raise about $4,000 as a part of a PurpleStride 5K walk in Prospect Park earlier this month.“I was paying forward what this foundation has done for me in my career,” she said.

Matrisian said dedicated scientists offer hope to patients and their families. “Researchers like Escobar-Hoyos spark scientific breakthroughs that may create treatments and ultimately, improve the lives of patients,” she suggested.

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James Riordan posing by a display of the Lunar Excursion Module used in Apollo 13. Photo from Jessica Frisina

By Rita J. Egan

When James Riordan, 82, died in 2016 after battling lung cancer, many would think his greatest contribution to the world was his involvement with the Apollo 13 space mission. But to his relatives, it was his sense of family and kindness that touched others most.

Inheriting his sense of generosity, the former Stony Brook resident’s family participated in the American Lung Association Fight for Air Climb April 1 for the second straight time, raising $1,512 for the cause in his memory. This year’s event included 600 participants climbing the 55 flights of stairs at One Penn Plaza, a New York City skyscraper, the equivalent of 1,210 steps.

Granddaughter Jessica Frisina, of Rocky Point, organized Team Apollo in honor of her fond memories of the aerospace engineer with the Northrop Grumman Corporation.

Jessica Frisina, on right, with her aunt Kathy Bern, stepfather Bob Riordan and stepbrother Matt, who started Team Apollo to raise funds for the American Lung Association in the memory of her grandfather James Riordan. Photo from the American Lung Association

“He was completely humble,” she said. “He was so willing to help anybody and everybody. He just wanted to lend a helping hand to anyone that was willing to take it — just a generous and kind person. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”

Riordan, who lived in Stony Brook with his wife Ruth since 1964, was an integral member of the Apollo 13 mission. Due to his work helping to direct the team on the construction of the Lunar Excursion Module and its safe return, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Richard Nixon in 1970 along with his fellow members of the Apollo 13 Mission Operations Team.

His son Bob Riordan, Frisina’s stepfather, said while growing up he and his siblings didn’t realize just how important their father’s job was. It wasn’t until they were going through their father’s books, or hearing from friends who worked at Grumman, that they realized just how much he had accomplished.

He said they were amazed that their father was in the control room during the Apollo 13 mission and treasure the book “Race to the Moon,” where James Riordan is pictured in a control room with astronaut Neil Armstrong.

“We can’t believe we had a father who did this for a living,” Bob Riordan said.

The son said he isn’t surprised his father didn’t talk much about his work though, because of his modesty.

“He never cared about keeping up with the Joneses,” he said. “All he ever cared about was his family.”

James Riordan suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the early stages of emphysema, and about a year before his passing, he was diagnosed with stage 0 lung cancer. His son said his father smoked for decades, starting as a teenager.

Frisina said she got the idea to start the Fight for Air Climb team after her grandfather’s death, and Riordan said he wasn’t surprised.

“He was so willing to help anybody and everybody. He just wanted to lend a helping hand to anyone that was willing to take it — just a generous and kind person.”

—Jessica Frisina

“I was so proud of her for doing that, but that’s the kind of person Jessica is,” he said.

Frisina said while the Riordans are her stepfamily, she considers them family all the same. Riordan said his father and stepdaughter hit it off as soon as they met when she was 7 years old.

“They took a liking to each other the first day they met,” Riordan said. “I always felt kind of emotional when those two were together. He was the type of man that any children who came into his life just took to him — that’s just the type of guy he was.”

While joining the Fight for Air Climb was a last-minute decision in 2016, with only a few relatives being able to come out and cheer them on, this year she said almost a dozen family members came out to show support for her, Riordan, her stepbrother Matt Riordan and her aunt Kathy Bern, who traveled from North Carolina.

Frisina said she looks forward to participating in the event again next year and knows participation from the family will only continue to grow.

Her uncle Jim Riordan was on hand this year to show support. He said Frisina always had a great appreciation for his father.

“She is by every definition a grandchild in this family,” he said.

Bob Riordan said he was in better shape for this year’s event after finding out how difficult the climb was last year.

“The first time I did it, I thought I was going to join my father,” Riordan joked.

Frisina said climbing the 55 flights of stairs is supposed to simulate how it feels to have a lung ailment, and once you pass flight 10, it becomes more and more difficult to breathe.

“It initially feels amazing to complete something like that,” Frisina said. “But in reality, it makes you think as you’re doing it. [My grandfather] had to deal with this every day — feeling like this and overcoming walking and not being able to breathe. It makes you put yourself in somebody else’s shoes who’s dealing with it.”

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