Stony Brook University

Debby Mastrodima, above, teamed up with Cornelia Bruu-Syversen to win 6-3 on Saturday. Photo from Stony Brook Athletics

Stony Brook tennis won its first match in the CAA in the 2024 spring season, taking a 6-1 victory at Monmouth to close a weekend swing in West Long Branch, New Jersey on Feb. 24.

Stony Brook improved to 2-5 overall and 1-0 in conference play, as head coach Thiago Dualiby recorded his first conference win leading the Seawolves.

The Seawolves took two of three doubles games to record the point, with freshmen Mia Palladino and Darian Perfiliev teaming up for a win, before sophomore Debby Mastrodima and freshman Cornelia Bruu-Syversen won the clinching game.

Stony Brook then took five of the six singles matches, with Palladino, freshman Elena Lobo-Corral, Perfiliev, Bruu-Syversen, and junior Sara Annamaria Medved winning their matches.

DOUBLES

Brezanin/Mills (MON) def. Boro/Lobo-Corral (SBU), 6-4; Palladino/Perfiliev (SBU) def. Girish/McKinney (MON), 6-0; Bruu-Syversen/Mastrodima (SBU) def. Jamir/Landstrom (MON), 6-3 – clinching game

SINGLES

Palladino (SBU) def. Brezanin (MON), 6-3, 6-2; Lobo-Corral (SBU) def. McKinney (MON), 6-3, 6-2; Girish (MON) def. Boro (SBU), 2-6, 6-0, WR*; Perfiliev (SBU) def. Jamir (MON), 6-3, 6-4; Bruu-Syversen (SBU) def. Landstrom (MON), 6-1, 6-4; Medved (SBU) def. Mills (MON), 6-4, 7-6

“I’m really proud of the team. We set controllable adjustments after yesterday’s play and everyone executed them really well,” said head coach Thiago Dualiby. “We were able to set the right tone from the start today and executed positive behaviors throughout the match.”

The team heads to Rhode Island for two matches next weekend, first with a matchup against Bryant on March 1. First serve between the Seawolves and Bulldogs is set for 12:45 p.m.

By Daniel Dunaief

Eating machines even more focused than teenagers approaching a stocked refrigerator, snakes slither towards foods other animals assiduously avoid.

In a recent and extensive study of snakes using the genetics, morphology and diet of snakes that included museums specimens and field observations, a team of scientists including Pascal Title, Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University, showed that the foods skin-shedding creatures eat as a whole is much broader than the prey other lizards consume.

At the same time, the range of an individual snake’s diet tends to be narrower, marking individual species as more specialized predators, a paper recently released for the cover of the high-profile journal Science revealed.

“If there is an animal that can be eaten, it’s likely that some snake, somewhere, has evolved the ability to eat it,” Dan Rabosky, senior author on the paper and curator at the Museum of Zoology and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan, explained in a statement.

The research, which explored the genetics and diets of snakes, suggested that snakes evolved up to three times faster than lizards, with shifts in traits associated with feeding, locomotion and sensory processing.

“This speed of evolution has let them take advantage of new opportunities that other lizards could not,” Rabosky added. “Fundamentally, this study is about what makes an evolutionary winner.”

No singular physical feature or characteristic has enabled snakes to specialize on foods that are untouchable to other animals.

“It seems to be a whole suite of things” that allows snakes to pursue their prey, Title speculates.

One unique aspect of many advanced snakes is that they have more mobile elements in their skulls. Rock pythons can stretch their jaw around enormous prey, making it possible for them to swallow an entire antelope. Garter snakes, meanwhile, can eat Pacific newts that have a high concentration of a neurotoxin. Snakes also can eat slugs and snails that have evolved a defensive ability to secrete toxins.

A change to textbooks

Title, who is the co-lead and first author on the paper, suggested that the comprehensive analysis of snakes, particularly when compared with lizards, will likely change the information that enters textbooks.

“I think the analysis of lizard and snake diets in particular could potentially enter herpetology textbooks because diet is such a fundamental axis of natural history and because the visuals are so clear,” Title said. He doesn’t believe an analysis of dietary resolution that encompasses snakes and lizards has been shown like this before.

With a few exceptions, the majority of lizards eat terrestrial arthropods. Snakes have expanded into eating not only invertebrates, but also aquatic, terrestrial and flying vertebrates.

“They have absolutely evolved the ability to prey on semi-aquatic and aquatic prey,” said Title.

Title and his collaborators gathered considerable amounts of sequence data from GenBank. They also collected data from samples and specimens in the literature.

“Our dataset involves specimen-based data from museum collections that span the globe over the better part of the last century,” he explained.

The project started with the realization that several authors were generating high-quality sequence data for separate projects from biodiversity hotspots for lizards and snakes, such as in Australia, Brazil and Peru. The researchers realized that combining their data provided unprecedented coverage.

After Title completed his PhD at the University of Michigan, he took a leading role in building the phylogeny and conducting many of the analyses.

Indeed, the list of coauthors on this study includes 19 other scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil and Finland.

As for his work, Title is broadly interested in the ecological/ environmental/ geographic/ evolutionary factors that lead to different species richness. He is not restricted to lizards and snakes.

“I do think snakes are unbelievable,” he said. “I’ve seen sidewinder rattlesnakes flip segments of their body forward across the sand in California, I’ve seen snakes climb straight up trees and walls, I’ve seen long, skinny snakes carefully navigate tree branches, and I’ve seen semi-aquatic snakes swim with their head above water. It’s mesmerizing.”

‘Snakes are cool’

Co-lead author Sonal Singhal, Assistant Professor in Biology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, met Title when she was a PhD student and he was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley.

Singhal is excited that readers can “learn cool facts about snakes from our paper,” she explained. “Research papers don’t always inspire a sense of wonder in the reader.” She hopes people “walk away from this study thinking that snakes are cool.”

Singhal suggested that Title is leading a group of collaborators to create a package that will enable other researchers to download the data from this paper quickly and easily and use it in their own work.

As a whole, snakes are moving around in their diet space at a much more rapid clip than lizards in general, Title suggested.

While snakes have evolved rapidly over short periods of time, it’s unclear how these creatures are responding to changes in the environment on smaller time scales, such as through what’s currently occurring amid climate change.

The scale, Title explained, is different, with climate changes affecting the world over decades and centuries, while snake evolution, particularly regarding specialized diets, transpired over the course of millions of years.

Grad school encounter

Title, who lives in East Setauket, met his wife Tara Smiley when both of them were graduate students.

An Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University, Smiley is a paleoecologist specializing in small mammals.

The couple enjoys taking their son Micah, who is almost three years old, on camping trips and spending time outdoors.

As for the paper scoring the coveted spot on the cover of Science, Title suggested the exposure validates “that lizards and snakes, and their natural history, are inherently intriguing to all sorts of people, regardless of whether or not they are trained biologists.”

He hopes the work will not only inspire young scientists to learn more about snakes and lizards, but also to seek to quantify and explore the different axes of biodiversity and to “appreciate the value of supporting natural history museum collections.”

———————————————————————————–Within a day of snake research published on the cover of Science last week, reports surfaced about the discovery of what may be the largest snake in the world. Scientists from the University of Queensland found a northern green anaconda in the Ecuadorian Amazon that was close to 21 feet long.

Pacal Title, Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University and first author on the recent Science paper, offered his thoughts in an emailed question and answer exchange about the anaconda, which was not a part of his recent research.

TBR: Is this a particularly compelling find?

Title: This is compelling as it provides an example of broadly distributed, large species of snakes having pretty significant genetic differentiation. There are quite a few examples, both within snakes and in other groups, where populations look superficially similar, but turn out to have been genetically independent of one another for quite a long time.

TBR: How does a discovery of what might be the largest snake in the world fit into the context (if at all) of your research? Does this species validate the radiative speciation you described?

Title: It shows that the number of known snake species is likely to be an under-estimate, although this is likely to be true for most groups out there. This fits well into the perspective that snakes have incredibly high global species diversity.

TBR: Do you have any guesses as to what the diet of this snake could be?

Title: The article describes anaconda diets as generally consisting of terrestrial vertebrate prey, despite the species being semi-aquatic.

TBR: What, if any, predators might pursue this snake?

Title: Jaguars have been known to prey on anacondas.

TBR: What scientific, life history, genetic or other questions would you address, if any, about this species?

Title: Now that the green anaconda is being considered as two separate species, all morphological, ecological and natural history attributes will need to be re-examined to evaluate whether or not the two species actually differ along any of these axes.

TBR: Is the ongoing attention snakes receive positive for the study of snakes?

Title: It is great that snakes are receiving positive attention. Such new studies are essential for conservation, and for the study of biodiversity and ecosystems.

From left, Prerana Shrestha, Sunghoon Kim (Postdoc), Andrew Gallagher (Research Support Specialist), Miura Traficante (SOAR Fellow, Summer undergrad researcher), Keith Yeung (Undergraduate researcher), Matthew Dickinson (PhD student), Saheed Lawal (PhD student), and Olivia Tabaka (MS student)

By Daniel Dunaief

An increasingly complex time filled with extreme stressors such as man-made and natural disasters creates conditions that can lead to post traumatic stress disorder.

PTSD, which can cause anxiety even amid safer conditions, can have adverse effects on the ability to enjoy life.

Prerana Shrestha

Stony Brook University Assistant Professor Prerana Shrestha, who joined the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the Renaissance School of Medicine in 2021, recently received a four-year $2.2 million grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the molecular mechanisms underlying stabilization of emotional memories in the brain, which is relevant for PTSD.

“Her work will help us understand how the brain stores these traumatic memories,” said Alfredo Fontanini, chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior. “The tools she has developed really are making possible a series of experiments that, before, were impossible to think about.”

Shrestha hopes to develop a druggable target that could “block a key machine inside neurons that are relevant for traumatic emotional memories,” she explained.

Using a mouse model, Shrestha plans to understand the neural signature at the level of molecules, neurons, and neural circuits, exploring the creation and stabilization of these potentially problematic memories and emotional reactions through a multi-disciplinary study.

Shrestha has developed and applied chemogenetic tools to block a key part of the memory process inside neurons that store traumatic emotional memories.

By developing tools to explore neural circuits in particular areas of the brain, Shrestha can help scientists understand the molecular mechanism involved in PTSD, Fontanini said.

‘From the ground up’

In humans, memories from traumatic events are over consolidated, creating an excessive avoidance behavior that can be a debilitating symptom.

“We are trying to understand the neurological basis for why these memories are so robust,” Shrestha said. She is looking at “what can we do to understand the mechanism that supports these memories from the ground up.”

With her chemogenetic tools, Shrestha can block protein synthesis in specific neuron populations in a time period of a few hours. She is developing new tools to improve the precision of blocking the protein synthesis machinery from hours to minutes.

Shrestha is trying to weaken the salient emotional memory while leaving all other processes intact.

The Stony Brook Assistant Professor said she has methods to create a targeted approach that limits or minimizes any off target or collateral damage from inhibiting the synthesis of proteins.

“Up until now, whenever scientists wanted to study the role of the synthesis of new proteins in memory formation” including those involved in the formation of aberrant memories such as those in PTSD, they had to “use drugs which would manipulate and affect protein synthesis everywhere in the brain,” said Fontanini.

The plan over the next four years is to understand and develop molecules to target cells in the prefrontal cortex, which, Shrestha said, is like the “conductor of an orchestra,” providing top-down executive orders for the brain.

She is focusing on neurons that interact specifically with the amygdala, which is the emotional center of the brain, exploring what happens in these streams of information between brain regions.

By increasing or reducing protein synthesis in the prefrontal cortex, Shrestha can see an enhanced or diminished avoidance response in her mouse experiments.

She is interested in how a memory is stabilized, and not as much in what is involved in its retrieval.

Shrestha works with inbred mice that are more or less genetically identical. Her experimental group has the transgenic expression of the chemogenetic tool to block protein synthesis and receive a drug after learning that triggers the tool to block the machinery from making new proteins.

When she introduces the inhibitor of protein synthesis, she found that the wave involved in stabilizing what the animal previously learned is finite in time.

Using a drug to block protein synthesis within an hour alters future behavior, with the animal showing little or no fear. Blocking protein synthesis after that hour, however, doesn’t affect the fear response.

In the first year of the grant, which started in December, Shrestha would like to send out some papers for publication based on the research her team members — postdoctoral researcher  Sunghoon Kim and graduate student Matthew Dickinson —  has already done. She also hopes to use some of the funds from this grant to hire another postdoctoral researcher to join this effort.

She has data on how the regulators of ribosomes are recruited in the prefrontal cortex, which stabilizes memories.

In other preliminary data, she has identified neurons in the prefrontal cortex that project into the amygdala that are selectively storing information for recent parts of emotional memory.

To be sure, while this research offers a potential window into the mechanisms involved in forming emotional memories in a mouse model, it is an early step before even considering any new types of diagnostics or treatment for humans.

Nepal roots

Born and raised in Kathmandu, Nepal, Shrestha received a full scholarship to attend Bates College, in Maine, where she majored in biological chemistry. She received a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellowship for an internship at Harvard Medical school during her junior year. While preparing for a pre-medical track, she “got spoiled after getting a taste of research in my junior year,” she said. “The idea of trying something new for the first time and seeing how things work was so cool.”

Shrestha lives about eight miles west of Stony Brook and is married to Sameer Maskey, the founder and CEO of an advanced machine learning company called FuseMachines Inc. They have a nine-year old daughter and a two-year-old son.

As for her ongoing work, Shrestha is eager to combine her expertise with those of people from different backgrounds.  “It’s a fascinating time to combine molecular approaches,” she said. 

Fontanini, who helped recruit Shrestha, has been impressed with the work she’s done.

“She’s on an outstanding trajectory,” he said.

By Melissa Arnold

The Stony Brook University Orchestra invites kids and adults alike on a musical journey with their annual Family Orchestra Concert on the Main Stage of the Staller Center for the Arts ton Tuesday, Feb. 27 at 7:30 p.m. The free hour-long performance allows even the youngest children to experience classical music and see where their imaginations lead. 

This year’s theme, “Musical Splendor in Nature,” showcases the wide variety of orchestral sounds — strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion — in ways that are inspired by natural beauty.

Orchestra conductor Susan Deaver comes up with a new theme each year, then scours her music library to see which songs work best together.

“There are so many pieces influenced by nature, and the decision making process was hard for this one — what to choose?” said Deaver, who’s been with the university since 2000. She also has to consider the length of each piece, the variety of instruments required, and how long ago it was last performed.

Among the more well-known selections is “Jupiter” from “The Planets” by Gustav Holst, which might make the listener feel as though they’re soaring through space and contemplating the majesty of the universe. In “Carnival of the Animals” by Camille Saint-Saëns, kids will enjoy listening for the slow can-can that represents a tortoise and the shrill “hee haw” of donkeys played by violins. Professor of Music Emeritus Peter Winkler will serve as narrator. 

Other songs will bring concertgoers to a field of cornflowers and a forest in Finland covered with snow. 

Along the way, Deaver will take time to talk to the audience informally about each song, introducing the different instruments in the orchestra and explaining how they’re played. As always, there will be a relaxed atmosphere, plenty of surprises and even an opportunity for the audience to participate.

The concert’s featured violin soloist is 16-year-old Joanna Huang, a junior at Ward Melville High School in East Setauket and this year’s Young Orchestral Artist. A few exceptional high school students are invited to perform with the orchestra each year.

Huang and her siblings are the first ones in their family to play an instrument.

“When I was very young, I would sit in on both my brothers’ violin and piano lessons. Watching and hearing them made me say, ‘I want to play, too!’ It was a huge motivator for me,” she said.

Huang’s relationship with the university began as a fifth grader, when she took part in the Young Artists Program and a music summer camp. After that, the desire to perform with the orchestra only grew.

“When she was in eighth grade, Joanna reached out to me and asked about joining the orchestra, and I had to turn her down because she was too young yet, but she was persistent,” Deaver recalls. “She loves piano but is also passionate about the violin, and is a really fantastic performer. We’re excited to have her.”

Huang will play the final movement of Dvorak’s Violin Concerto in A, Op. 53. She has already performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, held the coveted position of concertmaster with numerous ensembles, and hopes to study violin performance once she’s finished high school.

“I love the violin and I love collaborating with others in music. I have always had an interest in playing violin with an orchestra or a chamber group,” she said. “Hearing great pieces of music and then having an opportunity to play those masterpieces, as a soloist or in a group, is the best thing that could ever happen to me.” 

The orchestra is comprised of 70 Stony Brook University students with varied music backgrounds and academic majors. Many are heading toward careers in science, technology, engineering or medicine.

“I think for a lot of the students, music has been a part of their lives for so long that they wanted to stay with it, no matter where their careers take them,” Deaver said. “It’s a nice break for them to get away from the pressures of academics for three hours a week [to rehearse]. Some do study music, but others may go on to join community orchestras or just enjoy the arts and share that with their families.”

The Stony Brook University Family Orchestra Concert will be held on the Main Stage at the Staller Center for the Arts, 100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook on Tuesday, Feb. 27 from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call 631-632-2787.  

By Daniel Dunaief

It wasn’t easy, back in the late 1960’s for astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, to discover pulsars, which are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit detectable radio waves. So it only seems fitting that the famous and award-winning scientist, who is now a Visiting Academic at the University of Oxford, might run into obstacles when she came to Stony Brook University’s Simons Center for Geometry and Physics to deliver a Della Pietra Lecture to the public.

The recent snowstorm, which canceled classes and events at the university for a day, also pushed back her talk by 24 hours. When the delayed talk began, Bell Burnell contended with a microphone that cut in and out. “It might be designed for a male voice,” Bell Burnell joked. Combining humor, accessible scientific detail, and a first-hand narrative, she delighted and inspired a crowd ranging from local high school students to Stony Brook professors.

“Her talk was refreshing and different,”  said Marivi Fernández-Serra, Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department and at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at SBU. “I loved that it was both a personal story and a physics talk.”

Luis Álvarez-Gaumé, Director for the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, recruited Bell Burnell for a three-part lecture series that included a talk for high school students and one for faculty and advanced graduate students.

Her talks were “very inspiring,” said Álvarez-Gaumé. Bell Burnell is “very sharp, extremely intelligent and easy to talk to.”

Humble beginnings

Born in Northern Ireland, where, Bell Burnell said, “Catholics and Protestants fight each other,” she earned her bachelor’s degree in Glasgow, Scotland.

Bell Burnell endured a tradition where the men whistled, stamped and made cat calls when a woman entered the room, which, in lecture halls with wooden floors, meant she heard considerable noise. She learned to control her blushing because “if you blushed, they’d only make more noise.”

Bell Burnell had one female lecturer, who survived one class and then quit. When she got to Cambridge to do her PhD, she had the wrong accent, came from the wrong part of the country and was “clearly heathen-educated,” she said. “It was quite daunting.”

Surrounded by young men full of confidence, she thought the university made a mistake in recruiting her and that she would probably get thrown out. Until that day arrived, she decided to work her hardest so when they did, she won’t have a guilty conscience. Her strategy, she said, was to “do your best until they throw you out.”

Hard work

Working with five other people for two years, Bell Burnell helped build a radio telescope at Cambridge to search for quasars, which are enormous black holes that release energy and light. When  quasar jets interact with gas around the galaxy, they emit radio waves. The data in the search for quasars came out on long rows of red ink paper charts that she had to go through by hand.

By the end of her survey, Bell Burnell had gone through about 5 kilometers (or over 3 miles) of paper. She discovered an odd signal she couldn’t explain, which could have been radio interference. Recalling she had seen something like it before, she checked and found that it was in the same place in the sky.

When she conferred with her thesis advisor Anthony Hewish, he told her she needed to enlarge the signal by increasing the speed of the data collection.

For the first 10 days, she didn’t find anything.

“The thing had gone way,” she recalled. “That’s the grad student’s [i.e., her] fault. If you’re thinking of being a grad student, go ahead and go for it. You will get the blame for things that aren’t really your fault. Your thesis advisor has to vent their fury somehow.”

She persisted with these high-speed recordings until she got one. After pondering the signal for months and speaking with other astronomers, she found another signal the day before Christmas.

Bell Burnell was planning to leave the next day with her boyfriend to visit her parents, where the couple prepared to announce their engagement.

“I kind of have to be there,” she laughed.

At 2 a.m., she heard the pulse at a slightly different repetition rate in a different part of the sky. During her absence, her thesis advisor kept the survey running. When she returned, she found a pile of charts on her desk. 

Hewish told her to go back over the charts and found occurrences of these patterns. Bell Burnell and her advisor worked with another radio astronomer and student to see if other researchers could see the same signal.

When they didn’t, the two academics started walking away. The other student, however, stayed with the equipment and found the same signal. He had miscalculated when his telescope would be able to see the pulsar by 15 minutes.

“If he had miscalculated by an hour and 15 minutes, we would have all gone home,” Bell Burnell recalled.

What Bell Burnell had found — first with the unusual signal in the paper and then with a careful search for other signals — were rotating neutron stars that spin like a lighthouse and that emit pulses of radiation. Scientists have now catalogued over 3,000 of them.

The pulsars are “fantastically accurate time keepers,” she said, losing only about a second of time since the age of the dinosaurs.

You don’t want to visit

Pulsars have numerous compelling properties. The neutrons that make up a pulsar are so dense that a thimble full of them weighs as much as seven billion people. To climb a one centimeter mountain would require effort comparable to reaching the peak of Mount Everest.

“It’s not recommended to go to one of these,” Burnell said.

The force of gravity is so strong that an object falling from a few feet would hit the surface at half the speed of light.

Attendees react

Fernández-Serra, who, among others, described Bell Burnell as “a rock star,” appreciated how the guest speaker was an “extremely dedicated and hard worker and also a very sharp student. She went above and beyond what her advisor had asked her to do and was persistent in pushing for what she thought was something special. Thanks to that, pulsars were discovered.”

While science has made huge strides in its treatment of women since the 1960’s, Fernández-Serra still sees opportunities for improvement. “The science community values aspects that are more commonly found in men: loud voices, quick opinions, more presence in the room (height actually matters a lot!!!),” she said, and added that science would benefit from valuing the opinions and thoughts of people who are introverted, mild-mannered and cautious decision makers.

Rosalba Perna, Professor in Physics and Astronomy at SBU, believes “we still have a long way to go” in correcting various unconscious bias.

Perna, who conducts part of her research on pulsars in her work on neutron stars, suggested that Bell Burnell’s description of pulsar’s extreme gravity “still leaves me in awe any time I think about it!”

Neelima Sehgal, Associate Professor in Physics & Astronomy at SBU, said the technical talk was “of particular interest to our female graduate students who asked a number of thoughtful questions” while the high school students almost filled the big auditorium at the Simons Center.

“It was pretty great that we were able to bring her to Stony Brook,” said Sehgal.

#12 Ellie Masera and #43 Alex Finn celebrate after Sunday's victory. Photo from Stony Brook Athletics

Stony Brook women’s lacrosse scored 11 of the first 13 goals and got career offensive performances from Alex Finn and Ellie Masera to open the 2024 season with an 18-11 victory at LaValle Stadium on Feb 18.

Stony Brook (1-0) got a career-high eight goals and 10 points from Masera along with a career-high seven assists and nine points from Finn. Masera took 16 of Stony Brook’s 36 shots in the game. Kailyn Hart also added five goals on eight shots (.625), with Charlotte Verhulst getting in the scoring column twice and Morgan Mitchell once.

Defensively, the Seawolves had six caused turnovers and 10 ground balls as a team. Clare Levy and Emily Manning each caused two turnovers. Manning led the way with three ground balls and Finn, Levy and Masera each picked up two. In her first start as a Seawolf, Emily Manning made eight saves with a .421 save percentage.

In the possession game, Stony Brook got six draw controls each from Masera and Clare Levy, with Verhulst adding three.

For Dartmouth, Kate Elders scored four times, while Catherine Erb added three tallies and Lucy Murray scored twice. Goalkeeper Gisele Todd made nine saves in net on a .360 save percentage.

 The team is back home on Feb. 20 to take on Bryant, with first draw scheduled for 3 p.m. The Bulldogs are 2-1 on the season with wins over Holy Cross and Sacred Heart. Stony Brook is 3-0 against Bryant all-time and this will be the two teams’ first meeting since 2019.

#5 Aaron Clarke looks to pass the ball during Saturday's game. Photo from Stony Brook Athletics

The Stony Brook University men’s basketball team fell, 84-61, to Monmouth on Feb. 17 at OceanFirst Bank Center in West Long Branch, N.J. Three Seawolves finished in double figures, but it was not enough to overcome the Hawks strong second-half performance.

Stony Brook fell behind 13-7 early on, but battled back to grab a one-point lead after a 7-0 run spearheaded by Keenan Fitzmorris. After Monmouth evened things up at 16 apiece, the Hawks scored eight straight points to open up a 24-16 lead. Another eight-point scoring run to close the half helped Monmouth take an eight-point lead into the break.

The Hawks opened the second half by scoring the first 10 points and 24 of the half’s first 30 points to jump out to a 26-point advantage. The Seawolves never truly trimmed the deficit much further, pulling within 20 points of the Hawks momentarily before eventually falling, 84-61.

“Monmouth physically dominated us today, particularly on the glass. We were fortunate enough to catch them on a day where Xander Rice was off, but we weren’t in position to win due to an inability to deal with their fours and fives on the glass,” head coach Geno Ford said. “Our perimeter guys collectively couldn’t make any shots, so it was a formula for a convincing loss.”

The team returns home to host North Carolina A&T on Thursday, February 22. The Seawolves and Aggies tip-off at 6:31 p.m., with the contest streaming live on SNY and Flo Hoops.

Photo from Stony Brook Athletics

The Stony Brook University men’s basketball team fell, 95-77, to Campbell on Feb. 10 afternoon at Gore Arena. in Buies Creek, N.C. Aaron Clarke and Dean Noll scored 16 points apiece, while Tyler Stephenson-Moore chipped in with 10, but it was not enough to overcome Campbell’s five double-figure scorers.

Stony Brook was firing on all cylinders out of the gate, jumping out to an early 10-point advantage, 12-2, in the opening three minutes of action. After Campbell pulled back within one possession of Stony Brook, the Seawolves extended the lead back to double figures as the first half neared the mid-way point.

The Camels responded with a 23-3 run, turning their nine-point deficit into a 11-point lead, with just under four minutes remaining in the opening period. Campbell’s hot shooting continued over the final four minutes, taking a 52-38 lead into the locker room.

Stony Brook’s deficit kept widening after intermission, falling behind 79-61 before a 6-0 shrunk the deficit to 79-67 with 6:05 to go in the contest. After being down as many as 23 points halfway through the second stanza, the Seawolves pulled within 12 points, but could not trim the deficit any further. Campbell cruised the rest of the way, clinching a 95-77 victory over the Seawolves in the inaugural meeting between two of the CAA’s newest members.

STATS AND NOTES

  • Noll scored a team-leading 16 points, reaching double figures for the ninth time in his last 10 games played. He connected on three shots from beyond the arc, the 11th time this season he has registered multiple three-point field goals made.
  • Clarke matched Noll’s effort with 16 points, shooting 6-of-11 from the floor. He shot an even 50 percent (3-6) from long range, adding five assists and four rebounds.
  • Stephenson-Moore rounded out Stony Brook’s double-digit point scorers, contributing 10 points.
  • Andre Snoddy grabbed a team-high seven rebounds across 22 minutes of action. He added six points on a 3-for-7 mark from the field.
  • As a team, Stony Brook connected on 11 three pointers for the second straight game. Stony Brook moved to 6-4 overall this season when making at least 10 shots from beyond the arc.
  • The Camels finished with a stark 54-22 advantage in paint points. Campbell dished out 29 assists, the second most by an opponent this season.
  • Campbell scored at a 64-percent clip in the contest, the highest field-goal percentage by a Seawolves’ opponent this year. The Camels’ 95 points were also the second-most points allowed by Stony Brook in 2023-24.
  • Today’s meeting was the first between Stony Brook and Campbell.

“Campbell did a great job of running their offense today at a high level. We were not sharp mentally on that end of the floor,” head coach Geno Ford said. “We had several good looks we couldn’t convert and when you combined those two issues it’s a really bad formula. In league games, you have to play well to have a chance to win. We certainly didn’t today.”

Kyra McFarland during last Saturday's game. Photo from Stony Brook Athletics

Stony Brook softball suffered a pair of shutout defeats on Feb. 10, falling 12-0 in the first game to FIU and 9-0 to Ohio State in the second game.

Stony Brook dropped to 1-3 overall for the season and the weekend.

GAME 1: FIU 12, STONY BROOK 0 (5 innings)

  • A two-out double gave FIU a 1-0 lead after an inning.
  • A bunt single and error gave FIU a 2-0 lead, and the Panthers tacked on two more on a single to center for a 4-0 lead after two.
  • With the bases loaded, a double to left field plated two more for FIU, as the Panthers extended the lead to 6-0.
  • The Panthers tacked on six more in the fourth, first on a three-run home run followed by a two-run double and an RBI single later in the inning.

GAME 2: OHIO STATE 9, STONY BROOK 0 (6 innings)

  • Ohio State got runners on first and third with one out in the second, before scratching across a run with a sacrifice fly.
  • With two on and one out, Church homered to centered for a 4-0 OSU lead. Later on in the same inning, a bases-loaded walk tacked on another run for the Buckeyes.
  • A pair of walks and a fielding error loaded the bases for the Seawolves in the sixth, but SBU was unable to capitalize.
  • A fielding error and a three-run double finished off the scoring in the bottom of the sixth.
  • Ohio State pitcher Emily Ruck recorded a no-hitter.

“We played a better ball game in game two, although the results were not what we wanted. We have the opportunity to improve again tomorrow and finish this weekend strong,” said head coach Megan Bryant.

Sara Annamaria Medved at Saturday's game. Photo from Stony Brook Athletics

Stony Brook tennis picked up its first victory of the 2024 season, starting off the match with a victory in doubles and winning four of the six singles matches for a 5-2 win at the Tennis Club of Trumbull on Feb. 11 in Fairfield, CT.

Stony Brook marked a historic victory, as head coach Thiago Dualiby earned his first collegiate head coaching win on Saturday.

Stony Brook battled to win two tiebreakers in doubles to earn the point, with sophomore Kristi Boro and freshman Elena Lobo-Corral combining to win one tiebreaker, while sophomore Debby Mastrodima and freshman Cornelia Bruu-Syversen won the other.

The singles victories came courtesy of freshman Mia Palladino, Lobo-Corral, Boro and junior Sara Medved. Three competitors came back from a set down to win their respective matches.

RESULTS

Doubles

  • Boro/Lobo-Corral (SBU) def. Malinowski/Karman (FU), 7-6 (7-2)
  • Mastrodima/Palladino (SBU) def. Liu/Loeffler (FU), 7-6 (7-5)
  • Perfiliev/Bruu-Syversen (SBU) def. Hutchinson/Tuttle (FU), 6-2

Singles

  • Palladino (SBU) def. Liu (FU), 1-6, 6-4, 6-0
  • Lobo-Corral (SBU) def. Plumtree (FU), 4-6, 6-3, 6-0
  • Boro (SBU) def. Loeffler (FU), 6-1, 6-4
  • Karman (FU) def. Perfiliev (SBU), 3-6, 6-4, 6-3
  • Malinowski (FU) def. Bruu-Syversen (SBU), 6-2, 6-0
  • Medved (SBU) def. Harding (FU), 2-6, 6-3, 6-3

“I’m really proud of our team today. We showed resiliency and resolve, overcoming difficult moments and believing in ourselves throughout the match. Winning the doubles point today was a result of that resiliency and the commitment to keep pushing through our comfort zone in our gameplay. We look forward to keep building one day at a time,” said head coach Thiago Dualiby.

The team  heads back to Connecticut next weekend, beginning with a match with UConn on Friday, Feb. 16 with first serve at 6 p.m.