Stony Brook University Hospital Diabetes Program team members celebrate 2019 Pinnacle Award for Quality and Patient Safety. Photo from Stony Brook Medicine
StonyBrook becomes the seventh hospital in New York State and the first hospital in Suffolk County to achieve advanced certification. Only 66 hospitals nationally have achieved this distinction after a rigorous three-day review by Joint Commission surveyors.
Certification demonstrates continuous compliance with The Joint Commission’s performance standards. As the Joint Commission’s “Gold Seal of Approval®” for Advanced Inpatient Diabetes, it reflects a healthcare organization’s commitment to providing safe and quality patient care.
“This achievement demonstrates the outstanding quality of care that our faculty and staff provide for patients with diabetes,” said Carol Gomes, MS, FACHE, CPHQ, Chief Executive Officer of StonyBrook University Hospital. “Our entire diabetes team is uniquely equipped and qualified to help our patients address the daily challenges they face in managing their disease.”
“I am overjoyed that the StonyBrook Medicine Diabetes Program has been recognized for excellence by The Joint Commission and am honored to be among only a handful of hospitals nationwide with this certification,” said Joshua D. Miller, MD, MPH, Medical Director of Diabetes Care for StonyBrook Medicine, Assistant Dean and Associate Professor of Medicine for Endocrinology and Metabolism at the Renaissance School of Medicine at StonyBrook University. “This achievement acknowledges the dedication of our team to patients living with diabetes and showcases our shared commitment to providing the highest quality care to the community here on Long Island.”
Joshua D. Miller, MD, MPH. Photo from Stony Brook Medicine
Dr. Miller in particular acknowledged the contributions of Danielle Kelly, MS, ANP-C, RN, CDCES, lead inpatient diabetes nurse practitioner; Paul Murphy, BS, CSSBB, Assistant Supervisor of Quality; Sue Robbins, MS, RN, CPPS; and Nancy Cohen, MA, RN, in the Department of Regulatory Affairs; inpatient diabetes educators Patty Skala, RN, MA, MSN, CDECS, BC-ADM, and Mary Rieff, RN, CDECS; and members of the Diabetes Advisory Committee. He also cited Eileen Gilmartin, Michael Kaufman, Anthony D’Aulerio and team from StonyBrook Medicine’s Information Technology Department for their efforts to transform StonyBrook Medicine into the region’s leader in diabetes care.
“StonyBrook’s diabetes team is among the best in the nation,” Dr. Miller said. “As a person living with type 1 diabetes for over 21 years, I have tremendous pride in the care StonyBrook Medicine provides to patients living with the disease and consider myself privileged to work alongside individuals so dedicated to improving the lives of those we serve.”
Since Dr. Miller joined StonyBrook in 2013, the hospital has made a significant commitment to diabetes treatment and education, building the first comprehensive diabetescenter in the region. In 2019, the program received the Healthcare Association of New York State (HANYS) 2019 Pinnacle Award for Quality and Patient Safety.
To achieve Joint Commission certification, a team of reviewers evaluated StonyBrook’s compliance with related standards, including program management and delivering and facilitating clinical care. Certification recognizes healthcare organizations that provide clinical programs across the full range of care for patients with diabetes. The review process evaluates how organizations use clinical outcomes and performance measures to identify opportunities to improve care, as well as to educate and prepare patients and their caregivers for discharge.
“Advanced Inpatient Diabetes Certification recognizes healthcare organizations committed to fostering continuous quality improvement in patient safety and quality of care,” says Mark Pelletier, RN, MS, Chief Operating Officer, Accreditation and Certification Operations, and Chief Nursing Executive, The Joint Commission. “We commend StonyBrook for using certification to reduce variation in its clinical processes and to strengthen its program structure and management framework for diabetes patients.”
“Our teamwork has powered a transformational journey for patients with diabetes at StonyBrook,” Gomes said. “By focusing on specific opportunities for improvement, we are enhancing quality of care and clinical outcomes.”
Xiaoning Wu at her recent PhD graduation with Kevin Reed. Photo by Gordon Taylor
By Daniel Dunaief
If they build it, they will understand the hurricanes that will come.
That’s the theory behind the climate model Kevin Reed, Associate Professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University, and his graduate student Xiaoning Wu, recently created.
Working with Associate Professor Christopher Wolfe at Stony Brook and National Center for Atmospheric Research scientists, Reed and Wu developed an idealized computer model of the interaction between the oceans and the atmosphere that they hope will, before long, allow them to study weather events such as tropical cyclones, also known as hurricanes.
In his idealized program, Reed is trying to reduce the complexity of models to create a system that doesn’t require as much bandwidth and that can offer directional cues about coming climate change.
“When you’re trying to build a climate model that can accurately project the future, you’re trying to include every process you know is important in the Earth’s system,” Reed said. These programs “can’t be run” with university computers and have to tap into some of the biggest supercomputers in the world.
Reed’s work is designed to “peel back some of these advances that have happened in the field” which will allow him to focus on understanding the connections and processes, particularly between the ocean and the atmosphere. He uses fewer components in his model, reducing the number of equations he uses to represent variables like clouds.
“We see if we can understand the processes, as opposed to understanding the most accurate” representations possible, he said. In the last ten years or so, he took a million lines of code in a climate model and reduced it to 200 lines.
Another way to develop a simpler model is to reduce the complexity of the climate system itself. One way to reduce that is to scale back on the land in the model, making the world look much more like something out of the 1995 Kevin Costner film “Waterworld.”
About 30 percent of the world is covered by land, which has a variety of properties.
In one of the simulations, Reed reduced the complexity of the system by getting rid of the land completely, creating a covered aqua planet, explaining that they are trying to develop a tool that looks somewhat like the Earth.
“If we could understand and quantify that [idealized system], we could develop other ways to look at the real world,” he said.
The amount of energy from the sun remains the same, as do the processes of representing oceans, atmospheres and clouds.
In another version of the model, Reed and Wu represented continents as a single, north-south ribbon strip of land, which is enough to change the ocean flow and to create currents like the Gulf Stream.
The expectation and preliminary research shows that “we should have tropical cyclones popping up in these idealized models,” Reed said. By studying the hurricanes in this model, these Stony Brook scientists can understand how these storms affect the movement of heat from around the equator towards the poles.
The weather patterns in regions further from the poles, like Long Island, come from the flow of heat that starts at the equator and moves to colder regions.
Atlantic hurricanes, which pick up their energy from the warmer waters near Africa and the southern North Atlantic, transfer some of that heat. Over the course of decades, the cycling of that energy, which also reduces the temperature of the warmer oceans, affects models for future storm systems, according to previous studies.
Reed said the scientific community has a wide range of estimates for the effect of hurricanes on energy transport, with some researchers estimating that it’s negligible, while others believing it’s close to 50 percent, which would mean that hurricanes could “play an active role in defining” the climate.
Reed’s hypothesis is that a more rapid warming of the poles will create less of an energy imbalance, which will mean fewer hurricanes. This might differ in various ocean basins. He has been studying the factors that control the number of tropical cyclones.
Reed and Wu’s research was published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems in April.
Wu, who is completing her PhD this summer after five years at Stony Brook, described the model as a major part of her thesis work. She is pleased with the work, which addresses the changing ocean as the “elephant in the room.”
Oftentimes, she said, models focus on the atmosphere without including uncertainties that come from oceans, which provide feedback through hurricanes and larger scale climate events.
Wu started working on the model in the summer of 2019, which involved considerable coding work. She hopes the model will “be used more widely” by the scientific community, as other researchers explore a range of questions about the interaction among various systems.
Wu doesn’t see the model as a crystal ball so much as a magnifying glass that can help clarify what is happening and also might occur in the future.
“We can focus on particular players in the system,” she said.
A native of central China, Wu said the flooding of the Yangtze River in 1998 likely affected her interest in science and weather, as the factors that led to this phenomenon occurred thousands of miles away.
As for her future, Wu is intrigued by the potential to connect models like the one she helped develop with applications for decision making in risk management.
The range of work she has done has enabled her to look at the atmosphere and physical oceanography and computational and science communication, all of which have been “useful for developing my career.”
The Rotary Club of Stony Brook presented a $5,000 check to Stony Brook Children’s Hospital on May 25. The check was accepted by Elisa Ruoff, Development Officer at Stony Brook University. Pictured from left, Nancy Fogg, Elisa Ruoff, Judi Wallace, Hope Kinney, Christine Grobe and Cliff Lemkin.
Dr. Paolo Boffetta, who joined Stony Brook University as Associate Director for Population Sciences in the Cancer Center in the midst of the pandemic last April, asks the kinds of questions doctors, scientists and non-scientists also raise when they look at illnesses among groups of people.
An epidemiologist who worked for 20 years at the World Health Organization and at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City for 10 years, Boffetta joined Stony Brook because he saw an opportunity to replicate the kind of success he and others had at Mt. Sinai, where he helped the institution earn a National Cancer Institute designation. Cancer centers can apply for NCI designation when they have a well-established portfolio of research.
Dr. Paolo Boffetta
“The idea to try to get the Cancer Center” at Stony Brook “to the NCI level was very appealing,” Boffetta said. Stony Brook was looking to build out its population sciences work.
In addition to the big picture goal of helping Cancer Center Director Yusuf Hannun and other researchers earn that designation, Boffetta has partnered with several scientists at Stony Brook and elsewhere to address questions related to various illnesses.
Boffetta has applied for $12 million in funds over six years from the National Cancer Institute for a new water project.
The research will recruit people who are over 50 years old across several towns, primarily in Suffolk County to explore the link between the potential exposure these residents had to different chemicals in drinking water and types of cancers.
“The main idea is that people may be exposed to carcinogens through drinking water according to where they have been living,” Boffetta said.
The scientists will follow these residents over time to determine the health impact of their town of residency. “If this is funded, this will be a major project that will involve many institutions,” he added.
The chemicals they will study include nitrates, chlorinated solvents, 1,4-dioxane, and perfluoroalkyl substances.
While he awaits word on potential funding for the water effort, Boffetta and others are looking at another project to explore the link between various environmental factors and bladder cancer. This is not limited to drinking water contamination. The group plans to analyze tumor samples to see whether they can detect fingerprint mutations.
World Trade Center Studies
Boffetta also plans to continue and expand on work he’s done at Mt. Sinai with responders of the World Trade Center attacks, a group that has received considerable attention from numerous scientists at Stony Brook.
He has been “doing a number of quite detailed analyses on cancer, including survival of workers and responders to developing cancer,” he said. The WTC survivors are enrolled in a medical monitoring treatment program, sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control, which means they “should be getting good cancer care.”
Boffetta has been comparing their survival to the population at large in New York, analyzing how the risk of cancer evolved over the almost 20 years since the attacks.
Boffetta has started to look at one particular new project, in which he studies the prevalence of clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (or CHIP), which is an asymptomatic condition that increases the likelihood of leukemia and cardiovascular disease. He is studying 350 healthy World Trade Center responders and a group of historical controls from the literature.
He plans to use the results of his study to develop strategies to prevent these diseases in WTC responders.
In some of his WTC studies, Boffetta is working with Ben Luft, Director of the Stony Brook WTC Wellness Program at the Renaissance School of Medicine at SBU, who has been involved in providing extensive research and clinical support for WTC responders.
Boffetta is an “internationally renowned cancer epidemiologist” who contributed his “vast experience on the impact of environmental and occupational exposures [that were] seminal in our understanding of how the disaster of 9/11 would eventually lead to increased numbers of cancer cases among responders,” Luft wrote in an email.
Boffetta’s contribution and understanding will “transcend the events of 9/11 and its impact on the responder community to a general understanding of the increased incidence of cancer on Long Island,” said Luft.
While Boffetta has several academic affiliations with institutions including Harvard University, where he teaches a class for a week each year, and Vanderbilt University, his primary focus involves the work he conducts at Stony Brook and at the University of Bologna.
Boffetta plans to keep his research team considerably smaller than the 80 to 100 people who worked with him at the World Health Organization. Indeed, he said he mainly focuses on working with collaborators. He plans to hire his first post doctoral researchers soon.
As for teaching, Boffetta has been working with the program directors of the Masters of Public Health to develop a tract in epidemiology. He plans to start teaching next year.
Boffetta, who spoke with Times Beacon Record News Media through WhatsApp from Italy, said he often works double shifts to remain in contact with his colleagues in the United States and Europe. When he’s in the United States, meetings can start at 6 in the morning to connect with his European counterparts in the middle of their day. When he’s in Italy, his last meetings sometimes end at 11 p.m. or midnight.
Boffetta, however, said he has “a normal life,” which, prior to the pandemic, included trips to the opera and museums. He also enjoys skiing and hiking.
Married to Antonella Greco, who used to teach Italian, Boffetta lives in New York City. He has three daughters, who live in Brooklyn, Italy and Uruguay. He has been vaccinated against COVID-19 and is looking forward to the opportunity to interact with his colleagues in person once restrictions caused by the pandemic ease.
Some of the SBU SoCJ graduates at commencement. Photo by Julianne Mosher
As part of the dozen small commencement ceremonies that occurred last week at Stony Brook University, TBR News Media wanted to give a special congratulations to the graduates of the Stony Brook University School of Communication and Journalism.
We stopped by their graduation on Thursday, May 20, to talk to a few future reporters about why they chose the profession and what journalism means to them.
Photo by Julianne Mosher
Melissa Azofeifa
“I chose journalism because I’m very much a people person,” said Hampton Bays local Melissa Azofeifa. “I love talking to people and hearing their stories.”
With the goal to be a multimedia journalist after graduation, she said she can’t wait to continue her journey as a reporter.
“I’ve learned a lot, but I know there’s a lot more to learn to accurately tell someone else’s story,” she said.
While in school, she was managing editor of the university newspaper, The Statesman.
Photo from James Bowen
James Bowen
James Bowen, a senior from Ossining, received the Carol Chernow Memorial Scholarship, which supports young writers interested in pursuing careers in journalism.
He said he always wanted to be a television reporter, and after his studies at the SoCJ, he landed a job — starting this week— at a news station in Tyler, Texas.
“I knew that journalism was a facet for me because it would allow me to be on TV, either for meteorology or Spanish sports coverage. In the end, it ended up being news, which is the start of it all, but I know that I can maximize my talents there,” he said. “Plus, I love talking to people so it’s just a perfect fit.”
Photo from Kimberly Brown
Kimberly Brown
TBR News Media intern Kimberly Brown began writing for our six newspapers in December 2020. Over the last five months, she has covered everything from small business to police reform.
“I went into journalism because I have a passion for writing,” she said. “If I’m not writing, I’m not happy.”
After graduation, the Seaford native hopes to continue working with community news.
“I really liked supporting my local community and doing local journalism,” she said. “It’s become my passion and I had the best mentors at TBR to help me and guide me.”
Photo by Julianne Mosher
Brianne Ledda
SoCJ graduate Brianne Ledda said she has already been hired at another local paper starting this summer. The Miller Place resident will be working as a reporter with the Times Review Media Group in Riverhead.
During her time at SBU, she held the title of editor-in-chief of the Stony Brook Statesman. She was the recipient of The Alumni Association Dean’s Choice Award, which recognizes a highly accomplished and exceptional graduating senior.
“I chose journalism because I love to learn and I wanted to pick a career that would allow me to continue doing that and interacting with the world around me,” she said.
Photo by Julianne Mosher
Alek Lewis
Riverhead resident Alek Lewis started in journalism after taking an elective course at Suffolk County Community College. He realized there that he wanted to write and he was good at it.
After transferring to Stony Brook, he said his love for journalism continued to grow.
“Now, it’s something I’m super passionate about. And it’s what I want to do, possibly for the rest of my life,” he said. “So, this degree is a testament to the hard work that I put in, and I know that the work’s only going to get harder.”
Andrew Zucker and Kimberly Brown. Photo by Julianne Mosher
TBR wants to give a special congrats to our intern Kimberly Brown and freelance writer Andrew Zucker on their graduation. We’re all so proud of you both!
Three-year medical school grads Adam Bindelglass, Simrat Dhawilal, William Guo, Maxwell Moore, Justin Bell, Eliana Fine and Brant Lai. Photo from Stony Brook University
Behind every stethoscope is a story.
Chineze Nwebube during the Graduate Address. Photo from Stony Brook University
This year, the stories among the new doctors who recently graduated from the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University developed against the backdrop of a pandemic and included numerous firsts for the school and for the families of graduates.
Seven of the 150 graduates, which is the largest medical school class to earn a medical degree from Stony Brook, completed their training in three years, joining a small but growing trend among medical schools that are encouraging more people to consider becoming physicians while reducing the potential debt that can accrue while earning their medical degree.
“This year is really going to stand out,” said Andrew Wackett, vice dean of Undergraduate Medical Education and the director of the Clinical Simulation Center. “This was a group of students that really went through an awful lot. They rose to the occasion. They didn’t complain. Rather than do that, they tried to figure out how to help. It’s a special group of physicians that will make a great impact.”
Indeed, amid the worst of the pandemic, which hit Suffolk County especially hard during the spring of 2020, medical school students performed a host of important tasks, just as so many other health care professionals took on additional responsibilities and put themselves in harm’s way to protect the public.
Students volunteered to help with research, assisted patients who needed to connect with clinicians through in-person or telehealth and did “a lot of work with following up to make sure [residents] were doing okay when they were discharged,” Wackett said. These students were “really important in organizing the vaccine strategy,” as a number of them trained and volunteered to give vaccines. “They doled out thousands of them.”
Wackett suggested that the adversity caused by the pandemic has enabled class members to become resilient.
“What they learned, more than anything, was that they could adapt to whatever the world threw at them,” Wackett said. “It made them a much tougher group of students.”
Wackett said he was moved by the story of Chineze Nwebube, who described in the Graduate Address how she took the MCAT several times and had moments when she thought about giving up.
With the support of her family, she persisted and was “an exceptional medical student and will be an incredible physician,” Wackett wrote in an email.
Wackett said the spotlight on social injustice amid the pandemic also affected the dialog and the didactic efforts at the medical school.
“Certain populations have disparate health care, and we need to be involved to make that better,” Wackett said. That includes an analysis not just of disease or pathology, but also a consideration of how social factors impact the course of illnesses.
“Courses that traditionally taught science [are also] looking at the social context,” he said. “Medicine and public health are way more interconnected than we even realized.”
The graduates are preparing to venture into a world in which new lessons learned in the classroom and the clinic will prove especially valuable. At the same time, they bring a passion, dedication and conviction to the communities they plan to serve.
In between graduating and taking the next steps in their medical careers, some of this year’s graduates shared their inspiring and inspired stories.
Former dean and senior vice president of health services Ken Kaushansky, center, with Jheison and Monica Giraldo, the first married couple to enter and graduate from medical school at Stony Brook together. Photo from Stony Brook University.
Here comes the married couple
Monica Lenis didn’t think Jheison Giraldo, the guy from another class who was making up a lab in undergraduate biology at Stony Brook University, was all that funny. That just made him try so much harder, prompting eye rolls from a tough audience.
“His jokes were not making me laugh,” Monica recalled about that fateful science class eight years ago. “Somehow, we hit it off. We started talking after that and got to know each other.”
Despite Monica’s initial resistance to his charms, the couple started spending considerable time together, where they realized how much they had in common.
For starters, they were born in Colombia, five hours apart by car. Their families had moved to Long Island, his to Brentwood and hers to Bethpage, when each of them was nine years old.
Once they started to get to know each other, they appreciated each other’s strengths.
Jheison, who describes himself as the more outgoing of the two, tried to compete with Monica academically. That didn’t work out too well.
On a test in Biochemistry 2, in which the average was around 40, he reached the high 90s. He confidently went over to Monica, figuring he had to have beaten her.
She scored a 102, getting all the questions right and adding the two extra points.
“If you can’t beat them, join them,” he said. “I knew being next to her, she’s going to push me to excel in every way I could. I would do the same for her.”
Monica appreciated Jheison’s pervasive and persistent positive attitude. She also appreciated how well he interacted with her parents and her family, enjoying the older brother role he took with Monica’s 15-year-old brother.
After they graduated from Stony Brook, they got married. Jheison had always known he wanted to be a physician, dressing up for Halloween close to a dozen times as a doctor. Monica had other interests, including in the law. In addition to falling in love with Jheison, she also developed a deep appreciation for science in college and eventually deciding that she didn’t want to conduct research.
They applied to 30 medical schools. When they decided to go to Stony Brook together, they became the first married couple to enter the medical school together.
“When we first started” meeting people in the class, some of their peers “thought of us as the grown-up couple,” Monica said. Each of them, however, established their own academic and social friend groups.
While in medical school, they supported each other, as they focused on becoming, as Jheison put it, “the best physicians we could.”
Now that he is planning to become a resident in internal medicine and pediatrics and she plans to focus on internal medicine and cardiology, the medical couple has decided to contribute to a community they feel could use their support.
“From day one, we wanted to go to a place where we could be faced with patients who need more equity and diverse doctors working with them,” Jheison said. “We always looked at strong minority areas or historically under-represented areas. Miami stood out for us.”
While Long Island has been her home since she arrived in the United States in 2002 and has a “special place in my heart,” Monica is excited for an opportunity for personal growth. She is also thrilled to get away from the snow and the cold.
As she prepares for the next chapter in her life, she is looking forward to continuing in her journey with Jheison, who is “very positive and very uplifting. He’s always been very supportive, which is really all you could ask for in a partner.”
Eliana Fine with her husband Mark Feld, their 4-year-old son Ezra and their 6-month-old daughter Sophia. Photo from Eliana Fine.
Dr. Mom
Like many of her friends in the Orthodox Jewish community, Eliana Fine got married soon after high school, at the age of 19. Within two years, she gave birth to her son Ezra and, six months ago, to her daughter Sophia.
She could have dedicated herself and her time to becoming a stay-at-home mom, enveloping herself in a culture that emphasizes family and community and that keeps many women incredibly busy taking care of their often numerous children.
Instead, with the valuable and necessary support of her husband Mark Feld, Eliana decided to go a different route, not only pursuing a career as a doctor but also earning her degree in three years.
“I come from a community where most of the women don’t work,” Fine said. “I honestly didn’t even know any other orthodox Jewish woman who was a physician or was a medical student or physician trainee.”
Fine, however, wanted to develop her own career, particularly in the field of obstetrics and gynecology, where she felt she could help women, particularly in her community.
She described how the women in her community often don’t have extensive knowledge about reproductive and sexual health education before they get married. Women often have a kallah teacher, who is usually the wife of a rabbi.
“Your education is really based on the knowledge of your teacher,” Fine said, and “what they feel comfortable teaching you.”
Fine wanted to give back to her community, educating women about medical and health issues that can help “empower them to make better health care decisions.”
As a physician, Fine hopes to help other orthodox Jewish women understand more about women’s health and fertility.
“If women are having difficulty conceiving, the peer pressure can be stressful,” she said. “All of your friends are having kids and you’re not moving forward with your family.”
She wanted to give back to a community that she loves and that provides the context and framework for her life.
“There’s a lot of misconceptions when it comes to contraception,” Fine said. “People think contraception causes infertility. People don’t necessarily utilize contraception because of various misconceptions about it.”
To get to this point in her career, Fine said she had to overcome some of the expectations of a culture that sometimes places a stronger emphasis on family, particularly for women, than it does on developing careers.
She appreciated and is grateful for the support of her husband and her grandfather, Dr. Richard Fine, who was a dean of Stony Brook Medical School. When she was younger, she knew he was a physician, but wasn’t aware of his extensive career beyond that. She appreciated his regular questions to her about what she wanted to do when grew up, which allowed her to think for herself about what motivates her and how to make a difference in the world.
Fine believes that her experience and background as a member of the Orthodox Jewish community will help her relate to and communicate with her patients.
“Women have these family purity laws and it’s really important to go to an OB/Gyn who is very familiar with these laws. To be a part of the culture and come from the same community, you understand how to provide care.”
Fine, like several of her colleagues in the inaugural three-year medical program, felt closer to the incoming class of 2018 than to the graduating class of 2021, with whom she interacted primarily in the last six months of her medical school training.
During graduation, Fine appreciated the opportunities she feels she had that others don’t always get.
“I want to make sure I do something great with the opportunity I was given and make a difference in the world,” Fine said.
As for her children, Fine would like them to see that they, too, can choose how they live their lives, regardless of any expectations that others place on them.
“I would like to show my kids, if I can do it, they can do it,” she said. “I want them to know they have choices in life and that I will support whatever they choose. They should know they have the wings to fly, in terms of having a career and going to college.”
Adam Bindelglass. Photo from Stony Brook University
Early challenges
When Adam Bindelglass was five years old, the car he was in slid across black ice into oncoming traffic, which took the life of his two-year-old sister Amy.
Bindelglass also sustained serious injuries, breaking both his arms, his left leg, collar bone, and fracturing his neck. During his recovery, he had to wear a halo on his head to keep his spine aligned until it healed. The halo and the injuries left numerous scars, which triggered questions from his classmates.
“I have a pretty long scar from the base of my skull down my neck,” Bindelglass said. “I was self-conscious about those scars.”
Additionally, he has scars on his right bicep, and he has a mark that used to stretch the entire length of the long bone on his leg.
Motivated by the desire to help other people, particularly in difficult medical situations, Bindelglass said that day, and the scars he now bears as a mark of his career commitment, brought him to this landmark career moment.
A recent medical school graduate, Bindelglass said his experiences early in life have come up several times when he interacts with patients in high-stress situations in the hospital.
He recalled one incident when he spoke with a patient who was about to undergo spinal surgery.
He described how he could “live a full, fulfilling life without complications from these operations,” Bindelglass said. “I hope to continue to bring that [empathy], especially since the patients I’ll be working with [could be] in an acute situation where I’m going to see them right before one of the potentially the biggest operations or procedures of their life.”
He hopes to bring comfort and peace of mind going into surgery.
A three-year graduate from medical school, Bindelglass plans to continue in a residency at Stony Brook in anesthesia. Bindelglass said the pandemic showed him the importance of managing patients’ airways.
Bindelglass said he thinks about his sister “all the time” and hopes she “would be proud” of his commitment to helping others with his career choice.
Simrat Dhaliwal. Photo from Stony Brook University
The magic of threes
Simrat Dhaliwal graduated from Northeastern with her bachelor’s degree in neuroscience in three years and repeated the pattern at Stony Brook’s Renaissance School of Medicine, where she recently earned her medical degree.
The pattern of moving through degree programs in one fewer year is a by-product of several factors.
Dhaliwal is “efficient with time,” she said. “Medicine is a very long route. I know the path I want to take.”
Dhaliwal, whose mother Tejwinder Dhaliwal is a nurse practitioner at Rochester Regional and served as a health care role model, wanted to be a doctor from the time she was in kindergarten. As she attended middle school and high school, she became fascinated with science. She majored in neuroscience at Boston University.
Comparing the accelerated pace of her undergraduate years to medical school, Dhaliwal said the medical education is considerably more rigorous.
“As an undergraduate, once you finish a course, you can forget [some of the material] and move on,” she said. In medical school, students build “on the foundation. If you never had that strong foundation, there’s no way to move on. You’ll be responsible for patients” someday and “you need to know as much as possible.”
Indeed, the pandemic reinforced Dhaliwal’s decision to become a doctor, showing her that doctors had to “fall back on that foundation to help patients in need,” she said. “This pandemic made me want to become a physician even more because it is [a combination of] public service and critical thinking at the same time. There is no greater service to the public than helping someone, especially when it is in such high demand.”
Dhaliwal, who is starting her residency in internal medicine at Stony Brook on July 1, said her parents are originally from a rural part of India.
In her travels to visit family in India, she has “seen the health care disparity that exists in a non-developed nation.” For people in rural India, the nearest hospital is a 45-minute drive, which can create a dangerous delay for people who are having a heart problem or a stroke, where minutes can make the difference in a prognosis.
One of the most important lessons she learned from medical school is to keep learning. The same holds true for her expectations of herself when she practices medicine. She hopes to help educate people about how “preventive medicine is as important as treatment.”
To kick off National Nurses week, Stony Brook University Hospital rolled out the red carpet for its nursing staff, cheering them on as they made their way into work.
On Thursday, May 6, the 6:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. shifts were welcomed into the hospital with a red carpet and balloons to thank them for their efforts — especially throughout the last year.
Since the early 90s, May 6 through May 12 (ending on Florence Nightingale’s birthday), nurses across the country have been thanked for the work they do.
Photo from Stony Brook Medicine
But 2020 showed a new appreciation for nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. SBUH decided last summer to put out the red carpet, as nurses ventured into work during the height of the coronavirus crisis.
And for the second year in a row, more than 3,400 RNs, LPNs, nursing assistants, nursing station clerks and more were thanked as they readied a 12-hour shift like a celebrity.
Carolyn Santora, chief nursing officer & chief of regulatory affairs, said the red carpet was just one way of saying thanks.
“Our nurses are stars, and they’re wonderful,” she said. “We wanted to show our appreciation.”
Santora said that throughout the whole week, nurses and nursing staff were recognized for their hard work. One day they were delivered ice cream, another they were given awards.
“The staff, I can’t say they’re not weary and tired — it’s been a long, long year — but they’ve been incredible,” she said. “They come to work dedicated every single day, take care of our community and support each other in the process.”
Santora said the staff were appreciative of the hospital’s efforts.
“The importance of this is understanding and recognizing them for their skills, for their dedication, for their talents and for their heart,” Santora said. “Taking care of all of these patients every single day, it’s just remarkable what they do.”
And the winner is … Eszter Boros. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Stony Brook University, Boros recently won the 2021 Stony Brook Discovery Prize, which includes $200,000 in new funding.
The prize, which was established in 2013, is designed to fund higher-risk research for scientists who are no more than five years beyond tenure and promotion at the Associate Professor level or who are on a tenure track as an Assistant Professor. The research might not otherwise receive financial support from agencies like the National Institutes of Health.
Eszter Boros. Photo from SBU
Stony Brook awards the prize to a faculty member who is considered a rising star.
Boros’s proposal suggests using a radioactive light switch to activate anticancer molecules.
The goal behind Boros’s work is to target cancer cells in particular, while avoiding the kinds of painful side effects that typically accompany chemotherapy, which can lead to gastrointestinal discomfort and hair loss, among others.
Boros, who has been at Stony Brook since 2017, was pleased to win the award. “It’s really exciting,” she said. “I’m kind of in disbelief. I thought all the finalists had convincing and exciting projects.”
The four finalists, who included Eric Brouzes in biomedical engineering, Gregory Henkes in geosciences and Kevin Reed in climate modeling, went through three rounds of screening, culminating in a Zoom-based 10-minute presentation in front of four judges.
Bruce Beutler, the Director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, served as one of the four judges.
In an email, Beutler wrote that Boros’s work had an “inventive approach” and was “high risk, but potentially high impact.”
Beutler, who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, suggested that the Discovery Prize may give a start to “a bright person with relatively little track record and a risky but well reasoned proposal.”
The success from such a distinction “does build on itself,” Beutler wrote. “Other scientists hear of such awards or read about them when evaluating future proposals. This may influence decisions about funding, or other awards, in the future.”
Boros said she would use the prize money to fund work from graduate students and post doctoral fellows, who will tackle the complexities of the work she proposed. She will also purchase supplies, including radioactive isotopes. She hopes to stretch the funds for two and a half or three years, depending on the progress she and the members of her lab make with the work.
The idea behind her research is to send radioactive materials that emit a light as they decay and that bind to the cancer cell. The light makes the chemotherapy toxic. Without that light, the chemotherapy would move around the body without damaging non-cancerous cells, reducing the drug’s side effects.
She is thinking of two ways to couple the radioactive light-emitting signal with an activated form of treatment. In the first, the two parts would not be selectively bound together.
The chemotherapy would diffuse into tissues around the body and would only become activated at the target site. This may affect healthy neighbors, but it wouldn’t cause as many side effects as conventional chemotherapy. This could take advantage of already clinically used agents that she can combine.
In the second strategy, she is taking what she described as a “next level” approach, in which she’d make the radioactive agent and the chemotherapy react with one another selectively. Once they saw one another, they would become chemically linked, searching to find and destroy cancer cells. This approach would require new chemistry which her lab would have to develop.
Beutler suggested that Boros’s work might have other applications, even if cancer might currently be the best one. Some focal but infectious diseases can be treated with antimicrobial therapy which, like cancer directed chemotherapy, is toxic, he explained.
The same principle of using a drug activated by light that is connected to a site-specific marker “could be used in such cases,” he said.
While the potential bench-to-bedside process for any single treatment or approach can seem lengthy and filled with unexpected obstacles, Beutler said he has seen certain cancers that were formerly fatal yield to innovation. “People who are battling cancer can at least be hopeful that their cancer might fall into this category,” he said.
Boros appreciated the opportunity to apply for the award, to bond with her fellow finalists and to benefit from a process that included several sessions with experts at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, who helped prepare her for the presentation in front of the judges. She developed her full proposal during the course of a week, over the December holiday, when her lab had some down time.
In the final stage, she met weekly for an hour with Louisa Johnson, an Improvisation Lecturer at the Alda Center and Radha Ganesan, an Assistant Professor of Medicine, to hone her presentation.
Boros said she appreciated how the Alda Center guides helped her focus on the obsession she and other scientists sometimes have of putting too much text in her slides. “I put text and conclusions on every slide,” she said. Ganesan and Johnson urged her to focus on what she wants to say, while letting go of this urge to clutter her presentation with the same words she planned to use in her presentation. “That was a huge shift in mindset that I had to make,” she said.
As for the work this prize will help fund, Boros said she’ll start with targets she knows based on some research she’s already done with prostate, breast and ovarian cancers.
Boros, who was born and raised in Switzerland, described herself as a chemist at heart.
Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her husband Labros Meimetis, Assistant Professor of Radiology at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook, and their nine-month-old son.
From left, Dr. Maurie McInnis, President Of Stony Brook University, Wolfie and Dr. Margaret McGovern, Stony Brook Medicine Vice President for Health System Clinical Programs and Strategy, thank healthcare workers giving their time to help vaccinate Long Island. Photo from Stony Brook Medicine
In the race to get Long Island vaccinated against COVID-19, StonyBrook University hit a major vaccine milestone, celebrating its 200,000th shot today. The mark was reached at the state-run mass vaccination site established by Governor Cuomo, located in the Innovation & Discovery Building (IDC) in the University’s Research and Development (R&D) Park. StonyBrook’s IDC Point of Distribution (POD) has been up-and-running since January 18. In total, StonyBrook Medicine (SBM) has administered 350,000 vaccines at PODs all across Long Island.
Photo from Stony Brook Medicine
“I am so proud of the critical contribution StonyBrook University is making in the battle to stop the spread of this disease and bring the COVID crisis to an end,” says Maurie McInnis, President of StonyBrook University. “Today’s vaccine milestone is a profound testament to the dedication, expertise and resources we’ve been able to provide to the lives of those in our community and beyond.”
StonyBrook Medicine has also played a critical role in vaccinating residents on the East End of Long Island. SBM’s other state-run vaccination site located at StonyBrook’s Southampton campus opened on March 19 and has since distributed 30,000 vaccines. In addition, 20,000 shots have been distributed through PODs facilitated by StonyBrook Southampton Hospital in Southampton and StonyBrook Eastern Long Island Hospital in Greenport. Another 100,000 COVID-19 vaccines were administered at StonyBrook University Hospital.
Dr. Margaret McGovern, Vice President for Health System Clinical Programs and Strategy, StonyBrook Medicine, who oversees vaccine distribution, said, “StonyBrook Medicine has administered more than 350,000 vaccines at our various PODs, including StonyBrook University Hospital, the StonyBrook Union, StonyBrook Advanced Specialty Care in Commack, StonyBrook Southampton and multiple locations throughout the East End of Long Island, serviced by StonyBrook Southampton Hospital and StonyBrook Eastern Long Island Hospital.
“Today’s milestone of administering 200,000 COVID-19 vaccinations at the R&D Park, in partnership with New York State, demonstrates our responsiveness, capabilities and determination to protect the Long Island community. We will keep doing our part to vaccinate as many people as possible,” added Dr. McGovern.
To further serve its patients across the island, SBM worked with the state to successfully develop community PODs as pop-up sites in underserved communities on Long Island, to reach communities of color and the elderly, as well as help build trust.
Stony Brook University President Maurie McInnis (at center) took in Flowerland with Reginald Ligonde ’21 (at left) and Khadija Saad of the USG (at right).
Flower crowns were worn by many students during the Flowerland festival, elevating the mood.
Before hunkering down to study for finals, Stony Brook students ventured out to enjoy the campus in the Spring. Hosted by the University’s Undergraduate Student Government (USG), Flowerland is a new tradition designed to help students relax and breathe deeply before wrapping up the semester.
Students decorated the plaza around the Student Activities Center with flowers and flower arrangements to mark the new season. The arrangements will be present through the end of finals, reminding students that no matter how their year finished, there should always be time to stop and smell the flowers.
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