CLOSE
Search

brookhaven term limit - search results

If you're not happy with the results, please do another search

by -
0 1834
Above, algae growing in plastic grids in Ian Blaby’s lab. Photo from Blaby

This is the second of a two-part series on Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Crysten and Ian Blaby.

While his wife is something of a metal worker, Ian Blaby is much more of a farmer. He cultivates rows upon rows of an unusual crop under numerous different conditions to see how they’ll grow and respond.

Like his wife Crysten Blaby, the organism he studies is a single-celled algae, which means those rows upon rows of crops can fit on the top of a bench, instead of dotting an expansive green field in the middle of the country.

Ian Blaby, who was born in Torquay, England, and earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge University, wants to know what genes are involved in carbon metabolism as the power algal couple look to unlock some important genetic secrets. The algae they study, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, has 17,741 genes.

“We have a good idea what 5 to 10 percent of those genes are doing when it comes to the functioning of the cell,” Blaby said. Scientists have a vague idea for about another 40 percent, which means that about half of those genes are unknown. His goal is to figure out how the products of those genes, proteins, interact with each other.

Understanding these genes can translate into a better awareness of similar genes in more complex and diverse organisms, such as food and biofuel crops, Blaby said. The overlap and the potential for unlocking important genetic codes for more complex plants has led the Department of Energy to designate the alga a flagship species.

“It has been recognized as having a lot of potential,” Blaby said. He estimates there are about 100 labs around the world that are studying it.

John Shanklin, the head of the plant sciences group at BNL, likened the understanding of the genes of the algae to seeing the skyline of a city from a distance. While the view might provide information about where the buildings are, it doesn’t reveal much about what’s inside them. The information Ian and Crysten Blaby collect can provide greater insights about the genetic inner workings of this algae.

Additionally, Shanklin said medical researchers have been able to take studies done with yeast and apply them to human diseases. The similarities between algae and plants are two- to fourfold higher than they are between yeast and humans.

Discovering gene functions is “one of the, if not the, biggest problems in biology,” Blaby said. “Many, many labs around the world are tasked with addressing this. My approaches are not unique, but certainly very specialized.”

Indeed, using plastic grids that allow individual conditions in 384 small squares, Blaby can see how the alga grow and survive under a host of conditions, all at the same time. Blaby uses hundreds of these plates in any one experiment. He compares different strains under the same conditions of light, temperature or composition of the growth medium, or compares the same strains under different conditions.

Screening all those small squares would be laborious work and would invite human error.

“By the time we might be looking at plate 177, human error could creep in,” Blaby said. Instead, he uses robots to transfer the plates from incubators to readers. He gets real time information on how every strain is behaving under each condition.

When Blaby finds a plate where the growth is conspicuously different from the parent alga, he can go back and screen for the genetic differences. This can help him focus in on a particular genetic sequence.

“A different behavior can be assigned to a gene, or region of DNA, providing clues to a specific function which can then be followed up using other methods,” Blaby explained. This would be considerably harder and more difficult with crop plants that have more genes and a considerably longer time to produce the next generation.

Crop plants present numerous complications, including the time to grow, the space requirements, and the challenge of growing them under carefully controlled conditions, in addition to the different genes for roots and leaves, expressed in different cells.

For the algae, the doubling time is about eight hours, which means that this algae can be handled in a lab in a way that’s similar to bacteria.

Blaby’s interest in carbon metabolism stems from his post-doctoral work in Los Angeles.

“Carbon forms the basis of biofuel,” he said. He hopes to identify “novel genes that are involved in fuel production but that weren’t known.”

While scientists like Crysten and Ian Blaby are studying single-celled algae in their lab, they have the big picture goal of the application and translation of their work to a real-world problem and limitation that will affect future generations of people.

“We’re making more people, but we don’t have more land area for growing crops,” Shanklin said. “The only options are to grow crops” on currently unused land or to “make the growth more efficient. We’re working on both sides.”

The BNL department has a mandate, along with other researchers working with the DOE, to “make plants more efficient. We can’t do that if we don’t know what the genetic parts are of the plants” that are important for survival in different conditions, Shanklin added.

In addition to hiring Ian and Crysten Blaby and Qun Liu this fall, BNL is in the process of working with the DOE on long-term planning. “We’re looking at how big this program can become,” Shanklin said. He is excited about the work Ian and Crysten Blaby are doing. “It’s not enough to work hard,” he said. “You have to identify big problems and work on those. The problems they are addressing are ones that are holding back whole elements of science.”

Shanklin sees Ian and Crysten Blaby as contributing more together than the sum of their research parts. “They are both independently excellent scientists who have different but complementary skill sets,” he added.

This version corrects the name of the type of algae Ian Blaby is studying and the town in England where he is from.

by -
1 120
Bob Creighton is running for re-election. Photo by Rohma Abbas

By Phil Corso

Larry Vetter is running for the Smithtown Town Board. Photo by Rohma Abbas
Larry Vetter is running for the Smithtown Town Board. Photo by Rohma Abbas

Over the past several years, if a Smithtown Town Board vote resulted in a 3-2 tally, chances were incumbent Republicans Bob Creighton and Ed Wehrheim were the lone naysayers. Both electeds have been seeking re-election this fall, as political newcomers from both sides of the aisle have stepped up for their seats.

Creighton, 77, came out on the bottom of a three-way Republican primary back in September, losing the GOP line on Tuesday’s ballot to both Wehrheim and Lisa Inzerillo, 50, of Kings Park, while still retaining a spot on the Conservative, Independent and Reform party lines. Meanwhile, Democrat Larry Vetter, 62, threw his hat into the race over the summer and has been vying to break the town’s all-Republican board.

All the candidates, except for Inzerillo, sat down with the Times of Smithtown last week to discuss top issues facing Smithtown and what their plans were to address them if elected.

Creighton said he hoped his record would speak for itself in his bid for another term, citing his background in law enforcement and private sector success before joining the Town Board in 2008. In the interview, both Creighton and Wehrheim discussed that familiar 3-2 split on the board and argued that dissension too often got in the way of progress.

Ed Wehrheim is running for re-election. Photo by Rohma Abbas
Ed Wehrheim is running for re-election. Photo by Rohma Abbas

Earlier this year, Creighton, who is in his second four-year term on the board, took to a work session to propose that the town consider installing commissioner positions similar to those held in neighboring townships like Brookhaven and Islip, which he argued would streamline workflow and make department heads more accountable. Town Supervisor Pat Vecchio (R) was outright against the proposal and opposed it each time it was discussed before the board, which Creighton said stonewalled it from progressing.

“I’ve worked to try and change government a little bit and to make it more accountable, but it really hasn’t been acted on,” Creighton said of the plan, which Wehrheim also supported. “It will not be acted on until two of the other council people take a stand, which they will not do as long as Mr. Vecchio is there.”

Wehrheim, who is running for his fourth term on the board, said he would use another term in office to stimulate economic growth in the town, specifically with downtown business revitalization and infrastructure repairs in mind.

When asked how he planned on bettering his standing in the classic 3-2 Town Board split, Wehrheim said he would only keep doing what he has been doing — bringing business to every work session with hopes of spurring action.

Bob Creighton is running for re-election. Photo by Rohma Abbas
Bob Creighton is running for re-election. Photo by Rohma Abbas

“It’s a political issue that doesn’t need to exist. It might be great press, but I don’t pay much attention to the dissension,” Wehrheim said. “I bring business to every board meeting, because I have constituents that need me to discuss issues important to them.”

Wehrheim cited a recent legislative effort he championed alongside Creighton, adding that the two “went back and forth” over a minimum wage proposal for the town’s seasonal workers. That minimum wage hike was subsequently included in the 2016 preliminary budget in September.

Vetter, the lone Democrat in the four-way race, said one of the key points that set him apart from the rest, in his first run for public office, was his “outside looking in” perspective coupled with his extensive background in environmental science and business. He centered his campaign on attacking the “Long Island brain drain” and fighting to keep young adults in Smithtown by making it a more vibrant place to live and raise a family.

“I have four adult children — they’re all gone and off Long Island,” Vetter said. “I have three grandchildren I’m watching grow up on Skype. Everything springs from that, and that includes industrial development, downtown revitalization, housing initiatives, and other aspects, like sewers, infrastructure.”

Vetter said that if elected, he would only seek out one or two terms before removing himself from the board because of his strong support for term limits.

Earlier this month, Vecchio joined other marquee Republican names in Smithtown on the steps of Town Hall to endorse Inzerillo, flanked by councilmembers Tom McCarthy (R) and Lynne Nowick (R) as well as Suffolk County Legislator Rob Trotta (R-Fort Salonga) and state Assemblyman Mike Fitzpatrick (R-St. James).

Inzerillo, however, did not respond to several attempts to organize a four-way candidate debate at the Times of Smithtown’s headquarters. She was also absent at other debates throughout the town, with the latest one a week before Election Day at the Smithtown Fire House.

by -
0 1545
Supervisor Ed Romaine listens to resident concerns at the town meeting. Photo by Giselle Barkley

Civic leaders in Three Village are calling on Brookhaven to put the brakes on a local law that could potentially limit the number of vehicles parked on town roads.

In an attempt to crack down on illegal rental housing in Brookhaven, elected officials mulled over a proposal at a work session late last month that would restrict the number of permitted vehicles at a rental house to one car per legal bedroom, plus one additional car. But Shawn Nuzzo, president of the Civic Association of the Setaukets and Stony Brook, said imposing “separate and unequal” laws would infringe on residents’ most basic rights as Americans by determining which Brookhaven natives would be allowed to park their vehicles on the street.

The civic president wrote a letter in opposition of the town’s proposal.

“While it is certainly in the town’s purview to determine how our roadways should be used, our laws should apply equally to all,” Nuzzo wrote in the letter. “It is unwise to create restrictive laws meant to apply only to certain members of our society — in this instance, based on their homeownership status.”

Nuzzo said he submitted his remarks on the law for the board to consider at its Sept. 17 meeting, when the town will look to add an amendment to Local Law 82 in the Brookhaven Town Code, which oversees rental registration requirements. The proposed vehicle restriction was only the latest in a string of initiatives the town put forward to prevent illegal housing rentals, including one measure that outlawed paving over front yards to make way for parking spaces.

The measures were borne out of an issue Bruce Sander, president of the Stony Brook Concerned Homeowners, helped bring to the forefront after communities in and around Three Village became hotspots for illegal or otherwise overcrowded rental homes filled with Stony Brook University students. Sander was only one of many Three Village natives to come out against the overcrowded housing debacle, citing quality of life issues such as noise and overflowing trash.

Brookhaven Town Supervisor Ed Romaine (R) said at the Aug. 27 Town Board work session that he believed restricting the number of vehicles parked in front of rental homes could be a helpful tool in fighting illegal rooming houses.

“Normally, what we have to do is try to get inside to cite them, but to do that requires a search warrant, which judges are reluctant to give without probable cause,” Romaine said. “However, one of the other factors that these illegal rooming houses generate is the fact that there’s a lot of cars around. If we could control the number of cars, we would be better able to cite people.”

Looking ahead, Nuzzo said he planned on forwarding the proposal to the state attorney general’s office as well as the Southern Poverty Law Center to delve into the legality of a township restricting the number of vehicles parked in front of any given home, and whether or not the town can selectively enforce such a measure.

“If the Town Board feels street parking regulations are necessary, then those regulations should be implemented town wide,” Nuzzo said. “To target only certain residents for selective enforcement is un-American, and quite possibly illegal.”

by -
0 3301
Barbara Chapman on the side of a pyramid during her trip to Egypt. Photo from Chapman

If the smartest people in the world gathered in a room, they might struggle to collaborate. An Australian astrophysicist might have a different way of solving problems from the Spanish sociologist. That doesn’t even address language barriers.

Similar principles hold true for the world’s best super computers. While each may have an ability to perform numerous calculations, gather information, and extrapolate from patterns too complicated to discover with a pencil and paper, they can be limited in their ability to work together efficiently.

That’s where a leader in the field of parallel computing comes in. Barbara Chapman, who has been at the University of Houston since 1999, has taught rising stars in the field, written textbooks and enabled the combination of supercomputers to become more than the proverbial sum of their parts.

And, this week, she is bringing her talents to Long Island, where she’s starting the next step in her career as a professor of Applied Math and Statistics, and Computer Science at Stony Brook, as part of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science and as an affiliate at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Calling Chapman a “pioneer in the world of parallel computing,” Sunita Chandrasekaran, who was a post-doctoral researcher in Chapman’s lab, predicted Chapman would “attract top graduate students from across the globe. Many students would love to do research under Chapman’s supervision.”

Lei Huang, an assistant professor in the computer science department at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, considers Chapman his “mentor,” and said she is “always patient with students,” making her a “valuable asset” to Stony Brook. Huang, who did his Ph.D. and worked as a post doc in Chapman’s lab, added that she proposed and implemented innovative language features to improve performance and productivity of programming on supercomputers.

Chapman, who grew up in New Zealand, said she left the more temperate region of Houston driven, in part, by the intelligence and personality of Robert J. Harrison, Stony Brook’s director for the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. Additionally, Chapman sees opportunities to work with local collaborators.

Chapman works to make it easier for scientists and other users to get computers to solve their problems and gain insights from massive amounts of data. She strives to get high-powered computers to work together efficiently.

Scientists need to give computers a way of telling the cores how to interact and collaborate. Dividing up the work and ensuring that these computers share data are among the challenges of her role.

The new Stony Brook scientist helped develop OpenMP, which can be used to program multicores and is an industry standard used in cell phones, among other things.

President Obama unveiled plans to build an exascale computer, which might be capable of performing a billion billion operations per second. Building this computer will have numerous challenges, including hardware, power, memory, data movement, resilience and programming.

Chandrasekaran, who recently joined the University of Delaware as an assistant professor, said software programming needs to be more intuitive, portable across platforms and adaptable without any compromise in performance. Chapman, she said, is a leader in these fields, bringing together national laboratories, vendors and academia.

As a part of a group of researchers asked to identify opportunities for collaborations between the United States and Egypt, Chapman also journeyed to Egypt. While it was a “wonderful experience,” Chapman said the efforts were put on hold indefinitely after the revolution.

Applications that exploit supercomputers range from astrophysics to the automotive industry to analyzing old texts, to determine if the works of classical scholars were written or translated by the same person, Chapman said.

Chapman and her colleagues work to design features to support the next generation of computers. In the next few years, Chapman expects computers to have more complex memory, while the cores will be more heterogeneous.

At the same time, hardware manufacturers are focused on green computing, enabling the same computing power while using less energy.

Chapman enjoys working in an academic setting, where she can inspire the next generation of computer scientists. She will start teaching at Stony Brook in 2016.

While Chapman’s work centers around helping computers get the most from their collaborations, she also believes the workforce would benefit from attracting, training and supporting people from a broader range of backgrounds, including African-Americans, Hispanics, and women.

“If we had a much more diverse group of people, how would our use of computers change?” she asks. “Would we find other uses of computers?”

Chapman is encouraged that her concern about diversity is a matter numerous people in Washington are discussing. “I chaired a small study on this last year for the Department of Energy,” she said. “There’s a lot of buy-in to the notion that it’s important to change that.”

Chapman said an early experience working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ignited her interest in computer science. She worked with people who were exploring what happens when a spacecraft re-enters Earth’s atmosphere. They were designing materials that are better able to withstand the heat and speed of returning to Earth.

“People can use machines for finding out what’s going on in the universe in the big picture,” she said. “That got me hooked.”

This version corrects the title of Sunita Chandrasekaran.

by -
0 982

President Obama (D) announced this past Monday the final version of the Clean Power Plan, which is designed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 32 percent by 2030 to combat climate change compared with 2005 levels.

Environmental experts hailed it as an important step, giving the president a chance to lead by example at a global climate conference in Paris starting Nov. 30.

“This is the biggest emission reduction of greenhouse gases that any president has ever achieved,” said Judi Greenwald, deputy director for Climate, Environment, and Energy Efficiency at the Department of Energy.

Environmental and health groups have lifted their green thumbs in approval.

According to the American Lung Association, the plan will prevent up to 3,600 premature deaths, 90,000 asthma attacks and 300,000 missed days of work and school by 2030.

“This is a president who said the time to act is now and he’s followed through,” said Lyndsay Moseley Alexander, director of the healthy air campaign at the ALA. She said she was pleased to see the target increased from the level in the draft form last year, which was 30 percent.

“We don’t often see the rules strengthened when they’re finalized,” she said.

The states have considerable control: They now have until 2022, two more years than in the draft proposal, to begin complying; and they have until 2018 to create their own plans. If they do nothing, the federal government can create plans for them.

Given that the states can comply with the plan in their own way, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provided a rough estimate of 415 million less short tons of carbon dioxide in the air in 2030 with the plan than without it.

Brookhaven National Laboratory, which is a funded primarily by the DOE, has a team of scientists dedicated to energy security, which conducts just the type of renewable energy research outlined in the plan.

“This clean power plan will spur the adoption of cleaner technologies that are being developed” at BNL and other national laboratories, Greenwald said. “We really are going in a direction toward much cleaner power systems. This will accelerate that and will provide a market for the technologies.”

While Congress will determine future funding, the Clean Power Plan could provide an additional boost during appropriations.

“We’ll absolutely be working with our lab champions in Congress, who obviously include lots of members, to push for the most robust funding we can get for the department and the labs so we can get a lot of these technologies out of the lab” and into the field, said Eben Burnham-Snyder, deputy communications director at the DOE.

Some Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have suggested the new limits would cause hardship in his state and would hurt the national economy. He has suggested he would use every means at his disposal to fight the plan.

Margot Garant, mayor of Port Jefferson, got behind the plan.

“It’s totally in line with repowering the industry,” said Garant. “This, as far as I’m concerned, gives PSEG another shot in the arm to take down these legacy plants, repower then with clean, efficient plants.”

Garant said the plan, at first blush, didn’t appear “unrealistic.”

Cheap natural gas, a tough recession, the rise of wind power and improved efficiency have already reduced power plant emissions by 15 percent from 2005 to 2013.

by -
0 145

President announces candidacy against Valerie Cartright

Above, far right, Ed Garboski testifies before the town board. He has announced he is running for the seat held by Councilwoman Valerie Cartright. File photo

Ed Garboski will be taking a leave from his role as civic president as he works to unseat Councilwoman Valerie Cartright in the fall.

Garboski, of the Port Jefferson Station/Terryville Civic Association, announced his run against one-term incumbent Cartright (D-Port Jefferson Station) for Brookhaven Town Board’s 1st District at the civic’s meeting on Wednesday night — opening up much debate.

The association’s bylaws do not contain a provision for taking a leave of absence, which originally created a tricky situation for the membership during the discussion. The room was divided — and at times argumentative — over whether Garboski should resign his position as he runs for political office on the Republican and Conservative tickets.

Faith Cardone said she felt it would be a conflict of interest for him to remain the president while running a political campaign for the Town Board.

Garboski said he had wanted to take a leave of absence, largely because he foresees having less time to fulfill his presidential duties, but was limited because of the bylaws’ shortcoming. He pushed back, however, when some called for his resignation, including fellow civic executive board member Joan Nickeson.

Councilwoman Valerie Cartright. File photo
Councilwoman Valerie Cartright. File photo

“I don’t think that I need to resign as of right now,” he said. “Where’s the conflict [of interest]?”

Other members also spoke up against Garboski remaining in his civic position.

“I don’t want to insult your integrity, Ed,” Gerard Maxim said, but having Garboski serve as president while also running for Town Board “makes it awkward for us.”

There were, however, voices of support in the audience.

Kevin Spence, a Comsewogue library board member, said there is no ethical problem before Election Day.

“I don’t see where this is a conflict until he gets elected.”

After some back and forth, Garboski relented somewhat, saying, “if this is such a big problem … if it’s that important to this membership here that I step down, I’ll step down.”

But instead, another library board member, Rich Meyer, made a motion for civic members to vote on granting Garboski a leave of absence starting in August and ending after the election, overriding the bylaws.

The members unanimously approved the motion for his leave.

Once Garboski departs in August, Vice President Diane Lenihan-Guidice will step into his shoes, including running the civic meetings for the months he is away.

Cartright, who is running for a second term on the Democratic, Working Families and Independence lines, said in a statement she and Garboski “will continue to work together to address community concerns. As a sitting elected representative, I firmly believe government always comes before politics.”

She said if re-elected she would “address the needs and ideas of the community and advocate for an informative and transparent local government.”

by -
0 953

Bruce Stillman is still very determined even if he sounds frustrated. I interviewed the CEO of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory last week when the research institution released, for the first time, a set of numbers indicating the positive economic impact of CSHL on Long Island.

While proud of an institution that has produced eight Nobel Prize winners, Stillman sounded a theme I hear regularly when I interview scientists at CSHL, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University: The country isn’t investing enough in research.

“The reduction in federal funding means we do have to support the institution through philanthropy more than we’ve been doing in the past,” Stillman said. “Hopefully, Congress will realize they should reverse the dramatic reduction in funding in the federal budgets. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Indeed, investments in research around the country make sense on many levels. For starters, many of us have unfortunate direct experience with a deadly disease like cancer, which slowly tears through a person’s body. We have also witnessed friends who have demonstrated spectacular courage and determination in the face of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or other neurodegenerative diseases.

Inspired by our friends and neighbors, we walk, run or do triathlons and we spend time in church, synagogues and mosques praying for them and for strangers battling the same affliction.

Scientists aren’t just looking for ways to lessen the symptoms or ease the pain — they’re also working to find signs of the disease before they appear. Angelina Jolie raised awareness of the potential benefits of preventing problems when she elected to have several surgeries.

As their doctors would rush to tell them, people shouldn’t have surgeries just because a famous actress did. Places like CSHL can provide the kind of knowledge that provides information that empowers informed decisions.

“There’s a lot of misinformation on the Internet,” Stillman said. “What the scientific community is trying to do is to make sure the information about genomics and medicine is correct and [people aren’t relying on information] out there that is misleading.”

Beyond the applied science part, however, researchers who are doing basic science often wind up making critical discoveries. By only funding those projects that might have a direct impact on human health, can and will be too self-limiting. What we learn can and often does help us. On the other side of that scale, what we don’t know can’t have any impact.

And then there’s the financial benefit. Research often has a multiplier effect, creating jobs, bringing in revenue and supporting the local economy.

“Everybody knows, including politicians, that science is an economic driver,” Stillman said. “If you take away public research funding, you’re basically giving up.”

Stillman said that what’s gone on in the last 15 years in the United States “bucks the trend since World War II, when the U.S. was invested and was a world leader in research.”

Stillman himself, who was born in Australia, has won numerous awards and runs his own DNA lab, said he came to this country because of American leadership in research, but now “things are changing rapidly. People like me will not come to this country because there’ll be opportunities elsewhere.”

CSHL, BNL, Stony Brook and LIJ are all huge economic benefits for Long Island, Stillman said.

“Unless this gets reversed,” he warned, “we’ll be in trouble.”

So, what will turn the tide?

“There’ll come a time when one can’t ignore the government role in economic development,” he said. It’s happened before, he argues, as investments in research after World War II helped bring the U.S. out of debt.

As a result future generations benefited enormously — and will do so again.

Prev1...111213Page 13 of 13
TBR News Media is your local news and entertainment website.
We provide you with the latest breaking news and information for your community.
Contact us: [email protected]

Most Viewed

©