Ever stare at the head of an anxious adolescent — wait, is that a redundant phrase? — and wonder, “What’s going on inside that head?” While Johanna Jarcho can’t read their minds, she can see areas of the brain that are active during different simulated social situations using a functional-MRI brain scan.

Through her work, she found some areas of the brain are more active, or light up, with children who are isolated or feel socially withdrawn, compared with the same areas of children who are more socially comfortable.

“The goal is to identify what is it about certain kids that are at risk that makes them resilient and what it is about those that develop the symptoms” of anxiety disorders, said Jarcho, who is an assistant professor of psychology at Stony Brook University, with joint appointments in the clinical area as well as the social and health areas. “If we can identify those kids who might be at risk, we can specifically target treatments for them,” she said.

Jarcho, who was part of a study that followed the same group of children from the time they were 2 until they were 11, published her research in the journal Psychological Science. She participated in this ongoing effort for the last four years. “One of the amazing thing about having this long-term data is that we’re still following these kids,” she said. “They are being evaluated now.” The children participating in the study are now 14.

Understanding any signature activity in the brain could help with diagnosis, treatment or prevention of anxiety disorders, Jarcho said.

Adolescence is rife with the kind of stresses that can create long-term anxieties. “Social anxiety disorder in particular has a very specific developmental trajectory,” Jarcho said. “If you don’t develop it by the time you’re in your early 20s, your probability of developing it is low.” She said 80 to 90 percent of those who experience social anxiety disorder develop it when they’re adolescents.

Typical clinical measures, including self-reports from adolescents, aren’t good predictors for the development of anxiety disorders said Jarcho, who along with a host of scientists are using other biological measures, like MRI scans, in connection with clinical observations.

Collaborators applauded Jarcho’s efforts and see clinical potential down the road from this type of study. “These findings definitely contribute to our understanding of the etiology of anxiety disorders,” Amanda Guyer, an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology at the University of California, Davis, explained in an email. “This type of longitudinal work is critical to moving the field forward in understanding the etiology of disorders as they unfold over time” for some adolescents.

Gathering information about anxiety and social interactions while children are in MRI machines required some creativity. The children are on their backs, laying perfectly still in a dark, metal tube, which aren’t conditions conducive to social interactions.

Tapping into the next generation’s comfort with modern technology, Jarcho and her colleagues asked the children to create their own avatar, a cartoon version of themselves. While they are in the machine that monitors their minds, their avatars go through a range of social interactions.

“This is one of the first studies where we were able to utilize a lot of different social nuances that we experience,” Jarcho said. “Using this, we are able to bring a good slice of the social world into this constrained environment.”

These kinds of studies are in the early stages of development, said Jarcho, who made an avatar of herself. Researchers are using the latest technology to gather new insights about what patterns might lead to a range of longer-term emotional outcomes.

Numerous factors contribute to the mental health of developing children, Jarcho said, which could make the interpretation or predictive value of any biological information difficult.“You have to collect a huge amount of data to identify complex patterns to make these meaningful clinical classifications,” she said, including the type of parenting a child receives.

In the bigger picture, Jarcho is interested in understanding the mechanisms associated with having positive social interactions. She said she would like to know how neurobiology of normal social competence develops and what contributes to deficits in social competence.

Jarcho, who joined Stony Brook last August, is also interested in pursuing other research goals, including determining what other people are picking up from someone who has a clinical disorder. She wants to find the subtle signals that people use to interpret someone else’s behavior. She has tracked the eye movements of people observing others with clinical diagnoses to determine if there was something the socially anxious person was doing that signals an anxiety.

Jarcho has added a few undergraduates to her lab and plans to start working with her first graduate student in August.

Guyer, who has known Jarcho for five years and collaborated with her on writing research papers and grants, highlighted Jarcho’s dedication.

“She cares deeply about conducting rigorous research that can have a positive impact on youth,” Guyer said.

Jarcho and her husband Charles Best live in Port Jefferson with their rescue dog Tosh. A mathematician and software developer who was a researcher at Apple, Best is working with Jarcho on a startup effort called RSRCHR, which will provide neuroimaging researchers with a cloud-based platform to help maintain an infrastructure for fMRI data storage, management and analysis.

They have a prototype Jarcho uses and are seeking funding to support their work.

Starting in September, Jarcho plans to collaborate with Stony Brook Psychology Professor Greg Hajcak to look for a neural signature on how children react to their own errors. These signatures may suggest an increased risk for anxiety.

Jarcho said she feels comfortable at Stony Brook. “The longer I’m at Stony Brook, the more I realize what a truly unique place it is,” she said. “The faculty in the Psychology Department has a tremendous interest and willingness to collaborate.”

When he was 11, Bruce Stillman read about spina bifida and wanted to know what was happening and how he might help. By the time he got to college, genetic discoveries moved him away from medicine and toward scientific discovery.

In 1979, he came to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from his native Glen Waverley through Sydney, Australia, for what he expected would be just two years. At the time, the lab was led by Nobel-prize-winning scientist James Watson, who discovered the structure of DNA the year Stillman was born.

By the time he was 38, Stillman’s research success led Watson to pick him as his successor to lead an institution with an international reputation.

Now in his 36th year at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and with children and a grandchild born in the United States, Stillman has trained a generation of scientific leaders while maintaining two time- and energy-consuming jobs.

“I spend 80 percent of my time” on being the president and chief executive officer of CSHL and “the other 80 percent running the lab,” he jokes.

Former members of Stillman’s lab and collaborators have marveled at Stillman’s ability to continue to remain so active in his scientific pursuits while raising funds, hiring researchers and overseeing a lab with an endowment of $450 million, up from $32 million in 1994.

Stillman, his colleagues say, has a passion for discovery and a dedication to science that informs both sides of a schedule that often includes discussions, meetings and interactions during what many would consider off hours.

Leemor Joshua-Tor, a professor at CSHL who has collaborated with Stillman for about nine years, has interacted with Stillman as an administrator and as a scientist. She says it’s clear which role wins out.

When Joshua-Tor was the dean of the Watson School of Biological Sciences, she would email him in his capacity as president. She would often get a time slot three or four weeks from her request.

“If I called/emailed and said I would like to speak with him regarding the science, the reply would often be, ‘How’s 4 p.m.?’” Joshua-Tor recounted.

Stillman said that continuing in his role as a scientist helps him make better decisions for CSHL. He has a “connection with what’s going on” scientifically that informs his pursuit of scientific expertise and new technology, he said.

Stillman has also forged numerous connections with the people who work at CSHL. Joshua-Tor said he knows most people by name, from the grounds keepers to the graduate students to the postdoctoral researchers, a skill she said also follows Watson’s legacy.

In his long, storied and award-winning career, Stillman has worked with viruses, yeast and human DNA, making landmark discoveries that include using the Simian Virus 40 to discover human cell DNA replication proteins.

Stillman “covered many areas during his career that make him special,” said Christian Speck, a nonclinical lecturer in the Faculty of Medicine at the Institute of Clinical Sciences at the Imperial College in London who earned his Ph.D. in Stillman’s lab in 2006 and who collaborates with Stillman.

Huilin Li, a biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Stony Brook University, said Stillman’s discovery of the Origin Recognition Complex, abbreviated ORC, “set off an entire research field of eukaryotic DNA replication initiation.”

Indeed, Stillman, Li, Speck, Joshua-Tor and others continue to devote considerable energy to understanding the protein, signals and processes that are a key part of DNA replication, which allows cells to make genetic copies of themselves.

Replication makes it possible for the body to produce red and white blood cells at the rate of 500 million per minute. Spreading the spectacularly thin, tightly wrapped genetic material out over that minute would produce a million kilometers of base pairs, which could wrap around the equator 25 times.

Replication isn’t just important for passing along information, but, as Stillman recognized when he was 11, biological processes don’t always follow the typical code.

Stillman and his collaborators have explored numerous ORCs, which occur once every 50,000 to 100,000 base pairs along the chromosome. His recent studies suggest the ORC is involved in the fundamental decision of whether or not a cell divides.

His recent unpublished findings also show that ORC controls the expression of genes that are overexpressed in cancer by interacting with tumor suppressor genes, he said.

Understanding how DNA replication is regulated has already produced drugs that are in the clinic or are heading that way, Stillman said.

Through his years at CSHL, Stillman has worked with talented scientists. His lab was near that of Barbara McClintoch, who won a Nobel Prize for her work on jumping genes in corn. While Stillman said he enjoyed most of his interactions with her, he did struggle on occasion to return to his own research, which could often take 12 to 14 hours a day, after a long discussion with her.

Avoiding McClintoch during those long research days was no easy task for the six-foot, four-inch scientist, whose tall, trim figure is easy to spot down a hallway or in the picturesque CSHL laboratory setting.

Stillman met his wife Grace, a co-founder of Operation Hearts and Homes, a charity dedicated to improving the lives of orphans around the world, in Huntington. Their son Keith is a commercial real estate appraiser and their daughter Jessica is a fifth-grade teacher specializing in literacy.

Stillman, who has no plans to step away from either role in the near future, suggested that the scientific process, though demanding, has given him numerous rewarding experiences. In the 1980s, he made a hand drawing of how he thought histones, the fundamental building block of chromatin, might get together. About a decade later, X-ray crystallography showed that the drawing was close to accurate.

“It was how I imagined it to be,” he recalled. These discoveries provide “excitement and then with the new insight, [a desire to] get to a full answer quickly.”

If he succeeds, she may see the results of his efforts in her work. As fascinated as she is by her studies in the Antarctic, Heather Lynch knows the stakes are high for her husband Matthew Eisaman’s work.

“These days, ecologists like myself are often just carefully documenting environmental decline, and predicting how quickly or slowly a species will go extinct,” Lynch offered in response to emailed questions. “The work that [Eisaman] does will actually solve the problem.”

Indeed, as a physicist in the Sustainable Energy Technologies Department at BNL and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook University, Eisaman is focused on improving the efficiency of reusable energy sources, particularly solar cells.

It is through this effort that Eisaman made a compelling discovery recently that may have implications outside the world of reusable energy.

Eisaman worked with a team of scientists at BNL and the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at SUNY Polytechnic on a process related to graphene, which is a two-dimensional arrangement of carbon atoms that is one atom thick.

Eisaman was working on a process called doping in which scientists add or take away electrons. Doping is one way to control how graphene behaves at junctions with semiconductors. Eisaman set up an experiment to explore a way to make n-doping, which adds electrons to graphene, more efficient.

The team at SUNY Polytechnic built a product on top of a sodium lime substrate, which is an ingredient in household glass and windows. Eisaman layered graphene on top of that. He had planned to add other chemicals to dope the graphene.

“Before we doped it, we took a baseline measurement,” Eisaman said. “It looked like it was strongly n-doped, which we didn’t expect.” He followed this up with a series of other experiments, using the facilities at BNL including the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, at SUNY Poly and in his lab. “The whole study was really a team effort requiring many different areas of expertise.”

Eisaman believes this discovery was promising for solar cells and other possible technological advances. He plans to explore the fundamentals of the doping mechanism. He would like to understand how the chemical environment of the sodium affects the doping strength. He is also studying how the doping and other electronic properties of the graphene vary with the number of graphene layers.

Eisaman said one challenge to making this doping process work is that most semiconductor properties would change, mostly for the worse, if scientists tried to diffuse sodium through it. A possible solution is to deposit a material on top of the graphene that has a sufficiently high surface density of sodium. While this material would donate electrons to the graphene, it would not diffuse into the semiconductor as long as the temperatures of the deposition process were low enough, Eisaman suggested. He is currently working on this.

Since the paper came out in Scientific Reports in February, Eisaman said he has had inquiries from scientists and from a company that might want to use their discovery. He is “actively looking for funding and partnerships to help push this forward,” he said.

Eisaman has three Ph.D. candidates in his lab and he usually adds two to four undergraduate researchers in the summer. While this group will continue to develop technology that will seek ways to find applications of graphene doping techniques, Eisaman will continue with the bread and butter work in his lab: improving the efficiency of reusable energy alternatives.

In another set of experiments, Eisaman collaborated with Charles Black, a scientist and group leader at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials. Black and Eisaman worked on how to use the same anti-reflective properties in moth eyes to reduce the amount of light that escapes from a solar cell through reflections.

Black constructed structures that mimicked these properties. The structure worked even better than expected.

“Based on our limited knowledge of optics, which is [Eisaman’s] expertise, we couldn’t understand why they seemed to be doing better than we thought they should,” Black said. Eisaman’s complementary ability to model the optical properties of the material on the computer allowed them to see a “subtlety that escaped us. In the end, he figured out what was going on.” Black and Eisaman are continuing to work together to create a better structure.

Eisaman and Lynch, an assistant professor in the Department  of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook, have a 6-year old daughter Avery. They live in Port Jefferson, where they have had solar panels on their house for over a year.

The couple, who met when they were undergraduates at Princeton, discuss their work “constantly,” Lynch noted. “Sometimes, we sit and brainstorm how to solve the world’s energy problems, by which I mean that I throw out crazy ideas and [Eisaman] patiently explains why they wouldn’t work or why they don’t scale well.”

Eisaman, who grew up in Pittsburgh, said he appreciates being close to the water, where he and Lynch have enjoyed kayaking since they moved to Long Island in 2011. Eisaman and Lynch are recreational runners and try to run two marathons each year: the Pineland Farms Trail Race in Maine and the Hamptons Marathon.

As for his work, Eisaman said he feels a sense of urgency. “One of the most pressing problems we’re facing is to meet our energy goals in the next 10 to 20 years.”

More than a decade ago, Dmitri Kharzeev came up with an idea he thought he should find in nature. Many such concepts come and go, with some, like the Higgs boson particle, taking over 50 years to discover.

After working with numerous collaborators over the years, the professor of physics and astronomy at Stony Brook University and a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory found proof.

“This was absolutely amazing,” said Kharzeev. “You think an idea in your head, but whether or not it’s realized in the real world is not at all clear. When you find it in the laboratory on a table top experiment, it’s pretty exciting.”

The discovery triggered a champagne party in Kharzeev’s Port Jefferson home, which included collaborators such as Qiang Li, a physicist and head of the Advanced Energy Materials Group at Brookhaven, and Tonica Valla, a physicist at BNL, among others. “There was a feeling that something new is about to begin,” Kharzeev said.

Kharzeev’s idea was that an imbalance in particles moving with different projections of spin on momentum generates an electric current that flows with resistance. That resistance drops in a magnetic field that the scientists hope can reach zero, which would give their material superconducting properties.

A particle’s projection of spin on momentum is its chirality. The magnetic field aligns the spins of the positive and negative particles in opposite directions. When the scientists applied an electric field, the positive particles moved with it and the negative ones moved against it. This allows the particles to move in a direction consistent with their spin, which creates an imbalance in chirality.

The chiral magnetic effect can enable ultra-fast magnetic switches, sensors, quantum electricity generators and conventional and quantum computers.

Kharzeev had expected this kind of separation for particles at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL, where he figured he might observe the separation for quarks in the quark-gluon plasma.

Instead, he and his colleagues, including co-author Li, discovered this phenomenon with zirconium pentatelluride, which is in a relatively new class of materials called Dirac semimetals, which were created in 2014. Their paper was published in Nature Physics earlier this year.

The particles had to be nearly massless to allow them to move through any obstacles in their path. Particles that collided with something else and changed their direction or chirality would create resistance, which would reduce conductivity.

Genda Gu, who is in the Condensed Matter Physics & Materials Sciences Department at BNL, grew the zirconium pentatelluride crystals in his laboratory. Gu “is one of the best crystal growers in the world and he has managed to grow the cleanest crystals of zirconium pentatelluride currently available,” said Kharzeev.

Gu said he collaborates regularly with Li. This, however, was the first time he worked with Kharzeev. He called the work “fruitful and productive” and said the crystals had “generated a number of exciting scientific results.”

The materials they worked with have a wide range of potential applications. The semimetals strongly interact with light in the terahertz frequency range, which is a useful and unique property, Kharzeev suggested. Terahertz electromagnetic radiation, which is called T-rays, can be used for nondamaging medical imaging, including the diagnosis of cancer and high-speed wireless communications.

To be sure, there are limitations to zirconium pentatelluride. For starters, it only displays this chiral magnetic effect at temperatures below 100 degrees Kelvin, or minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit, which is on par with the best high-temperature semiconductors, but still well below room temperature. Its chirality is also only approximately conserved, so the resistance does not drop all the way to zero.

Another hurdle is that scientists have to improve the technique for growing thin films of this material. While it is possible, it will take considerable research and development, Kharzeev said. He hopes to find a material that will exhibit chiral magnet effects at room temperature.

Kharzeev has received interest from companies and other researchers but said “we have a lot of work to do before we can create practical devices” based on this effect. He hopes scientists will create such products within the next five to ten years.

There are numerous potential uses for zirconium pentatelluride and other similar materials, including in space, where temperatures remain low enough for these quasi-particles.

“You could envision this on space stations to generate electricity from sunlight,” Kharzeev said. When he saw the movie “The Martian,” Kharzeev said he thought about how thermoelectrics could power a station on the Red Planet.

“If we managed to increase the temperature at which the chiral magnetic effect is present just a little, by about 70 degrees Fahrenheit, our thermoelectric would be even more efficient,” he said.

Kharzeev, who grew up in Russia and moved to Long Island in 1997, appreciates the beauty and comforts of the area.

“The combination of Stony Brook, BNL and Cold Spring Harbor Lab makes Long Island one of the best places in the world to do science,” he said. He also loves the beaches and the ocean and plays tennis at the Port Jefferson Country Club.

As for his collaborations, Kharzeev is excited by the work ahead with a material he didn’t envision demonstrating these superconducting properties when he came up with this concept in 2004.

When he learned of the work Li was doing with zirconium pentatelluride, Kharzeev “rushed” into his lab. “It appeared that even though he and his group were not thinking about the chiral magnetic effect at the time, they had already set up an experiment that was perfect for this purpose,” Kharzeev said. They “even had a preliminary result that literally made my heart jump.”

When a successful chef mixes ingredients, he changes the proportions of nutmeg to cinnamon or of parsley to oregano. He’s much more likely to focus on how the final product affects the flavor than he is the way the ingredients mix.

That’s not the case for Jurek (pronounced Yoo rek) Sadowski. Although he’s not a chef, the staff scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) would like to understand how some of the smallest pieces of organic metal complexes come together when they go through a process called self-assembly.

“I’m not only interested in obtaining the recipe for making these [products], but I’m also interested in understanding how and why things happen in these conditions on a more basic level,” Sadowski said.

Working with the low-energy electron microscope, Sadowski is a part of a team at the CFN that is involved in seeing and interpreting changes that occur on an atomic scale.

Sadowski has collaborated on environmental products that can remove greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide from the air. This research helps understand how these self-assembled organic compounds develop pores of different sizes that can trap greenhouse gases.

The size of the pores works like a fishing net designed to catch the equivalent of Goldilocks gases from the air. Some gases pass right through them, while others bounce off without getting trapped. Then there are those, like carbon dioxide, that fit perfectly in the small spaces between the organic pieces.

In putting these products together, Sadowski asks what he needs to do to make the process more efficient and more selective.

The CFN is a user facility, which means that scientists around the world can benefit from the high level of technical expertise Sadowski possesses. He has worked with scientists from Columbia, Yale, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and SUNY facilities as well as visitors from the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Croatia and Japan.

Researchers who have worked with Sadowski suggested that his scientific and technical knowledge make him a particularly effective collaborator.

The low-energy electron microscope is a “very complicated instrument,” said Richard Osgood, the Higgins professor emeritus of electrical engineering and applied physics at Columbia University, who has collaborated for years with Sadowski. “You don’t just go in and turn a dial: it’s much more complicated than that. You have to tune things up.”

Working with Sadowski greatly lowers the cost of research because he can “do something in a couple of days” that might otherwise take a graduate student or other researcher a half a year or more to figure out,” Osgood said.

Sadowski said some of the products that use self-assembly include wearable electronics, such as solar cells or clothing, or wearable medical devices.

Sadowski divides his time about equally between pursuing his own research and working with others at the CFN.

Sadowski runs his own experiments mostly in a vacuum, where he varies the temperature and the density of the molecules he’s using.

Sadowski is planning to give a talk in March at the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore about his work.

“It’s important to understand how the molecules self-assemble themselves on the surface,” he said. “We can utilize self-assembly for further advances.”

For about five years, Sadowski has helped plan the creation of a new beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source II at BNL. That beamline, which will be called the electron spectro-microscopy beamline, will be completed later this year. The beamline will use a microscope that the CFN is contributing, which will help provide structural, chemical and electronic maps of surfaces with a resolution of a few nanometers.

“We will have a much more extended capability for studying chemical reactions as they happen on the surface and the electronic structure of the materials” by combining information of the surface morphology with the electronic structure and chemistry. This, he said, will provide a “comprehensive picture of the surface, or of a catalyst, or of a reaction” as it’s occurring.

One of the first experiments he might do would be to provide a chemical map of the surface of a material. He plans to determine the oxidation state of metals making up the surface.

Sadowski lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with his wife Adrianna Sadowska (whose name is slightly different to reflect her gender). The couple met in their native Poland where he was taking a class to brush up on Japanese before moving there after he earned his Ph.D. Sadowska, who is now a wine specialist at an auction house in White Plains, was preparing for a trip to Japan as well. The two expatriates lived in Japan for almost a decade. After getting married in Japan, they came to the United States.

As for his work, Sadowski said new questions regularly inspire him. “Every day, there’s a new challenge,” he said. “I really like to solve problems, one by one.”

The work done at Sadowski’s group and at the CFN can and likely will have numerous benefits, Osgood said.

This work could “form new technology that nobody dreamed about before,” said Osgood, who was an associate director at BNL and was directly involved in the creation of the CFN. “Every time I walk out there, I kick up my heels. It’s such a wonderful facility.”

Part 1 of a two-part series.

She is a “creative thinker,” while he is a “fearless experimentalist,” according to UCLA Distinguished Professor Sabeeha Merchant. Brookhaven National Laboratory recently hired the tandem of Crysten and Ian Blaby in the Biology Department.

Crysten and Ian Blaby did their postdoctoral work in Merchant’s lab for about five years. Merchant believes “there is no question that they will make discoveries to advance knowledge.”

The Times Beacon Record Newspapers will profile the scientific studies of the Blabys. This week’s column will highlight the work of Crysten Blaby, and next week’s will profile Ian Blaby.

Crysten Blaby is something of a metal worker, although she doesn’t dig anything out of the earth, wear a hard hat or ship metals by the ton. In fact, the amount of metal in her job is so small that the copper, iron, zinc and manganese she works with in a year wouldn’t fill a teaspoon.

That’s because Blaby (pronounced like “baby” with an extra letter) studies a one-celled algae called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. This organism survives in a wide range of environments, where the amount of available metals can be precariously low, dangerously high, or can bounce back and forth between extremes.

Blaby, who is an assistant biologist at BNL, would like to know which proteins in these algae, among other species, including bacteria, plants and animals, are involved in maintaining a balance of metals.

“I am focused on the genes and proteins in metal homeostasis,” she said. That means she wants to know what genes are active in different environments.

Understanding the molecular biology of algae can provide clues about where to look for similar genes in more complex members of the plant kingdom. Discovering these processes could help farmers develop techniques that will foster growth for biofuel crops that are cultivated on lands that are less suited for food production.

“With this research, we could find easy, cheap ways to ‘diagnose’ whether crops are deficient in metal nutrients and best know how to remedy it,” she explained. “This research could also be used to help select which crops or breeds would thrive best given the quality of a particular soil.”

While Blaby won’t help produce new biofuel crops, her discoveries about the genes involved in metal homeostasis is part of “foundational science” that will underpin those types of discoveries, said John Shanklin, the head of plant science research at BNL. “Without [Ian and Crysten Blaby] doing this” the scientists who want to produce biofuel crops in inhospitable environments “are stuck.”

Blaby’s work could also help provide information that might translate into therapies for human conditions.

Menkes disease and Wilson’s disease are two inherited disorders of copper metabolism, which are caused by dysfunctional copper transporters, she said.

Blaby recently discovered a copper chaperone that looks similar to a molecule in humans and that’s involved in keeping algae safe from accumulations of copper. She suggested that the chaperone in algae protects the cell from copper by making sure that it is hand delivered between proteins. More research, however, is needed to ensure this model is accurate.

Blaby is studying the biochemical routes these metals take into the cell. The main gatekeepers controlling the movement of metal ions across membranes are likely transporters, she said.

Blaby is scheduled for beamline time at the new National Synchrotron Light Source II facility at BNL this April. The process of getting time on the beamline is extremely competitive, with numerous top-notch scientific projects rejected in part because the facility can’t yet meet the demand for a light source that is 10,000 times more powerful than the original synchrotron.

“People recognize [Crysten and Ian Blaby] are asking cutting-edge questions and they are trying to assist them in every way they can,” Shanklin said. “Everyone wants to be a part of [their] success.” After she moved to BNL, Blaby developed her NSLS-II application with Professor Emeritus Keith Jones, a physicist who she said is involved in experiments at the new synchrotron, and several of his collaborators.

“The goal is to uncover where metals travel in the cell after uptake and before they are loaded into target proteins, and understand which proteins, such as transporters, are involved” in this process, she said.

Blaby is collaborating with Qun Liu, another new hire at BNL, to look at transporter proteins, to understand how many different kinds there are, and “figure out how plants move nutrients around,” Shanklin said.

One of the ways she can solve how genes respond to different environments is by using small RNAs to knock down gene expression.

Ian and Crysten, who met when they worked in a lab in Florida, are residents of Miller Place. When they met, they were “instantly friends,” she said, in part because of their shared interest in science. They each appreciate having someone who “understands the challenges, disappointments and pure joy of discovery that comes with pursuing this career.”

The plant biologists have a two-year old daughter Emily.

As for their work, Crysten Blaby said they collaborate with each other but also concentrate on those areas where they have each developed their individual skills.

“We focus on the pathways for genes that are involved in processes that we have expertise in and where our passion lies,” she said.

This version corrects the department Crysten and Ian Blaby work in at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The creation of a freeway in Los Angeles put Michael Bell on the road to his career choice. When Bell was about 12 years old, construction near his home cut through rocks that contained a treasure for him: fossil fish.

“I formed a relationship with the Natural History Museum in LA County and started bringing fossils [to them],” Bell recalled. “I had friends who would do it for a week or two and then they’d had enough. I did it endlessly. In a way, that’s how my career started.”

Indeed, that career led him to Stony Brook University, where he arrived in 1978 and is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution. Bell was co-editor of “The Evolutionary Biology of the Threespine Stickleback” in 1994 with Susan A. Foster.

Recently, the American Association for the Advancement of Science elected Bell as a Ffellow. Bell said he appreciated the “broader recognition of his work.”

Those who have collaborated with him said Bell is a leader and an exceptional scientist.

Bell’s “contribution to the field has been enormous,” explained Windsor Aguirre, a former graduate student who is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at DePaul University who still works with Bell. “Many of the most important papers in the field have been made possible or greatly enhanced [by Bell’s efforts],” he said.

From those early days, Bell has focused on the threespine stickleback, a fish that used to be considerably more prevalent at Flax Pond in Old Field and in the Great South Bay.

This particular fish, whose three sharp spines on the top of its body prevent some predators from swallowing it, appeals to scientists for a host of reasons —  from the variation it exhibits within and among populations to its relatively small size and ease of maintaining in a lab.

Bell has focused on establishing the relationship between traits and environmental factors. These fish can live in the sea ­— where they contend with the usual saltwater dilemma, where the concentration of salt is higher than in body fluids — and in freshwater, where salt is lower than in their body fluids.

Like salmon, they breed in brackish water (water that’s in between fresh and salty) and freshwater. The population of fish that evolve in freshwater can continue to survive despite having marine ancestors.

Indeed, the evolution, through mutations, of these fish is so rapid that they defy Charles Darwin. Coming up with the theory of natural selection when he studied the many unique birds in the Galapagos Islands 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, Darwin believed that evolution occurred on an almost imperceptibly slow time scale.

“Darwin underestimated the potential for rapid evolution,” Bell said. “He believed evolution is slow.” Sticklebacks have traits that evolve at high rates.

Bell has studied stickleback fossils in Nevada and California and modern stickleback in California and Alaska.

He has often studied the armor plates of stickleback, which have a marine and a freshwater version. In the ocean, the freshwater version would theoretically occur only once in about 10,000 young sticklebacks, because it’s a disadvantage to that individual. However, in a different environment, the fish with the freshwater armor plating becomes the natural selection superstar.

In an experiment in Cheney Lake in Anchorage, Alaska, Bell released sea-run stickleback. A year later, none of the fish had the freshwater plates, while fewer than 1 percent had them two years later. Six years after the experiment began, however, one in five fish had these plates.

“When you put the fish in freshwater, it evolves,” he said.

A resident of Stony Brook, Bell chose to live close enough to the university to walk to work. That, he said, was by design because he moved in during the gas crisis in the 1970s and didn’t want to wait in line for gas or struggle to get to work.

Bell and his wife Cynthia Blair travel to farms out east, shop and visit vineyards. Bell enjoys wandering through stores, especially for craft objects, which Blair also likes and makes herself. She designed a pillow of Bell, surrounded by swimming sticklebacks.

After four decades of research, Bell remains as inspired to find fossils and gather evidence about these rapidly evolving and adaptive fish as he was when he was a teenager.

“I won’t ever really retire,” said Bell, although he does expect to cut back so that he can travel with his wife. He appreciates being able to visit the shore of a lake in Alaska and “see what comes up in traps. It’s all still fun — making samples of modern and fossil stickleback, getting results that mean something scientifically and standing in front of a class and explaining biology to them.”

Aguirre, who described Bell as a “great” mentor, suggested that Bell and the stickleback are inextricably intertwined. “The threespine stickleback is truly one of evolutionary biology’s supermodels and [Bell] has played a critical role in bringing the species to the attention of the broader scientific community and the general public.”