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Brookhaven National Laboratory

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JoAnne Hewett has been named the new BNL director. Photo from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

For the first time in its over 75-year history, Brookhaven National Laboratory named its first female lab director.

JoAnne Hewett, associate lab director for fundamental physics and chief research officer at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, will take over the top job at BNL this summer.

Hewett will also join Stony Brook University as a tenured faculty member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Hewett “is not only incredibly qualified and talented, but will also make history as the first woman to serve in this critical role,” Gov. Kathy Hochul (D), who is the first woman elected governor of the Empire State, said in a statement. “The lab has developed innovative ways to deliver on New York’s top priorities, from battling disease to acting on climate change, that are making a difference today and for the future of New York.”

Hewett, who was the first woman member at SLAC in 1994, conducts research as a theoretical physicist, exploring the fundamental nature of space, matter and energy. Her work in physics focuses on efforts beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

Stony Brook University Distinguished Professor and Director of the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics George Sterman described her hire as a “wonderful turn of events.”

In an email, Sterman wrote that her work “as a theoretical physicist has earned wide admiration, and her leadership has helped shape the national program in fundamental particles.”

Sterman suggested Hewett’s research “continues to influence experiments worldwide, and her perspectives will be greatly valued by her new colleagues at Stony Brook.”

With over 2,800 scientists, engineers, technicians and professionals and an annual budget of about $700 million, the researchers at BNL tap into the site’s state-of-the-art technology, including the National Synchrotron Lightsource II. These researchers, and the many scientists from around the country and the world, work in fields including nuclear and high energy physics, clean energy and climate science, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, photon sciences, isotope production, accelerator science and technology and national security.

Hewett is coming to BNL as it prepares to begin construction on the Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC. Estimated to cost between $1.7 billion and $2.8 billion, the EIC will allow researchers to look inside the nucleus at the protons and neutrons. The research will reveal the arrangement of quarks and gluons that make up the protons and neutrons of nuclei.

Discoveries from the EIC could lead to future technologies.

“I am head-over-heels excited to build the EIC in partnership with Jefferson Lab to unlock the mysteries of the force that binds Nature’s building blocks, to strengthen connections to industry and the community with Discovery Park, and to advance the multi-program missions of the lab,” Hewett said in a statement. “And I’m very much looking forward to working with everyone at Brookhaven, Stony Brook and the DOE to usher the lab into its next successful chapter.”

The lab is also building a new welcome center, the Science and User Support Group, which is the first building planned for Discovery Park.

Maurie McInnis, president of SBU and co-chair of the BSA Board of Directors, which is a partnership between SBU and Battelle, welcomed Hewett, who will start this summer, to BNL.

Hewett’s “capable leadership, experience and future-forward vision complements Brookhaven National Laboratory’s continued focus on scientific innovation and discovery,” McInnis said in a statement. “The University is pleased to bring her expertise to the Physics and Astronomy Department and to the C.N. Yang Institute of Theoretical Physics, both of which have had “long-standing and critical connections to many major physics achievements at BNL.”

The next few months

Hewett takes over the top job at the lab from Doon Gibbs, who had been in that position from 2013. Gibbs is retiring on April 17.

“I am grateful to [Gibbs] for his outstanding leadership of Brookhaven and his long legacy of building and strengthening the lab for advancing scientific discovery,” Hewett said in a statement.

Jack Anderson, BNL’s deputy director for operations, will serve as the interim lab director until Hewett joins the lab.

Tom Daniels, the current ALD for Facilities and Operations will serve as interim deputy director.

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JoAnne Hewett. Twitter photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Finally!

Brookhaven National Laboratory has had nine lab directors since it was founded in 1946. Earlier this week, the Department of Energy facility, which has produced seven Nobel Prizes, has state-of-the-art facilities, and employs over 2,800 scientists and technicians from around the world announced that it hired JoAnne Hewett as its first female lab director.

Successful, determined, dedicated and award-winning local female scientists lauded the hire of Hewett, who comes to BNL from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory where she was associate lab director for fundamental physics and chief research officer. SLAC is operated by Stanford University in Menlo Park, California. In email responses, local female scientists suggested that Hewett’s hiring can and would inspire women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

“I am so delighted by the news that Dr. JoAnne Hewett has been named to be the next director of Brookhaven National Laboratory,” wrote Esther Takeuchi, William and Jane Knapp chair in Energy and the Environment and SUNY distinguished professor at Stony Brook University and chair of the Interdisciplinary Science Department at BNL. As the first female director for the lab, Hewett “is an inspiration not only for the women who are in the field, but for future female scientists who will witness first hand that success at the highest level.”

Stella Tsirka, SUNY distinguished professor in the Department of Pharmacological Sciences at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, suggested this hire was a part of an increasing number of women in prominent positions in science at local institutions.

Stony Brook and BNL are “becoming a hub of strong female role models for younger females, in STEM, in medicine, in leadership!” Tsirka wrote. “Between [SB President] Maurie McInnis, Hewett, Ivet Bahar (the director of the Laufer Center), Anissa Abi-Dargham [principal investigator for the Long Island Network for Clinical and Translational Science] and many other successful female faculty in leadership positions, hopefully, the message comes out loud and clear to our young women who are in science already, or aspire to be in science.”

For her part, Abi-Dargham, who is chair in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health, described Hewett’s hire as “amazing” and suggested it was “really exciting to see an accomplished female scientist selected to head our collaborating institution at BNL!”

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor and Cancer Center Program co-leader Mikala Egeblad added that the significance of Hewett’s hire goes “well beyond inspiring young girls. It is important to have women leaders for all sciences, also for someone at my career stage. I hope that one day, we will get to a point when we don’t think about whether a leader is a woman or a man.”

Women remain underrepresented at top leadership positions, so Egeblad finds it “very inspiring to see a woman recognized for her leadership skills and selected” to head BNL.

Leemor Joshua-Tor, professor and HHMI investigator at CSHL, called the hire “really great news” and indicated this was “especially true for the physical sciences, where there are even fewer women in senior positions than in biology.” Joshua-Tor added that the more women in senior, visible positions, “the more young women and girls see this as a normal career to have.”

Alea Mills, professor and Cancer Center member at CSHL, wrote that it is “fantastic that BNL has found the very best scientist to lead them into their next new mission of success. And it’s an extra bonus that this top scientist happens to be a woman!”

Mills added that efforts to enhance diversity are fashionable currently, but all too often fall short. Hiring Hewett makes “real traction that will undoubtedly inspire future generations of young women in STEM.”

Patricia Wright, distinguished service professor at Stony Brook in the Department of Anthropology, wrote that it was “inspiring” to see a female director of BNL and that “young female scientists can aspire to being in that role some day.”

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Ogochukwu Enekwizu with a suite of instruments at Brookhaven National Laboratory to make and study soot-seeded clouds. Photo courtesy of BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

Combining forces to form a three-part team, they strive to understand processes that are as visually stunning and inspirational as they are complex and elusive.

Clouds, which are so important to weather and climate, are challenging to understand and predict, as numerous processes affect properties at a range of scales.

A team from Brookhaven National Laboratory has provided the atmospheric sciences community with a host of information that advances an understanding of clouds.

In the atmospheric sciences community, “we typically talk about the three legs of a stool: modeling/ theory; field measurements; and targeted laboratory studies,” explained Arthur Sedlacek, Chemist in the Environmental and Climate Science Department.

Sedlacek conducts field experiments by collecting air samples from clouds in a range of locations such as flying through wildfire plumes.

In the beginning of 2021, BNL added postdoctoral researcher Ogochukwu Enekwizu to bolster another leg of that stool. Enekwizu conducts the kind of laboratory studies that provide important feedback and data for the work of Sedlacek and cloud modelers like Nicole Riemer, Professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign.

Enekwizu studies how soot aerosols from wildfires influence the lifetime and formation of clouds. She’s also investigating how soot-cloud interactions affect the absorption and scattering of light by soot particles.

Wildfires provide kindling for the climate, as fires release warming agents that contribute to increases in global temperatures which result in more wildfires. By determining how these smaller scale processes in soot affect clouds, Enekwizu can reduce the so-called error bars or level of uncertainty in the models other scientists create and that rely on the data she develops.

Enekwizu’s collaborators appreciate her contribution. As a modeler, Riemer suggested that Enekwizu’s work provided key information.

“While the microscale processes of soot restructure are incredibly complicated, [Enekwizu] was able to boil it down to a few simple parameters,” Riemer explained. “This makes it feasible to implement this process in a model like ours, which look at aerosol populations, not just a few individual particles. From there, we can come up with ways to implement this knowledge into climate models, which are still much more simplified than the model that we are developing.”

Sedlacek, who is her supervisor, suggested that Enekwizu’s work is “now on the cusp of answering important questions of how aerosols interact with clouds.” He descried her set up as “truly unique” and expects her results to inform the community about wildfire aerosol-cloud interactions and will offer guidance on other necessary field measurements.

In broader research terms, wildfires can be important for the ecosystem, as they remove decaying material, clear out underbrush, release nutrients back into the soil and aid the germination of seedlings

The increasing frequency, duration and intensity of these fires has been important to the scientific community. The general public has become increasingly aware of its importance as well, Enekwizu said.

Collaborations

Recruited to BNL by Sedlacek and Atmospheric Scientist Ernie Lewis, Enekwizu is considering collaborations with other researchers at BNL.

She has started speaking with scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials about exploring soot microstructure in a planned joint collaboration with her New Jersey Institute of Technology PhD advisor Dr. Alexie Khakizov. For this effort, Enekwizu has been in discussions with Dmitri Zakharov, who is in charge of the environmental transmission electron microscope at the CFN.

She hopes to take samples and introduces forces under a controlled environment in the transmission electron microscope to see how that affects the structure of soot in fine detail.

Looking at the news with one wildfire event after another, Enekwizu feels compelled to conduct research in the lab and share data amid “a heightened sense of urgency to get this work done” and to share it with the world at large.

Scientific origins

Born in the southeastern part of Nigeria in Enugu and raised in Enugu, Lagos and Abuja, Enekwizu developed an interest in science at 13. She enjoyed classes in a range of sciences and said chemistry was her favorite.

“I knew I was not going to go into medicine because I was squeamish,” she said.

Chemical engineering fascinated her and also appeared to offer career opportunities.

During a chemical engineering internship, she worked at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation where she learned about flaring practices. It inspired her final year project on biogas as a renewable energy source and sparked her curiosity on the fate of pollutants and particulate matter that arise from legal and illegal flaring activities. 

In flaring, companies burn off excess gas to control pressure variations, increasing the safety of the operation at the expense of burning a potential resource.

When Enekwizu was at NJIT, Lewis, who is a longtime collaborator with Sedlacek, reached out to Khakizov to inquire about someone with a background in carbonaceous aerosols. After interviewing with Lewis, Sedlacek and others, Enekwizu received the job offer and began working in January of 2021.

A resident of Ridge, Enekwizu, who goes by the name “Ogo,” enjoys festivals and events around Long Island. She also appreciates the area’s ubiquitous beaches and has delighted in strawberry picking.

She hopes to explore Montauk later this spring or summer.

Mentoring

Enekwizu is passionate about mentoring students, particularly those who might be under represented in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine.

She served as a graduate student mentor for Divyjot Singh, who was an undergrad at NJIT. Enekwizu taught Singh, who had grown up in Bhopal, India and had only been in the United States for six months when they met, “how to come up with research questions, how to develop hypotheses, how to write a proposal, how to make good presentations for conferences and everything in between,” he explained in an email.

While working with her, Singh found his passion for research and decided to pursue a PhD. 

Enekwizu is also passionate about supporting young women in science. She suggested that young black girls sometimes feel intimidated by STEM classes and careers. She urges a hands on approach to teaching and hopes to be a role model.

“If young girls see people like me thrive in STEM, they’ll be encouraged not to give up,” she said. “That is a huge win, in my opinion.”

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Braving the bugs, Alistair Rogers (right) and his colleague Stefanie Lasota collect leaf samples in Alaska for analysis. Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt

By Daniel Dunaief

Alistair Rogers lives, thinks and works on opposite extremes.

At the same time that he gathers information from the frigid Arctic, he is also analyzing data from the sweltering tropical forests of Panama and Brazil. He visits both regions annually and, within one eight-day span, saw a Polar Bear in Utqiaġvik (formerly known as Barrow), Alaska and a tarantula in Brazil.

Alistair Rogers. Photo from BNL

That’s not where the extremes end. Rogers is also studying plants at the physiological level to understand how best to represent processes such as photosynthesis, respiration and stomatal conductance in climate models.

The leader of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Science & Technology Group in the Environmental and Climate Sciences Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Rogers recently was honored as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The AAAS has named fellows every year since 1874 to recognize their contributions to the advancement of science. Previous honorees included astronaut and former Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa, a founding member of the NAACP and scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and inventor Thomas Edison.

Lisa Ainsworth, Research Leaders of the Global Change in Photosynthesis Unit for the USDA Research Service, nominated Rogers, who served as a mentor for her when she conducted her PhD research.

“[Rogers] is one of the world’s authorities on understanding how plants respond to atmospheric change and in particular rising carbon dioxide concentration,” Ainsworth said. He’s an experimentalist who “built a bridge to the scientific computational modeling community.”

Ainsworth suggested she would not have the career she developed if it weren’t for the support she received from Rogers.

Rogers, who the Department of Energy recognized as an Outstanding Mentor three times and has been at BNL since 1998, “makes you believe in yourself when you don’t have any reason to do that. He believes in you before you know you should believe in yourself,” Ainsworth said. For his part, Rogers is “delighted to be honored and recognized as a fellow.”

Carbon dioxide sinks

For all the extremes in his work, Rogers has been collecting data from plants to address a range of questions, including how they will react to and affect environmental changes caused by global warming.

Through photosynthesis, plants are responsible for absorbing about a third of the carbon dioxide humans produce through the burning of fossil fuels.

The uptake of carbon dioxide by plants and oceans has limited warming so far to 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-Industrial temperatures. Without such carbon dioxide removal by oceans and plants, the temperature would already be 3 degrees warmer.

The models his work informs are trying to understand what will happen to the carbon dioxide subsidy in the future.

“In order to work out how warm it’s going to get, you need to know the carbon dioxide concentration and the climate sensitivity (how much warmer it will get for a given amount of carbon dioxide),” he explained in an email.

Photosynthesis is less efficient at higher temperatures, but is also more efficient amid an increased amount of carbon dioxide. Drier air also reduces the efficiency of the process as plants close their stomata to conserve water, which restricts carbon dioxide supply to their chloroplasts.

The transfer of water from land to the atmosphere most often occurs through stomata, so understanding the way these pores open and close is important in predicting cloud formation and other land-atmosphere interactions.

Ainsworth described how a typical day of field work gathering data could last for 16 hours. She appreciated how Rogers worked and played hard — he is a cyclist and a skier — while keeping the work fun. Indeed, Ainsworth said Rogers, on regular calls with two other professors, blends discussions about grants and work decisions with their first choice for their guesses at the New York Times wordle game.

Leadership roles

In addition to his leadership role at BNL, Rogers is also part of the leadership teams for the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment — Arctic and the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment —Tropics.

Rogers said the Arctic is seeing the biggest increase in temperature relative to anywhere else on the planet faster because of climate feedback. When ice and snow melt, it reveals surfaces that absorb more heat.

The tropics, meanwhile, have been more stable, although the region is expected to experience hotter, drier temperatures in the coming decades as well.

Alistair Rogers. Photo from BNL

The Department of Energy is studying these biomes because they are climatically sensitive, globally important and poorly represented in climate models.

Rogers is working with other scientists at BNL and around the world to understand these processes to feed his data collection and analysis into global models.

Using an analogy for developing these models, Rogers suggested trying to predict the time it would take to get to the airport. A traveler would need to know the distance and the mode of transport — whether she was walking, biking or riding in a car.

A model predicting the travel time would make assumptions about how fast a person could go in a car, while factoring in other data like the weather and traffic density at a particular time to anticipate the speed.

If the traffic model wasn’t sure of the maximum possible speed of a vehicle, the error associated with predicting the arrival time could be large, particularly when considering the difference between traveling in a steamroller or a Lamborghini on empty roads.

Climate models use a similar process. By studying the species of plants, Rogers can tell the models whether the plants are the equivalent of sports cars or steamrollers.

Big picture

The worst case scenario of earlier models is highly unlikely, although the scenario of a drastic reduction in carbon dioxide also hasn’t occurred. The models, however, still suggest that changes in human behavior are critical to protecting the future of the planet against the effects of climate change.

Rogers is encouraged by the declining cost of solar energy and the work developing countries have done to bypass some of the more polluting sources of energy from the industrial revolution. He is also pleased by the commitment from the Department of Energy to look for climate change solutions.

These elements “represent great opportunities for scientists like me” to work on these problems.

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Ward Melville High School earned first place in the regional High School Science Bowl on Feb. 3. From left, team members Benjamin Zhang, Anna Xing, Benjamin Proothi, Michael Melikyan, and Rithik Sogal. Photo from BNL
Hunter College Campus Schools team Max Levin, Gabriel Fang, Kieran Torpey, Camille Pimentel, and Andres Fischer placed first in the middle school competition on Feb. 2. Photo from BNL
Middle School Second Place Winners: R.C. Murphy Junior High School — Menghan Tang, Willem Van der Velden, Harry Gao, Kayla Harte and Gabrielle Wong. Photo from BNL
Middle School Third Place Winners: John F. Kennedy Middle School Team 1 — Aiden Karp, Maya Swierupski, Jayden Brun, Chaeten Modgil, and Ryan Perovich. Photo from BNL

Hunter College Campus Schools and Ward Melville High School took the top spots in the Long Island Regional Science Bowl competitions hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory on Feb. 2 and Feb. 3. The fast-paced question-and-answer contest quizzed students on chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, astronomy, and general, earth, and computer science.

Science Bowl alumni Suraj Muralidharan, Stephanie Zhang, and Amanda Chen volunteered at the 2023 competitions.

This year, the regional middle and high school events returned to an in-person, head-to-head tournament at the Laboratory after going virtual for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. About 80 volunteers including BNL staff, community members, and past Science Bowl participants helped out this year.

“Brookhaven’s Office of Educational Programs was so excited to welcome students back onsite for a full day of competition and science learning,” said Amanda Horn, a Brookhaven Lab educator who coordinated the events. “This competition provides students with a unique opportunity to show off their science skills and knowledge, and learn about the Lab as well as the DOE.”

Hunter College and Ward Melville’s first place wins in the middle school and high school competitions, respectively, secured each team an all-expenses paid trip to compete at DOE’s National Science Bowl finals scheduled for April 27 to May 1 in Washington, D.C.

The DOE created the National Science Bowl in 1991 to encourage students to excel in mathematics and science and to pursue careers in these fields. Approximately 330,000 students have participated in the National Science Bowl® throughout its 32-year history, and it is one of the nation’s largest science competitions.

“The National Science Bowl® is an extraordinary competition that brings together young minds across America through science and technology,” said Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, DOE Office of Science Director, “and I would like to congratulate the Hunter College Campus Middle School and Ward Melville High School teams as they advance to the National Finals! Good luck to you — our future scientists, visionaries, and leaders!”

Middle School Science Bowl Results

First Place: The regional middle school event held on Feb. 2 was open to teams from New York City schools in addition to schools on Long Island. Under the guidance of coaches Jennifer Kasanuki and Christopher Torpey, a team from Hunter College Campus Schools of NYC — Kieran Torpey, Gabriel Fang, Max Levin, Andres Fischer and Camille Pimentel — earned a back-to-back win for their school after being tied halfway through the final round against R.C. Murphy Junior High School of Stony Brook.

“It feels really great,” said Hunter College team captain and eighth grader Kieran Torpey. “We’ve studied really hard for this. I love science and to know a lot of science is really great.”

Second Place: R.C. Murphy Junior High School — Harry Gao, Gabrielle Wong, Menghan Tang, Willem Van der Velden, Kayla Harte (Coaches: Jillian Visser and Emily Chernakoff)

Third Place: John F. Kennedy Middle School Team 1 — Chaeten Modgil, Maya Swierupski, Jayden Brun, Aiden Karp, Ryan Perovich (Coach: Steven Nielsen)

Fourth Place: NYC Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies Team 1 — Ryan Casey, Jonathan Lin, Vince Liao, Kolbi Canell, Daniel Berkovich (Coaches: Faithe Theresa Yates and Eva Deffenbaugh)

High School Science Bowl Results

First Place: Competing against 23 other teams, Ward Melville High School of East Setauket secured their first-place win in a second-round showdown against Great Neck South High School on Feb. 3. 

Under the guidance of Coach Philip Medina, team members — Benjamin Proothi, Rithik Sogal, Anna Xing, Benjamin Zhang and Michael Melikyan — went undefeated in their first four round robin matches and reached the double-elimination finals where they faced a team from Great Neck. 

Great Neck gave them their first lost, but Ward Melville High School pulled through during the tiebreaker round where they surged ahead with a rally of several questions and bonus points — an intense, yet exciting way to win.

“We didn’t really know exactly what the score was,” said Ben Proothi. “We just felt like we were ahead by a little bit, so we took the chance and ran out the clock.”

“It’s incredible,” said team captain and junior Michael Melikyan. “We’ve always been fighting Great Neck South for a top spot, and they’ve always been taking it. They always have a strong team and incredible people and we’re just happy we finally managed to pull through. We’re very grateful and very proud to be going [to the National Science Bowl].” 

This marks the first time in six years Ward Melville High School has qualified for the national tournament. “They’re an amazing group of people. I have no idea how they know this stuff, it’s incredible. They were working so well under pressure. I’m very proud of them,” added Coach Medina.

Second Place: Great Neck South High School — Richard Zhuang, Laura Zhang, Brandon Kim, Eric Pei, Erin Wong (Coaches: James Truglio and Nicole Spinelli)

Third Place: Farmingdale Senior High School — Waseem Ahmad, Ali Ahmad, Madhav Rapelli, Bevis Jiang, Rayan Adamjee, (Coach: Ashley Arroyo)

Fourth Place: Jericho Senior High School — Derek Minn, Natasha Kulviwat, He Xuan, Ashwin Narayanan, Brendan Shek (Coaches: Samantha Sforza and Emily Umile)

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Brookhaven Lab’s Office of Educational Programs (OEP) organized science fun for students throughout both competition days with a STEM Expo, tour, and additional science challenge. Staff and visiting students offered hands-on science demonstrations that included a cloud chamber that revealed electron tracks, sound and light sensitive microcontrollers, tricky engineering attempts, and robotic building blocks.

Science Bowl teams that did not move on to the competitions’ final double elimination rounds had the chance to get an up-close look at the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility for nuclear physics research. STAR, which weighs 1,200 tons and is as large as a house, tracks thousands of particles produced by ion collisions at RHIC to uncover clues about the universe in the moments after the Big Bang.

Teams also competed in a STEM Challenge, racing against the clock and each other to solve science and math puzzles to break several locks on boxes filled with treats. Among participating middle schools, Elmont Memorial High School earned first place, Sayville Middle School took second, and Great Neck South Team 1 placed third.

Long Beach High School completed the STEM Challenge first among participating high schools, followed by General Douglas Macarthur Senior High School, then Lynbrook Senior High School. Long Beach student Sam Adler used the periodic table to crack the code for one of the team’s final locks.

“It was so much fun,” Adler said. “I was so stressed during the competition itself and this was all good fun.”

For more information, visit www.bnl.gov.

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Electrons, shown as red dots above, collide with an ion. Such a collision will reveal the internal structure of the quarks and gluons that are the building blocks of the proton and neutron. Image from BNL

National labs, including Brookhaven National Laboratory, received considerable additional funds as a part of the federal Inflation Reduction Act.

BNL, which will get an additional $224 million over a five-year period, will collect the additional funding from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science to support several projects designed

In a statement, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm called the additional funds for energy-related research and support, which total $1.5 billion, “one of the largest ever investments in national laboratory infrastructure” and suggested that the effort would “develop advanced energy and manufacturing technologies we need to advance the frontiers of science and tackle tomorrow’s challenges.”

At BNL, the Electron-Ion Collider, an enormous project that will start construction in 2024 and should start running experiments in the early part of the next decade, will receive $105 million.

BNL is building the EIC in partnership with the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, which will also receive $33 million for work towards the new facility.

As its name suggests, the EIC will collide electrons and protons or heavier atomic nuclei and hopes to make numerous discoveries, including providing an understanding of how the energy from quarks and gluons provides the mass of a proton.

Additionally, the EIC will provide advances in health and medicine, national security, nuclear energy, radioisotope production and industrial uses in particle beams. Research on the technologies that will become a part of the EIC will advance the development of magnets and other particle accelerator parts. These advances could lead to energy efficient accelerators, shrinking the size and costs of future accelerators, which could attack cancer cells, design solar cells and batteries and develop drugs and medical treatments.

While the additional funds will help advance the development of the EIC, the total cost is considerably higher, at an estimated $1.7 billion to $2.8 billion.

Beamlines

Additionally, the Office of Science will provide $18.5 million to speed the creation of three new beamlines at the National Synchrotron Light Source II.

The NSLS II already has a host of beamlines that enable researchers from around the world to study the structure of batteries as they are operating, catalysts that help tap into energy sources, and biologically active molecules that could play a role in understanding basic biochemistry or that could lead to the development of drugs.

The new beamlines, which, like others at the NSLS II, have three-letter abbreviations. The ARI will provide a complete picture of the electronic structure of a sample, particularly in connection with temperature, chemical, structural and atomic variation.

ARI will help understand and control the electronic structure of next generation quantum materials.

CDI, meanwhile, will explore the condensed matter macroscopic and microscopic physical properties of matter, including the solid and liquid phases that arise from electromagnetic forces between atoms. CDI is in its final stages of its design.

The SXN will provide element access from carbon to sulfur. The beamline will offer measurements of different signals, such as X-ray fluorescence and total electron yield absorption, which is important in catalysis, condensed matter physics and environmental science.

The DOE is also providing $20 million for five Nanoscale Science Research Centers. The Center for Functional Nanomaterials is leading the effort to revitalize the nanoscience infrastructure.

The funds will accelerate the acquisition, development and installation of five instruments, which will advance research in fuel cells, solar cells and other materials that are part of the country’s efforts to develop cleaner forms of energy.

A/C and Heating

BNL will receive $33 million to support an upgrade to the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe’s CERN laboratory. The upgrades will enable a high-energy particle detector to make use of increased particle collision rates.

The lab, which focuses on energy research, will also receive $14.5 million towards infrastructure improvements that will increase the efficiency in distributing electricity and heating and air conditioning in labs throughout the facility.

Finally, the lab will receive $1 million to develop instrumentation for a nuclear physics experiment that seeks to find neutrinoless double beta decay, which is led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

BNL Lab Director Doon Gibbs described the funding as an investment in the nation’s innovation-based economy.

The funding will support “research with direct impact on the development of clean energy technologies as well as ground-breaking basic research in nuclear and high-energy physics — fields that could lay the foundation for future advances,” Gibbs said in a statement.

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Commemorating the start of construction for the Science and User Support Center from the U.S. Department of Energy and Brookhaven Lab are (from left) Joe Diehl, Caroline Polanish, Robert Gordon, Geri Richmond, Doon Gibbs, Chris Ogeka, Tom Daniels, Peggy Caradonna, Andrea Clemente, and Gary Olson. Photo from BNL

Construction is underway for the newest facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory. The Science and User Support Center (SUSC) is the first building for the planned Discovery Park, a development the Laboratory is pursuing near its entrance along William Floyd Parkway.

The three-story, 75,000-square-foot facility will serve as a welcome center for the 75-year-old Brookhaven Lab, which is home to seven Nobel Prize-winning discoveries and hosts thousands of guests annually. The SUSC will also offer conference and collaboration areas for scientists as well as office space for the Lab‘s support staff.

Officials from DOE and Brookhaven Lab commemorated the start of construction during a groundbreaking ceremony Wednesday, Oct. 26.

DOE’s Under Secretary of Science and Innovation Geri Richmond said, “This strategy—of welcoming the community to be part to our nationallaboratories and focusing on creative, innovative ways for public-private partnerships to strengthen the economy—is so important. This is a centerpiece, a catalyst for the campus and for the future.”

Manager of DOE’s local Brookhaven Site Office, Robert Gordon, said, “This is transformative for Brookhaven National Laboratory. We should be accessible. We’ve done that with our words and our actions. Now we’re doing it with concrete.”

Brookhaven Lab Director Doon Gibbs said, “This construction is a milestone in the Laboratory‘s long-term strategy to revitalize its physical plant. We look forward to welcoming visitors, users, students, and members of the community to connect with Brookhaven, the DOE, our science, and the impact it has.”

Plainview-based E.W. Howell is leading construction as the project’s general contractor. The Laboratory announced in February that it awarded E.W. Howell a $61.8 million contract to build the SUSC. DOE approved a total cost of $86.2 million for the project. E.W. Howell and BrookhavenLab are targeting 2024 for construction to be completed.

The SUSC is the first building planned for Discovery Park, a new vision for Brookhaven Lab‘s gateway with approximately 60 acres of previously used, publicly accessible land. The Laboratory is working with DOE on a process for developers, collaborators, and entrepreneurs to propose, build, and operate new facilities that could complement DOE and Brookhaven Lab‘s missions and leverage opportunities from close proximity to the Laboratory.

Empire State Development is supporting Brookhaven Lab‘s efforts for Discovery Park with a $1.8 million capital grant, recommended by the Long Island Regional Economic Development Council.

The future Science and User Support Center. Rendering courtesy of BNL

Increasing Efficiency for Discoveries, New Technology

Brookhaven Lab attracts scientists from across the country and around the world by offering expertise and access to large user facilities with unique capabilities.

Brookhaven hosted more than 4,400 in-person and virtual scientists from universities, private industry, and government agencies in fiscal year 2021. In the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 5,000 guests and facility users visited each year. The Laboratory expects the number of guests researchers to increase in the coming years, particularly as capabilities expand at the National Synchrotron Light Source II—a DOE Office of Science User Facility—and with the design and construction of the future Electron-Ion Collider.

The SUSC, when complete, is where those guests will arrive. The SUSC will also help improve the guests’ experiences of visiting Brookhavenbecause the Laboratory will consolidate a number of guest services into a central, modern building close to the site entrance.

The SUSC will also feature reconfigurable conference space, designed in response to requests from facility user communities to create opportunities for scientists to collaborate.

In addition, the SUSC will help the Laboratory increase efficiencies by reducing its building footprint atop the 5,322-acre site. The Laboratory plans to relocate approximately 225 staff at the SUSC. They are currently spread across the Lab site, which contains 314 buildings—some that date back to the World War II era, when the Laboratory was the site of the Army’s former Camp Upton.

The SUSC project is funded by the DOE Office of Science.

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov.

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Mercy Baez. Photo by Joseph Rubino/ BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

She is a greeter, a corporate concierge, a facilitator, a point of contact for people traveling thousands of miles, a Spanish translator, an important contact in case of emergencies, and whatever else visitors need.

While Mercy Baez, who was promoted to User Program Coordinator for the National Synchrotron Lightsource II and the Laboratory for BioMolecular Structure at Brookhaven National Laboratory early in October, wears many hats, one of the only ones she doesn’t wear is scientist, although that doesn’t keep her from appreciating and taking pride in the research conducted at the Department of Energy facility.

“We’re helping them and they are helping the world,” Baez said.

BNL has a steady stream of users who apply for time at the various research facilities at the national laboratories. 

Baez is specifically responsible for providing a wide range of support and services to the NSLS II and the LBMS. Users, which is how BNL describes potential visiting scientists who conduct research at the lab’s facilities, submit proposals to her office, which then distributes them to a proposal review panel.

When visiting scientists learn that their work, which includes monitoring batteries as they function and searching for fine structural sites in the molecular battle against pathogens, has earned a high enough score to receive coveted time on the lab’s instruments, they prepare for their visit by interacting with Baez and her current team of four by getting registered and approved for access.

Baez offers soup to nuts guidance that often also includes helping users literally find soup, nuts and numerous other items. Baez ensures that users take any necessary training courses, provides guidance regarding registering for on site access to BNL, provides information on the steps or items necessary when they arrive, helps find nearby hotels, coordinate travel to and from the lab and, if necessary, secures places to stay if they miss their planes, get snowed in or have other unforeseen changes in their schedules.

As of October 1st, visitors also have to have some type of active shooter training to access the lab’s facilities. Currently, users are required to take five training courses. Last week, the lab decided to incorporate active shooter training into one of these other training courses.

The lab has always had routine emergency training courses and drills for lab employees. With the changing times and current events, the lab is looking to equip users for such emergencies. The lab hopes never to have to use this training, but if such an event occurs, staff and users will know how to handle such a situation.

In addition to training to help users prepare to visit the facility, Baez provides visitors with a host of on site facilities, including adaptors in case they are using European electronics that don’t connect with the outlets, laptops in case the computer a scientist brought isn’t working, conference rooms for impromptu meetings, and dorm rooms for a respite while running time-intensive experiments.

BNL hosts employee resource groups including the African American Advancement Group, the Asian Pacific American Association, the Brookhaven Veterans Association, Brookhaven Women in Science, the Early Career Resource Group, the Pride Alliance and the Hispanic Heritage Group. Baez said the lab tries to involve users and visitors in as many cultural and social events as possible, which include outings to dinners, plays and cultural virtual cooking classes.

In September, Baez participated in the Port Jefferson Dragon Boat Race Festival which the Asian Pacific  American Association sponsored. 

Baez, whose mother is from Puerto Rico and whose father is from Ecuador, is a member of the Hispanic Heritage Group.

A people person

A member of the user offices since 2003, Baez had recently been responsible for coordinating conferences, workshops, and training courses, including financial and logistical aspects of the events for NSLS-II and the LBMS. She had been functioning as the user program coordinator since January, when Gretchen Cisco retired. Baez feels fortunate to have worked with Cisco since she joined NSLS in 2005.

A self-described “people person,” Baez said she loves the opportunity to interact with scientists from all over the world. She particularly appreciates the chance to get to know about other cultures and has added destinations to her travel itinerary from speaking with visitors. She is hoping to travel to Morocco and Peru next year and is hoping to travel to Japan and a few other countries in the near future.

Coming from a Latina family that tends to be loud and outspoken and whose family gatherings often includes more than 30 people, she has learned to speak in a softer voice, particularly with people from other cultures or backgrounds.

She also has a tendency to speak quickly and has learned to slow the pace down so visitors who haven’t interacted with her can understand what she’s saying.

A resident of Medford, which is a ten-minute drive from the lab, Baez has a son Xzavier and a granddaughter Francesca. She is excited for the upcoming arrival of her second granddaughter in November.

When she’s not at the lab, she uses her leisure time to go hiking, fishing and camping.

With her then teenage son in tow, she went to the jungle of Belize for a survival course, where they learned how to catch their own food, build shelters, and harpoon fish. She also learned which plants are safe to eat and which are poisonous.

While her work responsibilities can be hair-raising, particularly in emergencies, she “loves the feeling that I was able to help a scientist, whether to get him or her on site or in an emergency,” she said. Knowing that she’s a part of making all this science happen makes her day and job rewarding, she said.

Baez has had some requests from scientists who have wanted cultural foods, such as Turkish or vegan dishes, that might be harder to find, particularly during off hours.

Around Thanksgiving each year, some visitors have asked if they can hunt wild turkeys at BNL, which is located within the Pine Barrens and has turkeys and deer wandering on site. She has told those users that the lab does not allow hunting.

Hunting aside, Baez said she is “here to help [users] do what they need to do.”

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Duckweed. Photo from BNL
Scientists drive oil accumulation in rapidly growing aquatic plants

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have engineered duckweed to produce high yields of oil. The team added genes to one of nature’s fastest growing aquatic plants to “push” the synthesis of fatty acids, “pull” those fatty acids into oils, and “protect” the oil from degradation. As the scientists explain in a paper published in Plant Biotechnology Journal, such oil-rich duckweed could be easily harvested to produce biofuels or other bioproducts.

John Shanklin. Photo from BNL

The paper describes how the scientists engineered a strain of duckweed, Lemna japonica, to accumulate oil at close to 10 percent of its dry weight biomass. That’s a dramatic, 100-fold increase over such plants growing in the wild—with yields more than seven times higher than soybeans, today’s largest source of biodiesel.

“Duckweed grows fast,” said Brookhaven Lab biochemist John Shanklin [https://www.bnl.gov/staff/shanklin], who led the team. “It has only tiny stems and roots—so most of its biomass is in leaf-like fronds that grow on the surface of ponds worldwide. Our engineering creates high oil content in all that biomass.

“Growing and harvesting this engineered duckweed in batches and extracting its oil could be an efficient pathway to renewable and sustainable oil production,” he said.

Two added benefits: As an aquatic plant, oil-producing duckweed wouldn’t compete with food crops for prime agricultural land. It can even grow on runoff from pig and poultry farms.

“That means this engineered plant could potentially clean up agricultural waste streams as it produces oil,” Shanklin said.

Leveraging two Long Island research institutions

The current project has roots in Brookhaven Lab research on duckweeds from the 1970s, led by William S. Hillman in the Biology Department. Later, other members of the Biology Department worked with the Martienssen group at Cold Spring Harbor to develop a highly efficient method for expressing genes from other species in duckweeds, along with approaches to suppress expression of duckweeds’ own genes, as desired.

As Brookhaven researchers led by Shanklin and Jorg Schwender [https://www.bnl.gov/staff/schwend] over the past two decades identified the key biochemical factors that drive oil production and accumulation in plants, one goal was to leverage that knowledge and the genetic tools to try to modify plant oil production. The latest research, reported here, tested this approach by engineering duckweed with the genes that control these oil-production factors to study their combined effects.

“The current project brings together Brookhaven Lab’s expertise in the biochemistry and regulation of plant oil biosynthesis with Cold Spring Harbor’s cutting-edge genomics and genetics capabilities,” Shanklin said.

One of the oil-production genes identified by the Brookhaven researchers pushes the production of the basic building blocks of oil, known as fatty acids. Another pulls, or assembles, those fatty acids into molecules called triacylglycerols (TAG)—combinations of three fatty acids that link up to form the hydrocarbons we call oils. The third gene produces a protein that coats oil droplets in plant tissues, protecting them from degradation.

From preliminary work, the scientists found that increased fatty acid levels triggered by the “push” gene can have detrimental effects on plant growth. To avoid those effects, Brookhaven Lab postdoctoral researcher Yuanxue Liang paired that gene with a promoter that can be turned on by the addition of a tiny amount of a specific chemical inducer.

“Adding this promoter keeps the push gene turned off until we add the inducer, which allows the plants to grow normally before we turn on fatty acid/oil production,” Shanklin said.

Liang then created a series of gene combinations to express the improved push, pull, and protect factors singly, in pairs, and all together. In the paper these are abbreviated as W, D, and O for their biochemical/genetic names, where W=push, D=pull, and O=protect.

The key findings

Overexpression of each gene modification alone did not significantly increase fatty acid levels in Lemna japonica fronds. But plants engineered with all three modifications accumulated up to 16 percent of their dry weight as fatty acids and 8.7 percent as oil when results were averaged across several different transgenic lines. The best plants accumulated up to 10 percent TAG—more than 100 times the level of oil that accumulates in unmodified wild type plants.

Some combinations of two modifications (WD and DO) increased fatty acid content and TAG accumulation dramatically relative to their individual effects. These results are called synergistic, where the combined effect of two genes increased production more than the sum of the two separate modifications.

These results were also revealed in images of lipid droplets in the plants’ fronds, produced using a confocal microscope at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials [https://www.bnl.gov/cfn/] (CFN), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Brookhaven Lab. When the duckweed fronds were stained with a chemical that binds to oil, the images showed that plants with each two-gene combination (OD, OW, WD) had enhanced accumulation of lipid droplets relative to plants where these genes were expressed singly—and also when compared to control plants with no genetic modification. Plants from the OD and OWD lines both had large oil droplets, but the OWD line had more of them, producing the strongest signals.

“Future work will focus on testing push, pull, and protect factors from a variety of different sources, optimizing the levels of expression of the three oil-inducing genes, and refining the timing of their expression,” Shanklin said. “Beyond that we are working on how to scale up production from laboratory to industrial levels.”

That scale-up work has several main thrusts: 1) designing the types of large-scale culture vessels for growing the modified plants, 2) optimizing large-scale growth conditions, and 3) developing methods to efficiently extract oil at high levels.

This work was funded by the DOE Office of Science (BER). CFN is also supported by the Office of Science (BES).

Brookhaven National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit science.energy.gov. [https://www.energy.gov/science/]

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Dr. John Clarke. Photo from BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

Live from Upton, New York, it’s … Dr. John Clarke.

While the arrival of the new Occupational Medicine Director and Chief Medical Officer at Brookhaven National Laboratory doesn’t involve late-night comedy, or a live studio audience, it does bring a medical doctor with a passion for bringing his rap and musical skills to a health care audience.

Dr. John Clarke. Photo from BN

Formerly the director of occupational medicine at Cornell University, Dr. Clarke joined the Department of Energy lab as Occupational Medicine Director and Chief Medical Officer for BNL in June..

“My role is to help maintain safety and wellness among the workers,” said Dr. Clarke. “If we have employees who start coming in for some sort of complaint and we see a pattern, that may help us identify who could be at risk of something we didn’t know about that we are detecting.”

A doctor who served as chief resident at New York Medical College in family residency and Harvard University in occupational & environmental medicine, Dr. Clarke said he plans to support a range of preventive efforts.

“I’m excited about the potential to engage in what’s considered primary prevention,” said Clarke, which he defined as preventing a disease from occurring in the first place.

Through primary prevention, he hopes to help the staff avoid developing chronic illnesses such as cancer, while also ensuring the health and responsiveness of their immune systems.

Through physical fitness, a plant-based diet including fruits and vegetables, adequate sleep and hydration with water, people can use lifestyle choices and habits to reduce their need for various medications and enable them to harness the ability of their immune systems to mount an effective response against any threat.

“Modifying your lifestyle is the therapy,” he said. “If you engage [in those activities] in the right way, that is the treatment.”

Dr. Clarke added that the severity and stage of a disease may impact the effectiveness of such efforts. For any vaccine and for the body’s natural immunity to work, people need a healthy immune system.

When Dr. Clarke practiced family medicine, he saw how patients lost weight through a diet that reduced the need for medication for diabetes and high blood pressure.

“Losing weight and staying active does provide a therapeutic impact, where you could be medication free,” he said.

To be sure, living a healthier lifestyle requires ongoing effort to maintain. After reaching a desired weight or cholesterol level, people can backslide into an unhealthier state or condition, triggering the occurrence or recurrence of a disease.

In the vast majority of cases, Clarke said, “you have to make a permanent lifestyle change” to avoid the need for pharmaceutical remedies that reduce the worst effects of disease.

BNL has an exercise physiologist on staff who “we hope to engage in consultations with employees,” said Clarke. He would like the exercise physiologist to go to the gym with staff to show them how to use equipment properly to get the maximum benefit.

BNL already has some classes and various initiatives that promote wellness. “One of the things we’d like to do is coordinate and try to publicize it enough where employees are aware” of the options available at the lab to live a healthier and balanced life, he added.

BNL also has a dietician on staff. Dr. Clarke has not worked with the dietician yet, but hopes it will be part of an upcoming initiative. As he and his staff respond to the demand, they will consider bringing on other consultants and experts to develop programs. 

Covid concerns

Like others in his position in other large employers around Long Island, Dr. Clarke is focused on protecting workers from any ongoing threat from Covid-19.

“We’re still learning more as [SARS-CoV2, the virus that caused the pandemic] evolves,” he said. BNL does a “great job about monitoring the prevalence and the numbers of cases in Suffolk County and among workers.”

Dr. Clarke said he and others at BNL are following the Department of Energy, New York State and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on these issues.

If the numbers of infections and hospitalizations increase in the coming months, as people move to more indoor activities, BNL may consider deploying a strategy where the lab provides more opportunities for staff to work remotely.

Prior to his arrival at BNL, Dr. Clarke worked as a consultant for a company that was looking to create numerous permanent jobs that were remote.

He suggested that workers need to remain aware of their remote surroundings and shouldn’t work near a furnace or any heater that might release dangerous gases like carbon monoxide. 

Additionally, people should avoid working in areas that aren’t habitable, such as in an attic. Dr. Clarke urges people to notify and consult their employer if they have concerns about working safely at home or on site.

Music vs. medicine

A native of Queens who spent three years of his childhood in Barbados, Dr. Clarke attended Columbia University, where he majored in sociology and music while he was on a pre-med track.

While he was an undergraduate, Dr. Clarke wrote, produced and performed original music. An independent label was going to help secure a major label deal.

He chose to attend medical school at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Dr. Clarke has championed a program he calls “health hop,” in which he has used rap to reach various audiences with medical care messages. In 2009, he won a flu prevention video contest sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services for an “H1N1 rap.”

Train commuters may also recognize him from his work for the Long Island Railroad, for which he created a “gap rap.” The public service announcement was designed to protect children from falling into or tripping over the gap between the train and the platform.

Dr. Clarke has produced music for numerous genres, including for a children’s album and a Christian album.

As for life outside BNL, Dr. Clarke is married to Elizabeth Clarke, who is a nurse practitioner and is in the doctorate of nursing practice and clinical leadership program at Duke University.

When he’s not spending time with his wife or their children, he enjoys home projects like flooring and tiling.

Dr. Clarke is pleased to be working at the national Department of Energy lab.“BNL is a great place, because the science and the work they do has an impact,” he said.

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