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Daniel Dunaief

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Photo courtesy the Brown Family
Ben with his niece Emma at Wrigley Field, Chicago. Photo courtesy the Brown family
Ben played short stop for the Three Village Little League at age 7. Photo courtesy the Brown family
Left, Ben with his mother, JoAnne, wife Maggie and father Jody in Arlington, Texas. Photo courtesy the Brown family

By Daniel Dunaief

JoAnne Wilson-Brown was driving on Belle Mead Road, returning to her house in East Setauket with Easter Dinner and candy when Christmas came early.

Her 24-year old Ben, who tracks his parents on their cell phones and regularly checks up on them, was calling.

“Mom,” Ben said, “you need to be in Texas tomorrow.”

Ben, who left home seven years ago after graduating from Ward Melville High School when the Philadelphia Phillies chose him in the 33rd round of the major league baseball draft, was going to pitch for the Chicago Cubs in his first major league game against the defending World Series Champion Texas Rangers.

Ben also called his father Jody Brown, who had been working in the backyard on windows that he immediately put back in place so they could travel to The Ballpark in Arlington.

In his debut, Ben entered in the seventh inning. Perhaps fittingly, David Robertson, the pitcher the Cubs traded to the Phillies to acquire the hard throwing rookie Brown, pitched the top half of that same inning for the Rangers, allowing a hit without giving up a run.

Ben matched Robertson that first inning, giving up a lead off walk before inducing a groundout, strike out and line out to left field.

In his second inning of work, however, after getting three hours of sleep the night before, Brown allowed six runs on six hits in two third of an inning, leaving him with a tough introduction to “The Show” and an unsightly 32.40 earned run average.

Ben’s debut is a microcosm of the journey he took to the pinnacle of baseball. An impressive and imposing high school player, the now six-foot, six-inch pitcher had such a stellar sophomore season that he attracted considerable attention from college scouts, receiving five offers.

In his junior year, however, Ben developed appendicitis, which forced him to spend time in the hospital.

After an appendectomy, Ben, who wanted to be a baseball player from the time he was two, had to return to the hospital.

“When they took him away in the gurney, he looked up at me and said, ‘Mom, is this going to be it [for his baseball career]? Do you think it’s all over?’” Wilson-Brown recalled.

Recognizing her son’s fierce determination, she instantly told him “absolutely not!”

Brown rebuilt his body and boosted his fastball sufficiently that the Phillies chose him at the age of 17 at the tail end of the draft.

In the seven years that followed, Brown endured Tommy John surgery, an oblique injury that robbed him of time on the field, and Covid, which shut down the minor league system.

Undeterred and with considerable support from his family including his mother, father Jody, brother James and sister Abbey, Ben remained focused amid those interruptions and put hours into himself and his craft, cutting out sugar from his diet, listening to anyone who could offer advice and dedicating himself to improving.

Brown also found love, marrying Maggie Seibert, a woman he met in church in Florida.

Ben “has put in so much work and made so many sacrifices,” said Ward Melville High School baseball coach Lou Petrucci, who speaks to his former student and pitcher at least once a week and whom Ben refers to as “another parent.” 

After Ben was drafted, he arrived at the training camp in Clearwater, Florida, and talked to anyone and everyone about ways to improve.

Petrucci believes that Ben’s unquenchable thirst for baseball knowledge reflects an extension of the dedicated teachers in the Three Village school district who encouraged learning.

When graduates like Brown, former Met and current St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Steve Matz and current Yokohoma BayStars pitcher Anthony Kay advance in life, “it’s because of the K through 12 education” they received at the schools.

When Brown called Petrucci, whom he has known since he was a sixth grader in his class at Minnesauke Elementary School, to share the news about his promotion to the majors, Petrucci said, “Congratulations! 

And, now, your next step is to make sure you stay there.”

Bouncing back

After that rough inning in his first game, Ben received considerable public and private support from his teammates and from baseball people he admires and respects.

Fellow Cub players publicly supported him, telling him that they couldn’t throw strikes in their first outing.

“It’s so encouraging when you’re a young guy,” said Ben. “You feel like you’re not alone when you get all this love from your teammates. It makes such a difference.”

Matz, who predicted Ben would be in the major leagues within five years of being drafted after he saw Ben as a late teenager, also offered him immediate support and encouragement. Matz “let me know I’m going to be okay,” said Brown. Matz told him he has “good stuff and I’m in a good spot.”

A soccer player at Clemson years ago, Ben’s father Jody Brown suggested that circumstances in baseball change quickly and “you have to have a very short memory.”

Ben made his debut at Wrigley Field, the Cubs historic home park, on April 3rd against the Colorado Rockies.

His parents trekked to Chicago for that outing as well.

“When we got to Chicago that first night, it was just after midnight,” Wilson-Brown said. “We turned that corner and saw Wrigley Field and it just took my breath away.”

She felt the same way her son did when they traveled to Cooperstown for the 12U tournament when he saw the immaculate fields.

At Wrigley, Ben came on in relief and pitched well, using the combination of his fastball and curveball to pitch four innings, allowing three hits and one run.

Ben’s first start came in San Diego, where he threw 4 2/3 innings without allowing the Padres to score.

A Red Sox fan growing up who had an enormous blanket of David Ortiz that filled most of one wall, Ben spoke after the game with Red Sox star-turned-analyst Pedro Martinez, who said on the show that Brown looked “sharp” and “clean.”

In his second start, Ben continued to impress, as he allowed one run on one hit in six innings against the Arizona Diamondbacks, the team that made it to last year’s World Series and that scored a record 14 runs in one inning in its home opener this year.

“It’s been a little bit of a roller coaster,” said Ben. He was pleased that he “threw the ball well” and left a “solid impression.”

With an earned run average down to 4.41 after his fourth game, Ben made a case for staying in the majors.

Getting there

The journey from East Setauket to the major league ballparks not only involved considerable work from Ben, but support from family, friends and coaches.

Indeed, Ben’s older brother James was instrumental in sharing his love for the game.

James “showed me how to be a ballplayer, how to wear my jersey right,” said Ben. “He toughened me up on the baseball field.”

Ben believes he “wouldn’t be in the big leagues” if his brother and father didn’t work with him every day, from hitting grounders and fly balls to him so he could practice his fielding to throwing a ball.

The Brown family appreciates the tireless support of numerous coaches, friends and family, who sometimes helped drive Ben to baseball events and encouraged him throughout his baseball growth.

Petrucci has watched many of Ben’s games over the years, reveling in the progress he’s made and wishing him well with each new opportunity.

When Ben was on the Phillies, he gave Petrucci a tee shirt with the words “Train to Reign.” Every time Ben pitched, Petrucci wore the shirt.

Playing for the Cubs has particular meaning for Maggie’s family, who, thanks to her stepfather Matt Pippin, are lifelong Cub fans.

Indeed, one of Ben and Maggie’s dog’s names is Wrigley.

When they were dating and Ben was still on the Phillies, Maggie gave him a Cubs shirt.

“I thought it was such a weird thing,” Ben recalls. “She gave me a shirt for a team I’m not playing for.”

When he was traded, it came “full circle. It’s all too good to be true,” Ben said.

Pippin learned that Ben was joining the Mets and recalled almost running off the road with excitement.

So, if a local restaurant decided to make a meal they named after him, the way the Se-Port Deli did for Matz, what should it be?

A large steak that comes from grass-fed beef with butter works for Ben, he said.

As for advice, Ben urged people who enter a field like baseball, with numerous competitors and obstacles, to work “harder than everybody else in the world,” especially when such a small percentage of people realize their baseball dreams. “When you want to do something that’s really difficult, lock in on the best path.”

Early on, Ben saw that path and pictured the future he is now living.

When he was 12, Ben joined one of his teams for a field trip to Shea Stadium. His mother asked him to pose for one more picture on the field before they left.

“Don’t worry” about the photo, Ben reassured her. “I’m going to be back here.”

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Above, the Condor telescope in New Mexico which is a model for a similar telescope Lanzetta will be building this year in Chile as a Fulbright Scholar. Photo courtesy of Condor Team

By Daniel Dunaief

Five years later, Kenneth Lanzetta is bringing a telescope to Chile.

Professor Kenneth Lanzetta, PhD
Photo courtesy SBU

In 2019, Lanzetta, who is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, was planning to install a sophisticated state-of-the-art telescope in Chile that could look deep into the dark night sky for low-surface brightness and point sources. The onset of Covid in early 2020, however, disrupted that plan, as Chile closed its borders, leaving him scrambling to find a new site.

“I looked for an alternative I could drive to,” said Lanzetta, as flying was strongly discouraged.

He settled on the Dark Sky New Mexico observatory near Animas to set up a Condor Array Telescope.

Lanzetta had various manufacturers ship components to the site. At the end of 2020, he, his wife Robin Root, and his daughter Ciara drove across the country.

He had originally intended to spend about two weeks in the state. After many problems and delays, he and his wife stayed for more than four months, until early 2021. Ciara returned to college in London in the middle of January.

Lanzetta and Root moved every two weeks, expecting that they would be able to return to Long Island. Each time, delays in the project extended their stay. They figured they visited almost every airbnb in the area.

“I spent Covid in a very isolated part of New Mexico and I didn’t have to be back in Stony Brook,” Lanzetta said. “I had the ability to teach online.”

A view created by Condor and computer technologies of extremely faint shells of ionized gas surrounding the dwarf nova Z Camelopardalis.
Photo from Kenneth M. Lanzetta

While the New Mexico site worked out better than he could have imagined, producing enough information to leave him “awash in data” as he works to publish his findings, Lanzetta is planning to spend the next academic year in Chile. He will split his time between Concepción, Santiago, San Pedro and Cerro Taco, which is where he will install the new Condor telescope at an altitude of 5,200 meters, or 17,060 feet at Atacama National Park.

Lanzetta will serve as a Fulbright Scholar for the 2024-2025 academic year.

The Fulbright scholarship “recognizes the potential of the ‘Condor Array Telescope’ that is based on a possibly paradigm shifting astronomical telescope technology,” Chang Kee Jung, Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, said in a statement. “Deploying Condor in Atacama, a premier site for telescopes, opens up a greater opportunity for discoveries.”

That altitude and the expected clear skies in the South American nation will give Lanzetta and his colleagues an opportunity to study extremely faint images that would otherwise be more challenging or even impossible to see from other locations. The good weather and dark conditions also help.

Kenneth Lanzetta in the Atacama Desert. Photo by Robin Root.

The park has a road for access and an optical fiber connection, which makes it possible for him to do what they want to do at the site.

The site is at a high enough altitude that Lanzetta will need to breathe bottled oxygen.

The Stony Brook scientist will build as much of the telescope as he can at a lower elevation, ship it to the site and bolt it in place.

The Condor telescope will use refracting optics from several smaller telescopes into the equivalent of one larger telescope that uses newer and faster complementary metal oxide semiconductor sensors.

Most, but not all, of the components of the telescope are off the shelf. The recent development of extremely capable CMOS sensors, which are used in cell phones, back up cameras for cars and in industry, were not available in an inexpensive commercial format as recently as five years ago.

What Lanzetta plans to do in Chile is replicate the successful effort in New Mexico to capture more light signals in space that are beyond the limits of what conventional telescopes can distinguish.

He plans to create a telescope that, when it functions as it should, can operate autonomously, allowing him to control it from anywhere in the world as it transmits data back to his computers at Stony Brook.

New Mexico results

Lanzetta recently returned from an international conference in Aspen, Colorado, where he presented several results.

Condor revealed intergalactic filaments, which might provide glimpses of the cosmic web. He is actively working on this.

Computer simulations of structure formation in the universe has shown how structure came to be from a universe that was initially smooth.

The simulations suggest dark matter is distributed in a hierarchical fashion, with superclusters, clusters and groups of galaxies connected by filamentary structures that resemble a cosmic web.

Lanzetta has been working to see glowing gas of the cosmic web and he and his colleagues believe it is within reach of the current and the new Condor Atacama.

Higher than Chile?

With the increased visibility at the higher altitude site in Chile, researchers recognize that gathering information even further up in the atmosphere increases the likelihood of finding images from faint objects.

At the Aspen conference, scientists discussed the possibility of launching telescopes designed to study the extremely faint universe on balloons, which might be faster and cheaper than attempting to do this from space.

A resident of Smithtown, Lanzetta lives with his wife Root, who is planning to spend the year in Chile with him. Lanzetta’s son Ryan is finishing his PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Washington, while his daughter Ciara is finishing her master’s degree in costume design at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

Growing up in Warminster, Pennsylvania, Lanzetta and his father Anthony used to build things together. When he was 13, Lanzetta had an advanced class radio license. His father helped put together a radio transmitter and receiver and they installed various antennas on the roof.

His father had an undergraduate degree in physics and worked as an engineer. With Ryan’s educational experience, the family has three generations of Lanzettas with degrees in physics.

Lanzetta’s father had a telescope that they used to look at the moon and Saturn. In 1969, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the moon, he recalls his father telling him the astronauts were too small to see.

“This is what I was going to do from the time I was conscious,” he said. “It was always the way it was going to be.” 

Indeed, Lanzetta realizes how “lucky I’ve been to be able to spend my entire life” doing this work.

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METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Everywhere we go, we are surrounded by sights, sounds, and smells. More often than not, other people need something from us, want to talk with or at us, and expect us to provide feedback, learn from them, acknowledge them or validate their existence.

At the same time, our texts, emails, social media apps, and others require checking, replying, reacting and thought.

Throughout the day, we aren’t just draining our cell phone’s battery, we are also draining our own battery. We need time for our nervous system to catch up, to take a break and to experience the world around us in a calmer way.

For me, that happened recently when I went to a religious service. I don’t go all that often even though I often walk away feeling refreshed.

These services offer an opportunity not only to disconnect from my phone for several hours, but also a chance to be present, centered, and focused.

The words and the songs are familiar, which other members of the congregation say or sing, helping me feel like I’m a part of a connected group.

During the service, I am focused on where I am, reading the same text as everyone else and reacting, as if by reflex, to some of the interactive speaking parts.

This occurs even when I travel, as I did recently to attend a service. I didn’t know most of the people in the room and yet we reacted and interacted for several hours as if we had grown up next to each other, played on the street with our neighbors, attended the same schools and shared the same hopes for ourselves and our children.

Some of the songs had slightly different melodies, but they were more of a variation on a theme than a journey into another religious, spiritual or musical genre.

During these times in a house of worship, I appreciate and enjoy the quieter voice of some of the speakers, who encourage me to think of myself and my world in different ways and who share a wonderful combination of thought, insight, perspective, and spiritual ideas.

While I listen to them, some thoughts I have that might otherwise not bubble up to the turbulent surface of my life, where a combination of bright sun, wind, and cross currents of thoughts, ideas, actions and deadlines create a potentially exciting but murkier picture, can receive attention.

Through these thoughts, I can make connections to earlier versions of myself, track where I am and where I’m heading, and think about people who helped shape who I am but are no longer in my life.

I can also delve more deeply into the kinds of questions and thoughts that don’t tend to help with an assignment or a deadline, pondering the nature of existence and the meaning of life

I can reflect on the amazing and inspirational people I am fortunate to know, and the exhausting but miraculous gift of our children, who inherit the world we helped shape or alter during the course of our lives.

One image often appears in my mind as I breathe, think and listen during the service: that is of a tree with the words “I was here.” When I was younger, I didn’t understand why anyone would cut into a tree to let the world know they were here.

Over time, I’ve thought about the cave drawings primitive man made, the graffiti that adds color and chaos to our world and those words in a tree in the same way. In those moments, people are declaring, the way Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did when they planted an American flag on the moon, that their journey through life brought them to this place and time. They are announcing and reaffirming themselves.

I’m not advocating for carving anything into a tree or for painting graffiti. Instead, by sitting, standing and singing together, we are announcing to the other people in the room and to ourselves not just that “I am here,” but that “We are here.” While we might take that for granted much of the time, a religious service gives us the chance to marvel at the wonder of the connections we’ve made and at our existence and all it does and could mean.

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Joshua Homer. Photo by Constance Burkin

By Daniel Dunaief

Even as some antibiotics and anti cancer treatments help beat back infections and diseases such as cancer, pathogens and diseases can develop resistance that render these treatments less effective.

Researchers at pharmaceutical companies and universities spend considerable time trying to ensure therapies continue to work. Companies make derivatives of existing drugs or they combine drugs to reduce resistance. They also develop new agents to combat drug-resistant tumors.

Using a chemical process that won his mentor K. Barry Sharpless a Nobel Prize, John Moses, a Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, has deployed a new version of click chemistry to assemble biologically active compounds quickly and effectively, which could be used for further development into potential therapies.

Akin to fastening a seatbelt or assembling LEGO blocks, click chemistry benefits from an efficient system to create reliable end products, with the additional advantage of minimizing waste products or impurities.

Recently, Research Investigator Joshua Homer, who has been in Moses’s lab for over three years, published a paper in Chemical Science in which he created several libraries of over 150 compounds. He screened these for activity in anticancer or antibiotic assays.

The newer click process, called Accelerated SuFEx Click Chemistry, or ASCC, involves “less synthetic steps,” said Homer. ASCC can use functional groups like alcohols, that are naturally found in numerous commercially available compounds, directly. Homer can and has used commercially available alkyl and aryl alcohols as fragments in this application of ASCC.

This approach “allows us to explore chemical space so much faster,” Homer said.

In an email, Moses suggested that the paper “demonstrates that SuFEx chemistry can be a feasible and speedy approach compared to traditional methods.”

To be sure, the products could still be a long way from concept to bedside benefit.

“It’s important to note that while the chemistry itself shows promise, the actual application in drug development is complex and can take many years,” Moses added.

The research contributed to finding compounds that may be promising in treating various conditions and represent initial findings and potential starting points for further development, Homer added.

Specifically, Homer took inspiration from the structure of combrestastatin A4 when developing microtubule targeting agents.

The chemicals he produced had good activity against drug-resistant cancer cell lines that resist other treatment options.

Homer also modified the structure of dapsone, generating a derivative with greater activity against a strain of M. tuberculosis that is otherwise resistant to dapsone. 

“Strains of bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics,” said Homer. Derivatization of antibiotic structures can generate compounds that maintain activity.

Breast cancer

In creating these compounds, Homer bolted on different commercially available fragments and developed potential nano-molar treatments that could be effective against triple-negative breast cancer.

At this point, he has evaluated two lead agents in two dimensional cell culture and against patient-derived organoids. Homer did this work in collaboration with the lab of CSHL Cancer Center director David Tuveson.

Organoids can help gauge the potential response of a patient’s tumor to various treatments.

Homer found that eight of the microtubule targeting agents were more potent than colchicine against HCT-15. This cancer cell line, he explained, is known to have upregulated efflux, which is a major cause of drug resistance in cancer cells.

His compounds maintained a similar potency between two dimensional cell lines and organoids. Often, compounds are less potent in organoids, which makes this a promising discovery.

Making molecules and screening them for function to discover lead candidates is one of the first steps in the drug discovery process, with considerable optimization and regulatory steps necessary to generate a drug for the clinic.

Promising treatments sometimes also cause cellular damage in healthy tissue, which reduces the potential benefit of any new treatment. Effective cancer drugs are selective for cancer cells over normal cells.

At this point, the molecules Homer creates involve a search for function, he said. “Once we identify the reaction, we can remake our molecule to confirm it is our compound that is causing a reaction.”

Click chemistry doesn’t necessarily lead to solutions, but it enables scientists and drug companies to create and test molecules more rapidly and with considerably less financial investment.

Click solutions

Click chemistry has affected the way Homer thinks about problems outside the lab.

“I think more about doing things quickly and how to tackle the issues we face, rather than using brute force in one direction,” he said. “We can go in lots of directions and probe. We should be looking at all sorts of baskets at once to solve the issues we have.”

Originally from Tauranga, New Zealand, Homer enjoys traveling around the country, visiting new cities and interacting with different people. A resident of Huntington, Homer is looking forward to an upcoming visit from his parents Dave and Debbie and his aunt Carol, who are making their first trip to the continental United States.

“One of my favorite things about being a scientist is that I can bring my parents out of their comfort zone,” he said. His parents live on a small lifestyle block with several sheep and chickens.

Moses lauded the contributions Homer has made to the lab, including providing mentorship to other students.

As for click chemistry, Homer appreciates how the reactions create opportunities even for those without advanced backgrounds in chemistry.

Click chemistry creates the opportunity to help non-scientists understand scientific concepts more easily.

“I can give a high school student the reagents and substrates and they can reliably make biologically active anticancer agents or antibiotics,” he said. “That helps connect science and drug discovery with the community.”

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METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

If your daughter or son is about to graduate from high school in a few months, congratulations.

You will undoubtedly reflect on the many wonderful things, and maybe some that were not so magnificent, along the way, as he or she grew up, embraced you, emulated the way you talked, walked or ordered dinner at a restaurant, pushed you away, decided your existence was embarrassing, your breath was intolerable and your voice was like nails on a chalkboard, until he or she rediscovered some of your finer, or at least more tolerable, qualities.

Yes, the relationship between parents and children can and often does move closer and further away. If we’re lucky, the invisible rubber band only stretches so far before parent, child or both close the distance.

Some time this summer, those spectacular people who made you so proud will likely push you away again.

This, from what we experienced and what others have told us, is completely natural and is a way for them to assert their independence and prepare you for the moment you go up to their suddenly empty room and they are no longer in it screaming at you to “Get out, leave me alone, can’t you bother someone else?”

It’s a wonderful, terrible reality when their room is as clean or messy as it was when they left it, with their trophies, ribbons, pictures or abandoned former toys waiting, as if in an animated movie, until a young family who doesn’t mind hand-me-downs revives them.

These graduates will receive advice over the next several months. A graduation speaker will likely offer them important nuggets about being true to themselves, about challenging themselves to do something safe but outside their comfort zone, and about not being afraid to fail.

And a particularly helpful graduation speaker might also urge them to clap for you and for everyone else who made this achievement possible.

The speaker will suggest that they stay in touch with you when they go away. That, as it turns out, is not as easy as it sounds, nor is it a guarantee.

Not hearing from your kids for any length of time can and often is somehow even more challenging than the time they and their friends removed their footwear after a sporting event and made the air so toxic in a confined car that we opened the window in 20 degree weather so we could breathe.

A graduation speaker, friends, and family might suggest that you establish a minimum of a once-a-week call. That is good advice and can and does establish guidelines and expectations for a child you’re sending out into a world with new challenges and, at times, unfortunate temptations.

“Sure, let’s go to a party on Tuesday night. I have a few hours to study after the party before my midterm on Wednesday at 8 am.”

Whoops, bad idea, but they’ll learn that lesson the hard way.

Amid all the other advice or rules parents might give their children before they wish them the best and try to stop picturing them as five-year-olds toddling off with their colorful backpacks into kindergarten is to make sure they stay in regular contact.

The rules we established when our children were four and we didn’t allow them to cross streets without holding our hands might change when they go to college, but we still have an opportunity to create new ones for our children.

No one suggested we encourage our children or our nephews to call us when they were walking to class. And yet, in those moments when they called to catch up, hearing their voices on the way to school, with the sound of birds chirping in the background, gave us an opportunity to connect.

Not only that, those calls helped narrow the geographic distance between our nieces, nephews and children and us while also allowing the rubber band to slacken, bringing us closer to these people we love unconditionally who will, hopefully, one day bring whatever family can attend together to celebrate another graduation.

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Northwell Family Health Center at Huntington. Photos courtesy Northwell Healt
Northwell Family Health Center at Huntington. Photos courtesy Northwell Healt
Northwell Family Health Center at Huntington. Photos courtesy Northwell Healt
Northwell Family Health Center at Huntington. Photos courtesy Northwell Healt
Northwell Family Health Center at Huntington. Photos courtesy Northwell Healt
Northwell Family Health Center at Huntington. Photos courtesy Northwell Healt

By Daniel Dunaief

Different name, different location, same mission.

On Monday, April 8, Northwell Health opened its family health center at 1572 New York Avenue in Huntington Station. The center will replace the Dolan Family Health Center in Greenlawn.

The new center, which occupies a space formerly held by Capital One Bank, will provide primary care, as well as multi-specialty care for women.

Easily accessible by bus lines, the center is “in the heart of the community we serve” with the majority of the expected 30,000 patient visits each year coming from Huntington Station, said Lee Raifrman, Assistant Vice President of Operations for Huntington Hospital and the Northwell Family Center Health Center. Instead of having patients travel to the center, “we’re moving to them.”

The center anticipates around 30,000 visits per year.

“The new location, nestled in the heart of the neighborhood it serves and conveniently close to bus lines, ensures that our care remains accessible to all,” Stephen Bello, regional executive director of Northwell’s Eastern region, said in a statement.

The almost 18,000 square-foot building will provide pediatric care, adult/ family medicine, OB/GYN, ophthalmology, podiatry, gastroenterology, orthopedics and infectious disease care specific to HIV.

The center’s prenatal care assistance program, which offers expanded Medicaid coverage for pregnant women and children under the age of 19, will continue to operate. The center also provides outreach through its Women, Infants and Children program, a supplemental nutriton offering that features nutritious foods for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding and postpartum women, infants and children through the age of five.

The center also features a Nutrition Pathways Program, which is a collaboration dating to 2020 with Island Harvest that offers personalized nutrition counseling sessions with a registered dietician, access to nutritious foods from the on-site healthy food pantry, referrals to community resources and assistance with SNAP enrollment.

Through Nutrition Pathways, the center screens patients for social determinants of health.

“One of the areas we found that’s becoming more prevalent, unfortunately,” said Raifman. The center directs patients who are food insecure to a registered dietician, who can not only help balance food intake, but who can also manage the financial aspect of finding food.

“Better eating equals improved outcomes,” said Raifman.

Staff at the center reflects the diversity of the patient population.

About 19 percent of the patients are self pay, while a small percentage are on medicare. The center accepts many insurance plans, including all types of medicaid.

Staff at the Family Health Center will reflect a staff that reflects the patient population.

“Our mission is clear: to elevate the health of the communities we serve,” Nick Fitterman, Executive Director of Huntington Hospital said in a statement. “From our homeless to immigrant patients, we open our doors to all, offering care that’s not just accessible but compassionate.”

The hours for the center will be the same as they were in the previous location, opening 8:30 am to 5 pm on Monday and Wednesday and 8 am to 8 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Northwell executives would like to build similar healthcare facilities in other places within its geographic range.

The health care provider “anticipates replicating this model throughout the system in other under-served communities,” said Raifman.

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Brookhaven Lab biologist Meng Xie and postdoctoral fellow Dimiru Tadesse with sorghum plants like those used in this study. Note that these plants are flowering, unlike those the scientists engineered to delay flowering indefinitely to maximize their accumulation of biomass. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/ BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

A traffic light turns green and a driver can make a left turn. Similarly, plants on one path can change direction when they receive a particular signal. In the case of the sorghum plant, the original direction involves growth. A series of signals, however, sends it on a different trajectory, enabling the plant to flower and reproduce, halting the growth cycle.

Brookhaven Lab biologist Meng Xie and postdoctoral fellow Dimiru Tadesse in the lab. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/ BNL

Understanding and altering this process could allow the plant to grow for a longer period of time. Additional growth increases the biomass of this important energy crop, making each of these hearty plants, which can survive in semiarid regions and can tolerate relatively high temperatures, more productive when they are converted into biomass in the form of ethanol, which is added to gasoline.

Recently, Brookhaven National Laboratory biologist Meng Xie teamed up with Million Tadege, Professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Science at Oklahoma State University, among others, to find genes and the mechanism that controls flowering in sorghum.

Plants that produce more biomass have a more developed root system, which can sequester more carbon and store it in the soil.

The researchers worked with a gene identified in other studies called SbGhd7 that extends the growth period when it is overexpressed.

Validating the importance of that gene, Xie and his colleagues were able to produce about three times the biomass of a sorghum plant compared to a control that flowered earlier and produced grain.

The plants they grew didn’t reach the upper limit of size and, so far, the risk of extensive growth  that might threaten the survival of the plant is unknown.

Researchers at Oklahoma State University conducted the genetic work, while Xie led the molecular mechanistic studies at BNL.

At OSU, the researchers used a transgenic sorghum plant to over express the flowering-control gene, which increased the protein it produced. These plants didn’t flower at all.

“This was a dramatic difference from what happens in rice plants when they overexpress their version of this same gene,” Xie explained in a statement. “In rice, overexpression of this gene delays flowering for eight to 20 days — not forever!”

In addition to examining the effect of changing the concentration of the protein produced, Xie also explored the way this protein recognized and bound to promoters of its targets to repress target expression.

Xie did “a lot of molecular studies to understand the underlying mechanism, which was pretty hard to perform in sorghum previously,” he said.

Xie worked with protoplasts, which are plant cells whose outer wall has been removed. He inserted a so-called plasmid, which is a small piece of DNA, into their growth medium, which the plants added to their DNA.

The cells can survive in a special incubation/ growth medium, enabling the protoplasts to incorporate the plasmid.

Sorghum plant. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/ BNL

Xie attached a small protein to the gene so they could monitor the way it interacted in the plant. They also added antibodies that bound to this protein, which allowed them to cut out and observe the entire antibody-protein DNA complex to determine which genes were involved in this critical growth versus flowering signaling pathway.

The flowering repressor gene bound to numerous targets. 

Xie and his BNL colleagues found the regulator protein’s binding site, which is a short DNA sequence within the promoter for each target gene.

Conventional wisdom in the scientific community suggested this regulator protein would affect one activator gene. Through his molecular mechanistic studies, Xie uncovered the interaction with several genes.

“In our model, we found that [the signaling] is much more complicated,” he said. The plant looks like it can “bypass each [gene] to affect flowering.”

Regulation appears to have crosstalk and feedback loops, he explained.

The process of coaxing these plants to continue to grow provides a one-way genetic street, which prevents the plant from developing flowers and reproducing.

These altered plants would prevent any cross contamination with flowering plants, which would help scientists and, potentially down the road, farmers meet regulatory requirements to farm this source of biomass.

Ongoing efforts

The targets he found, which recognize the short sequence of DNA, also appears in many other flowering genes.

Xie said the group’s hypothesis is that this regulator in the form of this short sequence of DNA also may affect flowering genes in other plants, such as maize and rice.

Xie is continuing to work with researchers at OSU to study the function of the numerous targets in the flowering and growth processes. 

He hopes to develop easy ways to control flowering which might include spraying a chemical that blocks flowering and removing it to reactive reproduction. This system would be helpful in controlling cross contamination. He also would like to understand how environmental conditions affect sorghum, which is work he’s doing in the lab. Down the road, he might also use the gene editing tool CRISPR to induce expression at certain times.

Honing the technique to pursue this research took about four years to develop, while Xie and his students spent about a year searching for the molecular mechanisms involved.

Rough beginning

Xie departed from his post doctoral position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in March of 2020, when he started working at BNL. That was when Covid altered people’s best-laid plans, as he couldn’t come to the lab to start conducting his research for about six months. 

Born in Shanxi province in China, Xie and his wife Jingdan Niu live in Yaphank and have a two-year old son, Felix Xie.

When he was growing up, Xie was interested in math, physics, chemistry and biology. As an undergraduate in Beijing, Xie started to learn more about biology and technology, which inspired him to enter this field.

Biotechnology “can change the world,” Xie said.

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Tobias Janowitz and Hassal Lee. Photo by Caryn Koza

By Daniel Dunaief

Before treatments for any kind of health problem or disease receive approval, they go through a lengthy, multi-step process. This system should keep any drugs that might cause damage, have side effects or be less effective than hoped from reaching consumers.

In the world of cancer care, where patients and their families eagerly await solutions that extend the quality and quantity of life, these clinical trials don’t always include the range of patients who might receive treatments.

Hassal Lee. Photo by Caryn Koza

That’s according to a recent big-picture analysis in the lab of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Tobias Janowitz. Led by clinical fellow Hassal Lee, these researchers compared where clinical trials occurred with the population near those centers.

Indeed, 94 percent of United States cancer trials involve 78 major trial centers, which were, on average, in socioeconomically more affluent areas with higher proportions of self-identified white populations compared with the national average.

“We should test drugs on a similar population on which we will be using the drugs,” said Lee. In addition to benefiting under represented groups of patients who might react differently to treatments, broadening the population engaged in clinical trials could offer key insights into cancer. Patient groups that respond more or less favorably to treatment could offer clues about the molecular biological pathways that facilitate or inhibit cancer.

Janowitz suggested that including a wider range of patients in trials could also help establish trust and a rapport among people who might otherwise feel had been excluded.

The research, which Lee, Janowitz and collaborators published recently as a brief in the journal JAMA Oncology, involved using census data to determine the socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds of patient populations within one, two and three hour driving distances to clinical trials.

The scientists suggested researchers and drug companies could broaden the patient population in clinical trials by working with cancer centers to enlist trial participants in potential life-extending treatments through satellite hospitals.

Project origins

This analysis grew out of a study Janowitz conducted during the pandemic to test the effectiveness of the gerd-reducing over-the-counter drug famotidine on symptoms of Covid-19.

Janowitz generally studies the whole body’s reaction to disease, with a focus on cancer associated cachexia, where patients lose considerable weight and muscle mass. During the pandemic, however, Janowitz, who has an MD and PhD, used his scientific skills to understand a life-threatening disease. He designed a remote clinical trial study in which participants took famotidine and monitored their symptoms.

While the results suggested that the antacid shortened the severity and duration of symptoms for some people, it also offered a window into the way a remote study increased the diversity of participants. About 1/3 of the patients in that population were African American, while about 1/4 were Hispanic.

Lee joined Janowitz’s lab in early 2022, towards the end of the famotidine study. 

“The diverse patient population in the remote trial made us wonder if commuting and access by travel were important factors that could be quantified and investigated more closely,” Janowitz explained.

Lee and Janowitz zoomed out to check the general picture for cancer clinical trials.

To be sure, the analysis has limitations. For starters, the threshold values for travel time and diversity are proof of concept examples, the scientists explained in their paper. Satellite sites and weighted enrollment also were not included in their analysis. The cost other than time investment for potential clinical trial participants could present a barrier that the researchers didn’t quantify or simulate.

Nonetheless, the analysis suggests clinical trials for cancer care currently occur in locations that aren’t representative of the broader population.

The work “leveraged freely available data and it was [Lee’s] effort and dedication, supported by excellent collaborators that we had, that made the study possible,” Janowitz explained.

Since the paper was published, Cancer Center directors and epidemiologists have reached out to the CSHL scientists.

Searching for clinical research

After Lee, who was born in Seoul, South Korea and moved to London when she was five, completed her MD and PhD at the University of Cambridge, she wanted to apply the skills she’d learned to a real-world research questions.

She found what she was looking for in Janowitz’s lab, where she not only considered the bigger picture question of clinical trial participation, but also learned about coding, which is particularly helpful when analyzing large amounts of data.

Lee was particularly grateful for the help she received from Alexander Bates, who, while conducting his own research in a neighboring lab in the department of Neurobiology at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, offered coding coaching.

Lee described Bates as a “program whiz kid.”

A musician who enjoys playing classical and jazz on the piano, Lee regularly listened to music while she was in the lab. Those hours added up, with Spotify sending her an email indicating she was one of the top listeners in the United Kingdom. The music service invited her to an interview at their office to answer questions about the app, which she declined because she had moved to the United States by then.

The top medical student at Cambridge for three years, Lee said she enhanced her study habits when she felt unsure of herself as a college student.

She credits having great mentors and supportive friends for her dedication to work.

Lee found pharmacology one of the more challenging subjects in medical school, in part because of the need to remember a large number of drugs and how they work.

She organized her study habits, dividing the total number of drugs she needed to learn by the number of days, which helped her focus on studying a more manageable number each day.

Lee will be a resident at Mt. Sinai Hospital later this year and is eager to continue her American and New York journey.

As for the work she did with Janowitz, she hopes it “really helps people think about maintaining diversity in clinical trials using data that’s already available.”

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METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

We have learned to be impatient. Combining our instant gratification experiences with the information, access and communication at our fingertips, we have less tolerance to wait for anything.

When we find out we’ll have to stand in line for a meal for more than half an hour, we dive into our phones, searching for other nearby restaurants where we can eat within 10 minutes or less.

When we wait on the phone for customer service, we shake our heads, bite our lips, roll our eyes and sigh repeatedly while waiting for someone who encourages us to try the app or to use the automated system next time.

We want life to be at least as good if not better today than yesterday and we want that now. It’s a tough time to have to demonstrate patience and to show that we understand that life involves processes.

When we recover from an injury, we want to look at the damaged part of our bodies and, like Superman, somehow fix it by glaring at it or willing the cells involved in the process to work faster and to allow us to run on a stress fracture in our foot or to self-heal a torn rotator cuff so we can go back out and play tennis or softball again.

It’s tough to celebrate or appreciate small victories because we know where the finish line of our recovery is, where the endpoint of our request is and whatever we want immediately.

Perhaps we need to recalibrate our expectations to understand and appreciate what small wins look like. While we know what we’d like with the end result, we can see small improvements as a way to enjoy the moment and to understand and appreciate how we’re on the right track.

In recovering from my stress fracture, I have been impossibly impatient, staring at the treadmill the way I used to long for an ice cream sundae with hot caramel and chocolate sprinkles.

The treadmill, where I overdid my exercise routine and created the stress fracture, had been a source of relief.

Several times over the last few weeks, I was tempted to see if I could restart my running, only to decide, reluctantly, that I would be jeopardizing my longer term recovery.

Instead, I limited my walking and have appreciated how much better my foot feels when I maneuver around the house. The recovery isn’t complete, but the improvement, which seemed imperceptible at first, is now noticeable.

Recently, on a short walk with my dog, I spoke with a friend whose mother was celebrating a milestone birthday. Paul was frustrated with the lower quality of life that his mother is enduring, as she struggles with her memory and doesn’t enjoy many of the same things, like food and family, that used to bring her pleasure.

Paul wondered at the regular frustration he felt at the incremental losses he, his mother and their family felt each day.

While both my brothers are doctors, as was my father, I have no medical training, which makes it impossible for me to offer an informed opinion on the cognitive and physical processes that occur at the end of people’s lives.

That didn’t stop me from suggesting ways to find small wins each day, which may depend on the mental state of his mother.

At some point, those wins, whether they involve a memory of something meaningful to his mother, a card game that reaches completion, or a song she enjoys hearing can become the focus of a visit, rather than the parts she and they lose, can become the new yardstick for a win.

Impatience for something better immediately is a luxury, as are so many other aspects of life, we take for granted.

When the light turns green, we want to make the light so we can reach our destination. At the same time, a red light can give us a few extra seconds to look at the spring flowers blooming around someone’s house, to hear children shouting with delight as they pile into a car on the way to their youth soccer game, or to extend a conversation that might otherwise end when we step out of the car.

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From left, Juan Jimenez and Sanjaya Senanayake in front of CO2 and Methane Conversion Reactor Units in the Chemistry Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

If we had carbon dioxide glasses, we would see the gas everywhere, from the air we, our pets, and our farm animals exhale to the plumes propelled through the smokestacks of factories and the tail pipes of gas-powered cars.

Juan Jimenez. Photo by Kevin Coughlin/BNL

A waste product that scientists are trying to reduce and remove, carbon dioxide is not only a part of the photosynthesis that allows plants to convert light to energy, but it also can be a raw material to create usable and useful products.

Juan Jimenez, a postdoctoral researcher and Goldhaber Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory, has been working with carbon dioxide for the last 10 years, in his undergraduate work at CUNY City College of New York, for his PhD at the University of South Carolina and since he arrived at BNL in 2020. 

Jimenez contributed to a team led by engineers at the University of Cincinnati to create a way to improve the electrochemical conversion of this greenhouse gas into ethylene, which is an important ingredient in making plastics as well as in manufacturing textiles and other products.

University of Cincinnati Associate Professor Jingjie Wu recently published work in the journal Nature Chemical Engineering in which they used a modified copper catalyst to improve the electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide into ethylene.

“I’m always looking out to collaborate with groups doing cutting edge research,” explained Jimenez, who spearheaded the research at the National Synchrotron Lightsource II. “Since the work on CO2 is a global concern we require a global team” to approach solutions.

Jimenez is fascinated with carbon dioxide in part because it is such a stable molecule, which makes reacting it with other elements to transform it into something useful energy intensive.

A modified copper catalyst helped convert more carbon dioxide, which breaks down into two primary carbon-based products through electrocatalysis, into ethylene, which has been called the “world’s most important chemical.”

“Our research offers essential insights into the divergence between ethylene and ethanol during electrochemical CO2 reduction and proposes a viable approach to directing selectivity toward ethylene,” UC graduate student Zhengyuan Li and lead author on the paper, said in a statement.

A previous graduate student of Wu, Li helped conduct some of the experiments at BNL.

This modified process increases the selective production of ethylene by 50 percent, Wu added.

The process of producing ethylene not only increases the production of ethylene, but it also provides a way to recycle carbon dioxide.

In a statement, Wu suggested this process could one day produce ethylene through green energy instead of fossil fuels.

Jimenez’s role

Scientists who want to use the high-tech equipment at the NSLS-II need to apply for time through a highly competitive process before experimental runs.

Jimenez led the proposal to conduct the research on site at the QAS and ISS beamlines.

Several of the elements involved in this reaction are expensive, including platinum, iridium, silver and gold, which makes them prohibitively expensive if they are used inefficiently. By using single atoms of the metal as the sites, these scientists achieved record high rates of reaction using the least possible amount of material.

The scientists at BNL were able to see the chemistry happening in real time, which validated the prediction for the state of the copper.

Jimenez’s first reaction to this discovery was excitement and the second was that “you can actually take a nap. Once you get the data you’re looking for, you can relax and you could shut your eyes.”

Working at NSLS-II, which is one of only three or four similar such facilities in the United States and one of only about a dozen in the world, inspires Jimenez, where he appreciates the opportunity to do “cutting edge” research.

“These experiments are only done a few times in the career of the average scientist,” Jimenez explained. “Having continuous access to cutting edge techniques inspires us to tackle bigger, more complicated problems.”

In the carbon dioxide research, the scientists drilled down on the subject, combining the scope of what could have been two or three publications into a single paper.

Indeed, Nature Chemical Engineering, which is an online only publication in the Nature family of scientific journals, just started providing scientific papers in the beginning of this year.

“Being part of the inaugural editions is exciting, specifically coming from a Chemical Engineering background” as this work was published along with some of the “leading scientists in the field,” said Jimenez.

New York state of mind

Born in Manhattan, Jimenez lived in Queens near Jamaica until he was 11. His family moved into Nassau County near the current site of the UBS Arena.

During his PhD at the University of South Carolina, Jimenez spent almost a year in Japan as a visiting doctoral student, where he learned x-ray absorption spectroscopy from one of the leading scientists in the field, Professor Kiyotaka Asakura. Based in Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, Jimenez enjoyed touring much of the country.

A resident of Middle Island, Jimenez likes to run and swim. He enjoys cooking food from all over the world, including Spanish, Indian and Japanese cuisines.

As a scientist, he has the “unique luxury” of working with an international audience, he said. “If you are having lunch and you see someone eating amazing Indian food, you can talk to them, learn a bit about their culture, how they make their food, and then you can make it.”

As for his work, Jimenez explains that he is drawn to study carbon dioxide not just for the sake of science, but also because it creates a “pressing environmental need.”

He has also been looking more at methane, which is another potent greenhouse gas that is challenging to activate.

Ideally, at some point, he’d like to contribute to work that leads to processes that produce negative carbon dioxide use.

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