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Daniel Dunaief

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By Daniel Dunaief

While wind is nice and effective, moving water is even more promising, especially in the future of alternative energies.

Ali Khosronejad. Photo from SBU

That’s because water is almost 1,000 times more dense than air, which means that the movement of the wet stuff due to tides or storms could produce a considerable amount of energy.

Indeed, “if we can effectively harness the energy from moving waters in our national waterways alone, it could provide enough energy to power the whole country,” said Ali Khosronejad, Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Stony Brook University.

Khosronejad recently received $2 million as part of a $9.7 million four-year Department of Energy grant to study and develop ways to turn the movement of water into usable energy.

“I’m very optimistic about the future of this” approach, he said.

The DOE funds, which will involve a collaboration with East Carolina University, the University of New Hampshire, and Lehigh University, is a part of the new Atlantic Marine Energy Center, for which Khosronejad is a co-director.

The funds at Stony Brook will support hiring researchers at numerous levels, from post doctoral scientists, to graduate students and undergraduates. The money will also support adding new computer modules and expanding storage at the supercomputer. 

Stony Brook will also tap into these funds to enable travel for these new hires, to help them interact in person with their collaborators from other universities.

The combined effort at these academic centers will be dedicated to researching ocean energy technology, education and outreach. 

Researchers will work in the field, the laboratory and with computers on these ocean energy projects. They will seek to use wave energy and tidal energy conversion through such efforts as wave energy converters and tidal turbine farms.

This image depicts simulated turbulence in a waterway where a virtual tidal farm can be installed. The Stony Brook research team will use such simulations to investigate potential renewable ocean energy options. Image from Ali Khosronejad

The wave-energy converter floats on the seawater surface and uses the energy from the up and down motion of the water surface to produce electrical energy.

Researchers around the world are working to improve the efficiency of tidal turbine farms. Khosronejad described the effort as being in its infancy.

A good portion of the current project involves finding ways to optimize the positioning and layout of turbines in tidal farms. In his team, Khosronejad will work on the development of new artificial intelligence approaches to optimize the positioning and layout of turbines in tidal farms.

Stony Brook’s role in this project will involve working with computers.

In his research group, Khosronejad will work with supercomputers. His effort involves working to develop high-fidelity mathematical models that can address sediment transport and sediment-laden flows in tidal farms. 

Scientists at the University of New Hampshire and ECU are involved in addressing environmental concerns.

In the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stony Brook, co-principal investigators Fang Luo, Associate Professor and Peng Zhang, Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering will work with computers and laboratories for micro-grid software and hardware research, respectively.

Ali Khosronejad, right, with former graduate student Kevin Flora, who earned his PhD in 2021

Working with Lehigh University, Khosronejad is doing high fidelity simulations, to replicate what researchers in the field at the University of New Hampshire and the Coastal Studies Institute at ECU are studying.

“We validate and develop artificial intelligence for design optimization of these tidal farms,” Khosronejad explained. The goal is to optimize the design of hydrokinetic turbines in estuaries and coastal areas that can create tidal farms.

The collaboration will coordinate with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, European Marine Energy Centre and Old Dominion University.

The first year of the project involves hiring, training graduates and undergraduates, setting up the foundation, and beginning the infrastructure upgrade.

“The training part is important,” Khosronejad said. “This will be the next workforce. The infrastructure will stay there for the next 10 years” so the university can use it in a host of other projects.

Khosronejad is encouraged by the financial commitment from the Department of Energy. “They understand how important it is, which is why they are investing a lot in this,” he said. Some of these tidal farms are already working in the East River, between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island.

Wind turbines

At the same time, Khosronejad is continuing a wind turbine project he started with Fotis Sotiropoulos, the former dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook who is now Provost at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Khosronejad is now the principal investigator on that $1.1 million project and is continuing to work with Sotiropoulos, who officially left the project but is still volunteering to participate in its research activities. The scientists are working on how to use artificial intelligence to enhance the design of wind turbines.

Computer programs can alter the angle of the blades for the offshore wind farms where they attempt to use a control system to pitch the blades automatically to reduce the wind load during highly turbulent wind flows.

Changing the angle of attack of the blade can lower the loads and save money that would otherwise go to repairing blades that cracked or developed weaknesses amid strong winds, Khosronejad said.

The researchers presented their results at the American Physical Society meeting in Phoenix just before Thanksgiving. 

The researchers are trying to balance between using the turbine to generate energy and preventing the force of the winds from damaging the system.

When wind speeds are up to 25 miles per hour, the system uses the full power of the wind to maximize energy production. At speeds above that, the turbulent wind can damage the rotor and gearbox. The blades are pitched to reduce the angular velocity, which is known as self-preservation mode. At speeds over 55 miles per hour, the turbine stops working to produce no energy and avoid significant damage to the rotors and gearbox.

Generally, such federal research projects involve sharing results publicly and with the industry sector. The goal is to share science that enables the production of reliable energy.

 

 

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By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Dogs need to go outside, regardless of the temperature. My dog, who has a thick coat of hair, loves the winter and is perfectly happy to linger outside, especially when it’s close to freezing. When the grass is covered with frost, he slowly lowers his right cheek and does a lawn dive, bringing the rest of his body piece by piece down onto the cold, wet surface.

Once he’s completely on the ground, he rolls onto his back, using the blades of grass and the water and ice to scratch his back, while snorting with delight. With the eye that isn’t pressed into the ground, he stares at me, waiting for me to give up the ghost on getting some exercise or coming back inside quickly. When I reach down to pet him, I can almost see him smirk as he wags his tail triumphantly.

This month, he and I have seen some unusual sights. When I see something unusual, I try to take out my phone, but my reaction time, and all the extra material in my pocket, makes that a largely ineffective effort.

Even when I do manage to take out the camera and point it in the general direction of something interesting, the pictures typically disappoint, because my dog who hates to move suddenly gets the urge to pull just as I’m snapping the photo, leaving me with a blurry image of the road.

A few days ago, we were at the top of our street at dusk, near one of my dog’s favorite places to poop. In fact, I can take him on a four-mile walk and, within a tenth of a mile of our home, he finds his favorite blades of grass, takes his usual tentative steps, turns away from me — he needs privacy — and does his business.

This time, though, just as he was approaching his familiar spot, a hawk passed by only a few feet from my head, giving me a chance to look him, and the object he was carrying, squarely in the eyes.

The hawk was holding a squirrel, which seemed especially odd to me given the relative size of the two animals. The squirrel wasn’t moving but was clearly alive. When I told my family about it, they were sympathetic to the squirrel.

A few days later, walking toward the other end of the block, my dog and I observed a blow-up Frosty on one end of a lawn and a blow-up Santa on the other rise slowly from the ground as air flowed slowly into them.

My dog, whose fear of unusual inanimate objects builds around Halloween and the December holidays, stood at attention and considered announcing his presence with authority to objects that can’t, and don’t, react to his deep bark.

Fortunately, he only pulled his lips back slightly and lifted his tail, allowing the neighbors to enjoy their dark, quiet evening without the sound of a panicked pooch on a poop walk.

A few minutes later, I studied the stars at a distance when a light appeared in the sky, flashed toward the horizon and disappeared. Never having seen a shooting star before, I was mesmerized.

When I returned and shared the story, my son, who doesn’t seem too keen on superstition but is clearly aware of pop culture, asked if I made a wish. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity for help from anywhere, I did. Maybe by next December, I’ll let you know if it came true!

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From left, Daniele Rosado and Ullas Pedmale examine a sample of the model plant Arabidopsis. Photo courtesy of Ullas Pedmale

By Daniel Dunaief

Many plants are in an arms race akin to the developers of skyscrapers eager to get the most light for their prized penthouse apartments. Only, instead of trying to collect rent from well-heeled humans, these plants are trying to get the most sun, from which they create energy through photosynthesis.

Plants are so eager to get to the coveted sunlight that the part growing towards the light sends a distress signal to the roots when they are in the shade. While that might help an individual plant in the short term, it can create such shallow and ineffective roots that the plant becomes vulnerable to unfavorable weather. They also can’t get as many nutrients and water from the ground.

This is problematic for farmers, who want plants that grow in the sun, but that don’t sacrifice the development of their roots in the shade. Ullas Pedmale, Assistant Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, is working to lend a hand.

Pedmale, who recently published research in the journal Plant Physiology, is studying the signals the shoots, or the parts of the plants either in the sunlight or the shade, send to the roots.

Pedmale and postdoctoral researcher Daniele Rosado, who is the first author on the recent paper, explored the genes that turned on in the roots of the model plant Arabidopsis and tomato plants when these plants were in the shade.

When plants are in the shade, they “prioritize shoot growth and try to outcompete the neighboring plants,” said Rosado. “That’s when root development is compromised.”

Among the genes that are active when plants are in the shade is a family of genes called WRKYs, which affect gene expression and cause stunted growth in the roots.

WRKY genes respond to stress. Keeping WRKY genes on all the time, even when a plant is in the sun, caused stunted growth of the roots. WRKY proteins turn on or off other genes.

This can be problematic for farmers, who tend to try to increase yield by putting more plants in an area. At that point, the plants shade each other, which is “bad for the root system. If we can find a way to get the roots to grow normally, we can potentially increase yield,” Rosado said.

This could also remove more carbon dioxide from the air and store it in the developing roots, helping to mitigate the effect of global warming. “Our study can give a roadmap on how to make longer, deeper roots,” Pedmale said.

At this point, researchers still don’t know how the plant transfers information about the amount of sunlight it receives in the green chloroplasts where photosynthesis occurs to the WRKY genes, which are in the nucleus.

Researchers have been studying the shade response in the shoots of plants for over five decades. They have not, however, focused as much attention on the effect of less sunlight on the roots.

“We want to tackle this problem,” Pedmale said.

WRKY genes are a generalized stress signal, which is not just involved when a plant isn’t getting enough light. They are also turned on during pathogen attacks, stress and amid developmental signals.

Indeed, plants in the shade that have turned on these signals are especially vulnerable to attacks. Caterpillars, for example, can eat most of a shaded plant because the plant is so focused on growing its shoot that its defenses are down.

When that same plant is in the sunlight, it is more effective at defending itself against caterpillars.

At this point, Pedmale doesn’t know whether these genes and signals occur across a broad species of plants beyond tomatoes and Arabidopsis. He and others are hoping to look for these genes in grasses and grains.

Pedmale is also searching for other signals between the shoot and the root. “Plants are masters of adaptation,” he said. “They might have redundant systems” that signal for roots to slow their growth while the shoots tap into the available energy to grow.

Plants may also have natural molecules that serve as brakes for the WRKY signal, preventing the shoot from taking all the available energy and rendering the plant structurally fragile.

A scientist at CSHL for five years, Pedmale came to the lab because of the talent of his colleagues, the reputation and opportunity at CSHL and the location.

Born and raised in Bangalore, India, Pedmale enjoys reading fiction and autobiographies and wood working when he’s not in the lab. He recently made a book shelf, which provides him with a chance to “switch off” from science, which, he said, is a 24-hour job. He has taken wood pieces from his workshop and brought them to PhD classes at CSHL, where he can show them plant biology and genetics at work.

Pedmale and his wife Priya Sridevi, who also works at CSHL, have a mini golden doodle named Henry.

A native of São Paulo, Brazil, Rosado is married to plant biologist Paula Elbl, who is the co-founder of a start up called GALY, which is trying to produce cotton in a lab instead of in a field.

Rosado is the first in her family to attend a public university. She has been working in Pedmale’s lab for two years and plans to continue her research on Long Island for at least another year.

Rosado knew Pedmale had worked as a post doctoral researcher in the lab of celebrated plant biologist Joanne Chory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She met Pedmale at a plant conference, where she expressed an interest in his research.

Longer term, Rosado hopes her research has a broader impact.

“If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to see the fruits of my work being applied to make a difference and help feed people,” she said.

As for his work, Pedmale is eager to understand and use the signals from one part of a plant to another, given that the plant lacks a nervous system. “Once we can understand their language,” he said, “we can manipulate it to increase yield.”

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Jessica Tollkuhn Photo courtesy of CSHL

By Daniel Dunaief

They are like directors in a carefully choreographed production, instructing certain groups that become active, while giving others a five-minute break.

In the case of the human body, directors take many forms, including hormones; the same hormones that can transform adorable, sweet and well-behaved children into smelly, strong-willed teenagers.

Hormones like estrogen, testosterone and progesterone affect people at various ages and in different ways.

Recently, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Assistant Professor Jessica Tollkuhn and her graduate student Bruno Gegenhuber teamed up with University of California at San Francisco Herzstein Professor of Molecular Physiology Holly Ingraham to link the way estrogen in a specific area of the brain turns on particular genes.

For mice that are representative of post-menopausal women, the lower activity of a gene called melanocortin-4, or MC4R causes these mice to become less active.

By activating MC4R neurons in the ventrolateral ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus of the brain in the absence of estrogen, researchers caused a dramatic increase in physical activity and 10 percent body weight loss after one day.

Additionally, turning up the MC4R gene increased their bone density over time.

Linking the gene activated by estrogen in a part of the brain that affects how adult females use energy, the scientists provided a causative link that explains lower energy in this population.

Tollkuhn said her contribution showed that the estrogen receptor binds DNA in the presence of hormones.

The scientists published their research in the journal Nature.

“If anything, this paper is a study of how just one gene can show this exquisite behavioral response,” Tollkuhn added.

The MC4R gene is also found in the male brain, although not in the same area. Experimentally, turning up the gene also increases physical activity in males.

Numerous drugs currently target this gene in connection with increasing libido in post-menopausal women. Using these treatments for other issues, like weight gain and activity level, would require additional study.

Estrogen affects numerous other areas of the body, including some that may cause other problems. Hormone replacement therapy has contributed to the development or worsening of other cancers, such as breast cancer, although it is not clear why or how this happens.

“There’s evidence that there can be positive benefits [like bone and mental health], but also evidence that it can increase the risk of cancers,” Tollkuhn said.

Ingraham knew Tollkuhn from their overlapping research experiences at the University of California at San Diego and, later at UCSF.

Ingraham had reached out to Tollkuhn to see if the experiments in Tollkuhn’s lab could determine the link between the hormone and the MC4R gene.

“It’s always a challenge in biology to get a direct causality” because numerous factors in a living system could contribute to the development of a condition or a behavior, Tollkuhn said.

Tollkuhn suggested that the bulk of the experiments were done in Ingraham’s lab.

Ingraham recognized early on the benefit of finding these direct binding sites.

“We are saying, ‘Here is a hormone and it is acting through this molecule and it’s causing this change … that we know is really important for eliciting this behavior,” Ingraham said.

Ingraham, who worked with Tollkuhn when she was a post doctoral researcher and Tollkuhn was a graduate student in Geoffrey Rosenfeld’s lab at UC San Diego, called her colleague “really talented” and said she “spent years working this whole system out. It’s heroic and nobody else has done it.”

Ingraham sent Rosenfeld a message after the journal Nature accepted their paper, indicating his trainees had “hit pay dirt on this one.”

Ingraham hopes the paper motivates other researchers to think about entering this area and tackling this challenge, which is so important for women’s health.

“The only way we’re going to move forward for women’s health is to understand all these different facets of what estrogen is doing in the brain,” she added.

In press coverage of the research, Ingraham described the comments as falling into two categories. In the first, women suggest that they’re past menopause and have never been more active. In the second, women indicate that getting hormone replacement therapy genuinely helped them, including with brain fog.

Other scientists have sent Ingraham congratulatory emails about the paper. They have “appreciated that this had such a great molecular story,” she said.

In a broader research context, Tollkuhn is interested in determining how hormones affect the brain during sexual differentiation.

She is now focused on identifying a new repertoire that she and others can explore in future studies.

Tollkuhn’s lab is also investigating how estrogen influences brain development. She has found dozens of genes she would like to understand in the kind of detail with which she explored MC4R. Estrogen receptors also are connected to HTR1A and HTR1D, which are genes for serotonin receptors and may connect estrogen to mood.

Studies in scientific literature have shown that numerous psychiatric and neurological conditions have sex differences in terms of their impacts on men and women.

“We have these pieces and we can try to put together this puzzle,” Tollkuhn said. “We can try to understand why this would be the case. The long term goal is to figure out why there is a greater increase in [certain diseases] in men or women, which could lead to the development of better treatment.”

Tollkuhn is also interested in understanding the progression of neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s, which is twice as likely in women as in men. The symptoms for this disease develops more rapidly in post menopausal women, who typically have a more precipitous decline in estrogen than older men do in their levels of testosterone.

“I’m interested in what hormone receptors are doing in the brain,” she said.

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By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

When she was little, my daughter loved to build sand castles. She’d put wet sand in a bucket, gently pull the bucket back and marvel at the details in the castles that came out.

My son wasn’t as interested in building castles. He derived special pleasure out of stomping on the castles she made. It wasn’t just that it gave him power over the sand: he also felt power over his older sister, who was furious with him for crushing her castles.

While I tried to reason with him, which is almost as effective today as it was when he was two, I came up with an alternative plan that required additional energy from me, but that created peace on the beach. I’d quickly put together a ring of 15 castles, grabbing wet sand and dumping it several feet from where my daughter was working on her creation.

Like a young Olympic sprinter, my son would race over to the collection of castles and stomp all over them, while my daughter slowly built her own city of sand.

These days, it seems, we are surrounded by people eager to stomp on everyone else’s sandcastles.

Sure, it’s satisfying to feel the figurative sand in our toes and to revel in tearing down what other people have created.

But, really, given all the challenges of the world, I think we should ask a few questions of all those people who are so eager to belittle, attack and undermine others. What’s your solution? What are you doing better? How would you fix the problem?

Insulting others for their efforts, their awkwardness or their perceived flaws often seems like a form of ladderism. No one wants to be on the bottom rung of a ladder, so people try to push others down or to shout to anyone who will listen about how much better they are than the people below them. That seems to be a sign of weakness or insecurity, reflecting the notion that other people are below them.

In addition to dumping on others, we live in a society of people for whom hearing views that differ from their own somehow turns them into victims. Surely we have more choices than simply, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” If someone doesn’t agree with you, maybe it’s worth finding out why.

Anger, frustration and hatred, while they may make us feel slightly better in the moment, aren’t solutions and they don’t improve our world. They are a form of destructive energy, like stomping on sand castles.

We should ask more of ourselves and from our leaders. I’m tired of hearing about politicians who will fight for me. I don’t want to send people into office to fight against others who are trying to do the best they can for the country. I want leaders who will learn, listen and, gasp, reach across the aisle in the search for solutions.

While platforms aren’t as sizzling as slogans or take downs, they include ideas and potential solutions.

Civility makes it possible for us to hear and learn.

We have enough threats to our lives without needing to turn against other people or to give in to the urge to crush other people’s sandcastles to feel better. We don’t all have to be best friends, but it’d be nice to look forward to a holiday season and the start of a new year that focused on a shared sense of purpose. We need better ideas, not better ways to attack.

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From left, CSHL’s Bruce Stillman, Double Helix Medal recipients Leonard Schleifer and Reggie Jackson, Chair of the CSHL Board of Trustees Marilyn Simons, and Double Helix Medal recipient George D. Yancopoulos. Photos by Constance Brukin
Above, NYC Mayor-elect Eric Adams speaks at the 16th Annual Double Helix Medals dinner with CSHL President and CEO Bruce Stillmanon and television journalist Lesley Stahl. Photos by Constance Brukin
The guests, including scientists from CSHL, and the honorees shared stories and hors d’oeuvres beneath the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History. Photo by Tobias Janowitz
Above, NYC Mayor-elect Eric Adams speaks at the 16th Annual Double Helix Medals dinner with CSHL President and CEO Bruce Stillmanon and television journalist Lesley Stahl. Photos by Constance Brukin
Double Helix Medal recipient George Yancopoulos takes a selfie with CSHL President and CEO Bruce Stillman, Regeneron Chairman of the Board P. Roy Vagelos, Double Helix Medal recipients Leonard Schleifer and Reggie Jackson, and Chair of the CSHL Board of Trustees Marilyn Simons. Photo by Constance Brukin
Dinner was served under the Blue Whale at the Natural History Museum. Photo by Sara Roncero-Menendez
CSHL Trustee Robert W. Lourie, CSHL President and CEO Bruce Stillman, and County Executive Steve Bellone. Photo by Constance Brukin
From left, Assistant Professor Tobias Janowitz, Professor Leemor Joshua-Tor, Assistant Professor Peter Koo, and Professor Linda Van Aelst. Photo by Constance Brukin
Dessert at the awards dinner was caramel tart dessert with chocolate ganache and vanilla ice cream. Photo by Sara Roncero-Menendez

By Daniel Dunaief

This November, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory celebrated baseball’s Mr. October.

The research facility that specializes in studying cancer, neuroscience, quantitative and plant biology hosted its 16th annual Double Helix Medals dinner at the Museum of Natural History on Nov. 17.

The evening, which was emceed by television journalist Lesley Stahl, honored Hall-of-Famer Reggie Jackson, as well as Leonard Schleifer and George Yancopoulos, the founders of Regeneron, the pharmaceutical company that has provided a life-saving antibody treatment for COVID-19.

The evening, which featured a dinner beneath the blue whale at the museum, raised a record $5 million for research.

“When we were standing in the hall of dinosaurs at the museum, it was fantastic,” said CSHL President and CEO Bruce Stillman. “It was one of the first events where people went out like the old days” prior to the pandemic.

Stillman said guests had to have received their COVID vaccinations to attend the celebration.

In addition to establishing a career as a clutch hitter in the playoffs, Reggie Jackson has dedicated considerable energy through his Mr. October Foundation to improve education around the country.

“His Mr. October foundation complements and parallels the DNA Learning Center programs, particularly now that we’ve opened a large DNA Learning Center in downtown Brooklyn that is serving underserved students in lab-based science,” said Stillman.

In his acceptance speech, Jackson said he found it “significant” that he received an honor for his educational efforts off the baseball field.

Yancopoulos, meanwhile, described his roots as the son of first generation immigrant parents from Greece. Yancopoulos highlighted the need for more funding in research and suggested that science helped pull the world through the pandemic. Yancopoulos said the National Institutes of Health should increase its budget 10-fold to meet the research and clinical needs of the population.

“Biotechnology offers the promise of really solving some of the most difficult problems that we face if we want our citizens to live not only longer, but healthier lives,” Schleifer said in a statement.

Mayor-elect Eric Adams, meanwhile, gave a speech about his vision for the future of the city which included, after some prompting from Stillman, increasing science in the education system.

The Double Helix gala, which started in 2006 when the lab honored the late boxer Muhammed Ali, raises money that goes into CSHL’s operating budget to support research and education.

This year, the donations included a generous gift from Astros owner Jim Crane, who introduced his friend Jackson.

Stillman helps direct the funds raised through the dinner to support scientists who are making what he termed “breakthrough discoveries.”

Many of the most significant discoveries come through philanthropic support, Stillman said, which makes it possible for researchers to design high-risk, high-reward experiments.

CSHL Chair of the Board of Trustees Dr. Marilyn Simons, a previous winner, attended the festive evening.

Senior leadership at the lab chooses the honorees. Stillman said CSHL already has two honorees for the event next year.

Previous honorees include actor Michael J. Fox, basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, actor and science educator Alan Alda, and newscasters including Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric.

“It is a really spectacular list,” Stillman said. The winners, who receive a medal, have all contributed in some significant way to science or to science education.

The dinner provides an opportunity for supporters of the mission of CSHL, which has had eight Nobel Prize winners work at the lab during their careers, to invite others to hear about research at the lab.

“It was a very inspiring evening,” Stillman said.

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Pixabay photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Ah, the benefits of an older bladder.

Granted, that’s not generally the case. Usually, I get up in the middle of the night, realizing that the dream that involves the search for a bathroom is my brain’s way of telling me that I need to urinate in real life.

I shift my weight slightly toward the floor, hoping that the rocking motion of my body doesn’t move the bed so much that I wake my wife or the cat sleeping on her, who sometimes sees my movement as a starter’s gun to race toward the table in the laundry room to devour another can of the same food he eats every day.

I slide my feet off the bed and try not to step on our huge dog, who moves around often enough that he could easily be that furry thing under my feet. My toes can’t always tell whether that’s him or just the softer part of the inside-out sweatpants I’ve been wearing for a week. I also try to avoid the other cat, whose tail is like a spring waiting for me to step on so he can shriek loudly enough to wake my wife and terrify the other cat and the dog.

When I reach the bathroom, I try to urinate into the bowl but away from the water to avoid any splashing sound. I retrace my steps back to the bed, hoping the safe places to step on the way out from the bed are still safe on the return.

This past week, the bathroom routine gave me the opportunity to look at a rare event. I watched the extended lunar eclipse, which was the longest it’s been in 580 years. I crept out to the hallway to view it through a window, hoping I didn’t have to go out in the cold to catch a glimpse of Earth’s shadow. I was also concerned that the dog, even at 3 a.m., would fear that he was missing out on something and bark, negating my efforts to enjoy the eclipse in silence.

I was amazed at the shadow that slipped slowly across the moon. I took an unimpressive photo that captured the yin and yang of the light and shadow.

The next morning, I ran into some neighbors on my routine walk with my dog.

After saying how they’d stayed up all night to watch this rare event — they are retired and don’t have any time pressure most days — they started to recount their evening.

“I was tempted to dress in black and howl while I watched it,” the man said.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Well, you know, I figured as long as I was up, the neighbors on the other side who think it’s OK to play basketball at 11:30 p.m. should know I was awake and active.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“Yeah, and the other day, they had a party and threw beer bottles over the fence into our backyard. It took until late in the day for them to pick them up.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “Sorry to hear that.”

As I walked back with my dog, who was eager for his post-walk breakfast, I realized we had never discussed the sights from the night before.

Sleep deprivation overshadowed a discussion of the observation of the Earth’s long shadow.

As for me, I was, for the first time, grateful for the momentary need to pee. The evening and the morning interaction that followed brought to the fore a collision of the mundane and the magnificent.

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Above, DeLorenzo (in blue) at a Multiple Sclerosis benefit in which she and a group of friends climbed the stairs at Rockefeller Center. Photo from C. DeLorenzo

By Daniel Dunaief

Her colleagues highlight the joy, passion and optimism she brings to her work, which can be the opposite of the way people she is eager to help feel. 

Dr. Christine DeLorenzo, Professor of Psychiatry and Biomedical Engineering at Stony Brook University, studies depression.

A disease with numerous symptoms that likely has a wide range of causes, depression presents an opportunity for Dr. DeLorenzo to bring not only a relentless energy to her work, but also an engineer’s perspective.

“Engineering is all about examining a complex problem and thinking, ‘I bet we can fix that,’” explained Dr. DeLorenzo in an email. “Biomedical engineering takes it to a new level.”

Indeed, Dr. DeLorenzo specializes in brain imaging, using positron emission tomography, among other techniques, to understand and differentiate the factors that might contribute to depression and to develop ways to treat specific subtypes of the mental health disease.

Dr. Ramin Parsey, who mentored Dr. DeLorenzo and is professor and Della Pietra Chair of Biomedical Imaging at Stony Brook, believes she will help define the subtypes of depression by imaging the brain.

For Dr. DeLorenzo, the abundance of discussion in the popular and scientific literature that currently attributes the progression of depression to a host of causes, from eating the wrong foods to not exercising enough to not getting the right amount of sleep, doesn’t offer much clarity.

“We see a million articles about what causes depression and they don’t all agree,” said Dr. DeLorenzo. “Depression is caused by a bunch of different things, which is not all that helpful when you’re the person suffering.”

In her brain studies, Dr. DeLorenzo has looked at inflammation and neurotransmitter systems. The goal of her work is to find “whatever is outside the normal range in the person with depression and treat” that potential cause, she said. High levels of inflammation might suggest an anti-inflammatory treatment.

When people receive a major depressive disorder diagnosis, they often are prescribed a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. This enables the neurotransmitter serotonin to remain in the brain for a longer period of time.

“It’s great that it works in a subset of people” for whom it is effective, Dr. DeLorenzo said. “We would like to know beforehand if we give this medication will it work for you, specifically.”

In one of her studies, Dr. DeLorenzo uses positron emission tomography, or PET scans, to search for signs of inflammation. She is looking for translocator proteins, which is a marker of inflammation. Reactive glial cells in the brain, which are an important supporting part of the nervous system that don’t have axons and dendrites like nerve cells, increase the production of these proteins during some depression and other disorders.

The level of these translocator proteins increase in glial cells when the brain is having an inflammatory response, which likely occurs in a subtype of depression as well as in other diseases.

Dr. DeLorenzo has a PET tracer that sticks to that protein and that gives off a signal to the camera, which enables her to quantify the inflammation.

At this point, she and her collaborators, including co-Principal Investigator Dr. Parsey and Dr. Stella Tsirka, Professor of Pharmacological Sciences at Stony Brook, are recruiting a collection of patients with depression. They are testing the idea that people with higher inflammation are better treated with an anti-inflammatory. They are using PET to see who has high or low inflammation prior to treatment. During the study, the researchers will determine if those with the highest inflammation had the best response.

Dr. Tsirka’s lab uses animal models to understand mechanisms of disease and experiment on treatment, while Dr. DeLorenzo uses neuro-imaging in human patients to understand and treat pathology.

“Our preclinical results certainly support the idea of the neuro-inflammation hypothesis of depression” and suggest potential ways to interfere with the process in preclinical models, Dr. Tsirka explained in an email.

Dr. Tsirka, who has been working for Dr. DeLorenzo for over three years, described her colleague as “enthusiastic, rational creative and hard working” and believed imaging could provide a way to verify efficient treatment of depression.

By understanding the biology of the brain, Dr. DeLorenzo hopes to address a range of questions that might affect the disease.

In other work, Dr. DeLorenzo is exploring the possibility that a disruption in glutamate leads to circadian and mood dysfunction in a subtype of depression.

In some studies with glutamate, researchers assessed mood before and after sleep deprivation. They found that sleep deprivation provided an antidepressant effect in about 40 percent of patients with Major Depressive Disorder.

A healthy person would typically become tired and angry after staying awake for 36 straight hours. Some people with this form of depression, however, see an improvement in their mood after staying up for so many hours.

“Something about sleep deprivation causes an antidepressant effect in some people,” Dr. DeLorenzo said. “We don’t know what that is.”

The antidepressant effect can be short lived, although about 10 percent of people have benefits that last as long as a few weeks.

To be sure, Dr. DeLorenzo cautioned that no one is “advocating just doing sleep deprivation” or even a continuous cycle of partial sleep deprivation.

Born and raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Dr. DeLorenzo earned her undergraduate and Master’s Degrees at Dartmouth College. She earned her PhD from Yale University, where she started her brain imaging work.

When Parsey left Columbia to join Stony Brook in 2012, Dr. DeLorenzo moved with him, even though her commute from Queens was three hours each way.

“She never complained” about her travels, Dr. Parsey marveled. In fact, Dr. DeLorenzo uses the commuting time to read papers and prepare emails.

Dr. Parsey admired Dr. DeLorenzo’s dedication to teaching and mentoring students in her lab. In her first summer, she took on 17 interns. “This is the kind of stuff that nobody else I know does,” Dr. Parsey marveled.

As for her work, Dr. DeLorenzo believes understanding sub-categories of mental health will follow the same pattern as cancer research. “Back in the day, we used to say, ‘Someone has cancer or a tumor.’ Now, we say that that tumor has this genetic marker, which is what we’re going to target when we treat it.”

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METRO photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

Flying? Are we really flying? Well, sure, why not, right? Everyone else is flying.

Wait, then again, everyone else seems to be flying. What if one of those other people is sick? Don’t think too much about it and breathe through your nose. Oh, you can’t because the two masks you’re wearing are pinching your nose? Well, tough! 

They’re serving drinks and cookies? People have to lower their masks to eat and drink, right? So, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of mandatory masks? Look away from everyone who’s breathing. Yeah, that’ll help.

Okay, finally, we’re on the ground. 

Hey, this is a nice campus. The sidewalks are packed and filled with so much energy, not all of which is positive.

“Why are all these $#@! parents here this weekend? I have several tests and I don’t need them all staring at me!”

That girl is sharing her academic anxiety with her friend and anyone else within 100 feet of her. Subtle, real subtle! Tempted as I am to let her know that parents, likely including her own, make this sometimes miserable experience possible, I refrain. She might be my son’s current or future friend.

I ask two students for the location of a building. The first shrugs and points me in the wrong direction and the second nearly draws a map. Okay, one for two.

I sit just in time for the start of a talk by successful alumni, who connect their careers to the lessons they learned at school. Clever marketing! Other parents chuckle at the jokes. I imagine these parents as college students. In my mind, the presenters onstage become Broadway performers. Each of the two men and two women, which I presume is a well-planned balance of genders, does his or her rendition of “how I succeeded,” with the subtext, just feet from the school president, of, “keep paying those tuitions!”

When the session ends, the phone rings. It’s my son! He’s strolling across a lawn. Wait, is that really him? Much as I want to run over and squeeze him, I play it cool, congratulating myself on my impulse control. Well done, Dan. You haven’t embarrassed him so far, but the weekend is young yet, even if you are not. He adjusts his hair, a move I’ve seen him and almost all his friends do frequently, even while running back and forth on a basketball court. What’s with all the hair adjustment? I quietly ask for permission to hug him. Yay! He agrees. I wrap my arms around his shoulders and fight the urge to pick him up, which is probably best for my back.

As we head to his dorm, he tells me he hasn’t done laundry in nine days. I don’t know whether that’s a hint, as in, “Dad, while you’re here…” or a statement of fact.

We part company and I learn about the evolving world of the commercialization of college athletes, who can use their name, image and likeness to make money. He’s listening to a psychology lecture about, who else, Sigmund Freud.

At a football game, I wonder how it can be this cold in Louisiana. Aren’t we in the deep south? We leave before it’s over, waiting in the cool air for 11 minutes for an expensive Uber — they must know it’s parents weekend — to take two families who are heading back to the same hotel.

10 pm. Who eats this late? I’m usually half way to sleep by now. My older brother is undoubtedly already in REM sleep. My stomach is going to hate this. Shut up stomach!

Looking around the table at these families, one thing is clear: these parents adore their children.

This is part of the story of how these boys got here and, hopefully, will help them continue to learn lessons, like how to dress for a cold football game and how to make reservations in advance before a busy parents weekend so we can eat earlier.

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Three long-finned pilot whales. Photo by Andrew Sutton/ Shutterstock
From left, Lesley Thorne, Eleanor Heywood and Julia Stepanuk. Photo by Julia Stepanuk
Lesley Thorne on a research ship in the Antarctic. Photo from Lesley Thorne
Lesley Thorne in the Antarctic. Photo from Lesley Thorne
Lesley Thorne with black-browed albatross in the Falkland Islands. Photo from Lesley Thorne

By Daniel Dunaief

Long-finned pilot whales can’t stand the heat, so they are heading north.

Amid increases in ocean temperatures caused by global warming, long-finned pilot whales have moved the center of their range to the north, according to a 25-year study Lesley Thorne, Assistant Professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University and Janet Nye, Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences and Adjunct Professor of SoMAS, recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

What’s more, these whales are swimming farther north despite the fact that some of their prey, including fish and invertebrates such as squid, aren’t shifting as far north, while others are moving into deeper offshore waters.

That could have broad ecological consequences for both regions, as whales may head towards areas to compete against other predators for the same prey, while some fish populations in deeper waters offshore may increase, putting pressure on the creatures that live in those areas.

“We know that different species are responding in different ways to climate change,” Thorne said. “That will impact all the dynamics” including food webs and competition. 

Climate change may change the predator-prey dynamics in unexpected ways, Nye explained in an email. “We know that it would be wrong to assume that all species would shift at the same rate in response to changing environmental patterns, but this is one of a growing number of papers to illustrate that the rate at which individual species” in different feeding groups changes can be different, which alters the way ecosystems function.

Nye explained that researchers don’t yet have a good sense of how such mismatches would affect productivity of fisheries or the ecosystem as a whole, but they are “working on answering those questions with food web models and climate models.”

To be sure, Thorne indicated that the researchers would need considerably more data to validate any ecological conclusions, as they only looked at one species of whale and four main prey species.

“Understanding the specifics of the broader implications for a location would require looking at a range of important predator and prey species and assessing how the strength of interactions” might be affected by their responses to climate change, she said.

According to Thorne, this study and others suggested that species characteristics such as body size, mobility, thermoregulatory strategy and longitudinal range, in addition to the speed of change in the climate, can help predict the responses of marine species to climate change.

Whales such as the long-finned pilot whale examined in this study are challenging to observe because they have wide geographic ranges, could be difficult to track, and spend most of their time underwater, where they are difficult to see or track.

Additionally, even people with considerable maritime experience sometimes have difficulty differentiating between the long finned pilot whale and the short finned pilot whale, which are different species.

To address the central range of these long-finned pilot whales, Thorne and Nye used two data points: strandings, when whales strand on land, and bycatches, when people catching other fish with bottom trawls also bring up these whales in their nets.

Bycatches occur in part because pilot whales and other cetaceans depredate fishing gear, removing fish from fishing lines or trawls, which presents an easier meal than searching for food themselves. These whales, however, sometimes get caught in the nets themselves. 

People in the fisheries business sometimes use acoustic deterrents to keep the whales away. These efforts, however, can backfire, as the whales hear these sounds as something akin to a dinner bell and head for nets that could inadvertently trap them.

Strandings data is useful for looking at trends in the distribution of cetaceans because networks provide standardized observations throughout the coastline, dating back for decades.

Thorne is in the process of looking at strandings data more broadly. Her team is also looking at strandings of odontocete, or toothed whale, species along the east coast of the United States more broadly. She will also examine whether short-finned pilot whales, which are adapted to warmer waters, show similar trends.

“We are already examining the strandings data and testing our hypothesis that fish species may be shifting both horizontally (latitudinally or north-south) and/or shifting vertically (in depth),” Nye wrote. “I suspect that are doing a bit of both.”

Strandings represented about two thirds of the data in this study, while bycatch constituted the rest.

The shift in the central range represents a fairly dramatic geographic change in the center of the whale range and was considerably higher than that observed for their prey species.

Nye, who worked at Stony Brook from 2012 to 2020, said she was “shocked” that pilot whales were shifting much faster than the fish species, mostly because she knows how much the distribution of many species has changed over the last half century in the northeastern United States.

Whales are heading in the opposite direction that Thorne took in her career path. Thorne grew up in Kingston, Ontario and did her undergraduate work at the University of Guelph. She earned her PhD from Duke University and started as a lecturer at Stony Brook and was offered a tenure track position three years later.

During college. Thorne spent three years at the Huntsman Marine Science Center on the Bay of Fundy. Seeing the impact of the tides in the bay and taking field courses was “amazing,” she said. She first started working with whales at a research station on Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy in future years.

Married to Bernd Distler, who is a surface materials engineer, Thorne and her husband have a four-year- old daughter Annika and two-year- old daughter Franka.

As for what her work tells her about the changing world, Thorne said it was sobering to see first hand the rapid changes in temperature occurring in the Northeast and, specifically, in New York.

This kind of study, along with others that highlight the increases in temperature, should be “more than enough information” to encourage action, she said.

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