Do the birds on the Galapagos Islands, with their unique coloration, differently shaped beaks and specific nesting places, have anything to do with the cancer cells that alter the course of human lives?
For Mehdi Damaghi, Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, the answer is a resounding, “Yes.”
Damaghi uses the same principles of evolutionary biology to understand how cancer, which resides within human genes, works to adapt, as it tries to win the battle to survive.
“What we try to understand is the Darwinian principals of cancer,” said Damaghi. Cancer “adapts and reprograms themselves” to their environment to survive.
Damaghi, who arrived at Stony Brook four months ago from Moffitt Cancer Center, plans to address numerous questions related to cancer. He recently received a $4 million grant from the Physical Science in Oncology program (PSON) through the National Institutes of Health/ National Cancer Institute. Working with cancer biologists, clinicians, and computational scientists, he plans to define and understand cancer’s fitness.
“We are trying to study the core evolution of cancer cells and the normal stroma around them,” said Damaghi. “We are looking at the evolution of the tumor and some of the host cells.”
Cancer biologists are trying to build mathematical and theoretical models to explore the playbook cancer uses when confronted with threats, either in the form of a body’s natural defenses against it or from therapies against which it can, and often does, develop resistance.
Treating cancer could involve using adaptive therapy, which could enable people to control and live with cancer longer, Damaghi suggested.
In studying cancer’s phenotype, or the way the disease is expressed and survives, he hopes to understand factors in the microenvironment. Many cancers, he reasons, become more problematic as people age. Indeed, centuries ago, cancer wasn’t as prevalent as it is today in part because life expectancy was shorter.
Damaghi also has an evolutionary model to explore metastasis, in which cancer spreads from one organ or system to other parts of the body. He is looking at the earliest stages of breast cancer, to see what factors some of these cancers need or take from the environment that enables them not only to develop into breast cancer, but also to spread to other systems.
Through the microenvironment, he is looking for biomarkers that might signal a potential tumor development and metastasis long before a person shows signs of an aggressive form of the disease.
“We look at the tumor as a part of a whole ecosystem that can have different niches and habitats,” he said. “Some can be hypoxic and oxidative, and others can be like a desert on Earth, where not much grows and then cancer evolves.”
Damaghi challenges cells in a culture or organoids, which are miniature, three-dimensional live models of human cells, with different microenvironmental conditions to see how they respond. He exposes them to hormones, immune cells, and hypoxic conditions.
“We try to understand what is the adaptation mechanism of cancer to this new microenvironment and how can we push them back to the normal phenotype,” he said.
Like other scientists, Damaghi has demonstrated that many of these cancer cells use sugar. Removing sugar caused some of the cancer to die.
Increasing the survival for patients could involve knowing what kinds of micro-environments cancer uses and in what order. Deprived of sugars, some cancers might turn to amino acids, dairy or other sources of food and energy.
Damaghi thinks researchers and, eventually, doctors, will have to approach cancer as a system, which might have a patient-specific fingerprint that can indicate the resources the disease is using and the progression through its various diseased stages.
Choosing Stony Brook
Damaghi appreciates the depth of talent in cancer sciences at Stony Brook University. He cited the work of Laufer Center Director Ken Dill and Cancer Center Director Yusuf Hannun. He also suggested that the Pathology Department, headed by Ken Shroyer, was “very strong.”
For their part, leaders at Stony Brook were pleased to welcome, and collaborate with, Damaghi. Hannun suggested Stony Brook recruited Damaghi because his research “bridges what we do in breast cancer and informatics.”
Shroyer, meanwhile, has already started collaborating with Damaghi and wrote that his new colleague’s focus on breast cancer “overlaps with my focus on pancreatic cancer.”
To conduct his research, Damaghi plans to look at cells in combination by using digital pathology, which can help reveal tumor ecosystems and niches.
He also appreciated the work of Joel Saltz, the Founding Chair in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. “In the fight against cancer, we all need to unite against this nasty disease,” Damaghi said. “From looking at it at different angles, we can understand it first and then design a plan to defeat it.”
Originally from Tehran, Iran, Damaghi is the oldest of five brothers. He said his parents encouraged them to explore their curiosity.
Damaghi, whose wife Narges and two daughters Elissa and Emilia are still in Tampa and hope to join him before long, has hit the ground running at Stony Brook, where he has hired three postdoctoral researchers, a lab manager, four PhD students, two master’s candidates, and three undergraduates.
Damaghi is inspired to conduct cancer research in part because of losses in his family. Two grandparents died from cancer, his aunt has breast cancer, and his cousin, who had cancer when he was 16, fought through the disease and is a survivor for 20 years.
Damaghi bicycles and plays sports including soccer. He also enjoys cooking and said his guests appreciate his Persian kebobs.
As for his arrival in Stony Brook, he said it was “the best option for me. It’s a great package and has everything I need.”
Heather Lynch Photo courtesy of Rolf Sjogren/ National Geographic
By Daniel Dunaief
To borrow from the Pink song in the movie Happy Feet, the Pew Trusts for Marine Conservation recently delivered “something good” to Stony Brook University’s Heather Lynch.
Endowed chair for ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Lynch was selected as one of six Pew Fellows in Marine Conservation.
Lynch, who uses a host of tools including physics and satellite imagery to study penguin populations in Antarctica and associated island groups including in South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, is one of six international recipients of the 2022 fellowship, which includes $150,000 over three years, and is a mid-career prize.
Lynch plans to use the funds to chronicle species health in the macaroni and king penguin and forecast risks to Antarctica’s penguin populations.
Lynch’s work is “really important,” said Claire Christian, Executive Director of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC), who nominated Lynch for the fellowship. Lynch provides the kind of information “we need to make effective decisions about protecting Antarctica.”
Christian, who has known Lynch for about five years, said Lynch’s consistent commitment helps “provide a broader picture of what’s happening down there over a longer time frame.”
Christian is particularly pleased that Lynch’s work in the Antarctic brings necessary attention to the region, even though “it’s far away at the end of the world,” she said. “People understand that [the Antarctic] is worth investing time and resources into studying.”
The Pew Fellows Program in Marine Conservation provides recipients with an opportunity to interact with other winners and alumni. This year, the Pew Trust received over 50 nominees.
Past honorees at Stony Brook University include Endowed Professor of Ocean Conservation Sciences at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Science Ellen Pikitch and Endowed Research Chair for Nature and Humanity Carl Safina.
Jane Lubchenco, who won a Pew Fellowship in marine conservation in the 1992, was the first woman to lead the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and is the current Deputy Director for Climate and Environment in the White House.
Rebecca Goldburg, Director of Environmental Sciences at the Pew Charitable Trusts, appreciates the mixture of high-level research Lynch produces and the application of her discoveries to conservation and added that Lynch has “outstanding scientific achievement that is well-integrated into decision making.”
Climate change
While researchers haven’t broadly chronicled the movement of macaroni penguins into the Antarctic, Lynch anticipates that climate change would draw them into the Antarctic.
“My hope is that a focus on macaroni penguin census data will illuminate their trends,” she explained in an email.
King penguins, meanwhile, have recently arrived in the Antarctic. The presence of king penguins would represent a turning point for Lynch, as they would suggest that the Antarctic is starting to show ecological similarities with the sub-Antarctic.
King penguins have attempted to breed on Elephant Island, which is about 800 miles from their typical habitat in South Georgia. While this species of penguin has traveled this distance in prior years, their decision to settle and try to raise chicks, which they haven’t successfully done, is “new and ecologically interesting,” Lynch explained.
Lynch suggested such a geographic expansion is rare because these birds are long-lived and an established pair will breed in the same location for years. Even in young individuals traveling to new territories, the rate of range shift is slow and hard to track.
“The movement of king penguins into Antarctica is exactly what would have been predicted and so it is an exciting (if, from a climate perspective, disturbing) time to be watching this all unfold,” she said.
King penguins can form large colonies, which could, over the course of a longer period of time, create competition for space with chinstraps. Lynch suggested that the region could be in the early days of an ecologically important event.
Where’s Waldo?
As for macaroni penguins, whose stories about how they got their name include one involving a sailor slang for men who dressed in bright colors, they have frequently been the “Where’s Waldo?” of what Lynch does, she said, as she encounters them by chance in a colony of another species.
She is pulling together several decades of offhand notes about her findings on macaronis to track them systematically. She believes collecting information about populations of macaroni and king penguins in Antarctica is going to be informative.
In analyzing penguin populations across species, Lynch plans to take the kind of approach portfolio managers apply when they consider where to focus their attention.
A mutual fund manager with a large percentage of the value of the fund linked to changes in the stock price of Apple would likely track the earnings of the company and its share price more closely than stocks in which she has smaller holdings or whose values don’t fluctuate much.
For penguins, Lynch suggested that scientists and conservationists may “need to understand those colonies, and there may not be that many, that contain a large percentage of the world’s population,” she said.
For a long time, researchers have focused on colonies that were easier to study because they were small and close by. “I don’t think we can justify that approach anymore,” Lynch said.
Picking penguin spots
Goldburg appreciates Lynch’s framework for penguin conservation.
Lynch will address the “key penguin colonies,” some of which are contributing disproportionately to the risk of penguin declines, Goldburg said. This approach will enable conservationists to monitor important sites because they “can’t do everything.”
Understanding penguin populations goes beyond a simple rule that more of any population is necessarily better. Major increases or decreases should be cause for concern because they reflect shifts in the functioning of the ecosystem, she explained.
Christian is confident the work Lynch does will provide policy makers with key information.
“Her work is really important and it deserves to have a lot of visibility and funding,” Christian said. “Without understanding what’s happening to species that are living down there, we can’t” design effective strategies to protect them and their ecosystems.
Lynch provides the kind of information necessary to “make effective decisions about protecting Antarctica,” Christian added.
An over-the-counter stomach-soothing medication may also relieve some of the symptoms of mild to moderate COVID-19.
Tobias Janowitz Photo courtesy of CSHL
In a study recently published in the journal Gut, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Assistant Professor Tobias Janowitz and a team of collaborators at CSHL and The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health demonstrated that Famotidine, the active ingredient in Pepcid, shortened the duration of symptoms for a diverse patient group of adults soon after developing COVID-19 symptoms.
In a placebo-controlled study, people taking 80 milligrams of Famotidine three times a day reported that symptoms such as headaches declined after 8.2 days, compared with 11.4 days for patients who were taking the placebo.
“We think that the results are preliminary, but encouraging,” Janowitz explained in an email.
The research, which included 55 volunteers, may offer health care providers another tool to help treat mild to moderate cases of COVID-19. In the clinical study, the use of Famotidine helped reduce a potentially overactive inflammatory response without suppressing the immune system’s efforts to ward off the virus.
Participants in the study received Famotidine or placebo pills along with a host of instruments they could use at home to gather clinical data about themselves, including a cellular activated Apple iPad, a scale, thermometer, fitness tracker, spirometer to measure air flow in and out of the lungs and a pulse oximeter, which measured oxygen levels by taking a reading over a person’s fingernails.
The protocol for the study allowed volunteers to stay home, where they gathered results from the instruments and reported on their health and any symptoms they felt. Technicians came to the home of each volunteer on the first, seventh, 15th, and 28th days after entering the clinical trial.
Researchers and doctors involved in the analysis of the effectiveness of COVID believe this remote approach to participating in clinical trials could prove a safe and effective way to conduct research for other diseases.
“In today’s virtual world, our clinical trial strategy has significant implications for how to study new drugs in patients at home,” Dr. Kevin Tracey, president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes, explained in a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory news brief.
Janowitz added that other studies could also use testing protocols at home, including for other diseases. “We are looking forward to employing it to help develop better treatments for people with cancer,” which is the disease at the center of his research, he explained.
The CSHL Assistant Professor focuses on the whole body response to cancer, although many of the biological considerations are transferable to other diseases.
Pivot to COVID
According to Janowitz, “It was relatively easy for us to pivot to COVID research when it was a global area of unmet need.”
The researchers chose Famotidine because of encouraging studies and from a case series, Janowitz explained. They also found a potential mechanism of action where Famotidine blocked the H2 receptor, which encouraged them to move to a phase 2 randomized clinical trial.
The researchers were pleased that the participants in this small trial included people from a range of ages and ethnic groups. Nearly two thirds of patients, who were 18 years and older, were from black, mixed-race or Hispanic communities.
“Patients with different ancestry may have different responses to this disease,” Janowitz explained. “It helps to learn about the generalizability of the results.”
In a CSHL news brief, Nicole Jordan-Martin, executive director for New York City Health + Hospitals, added that “accessible, safe and low-cost outpatient treatment options are a priority in our global efforts to combat COVID-19.” Northwell and New York City Health + Hospitals provided care for the communities most in need of support for New York City, she added.
The collaborators were also encouraged by their teamwork.
“Our institutions worked extremely well together to face challenges the pandemic posed, like offering digital solutions and reaching populations who struggled for access to care,” Dr. Christina Brennan, vice president of clinical research at the Feinstein Institute and co-investigator of the trial, said in the news brief.
“From screening patients to organizing home delivery of the equipment and medication, this sets a new model for future trials and convenience for participants.”
Janowitz described the safety profile of Famotidine as “excellent” and said it “appears to have few interactions with other drugs and very few side effects in general.”
To be sure, Janowitz cautioned doctors and patients not to stock up on Famotidine before researchers conduct additional studies.
“Our trial is not conclusive and an early phase clinical trial (phase 1 or 2) is not sufficient to inform clinical practice,” he wrote.
Additionally without further study, researchers don’t know the best potential dose and dosing interval for this possible treatment. At this point, they know how long the drug stays in the blood and the strength of its binding to its receptor.
A dose of 20 milligrams per day or less may be too little to achieve an effect, but “we do not know this for certain,” Janowitz explained.
While researchers agreed that further studies were necessary to answer key questions, they believed that the results from this research could provide fodder for studies outside of the COVID world.
“It is possible that sustained inflammation contributes to illness in other contexts and changing this inflammation would be beneficial,” Janowitz wrote. “This will have to be explored separately. Importantly, the methods used in this trial are also transferrable, so we have learned a lot of important information” from this research.
Jose M. Adrover and Mikala Egeblad. Photo by Lijuan Sun
By Daniel Dunaief
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Mikala Egeblad thought she saw something familiar at the beginning of the pandemic.
Mikala Egeblad. Photo from CSHL
Egeblad has focused on the way the immune system’s defenses can exacerbate cancer and other diseases. Specifically, she studies the way a type of white blood cell produces an abundance of neutrophil extracellular traps or NETs that can break down diseased and healthy cells indiscriminately. She thought potentially high concentrations of these NETs could have been playing a role in the worst cases of COVID.
“We got the idea that NETs were involved in COVID-19 from the early reports from China and Italy” that described how the sickest patients had severe lung damage, clotting events and damage to their kidneys, which was what she’d expect from overactive NETs, Egeblad explained in an email.
Recently, she, her post doctoral researcher Jose M. Adrover and collaborators at Weill Cornell Medical College and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai proved that this hypothesis had merit. They showed in hamsters infected with COVID and in mice with acute lung injuries that disabling these NETs improved the health of these rodents, which strongly suggested that NETs are playing a role in COVID-19.
“It was very exciting to go from forming a hypothesis to showing it was correct in the context of a complete new disease and within a relatively short time period,” Egeblad wrote.
Egeblad, Andover and their collaborators recently published their work in the Journal of Clinical Investigation Insight.
Importantly, reducing the NETs did not alter how much virus was in the lungs of the hamsters, which suggests that reducing NETs didn’t weaken the immune system’s response to the virus.
Additional experiments would be necessary to prove this is true for people battling the worst symptoms of COVID-19, Egeblad added.
While the research is in the early stages, it advances the understanding of the importance of NETs and offers a potential approach to treating COVID-19.
An unexpected direction
Jose Adrover. Photo from CSHL
When Adrover arrived from Spain, where he had earned his PhD from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and had conducted research as a post doctoral fellow at the Spanish Center for Cardiovascular Research in March of 2020, he expected to do immune-related cancer research.
Within weeks, however, the world changed. Like other researchers at CSHL and around the world, Egeblad and Adrover redirected their efforts towards combating COVID.
Egeblad and Andover “were thinking about the virus and what was going on and we thought about trying to do something,” Adrover said.
Egeblad and Adrover weren’t trying to fight the virus but rather the danger from overactive NETs in the immune system.
Finding an approved drug
Even though they were searching for a way to calm an immune system responding to a new threat, Egeblad and Adrover hoped to find a drug that was already approved.
After all, the process of developing a drug, testing its safety, and getting Food and Drug Administration approval is costly and time-consuming.
That’s where Juliane Daßler-Plenker, also a postdoctoral fellow in Egeblad’s lab, came in. Daßler-Plenker conducted a literature search and found disulfiram, a drug approved in the 1950’s to treat alcohol use disorder. Specifically, she found a preprint reporting that disulfuram can target a key molecule in macrophages, which are another immune cell. Since the researchers knew this was important for the formation of NETs, Daßler-Plenker proposed that the lab test it.
Working with Weill Cornell Medical College and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai, Adrover explored the effect of disulfiram, among several other possible treatments, on NET production.
Using purified neutrophils from mice and from humans, Adrover discovered that disulfiram was the most effective treatment to block the formation of NETs.
He, Assistant Professor Robert Schwartz’s staff at Weill Cornell and Professor Benjamin tenOever at Mt. Sinai tried disulfiram on hamsters infected with SARS-Cov-2. The drug blocked net production and reduced lung injury.
The two experiments were “useful in my opinion as it strengthens our results, since we blocked NETs and injury in two independent models, one of infection and the other of sterile injury,” Adrover said. “Disulfuram worked in both models.”
More work needed
While encouraged by the results, Egeblad cautioned that this work started before the availability of vaccines. The lab is currently investigating how neutrophils in vaccinated people respond to COVID-19.
Still, this research offered potential promise for additional work on NETs with some COVID patients and with people whose battles with other diseases could involve some of the same immune-triggered damage.
“Beyond COVID, we are thinking about whether it would be possible to use disulfiram for acute respiratory distress syndrome,” Egeblad said. She thinks the research community has focused more attention on NETs.
“A lot more clinicians are aware of NETs and NETs’ role in diseases, COVID-19 and beyond,” she said. Researchers have developed an “appreciation that they are an important part of the immune response and inflammatory response.”
While researchers currently have methods to test the concentration of NETs in the blood, these tests are not standardized yet for routine clinical use. Egeblad is “sensing that there is more interest in figuring out how and when to target NETs” among companies hoping to discover treatments for COVID and other diseases.
The CSHL researcher said the initial race to gather information has proven that NETs are a potentially important target. Down the road, additional research will address a wide range of questions, including what causes some patients to develop different levels of NETs in response to infections.
Diseases like cancer take the normal raw materials of a cell and make them a part of a pernicious process that often threatens a person’s health.
Ideally, when researchers find the raw materials cancers need to survive, they discover specific proteins that are necessary for cancer, but aren’t critical for healthy cells.
That appears to have happened recently in the lab of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Chris Vakoc in the study of the blood disease Acute Myeloid Leukemia, or AML.
Vakoc’s former graduate student Sofya Polyanskaya, who now works in a pharmaceutical company in Germany, discovered the importance of an understudied protein called SCP4, which removes phosphate groups from other proteins, in some forms of AML. This protein acts as an enzyme, which makes it a particularly appealing target.
In his lab, Vakoc said he and his researchers take “genes and the proteins they encode and [try to] publish the first paper linking them to cancer,” Vakoc said.
Polyanskaya and Vakoc recently published their findings in the journal Cell Reports.
These scientists disabled proteins in a host of diverse cancer types, looking for dependencies that were unique to each cancer. After determining that SCP4 was only needed in leukemia and not other cancers, they inactivated the protein in normal, healthy blood cells and found that it wasn’t needed.
“Leukemia cells are super sensitive to the loss of this enzyme,” Vakoc said.
Vakoc praised the work of Polyanskaya, who he said conducted the “inspiring work” that led to this conclusion. “It’s not easy for a brand new scientist entering the field to write the first cancer paper on a target.”
Polyanskaya surveyed hundreds of these enzymes to find a potential new protein that cancer, specifically, might need. The CRISPR technology, which didn’t exist nine years ago, provides a way of altering a large number of potential enzymes to find the ones that are critical for cancer’s survival.
Ideally, this kind of analysis enables researchers like Polyanskaya and Vakoc to focus in on the ones that are critical to cancer, but that don’t perform any important function in normal cells.
One of the other benefits of this work is that it validates the importance of targets that have become the focus of other research projects.
“Part of what we’re doing is making sure that our processes more broadly in the field are robust,” Vakoc said. “We are more confident in other targets we didn’t discover” but that play a role in the progression of leukemia.
To be sure, the discovery of the SCP4 target is the first step in a series of questions that may require considerable time and resources to ensure a reliable and safe clinical benefit.
As with many cancers, leukemia may have the equivalent of a back up plan, in case this seemingly important enzyme is unavailable. Indeed, the battle against cancer and other diseases involves moves and counter moves by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and the diseases they battle.
Additionally, researchers like Vakoc need to discover the reason cells produce this enzyme in the first place. Mice lacking SCP4 are born, but develop metabolic stress after birth.
“The important experiment in the future will be to determine what the consequences of targeting SCP4 are in normal tissue much later after birth,” Vakoc explained in an email.
Like other cancers, leukemia is a heterogeneous disease, which is another way of saying that not everyone with the disease has the same symptoms and prognosis and not everyone would respond to the same treatment in the same way.
Vakoc would like to figure out for “which subset of patients with leukemia is this protein the most important. Down the road, that could help determine who might benefit from an SCP4 inhibitor.
“We want to personalize therapy as much as possible,” he said.
In his follow up research, Vakoc hopes to learn more about the three-dimensional structure of the protein complex.
Vakoc’s interest in leukemia stems from his interest in studying blood. When he conducted his PhD training at the University of Pennsylvania, he studied normal blood development.
He was particularly interested in pediatric cancer. While AML is on of the cancers that children can develop, it is far more common in elderly people.
The lab has a strong focus on leukemia.
Vakoc, whose lab is next door to CSHL Cancer Center Director David Tuveson, has also starting searching for potential therapeutic targets in pancreatic cancer.
He is excited about the potential to bring attention to a possible candidate that may provide a therapeutic benefit for patients at some point.
“It feels good to put a new target on the map,” he said.
The CSHL scientist recognizes that cancer can and often does develop resistance to a treatment that tackles any one enzyme or protein. Still, he said treating cancer with any new and effective therapy could extend life by several months, which are often “very valuable to patients.”
Vakoc suggested that any potential new treatment for leukemia would likely involve several drugs working together to stay ahead of cancer.
“The real hope and optimism is that, if you had a copule of targets like this that are not needed in healthy cells, you could add 10 or 20 years of high quality life. You could keep the disease in a chronic, latent state.”
Abhay Deshpande with a group of students at Stony Brook University. Photo from SBU
By Daniel Dunaief
The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently named physicist Abhay Deshpande a Fellow.
Abhay Deshpande. Photo from SBU
Deshpande, who thinks big about small matter, has distinguished himself with his discoveries, ideas, leadership, innovation, and mentorship. The Director of Electron Ion Collider Science at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and SUNY Distinguished Professor at Stony Brook University will become a fellow as part of an online ceremony on Feb. 19.
“I was really pleasantly honored” to be a part of a group that includes so many leaders in science, including actor and science advocate Alan Alda, who founded the eponymous Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook, said Deshpande.
Deshpande’s collaborators and scientific colleagues said Deshpande deserved the AAAS honor, which the society has given since 1874.
“Everything [Deshpande] has been doing is advancing science,” said Haiyan Gao, Associate Laboratory Director in Nuclear and Particle Physics at BNL.
Fundamental questions
A physicist who earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Bombay, which is now called the University of Mumbai, his Master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and his PhD at Yale University, Deshpande has put his academic and intellectual talents to work answering fundamental questions about atoms.
In his research, Deshpande studies protons in the nucleus.
Inside protons and neutrons are quarks and gluons, which are fundamental particles. Gluons have no mass and bind the quarks together, which suggests that the mass of protons must come from quarks — except that it doesn’t.
“The surprise is that all quarks together only account for about one percent of the proton’s mass,” Deshpande explained in an email.
Researchers don’t know how the components of quarks and gluons and their energies contribute to the proton’s mass. At the same time, Deshpande wants to know about the origin of a proton’s spin.
Quarks constitute about a quarter of a proton’s spin and gluon’s another quarter, which suggests that the remaining spin should come from their orbital angular momentum.
Deshpande never thought about the mass deficit until a few years ago because of his focus on a proton’s spin. “The same rotational motion of the quarks and gluons could not only explain the spin, but hopefully explain the mass,” Deshpande said. Such a solution to both unanswered questions would be “elegant,” he said.
EIC champion
A$2 billion Electron Ion Collider, which the Department of Energy awarded BNL in 2020, will take measurements that will study the origin of the remaining spin and mass. BNL will start building the EIC, which will take eight years to construct, in 2024.
Dmitri Kharzeev, Distinguished Professor and Director in the Center for Nuclear Theory at Stony Brook University, helped nominate Deshpande to become a AAAS fellow in part because of his work developing BNL’s EIC bid.
Deshpande “really played a major role in bringing this project to Long Island,” Kharzeev said. “It means a lot for BNL, and it also means a lot for Long Island as a whole. A lot of people will be hired to work on it.”
Kharzeev said Deshpande is the leader of the science effort at the EIC “precisely because of his status in the scientific community.”
Kharzeev said some of Deshpande’s papers are “among the highest-cited papers in experimental nuclear physics,” which is considered a reflection of the importance of the work.
Gao credited Deshpande and other key leaders in the community for preparing a “white paper which laid out the science in a very convincing and powerful way,” which helped make the EIC a reality.
In addition to Deshpande’s accomplishments as a scientist, Kharzeev lauded his colleague’s leadership. Deshpande brought together researchers from BNL and Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, which were originally competing for the rights to build the EIC. He helps researchers “put science first and scientific politics second,” which is a “spectacular achievement,” Kharzeev said.
Throughout his career, Deshpande has sought to find complementary strengths among his colleagues.
He is the founding director of the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science, which is a joint operation between BNL and SBU and is passionate about sharing the excitement of research with people who work outside science.
“The science we do, the excitement we feel, needs to be talked about to high school students, to college students, to their parents” and to others, Deshpande added.
Decision-makers in the government need to understand the benefit of the research, as well as the general public, whose taxes ultimately fund future discoveries, he said, and believes communicating science requires connecting with a range of audiences.
Science communicator
Deshpande’s colleagues gave him high marks for encouraging productive collaborations. He is “able to make very good, easy connections with people,” Gao said and is “approachable and easy to work with.”
Ciprian Gal, Assistant Research Professor at Mississippi State and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Frontiers in Nuclear Science, was a graduate student in Deshpande’s lab from 2010 to 2014
While he appreciated Deshpande’s intellectual acumen and knowledge of physics, Gal admired his mentor’s accessibility and eagerness to share his passion for science.
“He’s always very open” to everyone, Gal said, including students of any age. During Summer Sunday events at BNL, Deshpande spoke at length with middle school students and their parents.
“He instills a desire to communicate in all of us,” said Gal, who also appreciated how Deshpande made himself available to the graduate students in his lab during off hours and on weekends.
Engaging audiences
While he was interested in science during his formative years in high school in Mumbai, India, Deshpande also participated in several dramatic productions that were in Marathi, his native language. Typically, the plays tried to convey messages such as the importance of literacy and education or against blind faith and misinformation. Deshpande sees a benefit to using the techniques of drama to engage the audience.
He believes the EIC will provide precise knowledge of properties of the proton and the nuclei. “I promise that we will learn lots of new things,” he said.
Kindergarten connection
The celebrated physicist is married to Arati Deshpande, who works at American Health Pharmaceuticals. The couple, who met when they were in kindergarten and now live in Miller Place, have a daughter, Pooja, who is a graduate student at the Gillings School of Public Health in Chapel Hill, N.C. and a son, Ameesh, who is in high school.
As for his advice to students, Deshpande urges them to “identify a good scientific problem and pursue it no matter the cost or time.”
One day, ships in the Navy may not only last longer in the harsh environment of salt water, but some of their more complicated parts may also be easier and quicker to fix.
That’s thanks to the mechanical engineering efforts of researchers at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory, who have been teaming up to understand the microstructural origins of corrosion behavior of parts they produce through laser additive manufacturing into shapes with complex geometries.
The Navy is funding research at the two institutions.
Eric Dooryhee. Photo from BNL
“As you would expect you’d need near any marine environment with salt water, [the Navy] is interested in laser additive manufacturing to enable the production of parts at lower cost that have challenging geometries,” said Jason Trelewicz, Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Stony Brook University. Additionally, the Navy is hoping that such efforts can enable the production of parts with specific properties such as corrosion resistance on demand.
“If you’re out at sea and something breaks, can you make something there to replace it?” asked Trelewicz. Ideally, the Navy would like to make it possible to produce parts on demand with the same properties as those that come off a manufacturing line.
While companies are currently adopting laser additive manufacturing, which involves creating three-dimensional structures by melting and resolidfying metal powders one layer at a time with the equivalent of a laser printer, numerous challenges remain for developing properties in printed materials that align with those produced through established routes.
Additive materials, however, offer opportunities to structure products in a way that isn’t accessible through traditional techniques that create more complex geometry components, such as complex heat exchangers with internal cooling channels.
In addition to the science remaining for exploration, which is extensive, the process is driving new discoveries in novel materials containing unique microstructure-chemistry relationships and functionally graded microstructures, Trelewicz explained.
“These materials are enabling new engineering components through expanded design envelopes,” he wrote in an email.
With colleagues from BNL including Research Associate Ajith Pattammattell and Program Manager for the Hard X-ray Scattering and Spectroscopy Program Eric Dooryhee, Trelewicz published a paper recently in the journal Additive Manufacturing that explored the link between the structure of the material and its corrosive behavior for 316L stainless steel, which is a corrosion resistant metal already in wide use in the Navy.
The research looked at the atomic and microstructure of the material built in the lab of Professor Guha Manogharan at Penn State University. Working with Associate Professor Gary Halada in the Department of Material Science and Chemical Engineering, Trelewicz studied the corrosive behavior of these materials.
Often, the surface of the material went through a process called pitting, which is common in steels exposed to corrosive environments, which occurs in cars driven for years across roads salted when it snows.
The researchers wanted to understand “the connection between how the materials are laser printed, what their micro structure is and what it means for its properties,” Trelewicz said, with a specific focus on how fast the materials were printed.
While the research provided some structural and atomic clues about optimizing anti corrosive behavior, the scientists expect that further work will be necessary to build more effective material.
In his view, the next major step is understanding how these defects impact the quality of this protective film, because surface chemical processes govern corrosive behavior.
Based on their research, the rate at which the surface corrodes through laser additive manufacturing is comparable to conventional manufacturing.
Printed materials, however, are more susceptible to attack from localized corrosion, or pitting.
At the hard x-ray nanoprobe, Pattammattel explored the structure of the material at a resolution far below the microscopic level, by looking at nonstructural details.
“It’s the only functional beamline that is below 10 nanometers,” he said. “We can also get an idea about the electronic structures by using x-ray absorption spectroscopy,” which reveals the chemical state.
Pattammattel, who joined BNL in 2018, also uses the beamline to study how lung cells in mice interact with air pollutants. He described “the excitement of contributing to science a little more” as the best part of each day.
Meanwhile, Dooryhee as involved in writing the seed grant proposal. By using the x-rays deflected by the variety of crystalline domains or grains that compose the materials, HE can interpret the material’s atomic structure by observing the diffraction angles. The discrete list of diffraction angles is a unique fingerprint of the material that relates to its long-range atomic ordering or stacking.
In this study, researchers could easily recognize the series of diffraction peaks associated with the 316L stainless steel.
Dooryhee was able to gather insight into the grain size and the grain size distribution, which enabled him to identify defects in the material. He explained that the primary variable they explored was the sweeping rate of the laser beam, which included 550, 650 and 700 millimeters per second. The faster the printing, the lower the deposited energy density.
Ultimately, Dooryhee hopes to conduct so-called in situ studies, in which he examines laser additive manufacturing as it’s occurring.
“The strength of this study was to combine several synchrotron techniques to build a complete picture of the microstructure of the [additively manufactured] material, that can then be related to its corrosion response,” he explained in an email.
Dooryhee grew up in Burgundy France, where his grandfather used to grow wine. He worked in the vineyards during the fall harvest to help pay for his university studies. Dooryhee has worked at BNL for over 12 years and appreciates the opportunity to collaborate with researchers at Stony Brook University.
Pregnancy and lactation can alter genes in specific mammary cells, which may have implications in a defense against cancer.
In mouse models, mice that became pregnant at a young age have so-called epigenetic changes that survive for the animal life span and some of those are linked to a decrease in breast cancer.
In a recent study published in Cell Reports, Cold Spring Harbor Associate Professor Camila dos Santos and her graduate student Amritha Varshini Hanasoge Somasundara found that a protein involved in mammary cells in mice, called CD1d, boosts the immune system after a full pregnancy cycle, protecting it against breast cancer.
“Our research demonstrated that increased levels of CD1d in breast cells serve as a signal to recruit higher numbers of specialized immune cells” called natural killer T-cells, or NKT, “to come and reside within the breast tissue after pregnancy,” dos Santos explained in an email. These NKTs are part of mechanisms that reduce breast cancer risk after pregnancy.
Dos Santos would like to understand the molecular changes that occur from pregnancy and hopes one day to adapt them in the form of a vaccination or pill to decrease the risk of breast cancer.
To be sure, numerous questions about the process of using the immune system to prevent cancer remain, which means that the development of such a preventive pill requires considerable additional research.
Dos Santos has spent the last eight years developing model systems that allow her to discover pregnancy-induced changes that could lead to preventive strategies.
Enhancing the communication between epithelial and immune cells could represent a way to decrease breast cancer development and even treat cases of developed cancer.
To get to that point, dos Santos, the members of her lab, and her collaborators plan to make discoveries like this one to understand the dynamic interaction between the cascade of molecular interactions from pregnancy and the genetic and immunological reactions.
Humans have four CD1 genes, which all play a similar role in immunity. Additionally, there are several types of NKT cells, and each of them has a different immunological function, which means that any prevention or treatment that tapped into this system would need to bring the right CD1 molecule and the right NKT cells.
It is not yet clear whether enhancing CD1 signals protect women who might have a predisposition to breast cancer. Dos Santos is currently exploring this question in animals.
While dos Santos is focusing specifically on pregnancy-driven changes in the mammary gland, she acknowledged that altering CD1d levels in other organs might also decrease other types of cancer.
Dos Santos described pregnancy as being akin to turning on a light. First, during the course of gestation, pregnancy brightens that light to the top. After birth, the dimmer goes to the middle, leaving the system in a different state, which is not only more prepared for the next pregnancy but also to defend itself against alterations like cancer.
In most pregnancy mammary cells in mice, the scientists found a 10-fold increase in the abundance of NKT cells when compared to cells from an individual who had never been pregnant.
When the researchers removed the CD1d protein in mice, they found an association between the absence or low expression and the development of tumors in the breast.
Dos Santos and Hanasoge hypothesize that this protein is recruiting immune cells to monitor breast cells after pregnancy. If the epithelial cells develop cancer, the NKT cells may kill them, preventing the development and advancement of cancer.
In addition to working with mouse models of pregnancy, dos Santos is collaborating with Northwell Health to study cells from healthy women who are undergoing cosmetic surgery. They are analyzing that data, which wasn’t in this paper.
Dos Santos is investigating several questions, including how the age at pregnancy influences breast tissue. She is creating organoids, which are three-dimensional models of breast cells that react to change in their environment
Joining a family
From left, Amritha Varshini Hanasoge Somasundara and Camila dos Santos
Amritha Varshini Hanasoge Somasundara, who has been a part of dos Santos’s lab for over two years, explained that she felt comfortable and supported instantly when she arrived. She described the atmosphere as extremely collegial and felt as if she were included in a scientific family.
Joining dos Santos’s group was “possibly the best decision I’ve ever made,” said Hanasoge. Dos Santos’s lab is a “really special place” where lab members often have lunch together and support each other’s research.
Hanasoge was drawn to Dos Santos’s mentorship and the overall lab dynamic. Scientifically, she was also interested in the immunology project, exploring NKT cells. Her main project has involved trying to characterize NKT cells further.
Hanasoge sees plenty of opportunities to address additional questions in this field. “We don’t know if the process of lactation is causing more CD1d and increasing expression,” she said. “We are still trying to characterize what T-cell receptors are being expressed after pregnancy.”
A resident of Syosset, Hanasoge enjoys reading and said she was fascinated by science when she was growing up in Mysore, Kamataka in India. She asked her parents for a microscope when she was around seven and used it to looked at flower petals and leaves. That toy microscope, which her parents purchased from a science museum in Mumbai, is still in her parent’s house.
Hanasoge is eager to combine basic and translational work and hopes her research has a clinical benefit. She is looking forward to the next steps in her research in dos Santos’s lab.
“I learn from her every day by watching how she interacts with people she mentors, both inside the lab and out,” Hanasoge explained in an email. “Her passion and commitment to being a good mentor and her drive to ask the right questions in our research are inspiring.”
Richard Leakey at the Provost's Lecture Series: "Living Off the Grid with Good Access to Energy and Water". Paleoanthropologist, politician, explorer and environmentalist, Richard Erskine Frere Leakey is chairman of the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI), and Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University.
Famed paleoanthropologist, conservationist and SBU professor Richard Leakey leaves a lasting legacy
By Daniel Dunaief
A revered scientist, conservationist, Kenyan, and faculty member at Stony Brook University, Richard Leakey died on Jan. 2 at the age of 77.
Leakey made several significant human fossil discoveries, wrote books and ground breaking journal articles, appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1977, and saved elephants and rhinoceros from poaching.
Leakey, who received honorary degrees from numerous institutions including Stony Brook, was also a professor in SBU’s Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences and the founder of the Turkana Basin Institute in Nairobi, Kenya.
“I considered him my brother,” said former Stony Brook President Shirley Kenny, who had helped recruit Leakey to join the university and developed a close relationship with him over the course of over two decades. When she learned of his death, she was “devastated.”
The Stony Brook connection
Leakey was visiting Manhattan in 2001 when he met with Kenny and Lawrence Martin, who is the director of the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI). Eager to make a good first impression and “nervous about asking this great, incredible man to come and give a lecture,” Kenny got a manicure before the meal. “He wouldn’t have noticed if I had nails,” she laughed.
When Kenny learned that Leakey was in town to find new leg prosthetics after he lost his legs in a 1993 plane crash, the Stony Brook President asked if he had health insurance, which he didn’t.
Richard Leakey examines fossils at the Turkana Basin Institute.
“Jewish mother that I am, I said, ‘Richard, you have to have medical insurance.’ We arranged for him to be this faculty member at Stony Brook, who came for a certain amount of time each year to give lectures and work with students, to have students work on his digs,” Kenny recalled.
Leakey, who didn’t graduate from college, was proud of his role at Stony Brook and relished the opportunity to teach, several friends and faculty members recalled. Audiences appreciated the opportunity to hear about the most recent discoveries into human origins, especially from someone with Leakey’s world-renowned reputation.
He was just a“spellbinding public speaker,” said Martin, who first met Leakey when Martin was a graduate student in 1979.
“When [Leakey] got an honorary degree, he had two to three minutes to make an acceptance speech,” Martin said. “There was not a sound from the moment he got up. It’s one of only two occasions when the entire student body rose to their feet and gave him a standing ovation.” The other was when famed physicist C.N. Yang received an honorary degree.
Leakey was such a draw that he gave some of his bigger talks at the Staller Center for the Arts, which had to accommodate overflow space for the audience demand.
Patricia Wright, Distinguished Service Professor and founder of a research station Centre ValBio at Stony Brook, recalled how a primate conservation class responded to him.
In his provocative style, Leakey would come in and say something “totally outrageous,” she recalled. The students, who might have otherwise been starstruck and been inclined to write everything he said, felt compelled to speak and would respond, saying, “Wait a second, it shouldn’t be like that.” The class would then discuss a conservation issue with Leakey, which opened up an effective dialogue.
“They loved him because he was so charming and was able to turn their minds around,” Wright said. “I loved those classes and watching him with my students.”
In the world of conservation, Leakey took unconventional approaches that proved effective. In 1989, five years after the landmark discovery of Turkana Boy, a 1.5-million-year-old fossil of one of the most complete early human skeletons, Leakey arranged the burning of 12 tons of ivory tusks in Kenya, signaling that they belonged on live animals.
“We can absolutely say that there are elephants and rhinoceros that are alive today that wouldn’t have been alive if it weren’t for Richard Leakey,” Wright said.
Words of wisdom
In addition to leading by example, Leakey dispensed valuable advice, often over food he prepared specially (more about that in the None of the Above column in this issue).
Leakey “left me with a huge gift, the gift of being confident in what I’m doing, as long I’m doing it with principles,” said Sonia Harmand, Associate Professor in Anthropology at Stony Brook. Leakey urged Harmand not to be “scared of breaking boundaries” and trying something nobody else had tried, she said. “Have faith in what you think you want to do. Never be afraid of being judged.”
Richard Leakey and Joe Biden in 2017 at the Stars of Stony Brook gala at Chelsea Piers. Photo from SBU
Harmand made a significant archaeological discovery, for which she received some skeptical comments. Leakey suggested that she consider such questions a point of pride and a reflection of the value of the work.
“You start to have enemies when you start to be famous and important,” Harmand said Leakey told her. It made her think she should be pleased that people were scrutinizing and criticizing her work.
Wright, meanwhile, appreciated how Leakey gave her the strength to live life the way she wanted. He urged her to put in the time and effort to work on politics and networking.
Several people suggested that Leakey, who battled physical challenges throughout his life without complaint, also inspired them. “He really taught me about courage and strength,” Kenny said. “I had the kind of courage that let me take on paths I didn’t know if I could handle. He taught me physical courage.”
Indeed, Leakey displayed the kind of physical courage and belief in his convictions people typically associate with a character from a Tom Clancy novel.
In 1967, Leakey was on a Kenyan flight that had to divert because of a dust storm. Despite earlier reports that the land in the Lake Turkana region was volcanic, Leakey thought he saw sedimentary rock, which could contain fossils. He rented a helicopter and landed with only seven minutes of extra gas to spare for the return trip. When he got out of the helicopter, he found fossils. He quickly appeared at a National Geographic meeting, where he urged the group to fund the search on the east side of Turkana.
The chairman of the society told him “if you don’t find fossils, don’t bother to come back to National Geographic,” Martin said the chairman told Leakey. The findings were more than enough for the group to continue funding Leakey’s research, including on the west side of Lake Turkana, where he discovered Turkana Boy.
Life-altering contact
For several of those who knew Leakey, the interaction was life-altering.
When he was a high school student in Nairobi, Isaiah Nengo heard a talk Leakey gave about plate tectonics and evolution.
“I was completely blown away,” said Nengo, who is now Associate Director at the Turkana Basin Institute.
As a second-year student at the University of Nairobi, Nengo attended an evolution lecture by Leakey. At that point, he was hooked, deciding to become a paleoanthropologist.
Nengo, whose parents’ education stopped around fourth grade, wrote to Leakey after he graduated from college, not expecting to hear back.
“It goes to tell you what kind of person [Leakey] was,” Nengo said. “This kid from the University of Nairobi out of nowhere writing him a letter, and he wrote back.”
Nengo, who said he heard similar stories from others in Kenya, including some who are currently colleagues at TBI, volunteered for a few months, until he got a fellowship.
He said Leakey helped fund a post-baccalaureate one-year program in the United States.
“The best gift you could get is the gift of knowledge,” Nengo said. “From [Leakey], I got the gift of knowledge, which changed the trajectory of my life.”
Like others who were prepared to change their lives after interacting with Leakey, Harmand had been in a comfortable job at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France when Leakey suggested she join Stony Brook and the Turkana Basin Institute in 2011. “I’m not sure I would have taken” the job, but for Leakey. The work was only supposed to last a couple of years, but she never left.
“He marked my life forever and my career forever,” Harmand said. “We also had a very deep friendship” that extended to the next generation, as her nine-year-old daughter Scarlett has forged a connection with Leakey’s granddaughter Kika, whose mother Samira is the daughter of Richard and Meave Leakey.
With three daughters, including Louise Leakey, who conducts field research at Turkana Basin institute, Leakey was a strong advocate for women.
Women are “equally capable as men and for him, this was not even a question,” Harmand said.
A passion for Kenya
In addition to being pleased with his connection to Stony Brook University, Leakey, who accepted the ceremonial key to a French city in his first language of Swahili, was a proud Kenyan. He set out to employ, train, include and inspire Kenyans in research projects and encouraged the children of staff members to come see the fossils, Martin said.
Leakey also helped raise money from people who traveled to Kenya to support educational fellowships. He contributed to the construction of maternity clinics on either side of Lake Turkana so women could give birth in safe, sterile conditions with electric light, Martin added.
Kenyans recognized Leakey when he traveled and appreciated his contribution to the country.
“We were driving to his farm, when we got stopped,” Martin said. “Everybody knew him and wanted to shake his hand and say hello. He was a local hero who was seen as a Kenyan doing things for his fellow Kenyans,” Martin said.
Harmand recalled one of the last times she spoke with him; he reiterated his passion for his home country.
Leakey made it clear “how important it is to involve Kenyans in what we do,” Harmand said. “We are training the next generation of human origin scientists in Kenya. He is the son of Kenya.”
A passion for science
While Leakey had a genuine interest in a variety of fields, he was, at his core, a scientist. Nengo called him a “polymath” who knew a great deal about a wide range of scientific subjects.
In one of her final conversations with Leakey, Wright said he took her aside after a meal she described as “exquisite” and asked her about bones she’d found in Madagascar.
The conventional wisdom about human origins in the island nation was that humans had come from Borneo 2,000 years ago.
In the middle of Madagascar, however, Wright had found bones from hippos and birds that had cut marks from humans that dated back 10,000 years.
Leakey told her that she “had to find those people,” she recalled. “You will be letting down all of Madagascar if you don’t find their origins.”
Wright said that conversation, which had its intended effect, was “emblematic of his burning desire to know and to learn about hominid history and the burning desire to collect and assemble pieces of history.”
Birthday presents
Leakey, who gave so much of himself to so many people, didn’t like receiving gifts, Martin said, but he welcomed receiving cheese, wine or cooking tools, including pots and pans.
When Leakey reached his 70th birthday, Martin asked him what he planned to do to celebrate. He had scheduled a sailing trip, but he wasn’t sure if he could pull together a crew. Martin offered to be a part of his crew for a journey that lasted over a week aboard a 38-foot catamaran.
Leakey’s daughters Samira and Louise joined Martin as deck hands, giving Richard Leakey the opportunity to take the helm during his journey along the coast of Kenya near his home in Lamu.
“When he was steering the boat, it was the only time he wasn’t challenged by his disabilities,” Martin said. “He didn’t need his feet. Driving wasn’t particularly easy. When he was sitting in the catamaran, it didn’t heel; it went fast, and he could steer the boat. Watching him, I had the sense that he felt completely free.”
The same wind that powers sailboats, makes kites dart through the air, and causes flags to flutter can make being outdoors in a group safer, particularly during the pandemic.
While public health officials have suggested that being outdoors with others amid the pandemic is safer than remaining inside, the strength of the wind can affect the level of protection provided by wide open spaces.
That’s the conclusion Sean Clouston, Associate Professor in the Program in Public Health and the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, reached after studying public health data from 96,000 cases of COVID in Suffolk County from March 16, 2020 to December 31, 2020.
By combining public health data with the daily reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Clouston found that days in which the temperature was between 60 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit and in which the wind was about 5 miles per hour or less had higher COVID-19 transmission than those days in which the wind speed was faster.
This kind of study, which was recently published in the journal BMC Infectious Disease, might affect the guidance policy makers provide to reduce the risk of COVID transmission during outdoor gatherings.
“If you’re imaging yourself as a policy maker and you want to contain COVID, what do you do?” Clouston asked rhetorically. Vaccines and masks are established tools. Ensuring airflow is higher might also be important, he suggested.
Indeed, amid the early days of the pandemic in 2020, public officials closed parks in Suffolk County for a while and eventually reopened them.
An alternative could be to provide access to parks where wind speed is also protective, or to reduce the use of parks where social distancing is difficult and where wind speed is lower.
At the same time, residents might want to protect themselves by putting out fans in their backyard or some other airflow devices to keep the flow of air moving during a social gathering, reducing the chance of transmitting the virus. People might want to avoid using tents that reduce the flow of air around them.
Additionally, people could eat out at restaurants where the airflow is stronger.
Diners can search for places where the air “moves around, so the outdoor experience is as protective as possible,” Clouston said. He recognized that the data had some variability between when people who went outside might have contracted COVID. The air flow could increase and then decrease and the average length of time from exposure to symptoms and testing could differ between people.
“Any time we deal with humans, this is the problem,” Clouston said. Researchers can’t control for everything. Instead, they have to assume people make decisions in a consistent, but variable, way.
The larger data set, with close to 100,000 cases, enabled Clouston and his colleagues to average out the effects of the time when people reported their positive COVID tests.
For numerous cases, people had a good idea where and how they contracted COVID. Even when they were at outdoor events, such as a barbecue, some people had indoor parties where they ate together.
In addition, merely being outdoors didn’t reduce the risk if people were standing in the equivalent of stale air, where wind couldn’t reach them and help carry viral particles away from others who attended these events.
Being outside if the air isn’t moving is similar to being indoors in a space with a very large ceiling and a wide space between walls, he explained. It is safer than a small room, but it is not inherently safe on its own.
As for air circulation indoors, Clouston said people have suggested that moving air in buildings could reduce the spread of the virus.
Testing the effects of having HEPA filters or air filtration systems run continuously in hospitalscompared to areas that don’t have such units could reveal the benefit of having these air flow systems. Some studies have been done on this, although more work is ongoing, he said.
Clouston suggested that other environmental conditions could also impact the transmissibility of the virus. The heat index, for example, might explain why wind speed might be important.
The heat index “might diminish the effect or make it stronger,” Clouston said. “It can push people indoors.”
Clouston worked on this study with Stony Brook colleagues in the Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine Assistant Professor Olga Morozova and Professor Jaymie Meliker. The team has worked with the Suffolk County Department of Health since 2020 on different aspects of COVID modeling.
Clouston was surprised that the research revealed a threshold model wind speed. He was also surprised to see that the speed was so low. “You only need a little airflow,” he explained.
The Stony Brook scientist looked at where the positive cases were located by zip code. The summer distribution and the spatial distribution was somewhat unclear, he said.
The spread of COVID was distributed by population size and density. Population size and density are likely more important than alterations in microclimate in the summer.
The analysis is important for places when and where outdoor exposures are most common, he explained.
“This may be true in the summer on Long Island or in the winter in southern states like Louisiana when outdoor activities are more comfortable,” he wrote in an email.
Clouston has several ongoing projects. He has papers discussing the role of social inequalities and COVID, a paper looking at clinical risk factors for COVID at Stony Brook Hospital, and one describing the initial wave of COVID in World Trade Center responders.
He would like to look at the effect of outdoor protests during 2020 on the spread of COVID, which would require data on attendance at those events and at the ones in New York City.
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