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Power of 3

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From left, Dr. Sunil Kumar Sharma, Dr. Priyanka Sharma, Ritika Joshi, and Dr. Ben Hsiao. Photo by Lynn Spinnato

By Daniel Dunaief

“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” 

That won’t be the case, particularly in areas with fresh water that needs decontamination, if Stony Brook’s Ben Hsiao and Priyanka Sharma have anything to say about it.

The duo recently won first place for creativity in the prestigious Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water that drew research applicants, and runners up, from all over the world who are addressing water-related challenges. Hsiao, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Stony Brook University and Sharma, Research Assistant Professor, will receive $133,000 for winning first place for the award which is given every other year.

Hsiao and Sharma are continuing to develop a plant biomass-based filtration system that is designed to make drinking water, a scarce necessity in developing nations around the world, more accessible to people who sometimes have to walk hours each day for their allotment.

Hsiao said he was “really honored [just] to be nominated” by the Department Chair Peter Tonge. “There are so many people in the whole world working on water purification.” 

Winning the award was “truly a surprise,” with Hsiao adding that he is “humbled” by the honor.

Sharma said it was an “amazing feeling to receive an international prize.” The work, which has received two other awards including from the New York Academy of Science, has “truly gained its importance,” she wrote in an email.

Sharma said her parents and her husband Sunil Kumar Sharma’s parents, who live in her native India, have been “spreading the news” in India and are excited for the recognition and for the potential benefit to society from the research.

Hsiao, who started working on filtration systems in 2009 after Richard Leakey invited him to visit the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, has made several discoveries in connection with a process he hopes becomes widely available to people in communities that don’t have electricity.

He and Sharma have developed adsorbents, coagulants and membrane materials from biomass-sourced nanocellulose fibers.

The standard commercial water purification system involves using artificial polymers, in which electricity pumps water through the filter that can remove bacteria, viruses, heavy metals and other potential contaminants.

Hsiao and Sharma, however, have turned to the plant world for a more readily available and cost effective solution to the challenge of filtering water. Plants of all kinds, from shrubs to bushes to feedstock, have overlapping cellulose fibers. By deploying these overlapping needles in filters, the Stony Brook scientists can remove the kind of impurities that cause sickness and disease, while producing cleaner water. 

The needles, which are carboxy-cellulose nanofibers, act as a purifying agent that has negative surface charge which causes the removal of oppositely charged impurities. By using these fibers for water purification, Sharma said the team has improved the efficiency and cost related to impurity removal.

Hsiao and Sharma have not tested this material for filters yet. A few years ago, Hsiao used a similar material for filtration. When Sharma joined Hsiao’s lab, she helped develop a cost effective and simpler method, which is how she started working on the nitro-oxidation process. The substrate from nitro-oxidation acts as a purifying agent like charcoal.

The substrates they created can benefit the developed as well as the developing world. In the future, if they receive sufficient funds, they would like to address the ammonium impurities initially on Long Island. The area regularly experiences algal blooms as a result of a build up of nitrogen, often from fertilizers.

The negatively charged substrate attracts the positively charged ammonium impurities. They have tested this material in the lab for the removal of ammonium from contaminated water. Not only does that cleanse the water, but it also collects the ammonium trapped on the carboxycellulose fibers that can be recycled as fertilizer.

Hsiao is working with two countries on trying to make this approach available: Kenya and Botswana. The Kenya connection came through the work he has been doing with Richard Leakey at Stony Brook’s Turkana Basin Institute, while Botswana is a “small but stable country [in which he can] work together to have some field applications.”

Hsiao said Sharma, whom he convinced to join his lab in 2015, has a complementary skill set that enables their shared vision to move closer to a reality.

Sharma’s “cellulose chemistry is a lot better than mine,” Hsiao said. “I have these crazy visions that this is going to happen. She allows me to indulge my vision. Plus, we have a team of dedicated students and post docs working on this.”

Hsiao encouraged Sharma to join his research effort when he offered his idea for the potential benefits of the work.

Hsiao said he “ wanted to do something for societal benefit,” Sharma said. “That one sentence excited me.” Additionally, she said his lab was well known for using the synchrotron to characterize cellulose nanofibers and for developing cellulose based filtration membranes.

Coming from India to the United States “wasn’t easy,” as no one in her extended family had been to the states, but she felt a strong desire to achieve her academic and professional mission.

Hsiao described Sharma as a “promising, talented scientist,” and said he hopes they can land large research grants so they can continue to develop and advance this approach.

Back in 2016, Hsiao set an ambitious goal of creating a process that could have application throughout the world within five years, which would be around now.

“I was naive” about the challenges and the timing, Hsiao said. “I still have another five to 10 years to go, but we’re getting closer.”

Broadly, the effort to provide drinkable water that is accessible to people throughout the world is a professional challenge Hsiao embraces. 

The effort “consumes me day and night,” he said. “I’m dedicating the rest of my life to finding solutions. I’m doing this because I feel like it’s really needed and can have a true impact to help people.”

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Michael Frohman. Photo from SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

Bringing together researchers and clinicians from six countries, including scientists scattered throughout the United States, a team of scientists co-led by Stony Brook University’s Michael Frohman linked mutations in a gene to congenital heart disease.

Frohman, Chair of the Department of Pharmacological Sciences in the Renaissance School of Medicine at SBU, has worked with the gene Phospholipidase D1 (or PLD1), for over 25 years. Researchers including Najim Lahrouchi and Connie Bezzina at the University of Amsterdam Heart Center linked this gene to congenital heart disease.

“The current study represents a seminal finding in that we provide a robust link between recessive genetic variants of PLD1 and a rather specific severe congenital heart defect comprising right-side valvular abnormalities,” Bezzina wrote in an email. 

Michael Frohman at Glymur Falls in Iceland.

The international group collected information from 30 patients in 21 unrelated families and recently published their research in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

A number of other genes are also involved in congenital heart disease, which is the most common type of birth defect. People with congenital heart disease have a range of symptoms, from those who can be treated with medication and/or surgery for pre-term infants to those who can’t survive.

The discovery of this genetic link and congenital heart disease suggests that PLD1 “needs to be screened in cases with this specific presentation as it has implications for reproductive counseling in affected families,” Bezzina explained.

Bezzina wrote that she had identified the first family with this genetic defect about five years ago.

“We had a strong suspicion that we had found the causal gene, but we needed confirmation and for that, we needed to identify additional families,” she said. “That took some time.

Bezzina described the collaboration with Frohman as “critical,” as she and Lahrouchi had been struggling to set up the PLD1 enzymatic assay in their lab, without any success. Lahrouchi identified Frohman as a leading expert in the study of PLD1 and the team reached out to him.

His work was instrumental in determining the effect of the mutations on the enzymatic activity of PLD1, Bezzina explained.

The timing in connecting with Frohman proved fortuitous, as Frohman had been collaborating with Michael Airola, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry & Cell Biology at Stony Brook University, on the structure of the PLD1 catalytic domain.

“Together, they immediately saw that the mutations found in the patients were located primarily in regions of the protein that are important for catalysis and this provided detailed insight into why the mutations caused the PLD1 enzyme to become non-functional,” Bezzina wrote.

These findings have implications for reproductive counseling, the scientists suggested.

A couple with an affected child who has a recessive variation of PLD1 could alert parents to the potential risk of having another child with a similar defect.

One of the variants the scientific team identified occurs in about two percent of Ashkenazi Jews, which means that 1 in 2,500 couples will have two carriers and a quarter of their conceptions will be homozygous recessive, which virtually guarantees congenital heart disease. This, however, is about three times less frequent than Tay-Sachs. “This has, in our view, clinical implications for assessing the risk of congenital heart defects among individuals of this ancestry,” said Bezzina.

The mutation probably arose among Ashkenazi Jews around 600 to 800 years ago. There are about 20 known disease mutations like Tay-Sachs in this population that are found only rarely in other groups.

Lahrouchi and Bezzina specialize in the genetics of congenital heart disease, which occurs worldwide in 7 out of every 1,000 live births.

With 56 coauthors, Frohman said this publication had the largest number of collaborators he’s ever had in a career that includes about 200 papers. While this is unusual for him, it’s not uncommon among papers in clinical research.

The lead researchers believed a comprehensive report with a uniform presentation of clinical data and biochemical analysis would provide a better resource for the field, so they brought together research from The Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Israel, France, Italy and the United States.

Previous research that involved Frohman revealed other patterns connected to the PLD1 gene. 

About a dozen years ago, Frohman helped discover that mice lacking the PLD1 gene, or that were inhibited by a drug that blocked its function, had platelets that are less easily activated, which meant they were less able to form large blood clots.

These mice had better outcomes with strokes, heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms.

The small molecule inhibitor was protective for these conditions before strokes, but only provided a small amount of protection afterwards. Technical reasons made it difficult to use this inhibitor in clinical trials.

The primary work in Frohman’s lab explores the link between PLD1 and cancer. He has shown that loss of PLD1 decreases breast cancer tumor growth and metastasis.

As for what’s next, Frohman said he has a scientific focus and a translational direction. On the scientific front, he would like to know why the gene is required for heart development. He is launching into a set of experiments in which he can detect what might go wrong in animal models early in the development of the heart. 

Clinically, he hopes to explore how one bad copy of the PLD1 gene combines with other genes that might contribute to cause enough difficulties to challenge the survival of a developing heart.

A resident of Old Field, Frohman lives with his wife Stella Tsirka, who is in the pharmacology department and is Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs in the Renaissance School of Medicine. The couple has two children, Dafni, who is a first-year medical student at Stony Brook and Evan, who is a lawyer clerking with a judge in Philadelphia.

Outside of work, Frohman, who earned MD and PhD degrees, enjoys hikes in parks, kayaking and biking.

Having a medical background helped him learn a “little bit about everything,” which gave him the opportunity to prepare for anything new, which included the medical implications of mutations in the PLD1 gene.

Bezzina hopes to continue to work with Frohman, on questions including how the mutation type affects disease severity. “An interplay with other predisposing genetic factors is very interesting to explore as that could also help us in dissecting the disease mechanism further,” she wrote.

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Peter Koo Photo from CSHL

By Daniel Dunaief

The goal sounds like a dystopian version of a future in which computers make critical decisions that may or may not help humanity.

Peter Koo, Assistant Professor and Cancer Center Member at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, would like to learn how to design neural networks so they are more interpretable, which will help build trust in the networks.

The neural networks he’s describing are artificial intelligence programs designed to link a molecular function to DNA sequences, which can then inform how mutations to the DNA sequences alter the molecular function. This can help “propose a potential mechanism that plays a causal role” for a mutation in a given disease, he explained in an email.

Researchers have created numerous programs that learn a range of tasks. Indeed, scientists can and have developed neural networks in computer vision that can perform a range of tasks, including object recognition that might differentiate between a wolf and a dog.

Koo when he received a COVID vaccination.

With the pictures, people can double check the accuracy of these programs by comparing the program’s results to their own observations about different objects they see.

While the artificial intelligence might get most or even all of the head-to-head comparisons between dogs and wolves correct, the program might arrive at the right answer for the wrong reason. The pictures of wolves, for example, might have all been taken during the winter, with snow in the background The photos of dogs, on the other hand, might have cues that include green grass.

The neural network program can arrive at the right answer for the wrong reason if it is focused on snow and grass rather than on the features of the animal in a picture.

Extending this example to the world of disease, researchers would like computer programs to process information at a pace far quicker than the human brain as it looks for mutations or genetic variability that suggests a predisposition for a disease.

The problem is that the programs are learning in the same way as their programmers, developing an understanding of patterns based on so-called black box thinking. Even when people have designed the programs, they don’t necessarily know how the machine learned to emphasize one alteration over another, which might mean that the machine is focused on the snow instead of the wolf.

Koo, however, would like to understand the artificial intelligence processes that lead to these conclusions.

In research presented in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, Koo provides a way to access one level of information learned by the network, particularly DNA patterns called motifs, which are sites associated with proteins. It also makes the current tools that look inside black boxes more reliable.

“My research shows that just because the model’s predictions are good doesn’t mean that you should trust the network,” Koo said. “When you start adding mutations, it can give you wildly different results, even though its predictions were good on some benchmark test set.”

Indeed, a performance benchmark is usually how scientists evaluate networks. Some of the data is held out so the network has never seen these during training. This allows researchers to evaluate how well the network can generalize to data it’s never seen before.

When Koo tests how well the predictions do with mutations, they can “vary significantly,” he said. They are “given arbitrary DNA positions important scores, but those aren’t [necessarily] important. They are just really noisy.”

Through something Koo calls an “exponential activation trick,” he reduces the network’s false positive predictions, cutting back the noise dramatically.

“What it’s showing you is that you can’t only use performance metrics like how accurate you are on examples that you’ve never seen before as a way to evaluate the model’s ability to predict the importance of mutations,” he explained.

Like using the snow to choose between a wolf and a dog, some models are using shortcuts to make predictions.

“While these shortcuts can help them make predictions that [seem more] accurate, like with the data you trained it on, it may not necessarily have learned the true essence of what the underlying biology is,” Koo said.

By learning the essence of the underlying biology, the predictions become more reliable, which means that the neural networks will be making predictions for the right reason.

The exponential activation is a noise suppressor, allowing the artificial intelligence program to focus on the biological signal.

The data Koo trains the program on come from ENCODE, which is the ENCyclopedia Of DNA Elements.

“In my lab, we want to use these deep neural networks on cancer,” Koo said. “This is one of the major goals of my lab’s research at the early stages: to develop methods to interpret these things to trust their predictions so we can apply them in a cancer setting.”

At this point, the work he’s doing is more theoretical than practical.

“We’re still looking at developing further tools to help us interpret these networks down the road so there are additional ways we can perform quality control checks,” he said.

Koo feels well-supported by others who want to understand what these networks are learning and why they are making a prediction.

From here, Koo would like to move to the next stage of looking into specific human diseases, such as breast cancer and autism spectrum disorder, using techniques his lab has developed.

He hopes to link disease-associated variance with a molecular function, which can help understand the disease and provide potential therapeutic targets.

While he’s not a doctor and doesn’t conduct clinical experiments, Koo hopes his impact will involve enabling more trustworthy and useful artificial intelligence programs.

Artificial intelligence is “becoming bigger and it’s undoubtedly impactful already,” he said. “Moving forward, we want to have transparent artificial intelligence we can trust. That’s what my research is working towards.”

He hopes the methods he develops in making the models for artificial intelligence more interpretable and trustworthy will help doctors learn more about diseases.

Koo has increased the size and scope of his lab amid the pandemic. He current has eight people in his lab who are postdoctoral students, graduate students, undergraduates and a master’s candidate.

Some people in his lab have never met in person, Koo said. “I am definitely looking forward to a normal life.”

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Joel Hurowitz

By Daniel Dunaief

February 18th marked an end and a beginning.

On that day, the Mars Perseverance rover descended through the atmosphere with considerable fanfare back on Earth. Using some of the 23 cameras on Perseverance, engineers took pictures and videos of the landing.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration not only shared the video of the rover descending into the Jezero crater which held water and, perhaps, life three billion years ago, but also offered a view of the elated engineers who had spent years planning this mission.

 

In a calm, but excited voice, a female narrator counted down the height and speed of the rover, which weighs about a ton on Earth and closer to 800 pounds in the lower gravity of Mars. The NASA video showed staff jumping out of their seats, cheering for the achievement.

Launched from Cape Canaveral, the rover took 233 days to reach Mars, which is about the gestation period for a chimpanzee.

Some of the engineers “who got us there have reached the end of their marathon,” said Joel Hurowitz, Associate Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University and Deputy Principal Investigator for one of the seven scientific instruments aboard the Perseverance. 

With ongoing support from other engineers who helped design and build the rover, the scientists “get the keys to the vehicle and we get to start using these things.”

Indeed, Hurowitz and Scott McLennan, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University are part of teams of scientists who will gather information to answer basic questions about Mars, from whether life existed, to searching for evidence of ancient habitable environments, to seeking evidence about the changing environment.

Both Stony Brook scientists were riveted by the recordings of the landing.

Scott McLennan

Hurowitz marveled at the cloud of dust that formed as the rover approached the surface.“You could see these chunks of rock flying back up at the sky crane cameras,” he said. “I was amazed at the amount of debris that was kicked up in the landing process.”

Hurowitz had seen pieces of rock on top of the Curiosity rover after it landed, but he felt he understood more about the process from the new video. “To see it happening, I realized how violent that final stage of the landing is,” he said.

McLennan said this has been his sixth Mars mission and he “never tires of it. It’s always exciting, especially when there is a landing involved.”

Like Hurowitz, who earned his PhD in McLennan’s lab at Stony Brook, McLennan was impressed by the dust cloud. “I understood that a lot of dust and surface debris was displaced, but it was quite remarkable to see the rover disappear into the dust for a short while,” he wrote in an email.

While previous missions and orbiting satellites have provided plenty of information about Mars, the Perseverance has the potential to beam pictures and detailed analysis of the elements inside rocks.

Hurowitz, who helped build the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, or PIXL, said the team, led by Abigail Allwood at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has conducted its first successful instrument check, which involves turning everything on and making sure it works. Around April, the PIXL team will start collecting its first scientific data.

In addition to searching for evidence of previous life on Mars, Hurowitz will test a model for climate variation.

The SuperCam on the Perseverance Rover. Photo by Gregory M. Waigand

From measurements of the chemistry and mineralogy of sedimentary rock, the scientists can deduce whether the rocks formed in an environment that was oxygen-rich or oxygen-poor. Additionally, they can make inferences about temperature conditions based on their chemical compositions.

Looking at variations in each layer, they can see whether Mars cycled back and forth between cold and warm climates.

Warmer periods could have lasted for hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of years, depending on how much greenhouse gas was injected at any time, Hurowitz explained. “Whether this is long enough to enable biological development is probably one of the great questions in the field of pre-biotic chemistry,” he said.

The Martian atmosphere could have had dramatic swings between warm and oxygen-poor conditions and cold and oxygen-rich conditions. “This has not really been predicted before and provides a hypothesis we can test with the rover payload for how climate might have varied on Mars,” he added.

Tempering the expectation of confirming the existence of life, Hurowitz said he would be “shocked if we woke one morning and a picture in the rover image downlink [included] a fossil,” he said. “It’s going to take time for us to build up our understanding of the geology of the site well enough.” The process could take months or even years.

Using information from orbiters, scientists have seen minerals in the Jezero crater that are only found when water and rock interact.

With the 11-minute time lag between when a signal from Earth reaches Perseverance, Hurowitz said scientific teams send daily codes up to the rover and its instrument. Hurowitz will be involved in uploading the signals for PIXL.

A Martian day is 40 minutes longer than the Earth day, which is why the Matt Damon movie “The Martian” used the word “sol,” which represents the time between sunrises on Mars.

McLennan, who works on three teams, said PIXL and the SuperCam provide complementary skill sets. With its laser, the SuperCam can measure the chemical composition of rocks at under seven meters away. Up close, PIXL can measure sub millimeter spot sizes for chemistry.

SuperCam will then find areas of interest, enabling PIXL to focus on a postage-stamp sized area.

As a member of the Returned Sample Science Working Group, McLennan, who is a specialist in studying the chemical composition of sedimentary rocks, helps choose which rocks to collect and set aside to bring back to Earth. The rocks could return on a mission some time in the 2030s.

The scientists will collect up to 43 samples, including some that are completely empty. The empty tubes will monitor the history of contamination that the other rock samples experienced. 

For McLennan, the involvement of his former student is especially rewarding. Hurowitz “didn’t just help build the instrument, he’s one of the leaders,” McLennan said. “That’s really fabulous.”

For Hurowitz, any data that supports or refutes the idea about the potential presence of life on Mars is encouraging.

He is “cautiously optimistic” about finding evidence of past life on Mars. “We’ve done everything we can as a scientific community to maximize the chance that we’ve landed some place that might preserve signs of life.”

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U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm joined scientists from DOE national laboratories for a round table conversation on COVID-19 on March 4. Photo from the Department of Energy.

By Daniel Dunaief

Jennifer Granholm, the new secretary of the Department of Energy, is pleased with the role the 17 national laboratories has played in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic over the last year and is hopeful research from these facilities will aid in the response to any future potential pandemics.

There are “70,000 people who are spread out across America solving problems,” Granholm said in a recent press conference that highlighted the effort and achievement of labs that redirected their resources to tackle the public health threat. 

The DOE is “the solutions department” and has “some of the greatest problem solvers.”

“It is super exciting to talk about this particular issue, the issue of the day, the COVID, and what the lab has been doing about it,” she added.

Granholm, who was confirmed by a Senate vote of 64-35 and was sworn in as secretary on February 25th, had previously been the Attorney General in Michigan and was the first female governor of Michigan, serving two terms from 2003 to 2011.

The press conference included three research leaders from national labs across the country, including Kerstin Kleese van Dam, Director of the Computational Science Initiative at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton.

Kleese van Dam was the BNL lead for one of the five DOE teams that tackled some of the scientific challenges caused by the virus. She led the effort to inform therapeutics related to COVID-19.

The other four teams involved manufacturing issues, testing, virus fate and transport, which includes airflow monitoring, and epidemiology.

The public discussion was intended to give people a look at some of the “amazing work that you all are doing,” Granholm said.

The Department of Energy formed the National Virtual Biotechnology Laboratory, or NVBL, to benefit from DOE user facilities, such as the light and neutron sources, nanoscience centers, sequencing, and high-performance computer facilities to respond to the threat posed by COVID-19.

Funding for NVBL enabled BNL scientists to pivot from what they were doing to address the challenge created by the pandemic, John Hill, Director of the National Synchrotron Light Source II, explained in an email.

BNL had been constructing a new facility, called the Laboratory for Biomolecular Structures, prior to the pandemic. The public health threat created by the virus, however, accelerated the time table by two months for the completion of the structure. 

The lab has new cryo-electron microscopes that allow scientists to study complex proteins and the architecture of cells and tissues. The cryo-EM facility contributed to work on the “envelope” protein for the SARS-CoV2 virus, which causes COVID-19.

“We at BNL built a new facility which gives further capabilities to look at the virus during the pandemic,” Kleese van Dam said during the press conference. The lab prepared the facility “as quickly as possible so we could help in the effort.”

Kleese van Dam said the three light sources around the country, including the National Synchrotron Light Source II at BNL, have been working throughout the crisis with the pharmaceutical industry, helping them “refine and improve their medications.”

Indeed, Pfizer scientists used the NSLS-II facility to research certain structural properties of their vaccine. At the same time, researchers have worked on a number of promising antivirals, none of which has yet made it into clinical use.

The national laboratories, including BNL, immediately tackled some of the basic and most important questions about the virus soon after the shutdown last spring.

“There was a period last year, in the depths of the first lockdown in New York, when [the National Synchrotron Lightsource-II] was only open to COVID research,” Hill wrote in an email. “That was done both by BNL scientists and others working with our facility remotely. All other research was on hold.”

The facility reopened to other experiments in May for remote experiments, Hill continued.

Kleese van Dan explained that other projects also had delays.

“These [delays] were up front discussed with collaborators and funders and all whole heartedly supported our shift in research,” said Kleese van Dam. “Many of them joined us in this work.”

Hill said the NSLS-II continues to work on COVID-19 and that much of the work the lab has conducted will be useful in future pandemics. “We are also exploring ways to maintain preparedness going forward,” he continued.

BNL is collaborating with other groups, including private companies, to enable a robust and rapid response to future threats.

“BNL is part of a multi-lab consortium  — ATOM (Accelerating Therapeutics for Opportunities in Medicine) — that aims to pursue the therapeutics work in collaboration with other agencies, foundations and industry,” Kleese van Dam wrote in an email.

In response to a question from Granholm about the safety of schools and the study of airflow, Kleese van Dam explained that national labs like BNL regularly study the way aerosols move in various spaces.

“As a national lab, we study pollution and smoke and things like that,” Kleese van Dam said during the press conference.

The lab tested the virus in the same way, exploring how particles move to understand infections.

“When we think about this, we think about how air moves through small and confined spaces,” Kleese van Dam said. “What I breathe out will be all around you. If we were outside, the air I’m breathing out is mixed with clean and healthy air. The load of the virus particles that arrive are much smaller.”

Using that knowledge, BNL and other national laboratories did quite a few studies, including exploring the effect of using masks on the viral load.

People at numerous labs used computer simulations and practical tests to get a clearer picture of how to reduce the virus load in the air.

Granholm pledged to help share information about minimizing the spread of the virus.

“We’re going to continue to focus on getting the word out,” Granholm said. The labs are doing “great work” and the administration hopes to “make the best use of it.”

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A rendering of Beelzebufo, a mammoth-sized ancient frog discovered in 2008 by David Krause of Stony Brook University, by Luci Betti-Nash
Luci Betti-Nash drawing warblers
A rendering of Rahonavis, a bird-like feathered dinosaur discovered in Madagascar
Trans Saharan Seaway
Vintana sertichi reconstruction

By Daniel Dunaief

It started over four decades ago, with a “help wanted” advertisement.

Luci Betti-Nash needed money for art supplies. She answered an ad from the Stony Brook University Department of Anatomical Sciences that sought artists who could draw bones. She found the work interesting and realized that she could “do it fairly easily. I could not have imagined a more fulfilling career.”

Betti-Nash spent 41 years responding to requests to provide illustrations for a wide range of scientific papers, contributing images that became a part of charts and graphs and drawing everything from single-celled organisms to dinosaurs. She retired last April.

Her coworkers at Stony Brook, many of whom collaborated with her for decades, appreciated her contributions and her passion and precision for her job.

Maureen O’Leary, Professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences, said Betti-Nash’s work enhanced her professional efforts. “I couldn’t have had the same career without her,” O’Leary wrote in an email. “Artists are true partners.”

O’Leary appreciated how Betti-Nash noticed parts of the work that scientists miss. 

“I think the most important thing is figuring out together what to put in and what to leave out of a figure,” O’Leary explained. “A photograph shows everything and it can be a blizzard of detail, really too much, and it will not focus the eye. The artist-scientist collaboration is about simplifying the detail to show what is important and how to show it clearly.”

One of O’Leary’s favorite illustrations from Betti-Nash was a pull-out, color figure that envisioned the ancient Trans-Saharan Seaway from about 75 million years ago. The shallow sea, which was described in the movie “Aquaman,” supported numerous species that are currently extinct. Betti-Nash created a figure that showed these creatures in the sea and how water drained from nearby mountains, all superimposed over the geology.

“It told the story of how ancient life turned into rocks and fossils,” O’Leary explained.

Betti-Nash, who continues to sketch from her home office and plans to be selective about taking on future assignments, has numerous stories to tell about her work.

For starters, the world of science is rife with jargon. When she was starting out, she didn’t always stop researchers who tossed around the terms that populate their life as if they were a part of everyone’s vocabulary.

“Some [scientists] would come in and assume you knew exactly what they were talking about,” Betti-Nash said. “It was something they were studying for years. They would assume you knew all the terminology.”

Each discipline, from cell biology to gross anatomy to dinosaur taxonomy had its own terminology, some of which “was way over my head,” she said. 

Early in her career, Betti-Nash felt she didn’t know details she thought she should.

“The older I got, the bolder I got about asking” scientists to explain what they meant in terms she could understand, she said, adding that she felt fortunate to have scientists who were “more than willing and eager to answer my questions when I was bold enough to ask. That was one of the many life lessons I learned … don’t be afraid to ask questions.”

Betti-Nash sometimes had to work under intense time pressure. Collaborating with David Krause, who was at Stony Brook and is now Senior Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Denver Museum of Science, Betti-Nash illustrated the largest frog ever discovered, which lived in Madagascar over 65 million years ago. Called the Beelzebufo, this frog weighed in at a hefty 10 pounds and was 16 inches. Ribbit!

A short time before going to press, the scientific team decided they needed a common object as a frame of reference to compare the size of this ancient amphibian and the largest living frog in Madagascar.

“We scrambled,” Betti-Nash recalled. “We decided on a pencil.” 

She didn’t have time to draw the pencil, so she put it on her scanner, did some quick painting in Photoshop, put a shadow in, added it to the scan of the painting, saved it in the format required for the journal and sent it off.

“Adding the pencil was one of those typical strokes of genius that [Betti-Nash] routinely added to artwork,” explained Krause in an email. “Everyone knows the size of a number 2 pencil.”

Even though she hadn’t sculpted in 32 years, she had to create a sculpture of the frog that students could touch. The sculpture had to be non-toxic, dry and ready within three days.

Betti-Nash turned to the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, asking for help with ideas for the materials. She also asked Joseph Groenke from Krause’s lab to contribute his fossil preparing experience. She used an epoxy clay that she massaged into shape, and then colored it with acrylic, non-toxic paints.

That sculpture was featured as a part of a display at Stony Brook Hospital for years and has since traveled with Krause to Denver where “kids especially love it, in part because it is touchable,” Krause wrote.

Krause was grateful for a partnership with Betti-Nash that spanned almost 40 years.

“There is no doubt in my mind that [Betti-Nash] made me a better scientist and there is also no doubt that my science is better” because of her, he explained. Krause described her stipple drawings as “incredibly painstaking to execute.” His favorite is of a large fossil crocodile found in Madagascar from the Late Cretaceous called Mahajangasuchus. 

Betti-Nash urges artists considering entering the field of scientific illustrating to attend graduate school or even to take undergraduate courses, which would provide time to learn skills and terminology before working in the field.

She also suggests artists remain “interested in what you’re drawing at that moment, no matter what it is,” she said, adding that drawing skills provide a solid foundation for a career in science illustrating. Computer skills, which help with animation and videos, are good tools to learn as well.

Growing up in Eastchester, Betti-Nash often found herself doodling patterns in her notebooks. When she worked on graph paper, she colored in the squares. She also received artistic guidance from her father, the late John Betti.

A graphic designer, Betti worked for a company in Westchester, where he designed the town seal for Tuckahoe as well as the small airplane wings children used to get when they flew on planes.

During World War II, Betti, who grew up in Corona, Queens, used his artistic skills to create three-dimensional models from aerial photographs. Stationed close to the residence of his extended family in Italy during part of the war, Betti also created watercolor paintings of the Italian landscape.

When she was growing up, Betti-Nash had the “best model-making teacher in my dad,” who taught her to create paper maché.

Married to fellow illustrator Stephen Nash, Betti-Nash plans to remain active as an artist, doing her own illustrations involving nature and the relationship between birds and the environment. 

She currently leads Second Saturday Bird Walks at Avalon Nature Preserve in Stony Brook and Frank Melville Memorial Park in Setauket through the Four Harbors Audubon Society (4HAS.org)

Betti-Nash is pleased with a career that all started with a response to an ad in the paper. “I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to work as a scientific illustrator,” she said. “I hope I was able to help communicate the science behind the discoveries that the amazing scientists at Stony Brook made during my time there.”

All photos courtesy of Luci Betti-Nash

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Stem cell growth, required for kernel development, is controlled in corn by a set of genes called CLEs. But how these genes change the corn is complicated. Using CRISPR genome editing, CSHL researchers found they could change kernel yield and ear size by fine-tuning the activity of one of the CLE genes, ZmCLE7. In the image: an unmodified corn cob with normal ZmCLE7 gene activity (1) is packed with regular rows of kernels. Shutting off ZmCLE7 (2) shortened the cob, disrupted row patterns, and lowered kernel yield. However, decreasing the same gene’s activity (3) led to an increase in kernel yield, while increasing the gene’s activity (4) decreased the kernel yield. Jackson Lab/CSHL 2021

By Daniel Dunaief

The current signal works, but not as well as it might. No signal makes everything worse. Something in the middle, with a weak signal, is just right.

By using the gene-editing tool CRISPR, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Professor Dave Jackson has fine-tuned a developmental signal for maize, or corn, producing ears that have 15 to 26 percent more kernels. 

Dave Jackson. Photo from CSHL

Working with postdoctoral fellow Lei Liu in his lab, and Madelaine Bartlett, who is an Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Jackson and his collaborators published their work earlier this week in the prestigious journal Nature Plants.

Jackson calls the ideal weakening of the CLE7 gene in the maize genome the “Goldilocks spot.” He also created a null allele (a nonfunctional variant of a gene caused by a genetic mutation) of a newly identified, partially redundant compensating CLE gene.

Indeed, the CLE7 gene is involved in a process that slows the growth of stem cells, which, in development, are cells that can become any type of cell. Jackson also mutated another CLE gene, CLE1E5.

Several members of the plant community praised the work, suggesting that it could lead to important advances with corn and other crops and might provide the kind of agricultural and technological tools that, down the road, reduce food shortages, particularly in developing nations.

“This paper provides the first example of using CRISPR to alter promoters in cereal crops,” Cristobal Uauy, Professor and Group Leader at the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom, explained in an email. “The research is really fascinating and will be very impactful.”

While using CRISPR (whose co-creators won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in October) has worked with tomatoes, the fact that it is possible and successful in cereal “means that it opens a new approach for the crops that provide over 60% of the world’s calories,” Uauy continued.

Uauy said he is following a similar approach in wheat, although for different target genes.

Recognizing the need to provide a subtle tweaking of the genes involved in the growth of corn that enabled this result, Uauy explained that the variation in these crops does not come from an on/off switch or a black and white trait, but rather from a gradient.

In Jackson’s research, turning off the CLE7 gene reduced the size of the cob and the overall amount of corn. Similarly, increasing the activity of that gene also reduced the yield. By lowering the gene’s activity, Jackson and his colleagues generated more kernels that were less rounded, narrower and deeper.

Uauy said that the plant genetics community will likely be intrigued by the methods, the biology uncovered and the possibility to use this approach to improve yield in cereals.

“I expect many researchers and breeders will be excited to read this paper,” he wrote.

In potentially extending this approach to other desirable characteristics, Uauy cautioned that multiple genes control traits such as drought, flood or disease resistance, which would mean that changes in the promoter of a few genes would likely improve these other traits.

“This approach will definitely have a huge role to play going forward, but it is important to state that some traits will still remain difficult to improve,” Uauy explained.

Jackson believes gene editing has considerable agricultural potential.

“The prospect of using CRISPR to improve agriculture will be a revolution,” Jackson said.

Other scientists recognized the benefits of fine-tuning gene expression.

“The most used type/ thought of mutation is deletion and therefore applied for gene knockout,” Kate Creasey Krainer, president and founder of Grow More Foundation, explained in an email. “Gene modulation is not what you expect.”

While Jackson said he was pleased with the results this time, he plans to continue to refine this technique, looking for smaller regions in the promoters of this gene as well as in other genes.

“The approach we used so far is a little like a hammer,” Jackson said. “We hope to go in with more of a scalpel to mutate specific regions of the promoters.”

Creasey Krainer, whose foundation hopes to develop capacity-building scientific resources in developing countries, believes this approach could save decades in creating viable crops to enhance food yield.

She wrote that this is “amazing and could be the green revolution for orphan staple crops.”

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration is currently debating whether to classify food as a genetically modified organism, or GMO, if a food producer used CRISPR to alter one or more of its ingredients, rather than using genes from other species to enhance a particular trait.

To be sure, the corn Jackson used as a part of his research isn’t the same line as the elite breeding stock that the major agricultural businesses use to produce food and feedstock. In fact, the varieties they used were a part of breeding programs 20 or more years ago. It’s unclear what effect, if any, such gene editing changes might have on those crops, which companies have maximized for yield.

Nonetheless, as a proof of concept, the research Jackson’s team conducted will open the door to additional scientific efforts and, down the road, to agricultural opportunities.

“There will undoubtedly be equivalent regions which can be engineered in a whole set of crops,” Uauy wrote. “We are pursuing other genes using this methodology and are very excited by the prospect it holds to improve crop yields across diverse environments.”

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Feinstein Institutes’ Drs. Kevin Tracey and Christina Brennan break down the current COVID-19 clinical trials and treatments. Photo courtesy of The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research

By Daniel Dunaief

In a collaboration between Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Northwell Health’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, doctors and researchers are seeking patients with mild to moderate symptoms of COVID-19 for an at-home, over-the-counter treatment.

The two-week trial, which will include 84 people who are 18 years old and older, will use a high, but safe dose of Famotidine, or PEPCID, in a double-blind study. That means that some of the participants will receive a placebo while others will get the Famotidine.

Volunteers will receive the dosage of the medicine or the placebo at home and will also get equipment such as pulse oximeters, which measure the oxygen in their blood, and spirometers, which measure the amount of air in their lungs. They will also receive a scale, a thermometer, a fitness tracker and an iPad.

Dr. Christina Brennan. Photo courtesy of The Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research

Northwell Health will send a certified phlebotomist — someone licensed to draw blood — to the participants’ homes to collect blood samples on the first, 7th, 14th, and 28th day of the study.

The study is the first time CSHL and Northwell Health have designed a virtual clinical trial that connects these two institutions.

“What is very powerful with our work with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is the ability to do a virtual trial and utilize patient-recorded outcome measures,” said Christina Brennan, a co-investigator on the study and Vice President for Clinical Research for Northwell Health. “I’m thrilled that we’re doing this type of virtual trial. It’s very patient-centric.”

While reports about the potential benefits of Famotidine have circulated around the country over the last year, this study will provide a data-driven analysis.

“If we study this in the outpatient population, then we might have an opportunity to see if [Famotidine] really does play a role in the reduction of the immune overreaction,” Brennan said.

At this point, researchers believe the drug may help reduce the so-called cytokine storm, in which the immune system becomes so active that it starts attacking healthy cells, potentially causing damage to organs and systems.

In an email, Principal Investigator Tobias Janowitz, Assistant Professor and Cancer Center Member at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, wrote that “there are some retrospective cohort studies” that suggest this treatment might work, although “not all studies agree on this point.”

In the event that a trial participant developed more severe symptoms, Janowitz said the collaborators would escalate the care plan appropriately, which could include interrupting the use of the medication.

In addition to Janowitz, the medical team includes Sandeep Nadella, gastroenterologist at Northwell, and Joseph Conigliaro, Professor of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research.

Janowitz said he does not know how any changes in the virus could affect the response to famotidine.

In the trial, volunteers will receive 80 milligrams of famotidine three times a day.

The dosage of famotidine that people typically take for gastric difficulties is about 20 milligrams. The larger amount per day meant that the researchers had to get Food and Drug Administration approval for an Investigational New Drug.

“This has gone through the eyes of the highest regulatory review,” Brennan said. “We were given the green light to begin recruitment, which we did on January 13th.”

Volunteers are eligible to join the study if they have symptoms for one to seven days prior to entering the trial and have tested positive for the virus within 72 hours.

Potential volunteers will not be allowed in the trial if they have had other medications targeting COVID-19, if they have already used Famotidine in the past 30 days for any reason, if they have severe COVID that requires hospitalization, have a history of Stage 3 severe chronic disease, or if they are immunocompromised by the treatment of other conditions.

Brennan said Northwell has been actively engaged in treatment trials since the surge of thousands of patients throughout 2020.

Northwell participated in trials for remdesivir and also provided the steroid dexamethasone to some of its patients. The hospital system transfused over 650 patients with convalescent plasma. Northwell is also infusing up to 80 patients a day with monoclonal antibodies. The hospital system has an outpatient remdesivir trial.

“Based on all our experience we’ve had for almost a year, we are continuously meeting and deciding what’s the best treatment we have available today for patients,” Brennan said.

Janowitz hopes this trial serves as a model for other virtual clinical trials and is already exploring several potential follow up studies.

Brennan said the best way to recruit patients is to have the support of local physicians and providers. 

People interested in participating in the trial can send an email to [email protected] or call 516-881-7067.

When the study concludes, the researchers will analyze the data and are “aware that information on potential treatments for COVID-19, no matter if the data show that a drug works or does not work, should be made available to the community swiftly,” Janowitz wrote in an email.

The decision to test this medicine as a potential treatment for COVID-19 arose out of a conversation between Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cancer Center Dave Tuveson and CEO of the Feinstein Institute Kevin Tracey.

“I got involved because I proposed and developed the quantitative symptom tracking,” Janowitz explained.

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Weisen Shen. Photo by John Griffen/SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

Like so many others during the pandemic, Weisen Shen has had to pivot in his job.

An Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences at Stony Brook University, Shen has historically focused his efforts on understanding the geothermal heat flux, or the movement of heat from the core of the Earth, in Antarctica.

Constrained by travel restrictions created by the COVID-19 pandemic, Shen has decided to put his 180 seismometers to good use on Long Island.

“We have seismometers that stay in the basement of our building,” Shen said. “We can’t use them in Antarctica because of the travel ban and other complexities, and we want to make use of them in our community to understand the geology of Long Island.”

Shen is looking for students who might be interested in geology and who might like to plant a seismometer in their backyard, gathering information about how the flow of seismic waves deep beneath their homes and backyards reveals details about the structure, temperature and composition of the land miles below the surface.

Shen, who lives in Syosset, installed a seismometer in his own backyard, which has allowed him to see the signal from the local train station in Sayville. “We seek help from [the local community] to allow us to deploy a seismometer in their back or front yard for a month or so,” Shen said.

Planting a seismometer would involve digging a 15 centimeter by 15 centimeter hole that is 5 inches deep. Shen and his team would cover it. The seismometer wouldn’t need local electricity because it has a lithium battery. 

After about a month, the scientists would dig it out, put dirt back in, and return the backyard to the way it looked prior to taking these measurements.

The machine doesn’t make any noise and does not pick up any sounds from inside people’s homes.

The signal will contribute “to our understanding of the Earth,” Shen explained, including details about the crustal and mantle structure, seismic activities, and the Earth’s vibrations due to civil activities such as the rumbling of trains.

Shen is “more than happy to share data” with the people who host his seismometers. He also expects to produce a research paper based on his studies from Long Island.

He is charging the batteries and testing the instruments and plans to plant them in the field as early as the end of February.

People who would like to participate can reach out to Shen by sending him an email at [email protected]. Please include “Volunteer Long Island Imager” in the subject line.

Recent Antarctica Studies

While Shen is focusing his geothermal expertise on Long Island, he hasn’t abandoned or ignored Antarctica, a region he has focused research efforts on because of the vulnerability of the ice sheet amid climate change. He is also interested in the geothermal structure in the area, which reveals information about its geology and tectonics, which remain mysteries residing below the ice. 

Grounded during the pandemic, Shen spent several months gathering and analyzing considerable available data, hoping to understand what happens deep below the frozen surface.

“We are trying to analyze so-called ‘legacy data’ that has been collected over the past two decades,” he said.

On a fundamental level, Shen is trying to quantify how much heat is coming out through the crust, which includes heat coming from the deeper earth in the mantle and the core as well as within the crust.

Traveling beneath the oceans towards the center of the Earth, which would be considerably hotter and more difficult than 19th century author Jules Verne’s fantastic fictional voyages, would expose people to temperatures that increase, on average, about 10 to 30 degrees celsius per kilometer.

Some of the heat comes from the way the planet formed. In addition, unstable isotopes of potassium, uranium and thorium release heat as they decay, which mostly happens within the Earth’s crust. 

In areas with large ice sheets sitting on top of the land, the geothermal heat can melt some of that ice, creating a layer of water that accelerates the ice sheet movement. Indeed, pulling an ice cube across dry ground takes more energy than dragging that same cube across a wet surface.

Moving ice more rapidly towards the periphery will increase melting which, coupled with climate change, could increase the amount of water in Antarctica, particularly in the western region.

Comparing the two ice melting effects, Shen believes global warming, which is more rapid and has shorter term outcomes, plays a more important role in changing the liquid characteristics of Antarctica than geothermal heating, which is longer term.

In collecting available legacy data, Shen analyzed information from the entire western part of Antarctica, as well as parts of the central and eastern regions.

Using a measure of the geothermal heat flux, Shen found some unexpected results, particularly on Thwaites Glacier, beneath which he found a large area with elevated geothermal heat flux. 

Studying geomagnetic data, he compared their results with the results from geomagnetically derived results. In the future, he will combine the two different methods to improve the assessment. 

In a publication last summer in Geophysical Research Letters, Shen presented a new map of the geothermal heat flux for Antarctica with a new resolution of 100 kilometers by 100 kilometers, which is a much higher resolution than earlier studies, which are typically done at 600 kilometer by 600 kilometer ranges.

In West Antarctica, he found a more modest heat flux, despite the area being more tectonically active.

Finally, a major take of the paper, Shen said, is that the Thwaites glacier has a high geothermal heat flux, which could explain why the ice moves more rapidly and readily.

As for his future work, in addition to exploring the seismology of Long Island, Shen said he would pursue his National Science Foundation grant to look for additional water in the boundary between the ice sheet and the mantle.

He is working on “using high frequency seismic records to look for data,” he said.

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Valentina Bisogni. Photo from BNL

By Daniel Dunaief

Nature plays a wonderful game of hide-and-seek with its secrets.

One day, Joan might be searching for, say, an apple tree in the forest. Joan might consider all the elements that appeal to an apple tree. She might expect the journey to take two hours but, to her surprise, discovers a tree on the way.

That’s what happened to Valentina Bisogni, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Bisogni, who works at the National Synchrotron Lightsource II, wanted to figure out how the thickness in a magnetic film affected traveling modes involving the spin property of electrons, known as spin waves. Specifically, she wanted to control the energy of the spin wave.

This might be important in future devices that involve passing along information through an electron’s spin rather than through charge, which is the current method. Controlling the spin wave could be another way to optimize the performance or improve the efficiency of future devices.

Transmitting charge creates unwanted heat, which can damage the components of an electronic device and limit its usefulness. Heat also creates energy inefficiencies.

Valentina Bisogni with a collection of tomatoes in a garden in Bellport Village. Photo by Claudio Mazoli.

Bisogni, who arrived at BNL in 2014, has been working on a beamline called Soft Inelastic X-ray Scattering, or SIX. Each of the new beamlines at the nearly billion-dollar facility has its own acronym and number that corresponds to their location in the accelerator ring.

Before she planned to apply an electric field that might control the spin wave, however, Bisogni figured she’d explore the way thinner iron materials affected the spin.

That’s when the metaphorical apple tree appeared, as the thickness of iron films, that were as thin as one to 10 nanometers, helped control the spin wave before applying any electric field.

“This result was not expected,” Bisogni said. This was preparatory work to a more detailed, dedicated study. 

“Not having had any benchmark of iron crystals in general with the technique I am using, it was logical to study this system from a bulk/ thin form to a very thin film,” she explained in an email.

Bisogni and a team from Yale University recently published the results of this work in the journal Nature Materials.

While this unexpected result is encouraging and could eventually contribute to the manufacture of electronic devices, Bisogni said this type of discovery helps build a fundamental understanding of the materials and their properties at this size.

“For people assembling or designing devices or wave guides, I think this is an ingredient that has to be considered in the future,” Bisogni said.

This kind of result could enable the optimization of device performance. When manufacturers propagate a signal based on spin dynamics, they would likely want to keep the same frequency, matching the signal along a medium from point A to point B.

The effect of the thickness on the spin was like a power log, which is not quite exponential as the experimenters tested thinner material, she said.

Bisogni plans to continue with this collaboration, as the group is “excellent in preparing and characterizing this kind of system.”

In the bigger picture, Bisogni is focused on quantum materials and altering their spin.

She is also overseeing the development of a system called Opera, which copies the working conditions of electronic devices. Opera is the new sample environment available at SIX and is developed within the research project to copy device-working conditions in the beamline’s measurement chamber.

Bisogni ultimately hopes her work may improve the energy efficiency of electronics.

A resident of Bellport Village, Bisogni lives with her partner Claudio Mazoli, who is the lead scientist for another beamline at the NSLS II, called the Coherent Soft X-ray Scattering, or CSX.

Bisogni said the couple frequently enjoy exchanging ideas and have an ongoing active collaboration, as they share several scientific passions.

The couple met at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France when they were working in the same lab.

Bisogni was born and raised in Spoleto, which is in the province of Perugia in the center of Italy. Bisogni speaks Italian and English as well as French and German after her work experience in France, Germany and Switzerland.

Bisogni said she and Mazoli are “very food-centric” and can find numerous epicurean opportunities in the area of Long Island and New York City. The weather is also similar to home, although they miss their family and friends from Italy.

The couple purchased a house together during the pandemic and have been doing some work to shape the house to their needs. They remodeled the bathrooms in an Italian/ European style, purchased a German washing machine and dryer and painted some walls.

In the summer, Bisogni, who likes to eat, cook and grow vegetables, enjoys spinach, tomatoes and light-green zucchini.

As for her work, Bisogni is currently pleased with the state of her beamline, although she said its development took considerable team effort and time during the development, construction and commissioning.

At this point, her research team includes two and a half permanent scientists and two post-doctoral scientists. Within the team, they have two post-doc researcher positions looking to fill, one for her research project and another dedicated to her colleague’s research project.

Ultimately, Bisogni is excited with the opportunities to make fundamental discoveries at work.

“It is, in general, very exciting, as most likely you are doing something for the first time,” Bisogni explained in an email. “It is true that you may fail, since nobody is going to tell you if what you are doing is going to work or not, but if you get it right, then it is extremely rewarding.”

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