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Stony Brook University

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Katie Engel submitted a video of her spinning on the ice to demonstrate the work of Emmy Noether.

*This article was updated  Feb. 13 to reflect a change in the Jocelyn Bell Burnell lecture from Feb. 13 to Feb. 14 due to the weather.

By Daniel Dunaief

And the winner is … women in science! 

While Stony Brook University’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) announced the winners of its inaugural challenge to celebrate the scientific and engineering achievement of women on Feb. 7, the organizers and participants feel like they’ve already come out ahead.

The inaugural competition, which 195 students kindergarten through 12th grade in schools on Long Island entered by submitting a one-minute video, included prizes for the 13 finalists. The winner received $1,000 prize, the runner up got $750 and the third-place finisher collected $500.

Marivi Fernández-Serra

“The goal of it was to celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, while simultaneously promoting the important role that women had in science in the last century,” explained Marivi Fernández-Serra, Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department and at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science.

In their videos, the students selected one of nine scientists that included experiments showcasing the work of these researchers by using computers or household products to demonstrate the search for dark matter, explore the laws of conservation, create homemade telescopes, simulate a volcano with lava and many more.

Fernández-Serra, who had helped with a similar effort at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Madrid, Spain, brought the idea for the competition to Mónica Bugallo, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and affiliated member of the IACS  Faculty Director of the Women in Science and Engineering Honors Program, who immediately supported it.

Fernández-Serra thought the competition might attract 10 entrants in its inaugural year while Bugallo, who reached out to Long Island schools to showcase the competition, was confident local students would embrace the opportunity.

“Wait for a tsunami of participants,” Bugallo said she told Fernández-Serra, with whom she’s been a colleague and friend for years. “I was not surprised” by the contributions from the 103 teams, which included entrants from individual students and groups of as many as three students.

Bugallo, who recommended computer scientists Grace Hopper and mathematician and writer Ada Lovelace as important scientists for the competition, was impressed with the student effort.

“It was extremely tough to come up with the finalists,” said Bugallo.

Stony Brook plans to share the videos from the finalists after naming the winners.

Figure skating and conservation

One of the finalists, Katie Engel, a senior at Cold Spring Harbor High School, chose to demonstrate the work of Emmy Noether.

A German mathematician, Noether contributed to theoretical physics and abstract algebra. A theorem named after her, the Noether Theorem, explains that any continuous symmetry in a system has an associated conservation law. That helps explain how the speed of someone spinning in a chair changes depending on how far their arms re-extended.

Mónica Bugallo

An ice skater since she was six who is also interested in studying computer science or engineering, Engel had never heard of Noether but was intrigued with the physics and with the person who helped discover ways to characterize it.

In her entry, Engel explained the mathematical principals on a white board and then recorded a video of herself spinning on ice. When she learned about Noether’s life, Engel discovered that Noether was an important contributor to her field, despite some resistance to her work from men. “Reading about her stories is really inspiring,” said Engel.

Engel is stunned at the conclusions Noether reached with the tools at her disposal.

Currently working as an intern for Peter Koo at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Engel suggested she is committed to pursuing her interest in science, technology, engineering and math fields during and after college.

Engel was also a member of the robotics team at Cold Spring Harbor High School that won the regional conference and went to the World Championships in Houston last year. In robotics, Engel said the number of girls on the team declined from 10th through 12th grades. 

She is, however, heartened to learn that 180 boys and 200 girls attended a recent research fair at her school.

New teaching tools

Fernández-Serra and Bugallo are hoping that teachers at all levels can use the videos to inspire students and help them connect with scientists whose contributions continue to resonate with current researchers. The purpose of activities like the competition is to “spark interest, so students want to investigate more,” said Bugallo.

Stony Brook plans to build on this experience in future years through either similar efforts or ongoing programs or initiatives. “Our intent was to have these challenges year after year if this was successful, and it obviously was,” said Bugallo.

In the immediate future, Fernández-Serra encourages students in the area to attend the upcoming talks given by University of Oxford astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the pulsar, as a part of the Della Pietra lecture series at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics on Stony Brook University’s West Campus from February 13 through Feb. 15.

Bell Burnell is giving a general public lecture on Feb. 14 at 5 p.m., with a reception at 4:15 p.m. in the Simons Center Lobby. The lecture will also be livestreamed at scgp.stonybrook.edu/live.

Bell Burnell will also offer a special talk for high school students titled You Are Made of Star Stuff! on Feb. 15 at 11 a.m. that examines how and where elements in the human body were created in the cosmos. Both lectures will be held in the Della Pietra Family Auditorium (room 103).

A curiosity outside the classroom

For scientists, what they learn and study often stays with them long after they finish an assignment or submit or publish a paper.

Fernández-Serra, who studies the fundamental properties of liquid water using quantum mechanical simulations, thinks about how amazing water atoms are that are holding her when she swims.

As for Engel, thoughts of Noether will stay with her when she figure skates. “I probably can’t do a spin without thinking about her,” she said.

Heroes with staying power

For Fernández-Serra, Mildred Dresselhaus, one of the celebrated scientists of the past who was a part of the contest, was a “number one hero” in condensed matter physics.

Called the “Queen of Carbon,” Dresselhaus earned numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science and Engineering.

“She was a positive and brilliant scientist who never lost her enthusiasm and curiosity,” Fernández-Serra explained.

Stony Brook’s IACS team hopes this competition, the Bell Burnell lecture, and other efforts ignite such enthusiasm in the next generation of STEM students.

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These images from the PET scans reveal the side view of a pigeon’s brain at rest and in flight and highlights cerebellum brain activity. The redder colors indicate higher brain activity, and sub-regions of the cerebellum are outlined. Credit: Paul Vaska

Study Involving Advanced Brain Imaging Reveals Expansion of the Cerebellum was Key

An international team of researchers led by Amy Balanoff, PhD, at Johns Hopkins Medical Institute and Paul Vaska, PhD, at Stony Brook University combined the use of positron emission topography, or PET scans, of modern pigeon brains and studies of dinosaur fossils to help answer an ongoing question in evolutionary biology: How did the brains of birds evolve to enable them to fly? The answer, detailed in a paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B., appears to be an adaptive increase in the size of the cerebellum in some fossil vertebrates.

The evolution of flight is a rare event in vertebrae history, and one that demands functional integration across multiple anatomical/physiological systems. This new research combined modern PET scan imaging data of ordinary pigeons with the fossil record, examining brain regions of birds during flight and braincases of ancient dinosaurs.

The PET imaging and analysis for the study was conducted at Stony Brook University by a team of graduate and undergraduate students led by Vaska, a senior author on the paper, and Professor in the Departments of Radiology and Biomedical Engineering in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University.  Lemise Saleh, a graduate student in the PhD program in BME at Stony Brook, was one of the three lead authors.

The researchers performed PET imaging scans to compare activity in 26 regions of the brain when the bird was at rest and immediately after it flew for 10 minutes from one perch to another.  PET scans show the location and amount a tracer compound similar to glucose, indicating increased use of energy and thus brain activity (the tracer rapidly degrades and is excreted from the body).

Vaska collaborated closely with Amy Balanoff, lead author of the study, along with the rest of the research team, in order to compare the brain activity of modern pigeons before and after flight.

Of the 26 regions, one area — the cerebellum — had statistically significant increases in activity levels between resting and flying. Overall, the level of activity increases in the cerebellum differed by more than two standard statistical deviations, compared with other areas of the brain.  This makes sense because the cerebellum is a brain region responsible for movement and motor control.

The researchers also detected increased brain activity in the so-called optic flow pathways, a network of brain cells that connect the retina in the eye to the cerebellum. These pathways process movement across the visual field.

Their novel research links the cerebellum findings of flight-enabled brains in modern birds to the fossil record, which showed how the brains of bird-like dinosaurs began to develop brain conditions for powered flight. The team’s overall data is an important step toward establishing how the brain of modern birds supports their unique behaviors and provides insights into the neurobiology of the bird-like dinosaurs that first achieved powered flight.

“PET imaging is really the only way to directly assess brain function across the whole brain during animal behavior,” says Vaska.  “Because of our expertise and resources in PET technology, we were able to design a study that used PET to effectively capture the brain activity during flight, and then discovered the primary role of the cerebellum. This lays the groundwork for future studies to better understand brain evolution across species.”

Connecting the findings to avian dinosaurs

The researchers used a digitized database of endocasts, or molds of the internal space of dinosaur skulls, which when filled, resemble the brain’s outer shape. They identified and traced a sizable increase in cerebellum volume to some of the earliest species of maniraptoran dinosaurs, which preceded the first appearances of powered flight among ancient bird relatives, including the well-known Archaeopteryx, a winged dinosaur.

They also found evidence in the endocasts of an increase in tissue folding in the cerebellum of early maniraptorans, an indication of increasing brain complexity. They noted that their tests involved straightforward flying, without obstacles and with an easy flightpath, and that other brain regions may also be active during more complex flight maneuvers.

Their next step in the ongoing research is to pinpoint precise areas in the cerebellum that enable a flight-ready brain and the neural connections between these structures.

The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

 

 

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The new species named, Booralana nickorum, may play a crucial role in maintaining the health of the ecosystem. Photo courtesy of OceanX

By Daniel Dunaief

Oliver Shipley recently shared one of the mysteries of the heavily photographed but lightly explored deep sea areas near the Bahamas’ Exuma Sound.

Oliver Shipley

A Research Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University, Shipley and his colleagues published a paper in the journal Zootaxa describing a new species of isopod they named Booralana nickorum.

A few inches long, this isopod, which was found at a depth of about 1,600 feet, sheds light on some of the mysteries in these waters, offering a glimpse into areas mostly too deep for sunlight to penetrate.

“The level of knowledge on deep sea biodiversity anywhere in the Caribbean is very poor,” said Shipley. The scientists were specifically studying the biomass housed areas around The Exuma Sound.

In the Bahamas, the researchers are interested in preserving species biodiversity and identifying links between the shallow and deep-sea ecosystems, which can inform management of marine resources and help conserve biodiversity.

Shipley suggested it was “exciting” and, perhaps, promising that this area has already produced two isopods that are new species, both of which he described with low-cost technologies deployed off small boats.

“We haven’t even genetically sequenced 95 percent of the creatures that we’ve captured” which includes fish and sharks, Shipley said.

Brendan Talwar, a co-author on the paper describing the isopod and a Postdoctoral Scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, added that “this discovery is representative of the lack of knowledge” in this area. “You can swim from one environment, where almost every species is known or has been studied, to a place where almost nothing is known and almost nothing is studied.”

Finding new species could have numerous benefits, including in the world of drug discovery. To be sure, such findings require “many years of work and analysis” he said.

Still, such a possibility for future benefits exist, particularly as researchers catalog and study these creatures.

In the meantime, understanding individual species and the ecosystems in which they live can reveal information about how, depending on the biomass of various species, different places affect the cycling of gases such as carbon dioxide.

“When you find high biomass of a new species, it could have potentially huge implications for mitigating climate change,” said Shipley. “We have a primitive understanding of the Caribbean deep sea ecosystem. We don’t know the full effects or benefits and services of organisms that live in the deep ocean environment.”

In addition to finding organisms that might provide various benefits, scientists are also hoping to understand the “food web dynamics of the eastern Bahamas,” said Talwar.

Long road to identification

Shipley first saw an individual of this isopod species in 2013. Over time, he has since identified numerous other individuals.

Dorsal views of the newly described Booralana nickorum on left and previously known Booralana tricarinata highlight distinguishing characteristics between the two species. Image courtesy of Oliver Shipley

The region in which Shipley identified this isopod has several potential food or energy sources. The deep sea area is in close proximity to shallower sea grass beds, which are closer to the surface and use light to generate food and energy through photosynthesis.

The tides and currents wash that sea grass into the deeper territory, sending food towards the deeper, darker ocean.

Energy also likely comes from coral reef productivity as reefs line the edge of the drop off.

Additionally, animals that traverse the shallower and deeper areas, whose poop and bodies sink, can provide food sources to the ecosystem below.

“There may be multiple sources of productivity which combines to promote a high level of biodiversity” in the ecosystem below, said Shipley.

The isopod Shipley and his collaborators identified lives in a pressure that is about 52 times the usual atmospheric pressure, which would be extremely problematic for organisms like humans. Isopods, however, have managed to live in most major ecosystems around the planet, including on mountains, in caves and in the deep sea.

“There’s something about that lineage that has supported their ability to adapt to a variety of environments,” said Shipley.

To bring the creatures back to the surface for study, researchers have used deep sea traps, including crustacean and eel traps, that are attached to a line. People working on boats then retrieve those traps, which can take one to two hours to pull to the surface. 

When they are brought to the surface, many animals suffer high mortality, which is a known sensitivity of deep-sea fisheries.

“We must gain as much knowledge as possible from each specimen,” Shipley explained

Scratching the surface, at depth

Talwar and Shipley have each ventured deep into the depths of The Exuma aboard a submersible.

The journey, which Talwar described as remarkably peaceful and calm and akin to an immersive aquarium experience, is “like a scavenger hunt,” he said.

When scientists or the sub pilot see a new species of sea cucumber, the pilot can move the sub closer to the organism and deploy the manipulator arm to store it in a collection box. Shipley and others hope to explore deep sea creatures under conditions akin to the ones in which they live in high pressure tanks on land.

Talwar described Shipley as “an extremely productive scientist” who works “incredibly hard.” Talwar also appreciates how Shipley will put collaborative projects at the top of his list, which is “fairly unique in a field where people are so busy with their own stuff.”

Shipley, who lives in Austin, Texas with his girlfriend Alyssa Ebinger, explained that researchers are pushing to support scientific leadership by Bahamians to conserve marine resources threatened by climate change.

Looking under rocks

As a child, Shipley, who grew up in York, England, spent about three years in Scotland, where they spent time at a beach called Trune.

“I remember looking in rock pools, picking up stuff and inspecting it,” he said. He was naturally inquisitive as a child.

While Shipley enjoys scuba diving and is a committed soccer fan — his favorite team is Leeds United — he appreciates the opportunity to build on his childhood enthusiasm to catalog the unknowns of the sea. He’s so inspired by the work and exploration that it “doesn’t feel like a job,” he said. He’s thrilled that he gets paid “to do all this exciting stuff.”

 

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Pixabay photo

By Aramis Khorso

The ongoing struggle between adolescents and suicide problems has become increasingly prominent in recent years. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide has been among the top three leading causes of death for children and young adults ages 10 through 34. 

The battle against anxiety and depression, which are the main causes of adolescent suicide, has been surging among young adults. According to the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, such mental health disorders, which are treatable, have increased since 2003 among children aged 6–17. The mental health and suicide epidemic rose to such unignorable heights that the U.S. Surgeon General declared the pediatric mental health crisis a national emergency in 2021.

To many, these statistics are rightly shocking and frightening. For Stony Brook University undergraduate senior Vignesh Subramanian, they were a call for action. He had observed the consequences of untreated anxiety and depression in children throughout his own adolescence. This, as well as the declared national crisis combined, made him decide it was time to take a stance and help out other young adults suffering from mental health problems. 

“We were already aware that this was a new phenomenon,” Subramanian said. “People had not been this stressed before — I was seeing this among my peers. Something had to be done. It was amounting to something of a crisis, and then these official declarations came out.” 

Subramanian recognized that many communities, especially schools and other educational facilities, were unequipped to respond to this mental health crisis adequately. He pointed out that mental health disorders are still “overtly stigmatized,” adding, “Parents and schools alike don’t know how to support students and get the help they need or can’t accommodate them properly.” 

In early 2022, Subramanian established a youth-led organization called One More Option that is dedicated to helping provide as many resources and services as they can to young adults suffering from anxiety, depression or any suicidal-related mental issues. Subramanian emphasized during this interview that “a youth-led, youth-driven response to the crisis was what was needed.”

He decided to take his mission to the state Legislature in Connecticut in 2022. “Our M.O. is to draft legislation on our own, then present it to the state Legislature, then we advance it from there,” he said. 

Working with former Connecticut Sen. Will Haskell (D-Westport), Subramanian was able to successfully draft policies that he wrote himself into the Connecticut General Assembly. He was able to draft two main reforms: The establishment of mental health days in K–12 schools and more accessible outpatient counseling sessions that minors would be able to seek. 

As can be expected, there was some opposition that Subramanian had to face while fighting to get his reforms drafted. However, Haskell was able to provide what Subramanian called a “powerful rebuttal” of the counterarguments made against the reforms. “It was inspiring to see how we were able to surmount that opposition,” Subramanian recalled.

One More Option deservedly enjoyed its victory in Connecticut, but didn’t stop there. Subramanian and his organization hope to have the same success they’ve had in Connecticut in New York. Currently, New York has no policy on student suicide prevention. Since 2019, New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal (D-Manhattan) and Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell (D-Manhattan) have been repeatedly presenting the Student Suicide Prevention Act to the state Legislature. Unfortunately, the SSPA has been stalled over the past few years due to “disputes over its contents.” 

Using the framework provided by the SSPA and with the support of over 20 collegiate student governments from schools in New York, Subramanian and One More Option hope to see a statewide suicide prevention law enacted. Recently, Subramanian and Hoylman-Sigal’s office have incorporated some reforms Subramanian wrote into the SSPA, which have been approved. 

One of the main reforms that Subramanian made to the SSPA was the inclusion of college students. With these revisions, the SSPA would require K–12 schools, as well as higher educational facilities, to create guidelines and policies on how staff would react to students in suicidal crises. Subramanian spoke about the “optimistic feeling” he has due to the widespread support the act is gathering for this reformed version of the SSPA.

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Stony Brook University admissions office where about 10,000 students applied through the school’s first early action program. Photo courtesy Stony Brook University

By Daniel Dunaief

For Stony Brook University, 2024 will be the year of more, as in more college counselors, more classes, more study abroad opportunities, more artificial intelligence and more faculty.

The downstate flagship university, which is a member of the Association of American Universities and has been climbing the rankings of colleges from US News and World Reports, plans to address several growing needs.

“We have invested heavily in new advisors,” said Carl Lejuez, executive vice president and provost at Stony Brook, in a wide ranging interview. These advisors will be coming on board throughout the semester.

With additional support from the state and a clear focus on providing constructive guidance, the university is working to reduce the number of students each advisor has, enabling counselors to “focus on the students they are serving,” Lejuez said.

Advisors will help students work towards graduation and will hand off those students to an engaged career center.

At the same time, Stony Brook is expanding its global footprint. Lejuez said study abroad options were already “strong” in Europe, while the university is developing additional opportunities in Asia and Africa.

The university prioritizes making study abroad as affordable as possible, offering several scholarships from the office of global affairs and through individual departments.

Students aren’t always aware that “they can study abroad in any SBU-sponsored program for a semester and keep all of their existing federal aid and scholarships and in many cases the full cost of that semester abroad is comparable and sometimes even less expensive” than what the student would spend on Long Island, Lejuez explained in an email.

Stony Brook University Executive Vice President and Provost Carl Lejuez. Photo courtesy Conor Harrigan

As for artificial intelligence, Stony Brook plans to expand on existing work in the realm of teaching, mentoring, research and community outreach.

In efforts sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Learning and the Library, the university is holding multiple training sessions for faculty to discuss how they approach AI in their classrooms.

The library opened an AI Lab that will enable students to experiment, innovate and work on AI projects, Lejuez said. The library plans to hire several new librarians with expertise in AI, machine learning and innovation.

The library is training students on the ethical use of AI and will focus on non-STEM disciplines to help students in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Artificial intelligence “has its strengths and weaknesses,” said Lejuez. “We are not shying away from it.”

As for the community, the hope is that Stony Brook will use the semester to develop plans for kindergarten through 12th grade and then launch the expansion later this spring.

Additional classes

Lejuez acknowledged that class capacity created challenges in the past.

Stony Brook is using predictive analysis to make decisions about where to add classes and sections. At this point, the university has invested in the most in-demand classes in fields such as computer science, biology, chemistry, psychology and business.

The school has also added capacity in writing, math and languages.

Stony Brook is focused on experiential opportunities across four domains: study abroad, internships, research and entrepreneurship.

The school is developing plans for additional makerspaces, which are places where people with shared interests can come together to use equipment and exchange ideas and information.

New hires

Stony Brook is in the middle of a hiring cycle and is likely to “bring the largest group of new faculty we’ve had in many years” on board, the provost said. “This is going to have a big impact on the student experience” including research, climate science, artificial intelligence and healthy aging.

The additional hires will create more research experiences for undergraduates, Lejuez said.

Stony Brook recently created a Center for Healthy Aging, CHA, which combines researchers and clinicians who are focused on enhancing the health and wellness of people as they age.

Amid a host of new opportunities, a rise in the US News and World Report rankings and a victory in the city’s Governors Island contest to create a climate solutions center, Stony Brook has seen an increase in applications from the state, the country and other countries.

This year, about 10,000 students applied to Stony Brook’s first early action admissions process, which Lejuez described as a “great success.”

Amid a world in which regional conflicts have had echoes of tension and disagreement in academic institutions around the country and with an election cycle many expect will be especially contentious, Stony Brook’s Humanities Institute has put together several programs.

This includes a talk on “Muslim and Jewish Relations in the Middle Ages” on February 15th, another on “The Electoral Imagination: Literature, Legitimacy, and Other Rigged Systems” on April 17th and, among others, a talk on April 18th titled “The Problem of Time for Democracies.

True to the core values

Amid all the growth, Stony Brook, led by President Maurie McInnis, plans to continue to focus on its core values.

Lejuez said some people have asked, “are we still going to be the university that really provides social mobility opportunities in ways that are just not available in other places? We will always be that. Everything else happens in the context” of that goal. 

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Stony Brook, NY; Stony Brook University: Miguel Garcia-Diaz, Interim Vice President for Research talks with the recipient of an OVPR Seed Grant Department of Geosciences Assistant Professor Marine Frouin in her Luminescence Dating Research Laboratory. Photo by John Griffin/SBU

Proposals for preliminary work may lead to wider national funding for unique research from many academic disciplines

The Office of the Vice President of Research (OVPR) at Stony Brook University has awarded seed grants for 21 projects encompassing research from a wide range of disciplines such as biomedical engineering, pharmacology, computer science, microbiology, astronomy, and linguistics. This funding cycle from fall 2023 totals $1 million to faculty leading these projects. This is only the second time the OVPR has awarded $1 million in a single funding cycle. The first time occurred in summer 2022.

All cycles of the OVPR Seed Grant Program, including special initiative cycles, are managed by staff in the Office of Proposal Development (OPD) in OVPR. Since 2018, the OVPR has invested approximately $6.4 million in promising research by Stony Brook faculty.

The OVPR Seed Grant Program gives Stony Brook University faculty a competitive edge in securing external research funds by offering support for preliminary work that will lead to larger and more impactful research projects. A team of faculty reviewers assess project proposals from faculty to determine a proposals’ likelihood of success in acquiring extramural funding. Typical proposals include projects as proof of concept, feasibility studies, or the development of interdisciplinary collaborative research.

“Research is at the core of Stony Brook University’s identity, and the seed grant program represents an investment in our University’s future,” says Miguel Garcia-Diaz, PhD, Interim VP for Research. “It is a key engine to fuel the progress of our research enterprise and has historically resulted in a return of upwards of seven dollars in external awards for each dollar invested by the University.”

These seed grants provide faculty with the resources they need to transform their ideas into groundbreaking research. Selected by their peers, the awardees must demonstrate exceptional talent, dedication and excellence in their fields. For this cycle, 21 of 66 proposals were selected for funding, resulting in the second highest acceptance rate for proposals for a single cycle (32 percent).

The diverse set of recipients for this seed funding cycle include a chemist developing a new molecular catalyst platform to lessen the environmental impact of both commodity and specialty chemicals, a psychologist exploring how government policies are impacting the health of individuals in the sexual and gender minority, and a paleontology team assessing early dinosaurs and their kin at a Late Triassic Site in Northern New Mexico.

“The OVPR seed grant will represent a crucial milestone in my career, making a substantial contribution to the advancement of luminescence dating methods for application across various disciplines such as geoscience, archeology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary biology, where chronological accuracy is paramount,” says Marine Frouin, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geosciences, and one of the new recipients.

She reflects other recipients’ thoughts by adding that the “internal seed program not only provides a competitive advantage but also cultivates an environment conducive to innovative scientific research.”

For a list of all 21 funded proposals, the projects, and faculty involved, see this link.

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Goroff speaks to supporters at fundraising event on Jan. 18. Photo by Lynn Hallarman

By Lynn Hallarman

Talk to anyone about why they attended Nancy Goroff’s kickoff fundraiser event for the U.S. House of Representatives Democratic primary election for New York District 1, and they will mostly say the same thing: “She is smart, and she’s sane.”

Goroff, a Stony Brook resident, worked on perfecting her stump speech in front of a friendly crowd of supporters last Thursday night, Jan. 18, at the Port Jefferson Village Center. She seemed unconcerned about her primary competition, aiming most of her comments at incumbent Nick LaLota (R–NY1). 

“LaLota likes to talk about stuff but hasn’t done anything for the district,” Goroff said, in an interview with TBR News Media. 

A newcomer to politics in 2020, Goroff lost the House race by 55%-45% to four-time incumbent Lee Zeldin (R). But now Goroff sees this election cycle as winnable against first-termer, LaLota, who won the seat against former Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming (D-Noyac) in 2022. 

Goroff’s concerns now are the new redistricting maps currently being drawn by the state’s bipartisan Independent Redistricting Commission to be filed by Feb. 28. 

“We’ll deal with whatever we get, but we feel pretty good about where the district is right now,” she said. 

Goroff, 55, has spent her adult life in Suffolk County, raising her two children and building a career as a scientist at Stony Brook University. Her pedigree is pure university professor. Starting with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 1990 and a doctorate in chemistry from UCLA, Goroff then devoted her career to basic science research as faculty in the Department of Chemistry at SBU and then the department chair. She retired from her position in 2021 to focus on her political career. 

Goroff looked nonplussed at the assertion from some of her primary opponents that her academic credentials do not add up to enough experience working in government. 

Anyone that thinks that “hasn’t worked at a university,” she said. 

She sees her years navigating a career as a woman scientist and educator in a large state university as an asset. “I’m also the daughter of small business owners,” she said. “These things give me knowledge and experience that will be helpful as a policymaker.” If she wins in the general election in November, she will be the first woman basic research scientist in the House of Representatives.

Several of her former Stony Brook colleagues showed up for the event, commenting to TBR that Goroff’s leadership superpower is her ability to coalition build and work as a team member. They believe this makes her candidacy especially strong in the politically purple landscape of eastern Long Island. 

After losing the house race to Zeldin, Goroff did not retreat into an academic ivory tower, instead, she leveraged her skills to co-found the nonprofit Long Island Strong Schools Alliance. 

“Most candidates disappear after they lose— not Nancy,” said longtime supporter Shirley Hudson. 

Goroff explained that LISSA focuses on making sure Long Island public schools are places where children are welcomed regardless of their background. 

“We saw right-wing extremists win three school board seats in Smithtown in 2021, who had no interest in supporting public education,” she said. “They were trying to undermine it and make it fit their extremist ideology.” 

Goroff places the protection and well-being of children at the center of most of her policy positions, arguing that Long Island needs to be a safe and affordable place to work and raise a family.

“People are struggling,” she said. “Housing is a chronic issue on Long Island because of the cost.” 

Besides Goroff, other declared Democratic primary candidates to date are construction worker Andy DeCecco, former state Sen. James Gaughran (D-Northport), administrative law judge Craig Herskowitz and former Capitol Hill senior legislative aide Kyle Hill. 

The Democratic primary election is scheduled for June 25.

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Pixabay photo

By Daniel Dunaief

Decades ago, doctors endorsed cigarette smoking, promoting it in advertisements. That was back in the 1950’s, in the decade after the U.S. government shipped cigarettes to members of the armed forces during World War II.

On Jan. 11, 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry released a landmark report that showed a nine to 10-fold higher risk of lung cancer for smokers compared with non smokers. At the time, about 40% of the adult population smoked. The report helped dramatically alter the perception of smoking. Indeed, a Gallup Survey from 1958 showed that 44% of Americans believed smoking caused cancer. By 1968, that number surged to 78%, according to a report from the National Institutes of Health.

Pulmonologist Dr. Norman Edelman, a professor of medicine at Stony Brook University and a core member of the program in public health at Stony Brook, celebrated the legacy of that landmark report, even as he urged ongoing efforts to reduce smoking.

Dr. Norman Edelman. Photo courtesy Stony Brook University

“It was a momentous occasion,” said Dr. Edelman, who suggested that the number of deaths in the country would be even higher without this report. 

“By the beginning of the 1960’s, the medical literature was pretty clear that smoking causes lung cancer” but the tobacco lobby fought against warnings about the hazards of smoking, Edelman said.

Dr. Gregson Pigott, Suffolk County Health Commissioner, described the report as the “first step towards protecting the American people from the deleterious effects of tobacco use.”

Adult smoking rates have fallen from about 43% in 1965 to about 11.5% in 2011, according to Dr. Pigott.

The report, which was followed by 34 studies from the CDCs Office of Smoking and Health on the health consequences of smoking, validated the concerns of organizations like the American Cancer Society and helped reduce the prevalence of a habit that can have significant and fatal consequences.

“Smoking levels in teenagers are going down,” said Dr. Edelman. “It’s beginning to show up in the health effects” with lung cancer declining in men and plateauing in women.

Lung cancer deaths in men have fallen to 25.5 per 100,000 in 2021 from 65 per 100,000 in 1990, according to Dr. Pigott. More recently, smoking exacerbated the threat from Covid. An analysis of 22,900 people published in BMC Public Health in 2021 showed that 33.5% of people with a history of smoking experienced disease progression, compared with 21.9% of non-smokers. 

A ways to go

While smoking is not as prevalent as it had been in the 1960’s, it is still a killer, accounting for an estimated 480,000 deaths each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s about one in five deaths each year.

“Smoking still kills more people than other preventable causes of death,” said Dr. Edelman.

Dr. Edelman recognized the severity of other problems like the opioid and overdose crisis. In 2023, the CDC estimates that over 112,000 people died from overdoses.

Still, even with a reduction in smoking, the number of people who are smoking is high enough that the public should continue to look for ways to cut back on the harmful habit.

Over 16 million people live with at least one disease caused by smoking and 58 million non smoking Americans are exposed to secondhand smoke, explained Dr. Pigott, citing CDC data. Second hand smoke causes 40,000 to 60,000 deaths per year in the country, while smoking-related illnesses, which combine direct medical expenses, lost productivity and second hand smoke exposure, cost over $300 billion per year. 

Increasing the cost of cigarettes has helped serve as a deterrent, Dr. Edelman said.

Suffolk County operates a smoking cessation program, which provides behavior modification and supportive pharmaceuticals to medically eligible participants, Dr. Pigott explained in an email. A nurse practitioner oversees the cessation groups, which the county provides at no cost to participants, who also receive personalized follow-up.Stony Brook has several cessation resources. Students interested in smoking cessation can consult a student health care provider who will help them develop a program.

Prescription medications, which are covered under student’s health insurance, are available at a pharmacy after a consultation with a student’s health care provider. 

As for vaping, Dr. Pigott described it as “highly addictive” and explained that its long-term effect is not yet fully understood.

The 2023 Annual National Youth Tobacco Survey found that more than 2.1 million youth currently use e-cigarettes, which represents 7.7% of students in high school and middle school. 

“We are especially concerned about the effect of vaping on young people,” Dr. Pigott added. 

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Jin Koda and Amanda Lee at the recent 243rd annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans. Photo by Jenny Zhang

By Daniel Dunaief

Hollywood is not the only place fascinated with the birth of stars. Indeed, researchers at Stony Brook University, among many other academic institutions, have focused considerable time, energy and effort into understanding the processes that lead to the creation of stars.

Astronomers had tried, unsuccessfully, to detect molecular clouds in the galaxy outskirts, which is how stars form in the inner part of galaxies.

About 18 years ago, a NASA satellite called GALEX discovered numerous newly formed stars at the edges of a spiral galaxy M83, which is 15 million light years from Earth. 

Leading an international team of scientists, Jin Koda, Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, together with his former undergraduate student Amanda Lee, put together data and information from a host of sources to describe how these stars on the outer edge of the galaxy formed.

Their work demonstrated star-forming molecular clouds in this outer area for the first time.

“These molecular clouds at the galaxy edge are forming stars as much as the molecular clouds in normal parts of galaxies” such as molecular clouds around the sun, Koda explained.

Before their discovery, Koda said astronomers had considered that new-born stars at galaxy edges could have formed without molecular clouds.

Koda recently presented this work at the 243rd annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Orleans.

Indeed, partnering with scientists from the United States, Japan, France and Chile, Koda, who is the Principal Investigator on the study, and Lee found evidence of 23 of these molecular clouds on the outskirts of the M83 galaxy.

Combining data from a host of telescopes for this research, Koda and Lee found “higher resolution than before,” Lee said. “We could see a peak of atomic hydrogen in that region, which we didn’t know before.”

While helium also exists in the molecular clouds in the galaxy edges as well as in the atomic gas and in stars, it does not emit light when it’s cold, which makes its signature harder to detect.

Scientists are interested in “why we weren’t able to detect these molecular clouds for such a long time,” Lee said. “We ended up using a different tracer than what is normally used.”

The group came up with a hypothesis for why the molecular clouds were difficult to find. Carbon monoxide, which typically helps in the search for such clouds, is dissociated in the large envelopes at the galaxy edges. Only the cores maintain and emit this gas.

A collaboration begins

When Lee, who grew up in Queens, started at Stony Brook University, she intended to major in physics. In her sophomore year, she took an astronomy class that Koda taught.

“I was very interested in studying galaxies and the evolution of galaxies,” Lee said.

After the course ended, she started working in Koda’s lab.

“Her tireless efforts made her stand out,” Koda explained in an email. Koda appreciates how speaking with students like Lee helps him think about his research results.

Lee is “particularly good at identifying and asking very fundamental questions,” he added.

At one point about two years before she graduated in 2022, Lee recalled how Koda shared a picture of M83 and described the mystery of star formation at the outskirts of galaxies.

Two years later, by delving into the data under Koda’s supervision, she helped solve that mystery.

“I didn’t know my work would end up contributing to this project,” Lee said. “It’s really exciting that I was able to contribute to the big picture of star formation” in distant galaxies.

Since graduating from Stony Brook, Lee has been a PhD student for the last year and a half at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

At this point, Lee is still working towards publishing a paper on some of the work she did in Koda’s lab that explores the formation of stars in the inner disk of M83.

“Broadly,” she said, the two research efforts are “all related to the same picture.”

For her part, Lee was pleased with the opportunity to work with such a geographically diverse team who are all contributing to the goal of understanding star formation.

Future focus

The area they observed is relatively small and they would like to see more regions in M83 and other galaxies, Koda explained.

Finding so many molecular clouds at once in the small region “encourages us to hypothesize that the process is universal,” although scientists need to verify this, Koda said.

The researchers also discovered more atomic gas than they would expect for the amount of molecular clouds. A compelling discovery, this observation raised questions about why this abundant atomic gas wasn’t becoming molecular clouds efficiently.

“We need to solve this mystery in future research,” Koda explained. He is pleased with the level of collaboration among the scientists. “It’s very interesting and stimulating to collaborate with the excellent people of the world,” he said.

A resident of Huntington, Koda grew up in Tokyo, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees. When he moved to the United States, Koda conducted post doctoral studies for six years at Cal Tech. 

About 15 years ago, he moved to Stony Brook, where he replaced Professor Phil Solomon, who was one of the pioneers of molecular cloud studies in the Milky Way galaxy.

Science appeals to Koda because he is “interested in how things work, especially how nature works,” he said.

In this work, Koda suggested that the molecular clouds have the same mass distribution as molecular clouds in the Milky Way, indicating that star formation is the same, or at least similar, between the Milky Way and galaxy edges.

Koda made the discovery of the molecular clouds and the hypothesis about the carbon monoxide deficient cloud envelope in 2022. Since then, he and his team have obtained new observations that confirmed that what they found were the “hearts of molecular clouds,” he said.

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Helen Harrison. Photo by Durell Godfrey

This acclaimed art historian transformed the former home of artists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner into a thriving national landmark and developed the affiliated Study Center for modern American art at Stony Brook Southampton.

Helen Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center at Stony Brook University, is retiring after 34 years of service to the university. Credited with having the Pollock-Krasner House designated as a National Historic Landmark, securing an endowment for the property, establishing the Study Center and more, Harrison leaves behind a new university-endowed fellowship for studies in abstract expressionism.

“This fellowship will help bring more scholars in to use our resources and the resources that are available in this area,” she says, referring to the bustling artists’ community of eastern Long Island. “This is very important, because the first generation of scholars is dying out, and we need to keep this as an active field of study.”

So far, the House and Study Center have contributed five specialists, four conferences and a publication to the field. Harrison’s fellowship, an annual three-month program, will consistently attract new scholars eager to make a contribution of their own. Harrison hopes the Study Center will continue to expand its archive and offerings accordingly.

Prior to her tenure at Stony Brook, Harrison served as a curator at Guild Hall Museum, guest curator at The Queens Museum, and Executive Director of the Public Art Preservation Committee. She has also worked as an exhibition organizer and an art columnist, commentator, critic and feature writer for several news outlets including the New York Times.

Her multifaceted career has earned Harrison dozens of accolades, including multiple awards from the Press Club of Long Island and a 2021 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service. Her love for art and writing inspired her to write a series of murder mystery novels, one of which won a 2019 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award presented by the Independent Book Publishers Association. Harrison looks forward to publishing more in her retirement and remains a resource for the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center should her expertise be needed, she says.

“Helen Harrison’s undertakings for Stony Brook University and the Department of Art have gone far beyond her duties as Director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center,” says former Interim Chair and Professor, Affiliated Faculty for Art, Margaret Schedel. “She has served the department in every facet of its entity, and at the highest level. As she ends her service to the University I would like to honor her years of dedication to our mission.”

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