A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
A scene from Stony Brook University's May 19 9 a.m. graduation ceremony. Photo by Greg Catalano
Stony Brook University held 10 2021 Degree Conferral Celebration ceremonies between May 19 and 21 to comply with COVID-19 restrictions, according to a press release from SBU.
More than 7,700 graduates, the second largest graduating class in the university’s 61 year history, were awarded a combined total of 7,795 degrees and certificate completions. All candidates, with their families and friends using COVID-19 safety protocols, were invited to participate in-person or watch the ceremonies as they were streamed online.
Stony Brook University President Maurie McInnis addressed candidates saying, “Class of 2021, your unparalleled experience has given you a wisdom that was unimaginable just 18 months ago. You are leaving Stony Brook with lived, first-hand knowledge of the human condition — in all its foibles, nuances and possibilities. I submit that this commencement has unrivaled symbolic value. The world is opening up, and you are joining leaders in a new world with new possibilities. It thrills me to see the Class of 2021 embark on its next steps.”
After an address by Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY), McInnis, Provost Paul Goldbart and university deans conferred the degrees, as the Class of 2021 officially joined the ranks of more than 200,000 Seawolves worldwide. Students from 66 countries and 36 states were represented in the Class of 2021 and ranged in age from 19 to 69.
Degrees were bestowed in the following categories:
4,645 bachelor’s degrees, the largest number of degrees awarded in a year
2,275 master’s degrees
600 doctoral and professional degrees
275 certificates
The selected Class of 2021 student speaker was Kiara Arias, the director of Diversity and Inclusion Affairs for the Undergraduate Student Government who majored in Political Science and minored in journalism and media arts. She also served as a resident assistant and a digital journalism teaching assistant. Arias shared this with her fellow graduates.
“Our time at Stony Brook has been filled with so many great experiences surrounded by incredible people. I encourage us all to continue finding beauty in the ordinary, little things. When you do this, all moments become memorable; you’ll find yourself smiling even on your worst day, giving your life a whole new meaning,” Arias said.
As part of the ceremony, President of the Undergraduate Student Government, Asna Jamal presented the Senior Class Legacy Gift of $24,022. The Senior Class Legacy Gift will support the Student Emergency Support Fund, Stony Brook Fund for Excellence, General Scholarships, Student Life, the Staller Center and many other important parts of the University.
And the winner is … Eszter Boros. An Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Stony Brook University, Boros recently won the 2021 Stony Brook Discovery Prize, which includes $200,000 in new funding.
The prize, which was established in 2013, is designed to fund higher-risk research for scientists who are no more than five years beyond tenure and promotion at the Associate Professor level or who are on a tenure track as an Assistant Professor. The research might not otherwise receive financial support from agencies like the National Institutes of Health.
Eszter Boros. Photo from SBU
Stony Brook awards the prize to a faculty member who is considered a rising star.
Boros’s proposal suggests using a radioactive light switch to activate anticancer molecules.
The goal behind Boros’s work is to target cancer cells in particular, while avoiding the kinds of painful side effects that typically accompany chemotherapy, which can lead to gastrointestinal discomfort and hair loss, among others.
Boros, who has been at Stony Brook since 2017, was pleased to win the award. “It’s really exciting,” she said. “I’m kind of in disbelief. I thought all the finalists had convincing and exciting projects.”
The four finalists, who included Eric Brouzes in biomedical engineering, Gregory Henkes in geosciences and Kevin Reed in climate modeling, went through three rounds of screening, culminating in a Zoom-based 10-minute presentation in front of four judges.
Bruce Beutler, the Director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, served as one of the four judges.
In an email, Beutler wrote that Boros’s work had an “inventive approach” and was “high risk, but potentially high impact.”
Beutler, who won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, suggested that the Discovery Prize may give a start to “a bright person with relatively little track record and a risky but well reasoned proposal.”
The success from such a distinction “does build on itself,” Beutler wrote. “Other scientists hear of such awards or read about them when evaluating future proposals. This may influence decisions about funding, or other awards, in the future.”
Boros said she would use the prize money to fund work from graduate students and post doctoral fellows, who will tackle the complexities of the work she proposed. She will also purchase supplies, including radioactive isotopes. She hopes to stretch the funds for two and a half or three years, depending on the progress she and the members of her lab make with the work.
The idea behind her research is to send radioactive materials that emit a light as they decay and that bind to the cancer cell. The light makes the chemotherapy toxic. Without that light, the chemotherapy would move around the body without damaging non-cancerous cells, reducing the drug’s side effects.
She is thinking of two ways to couple the radioactive light-emitting signal with an activated form of treatment. In the first, the two parts would not be selectively bound together.
The chemotherapy would diffuse into tissues around the body and would only become activated at the target site. This may affect healthy neighbors, but it wouldn’t cause as many side effects as conventional chemotherapy. This could take advantage of already clinically used agents that she can combine.
In the second strategy, she is taking what she described as a “next level” approach, in which she’d make the radioactive agent and the chemotherapy react with one another selectively. Once they saw one another, they would become chemically linked, searching to find and destroy cancer cells. This approach would require new chemistry which her lab would have to develop.
Beutler suggested that Boros’s work might have other applications, even if cancer might currently be the best one. Some focal but infectious diseases can be treated with antimicrobial therapy which, like cancer directed chemotherapy, is toxic, he explained.
The same principle of using a drug activated by light that is connected to a site-specific marker “could be used in such cases,” he said.
While the potential bench-to-bedside process for any single treatment or approach can seem lengthy and filled with unexpected obstacles, Beutler said he has seen certain cancers that were formerly fatal yield to innovation. “People who are battling cancer can at least be hopeful that their cancer might fall into this category,” he said.
Boros appreciated the opportunity to apply for the award, to bond with her fellow finalists and to benefit from a process that included several sessions with experts at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, who helped prepare her for the presentation in front of the judges. She developed her full proposal during the course of a week, over the December holiday, when her lab had some down time.
In the final stage, she met weekly for an hour with Louisa Johnson, an Improvisation Lecturer at the Alda Center and Radha Ganesan, an Assistant Professor of Medicine, to hone her presentation.
Boros said she appreciated how the Alda Center guides helped her focus on the obsession she and other scientists sometimes have of putting too much text in her slides. “I put text and conclusions on every slide,” she said. Ganesan and Johnson urged her to focus on what she wants to say, while letting go of this urge to clutter her presentation with the same words she planned to use in her presentation. “That was a huge shift in mindset that I had to make,” she said.
As for the work this prize will help fund, Boros said she’ll start with targets she knows based on some research she’s already done with prostate, breast and ovarian cancers.
Boros, who was born and raised in Switzerland, described herself as a chemist at heart.
Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her husband Labros Meimetis, Assistant Professor of Radiology at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook, and their nine-month-old son.
Stony Brook University President Maurie McInnis (at center) took in Flowerland with Reginald Ligonde ’21 (at left) and Khadija Saad of the USG (at right).
Flower crowns were worn by many students during the Flowerland festival, elevating the mood.
Before hunkering down to study for finals, Stony Brook students ventured out to enjoy the campus in the Spring. Hosted by the University’s Undergraduate Student Government (USG), Flowerland is a new tradition designed to help students relax and breathe deeply before wrapping up the semester.
Students decorated the plaza around the Student Activities Center with flowers and flower arrangements to mark the new season. The arrangements will be present through the end of finals, reminding students that no matter how their year finished, there should always be time to stop and smell the flowers.
The Three Village Dads Foundation recently signed an official pledge with Stony Brook Children’s Hospital to donate $100,000 over the next 5 years to the Child Life Services program. A check in the amount of $10,000 was presented on April 21 in partnership with Jeff Hendel of Hendel Wealth Management.
Photo from TVDF
“Two years ago when our Foundation began it’s local philanthropic efforts, the Children’s Hospital was actually our very first recipient. What initially was supposed to be a small Three Village Dads group BBQ where I figured we could perhaps raise a few dollars for a great local cause, turned into something so much more. That event was wildly successful as we were able to raise $12,000 which opened our eyes to the effectiveness us Dads could have on our community,” said David Tracy, Three Village Dads Foundation President & Chairman.
“When we established that relationship with Stony Brook’s Child Life program we immediately felt as connected and dedicated to their mission as their wonderful staff do. To now be in a position where we are able to deliver so much more to this great organization truly means a lot to myself, my board members, and our amazing donors. Jeff Hendel of Hendel Wealth Management joined as a co-donor with this presentation. It is generous donors such as Mr. Hendel that have enabled us to do the good we strive to do in Three Village,” he said.
Pictured from left, Elisa Ruoff, Development Officer of Advancement at Stony Brook Hospital; Michael Attard, Child Life Specialist at Stony Brook Children’s Hospital; Vince DiCarlo, Three Village Dads Foundation board member; David Tracy, Three Village Dads Foundation President & Chairman; Jeff Hendel, Hendel Wealth Management President & CEO; and Three Village Dads Foundation board members Chris Carson and David Bitman.
Above, a humpback whale breaks the surface of the water. Photo from Eleanor Heywood/National Marine Fisheries Service permit no. 21889
By Daniel Dunaief
The waters off the South Shore of Long Island have become a magnet, attracting everything from shipping vessels, recreational boaters, fishermen and women, potential future wind farms, and humpback whales.
While the commercial component of that activity can contribute to the local economy, the whale traffic has drawn the attention of scientists and conservationists. Whales don’t abide by the nautical rules that guide ships through channels and direct traffic along the New York Bight, a region from the southern shore of New Jersey to the east end of Long Island.
Left, Julia Stepanuk with a drone controller. Photo by Kim Lato
Julia Stepanuk, a PhD student at Stony Brook University in the laboratory of Lesley Thorne, Assistant Professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, is focusing her research efforts on monitoring the humpback whale’s use of this habitat.
“This can help us understand how we focus our energy for monitoring and conservation,” she explained in an email. If the whales are traveling, it helps to know where to minimize human impact.
Ultimately, the work Stepanuk, who also earned her Master’s degree at Stony Brook in 2017, does provides ecological context for how whales use the waters around New York and how old the whales are that are feeding in this area.
In her dissertation, Stepanuk is “looking at the biological and ecological drivers, the motivators of where the whales are, when they’re there, specifically, from the lens of how human activity might be putting whales at risk of injury or mortality.”
Each summer, whales typically arrive in the area around May and stay through the end of October.
When she ventures out on the water, Stepanuk uses drones to gather information about a whale’s length and width, which indicates the approximate age and health of each individual. Since 2018, she has been gathering information to monitor activity in the area to track it over time.
With the research and data collected, she hopes to help understand the ecology of these whales, which will inform future policy decisions to manage risk.
Stepanuk’s humpback whale work is part of a 10-year monitoring study funded by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which includes four principal investigators at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. The study looks at carbonate chemistry, physical oceanography, fish distribution, and top predator abundance, distribution and body condition, Thorne explained.
“My lab is leading the seabird and marine mammal aspect of this project,” said Thorne.
The grid over the whale demonstrates how members of Thorne’s lab measure the size of the whale from drone images. Photo by Julia Stepanuk
By documenting the ecological ranges of whales of different ages, Stepanuk may provide insight into the age groups that are most at risk. Many of the humpback whales that travel closer to shore are juveniles, measuring below about 38 feet.
Stepanuk has seen many of these whales, either directly or from the drones she flies overhead. She has also gathered information from events in which whales die after boats hit them.
Mortality events off the east coast have been increasing since 2016 as numerous whales have washed up along the coast. About half of the humpbacks in these mortality events have evidence of human interaction, either ship strike or entanglement, Stepanuk said.
“There have been many more strandings than usual of humpback whales along the east coast” in the last five years, Thorne explained.
Humpback whales likely have appeared in larger numbers in New York waterways due both to the return of menhaden in nearshore waters, which comes from changes in the management of this fish stock and from environmental management more broadly, and from an overall increase in the humpback whale population after 40 years of protection, Thorne suggested.
Ultimately, Stepanuk said she hopes to use the scientific inquiry she pursued during her PhD to help “bridge the gap between academic, policymakers, conservationists, interested parties and the public.”
A part of Stony Brook’s STRIDE program, for science training and research to inform decisions, Stepanuk received training in science communication, how to present data in a visual and accessible way, and how to provide science-based information to policymakers.
For Thorne, this study and the analysis of the vessel strikes on humpback whales could be helpful for understanding similar dynamics with other cetaceans.
Julia Stepanuk and Matt Fuirst, a previous master’s student in Lesley Thorne’s lab, release a drone. Photo by Rachel Herman
“Understanding links between large whales and vessel traffic could provide important information for other studies, and could provide methods that would be useful for studies of other species,” said Thorne.
Stepanuk offers some basic advice for people on a boat in the New York Bight and elsewhere. She suggests driving more slowly if visibility is limited, as people would in a car in foggy weather. She also urges people to pay close attention to the water. Ripples near the surface could indicate a school of fish, which might attract whales.
“Slow down if you see dolphins, big fish schools and ripples,” she said. “There’s always a chance there could be a whale.”
If people see a whale, they shouldn’t turn off their engines: they should keep the engine in neutral and not approach the whale head on or cut them off. For most species, people can’t get closer than 300 feet. For North Atlantic right whales, which are critically endangered, the distance is 1,500 feet.
She suggests people “know the cues” and remember that whales are eagerly feeding.
Stepanuk has been close enough to these marine mammals to smell their pungent, oily fish breath and, when they exhale, to receive a residue of oil around her camera lens or sunglasses. She can “loosely get an idea of what they’re feeding on in terms of how bad their breath is.”
When she was younger, Stepanuk, who saw her first whale at the age of eight, worked on a whale watching boat for six years in the Gulf of Maine. An adult female would sometimes leave her calf near the whale watching boat while she went off to hunt for food. The calf stayed near the boat for about 45 minutes. When the mother returned, she’d slap the water and the calf would race to her side.
“Experiences like that stuck with me and keep me excited about the work we do,” Stepanuk said.
From left, atmospheric scientists Andrew Vogelmann, Edward Luke, Fan Yang, and Pavlos Kollias explored the origins of secondary ice — and snow. Photo from BNL
By Daniel Dunaief
Clouds are as confounding, challenging and riveting to researchers as they are magnificent, inviting and mood setting for artists and film makers.
A team of researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory and Stony Brook University recently solved one of the many mysteries hovering overhead.
Some specific types of clouds, called mixed-phase clouds, produce considerably more ice particles than expected. For those clouds, it is as if someone took an empty field, put down enough seeds for a thin covering of grass and returned months later to find a fully green field.
Ed Luke, Atmospheric Scientist in the Environmental Sciences Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Andy Vogelmann, Atmospheric Scientist and Technical Co-manager of the BNL Cloud Processes Group, Fan Yang, a scientist at BNL, and Pavlos Kollias, a professor at Stony Brook University and Atmospheric Scientist at BNL, recently published a study of those clouds in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“There are times when the research aircraft found far more ice particles in the clouds than can be explained by the number of ice nucleating particles,” Vogelmann wrote in an email. “Our paper examines two common mechanisms by which the concentrations of ice particles can substantially increase and, for the first time, provides observational evidence quantifying that one is more common” over a polar site.
With a collection of theoretical, modeling and data collecting fire power, the team amassed over six years worth of data from millimeter-wavelength Doppler radar at the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement facility in the town of Utqiagvik, which was previously called Barrow, in the state of Alaska.
The researchers developed software to sort through the particles in the clouds, grouping them by size and shape and matching them with the data from weather balloons that went up at the same time. They studied the number of secondary ice needles produced under various conditions.
The scientists took about 100 million data points and had to trim them down to find the right conditions. “We culled the data set by many dimensions to get the ones that are right to capture the process,” Luke explained.
The dataset required supercooled conditions, in which liquid droplets at sub-freezing temperatures came in contact with a solid particle, in this case ice, that initiated the freezing process.
Indeed, shattering ice particles become the nuclei for additional ice, becoming the equivalent of the venture capitalist’s hoped for investment that produces returns that build on themselves.
“When an ice particle hits one of those drizzle drops, it triggers freezing, which first forms a solid ice shell around the drop,” Yang explained in a press release. “Then, as the freezing moves inward, the pressure starts to build because water expands as it freezes. That pressure causes the drizzle drop to shatter, generating more ice particles.”
Luke described Yang as the “theory wizard on the ice processes and nucleation” and appreciated the opportunity to solve the mechanism involved in this challenging problem.
“It’s like doing detective work,” said Luke. The pictures were general in the beginning and became more detailed as the group focused and continued to test them.
Cloud processes are the biggest cause for differences in future predictions of climate models, Vogelmann explained. After clouds release their precipitation, they can dissipate. Without clouds, the sunlight reaches the surface, where it is absorbed, particularly in darker surfaces like the ocean. This absorption causes surface heating that can affect the local environment.
Energy obtained from microscopic or submicroscopic processes, such as the absorption of sunlight at the molecular level or the energy released or removed through the phase changes of water during condensation, evaporation or freezing, drive the climate.
“While something at microscales (or less) might not sound important, they ultimately power the heat engine that drives our climate,” said Vogelmann.
To gather and analyze data, the group had to modify some processes to measure particles of the size that were relevant to their hypothesis and, ultimately, to the process.
“We had to overcome a very serious limitation of radar,” Kollias said. They “started developing a new measurement strategy.”
When the cost of collecting large amounts of data came down, this study, which involved collecting 500 times more data points than previous, conventional measures, became feasible.
Luke “came up with a very bright, interesting technique of how to quantitatively figure out, not if these particles are there or how often, but how many,” Kollias said.
Luke found a way to separate noise from signal and come up with aggregated statistics.
Kollias said everyone in the group played a role at different times. He and Luke worked on measuring the microphysical properties of clouds and snow. Yang, who joined over two and a half years ago and was most recently a post doctoral research associate, provided a talented theoretical underpinning, while Vogelmann helped refine the study and methodology and helped write up the ideas.
Kollias said the process begins with a liquid at temperatures somewhere between 0 and 10 degrees below zero Celsius. As soon as that liquid touches ice, it explodes, making it a hundred times more efficient at removing liquid from the cloud.
Kollias described the work as a “breakthrough” because it provided real measurements, which they can use to test their hypotheses.
In the next few months, Kollias said the group would make sure the climate modeling community sees this work.
Luke was hoping the collaboration would lead to an equation that provided the volume of secondary ice particles based on specific parameters, like temperature and humidity.
From the data they collected, “you can almost see the equation,” Luke said. “We wanted to publish the equation. That’s on the to-do list. If we had such an equation, a modeler could plug that right in.”
Even though they don’t yet have an equation, Luke said that explicit descriptions of the dataset, in the form of probability density functions, are of value to the modeling community.
The group would like to see how broadly this phenomenon occurs throughout the world. According to Kollias, this work is the “first step” and the team is working on expanding the technique to at least three more sites.
On a conference call with New York college students last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) presented his plan to cancel up to $50,000 in debt for federal student loan borrowers.
The plan is derived from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), who proposed national debt forgiveness as a promise in her presidential campaign. Both Warren and Schumer’s joint plan involves using a presidential executive to nullify student debt up to $50,000.
“College should be a ladder up,” Schumer said during the call. “But student debt weighs people down, it is an anchor, and we have to do something about it.”
President Joe Biden (D) has the executive authority to substantially cancel student loan debt for students through the Higher Education Act, according to Schumer. This would also bypass the requirement to present the motion to Congress.
Biden has said that he supported alleviating students of loan debt up to $10,000, and now the call to action is being echoed loudly by his fellow Democratic Party members.
On his first day in office, the president addressed the ongoing dilemma regarding student debt, where his plan was to extend the pause on federal student loan payments and keeping the interest rate at 0% through the end of September.
The United States national student loan debt has accumulated at an alarming rate. An Experian survey indicated the total amount reached a record high of $1.57 trillion in 2020, an increase of about $166 billion since 2019.
Nearly 2.4 million New Yorkers owe $89.5 billion in federal student loans as of March 2020, Schumer said. The average New Yorker owes $34,600 in student loans, greater than the national average of $32,700.
To relieve loan borrowers of their debts, Schumer mentioned that if the federal government forgave debts up to $50,000, it would greatly bounce the economy. He detailed how instead of repaying their loans, people can instead allocate their money for other immediate and urgent payments, as well as leisure spending.
Schumer told conference attendees that the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 includes roughly $2.6 billion for New York’s colleges and universities, with half of the allocations distributed as financial aid to students in addressing hardships brought about by COVID-19.
Some of the local institutions benefiting from the American Rescue Plan for “estimated minimum amount for student grants” were listed by Schumer during the conference call: City College $23.6 million, CUNY Queens College $25.8 million, Syracuse University $15.4 million, SUNY Buffalo $31.7 million and Stony Brook University $26.8 million.
Schumer also made an urgent request for the call participants, primarily college students, to stay informed by reading local and student-run newspapers. He likewise reinforced the importance of those attending the conference to take a call to action to write, call and email Biden and get their friends and family to do so to spread awareness.
“Student loan payments are on pause, but they are not going away if we don’t do something once the pandemic is over,” Schumer said. “These debts are just going to keep piling up.”
Stony Brook, NY; Stony Brook University: School of Medicine 2018 Convocation Photo by Arthur Fredericks
Stony Brook, NY; Stony Brook University Medical Center: The White Coat Ceremony in the Student Activities Center. (8/14/2016)
Stony Brook, NY; Stony Brook University MART & Children's Hospital Pavilion: MART ribbon cutting, November 1, 2018. Left to right: New York State Assemblyman Steve Englebright; SUNY Trustee and Stony Brook Foundation board member Cary Staller; Stony Brook University President Samuel L. Stanley Jr., MD; New York State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle; SUNY Chancellor Kristina Johnson; Jim and Marilyn Simons; New York State Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan; Kevin Law, President of the Long Island Association and Chair of the Stony Brook Council; Kenneth Kaushansky, MD, Senior Vice President for Health Sciences and Dean of the School of Medicine; Director of the Stony Brook University Cancer Center Yusuf Hannun, MD; representing Governor Andrew Cuomo, Marta Santiago-Jones, Consultant Nurse Hospital Services Administrator at the New York State Department of Health.
Stony Brook, NY; Stony Brook University Medical Center: Donors David and Cynthia Lippe and Dean, School of Medicine and Senior Vice President of Health Sciences Ken Kaushansky outside of the garden area of the MART/Hospital Pavilion
Stony Brook, NY; Stony Brook University Hospital: Stony Brook Medicine rolled out new Mobile Stroke Units on March 18, 2019, to treat people who are having a stroke.
Left to right: Kimberly Noel, MD, Director, Telehealth, Stony Brook Medicine, Michael Guido III, MD, Neurologist, Director, Stony Brook Neurology Stroke Program, Ken Kaushansky, MD, Dean, Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, David Fiorella, MD, PhD, Neurointerventionalist, Director, Stony Brook Cerebrovascular Center, Trevor Marshall, MD and Eric Niegelberg, Associate Director, Operations, Emergency Services and Internal Medicine
Stony Brook, NY; Stony Brook University: Chancellor Jim Malatras and Stony Brook University President McInnis Announce Partnership with SUNY Upstate Medical University to Launch Pooled Surveillance Testing for COVID-19.
Stony Brook to Test 5200 Students Each Week. Testing Expansion Follows FDA Approval of Groundbreaking Saliva Swab Test Developed at Upstate Medical University
By Daniel Dunaief
Like so many others, Ken Kaushansky had to alter his plans when the pandemic hit last March. Kaushansky had expected to retire after over 10 years as Dean of the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University and the Senior Vice President of Health Sciences, but the public health needs of the moment, particularly on Long Island which became an early epicenter for the disease, demanded his attention.
“Now that COVID hopefully is coming under control, it seems more logical” to retire this year, Kaushansky said in a wide-ranging interview about the pandemic, his career, and the medical school. In January, he stepped down as the dean, while he plans to retire as Senior Vice President of Health Sciences at the end of June.
Views on the Pandemic
Dr. Kenneth Kaushansky
Looking back at the immediate challenges in the first few months, Kaushansky said SBU did “extremely well” in caring for patients who were battling COVID-19 and was gratified by the school’s effort to catalog and understand the disease. “I’m very proud that we’ve been able to study this infection on all sorts of levels and make a real impact that has helped others,” he said.
Early on, as the medical team at Stony Brook met, Kaushansky urged the hospital to study COVID “to the hilt” and to “extract every little bit of data we can. We must keep all that data on all these patients.”
Indeed, Stony Brook has created a database that continues to grow of close to 10,000 people, which includes 3,000 inpatients, 4,000 who weren’t sick enough for hospital admission, and around 3,000 who thought they had the disease, but had other illnesses. “We’ve learned a ton from that, and it’s not just learning for learning’s sake,” Kaushansky said. The demand for the use of the database is so high that a steering committee is reviewing proposals.
Stony Brook had heard from doctors in Italy that COVID patients were having problems with blood clotting. This symptom was particularly meaningful to Kaushansky, who is a hematologist.
SBU studied the symptoms and “did a trial to see if aggressive anticoagulants would produce better outcomes” than the standard of care at the time, he said. “Our [intensive care unit] patients who were on this more aggressive anticoagulation protocols had half the mortality” of other patients, so the hospital “quickly adopted all of our care” to the more effective approach.
The hospital preemptively used biomarkers to determine who should and should not get aggressive anticoagulation. A subsequent study using the database confirmed the school’s early conclusion. Stony Brook published over 150 papers on the structure of the virus, clinical observations, sociological interventions, and a host of other areas, according to Kaushansky.
Carol Gomes, Chief Executive Officer of Stony Brook University Hospital, appreciated Kaushansky’s hands on approach, which included participating in daily calls as part of the hospital incident command center.
She likened Kaushansky to an orchestra leader, coordinating the research and patient care, making sure there was “no duplication of effort.”
Kaushansky believes federal research funding agencies and policy makers will recognize the importance of gathering information about this pandemic to treat future patients who might battle against variants and to provide a playbook for other health threats. “We really do need to prepare for the next one” as this is the third and deadliest of three coronaviruses, including SARS and MERS, he said.
Vaccines
As for vaccines, Kaushansky said Stony Brook was making it as “convenient as we can” to get a vaccination for health care workers. As of about a month ago, over 80 percent of Stony Brook’s health care workers had been vaccinated.
The black and brown communities have benefited from seeing leaders and role models receiving the vaccine. “This is beginning to erode the mistrust,” said Kaushansky, which developed as a byproduct of the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which black men with syphilis did not receive penicillin despite its availability as an effective treatment.
Kaushansky added that a concern he’s heard from a range of people is that the vaccine was developed too quickly and that the side effects could be problematic. He cited the simultaneous steps doctors, pharmaceutical companies and others took to accelerate a process that didn’t leave out any of those steps.
Kaushansky participates in a group email interaction with prominent European hematologists. Looking at the data for the Astrazeneca vaccine, these researchers have calculated that anywhere from one in 500,000 to one in a million have developed blood clots.
“Not a single person on this mass email believes that they should stop the Astrazeneca vaccines for that kind of incident,” he said.
What He Helped Build
Kaushansky has been such a supporter of expanding the facilities and expertise at Stony Brook that he said the campus developed a joke about him.
“What’s the dean’s favorite bird?” he asked. “A crane.”
Fixtures on the campus for years, those cranes — the construction vehicles, not the birds — have changed the university, adding new teaching, research and clinical space on the campus.
That includes the Medical and Research Translational building and Bed Tower, which started in 2013 and opened in 2018, and the Hospital Pavilion, which has an additional 150 beds. Those extra beds were especially important a year after the pavilion opened, providing much-needed space for patients battling against COVID.
Gomes appreciated what Kaushansky built physically, as well as the interactive collaborations among different parts of the university. “An active collaboration and communication between researchers, clinicians and academics is a very different model” from the typical separation among those groups, she said. The work “reaped great rewards on the front end with the ability to collaborate to bring new ideas forward.”
As for the type of care patients received at Stony Brook, Kaushansky recalled a discussion over six years ago about central line infections. The data came from a 12 month period, starting six months prior to the meeting and going back to 18 months earlier.
“How are we going to know why all those central line infections occurred by looking at data” from so much earlier, Kaushansky recalled asking. The hospital created real time dashboards, which is an effort that has “paid huge dividends.”
Kaushansky cited the hospitals’ top 100 health grade for three years running. These grades assess whether patients survive a procedure, have complications or need to be readmitted.
“You’re going to get the best care possible when you come to Stony Brook,” Kaushansky said, as the top 100 rating puts Stony Brook in the top 2 percent of hospitals in the country.
Apart from the buildings Kaushansky helped develop, he’s proud of the program he helped build for medical school students.
About six years ago, Stony Brook instituted a new medical school curriculum that had translational pillars. The school starts students in the clinical realm considerably earlier than the classic program that involves two years of basic studies, followed by two years of clinical work.
Stony Brook provides basic science, followed by earlier exposure to the clinic, with a return to basic science after that
“It’s much more effective if you teach the basic science after the student has witnessed the clinical manifestation,” Kaushansky said. These approaches are part of translational pillars in areas such as cancer, physiology and infectious diseases.
As for what he’ll miss after he leaves, Kaushansky particularly appreciated the opportunity to speak with students. He used to hold a monthly breakfast with four or five students, where he learned about each student, their career goals and their medical journey.
A former colleague at the University of California at San Diego, John Carethers, who is the Chair in the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan, visited Kaushansky as a speaker twice at Stony Brook.
Carethers saw “first hand the wonderful impact he had on students — knowing their names, and providing wonderful advice,” he wrote in an email.
The Next Steps
For a decade, Kaushansky said he wanted to create a course about the future of medicine.
“There are a lot of great innovations in medicine that are fascinating from a scientific and clinical perspective,” Kaushansky said.
He will work on a course for use at Stony Brook in the main campus, the medical campus and for whichever program is interested in sharing these innovative medical and scientific steps in medicine.
He also plans to continue to be the lead editor of the primary textbook in hematology, called Williams Hematology. The textbook has gone through 10 editions.
Kaushansky and his wife Lauren, who is an author and education professor at Stony Brook, aren’t likely to remain on Long Island in the longer term. The couple has a getaway home in Santa Fe and may go there.
Kaushansky’s hobbies include wood working and running. He made a sofa when he was an undergraduate at UCLA, while his second significant work was a 16-foot sailboat he made as a second-year resident. He estimates he has made 40 pieces of furniture.
Kaushansky runs four miles a day four to six times a week. In 1990, he ran the Seattle Marathon which was the Goodwill Games Marathon, finishing in a time of around three hours and twenty-five minutes.
Culturally, Kaushansky hopes the school continues to embrace his focus on generosity.
“You’ve got to be generous with your time,” he said.
“No more can you say that you are too busy to talk. You have to be of a personality that takes pride and that gets the endorphins going from seeing the people you have brought, the people you have entrusted in leadership roles, succeed.”
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.”
On April 6, Stony Brook University administered 1,400 doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to students living on campus. The mass vaccination day fell on the first day that New York granted eligibility for those 16 of age and older.
“I’m so thrilled that the eligibility came much earlier than we ever expected,” said Rick Gatteau, vice president for Student Affairs at SBU and dean of students.
The administration sent out an email to residents last Thursday with a link to sign up. Within two hours it was filled, and there is currently a waitlist of 500 students waiting for the next session.
The event took place in the newly constructed Student Union building, where students arrived at their assigned time and were guided through the process by dozens of volunteers. They will return for their second dose on May 4.
“I felt compelled to get the vaccine”, said Victor Shin, a sophomore chemistry major. “I’m hoping that the campus will open up very soon and we can head back toward in-person learning.”
By the end of the day, 30% of on campus residents received a vaccine. With the semester wrapping up in a few weeks, the administration is hoping to vaccinate all students who are interested so that the second dose falls before the last day of classes May 4.
“The fact that we’ve had such a huge turnout is reflective of our students’ interest in getting the vaccine,” Gatteau said. “We’re a big STEM school focused on research, and students know the value of the science and research that went into it, which is similar to their own career pursuits.”
Residents were selected first due to their risk of transmission by living in close quarters in dorms. The next group to be offered a spot will be commuter students who travel to campus and those who are fully remote but live on Long Island.
“Even if it was never required, I think we’d get to our herd immunity number just based on interest,” Gatteau said.
The decision of whether or not vaccination will be required of students returning to campus in the fall is still up for deliberation by the State University of New York administration. This week they announced that in the fall, 80% of classes will be held in person.
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