#13 Collin O'Connor scored a career-high 27 points during Saturday's game. Photo courtesy of Stony Brook Athletics
Stony Brook men’s basketball fought to the finish, falling 80-70 to UNC Wilmington on Feb. 1 at Trask Coliseum. Collin O’Connor scored a career-high 27 points, logging a full 40 minutes in the contest.
Stony Brook opened the scoring on an Andre Snoddy trifecta, building a 6-0 lead in the opening minute before the Seahawks connected on a pair of threes to level the contest.
The Seawolves regained the lead for a moment, but UNCW turned the momentum with a 14-2 run to build a nine-point lead, 20-11.
Stony Brook struggled to slow down UNCW offensively, finding itself in a 16-point hole after the under-four media timeout of the first half. The Seawolves scored six of the final seven points of the half, holding UNCW without a field goal for the final 3:42 of the half, to head into the locker room trailing by 11.
CJ Luster II, who had a quiet first half, scored Stony Brook’s first eight points of the second half to whittle the deficit to six points, 45-39, at the 16-minute mark.
The Seawolves did a much better job of slowing down the Seahawks to start the second half, limiting runs and cutting into the deficit.
O’Connor began to find his groove offensively, scoring inside and outside, as well as at the free throw line. A pair of O’Connor free throws with 9:46 to play brought the Seawolves within four points of UNCW, the smallest margin between the two sides since the opening 10 minutes of the first half.
Trailing 60-54 with less than eight minutes to play, Stony Brook sent UNCW to the free throw line. After two misses, the Seahawks corralled an offensive rebound, which led to a second-chance basket. Stony Brook turned it over on the ensuing possession and UNCW capitalized with a three pointer to force a Seawolves’ timeout. Another Seahawks’ basket made it nine straight points and pushed Stony Brook’s deficit to 13 points, 67-54.
Stony Brook could not get within single digits for the remainder of the evening, ultimately dropping the road contest to UNCW.
“We battled tonight, but we weren’t able to make enough plays to pull it out,” head coach Geno Ford said. “Coming into the game, UNCW was 36th in the nation in offensive rebounding and we were able hold them to three total, a season low.”
“Collin had a good ballgame, and I thought Dre’s effort defensively and on the glass was outstanding. We are getting better. We still have eight games to try and build some momentum heading to D.C.,” Ford added.
The team heads home to host CAA preseason favorite Towson on Feb. 6. Tip-off is scheduled for 6:31 pm from Stony Brook Arena, with the contest streaming on FloCollege.
Drs. Iwao Ojima, left, and Martin Kaczocha in a Stony Brook University laboratory. Photo by John Griffin, Stony Brook University
A non-opioid investigational drug with promising pre-clinical results in treating neuropathic pain has passed an important hurdle after the study’s safety review committee (SRC) reviewed the data from initial volunteers and recommended to progress into the next dose level in a first-in-human clinical trial.The drug, ART26.12, is being developed by Artelo Biosciences, Inc, based in Solana Beach, Calif.
The compound was discovered and initially developed by Stony Brook University’s Iwao Ojima, PhD, and Martin Kaczocha, PhD. The technology is based on a class of fatty acid binding proteins (FABPs) inhibitors, including what is now ART26.12, and was licensed to Artelo in 2018 by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York.
Neuropathic pain is estimated to affect about eight percent of the U.S. population, which translates to approximately 20 million people. ART26.12 is being developed specifically for chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy, which remains a serious adverse problem for patients during cancer therapy and post therapy.
Dr. Ojima and colleagues selected FABPs as drug targets of the body’s endocannabinoid system to modulate lipids within the cell for a potentially promising way to treat pain, inflammation and cancer. According to Artelo, ART26.12 is the lead compound in Artelo’s proprietary FABP platform and is believed to be the first-ever selective FABP5 inhibitor (5 indicates a specific protein) to enter clinical trials.
The SRC completed its initial clinical safety review of ART26.12 in early January for the first cohort of eight volunteers. With that, the phase 1 clinical trial of this drug will advance to the next step, which will include more subjects and an evaluation of higher doses of the investigational drug.
Artelo says that other potential indications with the lead compound and other FABP5s in development include treatments related to cancer, osteoarthritis, psoriasis and anxiety.
Dr. Ojima, SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Stony Brook University, and Director of the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery, and Dr. Kaczocha, Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesia in the Renaissance School of Medicine, led the Stony Brook team in its work developing inhibitors to various FABPs.
They continue to consult with Artelo regarding the advancement of these compounds in clinical trials.
For more about the FABP inhibitor story, see this 2024 press release. For more about Artelo’s successful completion of the first cohort in the phase 1 study of ART26.12, see this press release.
Hand-drawn renderings of two of the seven sampled molars from Australopithecus (StW-148 and StW-47), illustrative of teeth frequently exposed to plant eating. Credit: Dom Jack, MPIC
Study published in Science identifies Australopithecus as a plant eater, narrowing the scope on when regular animal consumption increased and brains grew.
An international team of researchers including Dominic Stratford, PhD, of Stony Brook University and the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, have discovered that an ancient human ancestor found in deposits at the Sterkfontein Caves, Australopithecus, which lived more than three million years ago in South Africa, primarily ate plant-based foods. The finding, published in the journal Science, stems from an analysis of tooth enamel from seven Australopithecus fossils and is significant because the emergence of meat eating is thought to be a key driver of a large increase in brain size seen in later hominins.
Every human behavior, from abstract thought to the development of complex technology, is a result of the evolution of the brain. According to evolutionary scientists, meat consumption is a primary driver of many aspects of the evolution of our own genus, Homo, including brain size. When hominins started to exploit and consume highly nutritious animal products is a major question in human evolution studies because it represents a turning point in our evolution. However, direct evidence of when meat eating emerged among our earliest ancestors, and how its consumption developed through time, has remained elusive to scientists.
The research team included investigators from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) in Germany and the University of Witwatersrand. They analyzed stable nitrogen isotope data (15N/14N) from tooth enamel of Australopithecus fossils found in the caves, an area known for its rich collection of early hominin fossils.
The ratio of stable nitrogen isotopes accumulated in animals’ tissues has been used to understand its trophic position – place in the food chain – for many years. An enrichment of 15N is generally indicative of a higher position in the food chain and consumption of animal tissue. Conventionally, bone collagen or dentin are sampled to attain enough nitrogen isotopes for analysis. But these tissues typically decay relatively rapidly, limiting the application of nitrogen isotope analysis to about 300,000 years.
The recent development of more sensitive analytical techniques that can measure less nitrogen provided the opportunity to sample enamel, the hardest tissue of the mammalian body that also traps Nitrogen stable isotopes while it is forming. Enamel can potentially preserve the isotopic fingerprint of an animal’s diet for millions of years.
According to Stratford, an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University, and Director of Research at the Sterkfontein Caves, and his colleagues, this advancement in nitrogen isotope analysis enabled the researchers to obtain the first direct evidence of the diet of ancient hominin fossils and explore when meat eating started, the behavior that set hominins on a new evolutionary path.
They compared the isotopic data from those fossils with tooth samples of other coexisting animals at the time, such as monkeys, antelopes, hyenas, jackals and big cats. The comparison revealed that while its possible Australopithecusoccasionally consumed meat, its primary diet was plant-based.
In fact, the isotopic data showed the hominin ate more like a herbivore than a carnivore. One interpretation of this result, explains Stratford, is that changes in behavior known to occur in Australopithecus may not be a result of an increase in meat consumption. It may also suggest that regular meat eating had not yet emerged as a behavior in a hominin this old, implying that it occurred only later in time, or in a different geographic area.
“Overall, this work provides clear evidence that Australopithecus in South Africa did not eat significant amounts of meat three million years ago, and it represents a huge step in extending our ability to better understand diets and trophic level of all animals back into the scale of millions of years,” adds Stratford.
From left, postdoctoral researcher William Thomas, Professor Liliana Dávalos and former undergraduate fellow Maria Alejandra Bedoya Duque. Photo courtesy of William Thomas
By Daniel Dunaief
Captivity causes changes in a brain, at least in the shrew.
Small animals that look like rodents but are related to moles and hedgehogs, shrews have different gene expression in several important areas of their brain during captivity.
In a study led by 2022 Hearst summer Undergraduate Research Fellow Maria Alejandra Bedoya Duque in the lab of Stony Brook Professor Liliana Dávalos, shrews in captivity haddifferent gene expression in the cortex, hippocampus and olfactory bulb. These brain areas are important for cognition, memory and environmental sensing.
“I was very surprised by what we found,” said Dávalos. While she expected that the research might uncover differences between the brains of captive and wild animals, she didn’t expect the changes to be as many or as strong.
The change in brain activity could offer potential alternative explanations for studies that explore the effect of various experiments on animals kept in captivity.
“It could be very useful to find out if these environmental influences could be confounding,” said Dávalos. “We don’t know all the dimensions of what captivity is doing.”
Additionally, brain activity changes in captivity for shrews in terms of the transcripts that are over or under expressed mirror those found in humans who have neurological changes such as major depressive disorder or neuro degenerative disorders.
“How these [changes] influence behavior or cognition is a separate question,” Dávalos added.
To be sure, extrapolating from shrews to humans is different and requires careful analysis, Dávalos explained.
Humans and shrews have distinct life history, ecology, body size and other characteristics. While scientists can study genes they think might have similar functions, more studies are necessary to determine the effects of those genes in expression and how similar they are to those studied in humans or mice.
Dávalos does not expect to find a silver bullet that reorganizes human brains or a gene or pathway that’s going to revolutionize neurodegenerative research.
Nonetheless, in and of itself, the study suggested opportunities for further research and exploration into the effects of captivity on animals in general and, in particular, on their mental processes, which are affected by changes in conditions and needs in their environment.
A foundation for future work
Maria Alejandra Bedoya Duque
The study, which was recently published in the journal Biology Letters, grew out of a two-month internship Bedoya did at Stony Brook in which she studied the brains of four captive shrews and four wild animals. The analysis of the results involved numerous calls and discussions when she returned to Colombia to finish her undergraduate degree.
At the end of the summer, Bedoya was “going to present her work internally at Stony Brook,” explained William Thomas, a postdoctoral researcher in Dávalos’s lab and one of Bedoya’s mentors throughout the project. “Instead, she turned it into a paper.”
Thomas appreciated how Bedoya “put in a lot of work to make sure she got this out,” he said.
The shrew’s brain changed after two months in captivity, which is about 20 percent of their total lifespan, as shrews live an average of one year.
“We don’t know what the limits are,” in terms of the effect of timing on triggering changes in the shrew’s brain, Thomas said. “We don’t know how early the captive effect is.”
Thomas suggested that this paper could “lay the foundation for future studies with larger samples.”
Dávalos was pleased that the study resulted in a meaningful paper after a summer of gathering data and several years of analyzing and presenting the information.
“I’m immensely proud and happy that we had this unexpected finding,” said Dávalos. “It is one of the most gratifying experiences as a mentor.”
A launching pad
Bedoya, who graduated from Universidad Icesi in 2023 and is applying to graduate school after working as an adjunct professor/ lecturer at her alma mater, is pleased her work led to a published paper.
“I was so happy,” said Bedoya. “If it hadn’t been for [Thomas] and [Dávalos] cheering me on the whole time when I came back to Colombia, this study could have ended as my fellowship ended.”
Bedoya believes the experience at Stony Brook provided a launching pad for her career.
“It is a very valuable experience to have conducted this research all the way up to publication,” she said.
Thomas and Dávalos each recalled their own first scientific publication.
“I’m happy and relieved when they come out,” said Thomas. “While internal validation is important, the pleasure comes from providing something that you believe can help society.”
Dávalos’s first publication involved some unusual twists and turns. When she submitted her first paper about deforestation in the Andes, the journal wrote back to her in a letter telling her the paper was too newsy. She submitted it to several other publications, including one that indicated they had a huge backlog and weren’t publishing new research.
When it was published, the paper didn’t receive much attention. That paper, and another on her thoughts about how peace between the Colombian government and the FARC rebels might be worse for the rainforest, have since been cited frequently by other researchers.
Winter brain
At around the same time that Bedoya published her work about the effect of captivity on the shrew brain, Thomas published a study in the journal eLife in which he examined how shrew brains shrank during the winter and then regrew during the spring.
This work could offer genetic clues to neurological and metabolic health in mammals. Thomas focused on the hypothalamus, measuring how gene expression shifts seasonally.
A suite of genes that change across the seasons were involved in the regulation of energy homeostasis as well as genes that regulate cell death that might be associated with reductions in brain size.
Temperature was the driver of these seasonal changes.
The genes involved in maintaining the blood brain barrier and calcium signaling were upregulated in the shrew compared with other mammals.
After the winter, the shrew’s brains recovered their size, although below their pre-winter size.
Originally from Syracuse, Thomas attended SUNY Albany.
When he was younger, he entertained ideas of becoming a doctor, particularly as his grandmother battled ALS. On his first day shadowing a physician, he felt claustrophobic in the exam room and almost passed out.
He wanted to be outside instead of in “the squeaky clean floors” of a doctor’s office, he explained in an email.
As a scientist, he feels he can meld his passion for nature and his desire to help those who suffer from disease.
When Dr. Shirley Strum Kenny was getting ready to leave Queens College to become president of Stony Brook University in 1994, she called her mother in Tyler, Texas, where she grew up.
She told her mother she was taking “a much more important job” and she “burst into tears.”
Dr. Shirley Strum Kenny
She felt Queens College had a heart and cared about its students and that she was taking over at Stony Brook where “science ruled” and where the “faculty were more important than students.”
She believed the public university had the “most incredible science faculty for a state institution, but it didn’t have a heart.”
Supported by her husband Dr. Robert “Bob” Kenny, the first female president at Stony Brook made numerous changes during a tenure that lasted until the summer of 2009, overseeing the beautification of the campus, directing the school’s athletic program into Division 1, and forging lasting connections with luminaries including world-renowned paleanthropologist Richard Leakey and celebrated actor Alan Alda.
In a wide-ranging celebrity podcast phone interview from their home in McLean, Virginia, Shirley and Bob Kenny shared numerous stories, insights, observations and reflections, offering specific steps the former president took to bring about cultural change at the university.
“When I got there, students didn’t matter,” said Kenny. “Faculty mattered and we had incredible faculty, particularly in the sciences.”
Kenny appreciated how hard her predecessors worked to recruit and retain talented faculty.
“Each of us played a very different role,” she said.
John Toll, the first longtime president who held the role from 1965 to 1978 “couldn’t have cared diddly squat what the campus looked like or felt like,” said Kenny. “He just wanted the best scientists in the world.”
Kenny believes John Marburger, who was president from 1980 to 1994, consolidated what Toll had done. “I came in at a very different point in history,” said Kenny. “I thought students did matter.”
Changing the campus and the focus of the university wasn’t easy. She said she received numerous figurative bruises along the way.
University leaders thought it was a “waste of time” and money to focus on undergraduates, she said. “We want to be the best graduate university that we can be,” she recalled, echoing the underlying philosophy of the school in the mid- 1990’s. “There was tremendous resistance.”
‘The ugliest campus in America’
Kenny brought in famed architect John Belle, who had worked with her at Queens College and had also been involved in the 1990 restoration of Ellis Island.
“The first important thing I did was to change [Stony Brook] from the ugliest campus in America to the beautiful campus it is now,” said Kenny.
When Kenny arrived, the area that is now the central mall was asphalt. She and Belle, who was one of the founders of architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle, walked the campus.
Belle asked Kenny if the university had a center and “it really didn’t,” she said. Buildings went up here and there, seemingly without much consideration for developing aesthetically pleasing and relaxing outdoor green space.
Kenny also urged Belle to add a fountain, building on her experience at the University of Texas at Austin, where the fountain became not only a focal point for gatherings and activities but also a place to celebrate.
While Stony Brook doesn’t condone throwing people in the fountain, the way students did in Texas, the fountain has become a “central campus focus” and a place to show prospective students touring the university, she said.
Kenny also helped build and expand the student center, which created a place for students to interact and “have fun,” she said.
Important partners
Through easy-going laughter and self-deprecating humor, Shirley described meaningful and important partnerships that helped shape the direction of the school, academic opportunities and campus life.
Kenny described inviting Charles Wang to lunch. At the time, she was president of Queens College and he was the chief executive officer of Computer Associates.
“I thought I was being so sophisticated,” she laughed. “Here I am, Shirley, from Tyler, Texas. I thought, ‘He knows Chinese food. I’ll take him to a Korean restaurant.’”
Wang, as it turns out, was a Chinese food gourmet and thought she was mixing up his Chinese background with that of Korea.
“He never let me forget what a terrible mistake I’d make,” Kenny said. “He thought I didn’t know the difference between Chinese and Korean.”
She considered Wang one of her several brothers in her academic career.
Kenny met Richard Leakey at a lunch in Manhattan. She intended to see if Leakey might give a lecture at Stony Brook, but started by asking him why he was in New York.
He had come for new prosthetics, after he’d lost his legs in a suspicious plane crash in 1993 when he was working to save endangered elephants and eliminate the trade in ivory tusks.
When she found out he didn’t have insurance, she encouraged him to become a visiting faculty at Stony Brook, where he could get insurance.
“That connection with Leakey and the Leakey Center has endured since then and has been very important to the university,” said Kenny.
Shirley met actor Alan Alda of MASH fame at a dinner at the Staller Center.
Alda shared an idea he pitched to other university presidents around the country that deploys improvisational acting techniques to communicate and, in particular, to share information about science.
Kenny was receptive to the idea, which led to the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science.
A life partner
Shirley and Bob Kenny shared anecdotes and advice about their lifelong partnership.
The couple, both of whom grew up in Texas and met as undergraduates at the University of Texas when they worked for the school newspaper, have been married for 68 years.
When asked for the key to such a lasting marriage, Bob suggested it was “patience and tolerance.”
Shirley suggested the scales weren’t balanced as her husband “had to be patient with me more than I have to be patient with him. I’ve never doubted how clever I was to hook him.”
The Kennys have four grandchildren and a great grandchild.
The couple, who don’t travel as often to the university as they had in the years after leaving Stony Brook, maintain a close connection to the school through their daughter Sarah Azzara, who is a Full-Time Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook.
The next leader
While the Kennys aren’t involved in the current search for a new president at Stony Brook, Shirley shared some thoughts on the qualities she’d like from the next leader.
“What I really want is somebody who cares about Stony Brook and who is not just looking at this as a weigh station to a more ‘prestigious’ presidency,” she said. “The last few people have been on their way to other presidencies.”
She would like someone who “loves and cares about Stony Brook and wants to keep making it better.”
As for advice she’d share with anyone contemplating becoming a university president, Kenny suggested the importance of hearing other people.
“You need to be able to listen and not just talk,” she said. Presidents need to be sensitive to “what the campus wants, as well as having your own vision of where you think it should be going.”
Even if a prospective leader believes in a particular vision, that person “shouldn’t just pronounce and do, even if [he or she] thinks they have a wonderful vision.”
She urged universities and their leaders to focus on recruiting extraordinary teachers as well as talented researchers.
Robert Kenny spent 12 years without electricity, then rose to top academic posts
When the lights go out, Robert Kenny feels like he’s home.
“I react by saying, ‘Yeah, I’ve been there. I’ve been to this place,’” said Kenny.
That’s because, for the first dozen years of his life, Kenny had no indoor plumbing or electricity on what he described as a “hard scrabble farm” in Texas.
Shirley and Robert Kenny at Robert’s 90th birthday lunch. Photo courtesy of the Kennys
“I grew up basically in the 19th century,” said Kenny, from the current home he and his wife of 68 years Shirley share in McLean, Virginia.
Kenny brought buckets of water from the windmill to the house, while his mother cooked on a four-burner wooden stove.
The family, which farmed land to raise cattle for beef, had a battery powered radio powered by a windmill on the roof of the house.
When the wind blew, the battery charged and the family could listen to news and entertainment, but when the air was still for longer periods of time, the radio wouldn’t function.
Kenny also lived in a home with a phone that looked like a box with a crank. His neighbors, whose homes were about a mile away, all had similar boxes connected to one line.
Everyone was on the same line and a call to each family had a distinctive ring.
When the summer evenings got too hot indoors, the family took their beds outside and slept under the sky.
“It was terrific,” recalled Kenny. “I enjoyed it. You tended to wake up early.”
On the unusual night when it rained, the family would bundle everything up quickly and race indoors.
“I knew from childhood that I wanted to leave that world,” said Kenny.
When the family finally received electricity, Kenny was thrilled that he could read in the evening as long as he was allowed to stay up.
Kenny’s parents were “very supportive of education,” he said. “That’s what made” it possible for him to leave the farming world and enter academia.
Army counterspy
Before adding to his academic resume, Kenny served as a counterspy in the army.
“That was the age in which everybody was suspected of being a communist,” said Kenny. “The army was very worried about people becoming subverted and becoming spies.”
His unit’s job was to search for people who might be susceptible to any leverage the Russians might find.
“At that time and one hates to say it now, the Army was very suspicious of homosexual activity,” he said. “They thought [gay soldiers] were vulnerable to blackmail.”
When his unit found gay men, they were “usually pushed out of the Army,” he said.
That, Kenny said, proved ironic, because he was sure at least one of the people in this counterspy group was, himself, a closeted gay man who rose through the ranks.
While he was in the army, Kenny married Shirley Strum, who decades later would serve as the first female president of Stony Brook University.
Kenny, meanwhile, built on his love of reading and appreciation for education, becoming Dean of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University.
Real world lessons
While dedicated academics, the Kenny couple received difficult lessons in the real world during their honeymoon.
They were robbed twice on their honeymoon, first in Miami and then in Puerto Rico when they swam in the hotel swimming pool.
When they returned to the United States, Bob Kenny had to call his commanding officer to ask for an advance on his money so he could get back to the base.
Looking back on his over 90 years of life, Kenny suggested he especially enjoyed his 20s, when he could travel the world. He also reveled in the 40’s, when the family enjoyed time with their young children.
He described visiting the shrine at Delphi in Greece as being “absolutely eerie and magical.”
As for the way he best supported his wife during her tenure as the president of Stony Brook, Kenny suggested that his role was as a “listening post” and a “place to vent where she could express her frustrations.”
Looking at an academic legacy that has continued through the generations, with their daughter Sarah Azzara at Stony Brook and grandchildren including Avi Kenny, an Assistant Professor of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at Duke, the Kennys are proud of their ongoing academic legacy.
For Bob Kenny, such academic success came from a humble beginning.“Books were not easy to come by in that part of the world,” he said. “I read everything” he could get his hands on. His favorite was Mark Twain’s “Tom Sawyer.”
The Stony Brook women’s basketball team fell to North Carolina A&T, 79-46 on the road at Corbett Sports Center in Greensboro, N.C. on Jan. 19. Zaida Gonzalez notched a team-high 25 points and seven rebounds for the Seawolves.
After falling behind 3-0, Stony Brook went on a 5-0 run with 9:15 left in the first quarter, culminating in a three from Breauna Ware, to take a 5-3 lead. N.C. A&T regained the advantage and never trailed again. The Seawolves entered the second quarter down, 14-10.
Stony Brook continued to lose ground in the second quarter and faced a 37-20 halftime deficit.
Stony Brook came out of halftime on fire, going on an 8-0 run, punctuated by a basket from Gonzalez, to trim its deficit to 37-28 with 8:19 to go in the third. Gonzalez had a game-high nine points through the third quarter as the team went 5-9 from the field. N.C. A&T would later counter and stretch its lead to 61-39 heading into the fourth.
The Aggies kept widening its lead, constructing a 69-41 advantage before Stony Brook went on a 5-0 run, finished off by a Gonzalez jumper, to shrink the deficit to 69-46 with 4:44 to go in the contest. N.C. A&T responded and outscored the Seawolves the rest of the way, ending the game with a final score of 79-46.
Up next, the team returns to Long Island as they take on Northeastern on Jan. 24 at 6:31 p.m. This will be the second meeting between the Seawolves and Huskies this season. Coverage is set to be available on FloCollege.
The Paul Taylor Dance Company will close out the season on May 3. Photo courtesy of Staller Center
By Rita J. Egan
Stony Brook University’s Staller Center for the Arts has planned an upcoming spring season filled with diverse entertainment options, from music to dance to comedy and nights out on the town to family-fun experiences.
Season openers
STAR POWER: Two-time Tony® Award-winner Sutton Foster returns to the Staller Center on February 1. Photo courtesy of Staller Center
Alan Inkles, Staller Center director, said the season kicks off on the Main Stage with family fun on Sunday, Jan. 26. The circus act The Great DuBois, featuring Michael DuBois and Viktoria Grimmy, will feature juggling, aerial stunts, comedy and more,
“It’s that time of year where it’s three weeks after the holidays are over, you’re looking for something to do, and I thought a nice family show would be a good time for that,” he said.
Later that week, on Saturday, Feb. 1, the venue will host its annual gala. This year will be An Evening with Sutton Foster, featuring the two-time Tony Award winner in her solo concert. Foster has released three studio albums that mix Broadway and jazz classics along with her own compositions.
Regarding Foster, who has starred in several Broadway productions, including Thoroughly Modern Millie, Anything Goes and The Music Man, Inkles said, “No one is working harder or doing more shows.”
For the first time this year, gala attendees can purchase tickets for the show, a pre-concert dinner and a post-show dessert reception. As in previous years, they can also buy tickets for the show only or the show and reception.
According to Inkles, the money raised from gala ticket sales helps to produce other Staller Center shows and to fund its educational outreach programs. This outreach includes making tickets available to underrepresented families and university students and bringing petting zoos to various schools, churches and libraries.
Let the music play
Among this season’s musical acts will be Grammy-winning violinist Joshua Bell and soprano Larisa Martinez on Feb. 15 with Voice and the Violin. The husband-and-wife act will play classical art songs and operas to show tunes and selections from Latinx composers. Mardi Gras will be celebrated on Feb. 21 in the Staller Center’s Recital Hall with New Orleans Songbook, presented by Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Melissa Errico, accompanied by prolific jazz pianist Billy Stritch, will return to the Staller Center on March 22 for a tribute concert honoring the late Stephen Sondheim. Inkles described Errico as the “quintessential singer of Steven Sondheim.”
The Tony nominee will interpret the songwriter’s works, including Send in the Clowns and Good Thing Going and offer insights into the stories behind the pieces.
“Every Broadway singer in the world knows if you want Sondheim, Melissa Eririco is your gal,” Inkles said.
Returning on April 2 is Starry Nights. Directed by Colin Carr, Stony Brook University Department of Music musicians will perform chamber selections, including the works of Schubert, Schoenberg and Schulhoff.
On April 14, the Emerson Legacy Series will perform with former Emerson String Quartet member Paul Watkins. While known for being a cellist, Watkins will be playing piano in the April show, accompanying soprano Christine Goerke. The night will feature classical and cabaret styles and also include Eugene Drucker on violin and Larry Dutton on viola.
Make them laugh
The Staller Center will present two comedy productions this season. The Comedy of Errors by The Acting Comedy, in conjunction with the nonprofit Play on Shakespeare, takes place on Feb. 8. The comedy incorporates mistaken identities with whimsical adventures.
Brooklyn native Chris Distefano will perform his comedy show on March 8. Inkles described the comedian, known for his work on MTV’s Guy Code and Girl Code, as charming and having a growing fan base and said the act is a relatively clean show.
More fun for the family
The month of March will end with the classic Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf on March 30. The Staller Center Outreach Ensemble, which includes SBU music department students, allows audience members to learn how each instrument represents a character in the tale. The student-actors will also mingle with ticket holders after the show, where attendees can try the instruments. Inkles said the play is a way to introduce young people to the arts. In addition to the performance on March 30, the following day, children from a few of Suffolk County’s school districts will attend free of charge. During the year, the outreach ensemble also performs at schools, senior centers and hospitals.
Circus company The 7 Fingers will present Duel Reality on April 11 and 12. The company blends circus, theater and dance. Inkles said the storyline is loosely based on Romeo and Juliet with two feuding families and includes stunts and illusions.
In addition to the circus element, Inkles said, “I think the adults will enjoy the story that’s going on behind it.”
Dancing feet
The Syncopated Ladies, known for fusing storytelling with tap dancing and winning the first dance crew battle of So You Think You Can Dance, will perform at the Staller Center on March 14. The all-female tap group is choreographed by Emmy Award-nominated choreographer Chloé Arnold, who collaborated with Beyoncé in the past.
“This is going to be a phenomenal night,” Inkles said. “It’s really great for young people, and people who love tap.”
A week later, on March 21, audiences can enjoy Rhythm India: Bollywood & Beyond, which features traditional Indian dances from classical to Bollywood hits. Inkles said the production includes approximately 30 to 40 dancers.
Inkles said the Staller Center has partnered with Indu Kaur, owner of Curry Club at SaGhar in Port Jefferson, to bundle a ticket to the show and dinner at the restaurant for $95.
“I want to get the Indian community to our show, and I want the American community, too, because I want them to see the culture,” Inkles said. “I really want this amazing Indian community to make sure they come to this and get to see the culture and share with our audience.”
The last dance performance and show of the Staller Center’s spring season will be on May 3 with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. The modern dance group will perform classics and new works.
And, more
Inkles said in addition to the Staller Center’s spring season, the venue hosts the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra; and offers the Met Opera: Live in HD series on the Main Stage screen and art exhibitions in the Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery.
Stony Brook University’s Staller Center for the Arts is located at 100 Nicolls Road, Stony Brook. To order tickets, call the box office at 631-632-2787 or visit stallercenter.com.
This graphic illustrates the mechanisms that occur in kidney disease that leads to a poor protective antibody response against influenza infection and following vaccination. Image prepared using Biorender.com
Fighting off infections when one has chronic disease is a common problem, and during the Covid-19 pandemic that scenario often turned out to be dangerous and deadly. A new study led by Stony Brook Medicine demonstrates that advanced kidney disease compromises the survival of B cells, a type of infection-fighting white blood cell that produces antibodies to kill microbes, and thus significantly reduces the immune response to the influenza virus. The findings are published in Nature Communications.
Comorbid health conditions are critical determinants of immune function. One comorbid condition associated with increased risk of severe infection and infection-related deaths is kidney disease. Infections are the second major cause of death in patients with kidney disease. According to the International Society of Nephrology, an estimated 20 percent of patients with kidney disease die from infection. During the Covid-19 pandemic, mortality rates were as much as 10 times higher for those who had kidney disease compared to those with normal kidney function.
Lead author Partha Biswas, DVM, PhD, a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, and colleagues, set out to better understand why those who have kidney disease are unable to mount a protective immune response. The study centered on the condition experienced during kidney disease called uremia – the accumulation of toxic metabolites in the body in the absence of kidney filtration of the blood.
To date clinical studies often show a poor B cell-mediated antibody response after an infection or vaccination in those with kidney disease. Additionally, kidney disease is a known predisposing factor for infection complications, however the reasons are not clear.
“Most studies linking kidney disease with abnormal B cell response were either performed in kidney transplant patients or arecorelative in nature. Since kidney transplant patients are immune compromised, it is difficult to assess the impact of kidney disease on B cell response per se,” explains Dr. Biswas.
The researchers used a multiple well-characterized murine model of kidney disease that progresses to renal dysfunction in the subjects. Healthy mice and those with kidney disease were immunized with model immunogens or infected with the influenza virus to trigger a germinal center (GC) response in the spleen, which is central to the development of protective antibody level and infection-fighting response.
They discovered several cellular changes that helps to illustrate the poor immune response in the kidney disease model:
Kidney dysfunction leading to accumulation of toxic metabolites triggered cell death in GC B cells leading to poor antibody response during immunization.
A previously unidentified role of uremic toxic metabolites hippuric acid (HA) is responsible for increased cell death of GC B cells.
HA drove increased death of GC B cells via activating a specific G protein coupled receptor for niacin, which appears to further affect normal B cell response.
Kidney disease had negative impact on and inhibits GC and antibody response following influenza virus infection.
According to Dr. Biswas, the paper provides mechanistic insights on how kidney disease negatively impacts protective B cell response infection and immunization. He and his co-investigators believe that the knowledge gained from the laboratory study may shed light on how to generate protective antibody response following vaccination in individuals with kidney disease.
Currently, Dr. Biswas and colleagues are tooling up to use this experimental system to address the apparent lack of response to SARS-CoV 2 vaccination in kidney disease individuals, which may have broader implications for other respiratory virus and bacterial infections seen in these patients.
The research was supported in part by numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including several to Dr. Biswas, grants AI142354, AI162616, AI159058, and AI181831.
Collaborators included scientists from numerous departments and facilities at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Medical College of Georgia.
From left, Iwao Ojima, Ashna Garg and Maurizio Del Poeta.
Photo by Kathryn Takemura
By Daniel Dunaief
It worked for mice and now, several years later, has shown promise for cats.
Researchers from Maurizio Del Poeta’s lab, working closely with those from Iwao Ojima’s team at Stony Brook University, have demonstrated that an experimental treatment against a fungus resistant to the current standard of care can work with cats battling a ferocious infection, albeit on a small sample size.
The Stony Brook team, along with scientists and veterinarians in Brazil, used a drug they created in 2018 called D13 to treat 10 cats with severe forms of a fungus that affects cats and humans called sporotrichosis.
With this treatment, which the researchers introduced as a powder into the cat’s food, half of the 10 felines whose skin was under insidious attack from the fungus staged remarkable recoveries, offering a potentially promising development that could one day also offer an alternative care for cats and for people.
“The prevalence in South America is 25 to 20 cases per 100,000 people, which is not low,” explained Del Poeta, Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Immunology. “It affects mostly immunocompromised people and particularly people who have cats or people taking care of infected cats.”
Tis cat presented no improvement of the tumor-like lesion and of an ulcerated lesion on the nasal region upon treatment with ITC. After adding D13, the cat significantly improved, even though clinical cure was not achieved after 4 weeks of treatment with ITC and D13 combination.
Typically, people get superficial infections, but a person who is severely immunocompromised could have an infection that spreads and becomes fatal.
The work taps into the expertise of Ojima, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry. Ojima worked on the structure elucidation, the structure activity relationship and development of efficient synthetic methods for large scale synthesis of the drug.
Recent Stony Brook PhD graduate Ashna Garg contributed to this ongoing effort.
Ojima described the work as “solidly encouraging” and added that the scientists have “even better compounds in the same series for human use” that are more potent and more selective to fungi compared to humans which makes systemic toxicity “very low.”
Del Poeta’s lab has been studying sphingolipids metabolism and signaling in fungal and mammals cells to identify new markers for early diagnosis and microbial enzymes/ molecules essential to cause infections in the attempt to develop new antifungal targets.
To be sure, in the cat research, five out of the 10 cats didn’t complete the study. One of them died, although the cause of death was unknown, and four of the other cats abandoned the study.
Additionally, one of the cats for whom the drug worked showed an elevated level of a liver enzyme, which returned to normal within weeks of the conclusion of the study.
Still, the results were promising and provided encouraging improvements for cats battling an infection that threatened their health.
“I am very pleased with the efficacy of D13 on cats in Brazil,” explained Ojima, adding that it is “a compelling result.”
Additionally, in other preliminary studies, D13 works against various fungal infections, including cryptococcosis, aspergillosis and candidiasis. A new derivative of D13 is more effective for those other infections, the scientists said.
Del Poeta explained that the scientists chose to do the research in Brazil because of the prevalence of sporotrichosis in the area and because he had established collaborations in the country in earlier research.
‘Proud and grateful’
For her part, Garg was thrilled to contribute to research that provided a remedy to a deteriorating condition in an animal some of her friends own as pets.
Cat owners often reacted emotionally when she told them about her work, appreciating the significance of the results.
“I am deeply proud and grateful to have contributed to this work,” said Garg. “Its remarkable effectiveness continues to inspire and motivate me.”
A significant part of her PhD revolved around taking the initial lead compounds and developing second and third generation compounds to enhance their effectiveness and bioavailability.
With three bromine atoms, D13 is an unusual therapeutic treatment.
Bromine is “relatively rare among the top 200 pharmaceuticals,” Garg explained. “Bromine can be toxic or can act as an irritant. Part of my work involved exploring ways to reduce the bromine content” to make the treatment more viable in drug development. The scientists are working to understand why and how this treatment works.
“The exact mechanism of action of D13 is not fully understood yet but we are getting very close,” Garg explained.
With the third generation of D13, the team identified compounds that are highly fungal specific with broad spectrum activity, effectively eradicating 100 percent of the three malignant type of fungi.
“It’s important to note that some first and second generation compounds also demonstrated excellent antifungal activity at very low drug concentrations, even if they did not achieve complete eradication on one of the three fungal strains,” Garg added.
While promising, this study does not indicate a new human treatment will be on the market in the short term.
The scientists are doing toxicology studies and hope a new therapeutic option might be available as soon as five years, Del Poeta estimated.
From Delhi to Stony Brook
Garg, who defended her thesis in December, grew up in Delhi, India, where she pursued her undergraduate studies in Chemistry at Delhi University.
After that, she earned her Master’s in Chemistry at Vellore Institute of Technology in Tamil Nadu, India.
Garg arrived at Stony Brook in 2019 and joined Ojima’s lab in early 2020, just at the start of the pandemic.
“It was indeed a challenging time to start a new position,” Garg acknowledged.
Currently a resident of Poquott, Garg enjoys living on Long Island, where she visits beaches, drives around the area and cooks.
Garg, who attended meetings in the labs of both Professors Ojima and Del Poeta, is grateful for the support of these senior scientists, who were also part of her thesis committee.
Del Poeta described Garg as a “dedicated scientist” with an “impeccable” work ethic.
“Drug synthesis can be very challenging,” Del Poeta described. “She is tirelessly resilient.”
Garg is staying at Stony Brook for another year as a post-doctoral researcher.
Del Poeta is pleased with the productive collaboration he’s had with Ojima, whom he described as “passionate, intellectually stimulating, dedicating, inspiring and hard working.”
If Del Poeta sends an email on Saturday night, Ojima typically replies by Sunday morning.
“It is an honor to collaborate with him,” Del Poeta explained. Ojima’s work “makes these impressive results possible.”
Individuals who have had multiple Covid-19 infections appear prone to contracting Long Covid, which may include symptoms such as fatigue, respiratory distress and mental fog.
Study published in The Lancet provides a basis for investigating Long Covid in the post-pandemic era
Anew study that identified 475 patients with post-acute sequelae of Covid-19 (PASC), also known as Long Covid, revealed that nearly 85 percent (403) of these patients had multiple Covid-19 infections over the course of a four-year period (March 2020 to February 2024). Additionally, vaccination independently reduced the risk of Long Covid in patients who had received the vaccination prior to contracting the infection.
Conducted by a team of researchers at the Renaissance School of Medicine (RSOM) at Stony Brook University, in conjunction with the Stony Brook World Trade Center (WTC) Health and Wellness Program, the study may serve as a foundational assessment of Long Covid patients in the post-pandemic era. To date there are few studies with such a patient sample size that investigates what puts patients at risk for Long Covid and what causes this chronic condition.
“While it is possible that the causes of Long Covid could be many and variable depending on the patient population studied, with this cohort the evidence is clear that by having Covid numerous times, patients became more at-risk for developing Long Covid,” says lead author Sean Clouston, PhD, Professor, Department of Family, Population and Preventive Medicine in the RSOM, and Program in Public Health.
He adds that after adjusting for relevant demographic, lifestyle, and clinical variables, the findings reveal a statistically significant association between experiencing multiple Covid-19 infections and the risk of experiencing PASC (aka Long Covid).
The patients were identified from a group of more than 2,500 first responders who previously had Covid and are prospectively monitored for infection complications by the Stony Brook WTC Health and Wellness Program. The 475 identified with Long Covid by the Program’s physicians, led by Benjamin Luft, MD, Director of the Program, continually experienced Long Covid symptoms ranging from fatigue, mental fog, other neurological conditions, as well as multiple respiratory problems and gastrointestinal symptoms.
Given that some of the first responder patients have had symptoms over the years related to their environmental exposures, such as respiratory illnesses, Long Covid symptoms were identified and charted separately and after each subsequent Covid infection.
Since there is no diagnostic test for Long Covid, the researchers followed the World Health Organization’s guidelines as to identifying Long Covid. They identified participants with Long Covid as having experienced the continuation or development of at least one new symptom that emerged within three months after their initial Covid-19 infection and persisted for at least two months without other concurrent medical explanation. In contrast, those without such experiences after having Covid were placed in the non-Long Covid group.
“There are some possible pathogenic mechanisms that cause Long Covid, but the entire spectrum of its risk factors remains unknown,” explains Dr. Luft, a co-author, the Edmund D. Pellegrino Professor of Medicine in the RSOM, and an infectious diseases specialist. “This is why our study and future ones are so important. Identifying specific risk factors such as re-infection or lack of vaccination can assist in better understanding and managing the condition.”
The authors point out that the safest way to avoid contracting Long covid is to prevent the infection in the first place. However, they emphasize that the role of vaccination in the risk of developing Long Covid cannot be underestimated. They wrote, “Among those who later developed PASC, we found that the risk of PASC was much higher among individuals who were unvaccinated at the time of their first (Covid-19) infection.”
Dr. Luft adds that the vaccine is imperfect, and of those who develop Covid – even though vaccinated – are at risk and should take measures to mitigate the severity of infection.
This research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Aging (NIA) and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) – grants (NIH/NIA R01 AG049953), and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – grants (CDC/NIOSH U01 OH011864) and (CDC/NIOSH U01 OH012275).
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