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

By Daniel Dunaief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Qingzhi Zhu

Qingzhi Zhu, PhD, Associate Professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) at Stony Brook University, has received a SUNY Technology Accelerator Fund (TAF) award for his research to develop a low-cost, high-accuracy nitrogen detecting system for wastewater systems that has the potential to greatly improve testing processes and quality of water.

The TAF award provides seed funding for SUNY campuses to support potentially groundbreaking research on technologies. TAF helps faculty inventors and scientists turn their research into market-ready technologies by developing feasibility studies, prototyping and testing, which demonstrate that an idea or innovation has commercial potential.

A new technology to accurately and cost effectively detect nitrogen from wastewater, such as at a sewage plant as the one depicted, is being developed by Stony Brook researchers. Photo from Pixabay

Nitrogen pollution from septic tanks has been identified as the single largest contributor to deteriorating groundwater quality on Long Island. Advanced onsite wastewater treatment systems are needed to remove high levels of nitrogen. Regulators need nitrogen sensor for long term assurance of system performance, however, none of the existing nitrogen sensors are suitable for the advanced septic systems due to their frequent maintenance, high-cost and low accuracy.

With support by Stony Brook’s  Center for Clean Water Technology, Zhu and colleagues have created a low-maintenance sensor that has the potential to help manufacturers, homeowners, and governments know that the systems are performing as intended to protect water sources.

His method involves using very small qualities of inexpensive and innocuous chemical reagents to selectively separate and detect nitrate/nitrite and ammonium from wastewater in a compact sensor unit. The sensor is designed for long-term deployments in wastewater systems with low maintenance and remote data transmission. It can be used to measure nitrate/nitrite and ammonium/ammonia in wastewater, water treatment plants, advanced septic systems and in surface and groundwater with minor modifications. The sensor won the phase II of EPA’s Advanced Septic System Nitrogen Sensor Challenge, and it is now undergoing a 6-month ISO ETV 14034 field verification test sponsored by the US EPA. For more information about the technology and it’s stage of development, see this webpage.

“Our nitrogen sensor is the only sensor that is engineered to meet residential and municipal wastewater market requirements with high accuracy and low cost,” says Zhu. “The sensor can operate remotely and unattended in wastewater for several months and has great potential to be commercialized. The TAF fund will enable us to improve our current sensor prototype to a commercial readiness level, advancing our nitrogen sensor from laboratory to marketplace. We are extremely grateful for this support.”

Zhu receives a $50,000 grant with the TAF award. SUNY announced that he and three other SUNY professors are TAF awardees. For more information about the latest TAF awards, see this press release.

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Michael Frohman. Photo from SBU

By Daniel Dunaief

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

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

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

Michael Frohman at Glymur Falls in Iceland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo from SBU (copyright ©2013 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.) by Drew Fellman

Stony Brook University Distinguished Professor Patricia Wright wants you to visit Madagascar, virtually for now and in person in the future. Wright, an award-winning scientist who has spent over 30 years studying the lemurs of the island nation of Madagascar, has been encouraging virtual ecotourism to the island nation, which has been struggling economically amid a pandemic that halted tourism. Wright recently raised money to support continuing operations for Centre ValBio, a research station she built in a national park she helped create. She has also helped secure money to create the nation’s first canopy walkway. The award-winning professor discussed COVID-19, conservation and science in Madagascar.

TBR: How has Covid affected Madagascar?

Wright: I flew back in January just after New Year’s. The Madagascar I saw was a lot different from New York. They have been able to stave off Covid by not allowing people into the country. It’s an island nation. There’s only one international airport. It was in some ways, a little bit better than in New York because there was less Covid. However, economically, it was a disaster because much of the gross national product for Madagascar is tourism and there has been absolutely no tourists there, and no researchers, either.

TBR: Has the government provided some support to bridge the gap?

Wright: It’s a real problem, because it’s the third poorest country in the world. The government doesn’t have a lot of funding. We’ve been asking for funding from the United Nations, from the World Health Organization, from the international agencies and they’ve been able to give some stop gap funding.

TBR: Does this crisis become worse with each passing week?

Wright: This is what I worry about because families were telling me when I was in Madagascar that they don’t have money to buy the seeds to plant their crops. That means that it’s not only right now that they don’t have enough money, but if they don’t plant the rice, they’re not going to have enough rice to eat. It’s reaching a crisis. Stony Brook has really pitched in … We have virtual wildlife tours, where people can go to Madagascar and our tourist guides will take you to Ranomafana. That’s adding income. People are taking their families to Madagascar by just doing zoom.

TBR: Does it look like tourists will return to Madagascar soon?

Wright: We’re hoping that that will occur in June or July of this year. That’s what the hope is, that this will start. The international airport right now is closed. That’s a good thing because that means that there’s not as much Covid coming in … When enough people get vaccinated, you’ll probably have to show your vaccination card if you want to get on a plane.

TBR: Are people booking trips?

Wright: I have a ticket to go at the end of May. Air France and Ethiopian Airlines are booking tickets for May, June and July. There’s hope.

TBR: You mentioned the virtual tours that people are taking. How many people are taking those tours?

Wright: A couple of hundred a week, and particularly because we’re also tapping into schools. A teacher can bring a class to Madagascar … Families can have a family reunion going to Madagascar all together. It’s interactive.

TBR: Are people seeing the same things they would see if they were on site?

Wright: They have some really great footage. They can get much closer to lemurs than if you were underneath them looking up in real life.

TBR: Do you hope people will follow up with an in person visit?

Wright: I’m hoping we’ll get a big increase in tourism once everything opens up

TBR: What about conservation?

Wright: It’s really difficult because people think that because the nation is shut down from the outside world, they can just go in and hunt. They can go back into protected areas because there’s not tourists there. There’s a real threat. We’ve been able to continue our programs in education and health and reforestation.

TBR: Are you concerned that some of these species might become extinct?

Wright: I really worry about that. There are some species of lemurs where there’s only 50 left. … We have 113 species of lemurs. They are in every part of Madagascar. It’s hard to protect them all, each one is so individually different. Lemurs have been evolving for 55 million, 60 million years. They’re only found on Madagascar. If we lose them, we really lose a part of our primate history that is very precious.

TBR: Is there any thought about capturing them and protecting them in an enclosed space?

Wright: We have thought about that. There has to be a long term program, though. If you bring that many animals into captivity, you have to be sure you have the funding to keep them fed and well protected. We have been thinking about that. We’ve been doing some translocations, where we take them from a place where they’re really threatened and they’re eating crops and farmers don’t like that. We take them out of that very dangerous situation and bring them into a protected area.

TBR: Are there funders that recognize this is a time where they can do the most good?

Wright: We do have some foundations that are stepping up, but we need more to step up … I just received a grant from the Leakey Foundation, which is out of San Francisco, and they just gave us money to keep the lights on for another three months. We are working hard to keep going.

TBR: How can people help?

Wright: I’ve already mentioned virtual tours [which cost about] $30 a person. For donating, we have a donation button at Centre ValBio. This is through Stony Brook and Stony Brook is very good about making sure the money goes straight to Centre ValBio, which is the name of the research station.

TBR: What about the science side?

Wright: I just got off a Zoom call with the sifaka guys … With the Covid year, we have a beautiful database, now we’re able to mine that, which consists of the plants and animals that are in Ranomafana. We’re making a relational database [that has over] 35 years of data that we’ve been taking from all over the region. It’s one of the few long term databases that there are in the tropics and we’re very proud of that.

TBR: Will the public be able to access some of that data?

Wright: Yes, we’re not at that point yet, but that what’s what we’re hoping for … We just heard news that we’re going to have a canopy walkway, which we have been wanting to put into Ranomafana National Park for over a decade and the funding has just been found. And so, we are going over to Ranomafana in May/ June with a designer to put in that canopy, so we’ll be ready for the tourists when they come, so they can go up in the canopy and see the lemurs eye to eye, to be able to see those chameleons and birds and everything in a new way.

TBR: Who provided the funding?

Wright: It’s called Mission Green and the organization is raising money just for canopy walkways, there will be 20 canopy walkways. This will be the only one in Madagascar.

TBR: As far as the sifaka call you mentioned earlier, is there any news?

Wright: So far, we know that all the babies from last year have survived. We’re kind of at that stage right now. That’s very exciting. The babies will be born in May and June.

TBR: What did you notice that was different in the Covid world of Madagascar?

Wright: When we went out there without being there for six months, because the national parks were closed. When we did get to go out there, I couldn’t believe it. They came down and were [practically] saying, ‘Where have you been?”

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In a year and time in history when the value of medicine and the need for physicians has been magnified, the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University’s Match Day 2021 was its largest ever. Family, friends and other loved ones watched virtually as 149 fourth year students matched to medical residency program’s nationwide this afternoon.

Match Day is an annual nationwide event when more than 30,000 medical students learn of their residency assignments. It is administered by the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) and coordinated through the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

Click here for brief video clips showcasing signature moments when students found out where they will launch their medical careers.

Among the video clips is Jessica White, a mother of two and Long Island native, as she matched to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Plus, Joe Fiola, who matched to Stony Brook University Hospital for Anesthesiology and honored his deceased mother during the moment.

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Joel Hurowitz

By Daniel Dunaief

February 18th marked an end and a beginning.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott McLennan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sloths, rodents and primates – some of the largest and smallest mammals on Caribbean islands – are among those most vulnerable to extinction. Image from David Rini, Johns Hopkins University

A new study by a team of international scientists jointly led by Stony Brook University Professor Liliana M. Dávalos, PhD, and Professor Samuel Turvey of the Zoological Society of London, reveals that the largest and smallest mammals in the Caribbean have been the most vulnerable to extinction. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, help predict future extinction risk and inform the conservation strategies needed to prevent future biodiversity loss.

Most past studies find that larger mammals go extinct more often, so this study’s findings are unusual. Titled “Where the Wild Things Were,” the paper looked at past extinction patterns across the Caribbean mammal fauna in order to help scientists understand the factors that predispose species to extinction. With mammal extinction, what they found is that size does indeed matter in life.

The islands of the Caribbean have long been a source of fascination for scientists and conservationists. They were once home to a diverse array of land mammals including sloths, primates, unusual insectivores, and giant rodents, but the arrival of different waves of human colonists from around 6000 years ago onwards instigated the largest series of human-caused mammal extinctions since the end of the last Ice Age.

Only 11 native Caribbean rodents and two insectivores still survive today – including the two solenodons, large shrew-like mammals that have the unique ability to inject venom into their prey using modified grooved teeth. Both solenodon species are the only representatives of an ancient mammalian lineage that diverged from the ancestors of all other living mammals during the time of the dinosaurs, approximately 76 million years ago.

Dávalos, a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution in the College of Arts and Sciences, designed and completed the statistical analyses that led to the findings. By carrying out the study at the level of mammal populations instead of species, the team’s methods were able to account for the effect of varying environmental conditions across different islands on species’ chances of survival.

Conducting a huge-scale analysis that included records of extinction patterns for 219 land mammal populations across 118 Caribbean islands, the study went beyond previous research into Caribbean mammal extinctions, which has largely focused on reconstructing last-occurrence dates for extinct species and matching them with specific historical events. This study instead sought to identify wider ecological patterns – such as the relationship between body mass and extinction risk – that influence a mammal’s chance of survival in response to human activities.

They found that medium-sized Caribbean mammals – like the solenodons – have been less sensitive to extinction compared to both their smaller and larger counterparts.

According to Dávalos and co-authors, this overall discovery is likely to reflect the fact that larger species were more vulnerable to past human hunting, whereas smaller species were more vulnerable to predation or competition by introduced species such as mongooses and rats.

“To answer questions such as ‘what traits predispose species to survival?’ Or ‘what island features are associated with extinction?,’ we studied each population on an island as a natural experiment,” says Dávalos. “With enough of them, patterns that have often been discussed but couldn’t quantify start to emerge. Without the large database of many natural experiments in the Caribbean and powerful computing approaches, there is no way to answer these questions.

“The analyses also showed that Caribbean mammals of all sizes were less likely to survive on the earliest-colonized islands by humans and more likely to survive on tiny, low-elevation offshore islands, meaning that their future survival could be at risk from climate change and rising sea levels unless measures are put in place to protect these vital natural refuges.”

“Preventing the extinction of highly endangered species requires an awareness of not only the immediate risks to their survival, but also the history of human-caused biodiversity loss – and the unique insights that the past can provide about species’ vulnerability or resilience under differing conditions,” adds Professor Samuel Turvey of ZSL’s Institute of Zoology.

“The Caribbean islands are home to unique mammalian biodiversity, which has tragically been almost completely wiped out by past human activities. Our study clearly highlights the importance of learning from the past to make the future better – we must use information from the historical, archaeological and recent fossil records to inform current-day conservation, or else we risk losing these remarkable species forever.”

Research for this study was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF). For Professor Dávalos, grant numbers DEB 1442142 and 1838273, DGE 1633299. Additional funding by the NSF (OAC 1531492) enabled analyses by the SeaWulf computing system at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University.

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Screenshot from HACK@CEWIT

By Harry To

The Center of Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology at Stony Brook University hosted its 5th annual Hack@CEWIT “hackathon” featuring student-made inventions, Feb. 26-28.

Usually this showcase takes place in person, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic this year’s event was hosted online. In place of the usual format, the over-200 competitors communicated through Zoom or Discord.

Satya Sharma, executive director of CEWIT, emphasized the abnormal circumstances weren’t a problem.

“This year’s 5th annual Hack@CEWIT had over 200 registered undergrad and graduate hackers from across the U.S.,” he said. “And though it was held virtually due to the pandemic, it did not diminish the quality of projects submitted by these bright and motivated students. It’s opportunities like this hackathon that builds confidence in their creativity and grows their entrepreneurial spirit.”

According to Sharma, this year’s theme, Innovating Through the Pandemic, reminds people that though there are sudden and unknown challenges, they can seize the opportunities those challenges create and harvest ideas never before imagined.

Students Mohammad Elbadry, 23 (left) and Aaron Gregory, 23 (right). Photo from event

A standout project was R-AGI: Radiology Artificial General Intelligence, created by Stony Brook University graduate students Mohammed Elbadry, Joshua Leeman and Aaron Gregory.

“According to a survey, radiologists only have about 3-4 seconds to look over an X-ray and determine if there are any anomalies,” said Elbadry, a Ph.D. student with over 20-plus hackathons under his belt. “They don’t have much time, so if they had an AI that could help them that would be very useful.”

The limited time for scanning X-rays may result in a higher frequency of errors or discrepancies, with some studies citing an average 3% to 5% error rate, he said. That’s about 40 million radiologist errors every year, mistakes that could potentially cost hundreds of lives.

With the problem in mind, the team of three went to work to create AI that would offer a solution — a program that automatically scans X-rays and detects anomalies. This is something that could save not only time, but human lives.

By using an existing dataset of labelled X-rays, the team trained its AI to detect the presence of pneumonia as well as its specific manifestation. The AI then labels and informs the user of any further anomalies.

The SBU team ended up with an impressive showing, including Top-Tier Graduate Best in Show and Best Healthcare Innovation.

Another award winning project was DarkWebSherlock, created by Andrew Zeoli, Colin Hamill, Donald Finlayson and Ian Costa from Johnson & Wales University,  Providence, R.I.

The sale of personal information on the dark web, a hidden part of the internet accessible through the TOR Browser, is a problem that has persisted for years, and DarkWebSherlock aims to create a solution.

The program allows users to scan through online marketplaces on the dark web to see if their data is up for sale anywhere.

This enables victims to be proactive by updating their passwords or changing their credit card numbers to better secure their information.

Costa said the program will be an invaluable asset. “Searching for usernames on the dark web is something our team does on a daily basis,” he said. “Our project will save valuable time for investigators and with some extra work will become a staple tool for dark web investigations.”

DarkWebSherlock won Top-Tier: Undergrad Best in Show.

Another award-winning project, Vaccine-Finder, aims to help speed up COVID-19 vaccine distribution for 65-year-old-plus vaccine seekers.

The interface allows the elderly, also people with disabilities, to plug in their zip codes and view the appointment availability of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Joshua Muckey started this project only recently, and it won Best Pandemic Innovation.

In all, the event hosted 15 projects, many of which showcased student ingenuity in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This year is a reminder of why innovation is key to our success and our survival as a region, as a state and as a society,” said Marc Alessi, a judge for the event, CEO of SynchroPET and executive director of Tesla Science Center. “This weekend’s hackathon at Stony Brook University’s CEWIT center is an example of bringing together emerging innovators from very diverse backgrounds for the purpose of celebrating and practicing innovation in its most raw form. This is essential to foster an environment of innovation.”

All of the participants’ projects can be found online here.

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Paul Goldbart. Photo from SBU

Paul Goldbart, PhD, has been appointed the new Executive Vice President and Provost at Stony Brook University, effective March 22. The announcement was made by SBU President Maurie McInnis. Goldbart is currently Dean of the College of Natural Sciences, Robert E. Boyer Chair and Mary Ann Rankin Leadership Chair at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin).

Paul Goldbart

As the chief academic officer at Stony Brook, Goldbart will be responsible for oversight of the academic mission of the university, providing direct supervision for all academic units, support services and operations, including enrollment management and student success, and coordinating all academic programs. In addition, the deans and directors of the colleges, schools, libraries, centers and institutes, including those in the Health Sciences Center related to non-clinical matters, will report to the Provost.

“Dr. Goldbart is widely respected as a renowned scientist, educator and academic leader whose excellent experience in leading a large and complex college will help to build upon our performance and reputation as a leading public research university,” said President McInnis. 

“I’m a passionate advocate for public research universities such as Stony Brook University, which are crucibles of human creativity, guardians of human capability and places where students can discover who they are and how they can contribute to the world,” said Goldbart. “Stony Brook is a superb example, powered by its remarkable staff, students and faculty; outstanding partner organizations in the region; and passionate, dedicated alumni and friends. I feel thrilled and fortunate to be joining the community that I have long admired — and I am grateful to President McInnis and the search committee for the opportunity.”

Goldbart succeeds Fotis Sotiropoulos, PhD, who has served as Interim Provost since September 2020. Sotiropoulos will continue his role as Dean of the College Engineering and Applied Sciences (f) and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering.

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