Medications like the insulin she has injected every day since she was 16.

Now, as a biochemistry and neuroscience major at Binghamton University, she’s taking the first steps: helping to understand how nanoparticles can improve rechargeable batteries.

There’s no disconnect here: The skills and knowledge she’ll acquire working on Assistant Professor Gretchen Mahler’s project can be taken in many directions.

The connection, MacAneney said, is this: Industry leaders are interested in using nanoparticles of vanadium oxide as a cathode in rechargeable lithium ion batteries. “But before they can use nanoparticles in batteries, they need to understand the health effects,” she said, both on production workers making the products and the everyday user.

Vanadium in various forms can help lithium batteries store more energy, discharge more power and recharge faster — perfect for any number of smart energy projects from hybrid-electric or all-electric vehicles to household energy storage.

That is, if it doesn’t harm people. Acute vanadium oxide exposure in its larger form has been linked to increased bronchial infections, pneumonia, inflamed tissues and irritated eyes, throat, lungs and nasal tissue — even nervous disorders and paralysis. The health effects of vanadium oxide nanoparticles have never been studied.

“Our hypothesis is that when these nanoparticles come in contact with epithelial cells, it’ll cause inflammation and absorption,” MacAneney said.

The data will help Mahler and a colleague at the State University of New York at Potsdam to prepare a proposal for grant funding. And it’s a good project to help put a new researcher through her paces, using newly acquired skills from eight weeks of lab training.

“I put them through a pretty rigorous training program,” Mahler said. It weeds out people unsuited to a life of research and keeps the new researcher and her colleagues safe. “She is just starting to dive into the nanoparticle work.”

But understanding how a body can absorb nanoparticles relates directly to McAneney’s interest in medication. Insulin today cannot easily survive gastric acids, making oral insulin impractical.

“But can you encapsulate it in something to protect it?” she asked. “It wouldn’t degrade in the stomach.”

Interesting question, and one McAneney plans to keep asking on her way to a doctorate and perhaps a medical degree, too.

These are just some of the lessons that senior William Marsiglia learned from conducting research at Binghamton University. Those lessons helped the biochemistry and music double major receive a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for the 2011-12 and 2012-13 academic years.

“The benefits of performing research while taking classes are essential to a student’s academic development,” Marsiglia said. “We are lucky here at Binghamton University to have so many faculty members who are doing high-level research with students who gain experience.

“Although our university is already achieving outstanding research, it’s exciting to know that it’s only going to get better.”

Marsiglia, who has worked with chemistry professor Christof Grewer on the study of transport proteins in the brain and also won the Music Department’s Concerto Competition, delivered the student address at the Research Days celebration April 19.

Research Days, a series of events showcasing University research, scholarship and creative activity, took place April 17-19. The schedule included faculty panels, tours of research facilities and a keynote speech by NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam. The Friday celebration in Old Union Hall recognized Marsiglia and more than 30 other student researchers and their faculty mentors.

“We bring together the essential elements of a great university,” Provost Donald Nieman said. “We bring together bright, curious, hard-working students with faculty who are passionate about teaching and mentoring, and are engaged in cutting-edge research that is recognized by their peers and around the world.”

Student work takes center stage

More than 90 undergraduate and graduate students presented their work in two student poster sessions held April 19.

Phillip Emeritz, a senior majoring in history, English and classical civilization, displayed a project that examined Romanization in Ancient France and how currency was introduced to the Celtic society. “I focused on the social and cultural impacts, because the coins were basically used as propaganda with the images and inscriptions on them to implant Roman values into the minds of natives in France,” said Emeritz, whose project earned him one of the two initial Summer Scholar awards in 2012.

Emeritz’s project, titled “Changing Money, Changing Minds,” documents how the introduction of currency to France affected culture and class distinctions. The topic stems from Emeritz’s interest in classical studies.

“I am very passionate about classic studies, and Roman history has always been my favorite,” said Emeritz, whose faculty mentor is Andrew Scholtz, associate professor and chair of classical and Near Eastern studies. “And I am very interested in Celtic societies because, although they’ve been classified as primitive in the minds of Romans, their societies are a lot more complex than they’re given credit for.”

While Emeritz studied societal issues in a historical context, other students examined how technology can impact the future.

Zachary Birnbaum and Patricia Moat, both first-year doctoral students, conducted a project on computer security. Their faculty mentor is Victor Skormin, distinguished service professor in electrical and computer engineering. “You keep hearing in the news that there are various websites getting hacked and all these problems with new computer viruses,” Birnbaum said. “We’re trying to find new ways of detecting this type of attack.”

Titled “Intrusion Detection Systems: Object Access Graphs,” the project focused on tracking computer viruses. “What we do is take a picture of what your computer is doing, and then we compare a picture of your computer behaving normally to one of an infected computer. Then, we just look at the differences,” Birnbaum said. “From that, we can see if your computer has an infection, what type of infection, and from there you know you’re under attack and you can take action.”

Other student-presenters, including Jessica Huey, took a medical approach to their projects. “I’m a part of a larger lab that’s doing research in Lyme disease,” she said. “So what I did specifically was (study) Lyme disease in canines and other tick-borne diseases.”

Huey, a senior majoring in biology and anthropology, worked with Ralph Garruto, research professor of anthropology, on her project, “Prevalence of Tick-Borne Infection in a Canine Population Sample.”

While Huey hopes that her research raises awareness about Lyme disease, some students aimed to raise awareness of immigrant assimilation. Jillian Shotwell, Tara Perkins and Fédia Louis were among about a dozen students who got involved with the Binghamton community. They went to the American Civic Association in Binghamton, where they interviewed refugee students in ESL classes as well as their teachers to get their opinions on learning and teaching English.

“We just wanted to get their perceptions. For the teachers, why they began teaching ESL and what the biggest challenges were. So that’s what this poster is about,” said Shotwell, a double major in environmental health and geography. “(A second poster) is about the students’ perspective and how they think that the classes could be improved. What did they like most about learning English? What were the challenges in learning English?”

Shotwell said that to conduct the quantitative study, she and her fellow group members recorded interviews with the students and the teachers. The initiative to do this project came from an Africana Studies course, Refugees and Immigrants Health, taught by Titilayo Okoror.

“I think just knowing how these experiences affect the students and the teachers alike is beneficial in approaching immigrants, because not everybody can speak English,” said Perkins, a sophomore majoring in bioengineering. “Many of them were actually PhD students and business owners in their own countries. Then they came here and they can’t speak English, so they’re kind of at a disadvantage.”

Productive partnerships

Sponsored by the Undergraduate Research Center, the Division of Research, the McNair Scholars Program and Academic Affairs, Research Days highlighted student and faculty successes, Vice President for Research Bahgat Sammakia said. Research success is necessary for Binghamton University to become the premier public university of the 21st century, he noted. “The great thing about research today is that it is starting to blur between departments, between schools, and even between graduate and undergraduate students,” he said. “It is wonderful to see. It is exciting.”

Nieman stressed the importance of students engaged in research with faculty mentors. “This creates a rich opportunity for our students to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom to original research,” he said. “By doing so, they are able to join in the process of creating new knowledge – something that is at the heart of what we stand for and do every day as a university.”

Rosenberg, a professor of English at Binghamton University, says she found inspiration for the book in a real-life drama she heard about more than 30 years ago. A Pittsburgh man sued his cousin for a bone marrow transplant after the would-be donor changed his mind about the procedure. “It was just an instant novel in my head,” Rosenberg recalls. “What would it be like to be the surviving cousin? What would that do to a family?”

Rosenberg wrote to the justice who handled the case. They exchanged letters — this was before the days of e-mail, she notes — and he shared his views on the lawsuit. She even drove to Pittsburgh to discuss the case with him. “He knew that he could not force this person to do good,” Rosenberg says. “The powerful are sometimes powerless. And the seemingly powerless are sometimes powerful.”

Life and other projects got in the way, and Rosenberg shelved plans to write the book. But after her first novel, Home Repair, was published in 2009, Rosenberg’s thoughts returned to the project. “I was at a book club meeting in Binghamton for Home Repair when a book club member suggested to me, ‘What if it were cord blood?’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting.’”

That was just one of the crucial changes Rosenberg made for the novel. In the Pittsburgh case, two male cousins went to court. Her story would have one male cousin and one female cousin. And she decided it would take place in the present day on Long Island, where she spent the first 18 years of her life. “It felt remarkable to me to be able to go home in my fiction,” she says. “This is my hymn to Long Island.”

As Rosenberg describes the importance of place to her story, she refers to Eudora Welty’s views on the subject. It’s one of at least half a dozen references she makes to well-known authors in an hour-long discussion of her writing, moving effortlessly from Welty to J.K. Rowling and back to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The setting, Rosenberg explains, allows her to explore the intense family connections of suburbia, differences in wealth and attitude and even the challenges of driving on Long Island. Indeed, traffic serves as a unifying metaphor in The Laws of Gravity. “There’s always something in your daily life that is an obstacle,” she says. “In Binghamton, it’s the weather. On Long Island, it’s traffic. You have to plan around the traffic.”

Rosenberg finds remarkable texture and vitality on Long Island, and she dismisses the idea that the suburbs are nothing more than a bland string of strip malls, diners and gas stations. Her novel fairly bursts with lively secondary characters: an eccentric aunt, a romantic rabbi and a scheming judge, to name just a few.

“The suburbs get short shrift,” she says. “I grew up in suburbia. It’s full of passion and it’s full of intrigue and suffering and beauty. It’s not as easy as it looks. People are on the verge of wealth or they’re on the verge of bankruptcy. They’re rushing to get to the train on time. There’s a certain kind of energy. Maybe it’s a little dog-eat-dog, but there’s also something that emerges from that energy. There are those surprising moments where the loyalties align in ways that defy gravity. Moments of beauty, of clarity, even of redemption, come out of feeling pressed all the time.”

The presentations, which will take place at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Friday, April 19, are just one part of the three-day event scheduled for April 17-19. Research Days was first held last year, shortly after the opening of the Undergraduate Research Center.

“This year, we started earlier, went out with better information and we encouraged people to become involved,” Undergraduate Research Center Director Janice McDonald said. “This is an event for the entire community.”

This year’s Research Days will feature more events in more places, along with more student poster submissions from a greater variety of disciplines, McDonald said.

Events include tours of research facilities such as the Engineering and Science Building and the Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory; student and faculty research panels; and tours for local eighth-graders. A complete list of events may be found at http://go.binghamton.edu/researchdays.

Another new feature is a keynote speaker: Shankar Vedantam, a science correspondent for National Public Radio. Vedantam, who spent 10 years at The Washington Post before joining NPR in 2011, is the author of “The Hidden Brain: How our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives.” He will speak at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 17, in the Mandela Room.

Vedantam’s talk, which is also being promoted by WSKG, brings more visibility to Research Days and could appeal to Greater Binghamton residents, said Donald Loewen, vice provost for undergraduate education.

“What can we do to present the impact of research on the community and the world more broadly?” he said. “This (talk) gives us an entry to the community and presents them with a chance to come in and see Binghamton University as a research institution.”

The student poster sessions will be linked by a Campus Research Celebration at 1 p.m. Friday, April 19, in Old Union Hall. President Harvey Stenger and other University leaders will discuss the importance of research, while award-winning student researchers will be recognized. Those being honored include two Goldwater Scholarship recipients and the 12 recipients of the 2013 Summer Scholar and Artists Program Fellowship. Faculty mentors will also be saluted.

Not all students get the chance to present research at national conferences, so the poster sessions will provide a great opportunity for many, McDonald said.

“The students who are presenting research love to talk about it and have people engage them,” she said. “They like to be questioned or challenged and go into more detail about their work. They are looking forward to the sessions.”

The sessions are also valuable for students who are considering their own research projects, McDonald added.

“We know undergraduates are very, very interested in doing research,” she said. “They want to see what other students are doing and what they are capable of doing. It’s an educational process for those who aren’t doing research yet. They can say: ‘This is what I can do and get involved in.’”

Faculty can benefit from attending the sessions, too, Loewen said.

“It’s amazing to find out what students from different disciplines are doing on campus,” said Loewen, who is urging faculty members to discuss their own research with students in classes over the three days. “I hope this will inspire faculty to think about ways that they can collaborate with students in their own discipline.”

Loewen and McDonald praised the support that Research Days has received from the University community. They singled out Rachel Coker, director of research advancement, for organizing many of the events, and Shanise Kent, associate director of the McNair Scholars Program, for leading the poster sessions.

“We’ve gotten tremendous cooperation from everybody in terms of participation,” Loewen said. “Everybody has been extraordinarily cooperative.”

Loewen and McDonald agree that Research Days is one important step in advancing undergraduate research on campus. “People are talking,” McDonald said. “More people are becoming aware of (research). It’s getting into people’s awareness. It’s an ongoing process that will take time.”

“One of our fundamental objectives with Research Days is to help all of our undergraduates — even those in big, 100-level classes — understand: ‘You are part of a research university. What does that mean?’” Loewen said. “If they stop in the Mandela Room (on Friday), they are going to see some amazing projects. They will see the kinds of research their peers are conducting. That’s a good educational experience for someone to have.”

Binghamton junior Yudi Pardo works on one of the first hurdles: taking the photosynthetic engine out of a plant cell and putting it somewhere it can be used. It’s a problem he has been examining for nearly five years — since before he received his high school diploma.

Now, as a bioengineering major working in Assistant Professor Gretchen Mahler’s laboratory, he’s taking advantage of his opportunities.

He’s working with cyanobacteria ― essentially a blue-green algae — seeking a way to harvest its photosynthetic thylakoids. “How do I extract the complexes in a way where they won’t degrade over time?” he asks.

The solution, eventually, is to graft the thylakoids, which reside in the cell’s inner membrane, onto the cell’s outer membrane. “So when the outer membrane flakes off, you have a working photo system,” he says. “There’s a lot of genetic manipulation.”

Mahler sometimes has difficulty mentoring him, because bio-energy isn’t her research focus. “A lot of students don’t realize they’re into research so early,” Mahler says, much less develop such a specific interest. “He came to me with the project.”

“It’s an interesting problem,” she says, “That’s a good area of research. Nobody has done it.”

It’s an area of research with useful implications. Nathan Nelson of the University of Tel Aviv has developed an ultra-small working solar cell based on a pea plant; it generates 10 volts and with 20 percent efficiency is moderately more efficient than current silicon-based cells.

Nelson and Pardo understand some parts of a plant’s photosynthetic engine are 95 percent to nearly 100 percent efficient. If those parts can be harnessed properly, it could lead to great advances in bio-solar cell efficiency — enough to make them cost effective.

“If we can bring that to the entire device, that would make solar technology more viable for people,” Pardo says. “That really high efficiency on a small scale is what drew me in.”

Biological cells would be faster to construct and largely carbon neutral, although questions remain about how durable biological cells would be, and how they would distribute their energy.

But Pardo, who’s just 20 years old, has time to answer them. “I don’t know specifically where I want to go with this,” he says, citing interests in bio-medicine and medical instrumentation. “But alternative energy has always been at the top of my list.”

Isaac Patka, a sophomore studying electrical engineering, began researching the efficiency of solar cells last summer at Columbia University’s Lab for Unconventional Electronics (CLUE). At CLUE, Patka also developed kits for an upper-level class to use in a lab studying displays such as the electroluminescent display, used in backlights of digital watches, and LED screens used in cell phones.

“My role in that was to look at the lab kits that they currently have and to improve them,” the Albany native says. “Some of their circuit boards weren’t working so I designed a new circuit.”

Patka’s work at CLUE included studying organic LED displays. Organic electronics use small organic molecules that behave like a semiconductor, the electricity-conducting material that Patka describes as the “basis for how all electronics work.”

“The organic materials are easier to process, easier to work with in a lab, and they’re a lot cheaper,” Patka says. “The No. 1 focus that I want to get more into is improving the efficiency of organic solar cells, and there are a lot of different ways that you can do that.”

At Binghamton, Patka has begun that focus in a research group under the direction of Peter Borgesen, a professor in the systems science and industrial engineering department. Last semester, Patka learned how to perform stress tests to evaluate the durability of the layers of organic solar cells.

“The overall goal is to produce solar cells with a good balance between cost, efficiency and long-term reliability,” Borgesen says. “I work with both juniors and seniors, but Isaac is the first to approach me already as a sophomore, and I am impressed.”

Patka plans to continue researching organic solar cells with Borgesen’s group, and he would also like to work with Binghamton’s Center for Autonomous Solar Power (CASP) to investigate the properties of solar cells. “What I would like to do is work with fabricating solar cells for the CASP and do some characterization or improve the fabrication process,” he says.

Improving solar cells can help military operations, researchers far from a grid power source and people in regions such as central Africa that lack adequate sources of energy. “I think it’s important because as the technology is improved and as it will get cheaper and cheaper, it will be able to provide people away from the grid a source of power,” Patka says.

Patka says a week-long program at the U.S. Naval Academy inspired him to become an engineer. “We got to tour some of their research labs,” he says, “and that just got me interested in technical things, and development of research and building practical things.”

Members of the Interdisciplinary Research Group for the Study of Sexuality and Gender conducted a study of people’s reactions to the parenting behaviors of gay and straight parents. Their results showed a clear pattern of negative reactions from study participants toward a gay couple engaging in the same negative parenting behaviors as a straight couple.

Sean Massey and Ann Merriwether of Binghamton University and Justin Garcia of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University published the results of their study earlier this month in the Journal of GLBT Family Studies.

“We noted that when parents displayed favorable parenting behaviors like comforting an upset child, gay and straight parents were judged in a similar, positive manner,” said Massey, a research associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies.  “However, if parents got frustrated — raised their voice or slapped their child on the hand — the gay parents were judged more negatively than the straight parents.”

This marked difference in the study groups’ reactions is significant, he said. While no parent is perfect, the researchers believe that holding gay parents to a different standard adds additional stress to the already stressful job of parenthood. It can also negatively affect their chances of adopting or becoming foster parents.

“We feel that it is very important for social workers and adoption counselors to be made aware of the effects of modern anti-gay prejudices and they need to educate themselves and develop policies that help protect against these potential biases,” Massey said.

There is a shortage of people stepping up to take in hundreds of thousands of children who are waiting for foster families or adoptions. The gay community could be a resource for many of these children, but this study indicates that if judged more harshly than their straight counterparts, gay parents are at a disadvantage.

“Raising awareness of these attitudes is a critical step in being able to utilize a potentially valuable pool of prospective adoptive and foster parents,” Massey said, “but it is also vital to improving the day-to-day lives of our families and our children.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently issued a policy statement supporting same-sex marriage and reiterating its support for the adoption of children by gay families. The researchers say that with strong support for gay marriage coming from the medical and psychological professional organizations, and with increasing support among the general public (58 percent of whom now support same-sex marriage), the next frontier for gay rights may be same-sex parenting.

Overt and hostile prejudice may indeed be diminishing, but Massey said biases continues to affect the lives of lesbians, gay men and their families. “Prejudicial judgments, however subtle, that serve to limit access of these families to potential support and resources ultimately harm today’s youths,” he said.

Ronald Miller, a junior majoring in bioengineering, has interned for two summers with Daniel Tso at SUNY Upstate Medical Center, working with specialized cameras to measure activity level in the human retina, a light-sensitive layer of tissue that lines the inner surface of the eye. “Over the summer I worked in a vision lab in Upstate Medical Center, and we’d image the retinas of different students and volunteers, and myself, too,” Miller says. “Right now we’re trying to quantify the signal and measure what it looks like consistently in a healthy person.”

Being able to measure signals in a healthy person, Miller says, could allow for easier and earlier detection of retinal abnormalities.

“We tried to quantify that signal in healthy individuals so we can see what indicates certain retinal diseases like retinitis pigmentosa, glaucoma and macular degeneration,” he says. “A lot of times you don’t know you have one of these conditions until you have really big vision deficits, and by then it’s really difficult to correct or treat.”

Miller uses a laser to stimulate the retina, shining the light for less than a second and then recording activity level for the following five seconds. The lasers allow Miller to use differently shaped stimuli and see the resulting effects on infrared images of the retina.

Miller also works with bioengineer Jacques Beaumont, a visiting professor at Upstate Medical University who was until recently a Binghamton faculty member. They plan to re-create and eventually improve on a model of the visual cortex initially developed at New York University.

“I want to try to improve upon the model that they created, make it more biologically accurate,” Miller explains. “Eventually, if the model is totally accurate, you could test the effects of various drugs.”

Beaumont and Miller plan to continue working together this summer, when Miller will have a chance to put his training to use on a software development project. “I expect a significant contribution when he will be able to run simulations in parallel with his experiments,” Beaumont says.

Beaumont says Miller is developing an expertise on vision. “I hope he will continue in his future career applying modeling and experiments to develop an understanding of the molecular mechanisms of various forms of blindness,” Beaumont says.

Miller, a Syracuse native, is also an event coordinator for the Student Volunteer Center on campus. “It’s fun, I get to meet people and it’s cool to see what’s around the community because a lot of people need help with events and students don’t know about it,” Miller says.

He plans to pursue a doctorate or medical degree. His grandfather, who was a pulmonary specialist, inspired him to enter the medical field.

“I want to pursue a career in medicine because I want to be able to improve people’s lives,” Miller says, “possibly by inventing a biomedical device or devising some form of early detection or treatment plan.”

It’s the downside of the medium — films are made for profit. “If Hollywood is going to invest X millions of dollars, it has to appeal to everybody, which means it doesn’t appeal to anybody,” said Wall, an assistant professor of cinema and art history at Binghamton University.

That sounds like what his latest research interest — Theodor Adorno — might say. Adorno, about whom Wall is writing a book, was a composer and neo-Marxist social thinker of the Franklin School who turned his attention to popular media.

“The sheer idiocy of a mass product created especially for you assumes the character of a ghastly necessity,” Adorno wrote. “Individual needs have been so ruthlessly eliminated from the product that they have to be involved like magic formulae to prevent the customer from becoming aware of the murderous ritual of which he is the victim.”

Wall argues with that view in Theodor Adorno and Film Theory: The Fingerprint of Spirit. He looks at four films, The Maltese Falcon, Kiss Me Deadly, Repo Man and The Big Lebowski, to suggest that film, while an industrial product, can be art in its own right.

Heavy stuff for a guy who’s as interested in Cary Grant rom-coms as he is in films of the Weimar Republic, which evolved into the film noir that still fascinates him (Kiss Me Deadly is his favorite film, at least today), and influenced modern filmmakers such as Quentin Tarentino and Steven Spielberg.

Wonder about that? Watch 1922’s Nosferatu, Wall said. See how it uses light and shadow to tell the story. See how it plays with the idea of the living and the dead. See how it comments on Jews and anti-Semitism in Germany, given the vampire turns into a pile of gold and physically resembles Germany’s ethnic Jews.

Watch The Maltese Falcon or Kiss Me Deadly. Same techniques. You’ll find them in Raiders of the Lost Ark and throughout the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

What were the filmmakers trying to say? And in what social and political context were they saying it? That’s as much fun as the roller coaster modern film can be.

Now consider the need for profit and the context. A typical multiplex film costs $100 million to make and distribute. Social commentary is ditched in favor of commercial appeal, which is why Wall scrambles for a pen when told of The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, a sub-$100,000 film that used its Internet fan base to fund both production and distribution, skipping the traditional route.

That’s what Wall took with him when he watched one recent blockbuster: The Dark Knight Rises. Director Christopher Nolan made the crew watch The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 film commissioned by the Algierian government after its revolt from France. It portrays both sides of the conflict as sympathetic characters in an exercise, Wall said, of “political schizophrenia.”

Maybe it wasn’t so bad, after all.

That’s according to a new Binghamton University study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Binghamton researcher Hiroki Sayama and four students at nearby Maine-Endwell High School in upstate New York, conducted a survey of the school’s junior class. The students were asked about their friendships, and the researchers constructed a series of social networks focusing on acquaintances, friends and best friends.

The student researchers obtained the GPAs of every student in the 160-member class and developed a hypothesis: Students whose friends had better grades than they did had a better chance of improving their academic performance than students whose friends weren’t doing as well in school.

In the second year of the study, the students ― then seniors — demonstrated that this was indeed the case. “If your friends had a higher GPA than yours,” Sayama said, “you have a better chance of improving your GPA — and vice versa.”

Sayama worked with the students as well as an administrator from the school district. The teenagers proposed the study idea and pursued it even when Sayama explained the challenges inherent in working with human subjects.

“They were so persistent,” he said. “This is their research. I helped with statistical analysis, but they chose the topic and conducted the surveys.” The students, Deanna Blansky, Christina Kavanaugh, Cara Boothroyd and Brianna Benson, are now in college and appear as lead authors on the peer-reviewed research publication, which was conducted with support from the National Science Foundation.

Sayama, a professor and a father, said the study’s findings surprised him. His colleague in the school district, however, seemed to take the results as confirmation of something she had long suspected. The student researchers, who noted that friends had a stronger influence on academic performance than acquaintances or best friends, suggest that the study offers a potential method of predicting student performance.

The scientific community has recently uncovered other examples of so-called “social contagion,” most recently studies showing that your friends’ weight as well as happiness may affect your own.

“Many things are communicated over social ties,” said Sayama, director of Binghamton’s Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems Research Group. “This is one of the first discoveries that shows social contagion might also be taking place in academic performance.”

There, she found her future.

Materials from Africa, artisans from China and designs from Spain, all bolstered by trade with the Americas: The fortified church was a visible recreation of the fusion of cultures that has created the modern Philippines. All right there, from architecture to iconography.

Little, a doctoral student in art history, finds that kind of cultural blending fascinating. “I’ve always been interested in the visual exchanges between the West and Asia,” she says. “And I’ve been fortunate to get funding to visit.”

What she found on that hilltop — something that dots the 7,000 Philippine islands — was a key moment in modern Filipino culture: Pacific Islanders who imported ivory and other materials from Africa — and some of that culture; who drew artisans from China — and their culture; who attracted Spanish priests looking to spread European faith — and economic models.

The icons and architecture were needed to impress cultural values on an indigenous population. The fortifications protected communities from pirates. And despite strict Spanish control of the designs, there’s no eliminating the fusion of African and Chinese influences.

The churches bear a functional similarity to fortified cathedrals in Germany and Romania, Little says, but those were built in communities where Catholicism was already prevalent. These churches had the dual need to convert people.

The work, says Nancy Um, Little’s adviser, “has never been done before. She’s really pioneering in the field.” Little is bringing together a record of religious and devotional objects from a perspective of art history, and analyzing them with historical records.

For Little, this is gold. She has already secured a fellowship at the Lilly Library in Indiana and grants to visit Europe as well as the Philippines. “That fieldwork aspect is very important,” says Um, an associate professor of art history.

Little, who earned a bachelor’s degree in political science before pursuing a master’s degree in art history, also spent time last year at the Newberry Library in Chicago, examining 18th-century Filipino manuscripts. She’s looking for traces of immigration and hiring of Chinese workers.

“I’m peeling back the layers,” she says. “It’s more than just evangelizing — there are political and economic factors. There might be just one sheet of paper I find, but I that’s what I love. I’m a historian.”

The environmentally friendly thing to do is to have each sensor powered independently, perhaps by a small solar panel. But it gets expensive to attach a generator of any kind to each sensor that’s large enough to handle peak energy needs, when it won’t need that energy much of the time.

The network could use smaller, and cheaper, solar panels or other generators if the sensors could share their excess energy with their neighbors and ask for power when they need it, but all those wires are expensive and inefficient.

The network could use a central power source, but that’s vulnerable to failure, sabotage or even attack, in the case of military installations. A distributed network provides more reliability but is more difficult to coordinate.

Ting Zhu, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University, plans to tackle this challenge. He and his graduate students will develop the hardware and software to allow sensors in a wireless network to share energy.

“We built a prototype that can distribute energy over wires,” Zhu said. Now he hopes to take the next step. The team recently received a three-year, $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Zhu provided the proof of concept last year with a wire-based network.

Here’s what the Binghamton team aims to do:

• Create a network that monitors energy needs and available energy for each sensor.
• Establish a protocol so a sensor can ask its neighbors for spare power.
• Develop a way for each sensor to send and receive energy at a range of up to 10 meters with minimal loss of energy.

“The major problem of wireless energy transfer is efficiency,” Zhu said. The initial work in the field was done by Marin Solijacic and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology team, which wirelessly powered a 60-watt bulb at a distance of 2 meters with 40 percent efficiency in 2007.

In wireless power transmission, a magnetic field oscillates. That, in turn, causes other nearby magnetic fields to oscillate, generating electricity.

An Intel-sponsored team achieved 80 percent efficiency over two meters in 2009, with devices the size of basketballs. And a Stanford University team announced a project last year to develop high-power transfers — enough to recharge an electronic vehicle while in motion. But those projects are limited to 2-meter transfers. What about 10 meters?

“It’s a complicated hardware design,” Zhu admitted. “This requires deep understanding of wireless energy transfer principles.”

It is work that Solijacic sees as a logical application of the pure research he started six years ago — after being awoken by the beep of a cell phone’s low-battery warning. The MIT-affiliated spinoff company he founded, WiTricity Corp., envisions using magnetic resonance to power robots, electric vehicles, household electronics — and sensor networks

Each point in the network Zhu is devising would include several elements: an energy generator, most likely a solar panel; a capacitor to store and discharge energy efficiently; a magnetic resonance device to send and receive energy; a sensor; and a means to broadcast its information to a central node.

The goal is to do that for $1 a device. At that price, the hardware to monitor a typical grocery store-sized space — 100,000 square feet — would cost about $100. At the moment, Zhu said, the cost is more like $300 a device.

At $1 a device, you could find someday that sensor networks initially designed for industrial or military use could be protecting your back yard, and maybe even watering the lawn.

Brandon Gibb, associate professor of psychology and director of clinical training at Binghamton University, said he’s interested in genetic and environmental factors that may contribute to anxiety and depression. Identifying such factors early — he’s studying 7- to 11-year-olds — may make it easier to figure out which children need extra help before they hit the turbulence of adolescence.

The study will zero in on “attentional biases,” which occur when children and adults focus their attention too much on, or have difficulty pulling their attention from, something negative or threatening in such a way that it affects their mood for a prolonged period.

“We like to think of things in evolutionary terms,” Gibb said. “It’s an advantage, if you see something threatening in your environment, to pick up on it quickly so you can either fight it or run away. However, if you are constantly looking out for danger even when you are in an objectively safe environment, that can lead to problems with anxiety.  With depression the attentional bias appears to be different; there’s no bias in where you initially attend. But once you get stuck on something negative, then you have a hard time pulling yourself away from it.”

As Gibb embarks on this four-year study, with $2.9 million in support from the National Institute of Mental Health, he’s also wrapping up an earlier project. In that study, 255 children and their mothers were assessed every six months for two years. The team is still analyzing its data, but Gibb said it’s already clear that children whose mothers have experienced depression have a higher risk of being depressed themselves. Their lives also have a lot more stress. “If you have a mom with a history of depression,” he said, “your life is more stressful: at home, at school and with your peers.”

That project has informed the new one, and Gibb said he and his colleagues hope to find out more about which components of attention are disrupted in depression and anxiety. “We’re trying to tease apart what’s unique to one or the other as well as what’s shared by both disorders,” he explained.

The researchers will look at the combined influence of a number of genes operating within brain regions thought to underlie these patterns of attention and mood. Gibb’s team includes colleagues at Stony Brook University, Providence VA Medical Center, Rhode Island Hospital and the University of California, Davis. All of the research subjects will be drawn from the Binghamton area, with the other researchers focusing on the genetic testing.

This study fits into a broader effort in psychology, in which disorders have historically been diagnosed based on clinical observations. Now, the field is trying to base diagnoses not only on such observations but also on findings from genetic and neuroimaging research. “We think attention is a key mechanism that cuts across current diagnostic boundaries,” Gibb said.

Suicide is the third-leading cause of death among 10- to 14-year-olds and 15- to 24-year-olds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gibb said he’s motivated by the need to do more than document that problem; he wants to do something about it.

“We know that kids get on a developmental trajectory, and we know it’s a lot easier to change that trajectory the earlier you catch it,” he said. “Both risk and resilience start early.”

How do you spot depression or anxiety in a child? First, you have to differentiate normal ups and downs from more enduring problems. “Everyone will have a really anxious day or a really sad day every once in a while,” Gibb said. “But when it lasts for weeks on end and interferes with school work or friends or something else, we know it’s a problem. In kids, with depression and to some extent with anxiety, it may show itself as irritability more than sadness or fear. That’s the only real difference from how depression or anxiety looks in an adult.”

There are promising interventions, he added. But most of them are in use with adults because these disorders aren’t as well understood in children.

“In the 1980s, there was a lot of discussion about whether kids could even get depressed,” Gibb said. “Now we know they can, and we’re trying to figure out what to do about it. With these early markers, we can spot the kids who are at risk and do something.”

It’s the sort of question academic researchers tackle all the time, fodder for graduate students and professors.

Levine is neither. She’s an undergraduate; a Binghamton University senior majoring in philosophy, politics and law. She’s also an undergraduate fellow with the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH).

“The history of medicine is fascinating,” says Levine, 21, of Baldwin, N.Y. Her curiosity started with a simple question in a history seminar in the spring of 2012.

Using a $300 stipend, Levine began accessing primary sources, specifically public health reports and legal documents. She focused her work on the period from 1965 to 1970, right about the time when patients’ rights became an increasing concern.

What did she find? “Patient rights were not actively sought at all,” Levine says. The efficacy of treatment was the primary concern in whether to deinstitutionalize a patient.

She presented her findings last fall in a talk titled “Patient Rights and the Mentally Ill: Deinstitutionalization in the Late 1960s.” She was the only undergraduate to present findings to IASH.

“She’s setting her work off against the traditional viewpoint,” says Gerald Kutcher, professor of history and Levine’s adviser. “For an undergraduate, that’s impressive.”

Although the work is preliminary, it has the potential for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Seeking primary sources and in-depth analysis takes it beyond the standard undergraduate report, he says. “She has the ability to look at material and understand it in a sophisticated way,” Kutcher says.

Levine is the first to understand the limits of her work. She looked at one five-year period. A decade later, the process of deciding when and how to deinstitutionalize a patient was different. A patient’s wishes began to outweigh treatment concerns.

And she looked solely at records on individual cases. She hasn’t yet factored social, economic and political factors into evolving policies on deinstitutionalization. Many issues played into the decisions that closed and consolidated psychiatric facilities across the nation into a fraction of their numbers from the 1950s. One of the survivors is the Binghamton Psychiatric Center, which Levine recently visited for the first time.

Levine is interested in pursuing the topic after she gets her degree, but research isn’t her career goal. She’s looking to become a lawyer, specializing in health law.

“Working on a hospital ethics board will be ideal,” Levine says. “It’s going to continue to become more and more strict.”