Joy Hallmark began conducting research in high school. Now, she studies treatments for Parkinson’s disease in a Binghamton University laboratory. 

Parkinson’s is treated with a compound called Levodopa, or “L-dopa,” which causes abnormal involuntary motions after prolonged use.

Hallmark works with Christopher Bishop, an associate professor of psychology, to test several compounds that may allow Parkinson’s to be treated without this side effect. They rely on an animal model, observing the effects different Parkinson’s treatments have on rats’ body movements.

“The thing that attracted me most about this research was the fact that it was translational, so what you do in the lab applies in the field,” says Hallmark, who plans to pursue a doctorate or go to medical school after graduation. “We take what we’re learning now, and we can apply it by making new drugs and helping people.”

For the past year, Hallmark has been researching two compounds to see how they would affect Parkinson’s patients. As a part of the Undergraduate Research Center’s Summer Scholars and Artists program, Hallmark completed an eight-week fellowship with a postdoctoral student studying the serotonin system and its relationship to Parkinson’s.

“I’ve always had an interest in neurodegenerative disorders, so it was cool to come here and find Dr. Bishop’s lab and be able to take my interest a step further,” Hallmark says.

When she was in high school, the Queens native studied Alzheimer’s disease for three years at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine as part of the Intel Science Talent Search program.

Hallmark’s “prolonged interest” in medicine began even before that, though. “From a young age, I always wanted to be challenged,” she says. “I used to sit in the medical section at Barnes & Noble and just read the medical dictionary and learn new terms that I didn’t know.”

Bishop says Hallmark seemed like a great fit for his lab when they first met, and her work since has been “a testament to that fit.”

“She has demonstrated a commitment and growing knowledge base that has made her not only increasingly autonomous, but a true asset,” Bishop says. “Joy has proven herself to be an excellent young scientist, and her trajectory is outstanding.”

Hallmark says her passion for studying neuroscience stems from her curiosity and her willingness to explore uncharted territories. “The brain, I think, is just so intricate and there are so many things that we have yet to know about it,” she says. “I love going into the unknown and trying to figure things out.”

Seden Akcinaroglu analyzes trends in domestic terrorist attacks to predict when they will occur in the future.

Akcinaroglu, an assistant professor of political science at Binghamton, specializes in international conflict and rivalries. In the past, she has focused on three general areas: civil wars, international rivalries and terrorism. Her interdisciplinary project with Binghamton University computer scientists homes in on the relationships between major events in a country and its terrorist attacks.

“We are trying to understand, in a very dynamic way, how we can actually predict some terrorist attacks,” Akcinaroglu says. “Right now, a lot of the studies are very static.”

Yu David Liu, an assistant professor of computer science, says Akcinaroglu’s dynamic research direction is “challenging but essential, considering the fast pace of global events.”

He says the project uses public sources such as online newspapers and databases. “It then performs data analysis to correlate individual factors and the historical attack data,” Liu says. “Prediction is made based on findings of these correlations from historical data.”

Liu says computers streamline the data collection and analysis so predictions can be made quickly.

Previously, Akcinaroglu worked to unravel the effect of natural disasters, economic status and militarized disputes on terrorist attacks. “When states are engaged in militarized disputes with other states, terrorist attacks increase,” she says. “The terrorists find it as an opportunity to attack.”

The same is true, Akcinaroglu says, for cases in which a country is weakened economically. When natural disasters hit, however, terrorist attacks tend to decrease.

“It seems that terrorists do care about reputation to a certain extent,” Akcinaroglu says, “so during times of natural disasters, they don’t want to alienate supporters.”

These findings challenge how terrorist organizations are normally perceived to operate. “For us, any atrocity can be attributed to a terrorist organization. The fact that they kill civilians is basically telling us that they don’t care,” Akcinaroglu says. “But they do care about reputation, and some of them care more than the others.”

Her current project uses a complex model to encompass as many factors as possible and look at how those factors affect terrorist organizations’ decisions to attack.

Akcinaroglu, who is from Turkey, says her interest in researching terrorist attacks began when the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a rebel organization in Turkey, announced it would not attack the country following the devastating 1999 earthquake. Akcinaroglu says she saw the same thing occur in Indonesia later, and it made her curious about terrorist organizations’ hesitation to attack.

Nadia Rubaii, an associate professor of public administration, received a Fulbright grant to conduct research beginning in January at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. She will study how accreditation of public administration schools can improve graduate education and, ultimately, build more effective governments.

By conducting her research in Latin America, Rubaii hopes to examine to what extent U.S. standards can be used in other countries, based on whether they make sense culturally, politically and economically.

“What it’s forcing us to do is to learn from each other,” she said, “and to recognize that our way of doing things, which might be good, isn’t necessarily the only way or the best way.”

Rubaii believes that better public administration education will lead to more effective government institutions and ultimately increase the quality of life for people. “The real end goal,” she said, “is for governments all around the world to have sufficient capacities to engage in sustainable economic development, to promote improved health, education and security and to reduce crime, inequality, discrimination and poverty among their populations.”

An intermediate step is to improve the professionalization of government, she noted. She hopes that societies all around the world will value people who have a formal education in public administration as having something to contribute to government — not necessarily as elected officials, but as the people who do the day-to-day work of government.

Schools can seek public administration accreditation in the United States, and now internationally, through the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs and Administration (NASPAA). Rubaii oversaw NASPAA as its president and chaired its accreditation board for two years.

“Accreditation offers a kind of stamp of assessment and approval of quality,” Rubaii said. “If you as a student are looking to choose among programs, you know that the ones that are accredited have already been reviewed by somebody.”

Accrediting bodies evaluate a program’s curriculum quality, faculty credentials, student experience, placement record, admission standards and what knowledge and skills students have after graduating. Rubaii’s research focuses on how those standards differ internationally.

“Accreditation now from this organization is available to programs outside the United States, but the standards for accreditation are based on how we think about quality in the U.S.,” Rubaii said. “Those are not necessarily universal values or measures of quality.”

Sebastian Lippez De Castro, a graduate of Binghamton’s public administration graduate program and member of the faculty at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, worked with Rubaii in Binghamton researching the possibility of applying NASPAA standards to graduate public service programs in Latin America.

“She was always genuinely interested in listening, on both our experiences with Colombia’s higher education system and what we were able to learn about other Latin American countries’ systems,” De Castro said. “Her leadership style includes her cultural sensitivity.”

De Castro said he and other faculty members at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana look forward to working with Rubaii next year. “We not only expect to learn from her knowledge and experience regarding specific public administration topics, but also expect her research will help or graduate public service programs improve their quality,” De Castro said.

Other research of Rubaii’s, centered on the role of local governments in helping immigrants assimilate in the United States, helped shape a philosophy on diversity that drives her research. “It increasingly has been expanding to a focus on international diversity and cultural diversity, and so it’s an appreciation for diversity that connects the two,” she said. “It also reflects a genuine commitment to a notion of being part of a global community.”

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.”

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.”