Last year, the Binghamton University faculty member received a National Geographic grant to support her work on Neuroterus saltatorius, a wasp that forms abnormal growths called galls on oak trees from California to Washington state.

“Meeting some landowners and talking to people, I just came upon a part of this oak gall-wasp story. There was a master’s student in the ’90s who did a little bit of work on it, and the Canadian Forest Service had done a little bit of research on it, but it just seemed to be this open question,” Prior says. “I thought it was relevant and a really cool study system to ask questions about climate change and range expansion.”

Prior, an assistant professor of biological sciences, earned a bachelor’s degree from Western University and a doctorate in biology from the University of Notre Dame.

She documents the wasp as well as the insect communities surrounding it, including other oak gall-forming wasps it interacts with and the parasitic wasps that attack and prey on them. N. saltatorius is of particular interest because of its “ecological release” — the removal of factors limiting its growth — and its subsequent outbreak as the insect’s range has expanded to Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The expansion damaged several oak tree populations in an already threatened western oak ecosystem.

The $23,828 National Geographic grant made it possible for Prior and her lab, a mix of undergraduate and doctoral students, to survey these wasp communities at 18 different sites along the west coast. They have identified at least 25 oak gall-wasp species at these sites and will likely discover hundreds of parasitoid wasp species that they harbor.

“Parasitoid wasps are some of the most diverse insects in the world and some of the most functionally important,” Prior says. “What they’ll do is find their insect host that’s eating a plant and lay their egg into that host, and then their larva eats the host larva and kill it. They keep in check things like agricultural pests and tree pests, such as N. saltatorius.”

This work and Prior’s research questions will expand in the upcoming months with support from a two-year, $207,317 National Science Foundation grant.

Prior and her team also study other ecological systems. Along with wasps, she focuses on ants — such as those found on acacia trees in Kenya’s East African savannahs and those spreading the seeds of understory plants in eastern deciduous forests like Binghamton University’s Nature Preserve.

Carmela Buono, who is pursuing a doctorate in ecology at Binghamton, works with Prior and the ants of these eastern forests. Buono’s interested in how humans use land and disrupt ecosystems. This summer was her second collecting data and first without Prior’s assistance.

“My first summer she helped a lot with helping to frame the scope of the project. She’s very much a go-getter when it comes to collecting data, and she thirsts to be in the field,” Buono says. “She’s willing to get dirty and put her field boots back on and run out there. If she wasn’t there my first summer out in the field, I would have been panicking. She’s a true field ecologist through and through. It’s in her blood.”

One important concept within these studies is to understand how global transformation — land use change, climate change and the growth of invasive species — affects these important relationships and ecosystems.

Prior says that although her goal is to document the importance of these species and their interactions in ecosystems, she would also like her lab to focus on conservation and ecological health.

“I want my lab and field work to move towards restoration and management as well,” Prior says. “With the host-parasitoid work, it’s thinking about biological control — ‘can you introduce natural parasitoid populations to help control insect pests?’ With this ant project, we are still spending time documenting how changes are affecting this important mutualism, but our next steps are to think about restoring these communities.”

“I’ve had some what I call ‘Aha!’ moments in my career,” says Sutherland, a professor of nursing at Binghamton University. “I have an umbrella of research, which focuses on interpersonal violence and sexual health. I’ve looked at reproductive coercion, pregnancy risk and choices around birth control. I’ve had other studies that have focused on healthcare providers. Part of that is me thinking as a nurse practitioner, ‘What do I do? What is the role of the nurse practitioner?’”

Sutherland’s research focuses on interpersonal violence, its impact on young women and factors that perpetuate intimate partner violence. She has studied reproductive coercion — when a partner impairs a woman’s ability to access contraceptives or make reproductive decisions — and how it impacts college-age women. Her most recent and ongoing studies center on college health and screening.

A recent study reviewed how and when healthcare professionals documented experiences of violence. Often, the problem remained unaddressed, the experience remained undocumented and the victim was not pointed toward possible resources.

Sutherland, who began her studies at Cornell University, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in rural sociology before pursuing a second accelerated bachelor’s and then a master’s degree in nursing at Binghamton. She earned a doctorate in nursing from the University of Virginia in 2008.

Sutherland is also certified as a community health nurse practitioner. She has practiced in Binghamton and in Boston, Massachusetts, during her tenure at Boston College’s Connell School of Nursing.

As a Fulbright Fellow in the spring of 2017, Sutherland taught, worked and mentored faculty in the development of a nurse practitioner program at the Pontificia Universidad Cátolica de Chile in Santiago, Chile.

She is also a 2018 Fellow in the American Academy of Nursing and the director of Binghamton’s Kresge Center for Nursing Research, where she continues her research and mentoring. Both the American Nurses Foundation and the National Institutes of Health have funded her research.

“I think nursing is really unique, compared to some other disciplines, where we are also practice-focused,” Sutherland says. “It’s often a balance to figure out how you’re going to integrate practice into other roles that you’re focused on. Every day is trying to just figure out what’s going to work for today.”

Some ongoing studies have concentrated on how to address gaps in healthcare communication to help victims of sexual assault. Much of the work on reproductive coercion, for example, is being examined through different ethnic and racial populations. The next step of Sutherland’s work is to develop an intervention method that addresses and reduces barriers to screening.

Gale Spencer, an associate dean, distinguished teaching professor, community health nursing coordinator and the Decker chair in community health nursing, first met Sutherland as a student. She has only grown in her dedication to research and patients in the years since, Spencer says.

“I think her love of research and her high standard of practice and scholarship are what I really admire in her,” Spencer says. “I see that strength — she’s innovative, she’s excited about things, and she gets things done. I have seen that strength in her, intellectually, just continue to grow and grow. Now, I see her as an equal colleague.”

And her busy schedule is that much more relevant when her clinical work involves populations at risk for relationship distress.

“I noticed a lot of resilience in people that experienced pretty horrible things in their life,” Balderrama-Durbin says. “And I became very interested in wanting to understand how humans are able to manage things that one might think to be completely horrific — traumatic events — and somehow come out of the other side.”

An assistant professor of psychology, Balderrama-Durbin earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Colorado and a doctorate from Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on couples exposed to acute stressors, such as veterans or sexual minorities. Partner violence, infidelity and stigma, as well as external trauma such as car accidents or military combat, can all affect how couples function.

Her Couple Adjustment to Stress and Trauma (CAST) lab works to understand ways these problems can be addressed, in prevention or intervention, before they result in violence or prolonged suffering. Her published work includes research on post-traumatic stress disorder and couple therapy, which she continues to work on through her most recent studies.

One project attempting this goal is a five-session, 30-minute intervention targeting traumatic stress symptoms and problematic drinking. It works closely with primary care doctors and is to be administered in parallel with physical health check-ups.

Another study beginning this summer aims to collect data on lesbian, gay and bisexual pairs who face discrimination as a result of their sexual identity, as well as how they navigate potentially hostile environments.

If the process works, she plans to develop a reliable way for people to access the resources they need at the speed and intensity that their unique situations require.

“I don’t like to do research for research’s sake,” Balderrama-Durbin says. “I like to do research for the benefit of the population by which I’m doing the research on. It’s such a shame to think that a lot of our research studies sit there in journals and don’t actually inform practice. I hope to at least personally facilitate that change by translating it and testing it.”

This approach translates to her students, who say that Balderrama-Durbin cares deeply for the populations she studies and the people closest to her. For example, this fall she will participate in the AIDS Ride for Life, a 102-mile charity ride benefiting the Southern Tier AIDS Program.

“She’s constantly striving to learn as much as she can about her field and the surrounding fields’ relevance to what she studies, and she uses that to inform her research direction,” says Seigie Kennedy, one of her graduate students at the CAST lab. “We’re working together for my dissertation using eye-tracking, and she’s so invested in helping me to be able to use this new paradigm our lab has not used before. She’s a very supportive supervisor.”

As much as her students appreciate her, her ability as the head of a team comes across when she speaks about them.

“What makes me passionate about this, about research and about this position, is that mentoring others in their research is incredibly rewarding. Without my team, the work would not get done,” Balderrama-Durbin says. “If I were doing it by myself, it wouldn’t be any fun at all.”

While phrases about humanitarianism and illegality dominate the media, Binghamton University’s Óscar Gil-García works within migrant communities to redefine and understand the history of immigration policy and the health of these disadvantaged communities.

His advocacy and fieldwork most recently published focuses on immigrant children who have entered the United States without legal guardians — also known as unaccompanied minors — and how immigration procedures affect their well-being.

Increased enforcement practices allowing families to be separated have allowed a larger number of adults to be deported. Their children, often born in the U.S. and legally citizens, face hostilities, emotional traumas and other trials without their parents.

“It’s broadened my understanding that these children are not necessarily those that don’t have legal status,” Gil-García says. “We need to broaden our lens and understand how immigration practices have resulted in the production of unaccompanied minors in this country who are also U.S. citizens.”

Gil-García earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Vassar College before moving on to complete his master’s and doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2010. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, he worked as an assistant professor at DePauw University before accepting a position in human development at Binghamton’s College of Community and Public Affairs.

His past projects include research into the incorporation of Guatemalan refugees in the Mexican settlement of La Gloria, a petition to the Mexican government to initiate citizenship rights for members of similar settlements, and a photo-documentary that illustrated the strengths and stories of migrant families.

Some of the families Gil-García works with include parents without legal status in Mexico. If these parents have children born in Mexico, the children are barred from obtaining a birth certificate and become stateless. Other children have legal U.S. citizenship, but find difficulty in their entrance to the United States.

In one case, a father and his child, who wished to use his citizenship to study in the United States, approached border patrol for legal entry into the country, but were detained and separated. Due to their fears of deportation, U.S. family members who lacked legal status were unable to help. The child became part of the foster care system.

Gil-García and his wife are now taking fostering classes to care for this child.

“This has become my research. My wife and I can now be considered as a possible placement for this child, but the process has allowed me to learn that the people who are providing this information for prospective foster parents, they don’t know about the conditions of people being separated,” Gil-García says.

One aim of his work is to increase communication between institutions involved in separations, holding those who are harming immigrants accountable and teaching those who have the opportunity to help through affordable legal counsel and awareness. Another is to make it clear that U.S. immigration policy affects more than people at the southern border — it impacts migrants from all over the world, and U.S. citizens.

Sara Hobler, a Binghamton alumna who double majored in sociology and history, says Gil-García’s research can change the dialogue both socially and for students like her.

“Dr. Gil-García really hammered home the point throughout the course that good, well-executed research can be impactful and shape policy,” Hobler says. “I always had qualms about entering into academia and leaving the activist life that I’ve lived up until now, and he made me think ‘Maybe I’m not becoming a useless bookworm after all — I might decide to go get a doctorate.’”

The humanitarian language used politically to reduce immigrants and minors while bolstering border enforcement may actually do more harm than good in the fight for immigration rights. Empathetic legal advocacy focused on the individual may help these communities most significantly.

“We’re opening a Pandora’s box to allow the police state to surveil all forms of movement, citizen or otherwise,” Gil-García says. “We’re not going to be able to appropriately respond to large-scale social crisis with episodic humanitarian strategies but will actually need to employ strategic approaches to bettering human life and health in the long term.”

Parents’ behavior is one factor in a long list of underlying mechanisms that can affect childhood development, but little is known about the way these behaviors influence mother-infant attention. This link has become a focus of Foster’s research.

“One theorized mechanism through which depression develops and is maintained is through attention bias — how people pay attention to and disengage from certain emotional information such as facial expressions,” Foster says. “We see attention bias in adults with depression. We see it in adolescents and children, but we know less about infants.”

The results from the studies conducted so far seem to show that depression is too complex to rely only on attention bias, since outcomes vary greatly family to family. Foster says other mechanisms beyond attention bias, including environment and genetics, may also play a part in conferring risk factors.

Since the fall of 2017, when Foster joined the Mood Disorder Institute after earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Cornell University, understanding infants’ needs has been key to her research. As a second-year graduate student studying clinical psychology, she has written several papers on the subject and worked with a number of families and pediatrician offices within the lab.

Brandon Gibb, a professor of psychology at Binghamton University and the director of clinical training for the Mood Disorder Institute, says Foster is a smart and motivated part of the team, working toward a common goal: reducing the risk for depression, however it may present itself.

“She’s just a really warm, caring and nice person. And it makes her an even better team member,” Gibb says. “I think one thing [about Claire] is the sheer joy she has when she starts talking about doing infant research. One, because I think she enjoys it so much, but also because she recognizes how important it is.”

Foster recently received a 2019 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which will effectively fund the next three years of her schooling and proposed study, as well as expand her professional outreach and opportunities.

Since its founding in 1951, the competitive fellowship has supported more than 50,000 STEM students. Foster is the latest of three students and a former lab manager at the Mood Disorder Institute to be awarded the fellowship.

The relationships and factors that influence depression and attention bias in children are what Foster hopes to learn more about with her research in the upcoming years. Since she first became interested in clinical psychology, Foster has been driven to help people through her studies. This need led her to volunteer in Romania after learning about the treatment of institutionalized orphans. It also informed her work at the Yale Child Study Center, where she studied autism, and at the Cornell University B.A.B.Y (Behavioral Analysis of Beginning Years) Lab, where she studied as an undergraduate.

“I think the most important thing was the implications for families, how this information can impact people’s lives. Because I feel there is sometimes a disconnect between research and what families get in treatment,” Foster says. “If I can help improve our understanding of how these things develop, then we can better understand how to treat them.”