At Binghamton University, Susan Bane thinks she’s found an answer: an ADC that uses a boronic acid to bind cancer-fighting drugs to the proteins on the surface of cancer cells, creating a chemical reaction that could be well-suited for drug delivery, with the potential to avoid the complications of chemotherapy and radiation.

“Killing non-cancer cells is where side effects come from, which is why this research is so important to pharmaceutical companies,” says Bane, a professor of organic and biological chemistry who received a $50,000 investment from the SUNY Technology Accelerator Fund (TAF) in June. “You can make antibodies that recognize very, very specific things on the surface of cancer cells, things that are in much higher abundance than they are on a normal cell. These antibodies can attach themselves to the cancers, making the specific bonds that you want to see between the drug and the antibody. There aren’t a lot of chemistries that can make that happen efficiently, but we believe this method will be fast enough to use in a clinical setting.”

For the past 30 years, Bane’s cancer work has focused on microtubules, intracellular structures that are involved in cell division and organization. In this most recent breakthrough, she was conducting basic research on microtubules, trying to speed up a chemical reaction, and decided to add boron. Bane expected the reaction to take hours; instead, it finished within seconds, providing an a-ha moment that pushed her research into a new direction.

“We found it by accident, while were working on a completely different project,” Bane says. “We thought that if we tried the reaction with boronic acid, we could make it faster. Not only did we make it faster, we made it thousands of times faster. We thought, ‘What just happened?’ Chemists had made these kinds of molecules before, using a much slower process, but our pieces just snapped together. We were completely blown away, and that’s how we ended up here.”

The result of this latest research, patented as “Rapid and efficient bioorthogonal ligation reaction and boron-containing heterocycles useful in conjunction therewith,” has distinct advantages over products currently on the market. First, there’s speed, which should make the molecule much easier to produce and much quicker to react. Second, its reagents are more biocompatible, so there aren’t any concerns about its toxicity in the human body. Third, it’s able to work well in water, even at highly diluted levels, and can be used without having to eliminate excess reagents after treatment.

Like other bioorthogonal chemical reactions, which are increasingly being used in personalized medicine, Bane’s product can be carefully controlled for consistency. Plus, this same patented process has potential applications in medical imaging, where it could create radioactive molecules to make PET scans safer, more efficient and less expensive.

“We think this reaction has a lot of potential utilities, and we’re interested in seeing where it can go,” Bane says. “One step is to reach across the academic community, let people know about our work and find out where they can take it. Another is to move outside academia, to places that have the resources to develop this. We’re at the stage now where we want to show this process can work on a larger scale and in a more controlled environment. But first, we have to get this into the hands of people with enough resources to take it to the next step.”

That’s where SUNY’s Technology Accelerator Fund comes in. To bring the patent closer to clinical trials, Bane is using her investment to manufacture experimental quantities of the novel chemical reagents and modified antibodies, purchase the commercial material currently available and begin testing the two head-to-head in her Binghamton laboratory. At the same time, she has begun leasing the technology to outside labs, where it’s being tested for a variety of potential biomedical and pharmaceutical applications.

“The more material that gets out there, the more people will be doing basic research, the more peer-reviewed publications we’ll have and the more interest will be generated for this type of chemistry,” Bane says. “Drug development is enormously expensive for pharmaceutical companies, and before we can find investors, we need to show that this process will work in a much more controlled environment. TAF is helping us reach the stage where our product will be more attractive to potential licensees, including the companies that could ultimately develop this for the marketplace. Getting the TAF grant is showing people that this project has commercial viability.”

Shawn Sallis wants to know why.

“It’s unclear what’s causing the problem,” says Sallis, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering at Binghamton University. “The electrodes start as a powder, which is mixed with a liquid binder to create a paste. That makes it really hard to disentangle exactly what’s going on as the material starts to degrade, and it’s going to require a lot of work to find out.”

To solve the puzzle, Sallis is spending this school year on a prestigious fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, Calif., where he’ll be working with the Advanced Light Source (ALS), a synchrotron that produces a beam a billion times brighter the sun. By bombarding his materials with X-rays, Sallis can observe the electrons as the battery charges and recharges, and gain a better understanding how the surface and subsurface degrade.

“We need facilities like the one in Berkeley to answer why we’re not reaching the full potential of these materials,” says Louis Piper, an assistant professor of physics who serves as Sallis’ faculty advisor. “They’re not behaving as they should, and we suspect the differences between the surface and the interior of these nanoparticles that make the electrodes is responsible. If we can determine what’s occurring, then we can consider how to overcome the problem. Over the past few years, Shawn has gained a lot of experience, which makes him the natural candidate.”

Since coming to Binghamton in 2010, Sallis has co-authored 17 published papers, presented his work at five national conferences and won an award for Best Poster for the oxide semiconductors symposium at the fall 2012 Meeting of the Materials Research Society. He has already conducted research at ALS, as well as at the National Synchrotron Light Source on Long Island and at Diamond Light Source in the United Kingdom.

“It’s very expensive to make the kind of X-rays we need to do this work,” says Sallis, who grew up in rural Cortland County, the son of a nurse and a long-haul truck driver, before graduating from SUNY Cortland in 2010. “Improving batteries is going to be a long, hard process with a lot of incremental steps. So I’m really excited to go back to ALS, where I’ll be able to focus on my research, help other people with their experiments, and see a lot of science I wouldn’t find anywhere else in the world.”

“The implications are profound,” says Assistant Professor Greg Strauss, who directs the university’s Translational Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, where Frost is pursuing her dissertation. “We’re basically stuck in terms of the treatment of anhedonia, largely because the underlying cognitive and neural basis is unknown. This is a novel framework for testing the effects of stress on the brain’s reward system, one we haven’t studied before, and Katherine has a rare combination of drive and intelligence to see it through.”

Since graduating from Wellesley College in 2010, Frost has published three peer-reviewed abstracts and three peer-reviewed papers, with another manuscript currently under review and two others in preparation. She has presented 11 posters, mostly based on her work at Harvard University’s Social Neuroscience and Psychopathology Lab, McLean Psychiatric Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital.

She has begun thesis research into the effects of acute social stress on reward processing, starting with adults without psychiatric diagnoses, then progressing to adults with schizophrenia and then to children and adolescents at risk of developing schizophrenia. Most prestigious of all, she received a highly competitive 2015 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, which covers three years of graduate school tuition, money for dissertation research, worldwide opportunities in professional development, funding for travel and access to an NSF supercomputer.

“When I saw that I’d gotten the fellowship, I was so excited, I danced around my room,” says Frost, who worked long distance with Strauss to draft the grant application during the summer of 2014. “This is an incredible next step for me, being able to pursue this research that I fell in love with so young. Studying schizophrenia, you never know what you’re going to see, because it’s such a heterogeneous disorder.

“I’m a very curious person, and I’ve always been fascinated by the way the brain works,” she continues. “There are so many opportunities to cover unknown territory. And I’ve always been extremely driven. Driven to achieve, driven to learn, driven to help people. This just fits right in.”

Funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that supports interdisciplinary undergraduate research, Irwin worked on a pair of related experiments with Paul Chiarot, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Jeffrey Schertzer, an assistant professor of biological sciences. In the first, Schertzer studied how vesicles — small bubbles within a cell, enclosed by lipids — affect communication within a bacterial community; in the second, he examined the ways shear stress affects the growth of biofilms.

“What’s unique about this collaboration is that Rebecca’s device allows Jeff to grow biofilms in situ, to add stress in a controllable way, and to observe the structure of the biofilms, which are actually quite complex,” says Chiarot, who supervised Irwin’s work in designing and building the instruments. “Rebecca took leadership on this project, which requires a lot of initiative and a lot of independence. That would have been challenging for a graduate student, and for an undergraduate, it’s even more impressive.”

With biofilms all around us — between our teeth, in the slime on a rock, inside a medical implant — there’s hope this research will reveal what does and doesn’t make them grow, which would have medical, biological and environmental applications. By learning how to disrupt their growth, scientists can decrease the risk of infection; by learning how to increase their growth, they can create new industrial cleaning agents to reduce pollution.

Both are part of the motivation that drives Irwin, a 2015 graduate who plans to pursue a doctorate in bioengineering, and whose participation on these projects was a life-changing experience. “As an undergraduate, being able to do research at this level is really cool,” she says. “It’s different from being in a lab as part of a class, where there’s a desired outcome that your professor wants you to have.”

The industry has been shifting from open-air cooling of these facilities to increasingly complex systems that segregate hot air from cold air. When it comes to cost savings, there are definite advantages to the aisle containment systems, which have been estimated to save 30 percent of cooling energy — but it’s not yet clear how they increase the risk of overheating, or how to design them for greatest safety and optimum energy efficiency.

That’s what Husam Alissa, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering, is trying to determine at Binghamton University’s state-of-the-art Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2).

In a poster titled “Experimentally Guided Advances of Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling of Air-Cooled Data Centers in a Raised Floor Setting,” which won a contest at a recent meeting of ES2’s Industrial Advisory Board, Alissa lays the foundations for a systematic analysis of Binghamton’s new data center, using both empirical research and computer modeling.

“We included some guidelines for the initial characterization of data center facilities, such as air flow, turbulence, pressure, velocity, momentum and cooling capacity,” says Alissa, who began his work in heat and mass transfer as an undergrad at the Hashemite University in Jordan and a master’s student at Jordan University of Science and Technology. “There are certain things data center modelers seem to oversimplify, and in order to effectively reduce the energy cost, it is important to create accurate models.”

At a large data center, the cost savings could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, which is why the solution is so important to ES2, a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center. Partners in ES2 include Georgia Tech, the University of Texas at Arlington and Villanova University, along with Bloomberg, Comcast, Facebook, Future Facilities, IBM, Intel, NYSERDA and Verizon.

In 2013, U.S. data centers consumed an estimated 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough electricity to power all the households in New York City twice over, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. That figure is projected to reach 140 billion kilowatt-hours by 2020, dumping an electric bill of about $13 billion on American businesses.

During the next two years, Alissa expects to refine his analysis, cycling back and forth between data collection and computational fluid dynamics, validating his models along the way.

“Husam has done a very good job establishing a strong technical base for this research,” says IBM Senior Engineer Ken Schneebeli, who served as a mentor on the poster, along with ES2 director Bahgat Sammakia; Future Facilities’ Mark Seymour; IBM’s Roger Schmidt; and Villanova’s Alfonso Ortega. “This is a subject of critical business importance that has not yet been investigated at the university level or at the industry level, and Husam is establishing a basis to ably assert the accuracy of his modeling and methodologies. He has the patience, confidence and thoroughness to take on a project of this size.”

RNA (ribonucleic acid) is one of three major molecules essential for all known forms of life, along with DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and proteins.

“For a long time, people believed that RNA was simply a middleman, a worker that enabled the flow of genetic information from DNA to proteins,” says Rozners, an associate professor of chemistry. “Now, with the sequencing of the human genome, we know that only 2 percent of DNA encodes for proteins, while 70 to 90 percent is used to make RNA. That’s a lot of RNA, and even if we don’t yet understand it completely, we’re coming to appreciate that RNA is involved in the decision-making process of how cells develop.”

RNA, he notes, is an active player in cell development that determines which cells become skin, which become muscle, which become bone. “My lab is designing tools for the molecular recognition of different kinds of RNA, which can look very similar in cells, but are still significantly different,” Rozners says. “Such tools will enable studies on the various RNAs in their native environment, live cells.”

In the first project, “Amide-Modified RNA: Synthesis, Structure and Potential for RNA Interference,” Rozners and his collaborators — Martin Egli of Vanderbilt University, Kaizhang He of Dharmacon and Scott Kennedy of the University of Rochester — received a $1.5 million, four-year renewal grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to continue investigating the possibility of an artificial biopolymer that can mimic the properties of RNA.

In the second three-year project, “Sequence Selective Recognition of Double-Stranded Non-Coding RNA via Triplex Forming PNA,” the National Science Foundation awarded Rozners $414,767 to develop synthetic compounds that can differentiate between types of RNA by reading their sequence-specific nucleic codes. These compounds will be tested in collaboration with Paul Agris of the University at Albany, another SUNY institution.

Both projects are still years away from finding hands-on applications. But their potential, either as new research tools or as new medicines to target diseases that involve aberrant RNA expression, is enormous.

“This is difficult work, and Eriks is one of the few people who can do it, because it tends to be very elaborate, very complicated and very expensive” says Egli, an expert on X-ray crystallography. “Eriks is very meticulous, and has gone much further than previous attempts to study amides. He’s taking a much more holistic approach, focusing on the basic science of chemically modified nucleic acids and looking at fundamental changes all the way down to the atomic level.”

In 2009, while he was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University, Aynajian used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to observe the movement of electrons on the surface of a high-temperature superconductor. “The electrons order themselves in beautiful charge patterns before transforming into a high-temperature superconductor,” he says.

Using intense X-rays, Aynajian and his collaborators observed these patterns within the bulk of the superconductor. This breakthrough led to the 2014 publication of a paper titled “Ubiquitous Interplay between Charge Ordering and High-Temperature Superconductivity in Cuprates” in Science.

“Pegor spent years honing the technology to catch electrons in the act of forming these so-called ‘crystals’ that move in unison,” says Ali Yazdani, a Princeton professor who supervised Aynajian’s work there. “We don’t yet have a clear understanding why these materials superconduct, but we think it comes from the strong interactions between electrons. That’s what Pegor is trying to sort out, and why this work is so important. He’s able to synthesize many different ideas, and … he’s already made a big impact in the field.”

Aynajian received his bachelor’s degree from Lebanese University in Beirut and his doctorate from the University of Stuttgart in conjunction with the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Germany.

Since arriving at Binghamton in 2013, Aynajian has been setting up a below-ground, ultra-quiet lab, with undergraduate and graduate students constructing Binghamton’s own scanning tunneling microscope. Two semesters later, their STM has passed its first tests of visualizing carbon atoms on graphite and electron waves on copper. This gives sophomores their first view of the quantum world.

“It’s like exploring a new world, like landing on the moon for the first time,” says Aynajian, an assistant professor of physics. “But instead of the cosmos, you’re going to the microcosmos, to the quantum world. You land on a new sample, and for the first time you’re able to see what electrons actually do on this particular material, which makes it so special. That’s a tremendous excitement, but the real reward doesn’t come until you can explain what’s happening.”

“I have the mindset of an investigator, and I really think that’s where my career path is headed,” says Mihalik, a senior physics major from Patchogue, N.Y., who works in the thermoelectric energy generation lab of Bruce White, associate professor of physics and department chair. “I like finding things out, and I view this as a challenge. I know something is happening, and I want to get to the bottom of it.”

According to one hypothesis, the samples might simply be contaminated, possibly through an interaction with ultraviolet light. According to another, there might be a gap in the three omega method, the technique that’s used to test materials in White’s lab and around the world. If that’s true, then Mihalik might be on the trail of something that could change the way scientists measure thermoconductivity, and someday lead to materials that efficiently convert heat to electricity.

“We’re still at the beginning stages of discovery,” White said. “We know there are some strange, non-linear responses creating these spurious measurements. The question is whether we can describe them mathematically, and whether we can get to a level that would allow us to see the appropriate thermoconductivity of the materials we’re testing. If Darin is successful in doing that, it would be a great service to the community.”

During his remaining months at Binghamton — between playing baritone sax in the Harpur Jazz Ensemble, working as president of the College Republicans, leading campus tours and serving as a captain in the Civil Air Patrol — Mihalik is committed to solving this puzzle, hoping it might lead to his first published paper. It could also help him set a course for doctoral work in emerging phenomena, which he calls “one of the greatest mysteries in solid state physics right now. I want to get things done,” he says, “and I want to have a part in helping, really helping people.”

White considers Mihalik a natural leader. “He’s very intelligent, and his work ethic is tremendous,” White says. “That’s a powerful combination. Once he starts working on a problem, he’ll keep coming up with clever ways to attack it, and won’t let go until he’s found a way to solve it. That shows up in the successes he’s having in the laboratory, and I know it will keep showing up in whatever he’s going to do in life.”

Persister cells aren’t naturally resistant to antibiotics, but by entering a dormant state and waiting until the medicine wears off, they’re able to start a new colony and produce a new infection. That’s why some diseases are so hard to shake, biologist Claudia Marques explains.

In her work with Binghamton colleague David Davies, Marques studied the formation of multispecies communities of bacteria called biofilms. The team succeeded in identifying a molecule that signals these colonies to disperse, making the microbes easier to kill with antibiotics. Those findings have been cited more than a hundred times.

“When you take antibiotics, you are only targeting the cells that are creating your symptoms,” says Marques, who came to Binghamton as a post-doctoral researcher in 2004 and is now an assistant professor of biology. “But there are other kinds of cells within the biofilm, and because they live in community, they’re much more protected than the cells that were killed. In theory, if you take an antibiotic in combination with something that will wake these dormant cells, you’ll treat your infection much more efficiently.”

If the Binghamton researchers are right, their discovery could have a significant impact in treating diseases that begin with biofilms, including tuberculosis, sinusitis and urinary tract infections.

“Claudia’s focus on waking the cells is what makes her work so good,” says Thomas K. Wood, endowed biotechnology chair at Pennsylvania State University. “She understands how things happen at the molecular level, and her work is important because it puts the emphasis on the right place, which is in trying to get rid of bacteria that are asleep.”

Marques was born in Angola and grew up in Portugal, where she received her bachelor’s degree before pursuing a master’s in medical microbiology from the University of London and a doctorate from the University of the West of England. Now living on her third continent, she’s starting to feel at home again, and has begun collaborating with researchers in electrical engineering and bioengineering, creating infections to study how different species interact within a single biofilm community.

“The possibility of treating patients better and improving their lives, that’s what excites me about this work,” Marques says. “That’s what got me into this work: to improve the health of the overall population.”

“It’s one of the more extreme environments that I work on,” says Kulp, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Binghamton University since 2011. “Mono Lake has a pH of 9.7, and it’s so full of dissolved minerals that when you stick your hand in the water, it feels soapy. It’s a closed basin lake, so water flows in from the Sierras, but the only way it leaves is through evaporation, which concentrates all these metalloids in the basin. It’s a naturally arsenic-rich ecosystem that supports a very healthy population of bacteria.”

For years, scientists have known about bacteria that survive without oxygen, getting their energy by metabolizing compounds such as sulfate, nitrate and iron oxides. Kulp has pushed that knowledge further, studying the biogeochemical cycles of arsenic and antimony for a clearer understanding of microbiologically mediated reactions and their broader implications.

“I like the idea of discovering new ways life can exist that we didn’t realize before,” says Kulp, who came to Binghamton after years as a research microbiologist for the U.S. Geological Survey. “That’s the most exciting part, and a fair amount of my work has been funded by NASA, which is interested in ways life can exist outside the usual metabolic processes. So I study a lot of bacteria, not just in environmentally relevant aquifers and fresh-water ecosystems, but in some of the more extreme environments on Earth, places where there aren’t a lot of things that can survive.”

Along with his research at Mono Lake, Kulp’s work has taken him to arsenic-contaminated aquifers in Taiwan and California and the Stibnite Mine in central Idaho. That has become the main site for his current work, breaking ground in the study of bacteria that use antimony compounds in place of oxygen.

“There are some scientists who wave a flag to say, ‘Hey, look at me,’” says John F. Stolz, director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University. “Tom doesn’t do that. He’s quiet, unassuming, meticulous and very attentive to detail. But he does great science, and he’s contributing some very significant findings about life on Earth — and maybe even beyond.”

Instead of going home to Brooklyn, Cuiping “Becky” Deng spent last summer in Binghamton investigating the possibilities of solar energy storage.

As a participant in a National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, Deng worked closely with a doctoral candidate at the Center for Autonomous Solar Power. For nine weeks, she worked alongside Navjot Kaur Sidhu, building and testing a capacitor that could point the way toward the next generation of energy-storage devices.

“Navjot was very helpful, teaching me how to use all this equipment, how to analyze my data, how to present my findings in a poster,” says Deng, a Binghamton University senior majoring in electrical engineering. “She guided me along, step by step, and once I learned how to actually do that first experiment, she let me mix the chemicals and do the rest by myself. That was the most important lesson, to learn how to work independently.”

Using a combination of metal oxides and conducting polymers, Sidhu is trying to develop a low-cost, high-density, long-lasting supercapacitor to store energy for a variety of applications, especially solar power. Through her own research, Deng has found working examples of supercapacitors that provide energy for solar-powered streetlights in Japan and solar-powered buses in China, where she lived until 2007, when her family moved to New York City.

“This is a very advanced technology, very exciting,” says Deng, who is considering staying in Binghamton for a master’s degree, with a focus on biofuel cells. “When I went to apply for the REU program, this was my first choice, from the beginning. I felt like, ‘Wow, I really want to do this,’ and someday I hope I can apply this knowledge to my own research.”

This year, Deng will continue working with Alok Rastogi, who supervises Sidhu’s research. “I was immediately impressed by her talent for research-oriented projects, and the excitement she felt about this project was exceptional,” says Rastogi, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. “For an undergraduate to show such an inclination is remarkable. She will lead a team of three students in a senior design project, and I know she is going to do well. I’m counting on her.”

Mark Fowler, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, has hired Deng as a teaching assistant. “She’s great to work with, one of our best students,” he says. “She was at the top of the class last year, and this year she’s helping in that same class. She’s strong academically and thinks very logically. But the thing that really stands out is the eagerness she projects in everything she does.”

“I found a few preliminary studies that showed a correlation between chronic Lyme and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia,” says Davis, now a junior majoring in integrative neuroscience. “There was some strong evidence, but they were very basic studies, mainly done by one person about 10 years ago. I felt compelled to do more research, because I wanted to understand it better.”

Working with Garruto and doctoral candidate John Darcy, Davis surveyed people whose Lyme disease had progressed from the acute stage to become a chronic condition. In the 200 surveys that have come back so far, she has seen links by sex, with women outnumbering men by about 10 percent, and between chronic Lyme and people with family histories of neurodegenerative disorders.

“There are some definite trends with symptoms of pre-neurodegenerative disease, and with a bias toward females, which is consistent with the literature,” says Davis, who expects to receive another hundred responses before analyzing the results later this semester. “I plan to look at both, and though it’s not our main focus, we’re hoping to find information that could tell us why females are more likely to get chronic Lyme than males.”

In the rest of her work on Garruto’s team, Davis talks with survey participants, maps the tick population around campus and assesses whether there are specific behaviors that increase the risk of being bitten by ticks. “Sarah is a researcher with a lot of strengths,” says Garruto, a research professor of biomedical anthropology. “She’s bright, dedicated and inquisitive, with significant experience working in the field of neurology. That’s been the central theme of her academic training and her clinical experience. Though no one can really predict at this stage, I expect Sarah to wind up in the field of neurology.”

Davis, who grew up on a farm in Greenville, N.Y., and whose mother has recovered from acute Lyme disease, estimates that she has been bitten by ticks 20 to 30 times. But that isn’t going to stop her from trying to find out more about the disease.

“I really enjoy doing this research,” she says.  “It’s different from sitting in a classroom, because I’m able to go out on my own, listen to people tell their stories and discover things through my own process.”