Yao-Ying Ma, assistant professor of psychology at Binghamton University, wants to understand how those changes work at the cellular level. She hopes that a more precise understanding of those mechanisms will lead to therapies that reverse the effects on the brain and help to cure drug addiction.

“The problem is to find the precise spots that the therapeutic medications should target,” Ma says. “They need to be accurate, reaching not only a specific cell, but a specific ‘synapse,’ the structures that allow cells in our brain to communicate with one another.”

At birth, the brain is filled with immature synapses that barely pass information among neurons. Stimulation from the outside world prompts some of those synapses to mature. Although most of the surplus immature synapses are pruned soon after birth, about 5 to 10 percent of synapses left in the adult brain are immature, or silent. “This could be a good thing, since it provides the potential to quickly learn new tricks through our life experiences,” Ma says.

That is, unless the brain is exposed to an unusual stimulus, such as an addictive drug, which can regenerate silent synapses in our brain. When this happens in the adolescent or adult brain, the drug-induced silent synapses gradually wake up and grow in a way that elicits intense, abnormal communication among certain neurons. That leads to compulsive behavior such as drug addiction.

To study this effect, Ma and the students in her lab employ an animal model — rats prenatally exposed to alcohol, which puts them at high risk of addiction to cocaine or other drugs. For example, in one set of experiments using both brain slices and live animals, researchers direct light within specific wavelengths to a synapse, switching certain receptors on or off, and then observe the outcome. When the researchers work with live, addicted animals, they can see whether specific kinds of stimulation calm the synaptic storm.

Although this research is still in its early stages, it has already revealed some interesting things about the way silent synapses mature when a subject is exposed to alcohol prenatally. “Our original expectation was that the maturation process would be delayed,” Ma says. “But it actually gets accelerated.” When drugs stimulate the synapse, the signals generated are stronger than the ones an ordinary synapse would produce, prompting unusual behavior. “Through optogenetics, we are trying to reverse these pathologically matured synapses, to make their behavior normal.”

Once researchers learn which patterns of light waves — or other kinds of stimulation — might counteract the effects of addictive drugs in the brain, the next step in the search for effective therapies will be to learn how to target the correct synapses, Ma says.

Ma joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2015 after conducting postdoctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Pittsburgh. She has already attracted significant external funding. Her current and pending grants, totaling $1,655,000, come from the National Institutes of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (NARSAD) and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Ma has also won accolades for the time and passion she invests in her students’ success. She was one of 74 people recognized as Career Champions in November 2016 at an event sponsored by Binghamton University’s Fleishman Center for Career and Professional Development.

As a teacher and mentor, Ma says she takes an individualized approach, letting her students and postdocs tackle the challenges they find most appealing.

“I’m always talking with them about how far they want to go,” Ma says. Even undergraduates may take on advanced tasks, such as surgery on lab animals, she says. “If they are eager to learn, willing to devote their time and ambitious enough to delve deeper into academia, then I will spend more time with them and provide more sophisticated training.”

Four days of digging beneath the corn stubble yielded project director Michael Jacobson and his Binghamton University colleagues just a few modest items, including a charcoal smudge and the possible remains of a wooden post. But if test results show that those artifacts date from the late 18th century, that could be enough to convince National Register staff that the location of the Battle of Chemung should be preserved for further study.

Jacobson, PAF’s battlefield research coordinator, launched the dig in Chemung, N.Y., at the request of local residents who care about historic preservation. Once home to the Village of New Chemung, the site is a few miles east of the better-known Newtown Battlefield. Historians often treat the Newtown and Chemung encounters as one event, although they occurred two weeks apart.

“There was a local push to highlight the fact that Chemung was a separate battle from Newtown, and also to help preserve the landscape,” Jacobson says.

PAF received a $37,357 grant in 2009 from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program to conduct historical research on the Chemung battlefield and do some initial mapping. In 2012, the program awarded PAF a further $56,194 to perform an archaeological field survey.

The Battle of Chemung was part of the Sullivan-Clinton Expedition, a 1779 campaign of the Continental Army against British loyalists and the pro-British Iroquois. Gen. John Sullivan’s troops were camped at Tioga Point, near the present-day Athens, Pa., when scouts brought word of the settlement at New Chemung.

The village served as a base for various raiders, including, loyalists, Delaware and other Native Americans allied with the British. “It was also a traveling stop for loyalist refugees from New York City and Philadelphia who were making their way to Canada,” Jacobson says.

The Continentals stormed New Chemung on Aug. 13, only to find that all the occupants had fled. Heading west in pursuit, a detachment of soldiers encountered a group of Delaware warriors waiting in ambush about a mile away. The Continentals fought off the Delaware and then returned to New Chemung, where they burned the village to the ground.

To locate New Chemung in the landscape, the Binghamton archaeologists used a geographic information system (GIS) to lay an image of the Sullivan expedition’s official map over a present-day topographical map. They also used written accounts from the time of the battle, taken from Continental soldiers, loyalists and the Delaware, to pinpoint landmarks.

Finally, the archaeologists, guided by specialists from Ithaca College, walked the field with a magnetometer, a sensing device mounted on a cart. That exercise produced a printout that resembles a moonscape. The many dark splotches set against the gray background indicate disturbances in the soil that might — or might not — point to artifacts buried below.

At each of several spots that seemed most promising, the archaeologists dug a rectangular trench about 30 centimeters deep. In November, one of those test trenches produced the charcoal smudge, and another the traces of what perhaps was a post.

Now, the group awaits test results, hoping that the results will persuade the National Register that the site is significant enough to preserve, Jacobson says. “We’ll get the data, tie it with the historical documents and try to put together the best package we can.”

The work of three Binghamton University researchers, all raised in South Korea, demonstrates that the needs of Asian immigrants in the United States are more complex and nuanced than many have assumed. These researchers offer important insights to social workers, teachers and others who try to help individual immigrants thrive.

What they find is more important than ever: Asians have passed Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to the United States. In 2011, Asian-Americans numbered a record 18.2 million, or 5.8 percent of the total U.S. population, up from less than 1 percent in 1965, according to data published by the Pew Research Center.

Outside the enclaves

“Researchers like me try to categorize people,” says Suk-Young Kang, assistant professor of social work, who studies the needs of elderly people as well as the needs of Asian immigrants. Categories can be tricky, though. Not only does each immigrant group have distinct needs, but even people who come to the United States from the same country may live through different versions of the immigrant experience.

Kang grew curious about immigrant diversity after working with elderly Korean immigrants in Chicago for several years, and while helping his dissertation chair at Columbia University with a monograph on the healthcare needs of Asian immigrants in New York City. The findings of that study might also apply in Los Angeles, Chicago or Toronto — cities with large Asian-American populations. But what about immigrants living more isolated lives?

“There are small numbers of people who live outside the major metropolitan areas, where they don’t have access to the resources of ethnic enclaves,” Kang says. Few of their neighbors speak their language, eat their food or understand their culture. “I wondered if they lived differently.”

Kang started to explore that question while working at Arizona State University. He interviewed 240 elderly Arizona residents — half of them born in Korea and half born in China — about interactions with their local healthcare systems.

Preliminary findings show that small communities of Asian-American elders face different challenges than their counterparts in cities with big Asian populations. Language is one key concern.

“In New York City, they can see doctors who speak Korean or Chinese,” Kang says. But in Arizona, Asian-born patients usually rely on phone-based translation services. And translators often miss the finer points of the language.

“The interpreters aren’t familiar with nuances such as honorifics” — for example, the right verb form to use when addressing an older person, Kang says. Offended by such blunders, some elders refuse to use translation services. That makes it hard to get medical attention or to make use of what might be valuable information.

Besides Asian-American immigrants outside urban Chinatowns and Koreatowns, Kang is curious about at least two other ethnic subgroups — the tiny number of immigrants in the United States who hail from North Korea as well as Korean-speaking immigrants from China. He also hopes one day to add an Asian-American perspective to another important strand of his research: exploring ways to reduce stress on people who care for elderly family members.

Kang’s findings demonstrate that while heritage is important, it’s a complex factor. Social workers who are developing intervention plans shouldn’t assume too much based on what they think they know about their clients’ backgrounds.

“When I started in social work, I heard, ‘Everybody is unique,’” Kang says. “Sometimes people forget that.”

What caregivers want

If geography may help shape an immigrant’s needs, so may a person’s role in his or her household.

Consider a Korean-American immigrant caring for a loved one with dementia. Depending on whether the patient is the caregiver’s parent or spouse, the caregiver will feel different pressures, gain different rewards and seek entirely different kinds of help, says Youjung Lee, an assistant professor of social work at Binghamton.

Most studies of relatives who care for dementia patients focus on the burdens that those caregivers endure, Lee says. But according to a study she conducted, many caregivers also draw satisfaction from the work.

Lee surveyed 85 Korean-American caregivers in Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago to learn what factors made caregiving a positive experience. She assumed that culture would play a key role: The more a person held to Asian values, with their emphasis on family ties, the better he or she would feel about caregiving.

That initial hypothesis was wrong. “It turned out that culture was not that important,” Lee says. Far more crucial was the way in which relatives and friends pitched in to help with patient care and household chores. “When Korean caregivers have quality social support, it influences their positive appreciation of caregiving,” she says.

Lee next decided to find out more about the roles of culture and social support. She was curious about what kinds of support caregivers wanted most. To that end, she conducted in-depth interviews with eight Korean-American caregivers in Flushing, N.Y.

That’s where the differences emerged between people caring for husbands or wives and people caring for parents.

Spouses, Lee discovered, see dementia care not as a blessing or curse, but simply as a feature of the marriage compact. And those older caregivers don’t wish for a great deal of day-to-day help. What they really want is medical information in Korean, to help them provide better care.

For grown Korean-born children, the job of tending to a parent with dementia comes as one more duty on top of others, such as earning a living and caring for children of their own. These caregivers may feel overwhelmed. But they also feel good about helping their elders, Lee says: “They are fulfilling  the expectations of Asian culture that they should be good daughters, sons or daughters-in-law.”

Because they speak English, younger caregivers have an easier time negotiating the healthcare system. Still, juggling elder care, child care and outside employment, all while living with a foot in each of two cultures, causes a great deal of stress. “They need more specialized and individualized mental-health services,” Lee says.

Like Kang, Lee cautions against oversimplification. All families are not alike — not even all immigrant families from South Korea. “We need to investigate the level of acculturation, their relationship to the U.S. community, their level of income, their level of education in America,” she says. “All those factors should be taken into consideration when we assess an immigrant family and each family member.”

From anger to gratitude

Hyeyoung Kang also emphasizes the positive side of the immigrant family experience. It’s a poorly understood subject, since studies of minority families so often concentrate on challenges and conflicts, says Kang, an assistant professor of human development.

Much of her research aims to fill that gap by exploring relationships between immigrant children and their parents. She’s also interested in what factors contribute to these individuals’ resilience.

There are certainly occasions for conflict in immigrant families. “They’re usually starting life here at the bottom,” Kang says. “They need a lot of support from family members.” For example, parents who don’t speak English rely on their children to help them transact business outside their own communities.

Many Korean-American parents put in long hours running small businesses rather than nurturing children at home. Because of their cultural background and busy work life, they may eschew the open, affectionate communications that Americans consider the norm, while demanding unquestioning obedience and hard work from their kids. One of the most common complaints Kang hears from Korean-American young people is that their parents expect them to earn straight A’s.

Given those pressures, and the cultural gap between foreign-born parents and their U.S.-raised children, one might expect bitter feelings to endure as children grow into adulthood and away from their roots.

Not so, says Kang. “There seems to be a transformation during the transition from adolescence to young adulthood.” During that period, some of the very behavior that made kids’ blood boil when they were teens — the demands for perfect report cards, the weekends spent working at the family business — often begins to inspire gratitude and affection.

In research she conducted with colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Kang surveyed and interviewed Korean immigrant families and adolescents as well as Korean-American young adults, ages 18-25. Most of those subjects said that, yes, they had often resented their parents in the past. But now they saw their upbringing in a more positive light.

One phrase that kept coming up, Kang says, was “parental sacrifice.” The young people often attributed positive meaning to their challenging past experiences with their parents. For example, they would say, “My parents were unavailable because they gave up their life to provide for me so that I can live a better life than them,” instead of staying bitter about their parents’ absence early in their life. Some, Kang says, come to embrace their elders’ vision. “They say, ‘My parents came here so that I could be successful in this country. I have to work hard and give back.’”

This evolution comes in part because Korean-American children mature cognitively, gain physical distance from their parents and are exposed to a dense ethnic peer network as they leave their teens and enter their 20s. However, Kang notes, there are some Korean-American youth who feel pressured and continue to stay disconnected or bitter toward their parents.

In future studies, Kang hopes to extend this research to other immigrant populations, especially Latinos.

One lesson Kang draws from her findings is that the ingredients that make up a “normal” family experience vary greatly. “For example, we often hear that it’s important for parents to communicate with their children and express affection,” she says. “But these kids stay connected to their parents and maintain positive relations despite previous challenges.”

That message came through loud and clear when Binghamton researchers went into the field to learn how to deliver information about tobacco use to pregnant women. Based on insights from front-line experts — pregnant smokers and their healthcare providers — the investigators created a video that they hope will succeed where other interventions have failed.

Twenty-six percent of women in upstate New York who gave birth in 2009 smoked during the three months before they conceived, and 12.24 percent still smoked in the last three months of their pregnancies, according to the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In some rural areas the problem is worse, says Geraldine Britton, assistant professor at the Decker School of Nursing and director of Binghamton’s Interdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Program (ITURP). In western Steuben County, for example, 52 percent of women enrolled in Medicaid, Obstetrics and Maternal Services (MOMS) in 2009 said they smoked during the three months before they became pregnant.

Even that figure may not be telling the whole story. “Rates of smoking during pregnancy are profoundly under-reported,” Britton says.

Britton’s interest in smoking during pregnancy dates back to the 1980s, when she worked as a clinical nurse specialist and educator in maternal child care, and to the 1990s, when she coordinated the Southern Tier Tobacco Awareness Coalition.

Later, for her doctoral dissertation at the Decker School, she tested the effectiveness of a nurse-managed program called Smoke Free Baby and Me that was integrated into routine prenatal care. She and a coalition of providers followed 194 pregnant smokers through pregnancy and postpartum. Compared to a control group, the study found significant differences in smoking cessation at the postpartum visit in the group of women enrolled in the program who had quit just before their first prenatal visit — helping them not relapse. But it found no differences among those who were still smoking at the first prenatal visit.

In addition, the study revealed that many expectant mothers were hiding their smoking from healthcare providers. The women’s self-reports were validated by testing for a metabolite of nicotine called cotinine, which is found in smokers’ urine. “We found that 30 to 40 percent of the women who told us that they weren’t smoking had positive cotinines,” Britton says.

Hoping to devise better smoking-cessation strategies, Britton and her colleagues in ITURP, supported by a March of Dimes grant, conducted a series of nine focus groups. Three of those groups consisted of pregnant smokers and six of healthcare providers. “The purpose was to increase the understanding of the pregnant smoker, including the motivation to quit,” Britton says. The researchers also asked for ideas about how to communicate the message.

One important insight that emerged from the groups is that it’s hard to appreciate a risk you can’t see. Unlike a baby born with fetal alcohol syndrome, the child born to a smoker may look like any other newborn. But a mother’s smoking can create a host of hazards for the baby, including low birth weight, nicotine withdrawal, asthma, cognitive delays and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “We had to somehow put a face to the problem,” Britton says.

The idea of a video appealed to both the groups of expectant mothers and to the healthcare professionals. One nurse, for example, mentioned that New York state requires all new parents to watch a video on shaken baby syndrome before leaving the hospital, says Pamela Manktelow, coordinator of the MOMS program at Saint James Mercy Hospital in Hornell, N.Y. “She said, ‘If we had a smoking video for pregnant women, so they would know what they’re doing to their baby as they watch it, I think that would help.’”

A video also allows you to control the tone of the message — an urgent concern that emerged from the focus groups. “The pregnant women have an absolute cynicism, or even fear, about being lectured,” says ITURP co-investigator Sean McKitrick, former assistant provost and director of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment at Binghamton University.

Having analyzed the themes from the focus groups, ITURP contracted with White Knight Productions of Vestal, N.Y., to shoot the video. The researchers then returned to groups of pregnant women and nurses for ideas about content. To provide maximum impact, focus-group participants decided that the video should feature real people, not actors. For example, in one vignette, a woman who smoked during her pregnancy describes how she and her family resuscitated her weeks-old infant, who had stopped breathing — and then cautions pregnant women against smoking. “Her little girl is 4 years old and has severe asthma now,” Britton says.

Recruiting women to participate was easy, Manktelow says. “The women feel that they’re helping other people quit.” Even when the crew filmed a newborn howling his way through nicotine withdrawal, the mother didn’t hesitate to let ITURP use the footage, she says.

Along with mothers from participating hospitals and clinics, Manktelow and several other nurses, including Lucy Keith from Arnot Ogden Medical Center’s MOMS, appear in the video. The producers also used children to talk about the dangers of smoking. “The pregnant women felt that this message was probably better delivered by children,” Britton says.

With production complete, members of ITURP are seeking funds to help them test the video. They plan to show the segment, which runs about 10 minutes, to pregnant women during their prenatal visits. Researchers will measure whether women who see the video, compared with a control group, are more likely to quit or cut down on cigarettes and less likely to resume smoking.

Besides producing a new smoking-cessation intervention, the project has helped to solidify ITURP’s partnership with community healthcare providers. Such alliances are crucial for developing effective solutions based on real-world evidence, Britton says. “I like to call it the ‘triple helix’ — practice, research and theory,” she explains. “You need to start in practice in order to develop questions, design effective interventions and conduct research to test and build theory. Then you must return the findings to practice.”

But chest pain can signal a heart attack in a woman. Women also may experience a range of other symptoms, not all of them easy for the typical sufferer to identify.

“We believe that heart attacks in women go unrecognized 30 to 55 percent of the time,” says Stewart Fahs, professor and Decker Chair in Rural Nursing at Binghamton University’s Decker School of Nursing. Women who miss the warning signs fail to get help, or they head for the hospital only when the problem grows acute, increasing the risk that they will die or be gravely disabled.

In hopes of shortening women’s time to treatment, Stewart Fahs is collaborating with Melanie Kalman, associate professor and director of research in the College of Nursing at SUNY Upstate Medical University, on a project called  “Matters of  Your Heart.” The goal is to develop an effective program to educate women about heart attack symptoms and also to teach about the early warning signs that a heart attack might be on the way.

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women. In fact, 1 in 4 women in the United States dies from heart disease, according to the National Institutes of Health. The most recent national study on the subject, however, found that 49 percent of women don’t realize that they need to be concerned about heart disease, Stewart Fahs says.

That number is lower than in past years, and the medical community has gotten out the word that women’s heart attack symptoms may differ from men’s. However, as the story of the woman on the floor points out, there’s still room to improve education about women’s cardiovascular disease.

Intense pain might be the first obvious sign of an impending heart attack, Stewart Fahs says. But many women who look back on the period before an attack report that they first felt pressure or discomfort. “Some women will say, ‘It’s like I had a big knot up here,’” she explains, pointing to her upper chest. “‘Like I swallowed an orange whole.’” Overwhelming fatigue or pain that radiates into one or both arms or the neck or jaw are other common warning signs.

Kalman and Stewart Fahs conducted the first phase of their project under an intramural research grant from SUNY Upstate. Their first task was to develop a questionnaire to measure a woman’s knowledge of heart attack symptoms and warning signs. They then created a pilot version of an educational presentation.

Working with 141 post-menopausal women, Stewart Fahs and Kalman held small-group sessions to administer the questionnaire, present the program and then give the questionnaire again. “We did find that the educational program increased knowledge,” Stewart Fahs says.

The researchers based the presentation in part on a program that Stewart Fahs developed several years ago to teach rural residents about symptoms of a stroke. That program employed an acronym created by the American Heart Association — FAST, for Face, Arm, Speech and Time.

The new program uses a similar mnemonic device, and Stewart Fahs says the method has proven effective, especially when women practice putting it to use. “We have periods in the presentation when they work in groups of two to four and come up with different symptoms for heart attacks and the female warning signs,” she says. Members take turns naming the symptoms.

As a specialist in rural nursing, Stewart Fahs gave the questionnaire and program to women in rural areas, while Kalman concentrated on urban Syracuse. The population they have studied so far is too small to reveal whether the program works better for one demographic or the other, Stewart Fahs says.

In a second phase of their research, Kalman and Stewart Fahs plan to give the presentation to many more women over a broader geographical area. Eventually, they hope to do a longitudinal study to discover whether their program improves the way women respond when they experience signs of a possible heart attack. “Having knowledge doesn’t necessarily change your behavior,” Stewart Fahs says. “But if you don’t have the knowledge, you’re unlikely to change.”

Once they’ve perfected the program, the researchers will share it with hospitals, community health agencies and other healthcare organizations. Besides offering the PowerPoint slides for classroom use, they might someday use communication technologies to give the presentation a broader reach, Stewart Fahs says. “There should be a way, through cell phone apps or some kind of Internet application, to get this message out to women once it’s fully developed and tested.”

While looking for new ways to educate women about heart attacks, Stewart Fahs also continues helping to advance the discipline of rural nursing. In May, she became editor of the Online Journal of Rural Nursing and Health Care. She also serves as an external advisor to the Interdisciplinary Healthy Heart Center: Linking Rural Populations by Technology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Her combined expertise in rural nursing and cardiovascular issues makes Stewart Fahs especially valuable as an advisor to the Healthy Heart Center, says Professor Carol Pullen, principal investigator on the project. One striking aspect of Stewart Fahs’ work is that, along with publishing articles on cardiac risk among rural women for academic journals, she also writes for media that reach a wider audience, Pullen says. “I think it’s important not only to get your work in scientific journals, but also to get it out to lay publications for everybody to enjoy the results of your research.”

Stewart Fahs hopes that the results of her latest research will include better outcomes for more female victims of heart attack. “The more aware you are of the signs and symptoms,” she says, “and the more aware you are of the risk of heart disease for women, the better able you are to take a proactive stance.”

Linda Spear understands what motivates these parents. But she and her colleagues who study the effects of alcohol on brain development say that this bow-to-the-inevitable strategy is wrong. The dangers of youthful drinking extend beyond the risk of auto accidents. Science shows that alcohol changes the young brain in ways that may cause problems throughout a person’s life.

“We’re trying to convince policy makers that adolescents are responding differently to alcohol than adults,” says Spear, distinguished professor of psychology at Binghamton University. “We shouldn’t be providing alcohol at these younger ages, or condoning it.”

Spear, a noted expert on the adolescent brain, is author of The Behavioral Neuroscience of Adolescence, published by W.W. Norton in 2010. She’s an authority on the effects of alcohol on the adolescent. Among her major interests is how the adolescent brain responds differently to alcohol than the adult brain.

Dr. Jay Giedd, chief of the unit on brain imaging in the child psychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, calls Spear a pioneer in charting the biology of adolescence. Spear, he says, has helped to ground the debate about teen drinking in solid science.

“Apart from the cultural and social, there are biological reasons that the adolescent brain is particularly vulnerable to alcohol, down to the chemical and molecular and cellular levels,” Giedd says. Spear’s opinions on this hot-button issue are especially credible, he adds, because she argues directly from her data.

According to that data, some of the danger in youthful drinking stems from the fact that the typical adolescent can drink the typical adult under the table. “Adolescents are very insensitive to many of the cues that normally help you figure out that you’ve had enough to drink,” Spear says. Without signals to warn that they’ve gone way beyond tipsy, adolescents tend to drink more. “And that’s a problem, because high levels of alcohol are toxic.”

Stamping tolerance on the brain

It’s also a problem because the more you consume, the less you feel alcohol’s effects. In young drinkers, this tolerance may become stamped upon the brain, possibly creating the conditions for alcohol addiction, Spear says. “It’s not always the case,”  she says,  “but it does seem that there are a number of circumstances in which you may be ‘adolescentizing’ the alcohol response into adulthood with this chronic exposure to alcohol during adolescence.”

Hoping to better understand how youthful drinking might shape the adult brain, Spear has joined a consortium of scientists from throughout the United States to examine long-term effects on the brain and behavior of adolescent rats exposed to a great deal of alcohol — levels resembling repeated binge exposures. As part of the consortium, Spear and her colleague Elena Varlinskaya, a research professor at Binghamton, will focus on long-term effects on social anxiety after adolescent alcohol consumption.

“We’ve found that shortly after termination of alcohol exposure, the adolescent animals are socially anxious, and they’re unusually sensitive to the restoration of social behavior by alcohol,” Spear says. She and Varlinskaya hypothesize that, when the adolescent drinkers become adults, they will still grow anxious quickly as alcohol leaves their systems. When they drink again, they will relax and start to socialize, finding alcohol especially effective for reducing social anxiety.

Previous researchers have examined long-term effects of alcohol exposure by injecting rats with alcohol. Spear and her colleagues want to see if the effects are different when rats ingest the alcohol themselves.

As the consortium plans these experiments, Spear also is investigating alcohol and brain development through another initiative. In 2010, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism awarded a five-year, $8.5 million grant to fund the Developmental Exposure Alcohol Research Center, or DEARC. Spear serves as its scientific director. DEARC is a joint venture of Binghamton University and SUNY Upstate Medical Center. Researchers at SUNY Cortland are participating with a pilot project, and DEARC is considering project proposals from several other universities.

DEARC is the only research center today to focus on how alcohol affects brain development, Spear says. “We’re also unique in that we’re the only center that was ever put together to focus on both prenatal and adolescent exposures,” she adds.

Spear’s own project within DEARC explores the chemistry behind adolescent drinking patterns. “We’re keying in on some of the chemical systems that undergo change during adolescence, to try to see if those are associated with certain of the alcohol insensitivities,” she says.

Taking science to the street

Since it’s illegal and unethical to get teenagers drunk in the name of science, most research on alcohol and the brain uses laboratory rats. Spear’s work is no exception. That’s one reason she’s excited about a new project in Binghamton.

Working with Stephen Lisman,  distinguished teaching professor of  psychology, Gerard Johansen, senior counselor at the University Counseling Center, two graduate students and a cadre of undergraduate assistants, Spear is taking her research to the streets. Specifically, she’s taking it to State Street, the center of nightlife in downtown Binghamton.

Since spring 2010, the group has been surveying young drinkers outside bars, collecting information on their consumption habits and problems with alcohol. Some subjects are then invited to blow into a breathalyzer, complete simple cognitive and motor tasks and then take the breathalyzer test again. The subjects, who range in age from 16 to 30, do not give their names.

The study’s main goal is to learn whether younger human drinkers perform better on the tasks than older drinkers with the same blood-alcohol levels. “It is the only study I know of that’s currently able to look at that in the United States,” Spear says.

Through studies such as these, Spear helps to expand knowledge of how the brain may “sculpt” itself, and to what extent youthful experience shapes the brain in adulthood.

Ultimately, scientists in her field want to learn how to make the most of adolescence, Spear says. Young people need to understand that their choices have a serious impact. The message is: “You’re different from the adults,” she says. “And that’s kind of cool, because you may be able to build the brain the way you want. So, what do you want?”

In order to develop targeted therapies, scientists need to understand the activities these drugs disturb. If a compound seems to shrink tumors, for example, they need to define what’s going on inside the cells to produce that result.

Binghamton University researchers are helping to advance this work, which may pave the way for better cancer treatments.

Tracking an enzyme

Susan Bane, professor of organic and biological chemistry, and Susannah Gal, associate professor of biological sciences, deploy a novel tool in their study of an enzyme called tubulin tyrosine ligase, or TTL. Many cancer cells contain less-than-normal levels of this substance.

Bane and Gal are conducting their project with funding from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Their work focuses on microtubules, structures that provide part of the scaffolding that gives a cell its structure and also help chromosomes line up correctly during mitosis, or cell division.

Microtubules are made of proteins called tubulin. During the course of a cell’s life, an enzyme called carboxypeptidase clips an amino acid called tyrosine off the end of some of these proteins. Later, TTL puts tyrosine back on the tubulin. No one knows the purpose of this cycle, Bane says. “But we do know that if you don’t have that enzyme, you’ll die.”

In certain cancer cells, the cycle of removing and reattaching tyrosine has fallen out of balance: Too many tubulins lack tyrosine. “Patients who have that characteristic in their tumor have a poor prognosis,” Bane says. Those tumors tend to grow more aggressively.

Hoping to learn more about the role of TTL in cancer, Bane and Gal are studying the removal and reattachment of tyrosine in live cells. Bane has developed a way to mark tubulin with a fluorescent molecule, allowing the researchers to observe those molecules in action under a fluorescent microscope. The technique will help them explore questions such as what conditions allow tyrosine to reattach to tubulin and what conditions keep that from happening.

Marking tubulin isn’t easy. Most fluorescent markers will bond with any protein in a cell; they don’t distinguish between tubulin and other protein molecules. To mark just the tubulin, Bane and Gal essentially put a “hat” on that protein and then add a marker to that.

The hat is a special derivative of tyrosine that Bane created for the project. The researchers introduce this tyrosine derivative into a cell. They then add a fluorescent molecule that lights up when it bonds with the special tyrosine, but not with any other substance. In effect, they pin a glowing badge to the tyrosine hat.

TTL in the cell may pick up that hat and clamp it on the  “head”  of a tubulin molecule. Once the tubulin is wearing its luminous headgear, the researchers can tell it apart it from other objects in the cell and watch how it behaves.

Other methods exist for adding a fluorescent marker to a protein in a cell. The most common technique, using a fluorescent protein, presents certain disadvantages, says Dan Sackett, a biophysical cell biologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

“The down side is that it’s a very large molecule, as big as the protein we’re trying to track,” says Sackett, who collaborates with Bane and Gal on their project. The marker may actually block the observer’s view of the protein under study.

The new technique, using a smaller molecule, provides an easier way to watch the behavior of microtubules as cells divide, Sackett says. “And since a lot of anti-cancer drugs target the mitotic spindle — the array of microtubules that moves chromosomes apart at mitosis — being able to observe that easily in multiple cell types is really an advantage.”

Cancer cells are often undergoing mitosis at a much faster rate than normal cells, making cell division a major target of cancer research.

Although Bane and Gal aren’t trying to develop a new cancer treatment, their efforts to learn the role of TTL in tumor growth could someday make it easier to choose a treatment for a specific case of the disease.

“Potentially, someone could send us their tumor sample, and we could put it in our labeling system and say,  ‘Yes, that has a problem with the TTL system, and therefore you should be more aggressive with it,’” Gal says.  “Or we could say,  ‘That’s probably OK, so you can treat it with normal chemotherapy.’”

Can painkillers kill cancer cells?

While Bane and Gal focus on microtubules, Yulong Chen strives to understand the role that opioids might play in cancer therapies. His work hinges on the fact that an opioid — the key ingredient in painkillers such as morphine — can block a crucial reaction in certain cancer cells.

Chen, an assistant professor of biology at Binghamton, investigates how the transmission of chemical signals within cells turns genes on and off. Most of his research focuses on neurons, the cells that make up the nervous system. Some neurons have something interesting in common with certain cancer cells: They both carry molecules called opioid receptors that send signals into the cell when they touch opioid molecules.

In the nervous system, that signal blocks the sensation of pain. Unfortunately, the reaction also may cause side effects such as respiratory depression and constipation, and it may cause opiate addiction.

In a cancer cell, contact with an opioid may cause either of two reactions: Sometimes, an opioid kills cancer cells; sometimes, it stimulates tumor growth.

Since doctors often give opiates to cancer patients, it’s crucial to know what effect a painkiller might have on the cancer.  “If the opioid will stimulate cancer cell growth, that’s a big problem,” Chen says.

Before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2007, Chen worked in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Minnesota Medical School. There, he identified an opioid antagonist compound that kills small cell lung cancer. It does this by blocking the transmission of a signal that is crucial for cell survival.

He also found that this compound doesn’t always produce the same results. When Chen introduced the same opioid antagonist to cells taken from three different individuals with small cell lung cancer, the compound killed 20 to 30 percent of the cells in one sample, 40 to 50 percent in the second and 90 percent in the third.

The difference depended on the strength of a reaction called phosphorylation at the critical survival molecule Akt when the compound binds to a molecule at the cancer cell surface. “Our study shows that if the level of phosphorylation at Akt is high, then you block the pathway using this compound, and the cancer cell dies,” Chen says. “If the level of phosphorylation at Akt is not so high, the cell doesn’t respond well when you block it.” Different phosphorylation levels in different cancer cells from different individuals show a stronger or weaker reaction to the opioid antagonist.

“This observation,” Chen says, “also provides one more reason for personalized medicine in cancer treatment.”

Chen’s study has enhanced scientific understanding of how an opioid may kill cancer, says Kalpna Gupta, assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Minnesota. It’s significant that Chen focuses on how opioids may kill cancer cells, rather than on how they may promote cell growth, as earlier researchers have done, she says.

“This is more appropriate, from a therapeutic point of view,” says Gupta, who studies opioid-mediated cancer-cell growth.  “That is why his study is very important. It not only provides a basic understanding, but an understanding of — once the monster is there — how do we get rid of it?”

Since coming to Binghamton, Chen has been laying plans to further explore the mechanism that allows an opioid to kill cancer cells. “I still don’t know what molecule it’s targeting,” he says. His next goal is to identify the key receptor on the cancer cell. “If I can identify this molecule,”  he says,  “then I can study whether it’s valid as a target for an anti-cancer drug.”

In the long run, Chen’s research on molecular signals in neurons and his research on cancer cells may lead toward a common goal. He hopes to find an opioid that reduces pain in cancer patients, doesn’t cause side effects or addiction and kills tumors.

“If the compound that we develop to kill the cancer cells also can block drug tolerance and dependence, that will be one drug that does two things,” Chen says. “That would be wonderful.”

Susan Seibold-Simpson, clinical assistant professor in Binghamton University’s Decker School of Nursing, hopes that by learning to understand the influence of neighborhoods, nurses can help reduce a major risk that limits opportunities for girls — teen pregnancy. One of her most tantalizing findings suggests that when parents get involved in community organizations, their daughters may be less likely to become young mothers.

As a nurse practitioner in reproductive health since 1988, Seibold-Simpson has too often seen early motherhood shut doors in the faces of adolescent girls.

“Once a young woman becomes pregnant, whether it was planned or not, it appears to substantially alter her prospects of continuing in school and going to college,” said Seibold-Simpson, who still works several hours a week at a clinic near campus. The young mother often stays involved with the baby’s father, even if he makes a bad partner, limiting her chances for other, healthier relationships. And early motherhood might doom her to a life of low-paying jobs, with little time and few resources to devote to her children.

While caring for individuals, Seibold-Simpson came to realize that she also wanted to make a difference on a larger scale. And she wanted to prevent problems, not just deal with them after the fact. “What can we do at the community level,” she asked, “to make a teenager feel she has more options in life than becoming a teen mom, so she might choose to delay childbearing until she’s a little older?”

Seibold-Simpson took inspiration from social psychologist Peter Benson’s work on positive youth development, which stresses giving children assets to help them succeed. As a public health professional, she also seized on the concept of social capital, which looks at relationships among people in communities.

“A lot of the teenagers I work with come from difficult families,” Seibold-Simpson said. As mothers struggle to raise their kids, she wondered, what can the neighborhood contribute to help launch children in a positive direction?

To find answers, Seibold-Simpson examined data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a survey of about 90,000 adolescents in grades 7-12 conducted in 1994 and 1995. She chose about 2,000 girls from this sample, based on several criteria: they were sexually active; they answered survey questions about sexual activity, use of condoms and use of contraceptives; and the mother or father (usually the mother) had responded to a separate survey for parents.

For each girl, Seibold-Simpson examined the socioeconomic status of her neighborhood and family, her attitudes toward pregnancy and contraception, her reported use of condoms and contraceptives, and her parent’s level of social capital. She broke social capital into three components: parents’ norms of reciprocity (“If you saw your neighbor’s child getting into trouble, would you tell the neighbor? Would your neighbor tell you about your child?”) and network membership (“Do you belong to the PTA, a sports group, civic group, labor union or other organization?”) as well as teens’ perception of trust (“Do you know and talk to the people in your neighborhood?”).

Researchers already knew that many girls in poor neighborhoods regard early pregnancy as no great disaster, and therefore are less likely to use condoms and other contraceptives. For Seibold-Simpson, the big question was whether the right kind of neighborhood can overcome the influence of poverty.

As she analyzed the data, Seibold-Simpson was surprised to learn that reciprocity, trust and social networks don’t form a single factor called social capital. High levels of trust and high levels of network membership instead pull girls in different directions.

If women in a poor neighborhood believe that teen motherhood is fine, and they stand ready to help pregnant girls, the teens who trust those women probably will adopt the same belief. “That was not what I initially anticipated, but it does make sense,” Seibold-Simpson said. Those girls are likely to neglect contraception.

But the study showed that network membership has the opposite effect, she said. “If your parents belong to more networks, your positive attitudes toward adolescent pregnancy decrease.”

Seibold-Simpson speculates that networking does the most good when it takes parents out of their usual surroundings, exposing them to people from a variety of backgrounds.

This hypothesis is one of the most interesting aspects of Seibold-Simpson’s work, said Dianne Morrison-Beedy of the University of Rochester Medical Center’s School of Nursing. “To think that what happens with the parents, and the types of networks they have, moves down a layer in the family to impact girls and improve their health was a big find for her,” Morrison-Beedy said. “We don’t have a lot written about this.”

The notion that involving parents in community activities can help keep their daughters healthy has big implications for nurses. “Nurses understand the ins and outs of how to get into programs, how to get into networks, that parents might not have had experience with,” Morrison-Beedy said.

Seibold-Simpson is further exploring her theory of wider horizons, trying to pin down what kinds of groups exert the most helpful influence. She cautions that along with network membership, it’s also important to examine how broader issues, such as politics and economics, influence neighborhoods and adolescent girls. But she is intrigued by the notion that parents can point their daughters toward a brighter future by getting involved in community life.

“If you belong to more groups, you have a broader perspective,” she speculates. “That’s what I’m interested in following up on.”

Pamela Mischen’s research demonstrates that one program may have failed because the right people weren’t talking.

Traditional scholars of public policy trying to figure out what went wrong with a program might study the legislation behind it, or its funding. But researchers largely have ignored the dynamics inside the agencies that carry out policy, said Mischen, associate professor of public administration at Binghamton University.

That’s a mistake, she said. “Those turn out to be the most important things.”

To understand why policies fail or succeed, it’s essential to learn how people form networks within an organization, or among groups that collaborate, Mischen said. The tools she uses to explore those communication pathways come from complexity theory, a discipline that public-policy scientists haven’t called upon in the past. Mischen looks at service agencies in the same way that other scholars look at ant colonies, hurricanes or human cells.

Complexity theory examines complex systems — networks of interconnected agents that depend on one another. The agents might be ants, meteorological events or proteins. “In an organizational network, those agents are individuals,” Mischen said. In a coalition, they’re organizations. Members of a public-service network perform different tasks toward a common goal, and the work of each member affects the work of all the others.

Also, agents in a complex system share feedback that helps to shape future activity. When a school nurse notices that fewer second-graders are getting sick after their teachers launch a “wash your hands” campaign, she might urge the principal to expand that program to other grades.

Negative feedback discourages change; positive feedback spurs successful innovation, Mischen said. “Somebody is saying, ‘That really worked. I’m going to make the conditions such that you can continue to do that.’”

To learn how a new organization forms network pathways, Mischen worked with two Binghamton colleagues, Kristina Lambright, assistant professor of public administration, and Craig Laramee, assistant professor of bioengineering.

In 2007, they gave a social networking survey to 37 case workers who gathered in Binghamton for a program on self-injury among adolescents. The researchers chose this group in part because they expected that the case workers, who came from throughout Broome County, N.Y., might one day form a coalition.

The survey focused on trust and information flow. Asking each subject about his or her relationship with every other person at the meeting, it tried to determine who trusted whom and why. It also asked whom the subjects turned to for information about their work.

One surprise was that trust didn’t define how the case workers formed information networks. “We started with the assumption that the people they trust would be some of the most important people they would go to for information,” Mischen said.

Instead, the study found that people seek information from: a) the people they communicate with most, regardless of whether they trust them; b) people who have given them information before; and c) people they consider experts, leaders or the most active members of the network, assuming they have access to those people. Trust plays a role only in whether one person considers another an expert.

Among other things, the study suggests that people in an organization seek information from the same sources again and again. “Over time, we build information pathways within networks that are independent of perceived expertise,” Mischen said. “They’re probably there because they’re convenient. That doesn’t bode well for good information sharing.”

The easiest sources of information aren’t necessarily the best ones, and they don’t offer fresh insights. “This is an explanation for why a group of people may not produce good decisions. Information tends to get recycled,” Mischen said.

Mischen’s research helps her advise local organizations in her work as director of Binghamton University’s Center for Applied Community Research and Development. For instance, she is helping the Broome County Youth Bureau transform itself into a network-administering organization. In that capacity, rather than simply redistribute state funds to local organizations, the Youth Bureau will coordinate the work of local agencies and not-for-profits that serve young people.

To help promote better collaboration, the Youth Bureau is conducting a social network analysis of local agencies. “We want to know how networks are communicating,” said Beth Roberts, the Youth Bureau’s executive director. “Once we know that, we can see where the potential challenges, gaps and barriers are.” It’s important to know, for example, whether employees at all the agencies know about the full range of youth recreation programs available in the county, so they can refer young people to the programs that will serve them best.

“Pam’s work in the center has really influenced how the Youth Bureau looks at its mission, and how we are implementing programs in the community,” Roberts said. “We’re looking at things through a different lens.”

Political thinkers through the years have debated the economic role of Jews. Yet Jews who study Jewish history have long avoided the subject of economics.

“These historians didn’t want to contribute to the stereotype, to the negative image of Jews as merchants or Jews as Shylocks,” Karp said.

Examining writings on politics and economics published throughout the period, Karp’s new book traces evolving ideas about Jews’ traditional functions in the economy and, based on those functions, what rights they should have in society.

Karp said he focused on the years 1638 to 1848 because that period marks an important transition in thought about the economic roles of Jews. “At the beginning,” he said, “writers and debaters were saying, ‘Sure, bring the Jews in. Let them do their magic. They neither want, nor will we give them, any political rights.’ Jews were a safe bet as long as they remained non-citizens.”

But the French Revolution changed the rules. Under the new order, in many countries, a person who followed local customs and pledged loyalty to the state could become a citizen. In theory, Jews could gain political rights, but not if they still stood apart as a merchant class.

“The fact that Jews were anomalous in their occupations was a serious obstacle, in the minds of many statesmen and philosophers, to their acculturation, or their subordination to the discipline of citizenship,” Karp said. Society faced a dilemma: “Either we have to kick them out, or we have to transform them and reform them, so that they’ll no longer be a commercial people.”

That dilemma lasted well beyond the period of the book — in fact, until the Holocaust. The debate points to the fact that anti-Semitism didn’t spring only from religious prejudice or distaste for moneylenders, Karp said. It also grew out of ambivalence toward capitalism.

Because Jews gravitated to commerce, and because people weren’t sure whether commerce was a good or bad force, even when Jews seemed to assimilate, people weren’t sure they could trust them. “They’d say, ‘Aha! They are behaving as Jews, because they are behaving commercially. These people may share our language and culture, but their predominance in commerce shows that they have their own agenda, that they are a fifth column.’”

It did not occur to people who thought this way, Karp said, that Jews’ commercial orientation was the result of centuries of habituation and restriction. For this reason, the focus on traditional roles and stereotypes also makes Jewish economics a perilous area for scholarship today.

“It’s very tricky to talk about the subject objectively, without giving perceived ammunition to anti-Semitism,” said Karp, who is delving further into historical thought on Jewish economics this academic year as a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.  “That’s why it’s such an explosive topic.”

Much of the new information used by PAF’s archaeologists has resulted from cultural resource management investigations for economic development projects across New York.

Culling valuable data from ancient objects — stone tools, broken pottery, a few seeds, the remains of a hearth — archaeologists piece together a tableau of people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. “You take the data you have, you apply analytical techniques and then you weave the results into an interpretive story,” said Nina Versaggi, PAF director.

As PAF personnel discover new sites and apply more powerful analytical techniques, their interpretations of ancient diet, community organization, division of labor and group dynamics become more complex. However, these interpretations are not static. “Somebody 20 years from now will be able to re-analyze the same data with new analytical tools and add to the story,” Versaggi said.

For now, though, based on the work of the PAF, the story that is beginning to emerge about life before Europeans arrived in the region is more detailed and more complex than any version archaeologists subscribed to in the past.

Chronological sequences are one example. For a long time, Versaggi explained, archaeologists maintained that changes in prehistoric technology (tools and how they were made), “foodways,” or means of accruing sustenance (foraging vs. farming) and settlement patterns (seasonal movements vs. year-round villages) occurred at the same time everywhere across the region. Traditional chronological models stated that people changed the shape of their hunting tools or projectile points, replaced stone bowls with clay pots and began to plant domesticated species of maize, beans and squash according to an established temporal framework.

Archaeologists in the early to middle 20th century based these chronologies on data collected from a small number of deep, well-stratified sites. “Researchers accepted these chronologies as fact and adhered to them for decades,” Versaggi said. “They were used by us, and they’re still used by archaeologists today. They’re not invalid. But they tend to hide a wealth of variability that could be related to cultural and ethnic differences among prehistoric peoples.”

New analytical techniques have assisted the process of discovery and interpretation. For example, a new method of radiometric dating, Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS), has become more accessible and affordable, allowing the facility’s teams to obtain a greater sample of dates from a larger number of sites than archaeologists did in the past. Sometimes, these new dates show that sites with certain artifact types do not agree with the traditional chronologies. This suggests that the boundaries between cultural periods aren’t as precise as scientists once thought. “We’re finding there are regional differences, and we’re finding these may be related to cultural differences,” Versaggi said.

PAF’s teams are not the only archaeologists to propose that regional variations in cultural material and sites are important to our understanding of the social aspects of prehistory. But they stand at the forefront of the movement to reassess the traditional, one-size-fits-all chronology and the interpretations that result from this framework.

“Because of the dynamic exchange of ideas between the Anthropology Department’s faculty and students, and PAF’s researchers, I think we probably were more open to a lot of these revisions and new interpretations,” Versaggi said. “As we continue to present and publish our findings, other researchers may use our results to justify and support the patterns they are finding. They’re linking into what we’re doing, either to enhance our models, or maybe to advance new models of their own.”

Assistant Professor Aruna D’Souza was awarded a highly competitive Clark Fellowship for research in Spring 2008 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. D’Souza will work at the Clark on her new book, Open Secrets: Intimacy between Public and Private in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Research on one of the chapters of this book, “Strange Bedfellows: Vallotton, Marriage, and the Dreyfus Affair,” is also being supported by a Library Research Grant from The Getty Research Center in Los Angeles.

In its first year of operation, the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program has awarded Associate Professor Tom McDonough a major grant. The award will support McDonough’s project, “Inhabiting Authoritarianism: Students and the Iranian Pavilion in Paris, 1961-79, ” which is in collaboration with the artist Nancy Davenport. The project will focus on the production of a “biography” of the modernist pavilion designed by Claude Parent during a tumultuous period in French and Iranian history.

Also, the Metropolitan Museum has awarded Professor John Tagg the J. Clawson Mills Art History Fellowship for research at the Museum in the Department of Photographs. The Fellowship is the Metropolitan Museum’s only award for senior art historians, and Professor Tagg will use it to develop his study: “Politics and Meaning on the Eve of Revolution: Walker Evans’s Photographs for The Crime of Cuba.”

The faculty of the Department of Art History at Binghamton University has built up an extraordinary record of success in winning external recognition, external funding and prestigious external awards. Current faculty have held major fellowships from the major sponsors of advanced research in the discipline, including the American Institute for Yemeni Studies, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the Fulbright Research Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.

Howard Wang and C.J. Zhong have joined the ranks of Binghamton University researchers trying to build toward commercial success. Wang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, has worked to perfect electronic inks, infused with nanomaterials, that could find their way into wallpaper computer screens or clothes that regulate body temperature. Zhong, an associate professor of chemistry, has developed nanoparticle-based sensor arrays that could someday monitor air for noxious chemicals, or check diabetics’ sugar levels without drawing blood.

Both recently started firms to bring their discoveries to market, and both new companies are getting a boost in Binghamton University’s Start-Up Suite.

Housed in the Innovative Technologies Complex, the Start-Up Suite offers fledgling companies low-cost office space, a state-of-the-art conference room, access to high-speed printers, copiers and other business equipment and a receptionist. Companies that occupy the Suite must have their roots in technology developed at the University and work in areas directly related to the life sciences.

Wang, vice president and chief scientific officer of NanoMas, founded the company in January with fellow researchers ZhihaoYang, president and chief technology officer, and Tom Xu, vice president and chief operating officer. The firm moved into the suite this fall, when Wang came to Binghamton from Michigan Technological University. His partners also are moving to Binghamton, soon to be joined by Sonny Zhang, director of business development.

The NanoMas team has developed efficient, cost-effective processes for manufacturing electronic inks made of silver and zine oxide nanoparticles suspended in liquid. The inks serve as conductors and semiconductors. Printing them onto thin, flexible substrate, manufacturers can mass produce circuitry much as a printing press cranks out newspaper sheets.

Along with paper-thin video screens and clothing that heats and cools as needed, these light, flexible electronics could form the basis for environmental sensors. They could also enable a new, less-expensive generation of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, which manufacturers will embed in product packaging to help retailers manage inventory.

The urge to don the entrepreneur’s hat isn’t new to Wang and his colleagues: they’ve talked about founding a company for years, Wang said. “But we didn’t get excited enough to say, ‘If we don’t do it, it’s going to be too late.'”

Today, though, manufacturers that are developing machines to print electronic circuitry in high volume are getting ready to bring their products to market, probably by 2008. Once they do, demand for electronic inks will surge. So, for Wang and his colleagues, now is the time to make a move.

“We had our technology pretty much figured out,” Wang said. “We had to get out early and let people know they could test on our materials.”

Although many researchers are working on electronic inks, NanoMas’s nanoparticles are ideally suited to that application, Wang said. “For performance, smaller is definitely better, but smaller also means more unstable-difficult to make as well as difficult to use.” NanoMas has struck a balance between small and stable.

The researchers have also figured out how to control manufacturing costs so they can price their products attractively. “We invented an approach that is similar to making fertilizer or plastics, a large-scale wet chemistry approach, which can be scaled up,” Wang said.

Unlike Wang, Zhong only recently started to think about forming a business. Not that he hasn’t been keeping an eye on commercial applications for his work on nanotechnology. “The first question you want to ask in any research is, ‘Why is this interesting?'” he said. “Then the next question is, ‘Does it make money? What is the application?'”

Zhong’s research has produced several patents, and he has licensed some of those discoveries to industry. In the past, he and post-doctoral senior research associate Jin Luo sometimes talked about whether they should stick with that approach or try creating products on their own.

Then, the created the NSC Technology. Early this year, the Company obtained a $100,000 Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) feasibility study grant from the U.S Air Force to develop air quality sensors for aircraft cockpits.

That initial funding, plus an invitation to apply for a $750,000 Phase II SBIR grant to turn the prototype sensors into products, provided the spark for NSC Technology. Zhong and Luo founded the company in late 2005; Luo serves as its CEO.

NSC Technology takes advantage of the fact that nanomaterials react more sensitively to the presence of chemicals than the same materials at larger scale. Zhong’s lab has created chips containing nanoparticles of different metals and metal oxides, each of which emits an electronic signal when it comes in contact with a specific chemical.

Most sensors on the market today are designed to detect only one chemical at a time, Zhong said. But since people may need to monitor numerous substances in the air, these sensors aren’t as useful as they might be. “We believe we can design sensors that simultaneously target multiple chemicals,” he said.

Zhong collaborates with Susan Lu, assistant professor of systems science and industrial engineering, to package the chips in handheld devices with software to interpret the electronic signals, alerting the user to the presence of the target chemicals. A similar approach could produce a sensor that checks the breath of a diabetic person for acetone, a biomarker that indicates the level of glucose in the blood, Zhong said.

NSC Technology is also working with metals and alloys on the nanoscale to develop more durable, less expensive catalysts for use in fuel cells.

The market potential for both the sensors and the catalysts is strong, Zhong said. “People are concerned about the air they breathe. People worry about their future energy sources. I think we’re in the right business.”

In a short two-month period since NSC Technology presented its business vision and model in UNYTECH06 (Universities of Upstate New York Venture Forum 2006), it has been contacted by a number of investors. Discussions are underway to partner with economic development groups and service providers who have a vested interest in the entrepreneurial climate of Upstate New York.

While Wang and Zhong are the first pioneers to occupy the Start-up Suite, the possibility of moving into a well-appointed office environment, rather than searching for quality space off campus, is encouraging more faculty to enter the commercial world, said Eugene Krentsel, the University’s director of technology transfer and innovative partnerships.

If NanoMas were starting out on its own, it would have to settle for low-rent accommodations. “We probably would be in a garage,” Wang said. Instead, he and his partners have the space and technology they need to court potential investors, such as the venture capitalists from India, Shanghai and Silicon Valley who recently joined in a single conference call conducted from the Suite.

When faculty researchers decide to explore the commercial world, “we’re here to provide the services and facilities and advice they need to do that,” Krentsel said. Available services include help finding potential investors, dealing with intellectual property issues and scouting for space in the community when the time comes to expand. NanoMas worked with Terrence Kane, the University’s associate director of economic development and outreach, to locate the off-campus space where the company will soon set up a manufacturing facility.

With several other applications pending, the Start-up Suite is likely to fill in a couple of years, Krentsel said. “That’s much faster than anybody anticipated when we were designing this facility. University faculty have been developing companies in the last year at a greatly accelerated rate.”

Lesperance joined the faculty at the Watson School in 2004 and also serves as clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at SUNY-Upstate Medical University’s Binghamton Clinical Campus. Along with her M.D., she holds a Ph.D. in medical engineering. She has served as a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and is an editor with Harvard Health Publications/InteliHealth.com. Her current research interests include health care quality and type 2 diabetes.

Unlike patients with type 1 diabetes, many with type 2 do produce insulin, the hormone required to process sugar. But type 2 patients don’t use their insulin effectively. As a result, their cells may become starved for energy, and the buildup of unused glucose over time may damage the eyes, kidneys, nerves and heart.

Together with Ken McLeod, chair of the bioengineering department, and graduate student Anna Spektor, Lesperance is trying to learn whether a device called the Juvent 1000cs can help lower the risk for type 2 diabetes, particularly among people who live sedentary lives. Developed by Juvent, Inc. of Somerset, N.J., the Juvent 1000cs looks something like a bathroom scale. A plate on its surface vibrates at a frequency of 45 Hz. When a subject rests his or her feet on the plate, the vibrations stimulate receptors in the feet, which in turn send signals to the calves, causing the muscles to contract.

It already has been demonstrated that the vibrating plate can help improve cardiovascular function. “The theory is that it’s stimulating your muscles, doing things as if you were standing up and moving around,” said Lesperance. The success of these earlier experiments has led researchers to wonder if the vibrations could take the place of exercise to improve other health factors as well. “And a natural extension of that was to think about diabetes, because we know that exercise improves our blood sugar control.”

Starting in the fall of 2004, Lesperance and her team have recruited women-none of whom have been diagnosed with diabetes-to take two oral glucose tolerance tests. After drinking the glucose solution, the women spend three hours with their feet on a Juvent 1000cs, once with the vibration turned on and once with it turned off.

A tiny, catheter-like sensor, inserted under each subject’s skin, monitors the level of glucose in the blood during both three-hour tests. “We see how high it goes” after the subject drinks the solution “and how fast it goes down,” Lesperance said.

Results from the tests, scheduled to wrap up by June, look encouraging. In at least some of the subjects, “the stimulation is showing a positive effect,” Lesperance said. “I can’t draw any statistically-relevant conclusions at this point, but we’re getting data that suggests that there is some clinical effect to this device on the utilization of glucose by the body.”

Juvent has provided ongoing support to this project. It will also match dollar-for-dollar a $537,000 grant that McLeod received this year from the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR) for further work with the Juvent 1000cs.

That research is still in the planning stage, but Lesperance hopes to use several additional techniques to further examine how micromechanical stimulation affects glucose uptake. One proposal is for a long-term study in which subjects would use the vibrating plate during the workday for six months. Researchers would periodically measure a substance called hemoglobin A1C, which reflects the level of sugar in the blood over the previous two to three months.

The team also wants to explore the immediate effects of the vibrating plate, using a positron emission tomography (PET) scan to see how much the calf muscle absorbs a labeled glucose molecule. “We were thinking that we would do one leg on [the device] and one leg off and see if you could see the difference,” Lesperance said. She has talked with a physician at United Health Services in Binghamton about possibly using that institution’s PET scan equipment.

Another proposal is to use equipment at the University Hospital of the State University of New York in Syracuse to conduct a procedure called a euglycemic insulin clamp. This technique allows researchers to control precisely the levels of insulin and sugar in the bloodstream, eliminating any extraneous factors that might affect test results. “We might be able to work out a test where we can learn even more about what’s happening to the whole body glucose uptake during the use of this device,” Lesperance said.

Since exercise improves a whole range of health factors, the Juvent 1000cs might help prevent other medical conditions as well, Lesperance said. Examples are blood clots in the leg, a hazard that afflicts airline travelers, and osteoporosis.

Clearly, the vibrating plate has effects throughout the body, Lesperance said. “The question is going to be, what’s the mechanism, and how do you maximize it?”

“Now, it’s ‘What can we provide access to?'” Meador said. While, to some extent, providing access still means building collections, it also means subscribing to electronic publications and databases and developing efficient ways to share resources with other libraries.

BU’s Libraries-the Glenn G. Bartle Library and the Science Library-own more than 2.3 million volumes plus hundreds of thousands of other items, such as CD-ROMs, government documents, microforms, sound recordings and maps. The library system continues to vie with other institutions for unique materials to enrich its special collections. At the same time, Meador said, BU’s Libraries are following a new trend, cooperating to make information available more easily. “There is more collaboration among research libraries than ever, as we try to share existing print resources and find ways to capture digital resources,” he said.

In particular, the University Libraries are increasing their collaboration with other libraries in the State University of New York system, Meador said. For example, “we have a courier service now among all SUNY libraries that allows us to get a book for you within a couple of days.” With this service crisscrossing the state, SUNY librarians have started to discuss whether they all need to buy the same books. Perhaps, instead, each should concentrate on certain aspects of a discipline, relying on their collective resources to cover the entire field, he said.

SUNY’s libraries have all used the same software to develop their electronic catalogs. Now they’re working toward a unified catalog system, which would let researchers find materials housed on any SUNY campus with a single search, said Frank Mols, the BU Libraries’ associate director for technical services and budget.

Also, “we’re discussing a way that all of SUNY can participate in a digital repository for materials being generated now on campus that were ‘born’ digital,” Meador said. These include all student dissertations and a great deal of faculty research. “We’re trying to figure a way for libraries to help faculty and students by storing and cataloging digital information the way we have historically done with print,” making this material, from campuses across New York, instantly available on line, he said.

The emergence of electronic journals has also spurred opportunities to collaborate, and it has helped make information more accessible to researchers at BU. A five-year agreement now in place between the SUNY system and Elsevier Press gives students and faculty at all SUNY campuses online access to Elsevier’s 1,800 science and technology journals through the publisher’s ScienceDirect service. Leveraging the buying power of the state university system reduces BU’s costs, and it allows the BU Libraries to offer titles they stopped taking in print in the early 1990s due to budget constraints.

When those title reappeared as part of the package, that came as good news for scholars at BU, Mols said. “People needed those things and did without them for a few years. Now they’ve come back electronically, and the usage statistics are there to support that we should have had them.”

Publishers of science and technology journals have embraced electronic publishing sooner than their counterparts in humanities and the arts, Meador said. “But it’s a no-brainer that eventually every journal will become digitally available, exclusively, and if you want a print copy, you’ll probably have to print it yourself.” Libraries will no longer have to bind journals or make shelf space for them, and researchers won’t have to wait months for publishers to print and mail the latest issues, he said.

Today, though, a library is still a paper-intensive enterprise. The more BU’s collection grows, the more creative library officials must become about managing their physical assets. In 1999, the Libraries opened the Library Annex@Conklin in a converted warehouse ten miles east of the main campus. This facility houses about 300,000 volumes, mostly bound journals published before 1980 and selected monographs that are not often used.

The Libraries moved these materials off campus because “we were out of shelf space,” Mols said. “To create space to put up more stacks meant taking seating away, and there’s only so much you can do of that and still provide an effective study area.”

“We have many volumes out there, but the key is, they’re accessible,” said Caryl Ward, the Libraries’ head of acquisitions.  The facility is staffed and can support research on the premises, all of which is in keeping with a general trend that Meador said he has observed: “a shift in libraries toward the user of the materials being empowered.” Libraries have evolved a great deal since the days of closed stacks, he said. Back then, when if a patron needed a book, he or she used a slip of paper to request it and a runner retrieved it.

Even when electronic databases emerged, researchers didn’t search them on their own, Mols said. “It used to be that every search was a mediated search. The faculty member had to come in and sit with the librarian to search Dialog or another database. And what they paid in connect time was outrageous.”

Now, users locate books themselves and may also check them out on self-service machines; they request interlibrary loans on line; they search electronic databases and read electronic journals; they receive articles via e-mail. Today, “librarians are facilitating the self-help of users,” Meador said.

Nevertheless, “one of our most valuable resources, which has been cited in some of our surveys, is being able to come in and work with a librarian one on one,” Mols said. Subject area specialists at the BU Libraries work closely with faculty researchers, sometimes even co-teaching courses with them, he said. Despite the trend toward greater autonomy in research, the option of personal contact “is still there and still valued.”

Heat poses a puzzle for engineers who are working to replace the lead-based solders widely used in electronics today with more environmentally friendly materials. The problem arises during a manufacturing step called reflow, which sends an electronic assembly through an oven in order to melt the solder paste that holds components to the board. As it cools again, the solder hardens, forming permanent joints.

For many years, engineers have designed electronic components to endure reflow temperatures above 183 degrees C, the melting point of tin-lead solders. But the most promising lead-free solders melt at temperatures at least 20 degrees C higher than that, said Daryl Santos, associate professor of systems science and industrial engineering at Binghamton University’s Watson School of Engineering.

“There’s a concern about what happens with some of these expensive components on the board if they see temperature heights that they weren’t originally designed for,” Santos said. “We want to protect those components,” while still allowing the solder paste at the interface between their leads or connectors and the circuit board to reach melting point.

Cookson Electronics, a manufacturer based in Providence, R.I., has enlisted Santos and his graduate students to help create a device to protect sensitive electronic components during reflow. Alan Rae, former vice president of technology at Cookson, has proposed developing a “thermal cap” to fit over and protect each of the electronic components on a board.

“As the component goes through the reflow oven, the solder joints around the perimeter will still reach those high temperatures,” Santos said. But the thermal cap will shield the component itself from the extreme heat.

In two related projects, with combined funding of $77,250, Santos and his graduate research team are experimenting with different designs and materials that might be used to create thermal caps.

A successful cap would function like the radiator that carries heat away from a car’s engine, Santos said. And like a radiator, a thermal cap might use water to help control temperature, since materials that hold water seem to be good candidates for the caps.

“I’m not talking about a sponge,” he said, but rather a substance that behaves like plaster of Paris, which is mixed with water to make a mold and retains some of that liquid as it hardens. The trapped water “will really absorb a lot of the heat. Or, at least, that’s the idea.”

Santos and his team test the caps by using a series of thermocouples attached to a temperature recorder to gauge the temperature at different points on a board as it passes through the reflow oven. They are also testing caps of different shapes and sizes.

The work, so far, has yielded both successes and failures, Santos said.

“But overall it’s a successful idea that’s going to come to fruition and be marketable for the company.”

Companies must find ways to accommodate new solders so they can continue to compete in key markets, such as Japan and the European Union, that are requiring manufacturers to get the lead out of electronics. The work Santos is conducting for Cookson complements another of his projects that also explores the challenges that lead-free solders present. This one has gained $360,000 in support from the National Science Foundation under its Grant Opportunities for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) program. The grant runs through August 2005.

Santos is collaborating on the project with Eric Cotts, professor of physics and co-director of BU’s materials science program, and Peter Borgesen, a project manager at Universal Instruments in Binghamton. The goal is to identify potential substitutes for traditional tin-lead solders.

Santos and his research team are building test assemblies, following standard manufacturing procedures but using solders that combine tin, silver and copper in different proportions. The materials that compose these solders are known as SAC alloys, for the chemical symbols that represent their component elements-Sn, Ag and Cu.

Cotts and his team subject these assemblies to accelerated aging studies, running them through extremes of heat, cold and humidity to see how they endure the stress.

Borgesen lends the project his company’s expertise and has provided products on which the BU researchers can run experiments.

Results of the tests so far are encouraging, Santos said.

“We’re showing certain types of reliability tests where the lead-free solders are not appreciably different from the lead-based solders,” he said.

“It does look like the SAC alloys are going to be working, and we’re going to be using them as replacements for tin-lead.”

Actually, hypnosis is not like that at all, said Steven Lynn, professor of psychology at Binghamton University, who has devoted much of his career to establishing a clear, scientific understanding of hypnotic suggestion. A person who responds well to hypnosis takes an active rather than a passive role, working in partnership with the hypnotist. “Hypnosis involves the participant thinking and imagining along with whatever is suggested, in an expectant manner,” he said.

Hypnosis can serve as a valuable adjunct to certain kinds of psychotherapy, Lynn said. But not everyone responds to it equally well.

In some of his latest work, Lynn tries to pinpoint what makes certain people especially good hypnotic subjects and determine if it’s possible to raise others to their level. One project, supported by a $376,000 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, explores the idea that the ability to respond to hypnotic suggestions “can be changed and enhanced when participants are instructed,” Lynn said. Janet Ambrogne, assistant professor in BU’s Decker School of Nursing, is working on this study along with Lynn and his graduate students.

The research team tests subjects to determine how well each responds to hypnotic suggestions. Then researchers provide information about how hypnosis works, trying to eliminate the subject’s misconceptions-for example, that people under hypnosis are gullible and easily led. “We try to encourage them to use their imaginations, rather than to passively respond to the suggestions, and to actively immerse themselves in the experience of whatever is suggested,” Lynn said. Researchers also teach subjects how to interpret hypnotic suggestions, so that a misunderstanding won’t lead to an inappropriate response.
Two years into the three-year project, the research indicates that instruction does indeed help people respond better to hypnotic suggestions. By speaking with subjects and letting them watch how others perform under hypnosis, “we can get at least half of initially low-hypnotizable subjects to test as high hypnotizing subjects,” Lynn said. The team still needs to figure out, though, which elements of the training do the trick. “Is it telling people they should make an active response? Is it the imagination part of it, when we ask people to vividly imagine what we’ve been suggesting? We don’t know what components are responsible for the effectiveness.”

Lynn will also investigate the malleability of hypnotic response in a new study of “mindfulness”-the ability to stay non-judgmentally aware of one’s fluctuating thoughts and feelings. “Many psychotherapies are now recognizing that people try to suppress or conceal feelings,” but the more they try to push away unwelcome mental experiences, the more those experiences come back to trouble them, Lynn said. By learning to observe and accept whatever flows through their minds, “individuals can come to desensitize themselves to unsettling thoughts and feelings.”

Lynn and his graduate students are working to develop scales that measure a person’s aptitude for mindfulness and see how one’s ranking on those scales correlates to other traits. “Initial results suggest that the ability to be mindful is associated with a variety of positive characteristics, such as positive self esteem and the ability to be absorbed in different experiences, from watching a sunset to reading novels,” he said.

Along with other traits, they want to determine if mindfulness correlates to strong hypnotic response. “If we had scales where we could pre-select people who tend to be mindful, and contrast them with people who in everyday life tend to not be especially mindful, we could see whether, for example, there were differences in the way they responded to hypnotic suggestions,” Lynn said. “Or we could ask the question, ‘Would combining a hypnotic induction with suggestions to be mindful increase people’s suggestibility?'”

If the researchers can figure out what sort of instruction or encouragement helps subjects gain greater benefit from hypnosis, this knowledge could help therapists put hypnosis to better use for clients who want to manage anxiety, lose weight or make other positive changes.
It might also settle certain theoretical controversies. Along with the general public, some schools of psychologists also contend that hypnosis is a state apart from ordinary consciousness, Lynn said. In their research, he and his team “try to consistently debunk that position and show that the same variables that account for non-hypnotic behaviors and experiences account for hypnotic behaviors and experiences.”

“My way of thinking,” Lynn said, “is that hypnotic responsiveness is associated with attitudes, beliefs, expectancies, motivation, using your imagination and the kinds of strategies people use.” If he is correct, and if therapists can help subjects fine-tune those variables, that could increase the value of hypnosis as a therapeutic tool.

“Our research has shown that in many cases, consumers simply react to whatever information is put in front of them,” said Subimal Chatterjee, associate professor of marketing in Binghamton University’s School of Management.

Shoppers often approach buying decisions without strong preferences, Chatterjee said. “The environment, or what we call the context, surrounding the consumer is what ultimately drives the consumer’s preferences.” Context might include the variety of brands on display, the way items are placed, the range of prices available, a friend standing by with advice or a host of other factors.

Despite the resources poured into surveys and focus groups, the influence of context makes it hard to predict what consumers will buy, Chatterjee said. But it also offers opportunities to shape consumer choice. Marketers who understand context effects can turn certain elements on or off to steer shoppers toward the products they want to sell.

“My research focuses on the more descriptive aspects of consumer decision-making,” Chatterjee said. In one recent project, he and Timothy Heath of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio used laboratory experiments to explore how people make decisions that involve risk. Their goal was to improve upon prevailing theories, finding a more accurate way to predict when people will or won’t embrace uncertainty.

In one experiment, subjects were asked if they would rather receive $5 or take a one-in-one thousand chance of winning $5,000. Most subjects chose to gamble. One popular theory, called prospect theory, suggests people do this because they “overweight” the small probability of winning.

To test this explanation, Chatterjee and Heath offered another set of subjects the choice between $500 or a one-in-one thousand chance of winning $500,000. “If the prospect theory’s interpretation is correct, they would still overweight one-in-one thousand and go for the riskier alternative,” Chatterjee said. But most people in this group chose the $500.

When subjects explained their choices, members of the first group said that $5 is “a pittance”-too small a sum to dissuade them from trying for a higher reward. But $500 is “a lot of money”-enough to persuade the second group to accept a sure gain rather than gamble on a jackpot.

Working phrases such as “pittance” and “a lot of money” into a rule is difficult, but such expressions are more useful than the old mathematical formulas for explaining as well as predicting behavior in this kind of situation, Chatterjee said. And these descriptions can be useful to people who market products that involve risk, such as lottery tickets and insurance. Chatterjee says it is still not clear whether most people buy lottery tickets because they overweight the small probability of winning or because they think that the price of the ticket is a pittance to pay for the joy they get from dreaming of what they would do with untold riches. It’s also possible that this isn’t an either-or matter. It’s very possible that one perspective is more true for some people, while the other is more important to others. Both perceptions quite possible simultaneously factor into decisions made by a third group of lottery players, Chatterjee said.

Along with information gained in experiments in the lab, Chatterjee is starting to exploit the wealth of data that supermarkets capture when they scan bar codes and swipe shoppers’ loyalty cards. Studying data on purchases of staple products over eight years, Chatterjee and Heath are testing whether a discount steers shoppers in a particular direction. In lab experiments, they have found that national brands of orange juice benefit from discounts more when they dominate a store’s own lower-priced brand. Now they want to see if the same pattern holds in the real marketplace.

“When a national brand is discounted, did we see a sudden spike in their market share?” Chatterjee asked. “Preliminary results show that it makes a huge difference. Deep discounts of national brands, when they create such dominance effects, help those national brands more as compared to discounts that do not create dominance.”

Real-world data is also helping Chatterjee explore the economics of movie sequels. Films succeed when they exceed expectations, he explained. When a studio follows “The Matrix,” for instance, with “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions,” audiences expect more gratification with each film, making success even harder to attain. To keep attracting crowds, movies in a series must get better with each release. However, Chatterjee said, “if you believe in the regression to the mean, then successes and failures should converge to the mean quality of the Matrix franchise.”

“Studio managers are very smart people. So the reason they make these sequels must be that they have figured out some way of beating the so-called regression to the mean argument,” Chatterjee said. Together with Suman Basuroy of the State University of New York at Buffalo and S. Abraham Ravid of Rutgers University, Chatterjee has assembled a database on more than 500 movies, with information on box office receipts, distribution, production budgets, positive and negative reviews and more. The goal is to define the characteristics of sequels that make money and sequels that don’t.

“Perhaps there is no point in thinking in terms of a mean quality level. Perhaps when studios make the sequel, they make a deliberate decision to be even more lavish” than in the first movie, Chatterjee said. An earlier collaboration between Chatterjee, Basuroy and Ravid showed that a large budget and popular stars often blunt the effects of bad reviews. Could those factors also work in favor of a sequel, no matter its quality? “We’re trying to gather the data, but our initial hypothesis is that successful sequels keep exceeding expectations” with ever-bigger budgets and stars.

Whether the data support that hypothesis or point to a different explanation, Chatterjee welcomes the results. “It’s nice when your theories are supported, but it’s even nicer when they’re not, because then you know that the problem is more rich than you thought,” he said. “Whenever I get into my research, I try to keep as open a mind as possible. And I love these surprises.”

An assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science, Ackler came to Binghamton University in August 2003. Together with mechanical engineer Timothy Singler, Ackler is beginning a project to develop a micro-scale cell analysis device. The project builds upon Ackler’s earlier work, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, on a device to separate and identify cells in a fluid.

Ackler and Singler are talking with oncologists at Philadelphia’s Fox Chase Cancer Center and Thomas Jefferson Medical College “about developing sensors to detect small numbers of cancer cells in blood,” Ackler said. “These could be used for very early detection of cancer or monitoring patients after cancer treatment.”

The device relies on the fact that certain fluorescent chemicals can be bound to antibodies, and specific antibodies bind to specific cancer cells. “The oncologists have determined that, for at least one particular colorectal cancer, there are cells that have a very specific protein on their membrane surface,” Ackler said. Adding the right fluorophor to a blood sample “tags” the cells to which this antibody clings. “After the cells are tagged, you run the blood through a device that will excite them with light that causes the fluorescent molecules to glow,” he said. When a photo detector registers a set of glowing molecules, that identifies a cancer cell.

A portable system based on this technology would make it possible to diagnose a patient for cancer soon after taking a blood sample. “You can get results faster than if you had to take it out to a lab,” Ackler said.

Much of the fundamental technology needed for this device is already known. “The problem is integrating a variety of different functions into one device and one system, so it will enable you to process enough blood” to find very small numbers of cancer cells. The channel through which the blood passes is so small, one microsensor can process only minute volumes. Ackler and his partners are trying to create an array of sensors, “so you can run larger volumes of blood through in a reasonable time.”

The sensor array will be packaged in a system that also contains a mechanism for delivering blood to the microfluidic chips, plus electronics for controlling the process and processing data from the sensors. “It’s very much an interdisciplinary effort,” Ackler observed.

The principle of diagnosis on the spot also applies to another project on Ackler’s agenda. Together with electrical engineer Qing Wu, chemist Wayne Jones and environmental scientists Joe Graney and Siddartha Mitra, Ackler has applied to the National Science Foundation for a grant to develop a chemical sensor for environmental applications. Scientists could use the sensor to monitor water for heavy metals, transitional metals, endocrine-disrupting chemicals and other pollutants.

One technique the partners might employ takes advantage of fluorescent polymers that grow more intense in color when they come in contact with metal ions. Specific polymers react to specific ions. A waveguide coated with one of these polymers will direct light at water as it is pumped through the sensor. If the polymer changes intensity, a photodetector registers that fact, indicating that the water contains the metal in question.

Today, environmentalists generally monitor streams and wells by testing water in the lab. “That means they have people out in the field, collecting samples all over the place, all the time, and bringing them back. The costs of doing that are very high,” Ackler said. A device containing an array of microsensors, each testing for a different pollutant, could sit in the water, take measurements and periodically transmit data back to the lab via a wireless network.

One major challenge in developing micro-scale devices is figuring how to build them. Engineers working in this field borrow techniques from microelectronics but must adapt them for three-dimensional fabrication. Then they have to refine their techniques to make them robust enough for commercial production. “If it takes a PhD to make the device, it’s not a very good process,” Ackler said.

Another challenge is getting multiple microdevices to work with one another, and with other components, in a system built for use in the real world. When developing a microdevice, it’s important to consider from the start how it will be packaged, Ackler said. “If you don’t, you end up with a chip you can’t work with.” Ackler is lending his expertise in this area to BU’s Small Scale Systems Packaging Center, which works with other Centers of Advanced Technology throughout New York to incorporate micro- and nanoscale devices into integrated systems.

“Most academics are concerned with just the chip, which is fine, because it’s very challenging,” Ackler said. “But someone’s got to think about how to put those chips into an operating system.”