A new exhibit on display at the Center of Excellence Building highlights the artistic elements of scientific research at Binghamton University.

The seventh-annual Art of Science competition received 56 entries, says Martha Terry, creative services manager in the Office of Research Advancement and coordinator of the contest. She selected 11 images for the new show, which will remain in the COE Atrium through early 2024.

“I was impressed once again with the range of entries we saw in this year’s competition,” Terry says. “Researchers in the life sciences continue to capture such stunning images with microscopes, and we also have a number of extremely talented photographers on campus.”

Members of the campus community submitted images in two categories: The World Around Us, in which the subject is visible to the naked eye; and Visualizing the Unseen, captured with the use of optics that extend beyond what the eye can see.

The top prize, Best in Show and First Place in The World Around Us, went to Jessica Fridrich, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering. Her entry, titled “Celestial Cotton Candy,” featured violent weather in the Southwest. “Monsoons can be dangerous and destructive as well as awe inspiring and outright beautiful,” she wrote in her entry. “I am a researcher. My job is to look for new problems and open people’s eyes. My photography does the same as I search for new compositions and ways to portray remote places.”

Second Place in that category went to Pavel Masek, assistant professor of biological sciences, for an image he captured with his cell phone at home. The striking photograph shows two fruit flies harvesting nectar from a bee that was killed by a spider.

Third Place honors went to master’s student Olivia Lopez for an image titled “A Queen is Born.” “A queen bee has found her first drone to mate with on her nuptial flight,” she wrote in her entry. “A rare sight to see outside of a human-kept hive, this pair was on a twig on the ground of the campus Nature Preserve main trail, and safely relocated.”

Ling Wang, a lecturer in biomedical engineering, took home top prize in the Visualizing the Unseen category for an image and 3D rendering of breast cancer cells.
Second Place went to an image titled “Hippocampus Blues” submitted by Meredith Gamble, a doctoral candidate in psychology. Third Place went to “Mr. Wrinkle’s Sad Smile,” entered by Ash Spina, a doctoral candidate in biomedical engineering.

This year’s judges were Evan Henderson, creative marketing specialist, Harpur College of Arts and Sciences; Jeffrey Mativetsky, associate professor of physics, applied physics and astronomy and director of the Materials Science and Engineering Program; Blessin McFarlane, an English major and a member of the Class of 2023; and Meera Sampath, associate dean of research, Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science. They evaluated entries based on artistic merit as well as scientific significance.

Each of them presented a Judge’s Choice selection. Those honors went to “Levitating Gel Donut,” entered by Kirsten Krick, a graduate student in biomedical engineering; “Dermal Nebula,” also entered by Spina; “Fruit Flies Stealing Nectar from a Killed Bee,” submitted by Masek; and “Celestial Cotton Candy,” entered by Fridrich.

The contest, sponsored by the Office of Research Advancement and the S3IP Center of Excellence, was part of Research Days festivities.

“Research Days has become such an important campus event,” says Stephen Ortiz, assistant vice provost for academic enrichment. “As more and more undergraduates are conducting original research across the University, it is amazing to see the people who present and the pride they have in sharing their work.”

Nii Addy, a neuroscientist, Yale professor and mental health advocate, will deliver the Research Days keynote, titled “Living Your Best Life,” at 7 p.m. April 24 in UU-Old Union Hall.
Is it possible to achieve life satisfaction and emotional wellbeing, especially after the last couple of years? How do we deal with the pandemic, racial injustices, political tensions, financial stressors and emotional challenges? In Addy’s podcast, “The Addy Hour,” he has conversations that are at the intersection of brain science, mental health, faith, culture and social justice. In this upbeat, interactive session, he’ll explore topics and questions people are thinking about but may hesitate to discuss.

The Graduate School will run a Three Minute Thesis Competition starting at noon April 27 in UU-Mandela Room. The program challenges students to present research to a non-specialist audience in three minutes or less using only one PowerPoint slide. This year, Binghamton will award prizes to the first ($500), second ($400) and third ($300) place winners, as well as a People’s Choice winner ($150) who will be selected by the audience in real time.

Later that day, the Office of Research Advancement will open a show featuring entries from the 2023 Art of Science contest. The art opening begins at 4 p.m. April 27 in the Center of Excellence Atrium at the Innovative Technologies Complex. Winners of the competition will be revealed during the reception.

Research Days will conclude on April 28 with two large poster sessions in UU-Mandela Room and UU-Old Union Hall. Students from a variety of disciplines will present over 175 posters highlighting research projects conducted with Binghamton mentors. The sessions will run from 10:30 a.m.-noon and from 2-3:30 p.m.

“We often look at the statistics of how many students are doing high-impact practices such as research,” Ortiz says. “But Research Days gives me a chance to see the students involved and the impact their research experience has had on them while at Binghamton.”

Research Days 2023 is sponsored by Academic Affairs, Division of Research, Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, McNair Scholars Program, Undergraduate Research Center, Center for Civic Engagement and The Graduate School.

Many more activities are planned throughout the week.

The Center for Energy Smart Electronic Systems, established in 2011 with NSF funding as an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center, or I/UCRC, enters its third phase with sites at the University of Texas at Arlington as well as Villanova University in addition to Binghamton. The center’s 15 industry partners include Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), Bloomberg, Verizon, Corning, NVIDIA and Honeywell.

Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research at Binghamton, serves as the director of the center, known as ES2. He notes that the three campuses and the companies they work with have made significant advancements in establishing methods that allow data centers to operate as dynamic, self-sensing and regulating systems that are predictable and verified in real time.

“We are doing this at every level of thermal management, from the chip to the data center, using AI and neural networks to optimize energy consumption at a multitude of scales,” Sammakia says.

There are just 83 I/UCRCs across the country. To date, NSF has provided the center with nearly $4 million in funding.

Data centers are among the most energy-intensive types of buildings and account for an estimated 2 percent of the country’s total energy use, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

ES2 aims to help reduce that number — or to keep it in check — as data center usage continues to grow, in part by minimizing energy waste and recovering waste heat generated by data centers. In Phase III, ES2’s mission will expand to include edge computing, incorporation of renewable energy sources and cooling high heat-flux data centers as well as finding innovative ways to reduce the environmental impact of the data center ecosystem.

ES2’s research infrastructure across the three university sites includes:

• A one-of-a kind data center research laboratory and thermal lab at Binghamton.
• An electronics cooling lab, including a state-of-the-art immersion cooling facility, two data center lab facilities and an engineering research lab at UT-Arlington.
• An advanced liquid cooling laboratory for high-powered data center equipment and a high-performance computing laboratory at Villanova.

These facilities enable ES2 researchers to build, test and verify models and simulations at device, component and room scales.

NVIDIA, which joined ES2 in 2020, has collaborated with researchers at all three university sites. “ES2’s expansive facilities and expertise have enabled us to achieve many of our research objectives,” says Vladimir Troy, vice president of enterprise software at NVIDIA. “Several ES2 student interns proved to be such strong contributors that we hired them as employees upon completion of their Ph.D. studies.”

Dereje Agonafer, presidential distinguished professor and ES2 site director at UT-Arlington, says he’s especially pleased that founding member Meta will participate in Phase III. “Since the program started, we have been able to expand our lab facilities significantly, including new liquid and immersion cooling labs,” Agonafer says. “In addition to doctoral and master’s students, many undergraduates have taken advantage of the facilities as well in activities such as honors program and senior design projects.”

In the center’s first decade, 40 students earned doctorates while conducting research through ES2; another 65 students received master’s degrees. Most of them are now engaged in R&D activities at leading companies across the globe. With NSF support, ES2 has provided opportunities for undergraduates, teachers and other targeted groups to gain meaningful research experiences.

In addition, ES2-affiliated experts published more than 200 papers and filed 16 patents and invention disclosures during those 10 years.

That’s proof that ES2 has given faculty and student researchers opportunities to work on significant and timely research, says Al Ortega, James R. Birle Professor of Energy Technology and site director at Villanova.

“We are thrilled that the ES2 Center has helped our team become widely known experts in advanced data center cooling technologies and the fundamental science of convective cooling in single and two-phase flows,” Ortega says. “We are equally proud that the Villanova team has become the lead site in the area of sustainability by our research in energy and water usage efficiency and in waste energy recovery.”

ES2 researchers have new targets — items they see as the three major needs of modern data centers — as they look ahead to the next five years. They aim to:

• Automate operations that guarantee performance, reliability and availability with optimized energy consumption via energy-efficient improvements.
• Address the thermal challenges inherent in modern IT equipment that have increasingly large heat loads in ever smaller footprints, requiring liquid cooling in various forms, as well as data centers that rely entirely or partly on air cooling.
• Improve the sustainability of data centers through the use of renewable energy, stored energy, reduced water needs and harvesting waste heat.

Future Facilities has been a center member since 2012. Mark Seymour, chief technology officer, says ES2 research into the thermal performance of data centers continues to influence product development and the advice the company gives to customers.

“The ES2 data center has proven to be a highly valuable asset,” Seymour says. “We plan to take advantage of it on a regular basis to educate our clients and prospective clients by showcasing our products. In particular, we can highlight how the products help data center operators leverage the opportunities of energy-smart electronic systems.”

In a news conference held this morning, President Joe Biden and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo spoke directly to the 21 grant recipients, including the New Energy New York leadership team.

“I applaud every community that received the grant and those that applied. You’re the reason I’m so optimistic about the future. There are nothing but possibilities here,” said Biden.

“We designed this challenge to invest $1 billion to create jobs and opportunities for people in places where they live and where they have worked their entire careers, so they don’t have to leave. This is for them,” Biden said. “We estimate that these grants will result in 100,000 jobs created or saved in these communities. Together these projects will uplift underserved communities.”

“The New Energy New York team has worked hard on this project and without the leadership and guidance from Sen. Schumer from the beginning, we do not believe we would be here today,” said Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger. “Distinguished Professor and Nobel Prize-winner Stan Whittingham and our Associate Vice President Per Stromhaug had an idea they believed was crucial to our nation’s energy security. They, along with their team and NENY coalition members, have carried the concept to this point where we can stand here today as winners of the EDA’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge. With this win, and with the tremendous financial support from New York State Gov. Kathy Hochul, we are confident we can turn the Southern Tier and Finger Lakes regions of New York into the national hub for battery innovation, manufacturing and workforce development.”

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer advocated for the project, which had previously been announced as a finalist in the American Rescue Plan’s EDA Regional Challenge.

“I am proud to deliver this once-in-a-generation investment for Binghamton University to the Southern Tier, America’s home for the future of battery innovation, bringing manufacturing back from overseas, and training thousands of workers for good-paying jobs building an industry that will define this century,” Schumer said. “Broome County was once the global home to innovation, as the birthplace of IBM, flight simulation and virtual reality, and this project will breathe new life into that legacy to reinvigorate the Southern Tier economy and show the world what I have long known, that Binghamton workers can be the ones to rebuild our economy and take us into the future.”

“I want to congratulate Binghamton University on securing this important funding through the Biden administration’s Build Back Better initiative,” Hochul said. “Combined with our multi-million-dollar state investment, this funding will help Binghamton University to establish this state-of-the-art facility, advancing critical research and bolstering my administration’s commitment to renewable energy, creating a cleaner, more resilient future for all New Yorkers.”

Binghamton University will develop a battery technology and manufacturing center in an Opportunity Zone in Endicott. Additional projects will support the battery industry and its supply chain. The entire initiative is expected to have a $2 billion economic impact.

“This will enable North America to develop batteries rather than sending our technology overseas,” said Whittingham, an inventor of the lithium-ion battery who helped lead the proposal’s development. “We can’t have a supply chain dominated by any one part of the world. We can have batteries that have ‘Made in America’ stamped on them. I’m excited to spearhead the prototype facility in Endicott. We have built a coalition with industry partners so we have plans that are already informed by companies’ needs.”

Per Stromhaug, associate vice president for innovation and economic development at Binghamton University, will serve as regional economic competitiveness officer overseeing this project. He noted that the team consulted with more than 50 companies from every part of the battery supply chain in developing the proposal.

“Everyone we talked to has seen the importance of the project and been excited about being part of it,” Stromhaug said. “We are ready to have programs up and running quickly, with the Endicott pilot manufacturing facility open in a year or two. The program will be a magnet for the region and upstate New York, leading to high-paying jobs in development and manufacturing. It’s going to make an impact nationally.”

“The Build Back Better Regional Challenge will help fund an exciting pivot towards a clean energy future, while revitalizing and restoring a community back its thriving manufacturing roots,” Raimondo said. “The New Energy New York coalition will leverage recent private investment in the state and Binghamton University’s research strengths — boosting U.S. global competitiveness and creating new jobs.”

The project includes regional workforce development required to support the storage manufacturing ecosystem, with dedicated programs to promote equity and participation of individuals from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds.

Olga Petrova, assistant director of Binghamton University’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships, will serve as deputy regional economic competitiveness officer on the project.

“This funding from the EDA is a unique opportunity for comprehensive ecosystem building,” she said. “We will make a difference not only when it comes to technology development and manufacturing, but this will also benefit our region and its residents as a whole. We have already engaged community and local government and grassroots organizations in designing the projects. And we look forward to working with them to create jobs and workforce training programs, and to empowering our residents from various backgrounds to take advantage of these new opportunities.

William P. Acker, executive director of the New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST), said the New Energy New York project will strengthen the state’s robust ecosystem for batteries and energy storage technologies.

“Through the New Energy New York program, we will establish valuable new facilities, including a new Battery-NY Center, to support large-scale battery prototyping and manufacturing of new innovative ‘leapfrogging’ battery technologies,” Acker said. “We will also grow and develop the domestic supply chain and workforce needed to ensure that New York State and the nation are positioned to meet the growing domestic need for batteries. The New Energy New York project will be instrumental in driving job creation, economic growth and equity and justice from the rapidly expanding global battery industry.”

“This funding represents a significant investment in an innovative collaboration between the world-class researchers at Binghamton University and partners in the Southern Tier’s technology ecosystem,” U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said. “As I wrote to Secretary Raimondo in March, this funding will strengthen domestic supply chains and reduce the outsourcing of battery production to international companies.”

New Energy New York includes more than a dozen partners: academic institutions Binghamton University, Rochester Institute of Technology, SUNY Broome Community College and SUNY Corning Community College; nonprofits New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST), Research Foundation for SUNY, Incubator Works, Southern Door Community Land Trust, AM&T and The Clean Fight NY; and government representation from New York State Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), Empire State Development Division of Science, Technology and Innovation (ESD NYSTAR) and Broome County.

Doreen M. Harris, president and CEO of NYSERDA, noted that energy storage plays a central role in the integration of more renewable energy onto the grid. “This historic investment will support the workers and domestic supply chain needed to keep the Empire State leading America’s critical energy storage industry,” she said, “and NYSERDA is proud to collaborate with the University and its partners to capitalize on the opportunity before us.”

Assemblymember Donna Lupardo said, “I would like to sincerely thank the NENY team and all our government partners for bringing this project to fruition. This award will be a game-changer for the university, our local economy, and for our clean energy future. This is exactly what we hoped would happen when the Innovative Technologies Complex was first proposed many years ago.”

Noting that the Build Back Better application was one of the most difficult and time-consuming applications he had ever seen, Broome County Executive Jason Garner said that the stars have aligned. “We know how to work together as a community to get the things that we need,” he said. “This amazing team got this done and it’s going to change Broome County. This is probably one of the most impactful things that have happened here.”

Shailesh Upreti, CEO of C4V and chairman for the iM3NY Gigafactory in Endicott, welcomed the news. “The New Energy New York coalition will catalyze all our investment so far in the state towards domestic manufacturing and complement Binghamton University’s cutting-edge research capabilities to boost American competitiveness in the battery supply chain and help create new green jobs,” he said.

The annual contest, organized by the Office of Research Advancement, invites members of the campus community to share exceptional images that are connected to their research or scholarly work in some way.

This year, there were nearly 50 entries in two categories: The World Around Us, for images in which the subject is visible to the naked eye; and Visualizing the Unseen, for images captured with the use of optics that extend beyond what the eye can see, such as microscopes, or interpretations of scientific information.

“It was exciting to have representation from students, staff and faculty in this year’s entries,” says Martha Terry, creative services manager in the Office of Research Advancement and coordinator of the competition. “We saw a lot of variety in the types of images that were submitted, too.”

Graduate student Niranjana Dhandapani entered an image titled “Strength of Our Skin” and took home First Place in the Visualizing the Unseen category as well as Best in Show.

Dhandapani’s entry, which looks at first like an abstract sea of red waves, is a microscopic image of proteinaceous collagen fiber bundles within the skin’s dermal layer. They were stained with a fluorescent Picro-sirius dye. “When skin is stretched,” she says, “its biomechanical behavior depends on the overall alignment of these crucial stress-bearing fibers.”

She received a pair of AirPods as her prize.

First Place in The World Around Us category went to Junpeng Lai, a graduate research assistant in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He entered a striking photograph of a spider titled “Spiders Can Use Their Orb-web to Hear.”

Three additional entries were honored as Judge’s Choice Selections:

• Carmela Buono, a graduate student in the Department of Biological Sciences, was recognized for a photograph titled Moss and Mushroom Macro-landscape. The macro image features a bright green, moss-covered log with several light brown mushroom caps in a deciduous forest in the northeastern United States.
• Claire Horn, project director in the Public Archaeology Facility, was honored for an image titled Excavating in Floodplain Silt. Archaeologists typically conduct controlled excavations with set dimensions to more easily compare findings from different locations across a site, she says. This photograph shows work conducted in 2021 on the Susquehanna River floodplain.
• Lynn Terry, a graduate student from the Chemistry Department, was recognized for an image titled Under the Lens: Gold/Nanocellulose Membranes. The image, captured with a confocal Raman microscope, features gold nanoparticle / nanocellulose thin-film membranes in an impressive array of colors.

Images are evaluated based on scientific significance, originality and artistic and visual impact.

This year’s judges were Kirsten Prior, assistant professor of biological sciences; Marcus Newton, photo specialist/digital technician in the Department of Art and Design; and Lorin Miller, a member of the Class of 2022.

The S3IP Center of Excellence and the Division of Research co-sponsor the competition, now in its sixth year. This year’s entries are featured in a video and in an exhibit in the atrium of the Center of Excellence Building.

“We were able to have a reception for the show again this year,” Terry says, “and it was wonderful to have a good turnout for the exhibit and be able to see the entrants talk with each other. Some people told me they think about the competition while they’re doing research, and I’m already looking forward to seeing next year’s entries.”

Schools with at least $5 million in research expenditures that grant at least 20 doctorates yearly are eligible for consideration by the Carnegie Classifications as R1 or R2 campuses. The new R1 list of doctoral universities includes 146 schools, among them world-famous institutions such as Harvard and Princeton. Binghamton is one of 11 New York universities on the list.

President Harvey Stenger noted that it was a significant achievement when Binghamton was first named an R1 school in 2018-19. The classifications are updated every three years.

“Staying on the list requires a sustained, high-level effort from researchers and graduate programs across campus,” he says. “Our faculty have done a remarkable job during the past several years, advancing our understanding of significant topics ranging from Parkinson’s disease to information security.”

Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research, says Binghamton also rose slightly in the recent Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) rankings published by the National Science Foundation. The HERD Survey is the primary source of information on research and development expenditures at U.S. colleges and universities. The survey collects information on R&D spending by field of research and source of funds. NSF also gathers detail on types of research, expenses and headcounts of R&D personnel.
Binghamton is ranked 152 on the latest list, up from 158 a year ago. The campus now ranks 108th among public universities.

“It’s exciting to see Binghamton’s investments in research infrastructure and faculty hiring pay off,” Sammakia says. “Our scholars are committed to mentoring graduate students and to solving pressing challenges related to the pandemic, the environment, technology and human health. We have several ambitious new efforts in the pipeline, too.”

Those initiatives include projects such as the R&D facility under construction at the Health Sciences Campus in Johnson City and a new multimillion dollar NSF grant that will fund scholarships for students focused on cybersecurity.

Binghamton is also leading a coalition of partners on the New Energy New York project, which aims to establish a domestic supply chain for lithium-based batteries. The group was recently named a Phase 1 awardee and finalist for investment through the American Rescue Plan’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge. Finalists will compete for federal funding of up to $100 million through the Economic Development Administration.

Zili Yang’s monograph, titled “The Environment and Externality: Theory, Algorithms and Applications,” was published in December by Cambridge University Press.

“If we don’t cooperate, if each individual strives for their own interest, collectively we create an economy with uncontrolled pollution,” says Yang, a professor of economics who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2002. “If we cooperate, pollution can be controlled efficiently.”

Some ideas in the book are inspired by the RICE model (Regional Integrated Climate-Economy model) made famous by William Nordhaus. The 2018 Nobel laureate was Yang’s doctoral adviser at Yale University.

Think of the global economy as a cake to be shared among countries. It can be sliced in various ways. Right now, some slices are very large and others are quite thin. As economists think about ways to address climate change and reduce pollution, few if any countries are willing to go away from the table with a smaller piece of that cake.

Yang wants to find a way to divide the cake as fairly as possible. This cutting method is at the core of his work.

Yang begins the new book with a brief discussion of the concept of externality. When some people’s or countries’ welfares are affected by others’ activities without their explicit consent, then externality exists, he writes.

This is a core challenge of environmental economics. Why? Because all pollution hurts people. It may not harm you personally, but it’s hurting someone.

When people, countries or regions cooperate, they internalize this externality. The cake gets bigger, so to speak, but when it’s sliced some countries may still walk away with less than they had before.

“Most times it’s politically infeasible,” Yang says.

His goal? Come up with a cutting method where every country gets a larger slice of the new, larger cake.

The method many economists employ basically says we sum up all agents or countries to form a social welfare function (so 15 countries equals 15). Countries are treated as equals, whether they’re small or large and whether the climate impacts they face are significant or minimal.

“The ‘equal’ way is not fair,” Yang says.

Yang doesn’t think that Fiji and the United States should be weighted equally, for example. He would say 15 countries equals n; if you’re more significantly affected, you should be expected to do more to fix the problem. Likewise, if a country is responsible for more emissions, it should be responsible for more mitigation costs.

His method recognizes that countries have to see how their circumstances will be improved. “You can’t force people to collaborate if it makes them worse off than when they weren’t cooperating,” he says.

Yang is also the author of “Strategic Bargaining and Cooperation in Greenhouse Gas Mitigations,” published in 2008 by MIT Press.

In his earlier work, Yang worked with the RICE model to “cut the cake” fairly. What he came up with took months of trial and error.

In the new monograph, he outlines an algorithm that makes an accurate cut on the first attempt, no trial and error required. He says the outcome and its elegance surprised him.

“I apply the theory and try to tell non-economists about it so it can be useful in policy,” Yang says. “My conclusion is unique.”

Other methods rely on a second round of “cake cutting” to ensure greater fairness. Yang attempts to build in that fairness to start, then executes just one round of cutting. Most models accommodate three regions; his allows many more.

Some of Yang’s thinking is also based on understandings of bargaining that come from the work of Nobel laureate John Nash. In the early 1950s, Nash articulated the strategic interactions possible between two or more decision makers.

How do we make sure two people (or countries, or regions) want to cooperate? Yang says you have to ensure that both are better off if they work together than if they do not.

This is one reason that Yang is somewhat critical of the Paris climate accords; he thinks they don’t call for enough cooperation. The climate targets are too rigid, and countries’ actions are too independent, he says.

Yang hopes the ideas in his new book will be put to practical use. He provides all the algorithms so others can check his work, and the publisher will make a paperback copy available for sale, which may make it appealing as a textbook.

Jon M. Conrad, professor of resource economics at Cornell University, says the book will become an essential text for graduate-level courses in environmental economics. “Yang does a masterful job of determining the optimal level of externality in both static and dynamic models under cooperative, non-cooperative and coalitional solutions,” he wrote in a review of the book.

Yang sees himself as a scientist out to challenge established ways of thinking.

“You have to be skeptical,” he notes. “I don’t necessarily accept established results without questioning them. You want to find something other people haven’t noticed.”

“I don’t want to make anyone an atheist,” says Adam Laats, a professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Educational Leadership at Binghamton. “No public school should have that as its goal, just like no public school should be trying to teach kids any religious idea, which would include creationism.”

Laats’ new book, Creationism USA: Bridging the Impasse on Teaching Evolution, was published in October by Oxford University Press.

“Creationism is a private issue, and most Americans are some kind of creationists,” Laats says. “Most Americans have some sort of belief that, you know, all this didn’t just happen.”

A Gallup poll last year found that 40% of American adults believe God created humankind within the past 10,000 years. Another third of those polled said humans evolved over millions of years with God’s guidance. Just 22% said they thought humans evolved without any divine intervention.

“Most people who are creationists want their kids to learn evolution in schools,” Laats says. “It’s not a problem.”

The problem arises when people insist that their particular religious beliefs form part of the curriculum. Laats sees two key characteristics of what he terms “radical creationism.”

The first is that it disputes the legitimacy of mainstream science. “Radical creationists say mainstream science is entirely wrong,” he says. “Evolutionary science can’t be right.”

The other part is that radical creationists try to impose their beliefs into the public square. That includes public schools, but also questions such as: Should there be a prayer before a public meeting? Should people say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays?

A former middle school and high school teacher, Laats says researching this book helped him understand certain anti-science attitudes present in the country today.

“The 2020 political moment, this crisis-fueled moment, has parallels in the history of creationism,” he says. “Understanding that history helps people understand how it is possible that some large number of Americans have confidence in these statements that seem, to me, patently false.”

Laats says there’s a pattern going back to the 1960s of aggressively dissident, competing science that today is expressed when someone labels facts as “fake news.” It’s not that someone like Scott Atlas, a physician and advisor to the White House coronavirus taskforce, hasn’t heard what epidemiologists are saying about the pandemic. “It’s that they dispute the legitimacy of the people with whom they disagree,” Laats says. “And we’re experiencing an acute outbreak at the very top. It’s very easy for people to dismiss what seem like they might be obvious in-your-face truths if you dismiss the source of those ideas.”

Although debates surrounding creationism have certain elements in common with controversies about climate science, Laats says it’s not a fair comparison.

“They get lumped together because they’re the two most prominent science denialism issues out there,” he says, “but they actually have both different histories and different trajectories. Climate change denialism is a lot more like tobacco science.”

Large, well-funded tobacco companies paid to have scientists go over peer-reviewed reports in the 1950s and ’60s and issue statements highlighting the limitations of findings about the dangers of smoking. Some people who cast doubt on climate science have similar financial motivations, Laats says.

“It’s a deliberate, well-funded, intentional, cynical attempt to spread ignorance, or at least doubt about established science,” he says.

The creationism debate isn’t rooted in money, for the most part.

For science educators, this has been an issue for 50 years. And for many of them, it feels outlandish, Laats says. “How can there be a debate? It’s not a debate. There’s science. And then there’s this other thing.”

He’s optimistic that American schools will continue to teach mainstream scientific principles related to evolution. “Even the most ardent anti-evolution groups, like Answers in Genesis, want their kids to learn evolution,” Laats says. “They just don’t trust people like me to teach it to their kids. They don’t want their kids to learn from people that they don’t trust, including secular, politically liberal, union-member types. So it’s not evolutionary theory anymore that they actually have a beef with their children learning, even though they think it’s incorrect.”

From a public policy perspective, that needs to be the end of the discussion, he says, even if some people view that as accommodating science deniers. “Let’s stop fighting,” he says. “Let’s agree to stop talking right there because the rest of it isn’t our business. The rest of it is culture war talk. The way that I think of it is that Americans don’t disagree about evolution. We just don’t like each other. Or maybe a more polite way to say it is we don’t trust each other.”

Laats is the author of three other books about the history of American education: Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education; The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education and Fundamentalism; and Education in the Scopes Era: God, Darwin, and the Roots of America’s Culture Wars. He earned a doctorate in U.S. history at the University of Wisconsin—Madison in 2007. His next project focuses on the first systematic attempt at urban school reform in the United States.

Most research facilities closed March 21 to activities that were not deemed essential, though coronavirus-related projects continued.

The Division of Research held a series of town hall meetings via Zoom beginning in April. These offered faculty and staff members an opportunity to ask questions and share concerns. By early May, a Return to Research subcommittee with significant faculty participation began meeting. That group, in consultation with Environmental Health and Safety experts and the Public Health Advisory Committee, created protocols that continue to govern Binghamton’s return to research, including a maximum occupancy of one person per 200 square feet.

Principal investigators were able to apply to go back to campus beginning in mid-May. Most projects had resumed at least some activities before the fall semester began.

David Jentsch, professor of psychology, put particular emphasis on self-care as he worked with members of his lab to resume their experiments. “We have to be mindful of the fact that people are bringing a lot of trauma back to work with them,” he says. “At the same time, for a lot of researchers, work is part of a habit and a ritual that gives us comfort and structure.”

Adjusting to new safety protocols is fairly straightforward, Jentsch says. But it’s harder to address the many uncertainties surrounding this academic year and to support students and colleagues who face a whole spectrum of challenges beyond campus.

By early September, about 220 applications and modification forms from nearly 150 faculty members had been reviewed, according to Nancy Lewis, assistant vice president for research compliance. More than 670 faculty and staff members as well as students from 42 departments were able to return to laboratories and other research spaces.

“To date, we have zero reported cases of COVID-19 in any of the labs,” says Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research. He notes that research grant applications and committed funds are up significantly year over year.

Some Binghamton researchers adjusted their approach to existing projects. Jessica Hua, associate professor of biological sciences, arranged her students’ summer schedules so they spent more time on fieldwork and less time in the lab, for example.

One project was supposed to examine fertilizers’ impact on pond environments. Instead of being simulated in petri dishes, the study was conducted outdoors. Another group was supposed to study light pollution and its effect on amphibians. “Instead of conducting lab experiments that isolate just light as the factor,” Hua says, “we shifted our focus to outdoor studies that test the consequences of light pollution in more realistic scenarios.”

Binghamton faculty are also pursuing projects related to the pandemic, ranging from developing PPE that also serves as a diagnostic tool to research related to drug discovery.

And the campus continues to serve as a host for international conferences and seminars, with hundreds of people from around the world attending a Zoom-based Center of Excellence program in July and a workshop on Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in September.

The Division of Research has conducted two surveys related to the Return to Research process. The first asked faculty about their experience; the second focused on division staff and remote work. About 58% of faculty described the process as easy or very easy; 97% said they were confident they were meeting safety standards. Meanwhile, about 75% of Division of Research staff said they feel just as productive while working remotely.

Seniors Jacob Goodman, Alex Blumenthal and Jeremy Gendler are leading the effort, dubbed AeroBing.

They aim to send a rocket past the Kármán line, the international boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. It’s 100 kilometers — or 62 miles — above Earth’s mean sea level.

Only one school, University of Southern California, has managed to do it so far.

“We’d like to be significantly past the Kármán line, such that we are certain that we were in space,” says Goodman, the project lead. “And by doing that, we would achieve certainty that we were in space and beat the altitude record as well.”

In short, says Gendler: “We’re going to shatter their record.”

The group is working to see if it can have military radar track the rocket’s progress. Guinness World Records may also take an interest.

“The burning question for us is not what’s up there,” Gendler says. “It’s what we’re capable of.”

Goodman, Blumenthal and Gendler have been working on the project for nearly a year, and they bring lots of backyard rocket experience to the endeavor.

“As a kid, I was always doing all sorts of rocketry stuff, launching model rockets,” says Gendler, a Chicago native and chief engineer on the project. “My mom would buy me a kit, and I didn’t want the kit. I wanted to build my own rocket.”

After a family friend who was an Israeli flight engineer came for a visit, Gendler says, he became downright obsessive about building airplanes and launching rockets.

“I went to my local synagogue and asked if they would clear the parking lot for me because I was launching to the moon,” he recalls. “I was indulged by the administrators, but you can imagine that the launch from the South Side of Chicago didn’t happen.”

In the summer before his junior year at Binghamton, Gendler was walking on campus with a friend. He remembers telling him, “Listen, you know what? By the time I’m 25, I want to put something into space.”

So, he says, it felt a bit like destiny when Goodman, a fellow mechanical engineering major from New Rochelle, approached him about the project.

Goodman enjoyed a few minutes of fame early in the pandemic when he built a prototype of a ventilator in his dorm room one weekend using parts he found at Wal-Mart. He has been friends with Blumenthal since they were roommates during their first year at Binghamton.

Blumenthal, a chemistry and materials science major from Easton, Pa., took his first flight lesson when he was about 10 years old and recently earned his pilot license.

He says the team doesn’t have a launch date yet but expects it will be in late spring 2021. Until then, says Blumenthal, chief operating officer for the project, AeroBing will be building and testing many smaller rockets.

“To figure out, OK, does this system work? Are we getting the accurate height? Are our wind models accurate? We’ve got to make a bunch of scale models,” Gendler says. “So this next year, all the way up until the launch, is going to be hundreds of hours of research and several small launches.”

Working with advisor Bruce Murray, professor and chair of mechanical engineering, and additional faculty mentors, AeroBing includes three senior design projects, a signature of the Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s undergraduate curriculum.

The students worked on the project all summer, experimenting with fiberglass and running through different mathematical models. “You can simulate it all day and night, but you learn a lot when you actually get your hands dirty and start building it,” Goodman says.

Along with Blumenthal, Goodman and Gendler, another 12 students from STEM majors are on the design team.

Gendler says the group, which is organized like a small company, is a “beautiful hybrid,” with expertise in different areas and a variety of styles of working and thinking. “This symbiosis has given our team such strength,” he says.

AeroBing has a budget of roughly $100,000 and space in the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator in Binghamton. The students have developed a marketing plan, solicited sponsors and established social media channels, so the project requires mastering skills outside of engineering as well.

They’ll also have to clear some bureaucratic hurdles. The Federal Aviation Administration will require the group to apply for permission to launch. The students will be expected to predict the rocket’s trajectory and where it will land.

AeroBing’s rocket, called Ambition-III, will be built in Binghamton. It will likely be launched from somewhere in New Mexico or California.

“If we wanted to launch on the East Coast, it would have to land in the ocean, which is something we really don’t want to do,” Blumenthal says. “So we are going to be going out West for a launch site.”

The team hopes to spread a love for aerospace education and bring some attention to upstate New York.

“We’ve just had a dream to launch a rocket for a while,” Goodman says. “It’ll help us professionally, but that’s really not the end goal here.”

Along the way, he took an internship in Germany, co-founded the College Progressives, built a wheelchair for a cat and conducted research in the clean room at Binghamton’s Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM).

“A lot of people say, ‘Follow your passion.’ I mean, there’s a point to that,” Cadwell says. “But for me, I’ve considered college like a financial investment. I should evaluate what the return would be. That’s partly why I chose engineering. I also thought technology was a really good way to make a large impact on the world, from a humanitarian perspective. I did do something I was interested in, but I was also concerned with making sure I can do something that’s marketable.”

Cadwell decided to go to a SUNY school after his physics teacher at Whitney Point High School told him about the New York State STEM Incentive Program, which provides tuition awards to New York residents attending college in state. He settled on studying electrical engineering at Binghamton with the idea that he could one day design solar panels or medical equipment.

As a sophomore, Cadwell took a class on semiconductors and began learning more about the intersection of engineering and materials science. He enjoyed the subject so much that he served as a course assistant for that class as a junior.

He learned about the CAMM when it appeared on a list of possible senior capstone projects. Every project was given a budget, but that one was listed with zero dollars.

“Now I know they’re not going to give us a project that has no funding,” he says. “So I was thinking that maybe that’s a blank check. Maybe this project has a lot of money and a lot of importance. And I was kind of right about that because we easily spent a few hundred dollars on that project.”

CAMM researchers create flexible electronics by printing with metals on plastics using a roll-to-roll system. The CAMM is also the New York node of NextFlex, a federal initiative to advance flexible hybrid electronics manufacturing, and home to the Center for Flexible Hybrid Medical Device Manufacturing, designated a Center for Advanced Technology by the state.

Cadwell’s senior design group, working under the direction of CAMM Director Mark Poliks, built an inspection platform for use at the CAMM that relied on lights and a microscope camera to detect scratches or dust on rolls of printed electronics.

“One of the challenges is that once you deposit the metal or the insulator, you need to inspect it to see if it’s clean enough,” Cadwell says. “And if you’re patterning wires onto these rolls, you would also want to check and see if the wires are well-formed or if one of the wires is not connected.”

The experience opened new doors for Cadwell, who decided to continue at Binghamton for a graduate degree. The choice was made easier when he received support through the National Science Foundation’s S-STEM Scholarship (Scholarship in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Program.

With help from Poliks, Cadwell also lined up a three-month internship at Applied Materials in Germany the summer after he finished his undergraduate work.

As a grad student, Cadwell’s research focused on printed radio frequency (RF) electronics. “That’s basically anything wireless,” he says. “Like Wi-Fi radio or anything that you might think of with the Internet of Things or smart appliances.”

Applications could include tags on products so a retailer could have a complete inventory of everything in a store at any given moment. Printed RF sensors could also be attached to a bridge or an airplane to make it easier to monitor vibrations. Such sensors are expected to make it easier and less expensive to monitor patients’ heart rates on a continuous basis, too.

Some of Cadwell’s projects with Poliks involved creating simple radio frequency components using aerosol jet printing. The process is akin to the inkjet printers found in many home offices, though it requires far more precision, and the researchers are using silver nanoparticles rather than the kind of ink you’d get at Staples.

The group created RF components including antennae using metals printed on plastics. These flexible components’ performance was measured, with promising results.

“Once we confirm that we can make the components, then we can put the components together to make devices,” Cadwell says. “But first, we wanted to verify that the components would be able to perform well enough.”

Scott Miller, director of technology for NextFlex, says Cadwell was a critical part of the DataCube project undertaken by Binghamton University, NextFlex and other partners in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory.

“Ryan’s leadership has been clear in the project from the time he joined,” Miller says. “He has demonstrated technical expertise as well as the ability to plan and organize work and collaborate with a diverse team.”

Cadwell accepted a position with a design division of Anaren/TTM just before the coronavirus pandemic began and moved to Syracuse so he could begin work in July.

Anaren makes electronic components for companies such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The firm’s radar and satellite communications technology has military applications; customers also include cell phone companies.

Poliks, empire innovation professor of engineering, worked in industry for decades and says Cadwell is well prepared for the job. “It has been a privilege to work with Ryan over the last three years,” Poliks says. “He developed expertise in radio frequency design, modeling, fabrication and testing and made significant contributions to several of our research programs.”

“Research is meant to be shared,” said Valerie Imbruce, chair of the Research Days planning committee and director of the Undergraduate Research Center. “Students ask questions and find ways to seek answers. Analyzing and interpreting information, all of that is one aspect of research. But one of the things we herald as part of undergraduate research is the outward-facing nature of it.”

Lisa Theo, research and scholarship advisor with the Undergraduate Research Center, led an effort to retool the large campus-wide poster sessions and put them online. “It’s really exciting that students will be able to share their work when it looked like it could’ve been canceled,” she said.

The two poster sessions will run from 11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and from 2-3:30 p.m. Friday, April 17, at https://sites.google.com/binghamton.edu/2020researchdaystemplate/homepage, with many students available to speak to guests via Zoom.

“Because of technology, we aren’t limited by the size of the room,” Theo noted. “Potentially thousands of people can see the work of our students.”

She hopes that the event will give students a little sense of normalcy, however brief. “The projects they’ve worked on for months can still be shared with the world,” she said.

The Science Library will coordinate a Citizen Science Wikipedia Edit-a-thon from 3-5 p.m. April 21. Participants will celebrate citizen science by adding needed references to science-related articles on Wikipedia. They will also be encouraged to edit and create new science-related articles.

The Art Museum will coordinate an evening program of student curator presentations on April 23. Beginning at 6 p.m., student curators will present their exhibitions and answer questions posed by participants in a Zoom chat at https://binghamton.zoom.us/j/93560123459.

The spring 2020 exhibitions include “Marvels of Materials: Trade and Materiality in Ancient Egypt,” curated by senior Doug Braun with faculty advisor Hilary Becker, assistant professor of classical and Near Eastern studies; “American Mythology,” curated by senior Kaleigh Pitcher with faculty advisor Andrew Walkling, professor of art history; and “Visualizing Voyeurism,” curated by seniors Emily Mendelson and Eta Pastreich with faculty advisors Katherine Bouman, associate director of the Binghamton University Scholars Program and Tom McDonough, associate professor of art history.

Winners of the annual Art of Science competition, sponsored by S3IP and the Office of Research Advancement, will be announced during Research Days, and a video featuring all of this year’s entries will be posted to YouTube in place of the usual exhibition.

The current crisis is forcing people to think about how we can connect and adapt existing technology to suit our needs, Imbruce said. “We had to do it under the gun but now we can think about how we might build it into our future work,” she added. “We’re also training students to have a set of professional conduct online vs. personal or social space online. So that’s an ancillary teaching opportunity, too.”

Research Days are sponsored by Academic Affairs, Center for Civic Engagement, College of Community and Public Affairs, Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Division of Research, The Graduate School, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, McNair Scholars Program and the Undergraduate Research Center.

The contest, organized by the Office of Research Advancement, gives people an opportunity to share the beauty of science through photographs and images that describe some aspect of research captured visually.

“I’ve been so impressed by the quality and variety of the submissions to this contest,” says Martha Terry, creative services manager and coordinator of the competition. “It’s always interesting to see the entries as they come in. We have had stunning photos taken during people’s field work, but also amazing images from microscopes. If I had to pick a favorite from last year, it would be Pavel Masek’s Thermal Fly image.”

In 2020, there will be two categories:

• The World Around Us: images in which the subject is visible to the naked eye
• Visualizing the Unseen: images captured with the use of optics that extend beyond what the eye can see, such as microscopes and telescopes, or models of scientific phenomena or processes or interpretations of scientific information

Images will be evaluated based on scientific significance, originality and artistic and visual impact. This year’s judges are Jocelyn Bailey, account director at Idea Kraft; Steve Czarnecki, associate director of S3IP; Madhuri Govindaraju, UI designer/developer in University Communications and Marketing; undergraduate Jake Kerr; Claire Kovacs, curator of collections and exhibitions for the Binghamton University Art Museum; and Alexsa Silva, director of instruction and outreach in the Chemistry Department.

This year’s top prize will be a new iPad.

Entries, due Feb. 24, must have been created in 2017 or later in connection with research at Binghamton University. Winners will be announced at a reception during Research Days in April. For entry guidelines and more details, visit https://research.binghamton.edu/events/researchdays/artofscience.php.

“This opportunity is one I didn’t envision even five years ago,” says Louis Piper, associate professor of physics at Binghamton and the principal investigator for the grant, awarded last week. “We didn’t think it would be possible.”

The instrument, a HArd X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy system (or HAXPES), allows researchers to get detailed information about a device or material without taking it apart.

HAXPES relies on the photoelectric effect, one of the most important tools in condensed matter physics and in materials science (and the basis for Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize). The machine shines light (in this case hard X-rays) into a material. The material accepts the energy and momentum and kicks out electrons. Conservation of energy and momentum allows researchers to determine the chemical and electronic structure of the material being studied.

This is the kind of energy you’d use for a chest X-ray at the hospital, Piper explains. And HAXPES will let him study a device like a battery in a way that leaves the battery intact, just like your doctor wouldn’t remove your rib cage for that chest X-ray.

“We can see what we previously couldn’t see,” Piper says.

That’s because other techniques are surface-senstitive. They’re good at scanning the outer layer of a device, but don’t offer a view of what’s inside. It would be like looking at a ham and cheese sandwich but only seeing the outermost crumbs on the bread. “It might not be a good representation of the material or what the material is like when it’s in contact with other materials,” Piper notes.

HAXPES requires a powerful source of X-rays and an extremely sensitive detector. The techniques associated with it have been used for about a decade, but previously were only possible with a synchrotron — a kind of particle accelerator that generates X-rays. At those facilities, visiting scientists typically conduct experiments over a period of hours and then leave.

HAXPES will provide synchrotron-comparable data in a laboratory setting, which makes it much more forgiving in terms of time and much more useful for private industry.

Compared to similar instruments, HAXPES offers more kinetic energy, which means excited electrons have a greater chance of escaping from deeper within the solid. That increases the tool’s sensitivity to the bulk of a material being examined. “Bulk” is a relative term in this case; HAXPES may go 60 nanometers deep into a material vs. 5 nanometers with other tools.

Still, at 60 nanometers, scientists will be able to access interfaces of real devices such as transistors. They’ll be able to measure energy levels and the chemical composition of buried interfaces without tearing them apart.

Piper, who is also the director of the Institute for Materials Research at Binghamton, says the new equipment dovetails with the campus’ industry-level capabilities. “We want to have unique tools that can act as a bridge between computational modeling and real-world applications,” he says.

The HAXPES, made by European company Scienta-Omicron, should be ready for use within two years at Binghamton’s Smart Energy R&D Building, part of the Innovative Technologies Complex.

The campus has a long history of industry partnerships and of creating multiuser laboratories to benefit academic and private R&D. The HAXPES should extend those collaborations in exciting ways, notes Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research and director of S3IP, a New York State Center of Excellence focused on electronics packaging research. “Equipment like this adds to our unique capabilities at Binghamton and brings value to our relationships with major technology companies and startups alike,” Sammakia says. “Louis is a national leader in this area, and I am eager to see what he can accomplish with HAXPES on campus.”

The HAXPES is about the size of a pickup truck, and Piper notes that the Binghamton tool will have several upgrades. “I consider it the Cadillac of HAXPES instruments,” he says.

That is, if a Cadillac could generate hard and soft X-rays and take low-temperature measurements as well as high-temperature measurements.

The instrument will have four key areas of focus:

• Batteries
• Next-generation electronics
• Neuromorphic computing
• Solar energy harvesting

In addition, researchers in the humanities may use the HAXPES’ small vacuum chamber to study pigments and clays. The tool will tie into Binghamton’s Materials Matter course, an interdisciplinary class that brings principles of science to life for humanities students and future scientists alike.

Piper sees the lab-based HAXPES enabling him and his colleagues to continue developing ways to describe chemical concepts to students from other disciplines.

He says he’s already seen firsthand how HAXPES could change materials research, as the technique allowed researchers to observe how electrons degrade and how that effects batteries’ performance.

“At Binghamton, we solve industry-relevant problems,” Piper says. “Photoemission has long been a powerful technique for materials studies, but has been largely been limited to sterile, perfect crystals. This instrument is very flexible and means we can measure real materials and devices even while they’re in operation. This tool means we’ll be able to make significant contributions in smart energy technologies.”

The new center, to be known as FlexMed, will assist with job creation through the development and commercialization of technologies in New York state. FlexMed will be a part of the University’s Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM).

The FlexMed CAT will allow researchers at Binghamton University and our industry partners to build on more than a decade of experience in designing and manufacturing flexible electronics, said Mark D. Poliks, empire innovation professor of engineering and director of the new center. Poliks also serves as director of the CAMM, the official New York node of the national NextFlex manufacturing institute.

“We have unique facilities and expertise in partnering with industry that will enable us to make contributions to New York companies’ R&D right away,” he said. “This investment, combined with our ongoing work with NextFlex, establishes us as a major resource for large and small firms that are interested in flexible, wearable medical and industrial devices.”

Poliks, author of more than 100 technical papers, holds 47 U.S. patents. He envisions the center working with startup companies around the state to develop prototype devices in a cost-efficient and timely fashion so that they can be brought to market as quickly as possible. Initial projects may include wearable biosensors embedded in textiles and roll-to-roll manufacturing of electronic glass and ceramic surfaces.

The center, an interdisciplinary effort with collaborators at SUNY Polytechnic Institute, will offer training, workshops and academic classes. “As an educator, I’m also excited about the workforce development aspect of this center,” Poliks said. “Students at Binghamton and at SUNY Poly will have opportunities to learn state-of-the-art techniques and will be prepared for careers in this vital and growing economic sector when they graduate.”

FlexMed will serve as the nucleus of a manufacturing industry cluster in the quickly emerging field of medical and pharmaceutical device manufacturing, said Howard Zemsky, Empire State Development president, CEO and commissioner. “It will enable industry partners to scale up flexible-hybrid electronics technologies and present them to the marketplace more quickly, while harnessing various academic capabilities for product development and commercialization, workforce development and job creation efforts for New York state,” he said.

Flexible medical devices could include lightweight sensors for use in monitoring hospital patients, athletes and members of the armed services.

Harvey Stenger, president of Binghamton University, said FlexMed will build upon the campus’ strengths in engineering and the health sciences. “Our laboratories in Endicott and at the Innovative Technologies Complex are truly state of the art,” he said. “FlexMed will contribute to the Southern Tier’s rich culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Binghamton, which recently earned a “very high research” classification from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, is cultivating faculty teams to pursue large-scale center grants like this one, said Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research at Binghamton University. He noted that the campus is also home to another CAT, the Integrated Electronics Engineering Center.

“Mark Poliks is an exceptional researcher, and his decades of experience in working with teams of faculty members and industry partners will be a tremendous asset to FlexMed,” Sammakia said. “This center will work on technology that has the potential to benefit society and improve healthcare in important ways.”

“It’s a book I’ve been trying to figure out how to write my entire life,” he says.

Zentner, 45, grew up Jewish, the son of social workers who fought anti-Semitism and racism. The year he was 18, white supremacists firebombed their office in Ontario, Canada. His parents rebuilt the office, right next door to their home, and a year later it was attacked again. No one was ever charged with the crimes.

Copperhead opens with a note to readers that explains some of this background. “I’m generally a private person,” Zentner says. “But I think it’s important to know that there’s a context to writing this. This isn’t just a reaction to what’s happening today.”

Anti-Semitism and racism are on the rise, he says, but when in history were they ever not an issue? The key question as he sees it is: Why would anyone hate someone else for no reason?

Zentner, author of two other acclaimed works of literary fiction, also writes horror novels under the pen name Ezekiel Boone. Although some of those books deal with a plague of man-eating spiders, writing Copperhead was far scarier.

“A book like this, if I got it wrong, it would be wrong in a spectacular and unpleasant way,” says Zentner, noting he’s a straight white man taking on difficult questions related to race and racism. “What makes it scary is what makes it essential.”

He says he decided he had to risk being wrong rather than risk saying nothing about racism. “If we don’t talk about it in a real way, nothing’s ever going to get better,” he says. “This is a way to open a conversation.”

Copperhead centers on Jessup, a high school senior who comes from an infamous family in a small upstate New York town. His stepfather and half-brother are white supremacists who went to prison after beating two young black men to death. A talented football player with good grades and a black girlfriend, Jessup has tried to put some distance between himself and his family’s church, where members seem eager to fight a so-called racial holy war. He hopes college will be his ticket to a fresh start somewhere far from home.

Why create a protagonist like that? “The truth of the matter is that the bad guys are never as interesting as heroes who are flawed,” Zentner says. “What does it mean to be saddled with that family history? Can you escape it?”

Zentner describes Cortaca, the fictional setting for the book, as a through-the-looking-glass version of Ithaca, where he lives with his wife and their two teenage daughters. In Cortaca, there’s a town-gown divide as well as a white collar-working class divide. There’s also just one high school and thus no easy way for Jessup to start over.

It’s a made-up setting that offers Zentner the freedom to do what’s best for the story. “Fiction is beholden to the truth, not to the facts,” he says.

Copperhead is his attempt to give to readers some of the energy and challenging conversations that students find in his creative writing classes.

“Fiction talks about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human,” says Zentner, who joined Binghamton University’s faculty as an assistant professor of English in 2013. He wants his classroom to be a place where people can talk about things that really matter.

“One of the first things we can ask ourselves if we want to be progressive is: How do we progress?”

Zentner says that means acknowledging our mistakes and being willing to listen. The impulse is to say, “It’s not my fault,” he notes, rather than “How can I do better going forward?”

Zentner admits that nuanced arguments for diversity are hard to sell, much harder than fear. It’s easier to pick up the blunt sword of bigotry than to tease apart systemic problems embedded in our democracy and economy. Still, race, class, gender and sexuality are frequent topics in his classroom and with his friends outside the academy.

“I think of social justice as a language,” Zentner says. “If you were born before 1985, you’re probably not a native speaker. We need to remember that.”

Nobody should get a free pass, he adds, but we need to work at learning that language.

“Complicated conversations can quickly outpace your knowledge,” he says. “That’s true for tax law or home repair, and it’s certainly true when we talk about diversity.”

Zentner’s books

Copperhead, to be published July 9 by Penguin Random House, is the latest novel by Binghamton University author Alexi Zentner. Booklist says: “Zentner expertly and entertainingly distills America’s longstanding divisions over race, religion, and class.”

Zentner, author of The Lobster Kings and Touch, also writes horror novels under the pen name Ezekiel Boone.