Lam, a paleontologist and paleoceanographer, is an assistant professor in Harpur College’s Earth Sciences Department, but she was raised in a rural town in Hanover County, Va. Its location deep in the state’s backwoods aided Lam in her first scientific explorations: She collected rocks and animal skulls and learned how to distinguish between mineral types.

Now she studies a group of marine plankton called planktic foraminifera that live in the surface ocean. Foraminifera secrete a calcium carbonate shell, and when they die those shells collect in layers on the sea floor over millions of years. Lam’s goal is to date the sediments using the first and last occurrences of certain species of foraminifera preserved in the fossil record. This process is known as biostratigraphy.

Using the fossil plankton shells, researchers can reconstruct oceanic conditions across ancient warm periods to predict how Earth’s systems will react to climate change. For example, by looking at the Mid-Piacenzian Warm Period, which took place about 3.3 million years ago, researchers found that there was almost as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere then as there is now.

“With the chemistry of their [foraminifera] tests, we can actually infer things about climate change such as water temperatures, salinity changes, ice volume changes and also productivity changes in the water column through time,” Lam says.

Biostratigraphers normally rely on a particular scheme to tell the age of the rocks, but Lam realized that it was not universally applicable.

Plankton are migratory by nature and move to other areas over large spans of time. Therefore, her lab has been focused on creating more- nuanced schemes for telling time with the fossil plankton in different areas of the ocean.

Lam has zoomed in on the foraminifera of the southwestern Pacific Ocean’s mid-latitude region. She’s using the geochemistry of the plankton to reconstruct surface water temperature, salinity values and more.

The work is an extension of postdoctoral research Lam began at Binghamton as well as a continuation of her dissertation project. She earned her doctorate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in geosciences; that’s also where she was when she went on her first ocean expedition. After an extensive application process to board the ship, selected researchers work 12 hours a day while at sea for two months straight.

To Lam, it isn’t a bad trade. Scientists put in long days at sea, but daily tasks such as cooking, cleaning and laundry were taken care of by the crew. Many of Lam’s experiments are sourced from underwater sediment cores that she and her research team obtained during this trip.

“One of the most vivid memories from sailing in the Tasman Sea is going out onto the deck at night and looking up at the sky,” Lam recalls. “I’ve never seen the sky so clear. There’s no light pollution, and you can see the Milky Way stretching across the entire sky. It is breathtaking.”

For her dissertation research, Lam reconstructed the Kuroshio Current Extension, a western boundary current that supplies warmth to waters near Japan, and helps support a wide diversity of marine life. She wanted to observe the behavior of foraminifera as the Kuroshio’s warm waters met with the Arctic’s cold currents, creating a transitory area of warm and cool water species called an ecotone. More specifically, she wanted to quantify how many species were able to sustain life in the now-temperate waters.

“One of the papers we published found that actually, for the last at least 12 million years, there’s very high diversity within the Kuroshio Current Extension throughout this time period,” Lam says. “And we think that means two things: One, that this current has sustained planktic foraminifera for a really long time in that region. Two, that the Kuroshio Current Extension’s ecotone has been a prevalent feature in the Northwest Pacific for a very long time.”

Lam was interested to learn that foraminifera showed a greater diversity at 37° north latitude, which is much higher than the field’s previously predicted latitude at which foraminiferal diversity peaks.

“This is called the latitudinal diversity gradient, and a lot of biological studies say that the tropics hold the highest diversity of organisms — that’s not true for all species,” Lam says. “So our study found that the latitudinal diversity gradient for foraminifera may actually be a little different. … We were showing higher diversity at higher latitudes.”

Although Lam loves research, the coolest part of her job has been teaching students all about her passion: geology. Lam has a special message she likes to leave with all of her students throughout their time together.

“My first comment is: You belong, everyone belongs,” says Lam, who was a first-generation college student. “Academia may not have been made for everyone at first, but it surely is today. The second piece of advice I have is to find mentors — not just advisors; find mentors. These are people who are going to help you along in your career. It’s just finding people you can rely on, that you can vent to. That will give you good advice and support you, no matter what.”

Laura Cook’s minireview was published in the July edition of the society’s “Infection and Immunity” journal. This was the first time the editorial board used an issue to highlight some of the “brightest early-career scientists who embody the future of research on host-microbe interaction.”

The piece, titled “Two-Component Signal Transduction Systems in the Human Pathogen Streptococcus agalactiae,” was co-authored by Lamar S. Thomas, a doctoral candidate in Cook’s lab.

“We only had two months to put together the review, citing 100 different sources, so it was a lot of reading and work,” says Cook, an assistant professor of biological sciences who joined the Binghamton faculty in fall 2018. “I wanted Lamar to help me because it’s good for her career. I was impressed with how much work she put into it, considering the short timelines.”

Cook’s research focuses on Streptococcus pyogenes, a bacteria that causes strep throat and skin and soft tissue diseases like impetigo and cellulitis. She also studies Streptococcus agalactiae, which commonly live in the gastrointestinal and genital tracts but can cause invasive infection in newborns, maternal women and older individuals with underlying chronic conditions.

“It’s not ideal that the only and best course of treatment is antibiotics,” Cook says. “We’re working toward identifying new treatment strategies. We hope our research moves in the direction of identifying new vaccine candidates.”

Cook did her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Minnesota. Her post-doctoral studies took her to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she focused on quorum sensing (the ability to detect and respond to cell population density by gene regulation) in streptococci and the role of cell-to-cell signaling as they colonize the host.

While working in the lab of Michael Federle, she began using animal models of bacterial growth, and her use of a mouse model of vaginal colonization developed into her current research.

Cook, Thomas and several undergraduate students are studying how streptococci grow and interact on mucosal surfaces in the vaginal tract and nasopharynx of mouse models.

Federle said he appreciated Cook’s coordination of his group of bacteriologists with a group with physicians at another university, both of which were researching reoccurring strep throat diagnoses among adolescent patients. The two groups were looking at relevant questions that could be asked in a clinical setting and were researching therapeutic options outside of antibiotics.

“She was really good at finding collaborators and teams of scientists that can work together,” Federle says. “That’s one of the biggest impacts that she’s going to have at Binghamton University.”

Another strength is Cook’s approachability and innate ability to make people — especially students — comfortable. “She’s a good person to collaborate with because she takes on big goals and ideas and she takes them on with ease,” Federle says. “She asks the right questions — questions that are going to need collaboration through interdisciplinary work.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the associate professor of history a $60,000 fellowship in January to complete her research and write her second book. She expects “Trafficking, Travel, and Illicit Migration in Early Twentieth-Century French and the Americas” to be published in 2022.

“Elisa’s work really touches on central questions of our own day,” says Eileen Boris, Hull Endowed Chair and distinguished professor of the department of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara. “She reconstructs the social and political history of people who traversed the Atlantic for a living while studying the ideas of border control, belonging and citizenship, civilian surveillance, racial profiling and policing of sexuality.”

While French women were migrating to cities like Vera Cruz, Buenos Aires and Havana to work in commercial sex trade, there were open immigration policies from Argentina up to Nova Scotia until restrictions became the norm by 1930.

“Historians usually talk about how the growth of nationalism, race and ethnicity affected these policies, but women’s mobility and the problem or perceived problems associated with migratory prostitution play a key role in this development,” Camiscioli says. “I argue that these early debates about border policing, passport control, repatriating, restrictive immigration requirements — all in association with women working in prostitution and societal fears about women’s mobility — helped create current border control regimes and shape understandings of illicit migration today.”

Camiscioli’s work also looks at the distinction between free versus forced migration. Personal letters collected as evidence for police records against prostitutes or their pimps indicate these women generally made the decision to travel abroad. “They wrote about feeling seasick or asked for news about their goddaughter. They had tender ties to their families,” she says. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t dreadfully poor, didn’t have violence in their lives, or that they didn’t experience degrees of abuse and deception, but there are shades of gray between coercion and choice and I think many of these women fell somewhere in between.”

Occasionally, Camiscioli can piece together a rough timeline of one woman’s travels. For example, a family reported their 15-year-old daughter missing but once the Buenos Aires police found her, she said she was sick and didn’t want to tell her family why she was miserable. Consulate records and ship manifests show this individual traveled to several cities before ending up in San Francisco. She reported to the U.S. Census that she was a dressmaker, an occupation often used by women who worked in commercial sex. She traveled to France three times to visit an aunt, and by age 40, she was living in Paris and managing a brothel.

“She was entrepreneurial. And by migrating, she experienced a boost within her working-class status,” Camiscioli says. “I’m astounded by how profoundly mobile these people were and the ingenious ways they got around the system. There’s so much tenacity, and while it can be easy to overly romanticize some of these stories, their sense of freedom and adventure does shine through.”

Camiscioli’s first book, “Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century,” was published by Duke University Press in 2009.

She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history and French literature from the University of Pennsylvania and received her doctorate in history from the University of Chicago. She is the co-editor of the international Journal of Women’s History (along with distinguished professor of history Jean H. Quataert), and serves on research, teaching and granting committees in France, Belgium and the UK.

“Binghamton University has so much opportunity, energy and vitality,” says assistant professor Florence Varodayan, who joined the faculty in January. “As I settle in, I’m looking forward to learning about the cutting-edge research being performed in labs across campus and seeing how we can work together to build interesting multidisciplinary projects that span different departments. Science is a team sport.”

Varodayan’s research focuses on understanding how neural communication between addiction-related brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, is shaped by alcohol dependence and stress. Her goal is to find innovative therapeutic strategies to provide better treatment for patients suffering from alcohol- and anxiety/stress-related psychiatric diseases.

She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and biology and a master’s degree in chemistry from the Un iversity of Pennsylvania. Her second master’s degree and doctorate in neurobiology and behavior was completed at Columbia University.

From there, Varodayan completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Scripps Research, formerly known as The Scripps Research Institute. There, she worked in the cellular neurobiology lab of Dr. Marisa Roberto, a professor in the molecular medicine and neuroscience departments.

“Florence was a dynamic force in my lab,” Roberto says. “She demonstrated great skill at proposing elegant studies, learning new techniques and developing innovative approaches to scientific investigation. She is poised to make seminal contributions to addiction research.”

At Binghamton, Varodayan plans to continue her research on cognitive dysfunction and alcohol use disorder in affiliation with the Developmental Exposure Alcohol Research Center (DEARC).

“One of the main techniques that we use is electrophysiology, which is this cool opportunity to monitor brain activity,” Varodayan says. “You can actually see individual brain cells communicate in real time.”

The lab is recruiting postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students and research technicians. Varodayan has a long history of mentoring and working with students, and she is looking forward to encouraging curiosity and potential career paths in her new role.

“Sometimes it’s their first experience with research. They are used to there being a correct or right answer,” Varodayan says. “They can bring a fresh perspective to your research because they’re always asking, ‘Why are we doing it this way?’ or ‘Why does it work this way but not that way?’ Their questions can very actively contribute to research in very important ways.”

Varodayan arrives with grants to support her research. In 2017, she received a prestigious, multi-year Pathway to Independence grant from the National Institutes of Health, which supports highly qualified postdoctoral researchers as they transition to independent scientists. The first phase of this $1 million grant involved her mentored research at Scripps Research; the second phase that supports her independent research at Binghamton will start in the spring.

The Chancellor’s Early-Career Scholar award provides funding of up to $500,000 for items such as postdoctoral research fellowships, graduate student stipends, travel, equipment and software. Scholars who can attract more than $2 million of externally sponsored research funding within four years of their appointment are eligible to receive $100,000 in additional funding for the purpose of growing research.

In addition to the grants, Varodayan also learned in February she will receive faculty salary support through the PRODiG (Promoting Recruitment Opportunity, Diversity, Inclusion and Growth) program, which SUNY launched in 2019 to increase the representation of historically underrepresented faculty and women in STEM disciplines.

Her hobby is a little different. Hardesty also runs marathons — and she qualified for the recent 2020 Olympic trials.

Hardesty’s latest paper, published in the Johns Hopkins University Press, began when she noticed articles criticizing women who participated in an online trend of political selfies. Women in the photos would hold up a sign or whiteboard with phrases such as “I don’t need feminism because…” or “Why I don’t need feminism:” and Hardesty wanted to understand the reason for the photos in the first place.

Hardesty found these photos responded to a Duke University project where students were asked to complete the phrase “I need feminism because…” on a whiteboard. The photo series was shared widely online, but the photos in the “anti-feminist” category ultimately received more attention.

Political selfies in the digital age raise some unique challenges. It’s difficult to identify if the photo was staged, for instance, and sometimes it’s unclear whether the subject in the photograph is the person who is originating the statement.

“I think I can say pretty confidently, in part because of the way people react to photos, that people see pictures as being a snapshot of something that’s real,” Hardesty says.

Hardesty’s paper, titled Political Selfies and the Paradox of Giving Voice to Virtual Bodies, also addresses the idea that social media enables images to travel much further than messages can spread in person. We as individuals can publicly display our relation to wider, less specific political movements. Newer technology, including filters and photo editing apps, can also change our perception as well as our relationship with our own bodies.

“It’s interesting to consider how people can inhabit a digital mock-up of themselves,” says Hardesty, who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2016. “What does it mean to be an embodied human when people are having so many more interactions not in their flesh and blood bodies?”

Yvonne Smith, now an assistant professor at Syracuse University, was a doctoral student with Hardesty. She saw her dedication to integrating her research into her daily life. “I admire Melissa’s commitment to examining how feminisms play out in everyday practices — like political selfies or foster parenting,” Smith says. “I think her research puts feminist thought to work making sense of phenomena that are central to our profession.”

While Hardesty’s academic projects can take several years, marathons move faster: 2 hours, 44 minutes and 10 seconds to be exact. Completing the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in that time made her eligible to try out for the 2020 Olympics.

“I have no shot of making the Olympic team,” Hardesty said with a laugh before the trials, which were held Feb. 29 in Atlanta.

The trials were granted gold status by USA Track and Field; the top three runners from the men’s and women’s categories will go on to Tokyo in 2020.

Hardesty finished 191st out of the 390 women who completed the race, and 361st overall, out 565 runners. She finished in the top 60th percentile, with a time of 2 hours, 48 minutes, and 31 seconds — less than five minutes more than her qualifying time.

Hardesty began running in 2006 for recreational purposes, but she grew more serious about it as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago. She has been competing since 2008.

She describes her best races as the ones where she begins the race feeling less than ready but reaches a peak around the 20th mile — just when others may begin to fall in their speed. Her efficient use of energy to maintain a strong pace throughout a race is an essential trait among successful marathon runners.

When the weather gets below 20 degrees, or road conditions are too icy, Hardesty trains indoors on a treadmill. She sticks to a cycle of training, resting between marathons, and then slowly working her way back to a competitive level in the weeks before a race.

If you ask Alana Gunn, an assistant professor at University of Illinois at Chicago, Hardesty has always had the dedication of an Olympian.

“She qualified for the Olympic trials one week and got an awesome paper accepted the next!” Gunn says. “That still stands out to me — her ability to support others while also exploring her own diverse talents and ambitions.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When a high school math teacher saw a need for education reform, she ended up in the perfect position to make a difference.

Amber Simpson went back to school for her doctoral degree in curriculum and instruction in mathematics education at Clemson University. Now she’s an assistant professor of math education at Binghamton University.

“I had no idea what a PhD actually meant or required,” Simpson says. “But I started taking research classes and my world just flipped. I loved how you can contribute to the education field through research, and so that was a huge eye-opening experience for me, almost by happenstance.”

At Binghamton, Simpson says she has focused her research and coursework on changing the stigma associated with math education.

“Most students think of learning mathematics as, ‘Let me sit at my desk, listen to the teacher present procedures and do my homework,’” Simpson says. “But there’s a lot of research that supports the idea of inquiry, allowing kids to brainstorm ways to solve the problem through various approaches and having classroom discussions about their strategies.” 

In spring 2019, Simpson designed and taught a service-learning course called Making and Tinkering — an education class focused on design, physical creation and problem-solving. Students worked in groups to develop youth making programs. They implemented them in the community through a partnership with the Windsor Central School District and Your Home Public Library in Johnson City, Simpson says.

“Makerspaces provide a place for anyone to just go and make things, and tinker with things,” Simpson says. “Making can including high-tech tools such as 3D printers and laser cutters, low-tech tools such as makey-makeys and arduinos, or upcycled materials such as cardboard and yogurt containers. All of it has a huge presence within STEM education and as part of my research, I examine the role of making and tinkering for young children and educators.”

Jose A. Morales Collazo, a doctoral student in the department of teaching, learning and educational leadership, has worked with Simpson since she came to Binghamton in 2017. He attributes much of his success to her guidance.

“I was very intrigued by Dr. Simpson because she was this energetic person that was coming in with this fire,” Collazo says. “I waited a little bit, but then I just went to her office and knocked on her door and asked if I could help. … We started with just a smaller project that she was working on. And currently we are working on four projects involving STEM identity and meta-analysis.”

Simpson has published work in identity research, particularly STEM identity research, which is driven by her fascination of what people experience and their stories, she says. 

Aside from developing unique curricula, Simpson is involved in community research. She was awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant to work with families and engineers on considering the engineering design process in their own home and/or community. Simpson says families are guided by local engineers and students on how to come up with solutions or prototypes for something they see as a problem.

“The family engagement piece is sort of a newer interest of mine,” Simpson says, “and I always try to build in identity research and making and tinkering into my projects. So this particular grant has all three of my research studies coinciding.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did problems such as poverty, racism, gender inequality and increasing climate instability come to plague humankind? Binghamton scholar Jason W. Moore has an answer in his new book, 

Moore, a professor of sociology, is an environmental historian and historical geographer. His book, published last fall by University of California Press, argues that capitalism is one of the most flawed and inefficient systems of organizing humans and nature.

To understand his perspective, first look at what he means by “cheap.” 

Moore argues that cheapening is the method used by capitalism to extract the most profit with the least cost. “There are two motives of cheapness,” he says. “One is cheap in price, but the other is cheapening in an ethical political sense, as in to treat with less respect, to degrade the value of work.”

For example, companies sometimes use prison labor to manufacture products. Prisoners don’t need to be paid, and corporations only incur a small cost when working with the prison. This would be an example of cheap labor, one of Moore’s seven cheap things.

Cheapening also means externalizing costs, which include toxic waste, carbon emissions and other negative environmental byproducts. Environmental consequences are a cost capitalism has historically ignored.

A reason for this lies in one of the central tenets of Moore’s book: the mythical divide between nature and civilization. Capitalism promoted a Cartesian view of nature, which states that human society is above nature, and is actually meant to control nature and reap its benefits.

This made it possible to lessen the value of anything — even humans — by placing it under the category of nature. Slavery, the taking of indigenous land, racism and sexism are powerfully influenced by this concept, Moore writes.

Capitalism is more than just a socioeconomic construct — it is a way of thinking about and organizing life, Moore writes in A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things. “This is a book that encourages 21st-century thinking to deal with 21st-century problems,” he says. “We need to have a way of making sense of the biosphere and relationships between humans and the environment as fundamentally interconnected at every turn.”

Moore wrote this book with Raj Patel, an award-winning writer, activist and academic. Patel, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, regularly writes for The Guardian and is an advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

Moore and Patel had been reading each other’s work and borrowing ideas for a while. After meeting for the first time at a conference in Austin, they decided to write a book together the same day.

“This book is a set of ideas with a sense of urgency to it,” Patel says. “It’s exciting that there’s already a great deal of attention being paid to it.”

Moore previously wrote several other books, most recently Capitalism and the Web of Life (Verso, 2015) His next book, titled Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism, covers a world history of the origins of climate crisis. He has an active research agenda that spans topics such as agriculture and energy, environmental history and climate change.

“His work is groundbreaking,” says Richard Walker, professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and Moore’s doctoral advisor. “There are people working on many of the topics he covers, but the way he pulls it all together is unique, and it’s very accessible.”

Moore is also chair of the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association and coordinates the World-Ecology Research Network, a group of scholars and activists dedicated to studying historical change through seeing human society as a product and producer of the environment.

For more details about Moore and his book A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things, visit his website, https://jasonwmoore.com.

Fake “Frank” Lu, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, uses stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), a molecule identification technique, to develop a multicolor imaging technology for brain cancer pathology during surgery.

A three-year, $750,000 R00 grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) supports his research at Binghamton.

There are two steps to get rid of a brain tumor: removing the literal mass and then removing the lingering cancer cells at the edges. Removing the lingering cells can be tough, requiring evaluation to avoid destroying functioning brain structures.

Cancer cells are denser than normal cells, which helps them to be identified. Modern procedures involve a pathologist standing by for intraoperative consultation, using neuronavigation systems (such as an MRI scan) or fluorescence imaging to detect lingering cancer cells. Each of these techniques has drawbacks:

• With intraoperative staining-based histopathology, tissue samples are taken and evaluated in a nearby laboratory. Although accurate, this is ultimately a slow process, only allowing three samples to be evaluated during surgery.
• Neuronavigation systems can also be flawed as a result of the brain moving during the surgery, which is called “brain shift.”
• Fluorescence imaging uses fluorescent dyes to label and locate the cancer cells. Unfortunately, this is a messy process and isn’t accurate at distinguishing the margins of the tumor.

Lu’s technology is label-free, rapid and detailed. He expects that in the future, SRS can be used to evaluate 20-30 tissue samples during surgery to help delineate the tumor margin.

SRS detects “molecular fingerprints” by exciting the chemical bonds in molecules and reading the frequencies emitted by the vibrational states of the bond. This information is then used to assign different colors to the molecules, allowing for a detailed image.

Lu has also improved SRS so that it can create images of lipids, fatty acids that he says are important markers for the presence of cancer cells. Axons, the long, thread-like sections of nerve cells, are wrapped in lipid layers called myelin sheath. In areas affected by cancer, they break down, leaving lipid droplets that can be easily detected by Lu’s technology.

Lu envisions the technology being incorporated into a machine for operating rooms, and he is debating two options: a handheld probe to create images of the internal cavity, or a device that creates images of tissue samples from multiple locations. “We are providing a tool that is complementary to the current neuronavigation system,” he says.

The next step is to collect more data to solidify the efficiency of the technology. Lu is collaborating with SUNY Upstate Medical University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital to get larger data sets.

Eventually, Lu would like to implement machine learning into the technology for faster and more efficient diagnosis. He also hopes to apply this technology to other types of cancer diagnosis and even other neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s, and do more work in live cell imaging.

Before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2017, Lu completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he collaborated with cancer pathologists, surgeons and researchers to transform this technology. He also secured a prestigious NIH K99 Pathway to Independence Award, which is designed to facilitate researchers’ transitions from post-doctoral work to independent tenure-track jobs.

“Everyone contributes to the technical development of this technology, [but] Frank’s definitely the driving force behind the work,” says Sandro Santagata, a neuropathologist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and Lu’s post-doc collaborator. “He’s a team player, which is very important in scientific research.”

Lu, who was born in Shandong, China, received an undergraduate degree in optoelectronics from Zhejiang University in China and a graduate degree in bioengineering from the National University of Singapore.

He eventually realized he wanted to move toward healthcare applications of photonics rather than pure engineering and technology, which led him to Raman bioimaging. “For me, pure engineering work was not that exciting,” Lu says. “Later in my career I started thinking about practical applications of biophotonics in life science.”

As a kid, Lu was always tinkering, even attempting to develop a FM radio and an electric generator. Ever since, he has been on course to create innovations that would benefit society.

“To be successful in science requires a pretty remarkable drive,” Santagata says, “and he’s got it.”

Tara P. Dhakal, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, was awarded a five-year, $500,000 NSF CAREER grant for his study “Toward Twenty Year Lifetime: Hermetic Sealing for Perovskite Solar Cells.” The proposal was one of just 11 to be funded in a field of 150 proposals.

“Most solar cells are made from silicon and, while those solar cells are highly efficient, they have their limitations,” says Dhakal, who also serves as interim director of Binghamton’s Center for Autonomous Solar Power.

His work focuses on solar cells made with perovskite, a crystalline mineral found in nature that has shown the potential to create solar cells that are just as efficient as the silicon-based type.

“Unfortunately, the current versions of perovskite solar cells are typically fabricated with toxic lead,” Dhakal says. He wants to replace lead with non-toxic germanium.

“Germanium and lead both come from column 14 on the periodic table,” Dhakal says. “Other researchers have tried, without success, to use tin for the same reason but I’ve found evidence that germanium has a better chance of success.”

If he is able to replace the lead in the perovskite solar cells, they could prove to be more environmentally friendly than other solar cells.

However, even with the lead removed, there is another issue that could prevent perovskite solar cells from being deployed for an extended period of time.

That’s why Dhakal’s study will also be looking at ways to make perovskite solar cells last longer.

“Lead perovskite solar cells have only lasted for several months under ideal laboratory conditions,” he says. “With my proposed sealing techniques, I predict that module lifetimes could be greater than 20 years.”

With Dhakal’s seal on the perovskite solar cells, they could have the same shelf life that silicon solar cells do. Without lead and with this sealing, the cells will become more practical for use — which Dhakal says will facilitate a wider reach for solar power.

“Silicon makes a robust solar cell but one thing it misses is flexibility,” he says. “The perovskite solar cells could be made on fabrics or plastics, which would make solar power much more accessible.”

Dhakal, who did his undergraduate work in Nepal, came to Binghamton as a research scientist in 2010 after earning a doctorate at the University of Florida.

Pegor Aynajian, whose research focuses on quantum phase transitions, will receive $531,582 over five years through the NSF’s CAREER program, which supports early-career scientists.

Aynajian starts with a simple magnet you might find on your refrigerator when he explains phase transitions. “If you raise the temperature above its critical temperature, it becomes a regular metal,” he says of the magnet. “It won’t stick anymore. That’s called a phase transition.”

Specifically, that’s a thermal phase transition, just like the transition from water to ice. That’s a transition we see all the time. Now consider what would happen if we took a fridge magnet and cooled it to absolute zero, zero Kelvin (or −459.67 degrees Fahrenheit). Achieving a phase transition at absolute zero, say by tuning some parameter, can be remarkable, Aynajian says. Rather than thermal, though, it’s called a quantum phase transition.

“Near quantum phase transitions, new states of quantum matter are born,” he says. “We call it the physics of emergence.”

Under those conditions, scientists have found novel electronic phases — including superconductors — that aren’t seen otherwise.

Superconductors are materials that conduct electricity with absolutely no resistance, when cooled below a certain temperature.

This funding will accelerate Aynajian’s research into discovering emergent phases of matter with an emphasis on “unconventional” superconductors. He’s also interested in ferromagnetic superconductors, which are rare and poorly understood.

Aynajian’s group built a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), which uses quantum physics to “see” electrons on the surface of a sample. With this tool, they can observe the spatial patterns electrons form near a quantum phase transition. Many materials have never been studied this way before.

Aynajian’s group also uses X-rays and neutrons at research facilities around the world.

“Our STM is giving us new and unprecedented experimental results,” Aynajian says. “We can see what electrons do, how they form a new state of order, which did not exist before. Our next goal is to figure how we can ‘twist’ this order to create a new superconductor. Working directly with theorists helps us find ways to understand them further.”

Superconductors, which physicists have been studying for about a century, work at very low temperatures, which is a challenge to their practical use. In the past 30 years or so, physicists have found some materials that are superconductors at somewhat higher temperatures. If scientists can find a “room-temperature” superconductor, it would be a tremendous breakthrough for the electric grid and electronic devices of all kinds. That sort of technology could save billions of dollars in energy costs, Aynajian says.

Aynajian, who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2013, began studying superconductors in graduate school and continued working with them during a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University. He credits Bernhard Keimer, his graduate school mentor at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, with bringing him into the field.

The CAREER award will give Aynajian an opportunity to do some mentoring of his own, both with his graduate students and with children in Greater Binghamton. He plans to develop hands-on experiments and playful activities with superconductors, including a mini magnetic-levitation train, to inspire area students and offer some exposure to ideas in physics.

As for the experimental aspect of the project, he’s optimistic. “No matter what we find,” he says, “it will be interesting.”

“Skin acts as a physical, chemical and microbial barrier. It also helps regulate temperature and enables mechanoreception: the ability to sense touch,” says Guy German, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering whose research focuses almost exclusively on the body’s largest organ.

“[There is] a diverse population of microorganisms that naturally reside on your skin,” he says. “When [skin] becomes ruptured, its barrier function is lost, leaving underlying living tissue exposed to harmful pathogens. These pathogens can cause a variety of diseases and infections.”

German will continue his research into skin with a five-year, $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Early Career Development (CAREER) program. His project – “Understanding the Multi-scale Failure Mechanics of Human Skin with Age, Ultraviolet Photodamage and Bacterial Growth” – formally begins in July.

“My first reaction to learning about the award was a combination of happiness that I could support more graduate student research and excitement because the award will enable my lab to explore a new research area that I’m passionate about,” German says. “Overall, this project aims to support up to two graduate students over the five years.”

The fundamental research will explore how aging, ultraviolet light and bacteria weaken skin, cause wrinkles and increase the risk of skin rupture. The results will provide a better understanding of the biomechanical aging process, the onset of skin diseases that could be caused by bacteria in the skin microbiome, and new approaches in skin-based drug delivery in creams and ointments. Some of the results may also have applications related to flexible electronics and energy harvesting.

Much of the current work in the field focuses on macro-testing equipment and treating skin as a homogenous material, but skin is heterogeneous at many length scales, German says, so he plans to look at the tissue microscopically. Experiments will combine immunostaining, mechanical manipulation, high-speed imaging and traction force microscopy to show how skin degrades under a variety of conditions.

The National Science Foundation’s CAREER grants support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education while leading advances in their fields. German joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2013.

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.”

Schizophrenia affects about 1 percent of the world’s population and is the #1 cause of medical disability in the United States. The biggest reason for this high rate of disability is severe impairment in cognition, which makes it difficult to work or perform activities of daily living. Unfortunately, the cause of these cognitive impairments is poorly understood.

A recent paper by graduate student Lindsay Morra, which Strauss supervised, found that medical conditions such as diabetes, a high waist-to-hip ratio and especially high blood pressure were “particularly associated with a range of cognitive deficits” that occur in schizophrenia. This finding is significant because it suggests that general health problems that affect the body also affect the brain and cognition in schizophrenia. Earlier studies mostly focused on structural or neurochemical abnormalities that affect the brain broadly. The research from Strauss’ lab raised an important possibility that treating metabolic abnormalities, such as hypertension, may improve cognition in schizophrenia.

“The brain is intricately wired to receive blood from arteries,” Strauss says. “In people with schizophrenia, who often have had high blood pressure for 20 to 40 years, there is a systemic effect on the brain caused by a hardening of the arteries, which affects the brain’s ability to efficiently distribute blood throughout the brain.”

Several potential mechanisms complicate the interpretation of the finding in Morra’s study, Strauss says. “One is actually, unfortunately, the antipsychotic medications,” he notes. “They can cause the metabolic abnormalities to come about.”

Most of the recent drug therapies carry risks of elevated blood sugar, high blood pressure, weight gain and higher cholesterol. The new study was unable to follow the participants longitudinally to determine the cause-effect role of the antipsychotics.

All of this is not to say that high blood pressure causes schizophrenia or vice versa. Correlation isn’t causation, as the saying goes, and Strauss emphasizes that “metabolic abnormalities only predict a small proportion of the cognitive impairment in schizophrenia.”

Another potential explanation for cognitive impairment, which Strauss is investigating with a new grant from the American Psychological Foundation, is what he calls a “motivational impairment,” or abnormal interaction of the brain’s reward system with the prefrontal cortex that can cause a certain kind of reward process to go haywire.

Strauss explains it like this: For years, clinicians have thought that patients suffering from schizophrenia were cognitively impaired because something in the brain was demotivating them. “We’ve explored that, and we basically don’t think that that’s true,” he says. “What we think happens is that they try adequately but they’re inefficient at allocating their efforts.”

Healthy individuals, he says, engage in a labor-leisure tradeoff. When it’s necessary, psychiatrically healthy individuals ramp up their brain’s efforts when confronted with a hard task, but automatically ease off when that task gets easier or ends. They do this unconsciously, and it’s why you might like to play a mindless video game after a hard day at work.

By using brain recording techniques and pupillometry — the measurement of pupil diameter, which is a way to assess the amount of cognitive effort that someone exerts — Strauss and his students have found that it’s not that the brains of those suffering from schizophrenia aren’t expending as much effort; they’re ramping up and down their efforts inefficiently.

“They basically end up in the state of mental fatigue really quickly because they expend their effort inefficiently, and they can’t overcome it,” says Strauss, who received Early Career Awards for Research last year from the National Academy of Neuropsychology and the American Psychological Foundation.

By researching motivational mechanisms that can cause the cognitive impairments, Strauss hopes that he and his students might be able to design “cognitive rehabilitation training programs,” similar to some of the online brain games you’ve probably heard of.

“What we’re working toward,” he says, “is developing new cognitive training programs that actually target the motivational mechanisms that are inherent to schizophrenia and cause them to become mentally fatigued more quickly.”

Delirium is “an acute change in mental status characterized by inattention and fluctuating mental status,” Flanagan says. No one is really sure what causes it, but delirium can occur in 25-80 percent of hospitalized older adults and can lead to increase in morbidity and mortality. It can also lead to other serious health issues, including dementia.

That’s why she has examined the correlation between two different tools to measure delirium: the Confusion Assessment Method (CAM) and the Confusion Assessment Method-Family Assessment Method (FAM-CAM). The CAM, she says, is the “gold standard,” but it’s limited to the observations of geriatric patients by healthcare professionals. The FAM-CAM is aimed at getting families involved in assessing whether a patient has delirium. “My study was one of the first that looked at the comparison of the family members and the provider,” she says.

In the end, Flanagan, a nurse practitioner for more than 25 years, found a strong correlation between the CAM and the FAM-CAM, meaning that family members can play a role in catching delirium early. She published her findings in two nursing journals in 2015.

It’s important for healthcare providers and family members alike to recognize delirium so they can figure out what’s causing it, she said, and what can be done to try to limit its duration.

“The longer they stay delirious, the more likely they are to develop dementia,” Flanagan says. “In older adults, they have a 12½-fold more likelihood of developing dementia.”

What she found while researching her dissertation was that family members will notice subtle things not known or noticed by healthcare professionals. “You really have to rely on the family members or caregiver to give you the picture of what this person is like,” she says. “You know, pre-hospital or pre-rehab. What were they like at home? How are they managing?”

The impact of Flanagan’s research is that the FAM-CAM can be a starting point in getting a clearer picture of what’s happening with the patient. It’s also, she says, a way to introduce the topic of delirium and get family members to understand it.

“I think that’s probably the biggest impact, opening a window to some education about what delirium is and how it happens,” she says. “You know, as a team, the family and the provider and the patient can all work together to try to make things better. So it’s really about that collaboration between the family and nurse.”

While conducting research during graduate school at the University of Maryland, she saw firsthand that most students with disabilities weren’t getting the education they needed because the United States faces a shortage of special ed teachers, and worse, they’re often not assigned to the classrooms where they’re needed.

“For students who have more significant learning and behavior needs, we put them into the special education schools and they need specialists,” says Mason-Williams, who joined Binghamton’s Graduate School of Education in 2011. “And they’re not necessarily getting that.”

Instead, they get well-meaning teachers who might not have training in special education. Often the factor is the relative wealth of a school. Teachers tend to want to work in well-resourced schools, so children with special needs in high-poverty schools are missing out.

“The uneven distribution of SETs (Special Education Teachers) continues, especially among hard-to-staff schools where high rates of school poverty, high minority enrollment, or the geographic location of a school make it difficult to attract and retain qualified, prepared SETs,” she wrote in a 2015 paper. “The uneven distribution restricts meeting goals of educational equity for all students with disabilities.”

Mason-Williams’ research relies on the Schools and Staffing Survey, conducted by the Department of Education every four years, and is descriptive rather than prescriptive. She does have some ideas about how to solve the problem, however.

“We need to think of appropriate policies, appropriate programs that can both increase the supply, but then also incentivize or better recruit to more difficult settings,” she says, noting that there won’t be a one-size-fits-all policy. Instead, policy makers should concentrate on professional development opportunities aimed at teachers who don’t have the special education qualifications, but who are accepting these positions, and work with the teachers so they can be trained quickly. There should also be incentives for special education teachers to work in “more difficult situations,” she says.

“We need to think about the working conditions of the teachers and these settings,” she adds. “Things like class size to help the situation.”

Mason-Williams says she doesn’t expect her research to have any immediate impact, but she does believe in the value of data to show just how significant the problem is. It’s a crisis.

“The term that’s used is a chronic long-term shortage,” she says. “It’s something that’s been a problem for more than 30 years. So it’s not new, but it is a significant problem.”

Wall, a historian who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2010, received a highly competitive fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to research how Cold War politics and efforts by ethnic, religious, civic, patriotic and labor groups to spur, shape or halt immigration reform transformed vast swaths of American life.

“When President Lyndon Johnson signed the act into law under the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, he downplayed its importance,” she writes in her proposal to the NEH. “‘[This] is not a revolutionary bill,’ he declared. ‘It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.’ Few predictions have proven faultier.”

The act did away with a system of national origins quotas in place since the 1920s that heavily favored immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. It replaced this with a system that favored the reunification of families and, to a lesser extent, skills. This opened the door not only to Southern and Eastern Europeans, but also to millions of newcomers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. It also put a ceiling for the first time on immigration from the Western Hemisphere, greatly contributing to illegal immigration from Latin America.

“Neither popular writers nor historians of postwar America pay much attention to how we got the Immigration Act of 1965,” she says. “It’s often portrayed simply as the product of a great liberal moment — we got the civil rights and the voting rights, and the Immigration Act got thrown in there too. … I’m interested in both how we got the act, and why it took the shape it did.”

Immigration reform then was just as contentious an issue as it is today, she says. The Cold War was raging, and proponents of reform argued that failure to make changes in the policy was offending the newly decolonized people of Asia and Africa that the United States wanted to keep out of the Soviet Union’s orbit. Ethnic groups such as Greeks and Italians used Cold War rhetoric too, arguing that population pressure in their home countries encouraged social unrest and provided a fertile ground for communism.

“There were also people on the other side of the equation, people who didn’t want to open the borders. They said, ‘Ah, well, if we open the borders, then we’ll have all these spies coming in,’” Wall says. It’s a familiar argument in 2016, with some politicians seeking to limit or ban immigration from Muslim countries because of the fear of terrorism.

Andrew J. Rotter, Charles A. Dana Professor of History at Colgate University, recommended Wall for the NEH fellowship. He says any book she produces will be carefully researched and beautifully written, in part owing to her background as a Wall Street Journal reporter.

“Wendy has an astonishing knack to make history come alive through the prism of current events — in this case, the (often poisonous and nearly always ill-informed) debate over immigration,” Rotter says. “Her story promises to place these debates in a deep and illuminating context.”