When Marcin worked in Binghamton’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, she developed a partnership with Instituto Caro y Cuervo in Colombia, a prestigious language, philology and linguistics center that offers several master’s degrees. Through this partnership, students at both universities had the opportunity to converse: Students at Binghamton practiced their language, and the students at Caro y Cuervo experienced Spanish spoken as a foreign language. When those Colombian graduate students connected virtually with their Binghamton student peers, she witnessed how naturally the conversations flowed.

“I truly believe that the best way to learn a language is by using it, and it’s about being creative in using technology to connect people,” says Marcin, who holds a master’s degree in integrating technology in the classroom from Walden University and a doctorate from Binghamton’s Translation Research and Instruction Program. “Language is for usage. It’s not about how many questions you can answer correctly or how many words you have memorized. Not everyone is meant to become a grammarian.”

As one of the committee members tasked with revising the New York State standards for world languages, Marcin is aware of the dire need for public school language instructors. She created Lenguas Club (which translates to Languages Club) with the hopes of helping current classroom teachers accomplish their teaching goals while increasing students’ proficiency. Her program uses technology to immerse students in Spanish language and culture by involving them in virtual small group conversation sessions led by a native speaker from Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

Marcin, a lecturer in the Global Studies Program, gained strategic guidance on business viability when she went through the Binghamton Accelerator Program, offered by the Division of Research’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships. She then participated in the regional National Science Foundation I-Corps Program to determine potential customers and to explore business models at the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator in downtown Binghamton.

This semester, less than two years after the initial concept, Lenguas Club is in its first pilot run with high school students in the Binghamton City School District.

“So far I am pleased with the results we are seeing in these classes,” says Alice Kiereck, the district’s department chair of ELA, ENL, and World Languages for grades 6-12. “Marisol’s thorough knowledge of the New York State World Language standards has been an asset as we create a program that will best serve the students.”

Getting high school students to actually speak Spanish has always been one of the department’s biggest hurdles, Kiereck says. “Initially there was some hesitation around the amount of speaking required in this program,” she adds. “However, the instructors have been patient and encouraging, and students have become more comfortable engaging in the work.”

The district opted to test a three-day program, which provides conversation club, language lab, bi-weekly deep dives, curriculum alignment and assessment reports. On the days that students do not have virtual meetings, they work with their classroom teacher to deepen their language learning. As the business grows, Marcin hopes to offer other languages besides Spanish and English and envisions future users to include individuals and businesses.

“We want undergraduates to know what it means to be involved in research and scholarship,” says Janice McDonald, director of the Undergraduate Research Center at Binghamton and chair of the Research Days planning committee. “The people standing in front of them in class are pushing the boundaries of their fields.”

Two poster sessions, scheduled for 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. April 21 at the UU-Mandela Room, will include research presentations by more than 200 undergraduate and graduate students. New this year will be a creative performance showcase from noon-3 p.m. in the UU-Undergrounds the same day. “The poster sessions aren’t just important for the students who present,” McDonald notes. “It’s also a chance for students and faculty to see what our students are capable of. More than 500 people came to the poster sessions last year. It’s one giant learning experience.”

Another new event is an Art of Science competition, sponsored by the Office of Research Advancement and the Center of Excellence. Faculty, students and staff have submitted images that represent their research in some way. Select entries will be on display during a reception from 4-6 p.m. April 19 at the Center of Excellence Atrium.

In addition, McDonald and her staff are organizing a luncheon roundtable where undergraduates will be able to talk in small groups with graduate students and faculty members about grad school and careers in research. “We know that our students who are considering going into grad school in traditional research-based fields may not understand the benefit of starting in research now,” McDonald says. “We hope undergraduates will get some insight from our faculty members about what they can do to prepare and to figure out what interests them the most.”

Binghamton Research Days are sponsored by Academic Affairs, the Division of Research, Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, McNair Scholars Program and the Undergraduate Research Center. Research Days has become a campus tradition, but McDonald notes that the organizers continue to adjust the programming. She also looks at the outcome of the activities each year.

“We’re demonstrating that students are doing meaningful research,” she says. “They’re part of the process, part of the excitement of research. It gives students a feeling of accomplishment and of pride to present their work. We know that it has encouraged other students to get involved in research, and our faculty are impressed, too.”

For more details about Binghamton Research Days and a full schedule of events, visit http://go.binghamton.edu/researchdays.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) chose the Flex Tech Alliance, of which Binghamton University is a founding partner, as America’s first Innovation Institute for Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing (FHE MII).

“The Flex Tech Alliance and Binghamton University have been leaders in the advancement of flexible electronics manufacturing for nearly a decade,” Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger said. “This latest news is an extraordinary affirmation of the work being done by the Alliance and of the work being done by our own researchers here on campus.”

“Flexible hybrid electronics use both traditional chips as well as printed electronics on plastic, thin glass, paper and fabric materials that can bend. Applications include bandages that can sense when the wound they’re covering is infected, as well as wearable patches that monitor human performance,” said Mark Poliks, professor of systems science and industrial engineering and director of the Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM).

Other FHE applications include: health monitoring patches, medical devices, sensors, imaging systems, prosthetic devices, energy storage and energy harvesting devices.

The funding, announced Friday, will create the third federal center within Binghamton’s Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging Center (S3IP) and build on the University’s capabilities in electronics packaging and roll-to-roll manufacturing.

“Flexible electronics research is an example of what Binghamton University does best,” said Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research and director of S3IP. “This campus has a strong history of bringing academia and industry together to produce innovations that benefit society. We can’t wait to get to work with our partners.”

As part of the New York node, Binghamton University will work with New York state companies including Corning, Inc., i3 Electronics, General Electric and Lockheed-Martin to develop and manufacture this new technology. More companies are expected to join the initiative. Cornell University and the SUNY Network of Excellence in Materials and Advanced Manufacturing, representing all four SUNY research campuses, are also expected to participate.

The New York node will work closely with the Flex Tech Alliance to develop roadmaps and project plans. Selected projects are expected to begin early in 2016.

A handful of academic and private-sector jobs are expected to be created in the first two years of the program, with the potential for hundreds of new jobs coming online when new manufacturing initiatives hit the production stage.

The University and its partners will work to develop and then transfer advancements in flexible electronics from the lab to the commercial market. Binghamton and its collaborators have already experienced manufacturing successes and many more are expected to result from this investment. Some of the successes so far include: electronic packaging and reliability, thermal interface materials, thin chip-on-flex electronic systems-in-package technology, power conversion electronics packaging, biomedical and diagnostic electronics, human performance monitors, sensory systems, thin flexible glass for use in flexible electronics and displays, and functional glass surfaces, such as arrays of transparent antennas and touch-sensitive surfaces.

This new institute is part of the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation program (NNMI). The FHE MII is the seventh MII announced — the fifth under DOD management. The NNMI program is an initiative of the Obama administration to support advanced manufacturing in the United States. Each institute is part of a growing network dedicated to securing U.S. leadership in the emerging technologies required to win the next generation of advanced manufacturing.

The DoD leadership team includes technical direction from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST).

Bridging the gap between applied research and large-scale product manufacturing, the institutes bring together companies, universities, academic and training institutions and federal agencies to invest in technology areas that benefit the nation’s commercial and defense interests.

Seokheun “Sean” Choi developed an inexpensive, bacteria-powered battery made from paper, he writes in the July edition of the journal Nano Energy.

The battery generates power from microbial respiration, delivering enough energy to run a paper-based biosensor with nothing more than a drop of bacteria-containing liquid. “Dirty water has a lot of organic matter,” Choi says. “Any type of organic material can be the source of bacteria for the bacterial metabolism.”

The method should be especially useful to anyone working in remote areas with limited resources. Indeed, because paper is inexpensive and readily available, many experts working on disease control and prevention have seized upon it as a key material in creating diagnostic tools for the developing world.

“Paper is cheap and it’s biodegradable,” Choi says. “And we don’t need external pumps or syringes because paper can suck up a solution using capillary force.”

While paper-based biosensors have shown promise in this area, the existing technology must be paired with hand-held devices for analysis. Choi says he envisions a self-powered system in which a paper-based battery would create enough energy — we’re talking microwatts — to run the biosensor. Creating such a system is the goal of a new three-year grant of nearly $300,000 he received from the National Science Foundation.

Choi’s battery, which folds into a square the size of a matchbook, uses an inexpensive air-breathing cathode created with nickel sprayed onto one side of ordinary office paper. The anode is screen printed with carbon paints, creating a hydrophilic zone with wax boundaries.

Total cost of this potentially game-changing device? Five cents.

Choi, who joined Binghamton’s faculty less than three years ago as an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, earned a doctorate from Arizona State University after doing undergraduate work and a master’s degree in South Korea. Choi, who holds two U.S. patents, initially collaborated on the paper battery with Hankeun Lee, a former Binghamton undergraduate and co-author of the new journal article.

Choi recalls an actual “lightbulb moment” while working on an earlier iteration of the paper-based batteries, before he tried the origami approach. “I connected four of the devices in series, and I lit up this small LED,” he says. “At that moment, I knew I had done it!”

The fourth-annual Research Days will be held April 22-24, featuring a keynote speech, student poster sessions, laboratory visits for area students and more. This year’s theme is sustainability.

“This is a great opportunity to showcase the research that is being done at Binghamton University by faculty and students, and it also gives us a chance to focus on a topic that is very important to our campus and our community,” said Donald Loewen, vice provost for undergraduate education and chair of the committee that organizes Research Days.

Raj Patel, a food activist and author, will be this year’s keynote speaker. His talk, “Stuffed & Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System,” will begin at 7 p.m. April 22 in the UU-Mandela Room and will be followed by a book signing.

Patel, a research professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, and a senior research associate at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University in South Africa, holds degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University. He has worked for the World Bank and World Trade Organization and is now a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First.

Today there are 1 billion people starving and 1.5 billion overweight. The U.S. is the most overweight country on Earth, and has 48 million people who are “food insecure.” In Patel’s lecture, he’ll address how this came about and what can be done to stop it.

Research Days poster presentations will take place at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Friday, April 24, also in the Mandela Room. The events are a chance for undergraduate and graduate students from all academic disciplines to showcase their research. More than 100 students plan to participate this year, up from around 80 in 2014.

In addition to these events, Binghamton faculty will again be invited to introduce students to their scholarly work during classes April 22-24. Several researchers will open their labs to area middle and high school students as well.

For more details about Research Days, visit: http://go.binghamton.edu/researchdays.

In addition to a plenary talk and keynote speech, the day will include panels organized by Binghamton faculty members participating in the Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence. Topics will include the local implications of hydraulic fracturing and revealing the three-dimensionality of film emulsion.

Kevin Maney, a Newsweek columnist who began his journalism career at the Press & Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, will deliver the keynote: “Anticipating the Future … Just Enough.” Maney notes that big trends such as artificial intelligence and ubiquitous data will shape life. Sometimes, however, it’s the little things that help us understand what’s coming. His talk will invite participants to think about what it might be like to try on a dress, apply for college, pay for a coffee and do a few other things in the not-so-far-future.

Plenary speaker Mathias Vuille, associate professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University of Albany, will speak about how climate warming will influence everything from healthcare to the design of our future cities.

The day will conclude with two panels on education, one featuring current undergraduates musing on what college may look like in 2065 and another featuring Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger; James Pitarresi, assistant provost and executive director of the Center for Learning and Teaching; and Jason Andrews, superintendent of the Windsor Central School District.

“At Binghamton, we’re proud of our corporate partnerships,” said Per Stromhaug, assistant vice president for innovation and economic development. “Events like Innovation Day give us an opportunity to make connections among our faculty researchers, students, alumni, colleagues in industry as well as engaged community members. This year’s theme is especially fun and challenging. Imagining life at the midpoint of this century is a good way to spark new ideas about innovation across many disciplines.”

The Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging center (S3IP) and its interdisciplinary teams of engineers and scientists recently moved into a new $30 million glass, metal and stone building. The facility joins the Engineering and Science Building and Biotechnology Building at the Innovative Technologies Complex on Murray Hill Road in Vestal. A fourth building, the Smart Energy Research and Development Facility, is under construction and expected to open in 2017.

President Harvey G. Stenger joined this week with Sen. Thomas W. Libous, Assemblywoman Donna A. Lupardo, University faculty and staff, industry partners, community leaders and members of the public to celebrate the opening of the 114,000-square-foot Center of Excellence building.

S3IP, which was designated a Center of Excellence in 2006, connects industry and academia. Key research thrusts include electronics packaging, energy-smart electronic systems, flexible electronics and energy harvesting and storage.

“We have provided infrastructure that will catalyze the advancements already being made by our researchers in the areas of microelectronics, data center energy optimization, battery storage, autonomous solar power, as well as advanced materials and sensors,” Stenger said. “Collaboration is what brought us to this point in our research efforts. Collaboration and the right environment, this building, will lead to path-breaking technologies in the future.”

Stenger said the project, which generated nearly $16 million in economic impact and supported more than 180 jobs, would not have been possible without the support of the senator and assemblywoman.

“Binghamton University is partnering with various industries, academic institutions and government to achieve something very important with the Center of Excellence — an investment in our community and economy,” Libous said. “We set out to create opportunities for careers locally, and we’ll see those opportunities continue to grow in this new facility.”

Lupardo noted that the opening of the Center of Excellence marks another milestone in the development of Binghamton as a world-class research institution. “This new state-of-the-art facility strengthens the collaborative work being done between government, industry and academia at Binghamton University,” she said. “We are already seeing a positive impact on the local economy, as interdisciplinary teams develop products that will shape the future.”

The Center of Excellence was designed by the University’s in-house architect, William Hall. It was built to LEED standards, and features energy-efficient windows and skylights as well as a water retention system and the latest technology for heat recovery and humidity control.

“Today gives us an opportunity to reflect on the work we’ve done so far, including the more than $1 billion in economic impact on New York state and the nearly 2,000 jobs the center has helped to create or retain since 1996,” said Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research and S3IP director. “Tomorrow, we’ll get back to doing what we do best: making electronics that are smaller, lighter, smarter, greener and faster than the ones you have now.”

Imagine, he says, that you and your co-workers plan via social media to head for lunch about 12:30 p.m. most Thursdays. Usually that Italian place downtown. Frequently tweet about traffic on the way.

Now imagine that at 10 a.m., you’re tweeted a coupon from the Chinese place near the Italian joint — and directions around a traffic jam that will start in about 90 minutes. Score one Sichuan hot pot.

Yoon can make that happen. He and fellow Binghamton University systems scientist Sarah Lam have been working with Binghamton alumnus Nathan Gnanasambandam, a senior researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a division of Xerox Research. They used 500 million tweets to develop algorithms that not only paint a picture of everyday human dynamics, but can predict an individual’s behavior hours in advance. The team, which also included graduate students Keith Thompson and Bichen Zheng, recently published their findings in Industrial Engineer.

Think about what your typical social media post says about you: when you posted, where you were. Your networking relationships can be learned — and with context-based algorithms like those PARC and Binghamton University have developed — what you plan. They use what is called an artificial neural network.

How sure are they? Better than 90 percent for a typical social media user in a three-hour horizon. “If you look at the picture, it’s very static. But the individuals are all over the place,” Yoon says.

Some people are very careful about what data they give out, but the algorithms can work pretty well with anonymized data. Usable predictions can be made more than 60 percent of the time, if the right data are aggregated. And that data isn’t just coming from social media: Think about sources such as credit card transactions, monitored telephone calls, e-mail, GPS data.

Creepy, perhaps, but this type of analysis also has benefits. Xerox, which has funded and participated in the team’s ongoing research, can apply the tools to traffic. (It helps run the New York State Thruway’s EZ-Pass system and parking services in several cities across the country.) Imagine getting directions during an emergency that not only get you out of harm’s way, but get you to someplace personal where you’re safe, reducing the burden on emergency shelters. Or imagine directions that prevent a traffic jam, rather than simply route you around one.

Now apply that research tool to call and contact centers, which Xerox also runs. These methods can fuse data from call centers, online chat and e-mail help desks. “We give it structure — not all feeds have structure,” says Gnanasambandam, who is also a visiting professor in Binghamton’s department of systems science and industrial engineering.

“What if you call a company…” Yoon says, and Lam completes: “… And they know why you’re calling before you call?”

Help desk associates can be cross-trained in topics so they face less downtime, or calls could be routed faster to the best specialist. Data about problems can be analyzed in near-real time, perhaps allowing fixes to be made before the customer realizes there’s a problem. “That’s not too far away from what’s happening,” Gnanasambandam says.

Now direct this approach toward healthcare — which provides about $2 billion of Xerox’s annual business — and researchers can build tools to help patients, doctors, hospitals, insurers and pharmaceutical companies better understand the complexities of public health or ferret out prescription or Medicaid fraud.

“There’s a lot of different directions you can go,” Lam says.

Including to Yoon’s next Chinese meal.

In

Zentner, an assistant professor of English who joined Binghamton University’s faculty in 2013, describes his style as mythical realism, an idea related to (but separate from) the tradition of magical realism established in Central and South America.

“I try to work the myth through the fabric of the entire story,” he says. “I’m not interested in using myth or magic as a showy parlor trick. I hope what I’m doing is something new and different.”

The Lobster Kings is new and different on a number of levels. The novel, which pays homage to Shakespeare’s King Lear, centers on the relationship between an aging man and his three daughters, one of whom is named Cordelia. But it’s also an entirely modern tale featuring meth dealers and a female ship captain who hopes to stop them before they wreck her hometown. There’s homicide, a rape, the legacy of a world-famous painter and stormy seas, too.

Publishers Weekly called the novel “brutal and beautiful” and noted that Zentner gets the reader to root for Cordelia early on. “His fusion of myth and mission, fury and beauty, as well as the palpable sense of place in this unique corner of the world add up to a memorable tale,” the review concluded.

Zentner, who was born and raised in Ontario, now lives in Ithaca, N.Y., with his wife and two daughters, ages 10 and almost 12. The Lobster Kings unfolds on an island off the coast of Maine. Loosewood Island, just like Zentner himself, is contested territory, both American and Canadian.

Setting the story on an island (and in the near-past of 2005) allowed Zentner to work around technology challenges that all writers face when they write about the present day. “If you set a novel today in Manhattan, you can’t have missed connections,” he says. “You can’t have mistaken identities. It’s almost impossible to write about somebody getting lost.”

Like the community of Sawgamet in Touch, Loosewood Island feels so real that readers may be surprised to hear it’s entirely fictional. In fact, Zentner started working on the book during a writer’s residency in Wyoming.

“It’s easier to write about places you’ve been than places you are,” he says. “You can see more clearly what you’ve left than what you have.”

Zentner wanted the community of Loosewood Island to reflect reality, especially the reality that even in small towns, not everyone’s alike. His fictional fishing village has its tough guys and alcoholics — as well as lesbians, teachers, artists and criminals. Zentner says he tries to do enough research for a project that he knows what he’s talking about but not so much that he’s writing a book report. There’s a risk, he says, of being accurate but boring.

“Nobody’s interested in what the day-in, day-out of lobster fishing is; they’re interested in the idea of it,” Zentner says. “We’re more interested in what it means to be that person than what it actually entails.”

And he didn’t hesitate to put a female character at the heart of the book. “I can’t write women, plural,” Zentner says. “But I can write Cordelia, and I can write women, singular. There is no female voice or male voice, just the voices of individual men and women.

“I have two daughters. I’m really interested in the relationship between daughters and fathers and what it means as a woman to step into a position that’s been male-dominated. My goal wasn’t to make Cordelia anything other than complicated.”

In our candy-colored digital world, there’s no time for rust. Gadgets from five years ago are worthless to a “new-every-two” culture. And a man working long hours alone in a garage is presumed to harbor grand ambitions of becoming a start-up millionaire.

But on Robinson Street in Binghamton, you can pick up a distinctly analog signal. It emanates from the cramped studio of sculptor Ronald Gonzalez, a Binghamton University faculty member who transforms the detritus of the last century into burned and blackened figures that speak to the 21st century’s values, politics and ideas of beauty.

Step inside, and you’ll see a workbench that will never witness the birth of a shiny, high-tech gizmo. It’s dotted with drips of wax and home to ancient coffee cans bristling with tiny paintbrushes. The jumble of not-yet-art objects stacked against the walls includes a red typewriter, bicycle seats, a deer skull, a rotary phone, broken guitars, a doll-sized bathtub and hopelessly scratched 45s. Standing guard among this trove are completed works, figures with names like “Stitch,” “Bug” and “Stir.”

A slight, soft-spoken man in a black T-shirt, dark jeans and gray sneakers, Gonzalez is perhaps more at home among these curiosities than anywhere else. “I’ve got a great eye for decay,” he says, scanning his treasures. “The more dilapidated something is, the more attracted I am to it.”

Only in Binghamton

Gonzalez, a prolific sculptor and recipient of the 2013 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, has had solo exhibitions at world-class museums such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park near Boston. He has mounted shows at the Spoleto Festival, the Purchase Biennial and in places as far away as Peru and Germany. But his roots bind him to Binghamton, where Gonzalez grew up a bit of a street kid in the 1950s and ’60s.

His mother was religious; his father just the opposite. He was an altar boy who knew how to shoplift. In fact, Gonzalez says, the major dichotomies in his life can all be traced back to his childhood. Contrasts of sex and guilt, rich and poor, God and atheist, imagination and reality, life and death shaped his emotional and psychological outlook.

“I am definitely a TV and telephone kid from the 1950s,” he says. “I am a product of post-World War II existential Binghamton and the Atomic Age.”

Gonzalez was awakened to art through religious statuary stored in the basement of the local church, where he would pretend to be a sculptor. He was intrigued by the idea that someone could use his imagination to manipulate the human form.

Gonzalez went to the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City with his mother when he was 12. He got lost and recalls wandering through the exhibits until he came to Michelangelo’s Pietà, which was there on loan from the Vatican. Gonzalez couldn’t see over the people crowding around it, but remembers feeling “a sense of reverence and awe” among the onlookers.

That moment and one other, a few years later, sparked something inside Gonzalez. When he was in his teens, he saw pictures of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. His first thought was of the sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which sometimes featured the main character striking that classic pose. But Gonzalez’s second thought (in a moment of boredom) was to look for art books at the library.

He managed to locate a book about Rodin and another about Vincent van Gogh. “I became fascinated with the presence and power of the swirling sea of figures in Rodin’s The Gates of Hell,” Gonzalez says. “I went out and bought a bag of clay that day. I brought it into my bedroom and started making things. I’ve never really stopped.”

It was the late 1960s, but the art books he remembers finding in the public library highlighted figurative sculpture from the 1940s and ’50s. He learned about French sculptor Germaine Richier, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, artists often concerned with themes of isolation and anxiety. “There was enough there to get my mind going,” Gonzalez says, a slight smile crossing his lips.

In the mid-1970s, he met Ed Wilson, who taught sculpture at Binghamton University. Gonzalez eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in art from Binghamton, where he returned in 1999 as a faculty member. Today, he says, he sometimes feels “good vibrations” while critiquing student work in his office, which used to be Wilson’s. Though Gonzalez came late to teaching, he values the one-on-one contact with students. “I help them develop a personal language in sculpture,” he says. “I’m trying to turn them into themselves.”

Gonzalez says his own feeling for being an artist and making things, which began as a kid, still lives deep inside him. “It’s like I’m 60 going on 6 in some way,” he says. “That same thud of an idea and impulse I had as a child is something I never let go of. It’s still there, and I’m still making things from what I can find in my immediate environment.”

He has adapted to that environment, especially the wintry grayness of the upstate valley that has been his home all these years. “Geographic location defines identity,” he says. “My work is saturated with time and the moments of my life. I remember the black-and-white Twilight Zone qualities of the Binghamton diners, streets and train station growing up. Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz was right when she said there is no place like home. But home sickness is not something you get just when you miss home. It is also something you get because you never left.”

Don’t confuse Gonzalez’s strong roots with provincialism, though. He spent time last summer touring the museums and galleries of London and has made other pilgrimages abroad. “New perspectives are always healthy, even for a self-proclaimed homebody,” he says. “When you stay in one place your whole life, time and space take on a tremendous weight. There is no place like home — and no place like the rest of the world.”

The creative process

A new chapter in Gonzalez’s lifelong project on the personification of things might originate with something like an air filter from a car or a gas mask. He has a special fondness for objects that were designed to communicate and that are now useless. A telephone or speaker, for instance, could become the head of a new figure.

Gonzalez generally begins with a welded metal armature, almost a template, with legs and arms. He wires objects onto this base, starting with the item or items that will form the “head.” “From there, I try to create a persona, an identity for the figure,” he says.

He fills journals with possible titles for sculptures, and so sometimes he has a name in mind right from the start. “Stitch” features footballs with the stitching as a scar; several change purses were transformed into a piece called “Tabernacle,” suggesting an internalized sacred space.

Often the source material can be identified immediately, but other figures challenge the casual observer to look more carefully. The head of a piece titled “Stir” was made from stirrups you’d use to ride a horse, but they’re obscured by the sculpture’s insect-like quality. Gonzalez wants the objects to be recognizable if you look at them long enough.

At this point in the process, Gonzalez critiques the figure. Some will be thrown away. The ones he likes will be coated with paint, metal filings and carbon from a settling tank. Next, he scuffs the figure with steel wool and coats it with beeswax. For a final touch, he sets fire to the piece in a small courtyard next to his studio. That burns off the extra wax.

“I like the idea of corrosion because of its expressive power,” he says. “Destroying things is part of making things. It’s part of the process. A lot of things fall away.”

Sculpture is a day-in, day-out process for Gonzalez, who estimates that he has produced hundreds and hundreds of figures during the past five years.

While he’s in the studio, he keeps a schedule that bears more than a little resemblance to his father’s day when he was cutting soles for shoes at an Endicott Johnson Corp. factory. “I get up in the morning and come to work, take a break, come back, work,” he says. “At 5, I usually go home, have half a glass of wine and eat something and go to bed early. I think that assembly-line mentality is something I developed early in life. There are days when I think of my studio as a figure factory.”

Gonzalez isn’t a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. He says he doesn’t even like jokes. But in the studio, this introvert finds a sense of balance, one that energizes him. “There have been times in my life when things were horrible,” he says, “and I could come to my studio and be resurrected through my work.”

Forging ahead

His time in that studio, which he likens to a part of his body, may be coming to a close. The property, owned by Gonzalez’s elderly mother, recently went up for sale, and he has begun to consider losing the place that has informed the spirit of his work for nearly four decades.

This spring, he plans to create a new work space at his home. He’s carving out room in an outbuilding, tucked into the lush, beautifully landscaped yard where his old dog likes to play. Gonzalez expects the studio move to be a difficult transition, but he has grown accustomed to working through challenges.

There are the challenges common to all sculptors: where to store the work that’s not on display, how to transcend small studio spaces, buying a pickup truck that’s big enough to haul pieces to shows.

And there are the challenges more particularly his own: the paucity of Atomic Age objects available at flea markets and garage sales these days, chief among them. Younger generations often don’t value older things, he says, and at the same time eBay has given people a different way to make money on antiques.

“I’ve done things the hardest way possible,” Gonzalez says. “I work by myself. I make everything by hand. I’ve never been very strategic.”

Art carries a huge risk, he notes. It’s not just a lack of money or a traditional career trajectory. It’s hard to live through rejection. “Artists work out of a need for self-expression, not a need for recognition,” he says, possibly echoing conversations he has had with himself over the years.

Only a small sliver of artists achieve fame or even real recognition, Gonzalez says. And even those with tremendous ability may not get the attention of the art world. He draws a comparison that few artists would be likely to make: Artists toiling in obscurity are like Jimmy Bivens, a talented heavyweight boxer who never managed to get a title fight.

Gonzalez sees 21st-century digital culture as a colorful, hypnotic place in which a confusing visual experience is presented as reality. “It’s a kind of mummified world now,” he says. “There’s a loss there.”

He’s determined to keep sending out his unique analog distress signal and hopes his blackened minions will stand their ground against the electronic tidal wave. After all, he says,  “I am from the world of mud.”

The book is a collaboration of neuroscientist Terrence Deak, associate professor of psychology at Binghamton University, and his aunt, JoAnn Deak, a longtime educator with a doctorate in educational psychology and author of several books, including Your Fantastic Elastic Brain, written for children ages 5 to 9.

“The idea was to put together a follow-up to perhaps reach the same kids, a few years older, and provide them deeper information but in an accessible way,” Terrence Deak says. “With my aunt’s background in educational psychology and my experience in neuroscience, it was a natural partnership.”

The book, written for 9- to 14-year-olds, explains the brain’s structure, how different parts function and the physical and psychological changes that accompany brain development. It introduces children to terms such as “prefrontal cortex” and “inhibitory neurotransmitter,” then explains how they relate to behaviors like taking risks and making decisions. Analogies abound, and lively illustrations help keep the tone light.

“We worked with an editorial staff to get the scientific language down to the right level for the kids, while at the same time keeping the language and context technically accurate and acceptable to us,” Deak says.

The book is intended to empower children, but it also enlightens adults. Responses from parents, teachers and librarians have been astounding, Deak says. “They keep saying: ‘We didn’t know that much about the brain,’ and ‘This gives us some insight into how to work with adolescents a little better.’ It’s been an unexpected but positive outcome.”

Deak, whose brain research focuses on stress and resilience, says imaging studies are revealing more about the brain all the time. But there’s still a big chasm between the developing structure of the brain and the functional implications of that development.

“There are a lot of questions about enrichment and the idea that engaging in challenging tasks and exercises that appropriately utilize brain structures can make them stronger, but we don’t have a lot of information about how that actually happens.

“There are a lot of things that remain mysterious about the brain,” he says.

Owner’s Manual comes at an interesting time for Deak: his first child, Wyatt, is 9 years old — part of the target audience, with his two younger brothers, Owen and Oscar, not far behind.

“I look at adolescence with some trepidation about what it can become, because we all know examples of adolescents who have gone a little out of control. One of the hopes is that we can change perspectives about what it means to be an adolescent. We hope to get people to think of adolescence as a natural time of struggle and appreciate what those struggles mean, which, in many cases, will be striving for independence.

“Then maybe we can view the adolescent period less for its turmoil and more for its opportunity,” he says.

As for Wyatt, yes, he read the book (without being asked to). His review: “It was really interesting. I didn’t understand all of it, but I really love the pictures.”

Bruce White worked with semiconductors and transistors at Motorola and Texas Instruments. But when he left industry for a position on Binghamton University’s faculty, the materials scientist decided to take his research in a new direction. “I didn’t want to just continue to work on transistors and memory,” White says. “I wanted to try to apply those tools to big problems that impact society.”

Energy is one of those big problems; in the United States, more than half of the energy we burn each year gets lost as heat instead of being put to use.

“We do all this work to get oil out of the ground and to refine it, but when we try to do some work with it, most of the energy goes out the exhaust pipe of a car or out the smokestack of a power plant,” White says. “Even if we could reclaim a small fraction of what we throw away as heat, that would have a significant impact on our energy use.”

There are ways to turn heat into electricity. If a material is hot on one side and cold on the other, the flow of heat from hot to cold can be turned into electricity. But most of the thermoelectric materials on the market today are not very good at doing that. The tricky part, White says, is getting the heat to flow through the material on the backs of electrons. In most materials, the heat flows in a wave that simply makes the material’s atoms vibrate faster. That’s not a useful phenomenon, and it ends up destroying the important hot-cold differential. In many materials, the vibration of atoms carries away 90 percent of the heat before it can be harnessed.

White’s goal is to create materials where the vibrational effects are minimized — or, in other words, where a larger percentage of the heat gets shuttled by electrons, creating a flow of electricity. He also thinks it’s important to make sure those materials are abundant and nontoxic.

White may have found a candidate in zinc oxide, a substance used in many brands of sunblock. Zinc oxide is abundant, cheap and safe, and it happens to be really good at moving electrons around. Unfortunately, in its normal state, zinc oxide has a molecular structure that transports heat by vibrating atoms instead of turning it into electricity.

By manipulating zinc oxide at the molecular level, White and his colleagues are able to make it better at generating electricity. First, they stretch the material into wires that measure 50 nanometers across. (That’s roughly 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.) That incredible thinness changes the way heat spreads through the material. Next, they embed the nanowires in a silica aerogel, a substance that’s terrible at conducting heat. Because of the interesting and unique interactions that occur at very small scales, nanowires can take on the properties of surrounding materials. In this case, the wires became very poor heat conductors. Their ability to conduct heat through atomic vibrations decreased by a factor of 10, so their efficiency in turning heat to electricity shot up. The results were published in April 2013 in Applied Physics Letters, the top journal in the field.

What’s particularly exciting about this discovery, White says, is that the materials of the wires and the aerogel can be mixed and matched to customize the thermoelectric properties for different applications — such as harnessing waste heat from a power plant, car or household furnace. Since aerogels are nearly transparent, White even envisions making window coatings that exploit indoor versus outdoor temperature differences to generate electricity.

With the right materials, it may be possible to eliminate the internal combustion engine altogether. White and his lab members think they may have a way of doing that. It all comes down to silicon, which is an excellent semiconductor — that’s why our electronic devices are silicon-based — but is also really good at conducting heat via atomic vibrations. White’s group is getting rid of those vibrations by building a silicon-tin composite using a new fabrication technique that grows the material layer by layer.

The work caught the attention of the Naval Research Office, which provides funding for White’s research. “It’s his fabrication method that really makes it different,” says Robert Walters, head of the Naval Research Laboratory’s Solid State Devices Branch. “Bruce has developed the fabrication technique that we feel will actually achieve the layered silicon-tin structure, which we think we really need to have to de-couple silicon’s thermal and electrical properties. … It’s a very good idea. It’s innovative and it’s different from other things that we’ve seen.”

The new composite material has a thermal conductivity that’s 1,000 times lower than regular silicon. The group hopes to make it three times lower still by making the crystal purer and more evenly patterned. If the thermal conductivity gets that low, the material would be so good at turning heat into electricity that it could power a car with the burning of a flame.

That’s far off in the future, though. As they work on refining the materials they’ve already developed, White’s group is on the brink of creating less extreme materials that could still have a big impact. Heat-harnessing materials, which could be retrofitted onto a car’s tailpipe or radiator, could soon generate enough electricity to power the car’s electronics. “That alone could increase the fuel efficiency by a few miles per gallon,” White says. “When you think about integrating it over the entire automotive fleet, that makes a huge difference.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Binghamton University biologist Heather Fiumera thinks that some of those health problems may lie in the fact that mitochondrial function requires the cooperation of two different genomes. Every human inherits two genomes: one in the cell’s nucleus, which is a mix of mom and dad’s DNA, and a different one in the mitochondria (the cell’s powerhouse), which contains a replica of mom’s mitochondrial DNA. “It may be that some combinations of mitochondrial and nuclear genomes work together more efficiently than others,” Fiumera says. “While mutations in either genome may affect mitochondrial function, they don’t explain the whole story. You might inherit a mitochondrial genome that helps you become a world-class marathon runner, but your brother” — who would have the exact same mitochondrial genome as you — “might not be as successful, even with the same training.” Similarly, a mitochondrial mutation may cause a severe metabolic disorder in one sibling, but mild symptoms in another, because of how the mitochondrial mutation interacts with their different nuclear DNAs.

Fiumera and her colleagues received a $1.25 million award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to explore the importance of these genetic interactions. The five-year grant will help Fiumera scale up the studies she is already doing in yeast. “We’re swapping mitochondrial genomes and seeing if it affects how our yeasts grow,” Fiumera says. “And we are finding that it really matters.”

Kristi Montooth, a biologist at the University of Indiana, says the work may help to illuminate why metabolic diseases are so variable and unpredictable. “There are mutations in mitochondrial genomes that, on their own, don’t have a negative effect,” she says. “But brought together with certain nuclear genomes, there’s a synergistic effect that causes them to function badly.”

The problem goes back to the evolutionary origins of the mitochondrion. Scientists believe that a mitochondrion has its own DNA because it was once a free-living bacterium that was engulfed by another cell. But instead of becoming dinner, the mitochondrion was co-opted to provide energy for its predator. The two cells managed to work together and, over time, became dependent upon one another. Mitochondria have inserted some of their genes into the nucleus, and the nucleus uses protein messengers to control how much energy the mitochondrion produces and how it does its job. It may be that the two genomes are still co-evolving and still learning the best ways to live together peacefully.

“Heather’s exploiting a lot of the genetic and genomic tools that yeast offers to take this to the next level,” says David Rand, who studies the coevolution of nuclear and mitochondrial genomes at Brown University. “The ability for Heather’s experiment to track down the interactions is going to be quite powerful.”

Yeast is a single-celled fungus with some powerful genetic tools that allow Fiumera to mix and match mitochondrial and nuclear genomes. Are there special combinations that allow better mitochondrial performance? Does “strain A” work better with mitochondrion 1 while “strain B” works better with mitochondrion 2? Fiumera will decide which combinations thrive best by subjecting her yeasts to a variety of unpleasant environments — including heat stress, oxidative stress and low-nutrient conditions — and measuring how well the mito-nuclear hybrid strains grow.

Montooth says previous studies have focused on swapping mitochondria between different species of yeast. But by looking at the variation within just one species and exploring how that variation relates to dysfunction, Fiumera’s work is more relevant for studying human disease.

So far, Fiumera’s preliminary studies have shown that the mitochondrial-nuclear interactions are responsible for as much as 20 percent of the differences in growth rates between strains. “That’s huge,” she says. Until now, Fiumera and her team have managed to look at the interactions among only a handful of strains. The NIH grant will help to buy laboratory equipment that will measure growth rates in about 200 samples at once, helping Fiumera to test hundreds of different yeast strains. She predicts they will collect more than 10,000 growth rates in just the initial phase of the project.

The second part of the experiment will be to map the genes involved in determining whether a combination is effective or ineffective. Fiumera says she’d eventually like to see whether beneficial combinations are more common in wild yeast populations; if mitochondrial-nuclear interactions are as important as biologists expect, it is likely that natural selection favors different combinations in different environments.

But Fiumera won’t be doing all of this work alone. “This project is a marriage between yeast genetics and population biology, and it is enhanced by my actual marriage to a population geneticist,” she jokes, referring to her husband, Binghamton biologist Anthony Fiumera, who will be collaborating on the project. Binghamton computer scientist Kenneth Chiu will lend his expertise to help the biologists parse through huge data sets.

Since energy production is so vital to a cell’s functioning, mitochondrial genes and machinery tend to be highly similar in organisms as far flung as yeast and humans. That allows Fiumera to hope that one day her research will be used to devise treatments for people who are suffering from debilitating metabolic disorders.

“You have to understand the mechanism behind a problem,” she says, “before you can fix the problem.”

If your answer is the first farmer, you are in good company. For decades, economists could find no monetary benefit to managing access to groundwater. But, as researchers at Binghamton have proven, you and all those economists are wrong.

“We know that groundwater is a problem around the world,” environmental economist Neha Khanna says. “Groundwater is being depleted. You can talk to anybody on the street and they’ll say, ‘I know that, and we need to start thinking about it.’ Strangely, though, economists have always believed that if we put in some sort of system to manage water, it wouldn’t lead to much gain in terms of overall welfare. We have pretty much ignored the issue.”

In the 1980s, several prominent economists analyzed the possibilities. They found such marginal gains from managing access to groundwater that it became an established result among economists: There’s no reason to implement water-management systems. They even gave it a name, the Gisser and Sanchez Effect, after the authors of a seminal 1980 paper.

A different approach

Models in the economics literature have treated the physics of water flow in a simplistic way, notes Khanna’s colleague Andreas Pape, assistant professor of economics at Binghamton. The traditional method — the “bathtub model” — supposes that when you draw water from an aquifer, the water level drops evenly thoughout. But a bathtub is a poor stand-in for an aquifer, he says. For one thing, the depth of the water is irregular because water moves gradually through the ground rather than instantly like a giant underground pool. Changes in the type of rock or soil surrounding the water also affect how quickly the water flows through the ground.

“If you take a straw and suck some water from a glass, you can see the level of the water dropping evenly,” Khanna says. “But that doesn’t happen in an aquifer. The water is flowing through the materials in the soil: the sand, the clay and so on. It’s more like when you take a sip of a smoothie through a straw. You can sometimes see a little depression right around the straw. And that’s what happens with groundwater around a well.”

Hydrological models, on the other hand, do a much better job of mapping and predicting water flow in aquifers. Such models are of vital importance to states that rely heavily on agriculture, and these states often employ hydrologists who study water resources in great detail. Their models, however, don’t generally take economic concerns into account. For example, Khanna says, these calculations wouldn’t be concerned with how “expensive” water is; that is, whether it is easily accessible or must be pumped from a great depth.

An interdisciplinary team at Binghamton set out to build an economic model with a more sophisticated view of the physics of water flow, one that could take advantage of the latest geographic information systems (GIS) data. Economists Khanna and Pape were joined by their doctoral student, Todd Guilfoos, as well as hydrologist Karen Salvage.

What they came up with combines an optimization model — that’s the traditional economics piece — and a simulation model, which is where the hydrogeology comes in. Tying it all together was Pape’s expertise in agent-based modeling, a technique that’s becoming more mainstream even though its use in economics is still fairly new.

After developing confidence in the model during trials with hypothetical scenarios, they were ready for a real-life challenge. Guilfoos settled on California’s Central Valley Aquifer, where Bakersfield is the major population center. Kern County, Calif., had GIS maps that included detail about which crops were being grown. Some crops use more water than others — alfalfa needs more water than carrots, for example — Guilfoos says, and that information was used as a proxy for demand for water in the model. They also included information on well location, long-term precipitation that recharges the aquifer and much more. With help from Kevin Heard, assistant director of Binghamton’s GIS Campus Core Facility, the economists imported these GIS maps into their model.

“Twenty years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, we didn’t have the computing power to do this,” Khanna says. But these new tools provide a way to reexamine issues in economics, even ones that seem to have been settled definitively.

One scenario in the Binghamton model supposes there’s no management: Farmers take as much water as they want. The other, Pape says, involves taxing the water extracted at each well to curb overuse of the aquifer. “Then,” he says, “we compare the long-term profits of the farmers under the two scenarios and measure the difference.”

The findings

Previous work showed very small gains from water-management plans. The new model shows savings of several magnitudes higher when the hydrogeology is taken into consideration. It predicts increased profits for Kern County farms involved in a water-management system — over the course of perhaps 80 years. “That’s how far into the future we’re looking,” Guilfoos says, “but they actually start to see profits much, much earlier than that, within a decade or so.”

Farmers understand at one level that they have an impact on each other, he says, but because aquifers are so large, the individual farmers don’t necessarily see that their use has much of an effect on water levels. The model shows that heavy users would receive more benefits from a management system, he says.

And when the economists talk about “benefits,” they mean actual dollars and cents, not just a feeling of moral superiority: “We found that there is, in fact, a lot to be gained in terms of economic welfare from managing water,” Khanna says.

How is that possible? Pape puts it this way: “Let’s say there are two neighboring farmers. Each is trying to decide, ‘Should I withdraw another gallon of water today?’ Suppose that if he does, he adds $1 to his future pumping costs and $1 to the pumping costs of his neighbor. So the public cost — the total social cost — of the pumping is $2, but the private cost — the cost facing just him — is $1. Left to his own devices, the farmer will consider the cost to be $1 and impose the extra cost on his neighbor. Since pumping seems cheap to him ($1 instead of $2), he pumps more than he would otherwise. However, his neighbor is making the same decision! As a result, they both impose extra costs on each other.

Both neighbors would be better off if they chose to pump less, that is, if they recognized that the cost of pumping is $2, not simply $1. The policy remedy in this case, therefore, is to assign a tax of $1. Then both farmers will be deterred from overdrawing water, making them both better off.”

The tax is essentially a tool to bring about the conservation of water, Guilfoos notes. “This conservation of water decreases the cost of extracting water in the future, and people don’t have an incentive to save water for the future on their own,” he says. “Conserving water reduces farmers’ profits now but increases the farmers’ total profit in the long run. And we demonstrate that conserving groundwater can be significant to long-term profits, which is new to economics.”

As the group begins to look at other aquifers, Guilfoos says, they are seeing some variations. “The significance of the gains depends on the aquifer,” he notes. “We did find significant gains in Kern County. We found small overall gains in another aquifer in Pecos, Texas. Not all aquifers are going to have large gains; it depends on the dynamics of demand, well placement and how fast the water moves.”

Guilfoos has presented the Kern County research at several conferences, and the team recently submitted a paper to Environmental and Resource Economics, a flagship European journal, for review. Guilfoos is focusing on new data from Kansas now. Through the Kansas Water Office, he obtained detailed maps on well location, soil types and crops. This has enabled him to develop detailed economic models for the Kansas section of the Ogallala aquifer, the largest in the United States.

Policy implications

“Now we can say it’s important to manage water,” Khanna says. “But the next question is, ‘How do we manage that water?’ As an economist, the ultimate driver for me is a desire to affect policy.”

As the team looks to policy recommendations, they’ll try to assess what can be done reasonably, given the current economic and political environment. Which policy should be pursued? Should there be a price for water? Should states consider managing well locations? How do you get the stakeholders to talk to one another, especially when the boundaries of an aquifer don’t necessarily line up with county or state lines?

Guilfoos notes that the implementation need not be mandated from the top down. There are lots of ways to manage water resources, he says, from the local level up to the federal level. He and his colleagues do see an opportunity to influence policy, likely starting with the Kansas project, as there’s already the political will there to make changes.

Once there’s an American example, Khanna envisions putting the research into practice in arid regions of countries such as China, India and Spain. She says, quite simply: “We need to look at this collectively.”

Binghamton University’s Center of Excellence in Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging (S3IP) conducts research to advance this vital technology. “S3IP is about developing products and applications that improve the way people live their lives,” Director Bahgat Sammakia says. “It’s that simple. That’s our goal.”

Small-scale systems are electronic systems with features built at the microscale or even smaller. “These are difficult to construct, but also extremely useful,” says Sammakia, a former IBM engineer who is also vice president for research at Binghamton. “When you can build electronic systems at that scale, you can put much more function in a much smaller volume and weight. So your phone now can do what a supercomputer could do three decades ago. That’s where scale becomes really important, when you can have more function in a smaller space at lower power.

“We decided to focus on small-scale systems because that’s where the future is.”

S3IP, established 10 years ago, builds on Binghamton’s Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC), founded in 1991. The IEEC focuses on electronics packaging. Since then, S3IP has added to its portfolio of research interests. It now boasts centers that address:

• Flexible electronics: The Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM)
• Solar energy: The Center for Autonomous Solar Power (CASP)
• “Green” data centers: The Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2)

It also has three unique, multiuser laboratories that support this work:

• The Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory (ADL), which offers state-of-the-art instrumentation for electron microscopy, thermal analysis, X-ray analysis, surface and interface analysis and more
• The Nanofabrication Laboratory (NLAB), which focuses on nano-scale research
• The Reliability and Failure Analysis Lab, a facility focused on evaluating reliability of electronic packaging and determination of failure modes

An industry-driven quest for answers

The Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC) is where it all began, and electronics packaging remains at the core of S3IP’s activities. Those activities are driven by member companies, which provide faculty researchers an opportunity to tackle real-world problems and support their work financially. In turn, these companies obtain access to cutting-edge research and facilities.

From 1996 through 2012, the IEEC’s work led to the creation of 780 jobs as well as the retention of 1,000 positions at New York state companies. The center has had an economic impact of more than $971 million on the state. “The IEEC was our origin, and it remains our key economic engine,” says Daryl Santos, IEEC director.

William Infantolino, associate director of the IEEC, says reliability testing is one of the center’s specialties. It’s an area of growing concern to electronics manufacturers, whose customers now expect, for example, that their cell phones will still work if they’re dropped.

The IEEC can expose parts and devices to accelerated test conditions to see how they perform over time when exposed to elevated temperatures or other stressors. “We can fit a lifetime of on/off cycles into three months,” Infantolino explains. “It gives us an approximation of how a part will perform over time in actual use.”

Some of the most exciting IEEC projects now focus on 3D integration of silicon electronic devices. “That has always been a dream,” Sammakia says, “and now it is becoming real.”

Essentially, in an effort to make devices smaller and help them run faster, companies now are stacking microchips vertically, Infantolino says. Sematech, a consortium of semiconductor companies, is working in this area and has come to the IEEC for assistance with this research. Binghamton experts are conducting mechanical and thermal modeling as well as reliability assessments related to these designs.

“There’s high potential in 3D packaging,” Infantolino says. “It comes down to cost for performance. If the performance and size advantages can justify the cost of the more complex structure, there’ll be a major migration. It’s going to take some time to develop the processes, equipment and supply chain. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

Like the IEEC, the Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM) takes its cue from industry. In fact, the center is based at Endicott Interconnect Technologies, about a 15-minute drive from the University.

In general, the CAMM looks for ways to translate aspects of traditional electronics manufacturing into flexible, roll-to-roll processes. Its 10,000-square-foot facility boasts a panel line for process and product development and an integrated roll-to-roll research line for product development. Much of the equipment found there is available nowhere else in the country.

Roll-to-roll processing is traditionally the domain of paper: Think of the enormous rolls of newsprint on which your local newspaper is printed. The CAMM has helped to expand that domain to include lightweight, thin plastic and, most recently, flexible glass. Corning Inc. collaborated with the CAMM to evaluate its spooled flexible Willow Glass. While glass is the preferred substrate for many kinds of electronics, scientists were unsure about the design rules for equipment that would handle and process flexible glass.

Cynthia Giroux, division vice president and research director for optics and surface technologies at Corning, participates on the CAMM’s executive advisory board and notes the company’s relationship with the CAMM has led to numerous conference presentations and journal articles. “Cost-efficient manufacturing is a necessary step in achieving the goal of high-quality and interconnected electronics that are integrated into everyday objects such as tabletops, walls, appliances and vehicles,” she says. “We look forward to further collaborations with Binghamton University’s S3IP centers to identify flexible electronic device designs and fabrication methods for these emerging applications.”

“That’s the future of the CAMM: to help companies commercialize products,” Sammakia says.

The first product commercialized at the CAMM was a catheter system, and Sammakia envisions the center playing a role in future healthcare research. “S3IP’s role in healthcare research will be tied to electronics,” he says.

Mark Poliks, CAMM technical director and R&D director for Endicott Interconnect, agrees. “There is a huge opportunity for advanced diagnostic and therapeutic medical electronics for use both in and out of the body: high-definition ultrasound probes, wearable MRI coils, neural stimulation, retinal implants and more,” Poliks says. “Even relatively simple monitoring devices such as heart monitors, oxygen sensors or glucose monitors could be reduced to a comfortable-to-wear Band-Aid patch complete with a wireless interface.”

Looking to the future

In addition to healthcare, smart energy is a key focus of research at Binghamton. That emphasis is evident in the work done by the Center for Autonomous Solar Power (CASP) and the Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2).

At CASP, scientists are working to improve thin-film solar cells, build next-generation supercapacitors, conduct reliability studies and develop thermoelectric cells that expand on the fraction of the sun’s energy captured by most solar technology.

Laboratories around the world are engaged in a game of one-upmanship to build ever more efficient solar cells, says Charles R. Westgate, CASP director. Binghamton researchers have entered this race, focusing on cells made with copper zinc tin sulfide (CZTS), which is less costly than the materials used in most cells now on the market. “Among universities, we’re now No. 1,” he says.

The greatest barrier to more widespread use of solar power in the United States is cost, Westgate notes. The development of solar cells from materials that are easier to extract from the earth should address cost concerns and result in processes that are less harmful to the environment.

“We’re meeting only about 1 or 2 percent of our energy needs from solar energy,” he says. “A reasonable goal is to increase that to about 10 percent in the next decade and about 20 percent in the long term.”

ES2, meanwhile, unites researchers from computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and other disciplines in pursuit of “green” data centers. The goal is to reduce energy consumption without sacrificing computing power.

“The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts,” says Kanad Ghose, ES2 site director and chair of the Department of Computer Science at Binghamton. “The center takes a holistic approach when it considers computing, thermal and other challenges.”

ES2 is a National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center with nearly two dozen industry partners, including IBM, Microsoft and Facebook. The center will soon open a data center that’s also a “living laboratory” where new products and ideas can be tested. “Companies can come in, develop best-practice solutions and evaluate them,” Ghose says. “We’ll be developing standards for industry in this lab.”

ES2 researchers will help companies establish the right amount of cooling for a given number of servers, identify new ways to recover and use the waste heat from data centers, and suggest new methods of designing data centers to maximize efficiency.

“We have projects that have short-term consequences as well as projects that have significant long-term consequences,” Ghose says. “The research covers the spectrum from chip-level work to entire data centers. Our goal is to do long-term research and develop technology that can be translated into the real world.”

ES2 also offers interdisciplinary training for graduate students. The research center is quite new, but  graduates have already gone on to positions with industry giant Intel.

“The United States has to invest in computing technology to stay competitive,” he adds. “The future of the country is at stake. Already, some of the fastest computers are in China and not in the U.S.”

At Binghamton University, campus, state and federal investments are evident in a new facility for S3IP. The Center of Excellence will move this year into a $30 million, 114,000-square-foot space that will allow it to expand and consolidate its operations. ES2 will use the facility itself as a lab for “smart buildings,” testing ways to reduce energy consumption through smart lighting, natural cooling and other “green”  innovations.

The building will connect other facilities at Binghamton’s Innovative Technologies Complex focused on biotechnology and engineering as well as a future R&D facility to be devoted to smart energy.

“The S3IP building is going to be the virtual bridge between engineering and science,” Sammakia says. “The IEEC has always done that. Now we will have this building and these labs, and we expect that faculty from chemistry and biology, physics and math will come and partner with engineering.”

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

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

Outside the enclaves

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What caregivers want

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From anger to gratitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rosenberg, a professor of English at Binghamton University, says she found inspiration for the book in a real-life drama she heard about more than 30 years ago. A Pittsburgh man sued his cousin for a bone marrow transplant after the would-be donor changed his mind about the procedure. “It was just an instant novel in my head,” Rosenberg recalls. “What would it be like to be the surviving cousin? What would that do to a family?”

Rosenberg wrote to the justice who handled the case. They exchanged letters — this was before the days of e-mail, she notes — and he shared his views on the lawsuit. She even drove to Pittsburgh to discuss the case with him. “He knew that he could not force this person to do good,” Rosenberg says. “The powerful are sometimes powerless. And the seemingly powerless are sometimes powerful.”

Life and other projects got in the way, and Rosenberg shelved plans to write the book. But after her first novel, Home Repair, was published in 2009, Rosenberg’s thoughts returned to the project. “I was at a book club meeting in Binghamton for Home Repair when a book club member suggested to me, ‘What if it were cord blood?’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s really interesting.’”

That was just one of the crucial changes Rosenberg made for the novel. In the Pittsburgh case, two male cousins went to court. Her story would have one male cousin and one female cousin. And she decided it would take place in the present day on Long Island, where she spent the first 18 years of her life. “It felt remarkable to me to be able to go home in my fiction,” she says. “This is my hymn to Long Island.”

As Rosenberg describes the importance of place to her story, she refers to Eudora Welty’s views on the subject. It’s one of at least half a dozen references she makes to well-known authors in an hour-long discussion of her writing, moving effortlessly from Welty to J.K. Rowling and back to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The setting, Rosenberg explains, allows her to explore the intense family connections of suburbia, differences in wealth and attitude and even the challenges of driving on Long Island. Indeed, traffic serves as a unifying metaphor in The Laws of Gravity. “There’s always something in your daily life that is an obstacle,” she says. “In Binghamton, it’s the weather. On Long Island, it’s traffic. You have to plan around the traffic.”

Rosenberg finds remarkable texture and vitality on Long Island, and she dismisses the idea that the suburbs are nothing more than a bland string of strip malls, diners and gas stations. Her novel fairly bursts with lively secondary characters: an eccentric aunt, a romantic rabbi and a scheming judge, to name just a few.

“The suburbs get short shrift,” she says. “I grew up in suburbia. It’s full of passion and it’s full of intrigue and suffering and beauty. It’s not as easy as it looks. People are on the verge of wealth or they’re on the verge of bankruptcy. They’re rushing to get to the train on time. There’s a certain kind of energy. Maybe it’s a little dog-eat-dog, but there’s also something that emerges from that energy. There are those surprising moments where the loyalties align in ways that defy gravity. Moments of beauty, of clarity, even of redemption, come out of feeling pressed all the time.”

That’s according to a new Binghamton University study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

Binghamton researcher Hiroki Sayama and four students at nearby Maine-Endwell High School in upstate New York, conducted a survey of the school’s junior class. The students were asked about their friendships, and the researchers constructed a series of social networks focusing on acquaintances, friends and best friends.

The student researchers obtained the GPAs of every student in the 160-member class and developed a hypothesis: Students whose friends had better grades than they did had a better chance of improving their academic performance than students whose friends weren’t doing as well in school.

In the second year of the study, the students ― then seniors — demonstrated that this was indeed the case. “If your friends had a higher GPA than yours,” Sayama said, “you have a better chance of improving your GPA — and vice versa.”

Sayama worked with the students as well as an administrator from the school district. The teenagers proposed the study idea and pursued it even when Sayama explained the challenges inherent in working with human subjects.

“They were so persistent,” he said. “This is their research. I helped with statistical analysis, but they chose the topic and conducted the surveys.” The students, Deanna Blansky, Christina Kavanaugh, Cara Boothroyd and Brianna Benson, are now in college and appear as lead authors on the peer-reviewed research publication, which was conducted with support from the National Science Foundation.

Sayama, a professor and a father, said the study’s findings surprised him. His colleague in the school district, however, seemed to take the results as confirmation of something she had long suspected. The student researchers, who noted that friends had a stronger influence on academic performance than acquaintances or best friends, suggest that the study offers a potential method of predicting student performance.

The scientific community has recently uncovered other examples of so-called “social contagion,” most recently studies showing that your friends’ weight as well as happiness may affect your own.

“Many things are communicated over social ties,” said Sayama, director of Binghamton’s Collective Dynamics of Complex Systems Research Group. “This is one of the first discoveries that shows social contagion might also be taking place in academic performance.”

The environmentally friendly thing to do is to have each sensor powered independently, perhaps by a small solar panel. But it gets expensive to attach a generator of any kind to each sensor that’s large enough to handle peak energy needs, when it won’t need that energy much of the time.

The network could use smaller, and cheaper, solar panels or other generators if the sensors could share their excess energy with their neighbors and ask for power when they need it, but all those wires are expensive and inefficient.

The network could use a central power source, but that’s vulnerable to failure, sabotage or even attack, in the case of military installations. A distributed network provides more reliability but is more difficult to coordinate.

Ting Zhu, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University, plans to tackle this challenge. He and his graduate students will develop the hardware and software to allow sensors in a wireless network to share energy.

“We built a prototype that can distribute energy over wires,” Zhu said. Now he hopes to take the next step. The team recently received a three-year, $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Zhu provided the proof of concept last year with a wire-based network.

Here’s what the Binghamton team aims to do:

• Create a network that monitors energy needs and available energy for each sensor.
• Establish a protocol so a sensor can ask its neighbors for spare power.
• Develop a way for each sensor to send and receive energy at a range of up to 10 meters with minimal loss of energy.

“The major problem of wireless energy transfer is efficiency,” Zhu said. The initial work in the field was done by Marin Solijacic and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology team, which wirelessly powered a 60-watt bulb at a distance of 2 meters with 40 percent efficiency in 2007.

In wireless power transmission, a magnetic field oscillates. That, in turn, causes other nearby magnetic fields to oscillate, generating electricity.

An Intel-sponsored team achieved 80 percent efficiency over two meters in 2009, with devices the size of basketballs. And a Stanford University team announced a project last year to develop high-power transfers — enough to recharge an electronic vehicle while in motion. But those projects are limited to 2-meter transfers. What about 10 meters?

“It’s a complicated hardware design,” Zhu admitted. “This requires deep understanding of wireless energy transfer principles.”

It is work that Solijacic sees as a logical application of the pure research he started six years ago — after being awoken by the beep of a cell phone’s low-battery warning. The MIT-affiliated spinoff company he founded, WiTricity Corp., envisions using magnetic resonance to power robots, electric vehicles, household electronics — and sensor networks

Each point in the network Zhu is devising would include several elements: an energy generator, most likely a solar panel; a capacitor to store and discharge energy efficiently; a magnetic resonance device to send and receive energy; a sensor; and a means to broadcast its information to a central node.

The goal is to do that for $1 a device. At that price, the hardware to monitor a typical grocery store-sized space — 100,000 square feet — would cost about $100. At the moment, Zhu said, the cost is more like $300 a device.

At $1 a device, you could find someday that sensor networks initially designed for industrial or military use could be protecting your back yard, and maybe even watering the lawn.