NENY received a Regional Tech Hub designation from the Biden-Harris administration and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA). The Tech Hubs program aims to drive regional innovation and job creation by strengthening a region’s capacity to manufacture, commercialize and deploy technology that will advance American competitiveness.

The announcement included a Zoom meeting with White House representatives and campus visit from U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer.

“For months, you could feel the electricity and excitement in Binghamton over the growing battery industry, but today lightning has struck, and I am proud to announce the region has officially won the prestigious federal designation as America’s next battery Tech Hub,” Schumer says. “Binghamton University, its partners, and I have worked hand-in-hand to bring this idea to life, and now the ultimate recognition of the Southern Tier as the home to the future of our nation’s battery innovation has become a reality.”

NENY, one of 31 Tech Hubs, is the only awardee in the battery industry.

“NENY’s designation as an EDA Tech Hub is a momentous day in the history of the University, the coalition, as well across the Southern Tier of New York,” President Harvey Stenger says. “With [this] designation, Binghamton and the region will only grow as global leaders in energy storage solutions and will continue to be a driving force working towards a sustainable and secure energy future.”

The Tech Hubs designation significantly expands the goals and geographical region originally laid out by NENY for the EDA’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) last year. Project areas include broadening the scope from one of regional recovery to advancing the U.S. as a global competitor in the lithium-ion battery space, enlarging the focus from battery cell manufacturing to the entire battery lifecycle and supply chain, and expanding the supported region, core consortium members and external partnerships.

“New Energy New York’s designation as a Tech Hub by the Economic Development Administration (EDA) provides our consortium and wider team with the recognition we need to create a national battery epicenter in the region,” said Per Stromhaug, associate vice president for innovation and economic development. “As a federally designated Tech Hub, in addition to other prestigious acknowledgements, including being awarded the Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBBRC) grant and becoming a finalist in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Innovation Engines competition, we will be able to build out the battery innovation and manufacturing ecosystem here in Upstate New York and help the nation secure a domestic battery supply chain.”

Standout challenges the NENY Tech Hub designation will address include:

• The speed of innovation and lack of available resources to support domestic battery technology commercialization and market launch
• The development of a prepared and robust workforce to meet the expected job demand
• Fortifying U.S. national and economic security against unstable global battery supply chains.

“The EDA Tech Hub designation will help amplify the current efforts and momentum under New Energy New York, propelling our region towards becoming a nation-leading energy storage innovation ecosystem,” says Olga Petrova, director of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships.

The NENY consortium includes the Office of the Broome County Executive, Broome-Tioga Workforce, C4V and iM3-NY, the Community Foundation for South Central New York, Cornell University, Electrovaya, FuzeHub, IncubatorWorks, Intertek, NY-BEST, Raymond Corp., Rochester Institute of Technology, the Southern Tier 8 Regional Board, SUNY Broome Community College, The Agency (Broome County IDA), the Research Foundation for SUNY and Three Rivers Development Corp. Additional Hub partners include organizations representing New York State, economic development, workforce development and equity, industry, trade, manufacturing, start-ups, and more.

“I am so heartened to see how our University’s and region’s focus on batteries and energy storage solutions – something I’ve dedicated my entire professional life to – has achieved this level of attention and support from our federal government,” says Stan Whittingham, distinguished professor and Nobel laureate. “Thank you, Senator Schumer, for your vision and unwavering advocacy. This Tech Hub designation is just what is needed to take our coalition’s work to the next level and beyond. I am confident we will become the clean energy hub for the United States.”

The U.S. battery manufacturing industry relies on often-unstable global supply chains. NENY is focused on strengthening the domestic supply chain and lessening innovation losses. One way to bring manufacturing back to the United States is to expand prototyping and pilot testing infrastructure, which will be available at NENY’s Battery-NY Technology and Manufacturing Development Center. The planned Battery-NY facility is a stand-out initiative of NENY’s overall goal to establish the U.S. as a global leader in battery innovation and manufacturing, with the Tech Hub designation supporting further key infrastructure expansions.

“I created the Tech Hubs program in my CHIPS & Science Bill, always with Upstate New York in mind, because I knew with federal investment we could write a new chapter for Upstate New York,” Schumer says. “With Tech Hubs, we can breathe new life into our cities with the industries of the future. And nowhere is that more true than in Binghamton.”

In conjunction with the announcement, the Department of Commerce is launching a second Tech Hubs Notice of Funding Opportunity, which allows NENY and other designated Tech Hubs to apply to receive between $40-$70 million each for implementation funding, totaling around $500 million.

“The designation of an EDA Tech Hub will ignite synergies sparked under New Energy New York between technology and industry and cast a transformative light on workforce development by cultivating an ecosystem where skills flourish, careers thrive and the future of the battery industry gleams with unprecedented potential,” says Stacey Johnson, director of workforce development for NENY.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This venture brings Binghamton University faculty and other partners together to conduct academic and clinical research in areas such as biomedical research — particularly neurosciences — and computer science. Research applications include studies of the human brain, which will deepen a scientific understanding of brain disorders, from Alzheimer’s disease to autism.

It also enables UHS to offer cutting-edge clinical diagnostics for its patients. Clinical applications of the scanner include diagnosis of brain disease and disorders, cardiovascular disease and orthopedic injuries. It will also offer the capability for patients to receive cardiac MRIs locally, rather than traveling to larger cities such as Syracuse, Rochester and New York City.

“As the two largest employers in the region, UHS and Binghamton University have a history of working together to serve and invest in the community,” says John M. Carrigg, president and chief executive officer of UHS. “This partnership between UHS and BU, and specifically this scanner, will open new avenues of research for faculty and provide UHS physicians and patients with the latest advanced diagnostic imaging technology available in the industry.”

MRI-centered research is a cross-disciplinary pursuit that blends expertise in physics, anatomy, physiology, neuroscience and advanced data processing sciences. The center will enable faculty to expand on cross-disciplinary collaborations and work with UHS physicians to address new research questions that MRI technology can answer.

“This public-private partnership will benefit the community by providing the most advanced imaging technology in the region,” University President Harvey Stenger says. “This project is in alignment with the research strategy outlined by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul in her latest State of the State message, and will enhance our ability to attract external funding, as well as build research partnerships with industry and other universities.”

Binghamton University’s Brain and Body Imaging Research Center was established in 2021 in partnership with UHS and is led by Binghamton Professor of Psychology J. David Jentsch.

“About 50 years ago, MRI was invented by SUNY researchers,” Jentsch says. “Today, we’re bringing a 21st-century version of the technology to the Southern Tier. It will have a transformative impact on our ability to make scientific discoveries that advance human health and to offer the most sophisticated training opportunities to Binghamton students.”

The center will make both organizations more competitive in attracting and retaining research-active faculty and physicians. It also represents a new avenue to kindle collaborations between Binghamton faculty and UHS physicians working on research projects that advance the understanding of human health.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many more activities are planned throughout the week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The National Science Foundation announced Sept. 13 that it has awarded $15 million over five years to establish and implement the Interior Northeast Region I-Corps Hub, known as IN I-Corps. The region, which stretches from New Hampshire to West Virginia, includes portions of the United States that are largely rural, economically underserved and working to restore economic vitality. IN I-Corps aims to expand the nation’s geography of innovation by creating a cohesive innovation ecosystem that delivers inclusive models of education and workforce training designed for and by innovators in rural regions and small cities.

“To be a part of this cohort of premier research institutions, whose dedication to innovation is so outstanding, is truly exciting,” says Per Stromhaug, associate vice president for innovation and economic development at Binghamton University. “The ecosystem that the Interior Northeast I-Corps Hub will support and expand is sure to create lasting effects for the entrepreneurs we will assist, as well as our region.”

Founded by the National Science Foundation in 2011, I-Corps programming nationwide empowers researchers to combine their technical and scientific knowledge with an entrepreneurial mindset to develop new technologies and startups that benefit society. The I-Corps curriculum addresses the knowledge gap between the skills needed to develop an innovative technology in a lab and the skills needed to bring that technology to market. With a core tenet of customer discovery, participants in I-Corps courses work to connect with potential customers and ensure the solutions they’re developing fill an existing market need.

Binghamton University will be joined by hub partner institutions Dartmouth College, Rochester Institute of Technology, SUNY Buffalo, Syracuse University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Rochester, University of Vermont, West Virginia University and Hub lead Cornell University. Each institution will be hosting regional I-Corps courses and contributing to programming and curriculum strategy.

The IN I-Corps Hub joins nine other I-Corps Hubs within the National Innovation Network, expanding the geographical reach of the network and promoting economic growth and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) talent development within rural communities and the small cities on their boundaries. The hub will offer regional courses designed to support geographically dispersed participants in learning the I-Corps method of customer discovery and applying it to real-world opportunities while remaining connected to their home institutions and communities.

Binghamton University has been an active member of the National Innovation Network (NIN), with its Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships heading up the Innovation Binghamton I-Corps Site for over five years.

“I-Corps has been tremendously valuable to our research community,” says Olga Petrova, assistant director of Binghamton University’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships, site director and I-Corps instructor. “It is incredibly rewarding to watch our professors and students take their real-world learnings from the I-Corps training back to their labs and research programs, leading to increased grant funding, startup activity and development of technologies with amazing societal benefits.”

A mission-critical element of the IN I-Corps Hub’s approach to entrepreneurship is the creation and administration of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives. STEM researchers in underrepresented groups face heightened barriers to success, and creating equitable access to resources and talent development is crucial to ensuring the most innovative deep-tech developments are being discovered and amplified. Hub leadership and partners are working to create opportunities to support the development of STEM research talent who are women, veterans, people of color and individuals with disabilities. These initiatives will include collaborations with organizations like the National GEM Consortium’s Inclusion in Innovation Initiative (i4) and Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

The IN I-Corps Hub will officially launch Jan. 1, 2023. Details are forthcoming for STEM researchers interested in learning about opportunities to participate in regional I-Corps courses at a Hub institution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She received a pair of AirPods as her prize.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The projects supported by this year’s CAREER awardees will address pressing challenges related to batteries, cloud computing, nanobots and soft electronics.

Hao Liu, assistant professor of chemistry, will continue his research into sodium-ion batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries power smartphones and tablets, laptops and electric cars. But the silvery metal lithium isn’t so easy to obtain. Sodium-ion batteries are an affordable and promising alternative.

“It’s very cheap and much more abundant than lithium,” Liu explains.

Batteries of this type would be a boon for the growing renewable energy sector, since the forces that generate power are intermittent.

“The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow, and this requires energy storage on a much larger scale,” Liu says.

On the periodic table of elements, sodium is directly below lithium. They are members of the alkali metal group and share many characteristics. So do the batteries made from them, although there are differences, too.

Rechargeable batteries rely on the intercalation reaction, in which ions are inserted or removed from the layers that make up the electrodes. Because sodium ions are physically larger than lithium ions, however, these layers are more likely to collapse when ions are removed during use, compromising the battery’s structural integrity. After a few recharges, the battery begins to lose storage capacity as a result.

It’s a problem that Liu hopes to solve with structural pillaring, which would insert specific ions into the layers, a bit like how pillars in a building hold the stories together, he says.

Seunghee Shin, assistant professor of computer science, conducts research that may reduce the communication time between smart devices and the cloud.

His idea is to shorten the distance between our devices and the information they need by creating a series of memory caches along the route, which would make cloud-based programs run faster. The innovations rely on technology such as SmartNICs and non-volatile memory.

A network interface card, or NIC, is a hardware component that connects a computer to a network, almost always using Ethernet. The latest SmartNICs include advanced processing and memory capabilities that improve the user experience. Non-volatile memory (NVM) can retain stored information in memory chips even after the power is removed. It is often used for secondary or long-term storage not accessible to a device’s central processing unit.

Shin believes SmartNICs and NVM can be leveraged for improved cloud computing.

“The cloud server is so far away over the network Ethernet — you have to go there and grab the data and bring it back,” he says. “However, we have a much, much stronger NIC now, which can do a lot more in your local machine.”

Shin’s research could change the way that hardware and software are designed, complementing each other to satisfy software demands.

Kaiyan Yu, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, hopes to advance nanorobots.

Research into nanotechnology has grown exponentially in recent years. But because of the size involved — one nanometer is a billionth of a meter, smaller than a strand of human DNA — current techniques cannot independently manipulate large numbers of nanoscale objects precisely the way you might see in a sci-fi movie.

Yu will study ways to overcome these limitations.

She is trying to manipulate many micro- and nanoparticles with controlled three-dimensional poses and characteristics into functional devices, interconnects and other useful components for a variety of applications, such as building nanorobots that can deliver drugs directly to cells.

“Right now, because of manufacturing limits, it’s really hard to build this kind of nanorobot with a lot of sensors, strong actuators and on-board batteries, and also have them communicate with each other,” Yu says.

Her research will investigate the use of electric fields to control the movements of multiple nanoparticles in a three-dimensional microfluidic environment. Each tiny wire could then go a different way to perform its own task.

In the short term, Yu hopes her work will support engineering tools for large-volume automated control of microscopic objects for smart small-scale factories that could produce useful nanorobots and nanodevices.

Ultimately, she also has a much bigger goal in mind. “We can facilitate the computational power and mimic the energy-efficient structure of the calculations in our brain,” she says. “I won’t build a human brain for this project, but hopefully I can do that in the future.”

Pu Zhang, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, conducts research that could advance soft electronics, devices that can bend or stretch without breaking.

One critical challenge is finding new materials that are highly conductive like metals yet remain super-stretchable, so researchers have sought solutions from a variety of different angles.

Zhang has an intriguing solution to the problem: Use liquid metal networks in rubber that can deform easily while remaining highly conductive.

His NSF-funded research will build on experiments that Zhang has done on gallium-indium alloy, which has a melting point around 15 degrees Celsius (60 degrees Fahrenheit). That means it is liquid at room temperature. Using a fabrication process Zhang developed at Binghamton, he was able to produce liquid metal network composites with an ultra-low amount of liquid metal, but still maintain high electrical conductivity.

Ultimately, the goal would be to use an alloy of gallium, indium and tin with a melting point of minus 20 degrees (minus 4 Fahrenheit) that could function during winter in colder climates.

“We’ve achieved over 10-fold reduction of liquid metal consumption, compared to similar materials developed by others. So our new material is much cheaper and lighter-weighted,” Zhang says. “Existing technologies can make liquid metal fibers that are thicker than 100 microns, while we can make them 10 times thinner at 10 microns.”

CAREER Award-winning projects include an educational component as well as rigorous research goals.

Liu plans to expand public knowledge of electrochemical energy storage and prepare undergraduate and graduate students for the clean-energy workforce.

Shin’s proposal includes coaching students so they can be engineers capable of creating hardware/software co-designed systems.

Yu, who will create STEM-focused outreach programs in local schools, says she especially wants to inspire more women and members of underrepresented communities to enter engineering and other science-related fields.

Zhang, meanwhile, plans to establish a soft electronics inventor lab for undergraduates, giving them access to raw materials such as rubber compounds, silver pens and liquid metal.

Reporting by Chris Kocher and Jennifer Micale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The National Science Foundation’s CyberCorps Scholarship for Service (SFS) program is designed to recruit and train the next generation of information technology experts and security managers to meet the needs of federal, state, local and tribal governments. In return for their scholarships, recipients agree to work after graduation in government cybersecurity positions for a period equal to the length of their scholarships.

At Binghamton, the SFS program will be overseen by faculty members from the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science. If it is deemed a success, the NSF could award further funding.

There were about 465,000 open positions in cybersecurity nationwide in 2021, according to the tech job-tracking database CyberSeek. The SFS program seeks to help fill the gap, with a special emphasis on attracting people of diverse backgrounds to the profession.

Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger sees the CyberCorps program as one that takes advantage of several of the campus’ core strengths.

“We know there’s a huge need in this field for highly trained experts,” he said. “Binghamton has a longstanding commitment to first-generation students and scholars from underrepresented minorities. We also have a robust set of course offerings and scholarship related to cybersecurity. It’s exciting to know that Binghamton will play a part in diversifying this essential workforce.”

Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research, said Binghamton’s faculty members understand that research and teaching reinforce each other.

“This dynamic program will provide exceptional professional preparation for our students while also advancing Binghamton’s research related to information security,” he said. “I see in my own work how student contributions enable exciting discoveries and how strong mentorship can set up students to succeed in college and far beyond.”

In 2020, the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security named Binghamton a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Research (CAE-R) through 2025. The designation recognizes the work at the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity (CIAC), led by computer science Associate Professor Ping Yang.

“Professor Yang’s vision, leadership and unwavering effort played an instrumental role in securing this grant,” said Professor Weiyi Meng, chair of the Computer Science Department. “It is probably the largest single grant in the history of the department, and it will have a big impact on the department, Watson College and Binghamton University for many years to come.”

Watson College Dean Krishnaswami “Hari” Srihari is proud of the faculty and staff who collaborated to seek the NSF funding, which is granted to fewer than 100 schools nationwide. He knows it will increase the visibility of Binghamton’s cybersecurity efforts in the academic community and the U.S. government.

“Our researchers and students are building the future by tackling our 21st-century problems head-on,” Srihari said. “Ensuring that our data remain safe is a key part of that future, and all of us will benefit from the knowledge shared here at Binghamton and Watson College.”

Serving as co-principal investigators on the NSF grant are Professor and Associate Chair Dmitry Ponomarev, Professor Kartik Gopalan and Associate Professor Aravind Prakash from the Computer Science Department, and Associate Professor Yu Chen from the ECE Department. Senior personnel include Distinguished Professor Jessica Fridrich (ECE), Professor Lijun Yin and Associate Professor Guanhua Yan (both CS).

Together, the faculty members cover a wide spectrum of research interests, from architectural support for security and software/systems security to steganography, artificial intelligence (AI)-based security and mobile security. The approach mirrors what Yang hopes will happen in government, corporate and nonprofit settings, especially when members of underserved communities earn their degrees and join the workforce.

“Building teams of cybersecurity professionals with a variety of skill sets brings different voices and perspectives to the table, which can help to improve our defense against a wider range of cyber threats,” Yang said.

The CyberCorps scholarship will focus at first on recruiting for Watson College graduate programs (including the 4+1 accelerated five-year program for earning both a bachelor’s and master’s degree), where a cybersecurity curriculum is already in place. The first students to receive the assistance could be enrolled in fall 2022.

“We are going to build up slowly, to start with maybe two students in the first year and then go to five or six new students in each of the subsequent years,” Ponomarev said. “We also will integrate this program with other research activities, so students can be involved in current research grants. There will be synergy, especially with two departments working together.”

The SFS program’s requirement of government service in exchange for funding students’ education is one way for the public sector to compete with corporations that often can offer higher salaries, especially for entry-level positions.

“This program addresses the needs in the government sector,” Gopalan said, “by having motivated students who apply, get training, get a feel for the environment where you work for the government and also get the satisfaction of protecting the nation’s infrastructure.”

The CIAC team knows that having capable cybersecurity professionals in government is no longer optional, not only because of the amount of personal data being stored but also because lawmakers need to understand and pass legislation that protects citizens.

“The government cannot fall behind, because the virtual world and the physical world are starting to merge tighter and tighter,” Chen said. “Facebook’s Metaverse, Apple and Google are building a new world — what some people consider ‘version three’ of the internet. Private companies in the high-tech sector are preparing for this, and the government needs to be aware of those innovations.”

Prakash agreed. “Government professionals may need to take an adversarial position in some cases, and those battles are difficult if there are no professionals in that area,” he said, “Unlike industry professionals, government professionals have a fiduciary duty to the people of the United States and not to the shareholders of a particular company. Without talented individuals in the government, cybersecurity-related lawmaking and enforcement will greatly suffer. This grant helps fill this critical need.”

The award opens up two opportunities to the University, says U.S. Sen. Majority Leader Charles Schumer, who advocated for the proposal. It provides $500,000 in technical assistance funding that the University will use to develop its proposal to turn the Southern Tier into an energy technology hub. It also allows the University to compete in Phase 2 of the challenge.

“This award will make the New Energy NY project eligible for up to $100 million in federal funding to transform the Greater Binghamton area and broader upstate New York region, create thousands of jobs, fuel the innovation necessary to combat climate change, and importantly, strengthen a critical area of the U.S. domestic manufacturing supply chain,” Schumer says. “I am proud to have fought for the New Energy NY project to be selected for Phase 1 and I will continue to fight tooth and nail to secure the final award and supercharge this growing area of the Upstate New York economy.”

This initiative will not only create jobs and improve the regional economy; it’s also crucial to our nation’s energy goals and energy security efforts, says chemist M. Stanley Whittingham, Binghamton University distinguished professor and 2019 Nobel laureate.

“Our NENY proposal can turn our region into an energy technology hub that has the potential to turn out advancements that will have national and global impacts,” Whittingham says.

With the appropriate support, Binghamton can become a national hub for battery innovation, manufacturing and workforce development, University President Harvey Stenger said. “We thank Sen. Schumer for his support on this as well as all that he does for our University and we thank the EDA for understanding and supporting our vision and providing us the necessary resources to move this forward,” he said.

The University has a track record of successful collaborations with industry partners, says Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research at Binghamton. “We’re fortunate to have an experienced, well-respected innovator like Stan leading the way and pushing our region and our country to take bold action for a more environmentally friendly future,” Sammakia says.

Binghamton was chosen by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) for the project, which will bring together the University, SUNY Broome Community College, Rochester Institute of Technology, NY-BEST and others to develop a proposal for Phase 2 of the competition. The proposal will focus on expanding research, development, testing and workforce assets to meet the demand of the emerging battery manufacturing industry in the Southern Tier and upstate New York.

“Binghamton University is honored and excited to lead a coalition of premier organizations from across New York State to help the U.S. meet the critical and growing demand for domestic battery products,” says Per Stromhaug, associate vice president of the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships and regional economic competitive officer for the project.

If fully funded, the project estimates that as many as 8,000 jobs would be created during a 10-year period.

Schumer said that the Build Back Better Regional Challenge received 529 Phase 1 applications from across the United States, and the New Energy NY project was one of 60 proposals selected as a Phase 1 awardee.

In Phase 2, the EDA will award 20 to 30 regional coalitions $25 million to $75 million, and up to $100 million, for projects to grow new regional industry clusters or scale existing ones through planning, infrastructure, innovation and entrepreneurship, workforce development, access to capital and more.

Three of the grant winners — Jeremy Blackburn, Aravind Prakash and Mo Sha — are assistant professors in the Computer Science Department. The others are Emrah Akyol, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; Jessica Hua, associate professor of biological sciences; Nicholas Gaspelin, assistant professor of psychology; and John Swierk, assistant professor of chemistry.

It’s the campus’ most successful year ever with the NSF program, says Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research. “We’re excited about these CAREER winners,” he says. “They’re all outstanding scholars and educators, and they’re poised to do work that will make a significant impact on our campus and beyond. It’s especially impressive that three of the winners come from a single department, and I look forward to seeing how we can learn from the model established by our colleagues in computer science.”

Some of the projects have begun already; others will start within the next year:

• Akyol’s project, A Holistic Framework for the Analysis of Information Dynamics in Human Networks, began in February with $596,295 in funding.
• Blackburn received $517,484 in support for his project, Towards a Data-driven Understanding of Online Sentiment, which began May 1.
• Gaspelin was awarded $708,780 for his project, Understanding the Relationship of Covert and Overt Attention Using Concurrent EEG and Eye Tracking, which begins Aug. 1.
• Hua’s project, due to start in March 2022, received the largest grant in this group, $947,030. It’s titled Evolutionary Disease Ecology — Can Evolutionary Responses to Environmental Change Modify the Biodiversity-Disease Relationship?
• Prakash was awarded $499,893 for his project, Binary-Level Security Via ABI-Centric Semantic Inference, which will begin Oct. 1.
• Sha’s project, Advancing Network Configuration and Runtime Adaptation Methods for Industrial Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks, which started in March, received $500,000.
• Swierk received $630,000 for his project, Mechanistic Investigation of Photoredox Reactions, which begins July 1.

Emrah Akyol

According to classic theories of communication, the sender and receiver have the same goals. Both want to share whatever the message is, as free of errors and interference as possible.

But what if they have different goals? With our 21st-century technology increasingly stitched together using Wi-Fi or 5G networking, competing companies could try to prioritize their messages or otherwise seek an advantage.

Akyol has ideas about how to solve those concerns, and they involve using game theory to level the playing field again. He has three key goals:

• Investigate communication and compression problems between senders and receivers with differing objectives, cognitive limitations and biases.
• Examine models on the evolution of opinions and their applications when creating polarization, such as on social media.
• Explore truthful data-gathering strategies in behaviorally biased information networks.

Akyol expects increasingly “misaligned” intentions as smart homes connect with appliances or smart vehicles interact on busy interstates. How will, say, Ford and Tesla cars talk to each other with a certain level of trust?

Akyol believes his research could also help to mitigate confirmation bias by offering intervention strategies for social media platforms.

Because the combination of game theory and machine interaction is mostly uncharted territory, Akyol is looking forward to the discoveries ahead in his research. “It’s exciting because we are studying from scratch,” he says.

Read more about Akyol’s project.

Jeremy Blackburn

Discussions happening on social media drive a lot of public discourse and news coverage. Some people use platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to make positive connections, but others prefer to sow misinformation and hate.

Given the popularity of such platforms, it can be difficult for researchers to wrap their heads around what is being shared and how it affects our opinions. Blackburn devises ways to make online content easier to gather and sort.

His project includes four objectives:

• Create a multiplatform social media dataset, developing tools to leverage prior experience in large-scale data collection to perform continuous identification and collection of multimedia data from emerging social media platforms.
• Develop data-driven techniques to understand coded language used in social media, both text and images.
• Develop a system for rating the sentiment of content by comparing pieces rather than looking at them individually.
• Explore user and community-level modeling of online sentiment.

Although this technology to monitor online sentiment could have many uses, Blackburn has a specific goal.

“We could better understand violent content or hate speech online that is very coded, or we could identify misinformation so that people can’t hide this type of behavior by using just images,” he says. “That’s my personal passion and the reason why I’m developing it.”

Read more about Blackburn’s work.

Nicholas Gaspelin

As we go about our day, our eyes collect visual data that our brain sifts through. How does your brain know which visual stimuli require immediate attention, and how does attention really work? That’s what Gaspelin hopes to find out.

A cognitive neuroscientist, Gaspelin explores the relationship of attention and eye movements using concurrent electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking.

His research concerns whether certain kinds of visual stimuli can automatically distract us. There are times when we need to notice sudden stimuli to avoid danger, he notes.

Gaspelin would like to know whether the brain processes behind attention are initiated even before eye movements are physically generated. We move our eyes all the time during visual search, whether glancing about for road hazards or looking for a can of soup in the store.

Measuring the brain processes of attention before eye movements will require some technical innovations — namely, synchronizing an EEG machine with specialized infrared cameras called eye-trackers.

“Understanding the basic mechanisms of visual attention really is crucial to making society function efficiently,” he says. “If we could understand how to develop better visual warning signals — for example, if we could understand how to better control motor vehicle operators’ attention or better control children’s attention in a classroom — we could end up having a much better society as a whole.”

Read more about Gaspelin’s project.

Jessica Hua

Hua’s project seeks to answer a broad question: Why are some communities more susceptible to disease than others? Generally, communities with higher levels of biodiversity are expected to be less vulnerable to disease. But that’s not always the case.

As a graduate student, Hua discovered that wood frog populations respond to pollutants in two ways: Some always express high levels of pollutant tolerance while others only “turn on” pollutant tolerance if they detect pollutants in the environment. She built on that work during a postdoctoral fellowship, exploring whether the strategies led to different costs.

Her new project asks: Do differences in pesticide tolerance strategies influence why biodiversity does not always protect communities from disease?

This work provides a different perspective on the relationship between biodiversity and disease. Typically, biodiversity brings to mind the range of species that make up a healthy ecosystem. But diversity also exists within species. This variation may play a role in community disease outcomes, but our understanding of it is limited.

Hua’s project also features a citizen science program.

“Because this grant focuses on how environmental change can have cascading consequences on disease, we get the chance to show people how interconnected the world is,” she says. “…I hope that this education component will provide such an opportunity to show how protecting the environment and biodiversity could directly affect things like disease transmission and our health.”

Read more about Hua’s work.

Aravind Prakash

Imagine someone handing you a fancy cake and asking you to figure out the recipe as well as the ingredients’ origins. That process is similar to the research Prakash does with computer software. And yes, it can be as challenging as it sounds.

Prakash uses binary analysis techniques to understand the inner workings of a piece of software and to identify potential holes that could let hackers in.

“One problem with software today is having bugs in the programs that can lead to vulnerabilities,” he says. “There is a pressing need for accountability of software that we use. Although we use software by a particular vendor, the actual coding may have been outsourced to a third party. … When we factor in countries or other actors with a vested interest in intentionally introducing vulnerabilities into software, it becomes extremely important to establish provenance.”

Because defenders often don’t have access to the original source code for proprietary reasons, analysis of the industry-mandated application binary interface (ABI) can provide better information for consumers to decide the security of the software.

Prakash became interested in binary analysis as a graduate student.

“It is one of the harder topics in computer science,” he said. “You have very little information to go by. In principle, the binary contains all the information a processor needs, but what the processor consumes is very different than what humans can make sense out of.”

Read more about his project.

Mo Sha

Manufacturing and processing plants increasingly rely on automation to reduce costs and keep things running smoothly. A sensor takes a reading, a controller decides the right course and an actuator carries out the task.

However, the two main industrial wireless standards that specify how to connect those sensors, controllers and actuators — WirelessHART and ISA100 — were developed nearly 15 years ago. Technological advancements have been rapid since then, and much of the day-to-day network management has been guesswork by human operators.

Sha is studying more efficient ways to run industrial wireless networks.

“Traditionally, 40 or 50 years ago, a manufacturer would use cables to connect everything, but cables are too expensive to deploy and maintain, and they are very inconvenient when you want to add a new process requirement,” he says. “So now companies are trying to use wireless technology to replace all those cables.

Sha plans to use machine learning to provide new methods to optimize network performance. By cutting down on human error, Sha sees networks that are more efficient, more secure and better at responding to problems.

“I’m hoping that the outcome of my research can contribute to the post-pandemic recovery for the manufacturing and processing industries,” he says. “It’s been so hard for them because of social distancing, and some plants may be shut down due to high infection rates. This new tactic will decrease human involvement in the network management process.”

Read more about Sha’s work.

John Swierk

Set into motion by light, photoredox reactions forge new chemical bonds that are difficult to create with traditional laboratory techniques. Used in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals, this process can lead to the creation of new drugs.

There’s only one problem: No one knows exactly how photoredox reactions work.

Enter Swierk, whose lab focuses on the intersection of light and chemistry, and particularly how light can drive chemical reactions.

“There has been very little work on actually understanding what happens on an atomic or molecular level when the reaction absorbs light — what are the steps that you go through to form the bond,” he says. “On the one hand, this chemistry works and it’s being used in industry. On the other hand, we don’t understand how it’s working.”

The pharmaceutical industry is particularly interested in photoredox reactions, which have grown in importance during the past decade or so. There are other potential applications, too; this type of catalysis can, in principle, be used for any kind of small molecule synthesis, such as in the energy sector.

Learning more about how the process works may lead to faster reaction rates, the development of new products and increased product yields.

Swierk’s project also has an educational focus: aiding in the transition of community college students to the academic rigor of a four-year school. “We’re trying to do a better job of creating a more equitable, inclusive environment that can support student success,” he says.

Read more about Swierk’s work.

Reporting by Chris Kocher and Jennifer Micale.

The contest, organized by the Office of Research Advancement and co-sponsored by the S3IP Center of Excellence, offers an opportunity to share the beauty of science through photographs and images that describe some aspect of research captured visually.

This is the fifth year our office has sponsored the competition and I continue to be impressed by the images submitted,” says Martha Terry, creative services manager and contest organizer. “As the entries come in, it is exciting to see the fields of study represented and the creativity that is exhibited by each entrant. I am pleased that enthusiasm for this competition continues and each year I look forward to the next.”

Images were scored in two categories: The World Around Us, featuring images in which the subject is visible to the naked eye, and Visualizing the Unseen, for images captured with the use of optics that extend beyond what the eye can see.

This year’s judges were Yan Sun, manager, Health Sciences Core Facility; Surinder Kahai, associate professor, School of Management; and Kirk Van Zandbergen, photographer and owner of Van Zandbergen Photography. They evaluated entries based on scientific significance, originality and artistic and visual impact.

An image titled “Blue Flame” by Jessica Fridrich, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering, won first place in The World Around Us as well as Best in Show. She will receive a new iPad.

“The early southwest settlers had to cope with many challenges, one of them being water shortages,” Fridrich wrote in a caption that accompanied her entry. “White Pocket, the result of an ancient landslide depicted in the picture during a dramatic sunset, provided this source during the monsoons through natural depressions in sandstone.”

First place in Visualizing the Unseen went to an image titled “Label-Free Imaging of Water in Cartilage Tissue” by doctoral candidate Yuhao Yuan and Fake Lu, assistant professor of biomedical engineering.

“Water has important biological functions in the tissue and organs of living organisms,” they wrote in their caption. “Using a lab-built stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy, the distribution of water (pseudocolor cyan) and cartilage (yellow) in an intact mouse ear tissue can be directly seen at a subcellular level without the use of chemical labeling.”

The two first place images, along with a selection of other entries from the 2020 and 2021 competitions, are on exhibit in the lobby of the Center of Excellence Building at the Innovative Technologies Complex.

“Originally I didn’t think that I would be doing research and was only interested because my professor invited me,” Jonathan Gaughan says. “But throughout the years, [after] presenting at other conferences, I started to really like it more. Research Days was really helpful because it was a low-stress way to see what research was about.”

Gaughan, who’s majoring in integrative neuroscience, studies human sexuality and will be participating in Research Days for the third time this year. Through presenting at Research Days, Gaughan was also awarded opportunities to join other conferences, including the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association.

Taking place April 26-April 30 this year, Research Days showcases the research of Binghamton University students and faculty across all fields of study. Leading up to the student poster sessions on April 30, there will be events sponsored by different departments across the University. Featured programs include talks on smart energy and cancer therapies, presentations by student curators at the Art Museum, a panel discussion about community-engaged research and the second annual 3 Minute Thesis contest.

You can find the full schedule of Research Days online.

“A lot of times when you’re doing research, you’re talking to other people who are familiar with the area you’re studying,” says Valerie Imbruce, director of the Undergraduate Research Center and chair of the Research Days committee. “With Research Days, it’s all students across the entire University, so students gain an understanding of how to communicate specialty knowledge to people who come from different ways of thinking.”

The ability to communicate research effectively goes beyond conferences and can be applied to many different tasks in a student’s life.

Brittany Brems, a senior majoring in biochemistry, will pursue a doctorate in medicinal chemistry at Northeastern University after graduation.

“Research has definitely helped with a lot of classes,” she says. “Most times, I have to write papers or create a presentation, and it has made me more comfortable with what I have to talk about as well as more confident.”

This year’s Research Days will be online for the second year in a row. While traditionally held in person, the Research Days committee has made adjustments to accommodate COVID safety protocols.

Kimberly Jaussi, associate professor of organizational behavior and leadership in the School of Management and collegiate professor, sees research and Research Days as an opportunity for students to grow and adopt research as a part of their identity.

As the collegiate professor of the Dickinson Community, Jaussi established the Dickinson Research Team, or DIRT. DIRT, which is open to students from all majors who live in Dickinson, helps students gain an understanding of how to do research. Students in the group present at the poster session during Research Days every year.

Jaussi advises students who are participating in the poster session to show pride in their work and not be afraid to talk about the details of what they’ve done.

“Connect with the people who are asking about your research and be sure to share what you’re passionate about within your research,” Jaussi says, “and others will feel your passion.”

Participants in the Additive Manufacturing for Technology Protection (AM-TP) Consortium were challenged to create a 3D printed object to demonstrate additive manufacturing use for electronics.

The local team included two Lockheed Martin fellows, Steve Gonya and Venugopala Basava, as well as Mark Poliks, professor of systems science and industrial engineering at Binghamton, and two of his graduate students, Emuobosan Enakerakpo and Mohammed Alhendi.

The AM-TP competition drew entries from around the country for blind-test evaluation, including imaging analysis and electrical testing. The Binghamton-Lockheed entry achieved the highest overall highest score to win the challenge.

Gonya attended the virtual conference when the winner was announced and was very excited about the decision. “Our team put in a lot of hard work to make this competition article and we developed some very innovative 3D printing techniques along the way to meet the difficult challenge requirements,” he says.

The Lockheed-Binghamton entry was fabricated using stereolithography (SLA), fused deposition modeling (FDM) and an aerosol-jet (AJ) 3D printing method for the electrical components. AJ print technology can deposit micron-sized features of different materials including metals, dielectrics, insulators and resistors.

At the conclusion of this project, the local team demonstrated a functional electronic device fabricated entirely by additive manufacturing methods that won out over the other competitors in a spirted competition between U.S. labs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biophysical chemist Christof Grewer is part of an eight-year collaborative project backed by a $2.4 million National Institutes of Health grant, awarded to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and recently renewed until 2023.

Grewer is a professor of chemistry and the department’s undergraduate program chair. He’s also one of the world’s leading researchers of glutamine, an amino acid found naturally in the body that’s critical for a healthy immune system, and ASCT2, a glutamine transporter, or the “elevator” that carries the amino acid into cells to aid in the production of proteins.

“Cancer cells become addicted to glutamine as an energy source and they import it at a very high rate, so the idea is to target and prevent the glutamine from getting to the cancer cells,” Grewer says.

Avner Schlessinger, a computational biologist and associate professor of pharmacological sciences at Mount Sinai, partnered with Grewer to develop ASCT2 inhibitors. Grewer’s lab creates compounds and oversees functional testing, while Schlessinger’s lab conducts computational analysis and predictions.

“I wanted to collaborate with Christof because he is a top expert in the world in membrane transport biophysics,” Schlessinger says. “I knew I could learn from him and work with him to test both our hypotheses. It’s an ideal collaboration because we complement each other. He is kind and patient in sharing his data and knowledge, which enables us to do better science and really have fun while doing it.”

Grewer and Schlessinger first met during a 2012 conference in Switzerland. Grewer had already established himself as an expert in membrane proteins. During his post-doctoral fellowship at Cornell University in the mid-’90s, he studied glutamate receptors — glutamate is a neurotransmitter and an important molecule in cellular metabolism — and he became a pioneer in using lasers in his research.

After seeing the similar molecular structures in glutamate and glutamine transporters and studying how glutamate transporters responded to blockers, Grewer turned his focus in 2004 to glutamine and an ASCT2 inhibitor. To date, only a handful of labs in the world are involved in similar research.

Grewer and Schlessinger published a pre-print that includes a cryo-electron microscopy structure of ASCT2 and included one of their compounds. Three of Grewer’s doctoral students have assisted in the project; Elias Ndaru was included as a pre-print author due to his instrumental and prolific work in developing compounds.

The compound synthesis and the patent application filing are only the beginning of a long research and development journey. The steps toward potential clinical applications will involve developing the next generation of compounds at ideal potency levels, extensive pre-clinical testing for efficacy and safety, and eventually clinical trials, which will require additional research and development, funding and commercialization partners, such as startups or pharmaceutical companies.

The public tends to think of cancer as one disease when in reality it’s hundreds of different diseases, Grewer says.

“We’re learning every cancer is different and there is not going to be one silver bullet to ‘cure cancer,’” he says. “There are so many molecular aspects and so many different types of tissue involved that treatment may some day be individualized to the patient.”

Grewer has been teaching at Binghamton since 2008 and is thankful to be able work with students while continuing his research. “It’s a nice balance to be in the classroom and to be able to be in the lab,” he says. “It helps me keep up with the latest technologies and developments, and I think my students benefit from that type of experience.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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