The behavioral neuroscience doctoral student at Binghamton was among 28 winners of the 2022 SUNY Graduate Research Empowering and Accelerating Talent (GREAT) Award, designed to encourage undergraduate and graduate SUNY students to apply for competitive graduate fellowships to fund their master’s or doctoral studies. The prize provides $5,000 in flexible funding from the SUNY Office of Research and Economic Development, and is given to students who have already received national recognition from either the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program or the NIH’s National Research Service Awards.

Towner, who expects to finish his degree in December, plans to use his GREAT Award funding to attend research conferences, which will help him network and potentially secure a postdoctoral position in another research lab. “After three to five years, the end goal is to become a tenure-track faculty member,” the San Diego, Calif., native says. “I’ve always wanted to be a professor and to have that face-to-face connection with students, seeing the future faces of the field.”

Towner, a first-generation college student, earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in psychology at California State University San Marcos. His initial experience in a preclinical lab involved researching adolescents and the long-term effects of drugs of abuse. “It was an area of interest that was close to home for me,” he says. “A lot of my friends and family experienced substance or alcohol use disorders.”

That research experience helped prepare Towner for the rigors of Binghamton’s program, says David F. Werner, associate professor and director of graduate studies for the Psychology Department and member of the Center for Development and Behavioral Neuroscience. “Trevor was able to hit the ground running,” he says. “He is very motivated and independent, and he is integral to a lot of research in the lab. Trevor is one of the most productive individuals to date.”

Towner’s current research in Werner’s lab focuses on long-term behavioral and neural consequences associated with adolescent, binge-level alcohol exposure. “The research is important because of the staggering number of people who start drinking in adolescence,” Towner says. “We need to understand how our behavior and brains might change as a result of repeated exposure to ethanol during this time when the brain is undergoing substantial maturation.”

Alcohol exposure can lead to an increase in habit formation in adulthood, greater anxiety-like behavior and increases in risk taking. “What is that neural mechanism that is driving that behavioral change?” Towner asks. “Is it something that is a great enough issue to be corrected, potentially through pharmaceutical and behavioral treatment? Only through conducting the experiments will we have a better insight into future directed therapies.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Binghamton University senior wants to see if an environmental cue associated with intoxication, such as a scent, could alter the immune response.

Research shows that our immune system can learn to respond to a stimulus that didn’t initially cause a response, a process known as immune conditioning. These stimuli can either blunt the immune response or enhance it, which has several applications such as suppression of the immune response after organ transplant surgery.

“Immuno-conditioning has been shown for other drugs like heroin, but it is uncommon to see studies involving conditioning of the alcohol response,” says Mondello, an integrative neuroscience major.

Alcohol is the most commonly used drug in the U.S., with 71 percent of Americans saying they consumed alcohol in 2014.  Alcohol addiction affects millions of people worldwide. How does the body adapt in the presence of alcohol, and what makes it so hard to abstain?

Mondello says small amounts of alcohol have been shown to suppress the immune response. This makes ethanol (alcohol) an unconditioned stimulus (US). In her research, she uses a lemon-scented substrate as an environmental stimulus, which may function as a conditioned stimulus (CS). Successful immuno-conditioning, meaning the immune response would be suppressed by the lemon-scented substrate alone, would reveal major insights about alcohol cravings.

Intrigued by a class on drugs and behavior during her sophomore year, Mondello leaped at an opportunity to work with Terry Deak, professor of psychology at Binghamton. His is one of the few research labs looking into the physiological effects of drug conditioning as opposed to the more studied area of behavioral conditioning.

Mondello says she attributes much of her growth as a scientist to Anny Gano, who recently completed her doctorate in integrative neuroscience, and Andrew Vore, a doctoral student in behavioral neuroscience, also in Deak’s lab.

“Jamie loves science and she loves learning, and that kind of attitude benefits everyone in the lab,” Vore says. “She has contributed in the design of a study from the ground up, both in the logic justifying the hypotheses and also in crafting an effective design to answer the questions she set forth.”

Mondello, who completed a summer internship at the National Institutes of Health in 2016, says she is carrying over the lab techniques and planning skills she learned from watching an experiment from beginning to end.

Gano says it is Mondello’s reliability, good humor and willingness to do any work that has made her stand out from other undergraduates. “She is now at a high level of technical proficiency on many lab techniques, and is in the process of learning many more,” Gano says.

In her free time, Mondello loves cooking and trying new recipes. “I noticed I was setting up my kitchen like I would set up my lab for PCR,” she says, laughing.

Growing up on Hastings-on-Hudson, Mondello always loved science. She plans to pursue a doctorate in neuroscience, following in the footsteps of her grandmother, who has a doctorate in psychology.

“There are a lot of strong women figures in my family,” she says, “and that always inspired me.”

“With continued support like this, we expect to learn even more about the negative impacts of alcohol on the human brain and how we can create more and better intervention and preventative strategies,” Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger says. “We thank Sen. Schumer and all of our federal representatives, as well as officials with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, for their acknowledgement of our work to date as well as their continued support.”

The T32 grant, titled “Training in Development and Neuroadaptations in Alcohol and Addictions,” will begin June 1 and provide nearly $325,000 per year. The grant will support four graduate students and two post-doctoral fellows, with each trainee funded for one to two years.

“The intent is to have a training program focused on the developmental antecedents of alcohol and addiction,” says Linda Spear, distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Developmental Exposure Alcohol Research Center (DEARC) at Binghamton. “If you look at adult alcoholics, virtually all of them started using alcohol when they were young. The evidence is clear that alcohol and addictions have their roots in development. Understanding these roots is critical for the development of effective prevention/intervention efforts.”

Spear said the University received the prestigious grant on its first application. Hiring drug and alcohol researchers such as J. David Jentsch, Marvin Diaz and Yao-Ying Ma during the past two years enabled Binghamton to have the “critical mass” of mentor-eligible faculty members that was necessary for development of the training program.

“I’m pleased and gratified that this was funded the first time out,” Spear says. “That is exciting.”

The pre- and post-doctoral trainees will work with faculty members across disciplinary areas that include behavioral neuroscience, clinical psychology and the doctoral program in the College of Community and Public Affairs.

“Part of the training grant involves monthly meetings where research ideas and findings are shared; coursework in neural development, alcohol and addictions; training in the ethnics of research; and the development of writing and presentation skills,” says Spear, who is designing a new course for the trainees. “All aspects of the training program are designed to help the students and postdoctoral scholars excel.”

Spear stressed that the training grant will complement DEARC, a multi-university collaborative research venture now in its eighth year of federal funding.

“This will help bring more students into the DEARC,” she says. “One of the expectations of the trainees is that they will participate in monthly DEARC meetings. I think the DEARC and the new T32 will enrich each other – one is research-related and the other is training-related. They will feed off of each other.”

Initially, trainees will work in labs with funded research projects in the area of development and alcohol/addictions, Spear says. Once on the training grant, trainees will be encouraged to develop and apply for their own federal research fellowships.

“The goal is for our trainees to emerge at the forefront of research in alcohol and addictions, with state-of-the-art knowledge and skills that they can apply to understanding the developmental roots of alcoholism and addictions,” she says. “When our students graduate, we expect them to engage in challenging research that supports the field and moves it forward.”

Having pre-doctoral trainees involved is a relatively unique feature of the program, Spear says. “A lot of training programs provide support only for post-docs,” she says. “But we’ve had a long history of training exceptional graduate students in the areas of addiction and alcohol. We’re fortunate to be able to have trainees at both levels in our training program.”

A research team led by Nicole Cameron, assistant professor of psychology at Binghamton, was the first to investigate the effects of alcohol consumption during pregnancy on alcohol-related behavior (consumption and sensitivity to the effect of alcohol) on generations that were not directly exposed to alcohol in the uterus during the pregnancy.

Pregnant rats received the equivalent of one glass of wine, four days in a row, at gestational days 17-20, the equivalent of the second trimester in humans. Juvenile male and female offspring were then tested for water or alcohol consumption. Adolescent males were tested for sensitivity to alcohol by injecting them with a high-alcohol dose, which made them unresponsive (drunk on their back), and measuring the time it took them to recover their senses (back on their four paws).

The results suggest that if a mother drinks during pregnancy, even just a little, she increases the risk that her progeny will become alcoholic.

“Our findings show that in the rat, when a mother consumes the equivalent of one glass of wine four times during the pregnancy, her offspring and grand-offspring, up to the third generation, show increased alcohol preference and less sensitivity to alcohol,” Cameron says. “Thus, the offspring are more likely to develop alcoholism. This paper is the first to demonstrate trans-generational effects of alcohol consumption during pregnancy on alcohol-related behavior in offspring.”

To date, no study has shown a transgenerational effect of prenatal ethanol exposure on ethanol consumption in the second or third generation. Other research into the effects of alcohol exposure during pregnancy studied the effects only on the fetuses directly exposed or the effects on cellular activity over multiple generations, but never alcohol-related behaviors over multiple generations.

Cameron and her team recently received funding from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to continue the research on the transgenerational effects of gestational alcohol exposure.

“We now need to identify how this effect is passed through multiple generations by investigating the effects alcohol has on the genome and epigenome (molecules that control gene translation),” Cameron says.

This research was conducted in collaboration with Michael Nizhnikov of Southern Connecticut State University.

The study, “Trans-generational transmission of the effect of gestational ethanol exposure on ethanol use-related behavior,” was published Feb. 15 in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

The science is more complex than you’d think, and to an undergraduate like Lew, a lot more fun.

“For me, I really like the lab meetings and talking about the research,” says Lew, a physics and integrative neuroscience major from Massapequa, N.Y. “I like the whole scientific process.”

The process isn’t just observation-hypothesis-test-analysis. The process is immersion in a laboratory’s culture. Lew was hooked when he talked with Pete Donovick, who sized the freshman up, and asked: “Can you cook?”

“Lab lunch is the highlight of my day,” says Donovick, a professor of psychology at Binghamton. “What I expect of freshmen is to think — not accept dogma.”

Lew loves the camaraderie, with putting up data to face the questions and the challenges of his mentors. Challenge assumptions. Second-guess conclusions. Find a new way.

“No idea is stupid,” Donovick says.

That attitude served Lew well during a summer-long stint at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “I got to experience what it’s like to be a full-time researcher,” Lew says. “And a lot of the techniques I learned can be used elsewhere.”

Elsewhere, as in Lisa Savage’s lab, and work understanding what alcohol does to the brain.

Lew is subjecting adolescent rats to “chronic intermittent ethanol treatment” — binge drinking. The observation: Brains exposed to that much alcohol have a smaller hippocampus and fewer neurons connecting brain cells. That’s the part of the brain that governs memory, so alcoholism really does damage learning.

“We kind of see that binge drinking is an adolescent thing,” Lew says. “We’re trying to see how it’s different in adolescents — if it’s different.”

The hypothesis is that adolescents can recover the ability to learn and create new neurons — for a time. After that, neurogenesis declines and the brain is permanently damaged.

Savage, a professor of psychology at Binghamton, says her lab is testing that idea now. It requires studying brains of actively alcoholic, formerly alcoholic and control rodents through adolescence and into adulthood.

Lew sees the applications; as a resident adviser, he counseled more than one friend after a binge.

“I can’t pinpoint that one moment where I got interested in the brain,” Lew says, citing Bill Nye, the Discovery Channel and supportive parents. But he’s committed to earning a Ph.D. and an M.D. and pursuing a career in research. “It’s going to be quite a journey.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stamping tolerance on the brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking science to the street

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

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

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

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

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

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