“The question that we’re asking is: Why? What mechanism in the brain is responsible for that?” said Michael Nizhnikov, a postdoctoral associate in the Psychology Department at Binghamton University.

With support from a grant funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he will explore whether the kappa-opioid system in the brain could be involved. If you block that system during infancy, the animal no longer finds alcohol “reinforcing” – or enjoyable, Nizhnikov said. If you block that system during adulthood, on the other hand, animals will drink more alcohol. Nizhnikov will receive $191,250 from the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism for his study.

“The theory is that if you expose animals to things that activate this system in infancy, you might be perturbing it in some way,” he explained. “When they’re older, that system is no longer mediating the affects of alcohol the way it should. That can lead to abuse.”

“They’re important objects in physics,” he said. “The more we can prove mathematically about these objects, the more data we have to use in research. Basically, there are models that govern different universes. Some of them come from Shimura varieties.”

Vasiu, associate professor of mathematics at Binghamton University, received his PhD from Princeton University. He joined the Binghamton faculty in 2007.

Vasiu received $156,933 in funding through the National Science Foundation for a project pertaining to solving important polynomial systems of equation over finite fields. “This is a central problem in number theory,” he said. “It is very much in the middle of several fields of mathematics, including algebra, analysis, combinatorics and geometry.”

Vasiu plans to write several papers and two books during the next two years, with help from two graduate students whose work will be supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act-funded grant. He also has several collaborators in Germany and France.

“I hope these books will be used by generations of graduate students to come,” he said.

Di Lorenzo received a grant supported by the federal stimulus that allowed her to purchase new equipment and hire a technician. The money — $233,427 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders — supplements an existing five-year, $1.125 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The original project focused on “temporal coding” in the brain using the taste system as a model.

“We have found that the taste system can communicate through spike timing — when neurons fire — as well as how much they fire,” Di Lorenzo said.

Di Lorenzo and colleague Jonathan D. Victor at Weill Cornell Medical College reported their latest findings in a paper published in 2009 by the prestigious Journal of Neuroscience. She explained that they use the taste system as a model to study temporal coding in part because there aren’t a lot of taste qualities.

“Most cells in the brain respond to more than one taste quality, which is surprising because the nerves coming from the tongue are relatively specific,” Di Lorenzo said. “In the brain, everything converges. And so the question is, ‘How can the brain tell the difference between one stimulus and another if cells respond to everything, or many things?’ And the answer may be temporal coding.”

Her work could lead to new approaches to treating Alzheimer’s disease, Wernicke-Korsakoff’s disease and alcohol-induced dementia. The new funding — $126,226 from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — supplements a grant Savage received three years ago from the National Institutes of Health.

The goal of the initial project was to study how the neurotransmitter acetylcholine changes in brain regions that important for learning and memory. Savage found that acetylcholine is blunted in some regions — but increased in other regions — after amnesia. But her research has revealed that stimulating one critical brain region, the hippocampus, can lead to complete or partial recovery of behavioral function. Savage and her colleagues have found the cortex is even more impaired than the hippocampus by diseases that affect learning and memory.

Now she wants to find out whether direct delivery of therapeutic drugs to the cortex could further reduce or eliminate behavioral impairment. “Right now when we take drugs, they tend to be broad-spectrum drugs that affect many parts of the human body,” Savage said. “If we can target drugs that can go to specific regions of the brain, they can be more effective and produce fewer side effects.”

“We’re hoping not only to identify which risk factors are most important but also to determine a developmental window that may provide the best opportunity for intervention,” said Gibb, associate professor of psychology at Binghamton University and director of its Mood Disorders Institute.

During the next five years, Gibb and his colleagues will study 250 8- to 14-year-olds and their mothers to develop a better understanding of the genetic, environmental and psychological variables that can lead to depression.

They’ve received funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the National Institutes of Health, to support the $2.06 million project. The first two years of the grant, $874,859, will come through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

People are at risk for depression if something bad happens to them, Gibb explained. It’s as simple – and as complicated – as that. “But we also know there is huge variability in which people get depressed when terrible things happen to them,” he said. “What we’re interested in is how people think about the things that happen in their lives as this mechanism of risk.”

These differences in thought patterns – or information-processing biases – fascinate Gibb.

“Let’s say you have a fight with a friend,” he said. “You can say, ‘Oh the friend was just in a bad mood and he’ll probably be back tomorrow.’ Or you can say, ‘Wow, this means I’ll never have another friend in my life.’ And the people who take it the second way are going to be at risk for depression.”

These ways of thinking about the events in one’s life are pretty stable in adults and even toward the end of adolescence, Gibb said. He wants to know when children develop these thinking styles and find out whether negative experiences early in life contribute to that development.

His study will also look at how specific genes affect these outcomes. “We’re looking at variation in genes that we think are related to heightened reactivity to environmental stress,” Gibb said. “We’re looking at whether we can identify sub-groups that are protected from or at greater risk of depression.”

Collaborators on the project include geneticists John McGeary at Brown University and Andrew Smolen at the University of Colorado as well as Constance Hammen at UCLA and David Cole at Vanderbilt University.

“There’s no simple answer to depression,” Gibb said. “People can get depressed for a lot of reasons. What we’re trying to do is take a lot of the reasons and see how they all work together to contribute to an enduring risk that is developed during childhood and maintained throughout someone’s life.”

Researchers will meet with the study participants, who will all be drawn from the Greater Binghamton community, every six months for two years. The researchers will use interviews as well as questionnaires and computer-based tasks in the study.

“We’ll be able to develop a better understanding of the vicious cycle that depressed people find themselves in. What often happens when people are depressed is they feel bad, so they withdraw from friends and family. That makes them feel worse, so they withdraw more. And they get caught in this cycle.”

This is no small problem: Estimates suggest that, at any given point, 1 out of every 36 children and 1 out of 18 adolescents experiences major depression. By age 18, 1 in 7 has experienced at least one episode of major depression. Many others have less-severe problems. And children of depressed mothers have a risk three to four times higher than the general population.

Grants have been awarded to faculty members in fields ranging from chemistry and psychology to mathematics and mechanical engineering.

“This funding provides the opportunity for Binghamton University to continue its cutting-edge research in areas of national significance,” said Gerald Sonnenfeld, vice president for research. “The projects these researchers have undertaken could lead to significant advances in technology, including ‘smart’ sensors, as well as important progress in public health, such as understanding drug-resistant strains of malaria.”

ARRA, enacted by the federal government in February, is designed to save and create more than 3.5 million jobs. It authorized more than $16 billion in new research funds to be awarded by federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

“It’s a nice opportunity to get projects funded that might otherwise not have been because of the limits of the federal agencies’ budgets,” said Lisa Gilroy, director of the Office of Sponsored Programs. “The focus of the ARRA is to develop new technologies and projects that are going to create jobs, and I think the investment we have in research is going to do that. These projects are going to save lives, develop clean energy and generate new businesses. The endpoint is really boosting the economy, and that’s what this will do.”

ARRA requires unprecedented levels of transparency, oversight and accountability. Gilroy noted that the University will file quarterly reports for each ARRA-funded grant in addition to the typical annual reports filed for every federal grant. The first quarterly reports are due between Oct. 1 and 10.

Applications for ARRA research funds began in March and April, with grants reviewed and awarded on an unusually short schedule. In some cases ARRA funds were awarded to projects that had been proposed earlier, but other proposals have led to entirely new projects, Gilroy said.

“It has generated interest and collaborations,” she said. “Even if the researchers don’t receive ARRA support, we’re building a framework for future projects.”

Lisa Savage, professor of psychology at Binghamton, received more than $125,000 from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health. Her ARRA-funded grant supplemented existing support from the institute. She’s interested in the interactions between specific types of learning and memory problems and particular neurochemical and neuroanatomical abnormalities.

“Its goal was to accelerate science and it has been an excellent way to increase our knowledge base pretty rapidly,” Savage said of the ARRA grant program.