Yao-Ying Ma, assistant professor of psychology at Binghamton University, wants to understand how those changes work at the cellular level. She hopes that a more precise understanding of those mechanisms will lead to therapies that reverse the effects on the brain and help to cure drug addiction.

“The problem is to find the precise spots that the therapeutic medications should target,” Ma says. “They need to be accurate, reaching not only a specific cell, but a specific ‘synapse,’ the structures that allow cells in our brain to communicate with one another.”

At birth, the brain is filled with immature synapses that barely pass information among neurons. Stimulation from the outside world prompts some of those synapses to mature. Although most of the surplus immature synapses are pruned soon after birth, about 5 to 10 percent of synapses left in the adult brain are immature, or silent. “This could be a good thing, since it provides the potential to quickly learn new tricks through our life experiences,” Ma says.

That is, unless the brain is exposed to an unusual stimulus, such as an addictive drug, which can regenerate silent synapses in our brain. When this happens in the adolescent or adult brain, the drug-induced silent synapses gradually wake up and grow in a way that elicits intense, abnormal communication among certain neurons. That leads to compulsive behavior such as drug addiction.

To study this effect, Ma and the students in her lab employ an animal model — rats prenatally exposed to alcohol, which puts them at high risk of addiction to cocaine or other drugs. For example, in one set of experiments using both brain slices and live animals, researchers direct light within specific wavelengths to a synapse, switching certain receptors on or off, and then observe the outcome. When the researchers work with live, addicted animals, they can see whether specific kinds of stimulation calm the synaptic storm.

Although this research is still in its early stages, it has already revealed some interesting things about the way silent synapses mature when a subject is exposed to alcohol prenatally. “Our original expectation was that the maturation process would be delayed,” Ma says. “But it actually gets accelerated.” When drugs stimulate the synapse, the signals generated are stronger than the ones an ordinary synapse would produce, prompting unusual behavior. “Through optogenetics, we are trying to reverse these pathologically matured synapses, to make their behavior normal.”

Once researchers learn which patterns of light waves — or other kinds of stimulation — might counteract the effects of addictive drugs in the brain, the next step in the search for effective therapies will be to learn how to target the correct synapses, Ma says.

Ma joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2015 after conducting postdoctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Pittsburgh. She has already attracted significant external funding. Her current and pending grants, totaling $1,655,000, come from the National Institutes of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (NARSAD) and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Ma has also won accolades for the time and passion she invests in her students’ success. She was one of 74 people recognized as Career Champions in November 2016 at an event sponsored by Binghamton University’s Fleishman Center for Career and Professional Development.

As a teacher and mentor, Ma says she takes an individualized approach, letting her students and postdocs tackle the challenges they find most appealing.

“I’m always talking with them about how far they want to go,” Ma says. Even undergraduates may take on advanced tasks, such as surgery on lab animals, she says. “If they are eager to learn, willing to devote their time and ambitious enough to delve deeper into academia, then I will spend more time with them and provide more sophisticated training.”

The Binghamton University senior did wash test tubes; everyone in Patricia Di Lorenzo’s lab does. But Park also had an opportunity to run her own experiment, collect data and discover new things about the brain and how it processes taste.

She was one of 13 SUNY Brain Summer Scholars doing a 10-week stint in neuroscience laboratories across New York, part of President Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies program to develop new ways to treat and prevent brain disorders.

“It felt so legitimate,” says Park, 21, an integrative neuroscience major from Hannibal, N.Y. “For once, I really felt connected to science.”

Di Lorenzo, a professor of psychology at Binghamton, studies how the brain stem processes taste. Cooks can explain the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami. And they can explain that smell influences how humans perceive taste. But how does the brain do that?

Park helped find out. She analyzed how the brains of lab rats responded to the stimulus of grape juice in relation to its simpler sweet counterpart, sucrose. She set the experiment up, gathered the data and reported back to the lab, although she hesitates to draw her own conclusions.

“But all of a sudden, you have your own ideas churning,” Park says.

Di Lorenzo and Park found the brain stem — long known to be the processing center for the five basic tastes — does much more. Neurons in the rat brain stem responded to grape juice with slight but definite differences than they did for sucrose. It was a pattern repeated with clam juice as a salt surrogate, and other flavors, too.

It suggests, Di Lorenzo says, that the brain stem is responsible for more than just taste and is a multi-modal processing center that also responds to smell.

And Park, an undergraduate, helped discover that. “She was great,” Di Lorenzo says. “She was independent; she was reliable. She learned a lot.”

Park also learned that she’d like to make research part of her future. She plans to consider her options, including MD/Ph.D. programs, during a gap year following graduation. “I’m still young,” she says, “and I know there’s so much I want to learn.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The brain can reveal things that aren’t necessarily visible on the surface,” she says. “It can tell you things about what’s going wrong that you can’t find out by giving a kid a test or asking him to read out loud.”

Laszlo, who joined Binghamton’s psychology department in 2011, recently received a five-year, $400,763 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, the agency’s most prestigious award for young researchers. The funding will enable her to conduct a five-year brain activity study of 150 children with and without dyslexia.

Rather than lumping all children with dyslexia into one group, as many previous brain-imaging studies have done, Laszlo’s project will help to establish types and degrees of the disorder.

Her lab uses electroencephalography, or EEG, as a non-invasive way to measure the electrical signals sent between brain cells when they’re communicating with each other. Study participants — kids in kindergarten through fourth grade — wear a cap outfitted with special sensors while playing a computerized reading game.

These scans produce massive amounts of data: The cap’s 10 sensors collect readings 500 times per second for 45 minutes. That’s one reason that brain activity studies are expensive and time-consuming. It’s also the reason that a study of just 150 children is the largest study of its kind.

Kara Federmeier, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, says it’s not just the scale of the study that’s impressive; it’s also the project’s duration. “Sarah will be able to assess how the brain transitions from immature reading processes to mature reading processes,” Federmeier says. “Her project promises to provide important, novel data that may be critical for informing educational practices about teaching reading and clinical practices for assessing reading-related difficulties.”

Why study this disorder in particular? Laszlo notes that there are significant, sometimes lifelong consequences of growing up with dyslexia. Many dyslexic children don’t do as well in school as they might otherwise, which limits their career opportunities. Some also encounter social problems. “This has the potential to help a lot of people,” she says.

Laszlo hopes to identify the brain signatures of people with dyslexia and have a clear idea of how to help them. “Once you understand what’s going on in the brain,” she says, “you can do a better job of designing treatments.”

Today, the best-case scenario is that children with dyslexia receive interventions that enable them to get up to speed on reading aloud. But they may continue to lag behind their peers when it comes to comprehension, fluency and speed. “The treatments we have now don’t always fix the underlying problem,” Laszlo says. “They just put a Band-Aid on it. And when you go to do more complicated things, like reading larger passages, the Band-Aid doesn’t help.”