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.

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.”

Whittingham won the prize for pioneering research leading to the development of the lithium-ion battery along with John B. Goodenough, Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and Akira Yoshino of Meijo University in Japan.

“I am overcome with gratitude at receiving this award, and I honestly have so many people to thank I don’t know where to begin,” Whittingham says. “The research I have been involved with for over 30 years has helped advance how we store and use energy at a foundational level, and it is my hope that this recognition will help to shine a much-needed light on the nation’s energy future.”

Whittingham came to Binghamton University in 1988 after 16 years at Exxon Research and Engineering Company, where he received the patent for a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, and Schlumberger-Doll Research. In his 30-plus year career, he has been a pioneer in the development of lithium-ion batteries. He holds the original patent on the concept of the use of intercalation chemistry in high-power density, highly reversible lithium batteries — work that provided the basis for subsequent discoveries that now power most laptop computers.

With more than 200 publications in some of the leading scholarly journals and 16 patents, Whittingham has earned a national and international reputation as a prolific scientist. His research in the area of synthesis and characterization of novel transition metal oxides for energy storage and conversion, separations or as sensors has been continuously supported since his arrival in Binghamton, with over $7 million in federal research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

Whittingham also helped to establish Binghamton’s Materials Science and Engineering Program, bringing his creativity and innovation to the University’s graduate curriculum as well as to its laboratories.

Whittingham and his research group emphasize novel approaches to synthesis at ambient temperature, which often allows structures to be formed that are unstable under the high temperatures normally used for preparing oxides. He serves as director of the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage, an Energy Frontier Research Center that’s also part of Binghamton’s New York State Center of Excellence.

“Binghamton is very proud that the Nobel committee has chosen to award Distinguished Professor of Chemistry M. Stanley Whittingham with the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on lithium-ion batteries,” University President Harvey Stenger says. “Professor Whittingham’s work has fundamentally changed the way the world stores and utilizes energy, making possible a revolution in consumer and industrial technologies. For nearly 30 years, Professor Whittingham has been one of the most visible and productive researchers at the University, and all of us at Binghamton congratulate him on this great honor.”

Whittingham has been recognized by his peers with two major awards in recent years. In 2002, he received the Battery Research Award of the Electrochemical Society for his many contributions to “Intercalation Chemistry and Battery Materials,” and two years later he was elected a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society.

He has also participated and held leadership positions in the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the Electrochemical Society and the Materials Research Society; and served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Chemistry of Materials and the Materials Research Bulletin. He was also the founder and principal editor of the journal Solid State Ionics — one of the two major journals in the field.

Whittingham earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford University before coming to the United States as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University.

He is the State University of New York’s 16th Nobel laureate.

Coverage of this exciting story:

Forbes on the science behind this year’s chemistry prize

The Washington Post on Whittingham and his fellow award-winners

The New York Times on the sequence of events that led to the battery breakthrough

“This opportunity is one I didn’t envision even five years ago,” says Louis Piper, associate professor of physics at Binghamton and the principal investigator for the grant, awarded last week. “We didn’t think it would be possible.”

The instrument, a HArd X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy system (or HAXPES), allows researchers to get detailed information about a device or material without taking it apart.

HAXPES relies on the photoelectric effect, one of the most important tools in condensed matter physics and in materials science (and the basis for Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize). The machine shines light (in this case hard X-rays) into a material. The material accepts the energy and momentum and kicks out electrons. Conservation of energy and momentum allows researchers to determine the chemical and electronic structure of the material being studied.

This is the kind of energy you’d use for a chest X-ray at the hospital, Piper explains. And HAXPES will let him study a device like a battery in a way that leaves the battery intact, just like your doctor wouldn’t remove your rib cage for that chest X-ray.

“We can see what we previously couldn’t see,” Piper says.

That’s because other techniques are surface-senstitive. They’re good at scanning the outer layer of a device, but don’t offer a view of what’s inside. It would be like looking at a ham and cheese sandwich but only seeing the outermost crumbs on the bread. “It might not be a good representation of the material or what the material is like when it’s in contact with other materials,” Piper notes.

HAXPES requires a powerful source of X-rays and an extremely sensitive detector. The techniques associated with it have been used for about a decade, but previously were only possible with a synchrotron — a kind of particle accelerator that generates X-rays. At those facilities, visiting scientists typically conduct experiments over a period of hours and then leave.

HAXPES will provide synchrotron-comparable data in a laboratory setting, which makes it much more forgiving in terms of time and much more useful for private industry.

Compared to similar instruments, HAXPES offers more kinetic energy, which means excited electrons have a greater chance of escaping from deeper within the solid. That increases the tool’s sensitivity to the bulk of a material being examined. “Bulk” is a relative term in this case; HAXPES may go 60 nanometers deep into a material vs. 5 nanometers with other tools.

Still, at 60 nanometers, scientists will be able to access interfaces of real devices such as transistors. They’ll be able to measure energy levels and the chemical composition of buried interfaces without tearing them apart.

Piper, who is also the director of the Institute for Materials Research at Binghamton, says the new equipment dovetails with the campus’ industry-level capabilities. “We want to have unique tools that can act as a bridge between computational modeling and real-world applications,” he says.

The HAXPES, made by European company Scienta-Omicron, should be ready for use within two years at Binghamton’s Smart Energy R&D Building, part of the Innovative Technologies Complex.

The campus has a long history of industry partnerships and of creating multiuser laboratories to benefit academic and private R&D. The HAXPES should extend those collaborations in exciting ways, notes Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research and director of S3IP, a New York State Center of Excellence focused on electronics packaging research. “Equipment like this adds to our unique capabilities at Binghamton and brings value to our relationships with major technology companies and startups alike,” Sammakia says. “Louis is a national leader in this area, and I am eager to see what he can accomplish with HAXPES on campus.”

The HAXPES is about the size of a pickup truck, and Piper notes that the Binghamton tool will have several upgrades. “I consider it the Cadillac of HAXPES instruments,” he says.

That is, if a Cadillac could generate hard and soft X-rays and take low-temperature measurements as well as high-temperature measurements.

The instrument will have four key areas of focus:

• Batteries
• Next-generation electronics
• Neuromorphic computing
• Solar energy harvesting

In addition, researchers in the humanities may use the HAXPES’ small vacuum chamber to study pigments and clays. The tool will tie into Binghamton’s Materials Matter course, an interdisciplinary class that brings principles of science to life for humanities students and future scientists alike.

Piper sees the lab-based HAXPES enabling him and his colleagues to continue developing ways to describe chemical concepts to students from other disciplines.

He says he’s already seen firsthand how HAXPES could change materials research, as the technique allowed researchers to observe how electrons degrade and how that effects batteries’ performance.

“At Binghamton, we solve industry-relevant problems,” Piper says. “Photoemission has long been a powerful technique for materials studies, but has been largely been limited to sterile, perfect crystals. This instrument is very flexible and means we can measure real materials and devices even while they’re in operation. This tool means we’ll be able to make significant contributions in smart energy technologies.”

The battery combusted because of a phenomenon called “thermal runaway.” When the battery is heated to a certain temperature, a reaction occurs and causes the battery to generate heat, until eventually it decomposes.

Luckily, this situation virtually never happens, and that’s because of people like Carrie Kaplan. Kaplan, a fourth-year graduate student in chemistry at Binghamton University, is part of Battery 500, a project aimed at developing next-generation batteries with higher energy capacity. It’s her job to make sure these batteries are stable.

Thermal runaway issues were the cause of Boeing 787 fires that happened in recent years. These issues typically arise when batteries have a larger energy capacity.

“As you increase the energy level, the safety goes down,” says M. Stanley Whittingham, director of Binghamton’s Northeast Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES) and Kaplan’s advisor. “So you have this tradeoff between storage and safety.”

Kaplan studies thermal stability and searches for unwanted side reactions that may lead to decomposition. Using a differential scanning calorimeter, she increases the temperature of batteries and looks at changes in heat release.

If there is a high amount of heat released at a particular temperature, it indicates an unwanted reaction is occurring. That’s fine if the temperature, called the onset temperature, is high and relatively unreachable in a typical setting.

If the onset temperature is low, however, say 150°C, that’s a concern. That’s a temperature that can be feasibly reached, especially if the battery is in a car sitting on asphalt during a hot Arizona day.

Finding out what causes this decomposition is the challenge in Kaplan’s work. She is always moving around departments and using different technologies to understand what issues might arise.

“Is it because they’re organic? Is it because of the salt? Is it because of our material?” Kaplan wonders. “There’s a lot of different things that it could be, and we have to do further analysis to understand what exactly is happening.”

Kaplan, who’s from Ashburn, Virginia, did not expect to end up in battery work. At the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, she changed her major five times before ending up in chemistry because of an enthusiastic teacher.

“I took her class and knew that I was meant to do this,” Kaplan says. “She was so carefree. She would do these experiments in class, and I cannot count the amount of times she set the classroom on fire.”

While contemplating graduate school, Kaplan found out about the battery research at Binghamton, and she reached out to Whittingham.

“She’s a nice, easy person to work with, and a very good student,” Whittingham says.

Kaplan won the Lois D. Mackey Award, which goes to an outstanding first-year teaching assistant in general chemistry, and she received the Provost’s Doctoral Fellowship in the summers of 2017 and 2018. Now, she is the “safety and side reaction expert” for Battery 500.

He works with the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES), a network of professors, research scientists, post-docs and graduate students who aim to improve energy storage, focusing primarily on lithium-ion batteries.

These batteries power everyday portable devices such as cell phones and laptops as well as some cars.

They retain and transmit their power by cycling lithium ions (Li+) in and out of certain materials. Stan Whittingham, director of NECCES and Hidalgo’s advisor, says batteries can barely cycle one unit of Li+ at a time.

The compound Hidalgo and his colleagues are studying, called vanadium phosphate, is capable of cycling up to two. “The idea here is that the more lithium you can put in or remove, the more energy you can get out,” Hidalgo says.

To figure out what yields the best battery, Hidalgo and his colleagues tackle the compound from different perspectives.

“It’s almost like cooking. Depending on the pressure, depending on what I put inside, the products will be different, so usually I change something small, the pH, the concentration, the pressure, and the product will be completely different,” Hidalgo says. “If the material is what we want it to be, then we use it in a battery, we cycle it, and this process repeats.”

Hidalgo and his colleagues have successfully synthesized a battery that can cycle two lithium ions, and now they are moving on to develop batteries that can cycle more. “[Now] we’re looking at materials that have more than just one vanadium; the one I’m looking at now has 4, and so maybe we could have up to 8 lithium ions [cycled at a time],” Hidalgo says.

Hidalgo, who was born in Japan, moved to the Philippines when he was 7 years old. There, he completed an undergraduate degree in chemistry and materials science and engineering. He received a scholarship to complete a professional science master’s certificate at Binghamton, which trains students in business alongside their science degrees.

“For my scholarship, the idea is that the government will bring people here from other countries to study, and then for those people to bring what they learned back to their countries,” Hidalgo says. “Once I graduate, my plans are to go back home, work for a bit and see what my opportunities are.”

Hidalgo, who did research on solar cells as an undergraduate, says he plans to continue down the energy research path after he completes his graduate work in materials science and engineering.

“He could probably snap up any job he wanted,” says Whittingham, one of the inventors of the lithium-ion battery. “He’s got this natural leadership built into him. He’s enthusiastic; he goes and gets things done.”

Whittingham is one of 83 new members and 16 foreign members announced, bringing the academy’s total U.S. membership to 2,293 and the number of foreign members to 262. He will be inducted during the NAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 30.

Membership in the National Academy of Engineering honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

“Binghamton is very proud that the National Academy of Engineering has chosen to elect Distinguished Professor of Chemistry M. Stanley Whittingham to its ranks,” Binghamton University President Harvey Stenger said. “Professor Whittingham’s work has fundamentally changed the way the world stores and utilizes energy, making possible a revolution in consumer and industrial technologies. For nearly 30 years, Professor Whittingham has been one of the most visible and productive researchers at the University, and all of us at Binghamton congratulate him on this great honor.”

Whittingham, distinguished professor of chemistry and materials science at Binghamton University, joined the faculty in 1988 after 16 years at Schlumberger-Doll Research and Exxon Research and Engineering Company, where he received the patent for a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.

He has been a pioneer in the development of lithium-ion batteries. He holds the original patent on the concept of the use of intercalation chemistry in high-power density, highly reversible lithium batteries – work that provided the basis for subsequent discoveries that now power most laptop computers.

“It is a great honor to be elected to the National Academy of Engineering,” Whittingham said. “The research I have been involved with for over 30 years has helped advance how we store and use energy at a foundational level, and it is my hope that this recognition will help to shine a much-needed light on the nation’s energy future.”

With 16 patents and more than 300 publications in leading scholarly journals, Whittingham has earned a national and international reputation as a prolific scientist. His research in the area of synthesis and characterization of novel transition metal oxides for energy storage and conversion, separations or as sensors has been continuously supported since his arrival in Binghamton, with over $7 million in federal research grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. He now directs the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage, an Energy Frontier Research Center supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Whittingham helped to establish the Materials Science and Engineering Program, bringing his creativity and innovation to Binghamton’s graduate curriculum as well as to its laboratories.

Working a great deal with ambient temperature, he and his research group emphasize novel approaches to synthesis that often allow structures to be formed that are unstable under the high temperatures normally used for preparing oxides.

Whittingham has been recognized by his peers with two major awards in recent years. In 2002, he was honored with the Battery Research Award of the Electrochemical Society for his many contributions to “Intercalation Chemistry and Battery Materials.” Two years later, he was elected a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society.

He has also been active in the American Chemical Society, the American Physical Society, the Electrochemical Society, and the Materials Research Society; and served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Chemistry of Materials and the Materials Research Bulletin. He was also the founder and principle editor of the journal Solid State Ionics, one of the two major journals in the field.

Whittingham earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford University, before coming to the United States as a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University.

At Binghamton University, Susan Bane thinks she’s found an answer: an ADC that uses a boronic acid to bind cancer-fighting drugs to the proteins on the surface of cancer cells, creating a chemical reaction that could be well-suited for drug delivery, with the potential to avoid the complications of chemotherapy and radiation.

“Killing non-cancer cells is where side effects come from, which is why this research is so important to pharmaceutical companies,” says Bane, a professor of organic and biological chemistry who received a $50,000 investment from the SUNY Technology Accelerator Fund (TAF) in June. “You can make antibodies that recognize very, very specific things on the surface of cancer cells, things that are in much higher abundance than they are on a normal cell. These antibodies can attach themselves to the cancers, making the specific bonds that you want to see between the drug and the antibody. There aren’t a lot of chemistries that can make that happen efficiently, but we believe this method will be fast enough to use in a clinical setting.”

For the past 30 years, Bane’s cancer work has focused on microtubules, intracellular structures that are involved in cell division and organization. In this most recent breakthrough, she was conducting basic research on microtubules, trying to speed up a chemical reaction, and decided to add boron. Bane expected the reaction to take hours; instead, it finished within seconds, providing an a-ha moment that pushed her research into a new direction.

“We found it by accident, while were working on a completely different project,” Bane says. “We thought that if we tried the reaction with boronic acid, we could make it faster. Not only did we make it faster, we made it thousands of times faster. We thought, ‘What just happened?’ Chemists had made these kinds of molecules before, using a much slower process, but our pieces just snapped together. We were completely blown away, and that’s how we ended up here.”

The result of this latest research, patented as “Rapid and efficient bioorthogonal ligation reaction and boron-containing heterocycles useful in conjunction therewith,” has distinct advantages over products currently on the market. First, there’s speed, which should make the molecule much easier to produce and much quicker to react. Second, its reagents are more biocompatible, so there aren’t any concerns about its toxicity in the human body. Third, it’s able to work well in water, even at highly diluted levels, and can be used without having to eliminate excess reagents after treatment.

Like other bioorthogonal chemical reactions, which are increasingly being used in personalized medicine, Bane’s product can be carefully controlled for consistency. Plus, this same patented process has potential applications in medical imaging, where it could create radioactive molecules to make PET scans safer, more efficient and less expensive.

“We think this reaction has a lot of potential utilities, and we’re interested in seeing where it can go,” Bane says. “One step is to reach across the academic community, let people know about our work and find out where they can take it. Another is to move outside academia, to places that have the resources to develop this. We’re at the stage now where we want to show this process can work on a larger scale and in a more controlled environment. But first, we have to get this into the hands of people with enough resources to take it to the next step.”

That’s where SUNY’s Technology Accelerator Fund comes in. To bring the patent closer to clinical trials, Bane is using her investment to manufacture experimental quantities of the novel chemical reagents and modified antibodies, purchase the commercial material currently available and begin testing the two head-to-head in her Binghamton laboratory. At the same time, she has begun leasing the technology to outside labs, where it’s being tested for a variety of potential biomedical and pharmaceutical applications.

“The more material that gets out there, the more people will be doing basic research, the more peer-reviewed publications we’ll have and the more interest will be generated for this type of chemistry,” Bane says. “Drug development is enormously expensive for pharmaceutical companies, and before we can find investors, we need to show that this process will work in a much more controlled environment. TAF is helping us reach the stage where our product will be more attractive to potential licensees, including the companies that could ultimately develop this for the marketplace. Getting the TAF grant is showing people that this project has commercial viability.”

Binghamton University biochemist Brian Callahan has discovered a new way to fight cancer, one that attacks only the cancer cells and promises fewer side effects.

He hunts hedgehogs. No, he’s not Elmer Fudd.

Hedgehogs are proteins that help govern how cells develop. Normally, once a person reaches maturation, the hedgehogs turn off. But in some cancers — prostate, pancreatic, ovarian and lung in particular — the hedgehogs somehow turn back on, and force uncontrolled cell growth: cancer.

“Pharmaceutical companies have been after hedgehogs for years,” says Callahan, an assistant professor of biological chemistry. One in particular, Erivedge, binds with the same receptors that hedgehogs activate, blocking the cancer development.

“We don’t want to compete with Big Pharma,” Callahan says. “We’re trying a new strategy; we’re going after hedgehogs directly.”

Callahan recently published two papers, one about zinc and hedgehogs in the May edition of the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and one about phenylarsine oxide in the January edition of Chembiochem, in partnership with researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Both substances don’t simply block hedgehog reception; they shut hedgehogs down, preventing inactive hedgehogs from becoming biologically active and causing malignancies.

But before you start sucking on pennies or drinking phenylarsine oxide — an arsenic compound that will pretty effectively ruin your liver and kidneys — keep in mind that Callahan hasn’t discovered the medicine, just the method.

“It’s a proof of concept,” he says of his Department of Defense-funded work. “We can, with a small molecule, prevent the hedgehog from functioning. We think they bind a little differently. The arsenic seems to bind more tightly; it seems to be much more potent.”

The next step is a partnership with Michelle Arkin, an associate professor at the University of California San Francisco’s School of Pharmacy. During the next year or so, her lab will mirror Callahan’s first experiments with 80,000 or so compounds in its library.

“We’re looking for molecules that inhibit the functions that Brian found,” Arkin says. She expects a hit rate of between 0.1 percent and 0.5 percent — or maybe 100 or 200 compounds.

“There will be a lot of chemistry, a lot of tweaking,” Arkin says. “What we’ll get out of this is a puzzle piece,” an idea of a molecule that disrupts the hedgehogs without causing undue side effects.

The best candidates will be tested in lab animals, probably sometime in 2017, Callahan says. After that? It’s a matter of where the science leads.

“We want to get to molecularly targeted therapy,” Callahan says. In essence, a magic bullet that kills the cancer and not the patient.

Callahan does warn of one unavoidable side effect, though: Hedgehogs also govern hair growth. Turn them off, and the patient’s hair will fall out. Wascally hedgehogs.

RNA (ribonucleic acid) is one of three major molecules essential for all known forms of life, along with DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) and proteins.

“For a long time, people believed that RNA was simply a middleman, a worker that enabled the flow of genetic information from DNA to proteins,” says Rozners, an associate professor of chemistry. “Now, with the sequencing of the human genome, we know that only 2 percent of DNA encodes for proteins, while 70 to 90 percent is used to make RNA. That’s a lot of RNA, and even if we don’t yet understand it completely, we’re coming to appreciate that RNA is involved in the decision-making process of how cells develop.”

RNA, he notes, is an active player in cell development that determines which cells become skin, which become muscle, which become bone. “My lab is designing tools for the molecular recognition of different kinds of RNA, which can look very similar in cells, but are still significantly different,” Rozners says. “Such tools will enable studies on the various RNAs in their native environment, live cells.”

In the first project, “Amide-Modified RNA: Synthesis, Structure and Potential for RNA Interference,” Rozners and his collaborators — Martin Egli of Vanderbilt University, Kaizhang He of Dharmacon and Scott Kennedy of the University of Rochester — received a $1.5 million, four-year renewal grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to continue investigating the possibility of an artificial biopolymer that can mimic the properties of RNA.

In the second three-year project, “Sequence Selective Recognition of Double-Stranded Non-Coding RNA via Triplex Forming PNA,” the National Science Foundation awarded Rozners $414,767 to develop synthetic compounds that can differentiate between types of RNA by reading their sequence-specific nucleic codes. These compounds will be tested in collaboration with Paul Agris of the University at Albany, another SUNY institution.

Both projects are still years away from finding hands-on applications. But their potential, either as new research tools or as new medicines to target diseases that involve aberrant RNA expression, is enormous.

“This is difficult work, and Eriks is one of the few people who can do it, because it tends to be very elaborate, very complicated and very expensive” says Egli, an expert on X-ray crystallography. “Eriks is very meticulous, and has gone much further than previous attempts to study amides. He’s taking a much more holistic approach, focusing on the basic science of chemically modified nucleic acids and looking at fundamental changes all the way down to the atomic level.”

Optical dyes can be used to control color and light in applications ranging from laser welding to production of sunglasses and plasma TVs. The dyes used for this purpose are often expensive; others are cheap but apt to decompose when exposed to heat.

A better set of options — optical dyes that are both economical and stable — is about to hit the market, thanks to researchers at Binghamton University.

Wayne Jones, professor of chemistry and chair of Binghamton’s chemistry department, received a $50,000 investment from SUNY’s Technology Accelerator Fund (TAF) for a new process to bind organic dyes to metal oxides. The investment will help Jones and his lab further develop the process and scale up for commercial production.

Jones made the discovery in collaboration with Bill Bernier, a research professor in the chemistry department, and graduate student Kenneth Skorenko.

The organic dyes that form the focus of their research are small organic molecules. “In the presence of high temperature, they tend to react with oxygen and water in the atmosphere,” Jones says. The reaction causes the dyes to break down. That makes them a poor choice to use, for example, in plastics that are melted for extrusion or molding.

The new process runs an electric current through a metal electrode to create charged nanoparticles of metal oxide, which bind to molecules of the dye. The bound molecular composite is stable at temperatures higher than needed in most industrial applications.

Jones and his collaborators have used a prototype of this process to make polymer pellets infused with a light-controlling dye. “We hope the TAF investment is going to allow us to take this to full-scale manufacturing,” he says.

Jones’ lab has patented the binding process. To commercialize the invention, the researchers formed a small company, ChromaNanoTech, with Bernier as chief executive officer and Skorenko as chief technology officer. The company will operate in Binghamton University’s business incubator.

One potential customer has already sent ChromaNanoTech a purchase order for a large quantity of dye, Jones says. But there’s a catch. “The purchase order doesn’t become effective until we can produce a kilogram a week,” he says. “In a research lab like mine, typically we’re delighted if we produce one gram a week. So we have to scale up a thousand fold.”

The TAF investment will help the company do just that, allowing the startup to buy new equipment and hire Skorenko, who will work on technologies to make the process run faster.

Jones and his team also plan to develop and commercialize additional processes for stabilizing dyes. ChromaNanoTech has formed a partnership with a dye manufacturer that has hundreds of dyes in its portfolio, none of them currently suitable for applications involving high temperature plastics. “We can potentially convert all of them,” Jones says, “and have a wide series of these dyes.”

One of 32 grants awarded for a total of $100 million to fund Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs), it will help accelerate the innovations needed to build a 21st-century energy economy.

“We are mobilizing some of our most talented scientists to join forces and pursue the discoveries and breakthroughs that will lay the foundation for our nation’s energy future,” U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said this week in announcing the grants.

The Binghamton grant was awarded to the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES), directed by M. Stanley Whittingham, distinguished professor of chemistry and of materials science.

“Stan Whittingham is a pioneer in the development of lithium ion batteries and his research has already had a phenomenal impact on our society,” President Harvey Stenger said. “Receipt of this highly competitive grant will enable Stan and his colleagues to continue to push the boundaries of energy storage and battery life, and underscores the value of the work Binghamton University researchers are involved in every day.”

“This grant illustrates the quality and importance of smart energy research at Binghamton,” said Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research and distinguished professor of mechanical engineering. “Batteries are essential to improving technology in so many ways, whether it’s portable electronics; smart grids, which enhance security and save energy; green energy harvesting such as solar and wind; or data centers, which require a backup energy source.”

“Stan Whittingham’s center competed against proposals from top schools around the country and won,” Sammakia said. “It’s an endorsement of him and speaks to the high caliber of his research.”

Whittingham and his colleagues want to understand the fundamental chemical reactions in energy storage materials to make them work better and to develop new materials that are cheaper, environmentally friendly and able to store more energy than current materials can.

Intercalation reactions are the key to Whittingham’s research on lithium-ion batteries. Such reactions will require materials that remain structurally the same even as lithium ions are put into them and taken out of them. These materials would work much like a sponge, which retains the same basic structure even as it absorbs water and as that water is squeezed out of it. Finding that sort of structure is a crucial aspect of hybrid electric cars because consumers would expect a battery to last 10 years or so. The less battery materials change as they recharge and are used, the longer they’ll last.

“The research I have been involved with for over 30 years has helped advance how we store and use energy at a very foundational level — through batteries that, among other things, power most laptop computers,” Whittingham said. “This infusion of funding for the work that I do with my colleagues in the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage will allow our work to continue as we seek to improve on current methods for energy storage in a way that will impact everyone around the globe.”

More than 200 proposals were submitted to the Department of Energy for this second round of awards for EFRCs to enable fundamental advances in energy production, storage and use. The NECCES, with Whittingham as director, also received funding in the first round. Partner institutions include Rutgers, MIT, Argonne National Laboratory, Cambridge University, the University of California at San Diego and at Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois-Chicago and New York University.

Since their establishment by the Department’s Office of Science, the EFRCs have produced 5,400 peer-reviewed scientific publications and hundreds of inventions at various stages of the patent process. EFRC research has also benefited a number of large and small firms.

The centers selected for the second round of funding will help lay the scientific groundwork for fundamental advances in solar energy, electrical energy storage, carbon capture and sequestration, materials and chemistry by design, biosciences and extreme environments. 

Binghamton University chemist Nikolay Dimitrov imagines all of these things, and because of that they may someday be a reality for the rest of us. Dimitrov uses his expertise in electrochemistry, analytical chemistry and materials science to develop catalysts that he hopes will be sturdier and cheaper than existing options.

Take the lithium ion battery. This workhorse of the tech world powers products ranging from cell phones to electric vehicles. But it has basic limitations: Its capacity decreases so fast that even the best smartphones lose their juice in two days; its energy density pales in comparison to gasoline; and overcharging can lead to instability and, in the worst cases, fires.

One future alternative is the lithium oxygen (air) battery. Dimitrov estimates that, once developed, the lithium oxygen battery will store 10 times the energy of a similar-sized lithium ion.

Dimitrov contributes to that future by developing the fundamental catalysts from which those batteries (and many other things) could someday be built.

A paper he co-authored in Nature in 2001, which first introduced to a broader audience de-alloying, a key process to his approach, has been cited more than 1,000 times. Dimitrov, an associate professor of chemistry and materials science, has brought $1.5 million dollars in research funding to Binghamton since joining the faculty a decade ago. His National Science Foundation support includes a $300,000 award this year and a 2008 CAREER Award. (That’s the most prestigious federal grant for young faculty.)

“The NSF wants to make sure that we can control key fundamental aspects of this process so we can move to practical application in a more confident way,” Dimitrov said.

Most catalysts are now made using nanoparticles. They’re handy and versatile little objects, but controlling them is difficult and results in substantial losses.

Dimitrov’s method, on the other hand, involves electrochemically depositing an alloy of readily mixed metals, such as silver and gold, then selectively removing the less noble one (in that case, silver), to leave a noble, three-dimensional porous structure that’s ultra-thin, uniform and beautifully interconnected. This structure can then be customized with a variety of coatings with specific catalytic activity.

“We control the current, and by running it for a specific time, we get a charge that accounts for every atom deposited on the surface,” Dimitrov said.

Radoslav Adzic, a senior chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and leading researcher in fuel cell catalysis, says Dimitrov’s work on fundamental questions in electrochemistry has made significant contributions to their field.

“His recent work developing catalysts for energy applications is the subject of enormous importance for achieving goals of clean energy and a clean environment,” Adzic said. “His methodical approach and ability to identify key issues produces publications that will help in reaching these goals in the near future.”

“Even if students’ papers aren’t published by a major journal, the research is still worth showing to others and saying, ‘This is what the students do here,’”  he says.

Marsiglia, for example, has worked with Christof Grewer, associate professor of chemistry at Binghamton, on the study of transport proteins in the brain. The work could one day contribute to treatments for stroke and diseases such as ALS. Last spring, Marsiglia received the prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, which honors exceptional undergraduate researchers who intend to enter math, science or engineering.

High-level research at an early age is nothing new for Marsiglia. He won first place at the New York State Science and Engineering Fair as a high school student for a project that examined wound healing and regeneration rates in worms. The project later earned him a third-place award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

Marsiglia also received a fellowship as a high school student for research at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he studied how brain receptors are involved in inflammation response.

A double major in biochemistry and music, Marsiglia also plays trombone with the University Orchestra. He plans to pursue a doctorate in organic chemistry and pass on his knowledge of the subject as a university professor.

Pursuing his love of music while continuing his research and taking a variety of science classes is part of what Marsiglia calls a “holistic approach” to education.  “If you are going to do something, you might as well learn everything you can about it,” he says.  “Ten years down the road, I don’t want to say, ‘I wish I had taken that extra class and done the major.’”

“We would be interested in seeing what happens when the car is moving, and we’d take pictures of that,” he says. “We’d see the pistons moving, and that would be the beginning of understanding.”

Grewer, a biophysical chemist at Binghamton University, studies glutamate transport proteins, miniscule components of our brains that move glutamate among cells. Glutamate, an important molecule in cellular metabolism, is also a neurotransmitter.

Scientists know the transport proteins are important, and they know they move glutamate in and out of cells through a sort of door in the cell wall, known as a glutamate transporter. But exactly how the proteins trigger those doors in the cell wall, and what makes them move glutamate to the inside or outside of a cell, is unknown.

Learning how those triggers function could have major implications for human health. For example, during a stroke, when blood and oxygen to the brain are restricted, brain cells release glutamate into the space surrounding them. That starts a toxic chain that can kill brain cells and harm certain brain functions.

Knowing how the glutamate molecules are transported through cell walls could one day lead to drugs that help or halt the transport.

Grewer — one of perhaps two dozen researchers in the world who work on this problem — switches analogies as he continues describing the way these proteins move. Now he’s talking about a tall building.

“People are transported in an elevator,” he says. “So in order for that to work, the door of the elevator has to open, and then the person has to step into the elevator. And then the elevator brings you to a higher floor, and then the door has to open, and the person has to walk out.”

In this case, glutamate molecules are the people. The elevator cars are the glutamate transporters. And the electricity and wires that move elevator doors are — well, that’s what he’s trying to figure out.

Grewer’s brainstorm was to create a method that uses lasers to trigger the transports’ action. By controlling when the movement happens, he can document it.

It all goes back to his analogy of photographing a car’s pistons. Taking snapshots may illuminate how the transporters and glutamate molecules work together.

Scientific serendipity

Grewer stumbled onto the glutamate transporters.

When he was a graduate student in physical chemistry at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University in Frankfurt, Germany, his research focused on chemistry and light. His introduction to biochemistry — and to glutamate receptors — came during a post-doctoral fellowship at Cornell University.

“We were trying to activate these receptors on a very fast time scale,” he says.  “It’s not that easy to do.”

His background in chemistry and physics brought fresh insight to the lab. What if, he thought, a flash of light could help trigger the transport process? By timing the reactions, the researchers could better capture what happens during the glutamate transfer.

“They were so interesting to me that I just had to stay with them,” Grewer says of glutamate transporters. “I thought, that is just the most amazing thing to study.”

Most biochemical research on the brain focuses on possible cures, says Peter Larsson of the University of Miami. Many researchers experiment with known drugs to judge their effect on brain function.

“In most proteins, and in biology these days, we know the genetic code, and we know what the DNA looks like, and we know how many proteins you have in your body,” Larsson says. “But we don’t really know how these proteins work, how they function.”

What sets Grewer apart in this small community of researchers? “He’s pioneering using lasers,” Larsson says. “It had been used on other types of proteins, but nobody has used it in this type of study.”

Blending research, teaching

Grewer took his studies back to Germany for a few years before accepting a post at the University of Miami School of Medicine.

“In the medical school community, there is more interest in the neuroscience,” Grewer says of his time in Miami. But he didn’t teach much, and he missed working with undergraduates.

At Binghamton, Grewer teaches every semester.

Donald Nieman, dean of the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at Binghamton, says Grewer’s arrival in 2008 also created opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations in biology and chemistry. “While the research Christof does is very specific and doesn’t replicate what others are doing,” Nieman says, “the basic science and techniques he is using mesh nicely with the work of several faculty members.”

Grewer’s research, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health, is painstaking and full of dead ends. Results are years, and possibly decades, in the making. Frustration comes easily.

But teaching tempers that frustration, Grewer says.

“With the teaching, you see the outcome much more quickly,” he says. “When you give a lecture and have a student later come to you with a question and say, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever really understood that’ — that’s a very gratifying feeling that you don’t often have in the research.

“Teaching gives you the strength to keep going with the research.”

Fellowship is awarded to nominees who have made outstanding contributions to the advancement or application of chemical science or who have demonstrated excellence in the chemical science profession. Sadik serves as nanotechnology editor for the Journal of Environmental Monitoring, which is published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Sadik, a Vestal resident who holds three U.S. patents, joined the Binghamton faculty in 1996. She has presented more than 380 scientific papers, book chapters and lectures focused on biosensors, bioelectrochemistry, environmental and materials chemistry. Her team has received more than $5.5 million in funding and contracts from government agencies and the private sector.

At least that’s the way Omowunmi Sadik, director of Binghamton University’s Center for Advanced Sensors and Environmental Systems, sees it. She’s working to develop sensors that would detect and identify engineered nanoparticles. Her research will advance our understanding of the risks associated with the environmental release and transformation of these particles.

“Society has a duty to not only consider the positive sides of science and technology but also the not-so-desirable sides of technology itself,” said Sadik, a professor of chemistry. “We need to think not just about how to make these nanoparticles but also about their impact on human health and the environment.”

A survey by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies found that nanoparticles — particles less than 100 nanometers in size — are now used in more than 1,000 consumer products ranging from cars to food. Silver nanoparticles are widely used as coating materials in cookware and tableware and as ingredients in laundry liquids and clothes because of their antibacterial properties. You can even buy socks infused with silver nanoparticles designed to reduce bacteria and odor.

“But what happens if we buy those socks and we wash them?” Sadik asked. “The nanoparticles end up in our water system.”

Little is known about how these and other engineered nanoparticles interact with our water systems, the soil and the air. Some are known toxins; others have properties similar to asbestos. And it’s difficult, if not downright impossible, to monitor them. Current techniques rely on huge microscopes to identify nanoparticles, but the devices are not portable and do not provide information about the toxicity of materials.

Sadik and a Binghamton colleague, Howard Wang, have received funding from the Environmental Protection Agency to design, create and test sensors for monitoring engineered nanoparticles and naturally occurring cell particles.

“We need to understand the chemical transformation of these materials in the ecosystem so we can take action to prevent unnecessary exposure,” Sadik said.

Her lab has already created a membrane that will not only trap a single nanoparticle but also provide a means of signal generation. It uses cyclodextrin, whose molecular structure resembles a tiny cup. “It can be used not only as a sensor, but also for cleanup,” Sadik said.

That discovery and others make Sadik believe that nanotechnology may also prove useful in the remediation of environmental pollutants. Green nanotechnology could even reduce the use of solvents and result in manufacturing protocols that produce less waste, she said.

For instance, Sadik has used nanoparticles to transform Chromium 6, a known carcinogen, into Chromium 3, which is benign. “I do see the positive side of it,” she said.

“We want to be able to develop nanomaterials while avoiding the unintended consequences of such developments,” Sadik added. “We don’t want to stop development, but we do want to encourage responsibility.”