“The AHA is such a big and well-respected organization, so it is a nice validation to see that they value my research and ideas,” says Weiss, a biomedical engineering doctoral student who received a competitive two-year pre-doctoral fellowship.

Weiss conducts her work in the lab of Tracy Hookway, assistant professor of biomedical engineering. The team uses cell culture, 3D modeling of stem cells and live imaging of tissue for regenerative medicine therapy.

“Natalie has been a huge asset to my lab,” Hookway says. “She’s incredibly intelligent and very ambitious, and she’s not afraid to ask questions.”

Weiss’ research involves creating working models of human hearts and then testing various drugs and therapies with the goal of resolving or improving cardiac fibrosis. She uses stem cells derived from human skin to make heart muscle cells and then combines them with proteins, sugars and a gel polymer, which is then piped into a 3mm donut ring mold (of sorts). The process takes about a week and a half, but once the cells are added to the mold, the ring forms overnight into a simplified, beating human heart model.

“By testing on these models, it saves time, money and testing on animals,” Weiss says, adding that she often has 40 rings going at a time. “What I’m hoping to do, once the models are a little more advanced, is replicate the stiffness of cardiac fibrosis in the model and then test a couple of drugs and see if it responds in a positive way.”

As a high school student in East Meadow, Long Island, Weiss knew she was interested in the medical field. She volunteered in an emergency room and got her EMT certification.

“I’ve also always loved problem solving — taking things apart and figuring out how they worked,” she says. “I wasn’t aware I could put those two interests together until a biomedical engineering major kept popping up again and again as I was researching college programs.”

She received her undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering at Stony Brook University in 2019, and then started her graduate career at Binghamton that fall. She selected the program because she was impressed with Hookway, who would become her advisor.

“I wanted someone who I can connect with,” Weiss says. “Dr. Hookway really seemed like someone who would advocate for her students, so I knew she was going to care about my progress and help me out.”

Once Weiss completes her doctorate, she hopes to complete a post-doctoral fellowship and then become a professor and run her own research lab.

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.”

Laura Cook’s minireview was published in the July edition of the society’s “Infection and Immunity” journal. This was the first time the editorial board used an issue to highlight some of the “brightest early-career scientists who embody the future of research on host-microbe interaction.”

The piece, titled “Two-Component Signal Transduction Systems in the Human Pathogen Streptococcus agalactiae,” was co-authored by Lamar S. Thomas, a doctoral candidate in Cook’s lab.

“We only had two months to put together the review, citing 100 different sources, so it was a lot of reading and work,” says Cook, an assistant professor of biological sciences who joined the Binghamton faculty in fall 2018. “I wanted Lamar to help me because it’s good for her career. I was impressed with how much work she put into it, considering the short timelines.”

Cook’s research focuses on Streptococcus pyogenes, a bacteria that causes strep throat and skin and soft tissue diseases like impetigo and cellulitis. She also studies Streptococcus agalactiae, which commonly live in the gastrointestinal and genital tracts but can cause invasive infection in newborns, maternal women and older individuals with underlying chronic conditions.

“It’s not ideal that the only and best course of treatment is antibiotics,” Cook says. “We’re working toward identifying new treatment strategies. We hope our research moves in the direction of identifying new vaccine candidates.”

Cook did her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Minnesota. Her post-doctoral studies took her to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she focused on quorum sensing (the ability to detect and respond to cell population density by gene regulation) in streptococci and the role of cell-to-cell signaling as they colonize the host.

While working in the lab of Michael Federle, she began using animal models of bacterial growth, and her use of a mouse model of vaginal colonization developed into her current research.

Cook, Thomas and several undergraduate students are studying how streptococci grow and interact on mucosal surfaces in the vaginal tract and nasopharynx of mouse models.

Federle said he appreciated Cook’s coordination of his group of bacteriologists with a group with physicians at another university, both of which were researching reoccurring strep throat diagnoses among adolescent patients. The two groups were looking at relevant questions that could be asked in a clinical setting and were researching therapeutic options outside of antibiotics.

“She was really good at finding collaborators and teams of scientists that can work together,” Federle says. “That’s one of the biggest impacts that she’s going to have at Binghamton University.”

Another strength is Cook’s approachability and innate ability to make people — especially students — comfortable. “She’s a good person to collaborate with because she takes on big goals and ideas and she takes them on with ease,” Federle says. “She asks the right questions — questions that are going to need collaboration through interdisciplinary work.”

Brems, a biochemistry major from Long Island, researched ways to strengthen antibody drug conjugates with support from Binghamton University’s Summer Scholars and Artists Program.

When we get sick and take medicine to help our bodies recover, a drug entering our system will attach itself to any cell within our bodies — regardless of whether that cell is infected. Brems’ research aims to create and test drug conjugates that will attach themselves to a specific antibody, which will then only attack infected cells.

This makes the drug more effective; it also has the potential to eliminate the harmful side effects of some medications.

Brems focused on anti-inflammatory drugs that work to combat rheumatoid arthritis and breast cancer, working to optimize the chemical reaction that takes place once the drugs enter the body and to maintain the drug’s overall stability. She was able to decipher the optimal reaction conditions for several drugs in her study.

Brems began her research at Binghamton through the Freshman Research Immersion program, which led to an opportunity to work in a lab studying drug development. That experience has helped her to understand just how much time researchers invest in their work.

“People think it’s a lot quicker than it actually is,” Brems says. “A lot of the reactions I do take days to complete. So I’ll do it and I can’t even see if it worked until a day or even two days afterward.”

Nathan Tumey, assistant professor of pharmaceutical science, mentored Brems in his lab.

“What’s fun for me to see is that she was already in the lab prior to the summer,” Tumey says. “She spent the entire summer in the lab, and by about one-third of the way through summer, she was completely independent.”

Brems has always had an interest in science, which grew throughout high school in her lab courses. She also enjoys taking dance classes at the university, as well as swimming, reading and crochet.

Brems will continue her research in Tumey’s lab through senior year, and she plans to obtain a PhD in medicinal chemistry after she graduates from Binghamton. While she says her love of science led many to suggest she become a medical doctor, she stayed set on becoming a researcher.

“Think about what you would enjoy doing every single day,” Brems says. “The most difficult parts [of research] are the most rewarding. … Do something you enjoy every day, not just because that’s what you’re told to do.”

The new center, to be known as FlexMed, will assist with job creation through the development and commercialization of technologies in New York state. FlexMed will be a part of the University’s Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM).

The FlexMed CAT will allow researchers at Binghamton University and our industry partners to build on more than a decade of experience in designing and manufacturing flexible electronics, said Mark D. Poliks, empire innovation professor of engineering and director of the new center. Poliks also serves as director of the CAMM, the official New York node of the national NextFlex manufacturing institute.

“We have unique facilities and expertise in partnering with industry that will enable us to make contributions to New York companies’ R&D right away,” he said. “This investment, combined with our ongoing work with NextFlex, establishes us as a major resource for large and small firms that are interested in flexible, wearable medical and industrial devices.”

Poliks, author of more than 100 technical papers, holds 47 U.S. patents. He envisions the center working with startup companies around the state to develop prototype devices in a cost-efficient and timely fashion so that they can be brought to market as quickly as possible. Initial projects may include wearable biosensors embedded in textiles and roll-to-roll manufacturing of electronic glass and ceramic surfaces.

The center, an interdisciplinary effort with collaborators at SUNY Polytechnic Institute, will offer training, workshops and academic classes. “As an educator, I’m also excited about the workforce development aspect of this center,” Poliks said. “Students at Binghamton and at SUNY Poly will have opportunities to learn state-of-the-art techniques and will be prepared for careers in this vital and growing economic sector when they graduate.”

FlexMed will serve as the nucleus of a manufacturing industry cluster in the quickly emerging field of medical and pharmaceutical device manufacturing, said Howard Zemsky, Empire State Development president, CEO and commissioner. “It will enable industry partners to scale up flexible-hybrid electronics technologies and present them to the marketplace more quickly, while harnessing various academic capabilities for product development and commercialization, workforce development and job creation efforts for New York state,” he said.

Flexible medical devices could include lightweight sensors for use in monitoring hospital patients, athletes and members of the armed services.

Harvey Stenger, president of Binghamton University, said FlexMed will build upon the campus’ strengths in engineering and the health sciences. “Our laboratories in Endicott and at the Innovative Technologies Complex are truly state of the art,” he said. “FlexMed will contribute to the Southern Tier’s rich culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Binghamton, which recently earned a “very high research” classification from the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, is cultivating faculty teams to pursue large-scale center grants like this one, said Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research at Binghamton University. He noted that the campus is also home to another CAT, the Integrated Electronics Engineering Center.

“Mark Poliks is an exceptional researcher, and his decades of experience in working with teams of faculty members and industry partners will be a tremendous asset to FlexMed,” Sammakia said. “This center will work on technology that has the potential to benefit society and improve healthcare in important ways.”

Fake “Frank” Lu, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, uses stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), a molecule identification technique, to develop a multicolor imaging technology for brain cancer pathology during surgery.

A three-year, $750,000 R00 grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) supports his research at Binghamton.

There are two steps to get rid of a brain tumor: removing the literal mass and then removing the lingering cancer cells at the edges. Removing the lingering cells can be tough, requiring evaluation to avoid destroying functioning brain structures.

Cancer cells are denser than normal cells, which helps them to be identified. Modern procedures involve a pathologist standing by for intraoperative consultation, using neuronavigation systems (such as an MRI scan) or fluorescence imaging to detect lingering cancer cells. Each of these techniques has drawbacks:

• With intraoperative staining-based histopathology, tissue samples are taken and evaluated in a nearby laboratory. Although accurate, this is ultimately a slow process, only allowing three samples to be evaluated during surgery.
• Neuronavigation systems can also be flawed as a result of the brain moving during the surgery, which is called “brain shift.”
• Fluorescence imaging uses fluorescent dyes to label and locate the cancer cells. Unfortunately, this is a messy process and isn’t accurate at distinguishing the margins of the tumor.

Lu’s technology is label-free, rapid and detailed. He expects that in the future, SRS can be used to evaluate 20-30 tissue samples during surgery to help delineate the tumor margin.

SRS detects “molecular fingerprints” by exciting the chemical bonds in molecules and reading the frequencies emitted by the vibrational states of the bond. This information is then used to assign different colors to the molecules, allowing for a detailed image.

Lu has also improved SRS so that it can create images of lipids, fatty acids that he says are important markers for the presence of cancer cells. Axons, the long, thread-like sections of nerve cells, are wrapped in lipid layers called myelin sheath. In areas affected by cancer, they break down, leaving lipid droplets that can be easily detected by Lu’s technology.

Lu envisions the technology being incorporated into a machine for operating rooms, and he is debating two options: a handheld probe to create images of the internal cavity, or a device that creates images of tissue samples from multiple locations. “We are providing a tool that is complementary to the current neuronavigation system,” he says.

The next step is to collect more data to solidify the efficiency of the technology. Lu is collaborating with SUNY Upstate Medical University and Brigham and Women’s Hospital to get larger data sets.

Eventually, Lu would like to implement machine learning into the technology for faster and more efficient diagnosis. He also hopes to apply this technology to other types of cancer diagnosis and even other neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s, and do more work in live cell imaging.

Before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2017, Lu completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he collaborated with cancer pathologists, surgeons and researchers to transform this technology. He also secured a prestigious NIH K99 Pathway to Independence Award, which is designed to facilitate researchers’ transitions from post-doctoral work to independent tenure-track jobs.

“Everyone contributes to the technical development of this technology, [but] Frank’s definitely the driving force behind the work,” says Sandro Santagata, a neuropathologist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and Lu’s post-doc collaborator. “He’s a team player, which is very important in scientific research.”

Lu, who was born in Shandong, China, received an undergraduate degree in optoelectronics from Zhejiang University in China and a graduate degree in bioengineering from the National University of Singapore.

He eventually realized he wanted to move toward healthcare applications of photonics rather than pure engineering and technology, which led him to Raman bioimaging. “For me, pure engineering work was not that exciting,” Lu says. “Later in my career I started thinking about practical applications of biophotonics in life science.”

As a kid, Lu was always tinkering, even attempting to develop a FM radio and an electric generator. Ever since, he has been on course to create innovations that would benefit society.

“To be successful in science requires a pretty remarkable drive,” Santagata says, “and he’s got it.”

Binghamton junior Khin Oo studies how the adoption of a Western diet affects children in the island nation of Vanuatu.

“When it comes to a westernized diet, we have a lot of high-fat, high-salt, high-sugar intakes that will impact children growing up,” she says. “Obesity is the big chronic disease that we’re seeing world-wide, so studies like these help us understand at an earlier rate how it starts.”

Oo, a biomedical anthropology major, explored young girls’ weight growth in Aneityum, one of Vanuatu’s islands. According to Oo, Aneityum has seen an increase in the consumption in processed tinned meat and fish and instant ramen noodles that have come as a result of Westernization.

She analyzed girls’ macro-nutrition and body weight data (such as Body Mass Index) from the years 2007, 2011 and 2017 to understand changes in body fat. She compared girls of the same age at the three different times, focusing on children ages 6-17.

“Interestingly enough, we found that body fat has actually decreased in females,” Oo says. Macronutrient intake also increased, and their BMI became more similar to growing girls in the United States.

These findings indicate that a Western lifestyle may help increase macronutrient diversity. Oo emphasizes this is not the whole story, however, and that physical activity, economic status and education are also important factors in overall health, which may be studied in future research.

Oo, who presented her study during Binghamton Research Days, also collected data for boys during the three years. She found that body fat increased in 2011 and decreased in 2017, but due to a low sample size for nutrition data she wasn’t able to draw conclusions about why that might be.

Graduate student Kyle Gowen said Oo came up with the idea to study how a Western diet influenced weight and nutrition throughout the years. Their professor, Ralph Garruto, had already collected most of the data from Aneityum for related research.

“She’s incredible. Analyzing how modernization affects children’s growth, these are large problems to tackle,” Gowen says. “She has the mind to think about these larger problems. She knows what she’s doing and she knows what she needs to get done and when.”

Oo, a native of Myanmar who now lives in Brooklyn, plans to go to medical school. “The health system is really bad [in Myanmar],” she says. “My grandparents actually passed away from diseases that could have been prevented there, and that jump-started me into the pre-med route.”

Oo says she’s interested in Doctors without Borders, in part because of her desire to bring modern medicine to areas that need it while also being mindful of cultural differences. In the summer of 2017, she interned at a research facility in Madagascar, providing healthcare and conducting research on children’s respiratory health.

One way she learns about people and cultures is by cooking dishes from other countries. Oo, a renaissance woman of sorts, also serves as a teaching assistant for physics and an assistant at the systems science and industrial engineering department. She enjoys painting, too.

“I don’t want to just focus on one field as an undergraduate,” she says. “I’m trying to branch out, see everything I can, just intake knowledge and see where it leads me.”

Lakshmi Hareendran was part of a research team investigating drug treatment for Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative disorder caused by a loss of the brain chemical dopamine.

The dopamine circuit involved in motor movements consists of two receptors in the brain, the D1 and the D2 receptors. The current treatment for Parkinson’s is the drug L-DOPA, which acts on both of these receptors to release and replenish dopamine in the brain.

Hareendran and her colleagues in the Freshman Research Immersion program (FRI) at Binghamton provided evidence that stimulating the D2 receptor produces cognitive deficits, illustrating that L-DOPA may not be the best treatment for Parkinson’s.

The researchers treated rodents with L-DOPA and drugs that target either the D1 or the D2 receptors and then observed the effects on their ability to complete a behavioral task.

Stimulating the D2 receptor caused attention deficits on the behavioral tasks in both Parkinson’s and control models. Stimulating the D1 receptor produced no such effects.

“Parkinson’s disease is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases in the world,” Hareendran says. “Knowing that the current treatment isn’t as effective as it could be is important.”

Hareendran, 21, has wanted to be a doctor since she was growing up on Long Island, influenced by several doctors in her family. Even then, she was interested in neuroscience.

“I had an uncle who was a brain surgeon,” Hareendran says. “As a kid, just thinking about him being able to understand something as complex as the human brain really inspired me to go down that path.”

Hareendran wants to work with Doctors Without Borders someday. An experience with MEDLIFE, an organization that provides medical care to impoverished areas, helped to solidify her goal. Hareendran traveled with the group to Peru and Ecuador to help set up medical clinics.

“My parents are refugees from Sri Lanka,” Hareendran says. “There was a genocide happening there for a while, so specifically with Doctors Without Borders I want to go and give back there.”

Hareendran is also president of the Indian International Student Union and was a peer mentor for FRI after she finished the program.

Corinne Kiessling, research educator for the FRI neuroscience stream, emphasized Hareendran’s dedication.

“She was one of those students that puts extra hours in, came in early, stayed late,” Kiessling says. “As a peer mentor, she was very open and receptive, and she challenged students to find answers. She’s a natural leader.”

Hareendran and her colleagues published their research in UCLA’s undergraduate research journal.

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.”

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.”

Matthew Wersebe studies the effect of antibiotics on wetland ecosystems. “I realized no one was really looking at the effects of antibiotics as a contaminant, so that’s where we started,” says Wersebe, a biology major.

Antibiotics kill or inhibit the growth of microorganisms. Agricultural companies treat animals with antibiotics for a variety of reasons, such as the reduction of pain or suffering, or to ensure their health or survival.

Wersebe studies sulfadimethoxine (SDM), an antibiotic used to treat dairy cows, chickens and other animals.

Antibiotics, which are present at low levels in the environment, are considered “practically non-toxic” by the EPA. However, Wersebe found low levels of antibiotics do have an environmental impact. SDM, for instance, had a negative effect on zooplankton, which is an important or “keystone” consumer for the proper functioning of an aquatic ecosystem. Green algae is a main source of energy for zooplankton, whereas blue-green algae (BGA) is toxic or unpalatable to zooplankton. Blue-green algae populations increase in the presence of SDM.

“We should expand the assessment of chemical toxicity to include community interactions, so that we can better determine the impacts of antibiotic pollution on natural systems,” Wersebe says.

According to a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, U.S. livestock producers use an estimated 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics annually. Considering the variety of antibiotics in use, as well as their varying methods of disrupting the growth of microorganisms, it is important to consider their effect on the environment even at low levels, Wersebe says.

SDM is just one antibiotic chemical used by agricultural companies; there are many more. “That’s what makes the research complicated,” Wersebe says. “Antibiotics are a diverse group of chemicals with different modes of action.”

Wersebe began his research after receiving a 2016 Summer Scholars and Artists grant. He works in the lab of Jessica Hua, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Binghamton.

“One clear example of his leadership is his work with the Friends of Recreation, Conservation and Environmental Stewardship (FORCES),” Hua says. “This organization aims to develop relationships between faculty and students that lead to a mutually beneficial relation with state park units. Matt has been working to develop a FORCES chapter here on campus and has taken the initiative to involve my lab in his efforts.”

While many undergraduates put in a lot of time and effort in the lab, Wersebe extends beyond that and is very independent, says Vanessa Wuerthner, a doctoral student in Hua’s lab. “He spends much of his time in the lab and is continuously coming up with new research ideas that he carries through from start to finish,” she says. “He is currently working closely with another graduate student in the lab to publish his first manuscript.”

Next, Wersebe wants to see how zooplankton affected by antibiotics interact with other chemicals in agricultural runoff, such as insecticides that get sprayed on crops. He wants to know if antibiotics make zooplankton more or less resistant to insecticides, using antibiotics and algae that will be cultured in the lab. Wersebe’s work this summer is funded by the Garden Club of America.

“As consumers, we vote with our dollars,” Wersebe says. “Seeing firsthand how antibiotics have an environmental impact, I’ve become more conscious of what I consume and where it is sourced from. I try to have the smallest impact on the environment.”

You don’t have to be deep in the backwoods to be at high risk for Lyme disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects that about 300,000 people are infected with Lyme disease each year, yet only 30,000 incidences are reported.

The disease spreads from a pathogen — a bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi — to a blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis, also known as the “deer tick.” Ticks are in the nymphal stage of their life cycle during the late spring and summer, the stage in which they are most likely to infect humans with Lyme disease.

Rani Schoenhaus, a junior at Binghamton University, spent last summer alongside three other students collecting and testing ticks from the Susquehanna River Basin area, a nearby six-county region. “Dragging” is the process of pulling material, in this case a 1-square-meter piece of white corduroy, along terrain in order to collect ticks.

“It was a really great experience,” says Schoenhaus, a biology major from Slingerlands, N.Y. “We camped for about half of the week. We would pack into one car and hike all day, dragging different trails in a bunch of state parks and places that have high foot traffic.”

The project, which began in 2011, is headed by Ralph Garruto, a professor of anthropology at Binghamton. Garruto’s lab aims to find the rate of infected ticks, compile the demographics of people encountered in these areas and spread awareness to improve reporting rates.

“The Susquehanna River Basin area that we have been collecting ticks from has the second highest infectivity of ticks per density of ticks in the entire United States,” Schoenhaus says. “The infectivity rates of ticks with Lyme disease is actually the same as in the Hudson Valley, which has the highest infectivity rates in the U.S. They just have more reported cases.”

Results show an overall infectivity rate of 34.3 percent, meaning that about one in three ticks encountered in areas with high foot traffic were carrying the bacterium. “We’re looking at campus, neighborhood backyards, parks, places where people don’t often realize they’re at risk,” Garruto says.

Schoenhaus works on this project with doctoral student Amanda Roome, senior Zara Shah and sophomore Erik Pecina. They presented their collaborative poster and abstract at the prestigious Human Biology Association conference in April in New Orleans.

“Rani is very committed. She has worked on several teams, specifically our collection team, working more than 20 hours a week over the summer,” Garruto says. “All of the students are part of each step of the project, from collection to the DNA analysis.”

Schoenhaus’ longtime interest in epidemiology — the study of disease states and how they affect different groups of people — and other facets of public health brought her attention to this research. As part of the demographic and behavioral team, she played a critical role in collecting demographic information related to people putting themselves at risk. She looked at behavior such as who was running by, whether their arms and legs were exposed and other factors. Even areas with small green patches revealed a high density of infected ticks.

“This project is so important for public health outreach,” says Schoenhaus, who hopes to attend veterinary school. “Awareness can prevent diseases. I think people would be surprised by the density of ticks in this area first off, but the amount of ticks infected with Lyme disease is even more surprising.”

“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.”

Thanks to Project Lead The Way, an initiative that introduces students to STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — subjects at an early age, Hays chose to research tissue engineering, the process of combining scaffolds, cells and biologically active molecules into functional tissues.

“It was science fiction come to life,” he says.

Now a senior biomedical engineering major at Binghamton University, Hays has a 4.0 average and a place working in the laboratory of Kaiming Ye, a professor and chair of the biomedical engineering department. “He’s a very smart and dedicated researcher,” Ye says. “He works hard, and he can solve a problem very quickly. His interests and his career goals are what made him stand out.”

Binghamton is one of the few universities working on 3D printing as a method of tissue engineering. Essentially, biocompatible material is “printed” in droplets that are then overlapped, eventually creating a bulky organ. This method allows for a lot more control over the “printing landscape,” Hays says.

Other schools, such as Harvard and Stony Brook University, are looking into a barrier in 3D printing known as the oxygen-diffusion limit, which says that a cell can’t survive outside of 100-200 microns from a vessel. “That’s like 1/10th of a millimeter,” Hays says. That’s why certain tissues, like skin and cartilage, lend themselves to the “printing” process more easily. They are relatively avascular, meaning they do not contain blood vessels.

Hays believes that in the next decade tissue engineering will make it possible to 3D print a fully functional organ created with a patient’s own cells or stem cells. For example, beta-islet cells — cells that produce, store and release the insulin hormone — are attacked and destroyed by the body’s immune system in Type 1 Diabetics. Tissue engineering may allow scientists to create beta-islet cells and produce a new artificial pancreas for these patients.

“Hopefully 3D printing will make something like the organ donor list obsolete in the near future,” Hays says.

In the meantime, Hays has found a way to save lives in the present day. He’s an emergency medical technician with the campus ambulance squad, Harpur’s Ferry. In the fall, he administered patient care and CPR that resuscitated someone in cardiac arrest.

“I was happy with how I responded,” Hays says. “It registered, but not emotionally. You realize you have a team. And if you learn how to work with your team, you’re never going to feel alone.”

Hays has been accepted into medical school for the fall, and he also looks forward to the possibility of using his engineering degree to become a biomedical consultant. He says he will always look at problems with an engineering mindset.

Hays and Rushi Shah, a fellow biomedical engineering student and Harpur’s Ferry EMT, realized there was not a device at the basic life support level to monitor respiratory heart rates automatically. They created an invention that they called a “respiratory quantifier,” which can measure and report respiratory rate in real time.

“I thought I would have to choose between biomedical engineering and medical school,” Hays says, “but in the end you don’t have to choose. You can do both.”

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.”

Schizophrenia affects about 1 percent of the world’s population and is the #1 cause of medical disability in the United States. The biggest reason for this high rate of disability is severe impairment in cognition, which makes it difficult to work or perform activities of daily living. Unfortunately, the cause of these cognitive impairments is poorly understood.

A recent paper by graduate student Lindsay Morra, which Strauss supervised, found that medical conditions such as diabetes, a high waist-to-hip ratio and especially high blood pressure were “particularly associated with a range of cognitive deficits” that occur in schizophrenia. This finding is significant because it suggests that general health problems that affect the body also affect the brain and cognition in schizophrenia. Earlier studies mostly focused on structural or neurochemical abnormalities that affect the brain broadly. The research from Strauss’ lab raised an important possibility that treating metabolic abnormalities, such as hypertension, may improve cognition in schizophrenia.

“The brain is intricately wired to receive blood from arteries,” Strauss says. “In people with schizophrenia, who often have had high blood pressure for 20 to 40 years, there is a systemic effect on the brain caused by a hardening of the arteries, which affects the brain’s ability to efficiently distribute blood throughout the brain.”

Several potential mechanisms complicate the interpretation of the finding in Morra’s study, Strauss says. “One is actually, unfortunately, the antipsychotic medications,” he notes. “They can cause the metabolic abnormalities to come about.”

Most of the recent drug therapies carry risks of elevated blood sugar, high blood pressure, weight gain and higher cholesterol. The new study was unable to follow the participants longitudinally to determine the cause-effect role of the antipsychotics.

All of this is not to say that high blood pressure causes schizophrenia or vice versa. Correlation isn’t causation, as the saying goes, and Strauss emphasizes that “metabolic abnormalities only predict a small proportion of the cognitive impairment in schizophrenia.”

Another potential explanation for cognitive impairment, which Strauss is investigating with a new grant from the American Psychological Foundation, is what he calls a “motivational impairment,” or abnormal interaction of the brain’s reward system with the prefrontal cortex that can cause a certain kind of reward process to go haywire.

Strauss explains it like this: For years, clinicians have thought that patients suffering from schizophrenia were cognitively impaired because something in the brain was demotivating them. “We’ve explored that, and we basically don’t think that that’s true,” he says. “What we think happens is that they try adequately but they’re inefficient at allocating their efforts.”

Healthy individuals, he says, engage in a labor-leisure tradeoff. When it’s necessary, psychiatrically healthy individuals ramp up their brain’s efforts when confronted with a hard task, but automatically ease off when that task gets easier or ends. They do this unconsciously, and it’s why you might like to play a mindless video game after a hard day at work.

By using brain recording techniques and pupillometry — the measurement of pupil diameter, which is a way to assess the amount of cognitive effort that someone exerts — Strauss and his students have found that it’s not that the brains of those suffering from schizophrenia aren’t expending as much effort; they’re ramping up and down their efforts inefficiently.

“They basically end up in the state of mental fatigue really quickly because they expend their effort inefficiently, and they can’t overcome it,” says Strauss, who received Early Career Awards for Research last year from the National Academy of Neuropsychology and the American Psychological Foundation.

By researching motivational mechanisms that can cause the cognitive impairments, Strauss hopes that he and his students might be able to design “cognitive rehabilitation training programs,” similar to some of the online brain games you’ve probably heard of.

“What we’re working toward,” he says, “is developing new cognitive training programs that actually target the motivational mechanisms that are inherent to schizophrenia and cause them to become mentally fatigued more quickly.”

Delirium is “an acute change in mental status characterized by inattention and fluctuating mental status,” Flanagan says. No one is really sure what causes it, but delirium can occur in 25-80 percent of hospitalized older adults and can lead to increase in morbidity and mortality. It can also lead to other serious health issues, including dementia.

That’s why she has examined the correlation between two different tools to measure delirium: the Confusion Assessment Method (CAM) and the Confusion Assessment Method-Family Assessment Method (FAM-CAM). The CAM, she says, is the “gold standard,” but it’s limited to the observations of geriatric patients by healthcare professionals. The FAM-CAM is aimed at getting families involved in assessing whether a patient has delirium. “My study was one of the first that looked at the comparison of the family members and the provider,” she says.

In the end, Flanagan, a nurse practitioner for more than 25 years, found a strong correlation between the CAM and the FAM-CAM, meaning that family members can play a role in catching delirium early. She published her findings in two nursing journals in 2015.

It’s important for healthcare providers and family members alike to recognize delirium so they can figure out what’s causing it, she said, and what can be done to try to limit its duration.

“The longer they stay delirious, the more likely they are to develop dementia,” Flanagan says. “In older adults, they have a 12½-fold more likelihood of developing dementia.”

What she found while researching her dissertation was that family members will notice subtle things not known or noticed by healthcare professionals. “You really have to rely on the family members or caregiver to give you the picture of what this person is like,” she says. “You know, pre-hospital or pre-rehab. What were they like at home? How are they managing?”

The impact of Flanagan’s research is that the FAM-CAM can be a starting point in getting a clearer picture of what’s happening with the patient. It’s also, she says, a way to introduce the topic of delirium and get family members to understand it.

“I think that’s probably the biggest impact, opening a window to some education about what delirium is and how it happens,” she says. “You know, as a team, the family and the provider and the patient can all work together to try to make things better. So it’s really about that collaboration between the family and nurse.”

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.

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.”