This venture brings Binghamton University faculty and other partners together to conduct academic and clinical research in areas such as biomedical research — particularly neurosciences — and computer science. Research applications include studies of the human brain, which will deepen a scientific understanding of brain disorders, from Alzheimer’s disease to autism.

It also enables UHS to offer cutting-edge clinical diagnostics for its patients. Clinical applications of the scanner include diagnosis of brain disease and disorders, cardiovascular disease and orthopedic injuries. It will also offer the capability for patients to receive cardiac MRIs locally, rather than traveling to larger cities such as Syracuse, Rochester and New York City.

“As the two largest employers in the region, UHS and Binghamton University have a history of working together to serve and invest in the community,” says John M. Carrigg, president and chief executive officer of UHS. “This partnership between UHS and BU, and specifically this scanner, will open new avenues of research for faculty and provide UHS physicians and patients with the latest advanced diagnostic imaging technology available in the industry.”

MRI-centered research is a cross-disciplinary pursuit that blends expertise in physics, anatomy, physiology, neuroscience and advanced data processing sciences. The center will enable faculty to expand on cross-disciplinary collaborations and work with UHS physicians to address new research questions that MRI technology can answer.

“This public-private partnership will benefit the community by providing the most advanced imaging technology in the region,” University President Harvey Stenger says. “This project is in alignment with the research strategy outlined by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul in her latest State of the State message, and will enhance our ability to attract external funding, as well as build research partnerships with industry and other universities.”

Binghamton University’s Brain and Body Imaging Research Center was established in 2021 in partnership with UHS and is led by Binghamton Professor of Psychology J. David Jentsch.

“About 50 years ago, MRI was invented by SUNY researchers,” Jentsch says. “Today, we’re bringing a 21st-century version of the technology to the Southern Tier. It will have a transformative impact on our ability to make scientific discoveries that advance human health and to offer the most sophisticated training opportunities to Binghamton students.”

The center will make both organizations more competitive in attracting and retaining research-active faculty and physicians. It also represents a new avenue to kindle collaborations between Binghamton faculty and UHS physicians working on research projects that advance the understanding of human health.

Junior Alejandro Wiltshire has been interested in conducting research for as long as he can remember. Now he works in the Biological Soft Matter Mechanics Laboratory (BSMM) with Guy German, associate professor of biomedical engineering.

“I think of it as a skin lab, even though it’s more than just that,” Wiltshire says. “It’s a very versatile biomedical engineering lab. Most of the time when people think of biomedical engineering, they think of cells or creating some sort of vaccine, whereas this is the more mechanical aspect of it. It’s a great place to learn about skin and to learn about a different aspect of mechanical engineering.”

Wiltshire joined the lab his freshman year. With German’s guidance, he has refined his skills in research and laboratory methods.

“Alejandro is committed, rigorous, and an asset to my team,” German says. “He has integrated well with my team of graduates and undergraduates, has learned the varied techniques required for his research quickly and efficiently, and has shown me he can perform effectively independently and as part of a team.”

Wiltshire is part of two research projects. His work on the rate of infection resulting from surgical sites has broad implications in helping regions of the world where infection rates are higher than average.

“If we can figure out how bacteria enters wounds, we can hopefully prevent this from happening,” Wiltshire says. “We are hoping that through this research, we can actually improve the pre-operative procedures, in order to lower the rate of surgical site infections.”

Wiltshire examines the rate of bacterial infection by making observations through imitation. Using a powerful microscope, Wiltshire shared images of his biomechanical model in detail. A substrate plays the role of the skin, while fluorescent beads mimic bacteria.

He included visuals in the demonstration, which allowed for a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of his investigation.

“I think a lot of science is visuals, like you need to see it in order to understand it,” he says. “I’m more of a visual learner myself, so I like to show things and explain along the way.”

Wiltshire’s second project relates to wrinkle formation as a result of aging. Using a series of complicated instruments, Wiltshire works to determine the individual mechanical and structural properties of skin and how this relates to the formation of wrinkles.

The experiments use skin samples from human cadavers. Within four to six days, members of the lab conduct rigorous experimentation on the samples to gain a better understanding of how wrinkles develop over time and how collagen fibers in the skin alter the shape of the wrinkles.

As a member of an artistic family, Wiltshire knew his interests differed greatly from the people around him, but that didn’t deter him from finding a balance between his love for engineering and his appreciation for art.

“I try to take everything in my life and tie it together,” says Wiltshire, who grew up in Hempstead on Long Island. “I think my purpose was kind of trying to tie the things that I enjoy in science and STEM with the artsy side of my life and the things that I view as being artsy.”

Through his position as the STEAM chair of the Binghamton Art Club, Wiltshire hopes to bring awareness to the intersection of art and engineering, and encourage students to pursue and enjoy both paths.

Wiltshire says his experiences in the lab, including a project as part of the Summer Scholars and Artists Program in 2022, have improved his understanding of complex concepts in his undergraduate engineering classes.

“I’m not a classroom learner, I’m more of a hands-on learner,” he says. “So I’ve realized that the more time I spend in the lab, the more that I actually learn here and that I can apply it to the classroom as opposed to the other way around.”

Wiltshire hopes to pursue a doctorate in biomedical engineering at Binghamton after he graduates.

“I’m always investigating something that I didn’t know before,” he says, “and that, to me, is what I want to do.”

That research has now become a line of study in the lab of her mentor, Marvin R. Diaz, associate professor of psychology. “Rhea is an excellent example of a highly motivated and driven student who will achieve great things in her career,” he says. “Her dedication was contagious and she made a significant impact in my research program.”

Marfatia first approached Diaz about his work when she was a freshman, and she became one of his research assistants as a sophomore. Diaz’s Alcohol and Development Lab, part of the Developmental Exposure Alcohol Research Center, looks at neurobiological, physiological and behavioral adaptations that occur during development as a result of alcohol, drug and stress exposure.

Marfatia initially researched prenatal ethanol exposure and its effects on anxiety-like behaviors in offspring by conducting breeding, drug exposures and behavioral and data analysis. After she received the Summer Scholars and Artists award in the summer of 2019, she designed her own research project involving prenatal methadone exposure and its effects on learning and memory in offspring.

“The opioid epidemic is obviously increasing at an alarming rate, and there are understudied aspects in pregnant women and the effects on their offspring,” Marfatia says.

Methadone, a medication used to treat opioid use disorder, can also be prescribed for pain management. Although in utero exposure to opioids does not cause birth defects, some babies may experience withdrawal, also known as neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome. Methadone maintenance therapy in pregnant women can help improve opioid withdrawal in newborns. However, the long-term effects from methadone maintenance therapy in the offspring on areas such as cognitive development, motor skills, physical growth and social/emotional status are not yet fully known.

In Diaz’s lab, Marfatia developed an animal model of prenatal methadone exposure and picked three specific age points (juvenile, adolescence and adulthood) to observe any learning and cognitive deficits as a result of exposure. Her research showed that effects didn’t become apparent until adulthood.

“It’s really exciting that the research is progressing past the framework that I created,” Marfatia says. “I didn’t have much experience or opportunity to work in research until I was in Dr. Diaz’s lab, but it really confirmed that it’s something I’m good at and something I’m interested in. I couldn’t have asked for a better professor and mentor. He knows how to guide students to be the best version of themselves.”

Marfatia graduated summa cum laude in December 2020 with a B.S. in integrative neuroscience with distinguished independent work, an accomplishment completed in 3.5 years. She was on the Dean’s List each semester, worked as a teaching assistant, was part of the Binghamton University Emerging Leaders Program, and was the vice president of finance for Phi Delta Epsilon, the professional pre-medical fraternity.

Marfatia plans to enroll in Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at the University at Buffalo this fall. For now, she’s working full time on campus at Decker Student Health Services’ COVID-19 rapid testing clinic.

“People don’t often discover the course until they are older,” she says. “I had no idea what nursing research was like, but I wanted to dip my toes in it. I really discovered I liked working with kids and I learned how to better communicate with them.”

Vilda was part of a group that used data analysis to determine whether asthma education helps elementary-aged children better manage their health. Their findings were presented during Binghamton Research Days. She completed training in working with human subjects, became a facilitator through the American Lung Association’s Open Airways for Schools program, and then went to a local elementary school and taught children with asthma how to detect the warning signs of asthma, avoid their triggers and make decisions about their health.

That research experience, along with a three-month student nursing externship in the pediatric intensive care unit at NYU Langone Medical Center, helped influence her career aspirations: Vilda hopes to work in a pediatric emergency department after graduation.

“I just really love that population and the diversity of cases you see. You have to think on your feet and really use your critical thinking skills,” she says. “And I love treating the person rather than the idea that you’re treating a patient with a medical diagnosis. It’s why I chose the profession in the first place. You’re treating the mind, body and spirit, and I try to focus on that every time I have a patient interaction.”

The New Windsor resident knew nursing was her calling by the time she was in high school.

Binghamton University was the first school out of the 30 that she visited. “It was the gold standard for all of the other visits going forward,” she says. “I fell in love with the campus and the welcome I got from the nursing program advisors. Without a doubt, I know I made the right decision. It’s one of the best in the state and as a New York resident, it’s a great value.”

When Vilda graduates from the Decker School of Nursing this spring, she will also leave behind a legacy of mentorship, professional development and networking that will help future students pursue healthcare careers.

The Nursing Student Association, like so many organizations on campus, had to limit traditional social gatherings this school year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Vilda saw it as an opportunity to encourage her peers to develop relationships with older classmates and alumni so they might feel better prepared applying for externships or future jobs.

As the outgoing president of the NSA, Vilda oversaw the creation of a professional development chair position. She also designed a series of networking and mentoring events, including a collaboration with the Fleishman Center for Career and Professional Development for nursing-specific workshops on resume-writing and LinkedIn. There was also a summer job/externship event where seniors shared their experiences with younger students and an alumni week that featured a virtual panel discussion.

“Alyssa takes pride in serving as a role model to current and future nursing students, and her leadership is valued and respected,” says Sara Wozniak, senior assistant dean for the Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences. “She is passionate, outgoing, reliable and has an amazing ability to bring people together.”

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.”

“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.”

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.

If you consistently experience high levels of stress, you may be stimulating bacteria that weaken your blood vessels, Binghamton University researchers have found.

The microbiologists discovered a link between stress hormones and bacteria that may explain how emotional shock or over-exertion can trigger heart attacks or strokes in vulnerable people. Researchers believe that this is how someone could literally be scared to death.

The research, published in mBio, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, indicates that hormones released during stress could cause thin sheets of bacteria called biofilms to disperse.

If this happens in your body, biofilms within your arterial walls would be stimulated to release enzymes that might weaken the arterial wall and lead to plaque rupturing into the blood stream. Plaque rupture has long been known to be one of the leading causes of heart attack and stroke.

“Our hypothesis fits the observation that heart attack and stroke often occur following an event where elevated levels of catecholamine hormones are released into the blood and tissues, such as occurs during sudden emotional shock or stress, sudden exertion or over-exertion,” says David Davies, associate professor of biological sciences at Binghamton.

Biofilms, often referred to as slime, form when bacteria undergo a genetic change and then organize within a self-produced matrix of extracellular polymeric substance. Once they are protected within the biofilm, bacteria are harder to detect and to treat with antibiotics.

Davies and his colleagues grew different species of bacteria taken from diseased carotid arteries affected by atherosclerosis, the build-up of thick plaques within the walls of blood vessels. They found multiple bacterial species living as biofilms in the walls of every atherosclerotic carotid artery tested. Certain molecular signals can cause the biofilms to release enzymes that digest the scaffolding anchoring the bacteria in place.

“The release of iron into the blood as a result of increases in stress hormones is what causes the bacteria to release their hold on each other and the plaque,” says study co-author Karin Sauer, professor of biological sciences at Binghamton.

This research suggests that bacteria should be considered to be part of the overall pathology of atherosclerosis. The scientists suggest that management of bacteria within an arterial plaque lesion may be as important as managing cholesterol.

Davies believes this research might someday change the medical community’s view of many conditions. “We’re going one disease at a time and trying to demonstrate whether or not bacteria are involved,” he says. “In most diseases with the letters itis … it means inflammation, it means a biofilm infection.”

Amber Doiron, assistant professor of bioengineering, says current methods of assessing atherosclerosis — commonly known as hardening of the arteries — are not terribly accurate. Some 30 percent of deaths worldwide can be attributed to the disease, which occurs when fat, cholesterol and other particles form hard structures called plaques in the walls of arteries.

“It’s really a guessing game right now,” she says. “Doctors use factors like blood pressure and cholesterol level to get an idea of a patient’s risk. Then they use plaque size as a general measure of whether a person has the disease. But there’s a fairly poor correlation between plaque size and heart attack or stroke.”

Doiron, who has an interest in molecular imaging as well as expertise in nanoscience, wants to help physicians do a better job of identifying which plaques are cause for concern.

She and a Temple University colleague recently received a two-year, $418,000 grant from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering to support this project. It’s a notable success in part because this was Doiron’s first National Institutes of Health grant proposal.

The researchers will use a combination of polymers and superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles for the study. The nanoparticle is sensitive to oxidative stress, which occurs in atherosclerosis and has been linked to patients who have a higher prevalence of heart attack and stroke. Using an MRI scan, the researchers will be able to see how active the nanoparticle is, which will indicate whether the plaque is stable.

“A stroke or a heart attack doesn’t necessarily come when a plaque fully blocks the flow of blood through an artery,” Doiron explains. “What happens is the plaque ruptures and the gunk that underlies the plaque is exposed to blood and a clot forms. The clot builds quickly — on an hour time scale as opposed to over years — and the clot can grow there until it blocks flow, or it can dislodge and block flow somewhere else. Most heart attacks do not occur from a full blockage of plaque. It happens because the plaque bursts. Same thing with strokes. That’s why size isn’t necessarily indicative of how dangerous a plaque is.”

The discovery of a molecule or a cell type that indicated which plaques are safe and which ones are dangerous would be a huge breakthrough, Doiron says. She thinks oxidative stress may be such an indicator.

“Atherosclerosis is an incredibly complex disease that progresses over decades,” Doiron says. “It’s hard to tell who’s walking around with plaques that are stable, relatively safe, and who has plaques that may cause a heart attack tomorrow. For some patients, the first sign of trouble is a heart attack.”

David Klotzkin, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Binghamton, says that’s not good enough. He and a colleague, Ian Papautsky, director of the University of Cincinnati’s BioMicrosystems Lab and its Micro/Nano Fabrication Engineering Research Center, have developed a technology to accelerate testing and enhance it in a number of other ways.

Klotzkin is an expert on the properties of light. Much of his research has focused intensely on photonics — the science of photons, elementary light particles — since he earned his PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan.

As a senior engineer at Lasertron Inc., a manufacturer of photonics components, he developed high-speed laser modulation equipment used in multiplexing — the combining of multiple message signals or data streams, such as many television channels or telephone conversations that share a single cable to maximize the use of an expensive resource.

As an American Society for Engineering Education summer faculty fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he designed circuits that are essential for free-space optical communications. This low-power, high-data-volume alternative to conventional radio frequency communications, with military and civilian applications, is quickly evolving thanks to improved laser technology and compact optical systems.

Klotzkin began collaborating with Papautsky while he was on the faculty at the University of Cincinnati. At the time, Klotzkin was involved in research on organic light emitters, thin films of organic matter on glass that emit light when exposed to an energy source to excite their electrons.

Papautsky, a fellow faculty member, was studying microfluidics, the science of how fluids behave when they are manipulated in tiny spaces. He is a leader in development of what’s called “lab-on-a-chip,” which integrates several laboratory tests on a tiny chip.

With a single inexpensive, disposable lab-on-a-chip, it may be possible to conduct — in the field — tests that, not so long ago, had to be conducted individually in a laboratory remote from where the sample was acquired. It’s also possible to perform those tests simultaneously and quickly, using samples as small as a millionth of a liter.

“In the microfluidics community, we’ve had this idea of small, disposable platforms that could be used for many different tests for a long time,” Papautsky says.

Klotzkin helped him find the way. Since different materials emit different light waves, it is possible to use light to detect the presence of disease-causing micro-organisms such as viruses and bacteria.

“Fluorescence is one of the most commonly used analytic techniques in the biosciences,” Klotzkin explains. Here’s how it works in the typical microfluidic immunoassay: Whatever is being tested — bacteria, viruses or some other type of organic molecules — is tagged with fluorescently labeled antibodies. An excitation light stimulates the dye to fluoresce. The wavelength of the fluorescence — essentially the “fingerprint” of the disease-causing agent — is observed through a filter that suppresses the excitation light.

There was a problem, though. “There was no way to conveniently build filters into the micro system,” Klotzkin says. Consequently, the detector signal emitted by the dye was inevitably overwhelmed by the excitation light.

That is, until he and Papautsky found a simple solution. Using polarizers, they were able to isolate the excitation light from the detector. While the excitation light is polarized, the fluorescence from the dye is emitted with random polarization. Then, when a second polarizer is positioned 90 degrees from the first, the intensity of the excitation light is dramatically reduced as it crosses the two polarizers.

“This solution works with any combination of excitation and emission light,” Klotzkin says, “even if two signals overlap in wavelength.”

Klotzkin and Papautsky published their first paper on their solution in 2007. The following year, Klotzkin joined Binghamton’s faculty. Since then, they have continued to collaborate on lab-on-a-chip models that employ the polarized light approach. They’ve demonstrated the efficacy of this technique with what Papautsky calls “low-hanging fruit,” miniature and portable oxygen sensors for firefighters. Labs-on-a-chip for blood analyses are next.

“We are working toward the goal of putting a ‘lab’ in everyone’s office,” Klotzkin says, “and putting fluorescence in a microchip is one step toward that. More than half of emergency room patients require at least one blood test. With this technology they can get results immediately, from a much smaller volume of blood. Rather than send a vial of blood out to a lab, the doctor can put a drop of blood into a microfluidic system and analyze it instantly.”

Not only do labs-on-a-chip produce potentially life-saving results more quickly, they can perform several tests simultaneously. With patents pending, the engineers’ work may be about to pay off.

“There was a lot of excitement about the lab-on-a-chip idea back in the early 2000s,” Papautsky says, “but then a number of start-ups failed and investors pulled back. Things got even worse when the economy went into recession.” Now that the economy is rebounding, the inventors’ concept could result in a new product in the near future.

Margolis’ machine learning is in the area of “clinical support systems,” which are computer programs that can learn to make decisions such as diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of medical conditions. “There are various names for these types of computer programs … such as machine learning, data mining or pattern recognition,” says Margolis, who has collaborated with researchers at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Fla., and at the University of Arizona.

“The work with Moffitt dealt with a newly developed technique that accomplished two difficult tasks: combining the decisions from multiple computer programs intelligently and combining the data from multiple clinical tests intelligently,” Margolis explains. “For example, assume a doctor has several computer programs that try to automatically diagnose lung cancer from a DNA microarray or CT scans. However, each program only works well with certain patients and/or a certain test. This new technique would learn which combination of programs and tests works best for a particular patient.”

The research with Arizona used machine learning to improve methods of evaluating cancer treatment response. “We took the data that is normally used when looking at CT scans, added additional clinical data and then sent it through a machine learning method,” Margolis says. “We showed that machine learning methods could be designed to allow any new type of data to be added, and these methods performed far better than the current ‘gold standard’ method.”

He says they also noticed interesting patterns in “observer variability,” that is, the fact that doctors disagree with each other — and sometimes with themselves. These patterns showed that machine learning methods eventually could be developed to objectively score and train doctors in fields such as radiology.

Margolis says an increase in the use of machines would not affect a patient’s opportunity to receive personalized care. “The goal is for cheaper, better detection methods using computers,” he says. “Nobody would not get the medical test they needed.”

Once he completes his doctorate in systems science, he hopes to work in industrial research. His advisor, Walker Land, predicts success.

“Dan is best described as a unique thinker, one who sees a difficulty as an opportunity rather than a problem,” says Land, research professor of bioengineering. “It’s just the kind of thinking required for successful bioinformatics/biomedical research.”

That message came through loud and clear when Binghamton researchers went into the field to learn how to deliver information about tobacco use to pregnant women. Based on insights from front-line experts — pregnant smokers and their healthcare providers — the investigators created a video that they hope will succeed where other interventions have failed.

Twenty-six percent of women in upstate New York who gave birth in 2009 smoked during the three months before they conceived, and 12.24 percent still smoked in the last three months of their pregnancies, according to the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In some rural areas the problem is worse, says Geraldine Britton, assistant professor at the Decker School of Nursing and director of Binghamton’s Interdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Program (ITURP). In western Steuben County, for example, 52 percent of women enrolled in Medicaid, Obstetrics and Maternal Services (MOMS) in 2009 said they smoked during the three months before they became pregnant.

Even that figure may not be telling the whole story. “Rates of smoking during pregnancy are profoundly under-reported,” Britton says.

Britton’s interest in smoking during pregnancy dates back to the 1980s, when she worked as a clinical nurse specialist and educator in maternal child care, and to the 1990s, when she coordinated the Southern Tier Tobacco Awareness Coalition.

Later, for her doctoral dissertation at the Decker School, she tested the effectiveness of a nurse-managed program called Smoke Free Baby and Me that was integrated into routine prenatal care. She and a coalition of providers followed 194 pregnant smokers through pregnancy and postpartum. Compared to a control group, the study found significant differences in smoking cessation at the postpartum visit in the group of women enrolled in the program who had quit just before their first prenatal visit — helping them not relapse. But it found no differences among those who were still smoking at the first prenatal visit.

In addition, the study revealed that many expectant mothers were hiding their smoking from healthcare providers. The women’s self-reports were validated by testing for a metabolite of nicotine called cotinine, which is found in smokers’ urine. “We found that 30 to 40 percent of the women who told us that they weren’t smoking had positive cotinines,” Britton says.

Hoping to devise better smoking-cessation strategies, Britton and her colleagues in ITURP, supported by a March of Dimes grant, conducted a series of nine focus groups. Three of those groups consisted of pregnant smokers and six of healthcare providers. “The purpose was to increase the understanding of the pregnant smoker, including the motivation to quit,” Britton says. The researchers also asked for ideas about how to communicate the message.

One important insight that emerged from the groups is that it’s hard to appreciate a risk you can’t see. Unlike a baby born with fetal alcohol syndrome, the child born to a smoker may look like any other newborn. But a mother’s smoking can create a host of hazards for the baby, including low birth weight, nicotine withdrawal, asthma, cognitive delays and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). “We had to somehow put a face to the problem,” Britton says.

The idea of a video appealed to both the groups of expectant mothers and to the healthcare professionals. One nurse, for example, mentioned that New York state requires all new parents to watch a video on shaken baby syndrome before leaving the hospital, says Pamela Manktelow, coordinator of the MOMS program at Saint James Mercy Hospital in Hornell, N.Y. “She said, ‘If we had a smoking video for pregnant women, so they would know what they’re doing to their baby as they watch it, I think that would help.’”

A video also allows you to control the tone of the message — an urgent concern that emerged from the focus groups. “The pregnant women have an absolute cynicism, or even fear, about being lectured,” says ITURP co-investigator Sean McKitrick, former assistant provost and director of the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment at Binghamton University.

Having analyzed the themes from the focus groups, ITURP contracted with White Knight Productions of Vestal, N.Y., to shoot the video. The researchers then returned to groups of pregnant women and nurses for ideas about content. To provide maximum impact, focus-group participants decided that the video should feature real people, not actors. For example, in one vignette, a woman who smoked during her pregnancy describes how she and her family resuscitated her weeks-old infant, who had stopped breathing — and then cautions pregnant women against smoking. “Her little girl is 4 years old and has severe asthma now,” Britton says.

Recruiting women to participate was easy, Manktelow says. “The women feel that they’re helping other people quit.” Even when the crew filmed a newborn howling his way through nicotine withdrawal, the mother didn’t hesitate to let ITURP use the footage, she says.

Along with mothers from participating hospitals and clinics, Manktelow and several other nurses, including Lucy Keith from Arnot Ogden Medical Center’s MOMS, appear in the video. The producers also used children to talk about the dangers of smoking. “The pregnant women felt that this message was probably better delivered by children,” Britton says.

With production complete, members of ITURP are seeking funds to help them test the video. They plan to show the segment, which runs about 10 minutes, to pregnant women during their prenatal visits. Researchers will measure whether women who see the video, compared with a control group, are more likely to quit or cut down on cigarettes and less likely to resume smoking.

Besides producing a new smoking-cessation intervention, the project has helped to solidify ITURP’s partnership with community healthcare providers. Such alliances are crucial for developing effective solutions based on real-world evidence, Britton says. “I like to call it the ‘triple helix’ — practice, research and theory,” she explains. “You need to start in practice in order to develop questions, design effective interventions and conduct research to test and build theory. Then you must return the findings to practice.”

Lead author Gretchen Mahler, assistant professor of bioengineering at Binghamton University, says much of the existing research on the safety of nanoparticles has focused on their direct health effects. But what Mahler, Michael L. Shuler of Cornell University and a team of researchers really wanted to know was what happens when someone receives constant exposure in small doses — the kind you’d get if you were taking a drug or supplement that included nanoparticles in some form.

“We thought that the best way to measure the more subtle effects of this kind of intake was to monitor the reaction of intestinal cells,” Mahler says. “And we did this in two ways: in vitro, through human intestinal-lining cells that we had cultured in the lab; and in vivo, through the intestinal linings of live chickens. Both sets of results pointed to the same thing — that exposure to nanoparticles influences the absorption of nutrients into the bloodstream.”

The uptake of iron, an essential nutrient, was of particular interest because of the way it is absorbed and processed through the intestines. Mahler and the team tested this with polystyrene nanoparticles because of its easily traceable fluorescent properties.

“What we found was that for brief exposures, iron absorption dropped by about 50 percent,” Mahler says. “But when we extended that period of time, absorption actually increased by about 200 percent. It was very clear: Nanoparticles definitely affect iron uptake and transport.”

While acute oral exposure caused disruptions to intestinal iron transport, chronic exposure caused a remodeling of the intestinal villi — the tiny, finger-like projections that are vital to the intestine’s ability to absorb nutrients — making them larger and broader, thus allowing iron to enter the bloodstream much faster.

Humans consume about 100 trillion nanoparticles every day. Although the impact of chronic exposure remains somewhat unknown, the ingestion of dietary particles is thought to promote a range of diseases, including Crohn’s disease. With so many nanomaterials under development and with so much yet to be learned about nanoparticle toxicity and potential human tissue reactivity, Mahler and the team hope that their work, particularly the in vitro model, will provide an effective low-cost screening tool.

They plan to take a look at whether similar disruptions in nutrient absorption could be possible in other inorganic elements, such as calcium, copper and zinc. Also on the research agenda is the reaction of other nutrients such as fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. And chickens and their intestines will definitely be part of this next phase of the study.

“The gastrointestinal tract of a chicken has very similar features to that of a human,” Mahler says. “We can learn a great deal from the way chicken tissue works, which means we can make better predictions about how humans will react.”

To study such an intricate organ, scientists need high-tech labs that can handle equipment measuring in nanoseconds the electrical impulses sent and received by the brain. During the last several decades, researchers at Binghamton University have built one of the top behavioral neuroscience (BNS) programs in the country, although they have conducted their experiments in labs built for very different purposes a very long time ago.

Scientists have done pathbreaking research in these retrofitted spaces, but there comes a point when space limitations constrain the progress of research. That’s what makes the move to Binghamton’s new Science 5 building so exciting.

“BNS research has been a great strength of Binghamton for the last quarter century or more, and it’s grown piecemeal,” Harpur College Dean Donald Nieman says. “It was time for us to take the next step and invest in a facility that’s state of the art for this kind of research.”

Science 5 reflects the growth of Binghamton’s BNS program, which integrates the cellular and molecular techniques of biological neuroscience with the sensory and behavioral aspects of psychology. With the new facility, BNS researchers will deepen their study of an array of critical issues that affect health and well-being — addiction, stress, obesity, memory and neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. By determining the genesis of these problems and better understanding how they affect the brain, their research may lead to interventions to treat them.

The building is designed to foster collaboration. Traditionally, every scientist has his or her own laboratory space and equipment, which is not only expensive, but creates silos of knowledge and techniques. The new space builds a shared environment, encouraging scientists doing similar work in wet labs and data entry rooms to interact, learn from one another, ask novel questions and develop creative strategies for answering them.

“Team research is the future of scientific discovery and the Science 5 building sets the stage for such progress,” says Lisa Savage, professor and graduate coordinator. Although there is already collaboration among BNS researchers, the design of the building and the shared space and equipment will open additional possibilities. And that will help an excellent program become even better.

“You’ll see someone working 10 feet away from you doing a procedure that you may not know about,” Savage explains. “So you may ask them about it and what it does, or think about how you might potentially use that type of procedure in your own research.”

Designed to LEED gold standards, the space boasts a partial green roof, energy-efficient lighting and climate control measures and other environmentally friendly features. And rather than clear out additional space on campus, Science 5 was constructed on part of the old plaza between Science 3 and Science 4.

Nieman says the Science 5 vivarium is the culmination of impressive efforts by faculty members hired years ago. As their own work gained prominence, they fostered an environment that attracted young talent and helped them succeed in their own work.

“Because the core faculty here have international reputations, we’re able to recruit really good faculty,” Nieman says. “And because people like Linda and Skip [Spear] have such high standards, they recruit well and they set the bar high for those they hire. People don’t earn tenure unless they’re highly productive. But at the same time, our senior faculty are really good mentors, and they create an environment where people can succeed.”

Linda Spear’s exceptional work was recognized in 2010, when the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism awarded a five-year, $8.5 million grant to fund the Developmental Exposure Alcohol Research Center (DEARC). Spear, distinguished professor of psychology, serves as its director. The DEARC is a joint venture of Binghamton University, SUNY Upstate Medical University and SUNY Cortland.

The grant is one of the many garnered by the department. In fact, 80 percent of the faculty conduct sponsored research, well above the national average for both psychology and neuroscience. Such external funding has allowed the department to be self-sufficient and hire faculty even during lean times.

Of course, in today’s economic climate, there are never enough research dollars to go around. So universities are seeking partners that complement their strengths and give them a competitive advantage. Binghamton and SUNY Upstate Medical University have started to look at possibilities for working together.

“What you’re seeing with the recent articulation agreement is another layer being graphed onto this,” Nieman says. “We’ve set up plans that will allow our graduate students to take classes at Upstate and our undergraduates to apply for research opportunities. What we’re really trying to do is build a more broad-based collaboration. We don’t have a medical school, but we do have research and teaching strengths that Upstate doesn’t have.”

But chest pain can signal a heart attack in a woman. Women also may experience a range of other symptoms, not all of them easy for the typical sufferer to identify.

“We believe that heart attacks in women go unrecognized 30 to 55 percent of the time,” says Stewart Fahs, professor and Decker Chair in Rural Nursing at Binghamton University’s Decker School of Nursing. Women who miss the warning signs fail to get help, or they head for the hospital only when the problem grows acute, increasing the risk that they will die or be gravely disabled.

In hopes of shortening women’s time to treatment, Stewart Fahs is collaborating with Melanie Kalman, associate professor and director of research in the College of Nursing at SUNY Upstate Medical University, on a project called  “Matters of  Your Heart.” The goal is to develop an effective program to educate women about heart attack symptoms and also to teach about the early warning signs that a heart attack might be on the way.

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women. In fact, 1 in 4 women in the United States dies from heart disease, according to the National Institutes of Health. The most recent national study on the subject, however, found that 49 percent of women don’t realize that they need to be concerned about heart disease, Stewart Fahs says.

That number is lower than in past years, and the medical community has gotten out the word that women’s heart attack symptoms may differ from men’s. However, as the story of the woman on the floor points out, there’s still room to improve education about women’s cardiovascular disease.

Intense pain might be the first obvious sign of an impending heart attack, Stewart Fahs says. But many women who look back on the period before an attack report that they first felt pressure or discomfort. “Some women will say, ‘It’s like I had a big knot up here,’” she explains, pointing to her upper chest. “‘Like I swallowed an orange whole.’” Overwhelming fatigue or pain that radiates into one or both arms or the neck or jaw are other common warning signs.

Kalman and Stewart Fahs conducted the first phase of their project under an intramural research grant from SUNY Upstate. Their first task was to develop a questionnaire to measure a woman’s knowledge of heart attack symptoms and warning signs. They then created a pilot version of an educational presentation.

Working with 141 post-menopausal women, Stewart Fahs and Kalman held small-group sessions to administer the questionnaire, present the program and then give the questionnaire again. “We did find that the educational program increased knowledge,” Stewart Fahs says.

The researchers based the presentation in part on a program that Stewart Fahs developed several years ago to teach rural residents about symptoms of a stroke. That program employed an acronym created by the American Heart Association — FAST, for Face, Arm, Speech and Time.

The new program uses a similar mnemonic device, and Stewart Fahs says the method has proven effective, especially when women practice putting it to use. “We have periods in the presentation when they work in groups of two to four and come up with different symptoms for heart attacks and the female warning signs,” she says. Members take turns naming the symptoms.

As a specialist in rural nursing, Stewart Fahs gave the questionnaire and program to women in rural areas, while Kalman concentrated on urban Syracuse. The population they have studied so far is too small to reveal whether the program works better for one demographic or the other, Stewart Fahs says.

In a second phase of their research, Kalman and Stewart Fahs plan to give the presentation to many more women over a broader geographical area. Eventually, they hope to do a longitudinal study to discover whether their program improves the way women respond when they experience signs of a possible heart attack. “Having knowledge doesn’t necessarily change your behavior,” Stewart Fahs says. “But if you don’t have the knowledge, you’re unlikely to change.”

Once they’ve perfected the program, the researchers will share it with hospitals, community health agencies and other healthcare organizations. Besides offering the PowerPoint slides for classroom use, they might someday use communication technologies to give the presentation a broader reach, Stewart Fahs says. “There should be a way, through cell phone apps or some kind of Internet application, to get this message out to women once it’s fully developed and tested.”

While looking for new ways to educate women about heart attacks, Stewart Fahs also continues helping to advance the discipline of rural nursing. In May, she became editor of the Online Journal of Rural Nursing and Health Care. She also serves as an external advisor to the Interdisciplinary Healthy Heart Center: Linking Rural Populations by Technology at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Her combined expertise in rural nursing and cardiovascular issues makes Stewart Fahs especially valuable as an advisor to the Healthy Heart Center, says Professor Carol Pullen, principal investigator on the project. One striking aspect of Stewart Fahs’ work is that, along with publishing articles on cardiac risk among rural women for academic journals, she also writes for media that reach a wider audience, Pullen says. “I think it’s important not only to get your work in scientific journals, but also to get it out to lay publications for everybody to enjoy the results of your research.”

Stewart Fahs hopes that the results of her latest research will include better outcomes for more female victims of heart attack. “The more aware you are of the signs and symptoms,” she says, “and the more aware you are of the risk of heart disease for women, the better able you are to take a proactive stance.”

Cardullo, then a Link Simulation and Training employee, worked on the Apollo program and has decades of experience in simulation for flight and aerospace applications. Since joining Binghamton’s faculty in 1980, he has explored some of the underlying principles of simulation, including mathematical models and signal processing.

“Space simulators are unique, particularly the Apollo simulators,” Cardullo says. “You can train people to fly airplanes and drive cars by having them fly airplanes and drive cars. But you couldn’t train an astronaut to go to the moon by going to the moon. So you had to have a very sophisticated simulator to do that. The astronauts often said ‘just like in the simulator’ as they encountered events.”

In recent years, flight and driving simulators have grown increasingly realistic, with significant improvements in motion cues. Cardullo notes that physiology and biology play a growing role in simulation, as do new ideas about cognition and learning.

“Simulators, I think, are creating better pilots,” he says. “They’re better able to handle complex situations.” Engine failure, like the problem in the 2009 so-called Miracle on the Hudson flight, is a prime example. Most pilots experience engine failure only in simulations. Nevertheless, they are often able to identify it and to respond appropriately because of that training.

Cardullo, a professor of mechanical engineering whose work has been supported by NASA as well as the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Research Laboratory, earned his master’s degree from Binghamton. He sees applications for his work wherever he goes. A decade ago, he explored the possibility that data from simulators could be used to identify specific pilots, which could be useful in determining whether a pilot had been disabled or was impaired in some way. An avid Red Sox fan, he has also considered taking what he knows about brain waves to see whether they are the reason that some athletes respond faster than others to visual information. Perhaps, he says, there was some scientific truth behind the  “fast eyes” of the late Boston great Ted Williams.

Cardullo is also interested in medical applications of his field, especially in the idea that surgeons benefit from simulation training in much the same way pilots do. Simulators can present malfunctions and difficulties to doctors so that they can become more experienced in dealing with them. (Standard training now often relies on the use of pigs.) Cardullo hopes to build a simulator that would provide tactile sensation to surgeons.  “My hypothesis is that tactile feedback will improve the surgeon’s performance,” he says. Simulation technology may also lead to improvements in the design of surgical robots, Cardullo says, just as it has led to better aircraft.

He wants to examine the complications surrounding robotic surgery done remotely, including questions about satellite and phone connections. “The up-down time can be two seconds,”  he says.  “A lot of simulation research that I’ve done over the years is looking at the effect of that communication delay on human performance. Once you get over about 70 or 80 milliseconds of delay, it affects performance. You can’t have that if somebody’s cutting out someone’s liver.”

Olympia Berger is a family nurse practitioner at the Greater Binghamton Health Center, where she cares for patients with severe mental illness.

“Some of my geriatric patients wander,”  Berger says.  “I noticed that as their blood pressure dropped, I saw some cognitive changes.”

That led her to studying the effects of hypotension (for these purposes, a systolic reading of 140 or lower) on cognitive function, and to a theory that low blood pressure may trigger wandering. Decrease in regional cerebral blood flow is common in individuals with Alzheimer’s. In fact, patients who wander may have more advanced pathology and a more pronounced decrease in cerebral blood flow.  “No one has looked at changes in blood pressure before, during and after an episode of wandering,”  Berger says.  “Is that the body’s mechanism to increase cerebral blood flow?”

Berger notes that not all Alzheimer’s patients wander. Those who do — more often men than women — aren’t looking to go anywhere; they just seem to need to move. She has seen patients get up and walk when they’re in pain, even soon after having surgery.

Working with her advisor, Carolyn Pierce, an assistant professor of nursing and of bioengineering, Berger is following a small group of patients using an ambulatory blood pressure monitoring device. They hope to identify peak times for wandering to see if there are connections to mealtimes or blood pressure.

One idea they’re exploring is that senior citizens may need a higher blood pressure than younger people. If that’s true, it may suggest changes in blood-pressure medication and diet for this population.

For Berger, there’s no question that psychiatric and medical issues are related.  “You need,”  she says,  “to look at the whole person.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stamping tolerance on the brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking science to the street

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”