An Illinois native, Franks came to Binghamton University to realize her dream of living on the East Coast and her goal of becoming a doctor. Now, she’s a graduating senior majoring in biochemistry and minoring in music, finalizing her enrollment in SUNY Upstate Medical University, which she chose in part due to its proximity to an orchestra.

Her enthusiasm for research stems back to a high school experience with her older brother. Both were a part of their specialized school’s Student Inquiry and Research (SIR) program, which allowed them to collaborate with different STEM labs and health clinics. Franks worked with CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tools and mixed lineage leukemia in breast cells. It was the project that set her on the path of cancer research.

“My brother had done the SIR program at our high school and did a really cool project about looking for differences in brain structure of those with Alzheimer’s,” Franks says. “He got to work with rat brains and present his project at conferences so I decided I wanted to do that too.”

With graduation on the horizon, Franks is focused on completing her duties in the labs where she works. At the Guthrie Clinic, she and her mentor, Gastroenterology Fellow Alex Miller, are narrowing down methods to increase the rates of hepatitis A and B vaccinations, specifically among adult patients with Chronic Liver Disease (CLD). Miller’s original goal for the project was to look at the overall population of those with CLD and to raise the vaccination rates holistically. Franks introduced the idea of finding groups within the population who may need the vaccine more urgently than others, and potentially targeting them first.

“She very thoughtfully brought in additional components that we could look at simultaneously,” Miller says. “She took us a step further and said, ‘Why don’t we introduce different types of healthcare disparities out there? That way we can see if there’s one population more vulnerable and not only increase vaccine rates but also try to focus on those in the highest need.’”

This opened the team up to looking into patient demographics, giving the researchers more insight into the types of aid and communication they would need to administer alongside the vaccination. Due to her significant contribution, Franks is in charge of data extraction for the project.

“A lot of people can learn different aspects of medicine, but what I appreciated from Miriam is that she was always willing to learn, always willing to help out however she could, and she would actively seek out tasks,” Miller says. “That’s not something that can be learned — it’s innate.”

Besides her work at Guthrie, Franks is also involved in a biochemistry lab under Susan Bane, biochemistry program director. Franks emailed her the summer before her freshman year.

“I’ve had a couple hundred undergraduate research students over the years, and never have I been contacted that early,” Bane says. “She’s planning a long way ahead and is someone who’s thought carefully about what she wants to do and the steps she needs to get there. Yet, she also focuses on what she wants to do at the moment. She isn’t doing research just to get into med school; Miriam does it because she genuinely loves it.”

In that lab, Franks is working with a partner to isolate tumor overexpressed gene (TOG) proteins from genetically modified Escherichia coli cells. They have to grow the cells themselves and then break down their membrane walls, resulting in the release of TOG protein. This is all done as a way to harvest tubulin, the main constituent of living cells’ microtubules and a primary target for many cancer medications. It’s foundational research but Bane calls it critical, as the lab had yet to attempt to collect microtubules from cancer cells.

Franks has mastered the art of splitting her attention between her two passions: research and music. When she isn’t in the lab, she’s playing the flute. She took up the instrument at age 7 and has continued to play during her college career, most notably in “The Child and the Enchantments” and “The Magic Flute.”

“I’ve been playing the flute for 16 years,” Franks says. “I started originally because my mom played the flute when she was younger so we already had one in the house. It was natural for me to follow in my mom’s footsteps so I started band in the second or third grade and I’ve been in band or orchestra ever since. I was in a few community orchestras once I got a bit older and I really found my place in it.”

Franks says she is grateful so many people at Binghamton have invested in her success. “The grad students have been amazing whenever I’m facing setbacks,” she says. “They helped me learn how to use equipment and I can ask them how to do certain equations. Of course, Dr. Bane, as well, she’s been pivotal to this entire experience. At Guthrie, working with Dr. Miller and getting to shadow him as he went through his daily tasks as a fellow really solidified for me that I want to do that, too.”

“The piece displays all the hallmarks of a very promising artist, with a unique fusion of playfully complex rhythms, surprising harmonies and genre-crossing riffs that is ‘very Julian,’” says Daniel Thomas Davis, associate professor of music. “Beyond that, it’s particularly special to see and hear a student create a major new composition for an ensemble in which they’ve been a performing member for a number of years.”

When Cubeiro, a vibraphonist with the ensemble, asked the group’s director about the possibility of performing an original composition last fall, he agreed to it without hesitation. “Julian is an incredible jazz musician and his level of ability on the vibraphone from the get-go was extremely high,” says Michael Carbone, director of jazz studies. “The first read-through of the piece was, ‘Wow … this is incredible.’ The piece is so well put together and colorful.”

It took Cubeiro 60 hours to compose “Kolymbithres,” which is named after a beach on the island of Paros in Greece. It’s where he spent his summer break with friends, getting “into the weeds” of composing, drawing inspiration from the beach and the emotions that came with that — relaxation, happiness and bliss.

The Flushing, Queens, resident taught himself how to play and harmonize on the piano starting at age 3, and later expanded into percussion and electric bass. Cubeiro didn’t experience playing in a band until he was a senior in high school, but since he was already comfortable with percussion, he found the vibraphone a natural fit: “I could see the keyboard in front of me so it was a colliding of those two worlds.”

His first love will always be piano, though, and it is key to his creative process: “Playing the piano is almost meditative or therapeutic. I enjoy just playing something without thinking,” Cubeiro says. “I like to sit down without a goal and just play chords. And when I play something memorable, I build on it.”

He didn’t start creating his own music until he was teenager, writing his first song during his junior year of high school. Cubeiro initially learned about composition by taking existing songs and recreating them in a free, open-source musical notation software called MuseScore.

He has hundreds of voice memos on his phone that run from a mere 10 seconds to 25 minutes, named after their key, an emotion or another artist, just so he has an idea of what’s saved.

“‘Kolythimbres’ was initially named something like ‘Warm night melody in E major,’” he says, “and it came from a 10-second snippet that I recorded in October 2020. I’m not the greatest when it comes to naming things. It’s last in the process for me.”

Cubeiro has about 30 completed songs, and he hopes to compose music for video games, movies or television shows and to teach music.

His compositional strength is pulling together genres and styles that don’t seem to belong together, Davis says, “and he creates something deeply personal in the process — video game aesthetics, minimalistic repeating figures, Big Band color and harmonies, and ear-catching tunes all woven together into a dynamic tapestry of sound.”

Pianist John Kirkpatrick “tirelessly promoted and championed” the music of American composers, wrote Tom C. Owens, editor of

Massey wrote his dissertation on Kirkpatrick while pursuing a doctorate in historical musicology at Harvard University. He expanded the work into John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page, published in 2013 by University of Rochester Press. The book combines biography with analysis of Kirkpatrick’s historical approach to editing. He demonstrates how Kirkpatrick, who died in 1991, became a collaborator as well as an editor, proposing revisions that altered composers’ original intentions.

Ryan Raul Bañagale, an assistant music professor at Colorado College, says his own writing has been inspired by Massey’s approach to scholarship, “particularly his demonstration that the editors of music have as much to do with the writing of history as do the composers themselves.”

Although his book is primarily a scholarly work, Massey says he hopes to reach a broader audience. “Kirkpatrick played a small but important role in the history of American music,” he says, “and one of the goals of my project has been to introduce him in such a way so that some aspects of my research would be appealing to non-musicologists.”

Massey, whose bachelor’s degree is in piano performance and mathematics, said he turned to musicology because he “enjoyed the kind of puzzles that lay at the center of our experience of music.” He came to Binghamton University in 2012, attracted by the “energetic” music department. “Now that I’m here,” he says, “I am enjoying working alongside faculty throughout the humanities who are passionate about their diverse interests.”

During the 2013-14 academic year, Massey is teaching and working on two publications: a definitive list of Virgil Thomson’s compositions at the request of The Virgil Thomson Foundation and a book, due out in 2017 from Oxford University Press, about British composer, conductor and pianist Thomas Adès, one of the most famous living composers working today.

“My book will be the first full-length study of Adès’ music as a whole in English,” Massey says. “I think an in-depth look at his work can give some interesting answers about the different directions that contemporary composition is headed.”

Schleuse, who received a fellowship from Binghamton’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, spent the summer of 2010 in Italy and London, where he researched archival and musical sources for Vecchi.

Schleuse’s critical edition of Vecchi’s “Selva di varia ricreatione,” a large collection of many kinds of pieces, will be published later this year by A-R Editions in the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Renaissance. It will be the first time the music of Vecchi’s “Forest of Varied Recreations” is available to performers and scholars in a modern edition (the original was published in 1590).

He is writing a second book with a working title of “The Poetics of Recreation: The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi,” which he plans to complete in 2012. The monograph will combine a survey of Vecchi’s career and music with a study of his unusual conception of the music-book.

“Much of Vecchi’s music has been neglected or misunderstood,” Schleuse said. “Today we are accustomed to thinking of musical performers and audiences as separate individuals, but when a group of singers themselves are the audience, it changes the way they interact with the musical and poetic texts, and calls for a different kind of analysis.”

Schleuse, who is also a composer and performer, is also interested in bringing early music to today’s audiences.  Last year he gave a talk as part of the Music Department’s Friedheim Lecture-Recital Series on Il lamento d’Arianna (Ariadne’s Lament), the only surviving music from 17th-century composer Claudio Monteverdi’s second opera. Schleuse’s lecture was illustrated by examples played by members of the Binghamton Baroque Ensemble (a group he co-directs with Professor Andrew Walkling), and concluded with a complete performance of the work.

“One day a member gave me this book about a drummer who got interested in world drumming through meeting other people and studying their drumming culture,” Burns says. “That’s when I first saw the name ethnomusicology, and all the interests I had just clicked into one word that meant world culture, travel and music.”

Now a professor of ethnomusicology at Binghamton, Burns produces and distributes CDs of music from African countries such as Ghana, Togo, and Benin. His field work creates a positive image of Africa through music.

“What I want to do is bring traditional music out in a way that people can appreciate,” he says. “A lot of people have negative associations with Africa that they pick up from the media, whereas music portrays the best side of every culture.”

Since 2000, Burns has completed 15 CD projects.  One of the discs, from a dance-drumming group in Ghana titled “The soup which is sweet draws the chairs in closer,” is available on Amazon.

Burns also records music videos.  He says his most remarkable experience occurred while filming a religious ceremony. “The dancers wanted to perform a miracle by saying a prayer, while someone stuck their hands into a pot of boiling palm oil,” he says. “They asked me if I wanted to participate. On the video you see me afraid to do it, and then the priest grabs my hands and puts them into the oil. It felt like I stuck my hands in a bath of ice!”