Undergraduate Eliza Klos has already crafted a sturdy foundation to flourish as a physician. 

One of Klos’ first pivotal steps when she got to Binghamton University was declaring a major in neuroscience — an interesting choice for a pre-health student. Klos said she sought a concentration that would allow her to learn about people holistically. 

“I wanted something that was going to be different,” says Klos, a member of the class of 2024. “I like that (neuroscience) is interdisciplinary and it involves more than just biology. It has more of a human-basis so it’s been a really good fit for me so far.”

The next step Klos took was getting involved in research early — even before getting into college.  Klos grew up in Buffalo, which is where she discovered her passion for helping others. Through a high school summer program at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Institute, Klos was able to gain her first taste of what it would mean to be a physician and a researcher. She was given an independent project where she examined a type of cancer called mantle cell lymphoma, which targets the lymphatic system. 

“The summer before my senior year, I worked in a lymphoma and myeloma cancer research lab,” Klos recalls. “My research focused on examining a potential mechanism for resistance of the cancer to chemotherapy drugs. If the pathway can be discovered, it could be targeted with drugs, hopefully eliminating the problem of resistance.”

As a First-Year Research Immersion Program (FRI) participant and a member of Binghamton University’s Scholars Program, Klos has had plenty of research experiences since then. For FRI, her project focused on creating a novel model of the effect coronavirus-related stress had on children. Their chosen schematic? Rats.

“This was the first time this project was done in the neuroscience stream,” Klos says. “Really we were trying to find a way to model what that kind of stress that came for kids during the time of COVID-19 would look like in rats. So that involved socially isolating the rats for short periods of time and then analyzing both their behavior and their neurochemistry.” 

Following her last semester in FRI, Klos knew she wanted to continue doing research, so she emailed several professors with similar interests. That’s how she landed her next research opportunity as an undergraduate research assistant in Assistant Professor Laura Cook’s biology lab. 

The lab’s main focus is on streptococcus A, the bacteria that may cause strep throat symptoms in some patients, but not in others. It’s important to understand differences between bacteria that require treatment and those that don’t. As a means to deter the onset of antibiotic resistance, physicians need to be able to narrow down whether certain patients need to be prescribed antibiotics, even despite their strep tests coming back positive.

Within the Cook lab, Klos is something of a head researcher, helping with the organization of the lab’s undergraduates, training them and keeping Cook informed on their progress. According to Cook, she’s also in charge of collecting samples, testing them, reporting all the data and forming training initiatives. 

“She’s a leader, both socially and scientifically,” Cook says. “We had some issues with contamination, especially with all of the new workers, but she’s been helping us troubleshoot that. She streamlined the undergraduates and their processes, taught them sterile technique and suggested training. She always goes above and beyond!”

Klos serves as the vice president of the American Medical Women’s Association on campus. It’s an organization devoted to advancing women and others in medical careers. 

“It’s really meant for anyone who has an interest in medicine, whether they’re hoping to go into medicine or just find it interesting,” Klos says. “We try to be open to everyone.”

Klos’ antibiotics research did not stop in the Cook lab. As a university scholar, she had access to the Guthrie Scholars Premedical Internship, where besides helping with research, she also had the chance to shadow different doctors and present a research lecture before a panel. Her main focus for the lecture was her collaboration with an orthopedic surgeon, studying the necessity of antibiotics among elective foot and ankle surgery patients.

“One of my favorite things [about research] has been communicating it to other people,” Klos says. “I’ve done quite a few presentations and a pretty big research lecture at Guthrie, and it’s very exciting to share the research I’ve been working on. I’m very proud of all of it and it’s so nice to get positive feedback and bounce ideas off of different people who are even more knowledgeable than I am.”

While she isn’t set on any one medical career yet, Klos knows medical school is her next step following graduation. Anesthesiology has been the most interesting focus for her, given the personable nature of the position.

“Being an anesthesiologist involves talking with patients at a high-stress time for them, so you have to focus on making sure patients are comfortable,” Klos says. “It’s been one of my favorite specialties so far, but I still have more to explore.”

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.

The behavioral neuroscience doctoral student at Binghamton was among 28 winners of the 2022 SUNY Graduate Research Empowering and Accelerating Talent (GREAT) Award, designed to encourage undergraduate and graduate SUNY students to apply for competitive graduate fellowships to fund their master’s or doctoral studies. The prize provides $5,000 in flexible funding from the SUNY Office of Research and Economic Development, and is given to students who have already received national recognition from either the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program or the NIH’s National Research Service Awards.

Towner, who expects to finish his degree in December, plans to use his GREAT Award funding to attend research conferences, which will help him network and potentially secure a postdoctoral position in another research lab. “After three to five years, the end goal is to become a tenure-track faculty member,” the San Diego, Calif., native says. “I’ve always wanted to be a professor and to have that face-to-face connection with students, seeing the future faces of the field.”

Towner, a first-generation college student, earned his undergraduate and master’s degrees in psychology at California State University San Marcos. His initial experience in a preclinical lab involved researching adolescents and the long-term effects of drugs of abuse. “It was an area of interest that was close to home for me,” he says. “A lot of my friends and family experienced substance or alcohol use disorders.”

That research experience helped prepare Towner for the rigors of Binghamton’s program, says David F. Werner, associate professor and director of graduate studies for the Psychology Department and member of the Center for Development and Behavioral Neuroscience. “Trevor was able to hit the ground running,” he says. “He is very motivated and independent, and he is integral to a lot of research in the lab. Trevor is one of the most productive individuals to date.”

Towner’s current research in Werner’s lab focuses on long-term behavioral and neural consequences associated with adolescent, binge-level alcohol exposure. “The research is important because of the staggering number of people who start drinking in adolescence,” Towner says. “We need to understand how our behavior and brains might change as a result of repeated exposure to ethanol during this time when the brain is undergoing substantial maturation.”

Alcohol exposure can lead to an increase in habit formation in adulthood, greater anxiety-like behavior and increases in risk taking. “What is that neural mechanism that is driving that behavioral change?” Towner asks. “Is it something that is a great enough issue to be corrected, potentially through pharmaceutical and behavioral treatment? Only through conducting the experiments will we have a better insight into future directed therapies.”

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.

“Binghamton University has so much opportunity, energy and vitality,” says assistant professor Florence Varodayan, who joined the faculty in January. “As I settle in, I’m looking forward to learning about the cutting-edge research being performed in labs across campus and seeing how we can work together to build interesting multidisciplinary projects that span different departments. Science is a team sport.”

Varodayan’s research focuses on understanding how neural communication between addiction-related brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, is shaped by alcohol dependence and stress. Her goal is to find innovative therapeutic strategies to provide better treatment for patients suffering from alcohol- and anxiety/stress-related psychiatric diseases.

She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and biology and a master’s degree in chemistry from the Un iversity of Pennsylvania. Her second master’s degree and doctorate in neurobiology and behavior was completed at Columbia University.

From there, Varodayan completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Scripps Research, formerly known as The Scripps Research Institute. There, she worked in the cellular neurobiology lab of Dr. Marisa Roberto, a professor in the molecular medicine and neuroscience departments.

“Florence was a dynamic force in my lab,” Roberto says. “She demonstrated great skill at proposing elegant studies, learning new techniques and developing innovative approaches to scientific investigation. She is poised to make seminal contributions to addiction research.”

At Binghamton, Varodayan plans to continue her research on cognitive dysfunction and alcohol use disorder in affiliation with the Developmental Exposure Alcohol Research Center (DEARC).

“One of the main techniques that we use is electrophysiology, which is this cool opportunity to monitor brain activity,” Varodayan says. “You can actually see individual brain cells communicate in real time.”

The lab is recruiting postdoctoral fellows, graduate and undergraduate students and research technicians. Varodayan has a long history of mentoring and working with students, and she is looking forward to encouraging curiosity and potential career paths in her new role.

“Sometimes it’s their first experience with research. They are used to there being a correct or right answer,” Varodayan says. “They can bring a fresh perspective to your research because they’re always asking, ‘Why are we doing it this way?’ or ‘Why does it work this way but not that way?’ Their questions can very actively contribute to research in very important ways.”

Varodayan arrives with grants to support her research. In 2017, she received a prestigious, multi-year Pathway to Independence grant from the National Institutes of Health, which supports highly qualified postdoctoral researchers as they transition to independent scientists. The first phase of this $1 million grant involved her mentored research at Scripps Research; the second phase that supports her independent research at Binghamton will start in the spring.

The Chancellor’s Early-Career Scholar award provides funding of up to $500,000 for items such as postdoctoral research fellowships, graduate student stipends, travel, equipment and software. Scholars who can attract more than $2 million of externally sponsored research funding within four years of their appointment are eligible to receive $100,000 in additional funding for the purpose of growing research.

In addition to the grants, Varodayan also learned in February she will receive faculty salary support through the PRODiG (Promoting Recruitment Opportunity, Diversity, Inclusion and Growth) program, which SUNY launched in 2019 to increase the representation of historically underrepresented faculty and women in STEM disciplines.

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.

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The implications are profound,” says Assistant Professor Greg Strauss, who directs the university’s Translational Affective Neuroscience Laboratory, where Frost is pursuing her dissertation. “We’re basically stuck in terms of the treatment of anhedonia, largely because the underlying cognitive and neural basis is unknown. This is a novel framework for testing the effects of stress on the brain’s reward system, one we haven’t studied before, and Katherine has a rare combination of drive and intelligence to see it through.”

Since graduating from Wellesley College in 2010, Frost has published three peer-reviewed abstracts and three peer-reviewed papers, with another manuscript currently under review and two others in preparation. She has presented 11 posters, mostly based on her work at Harvard University’s Social Neuroscience and Psychopathology Lab, McLean Psychiatric Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital.

She has begun thesis research into the effects of acute social stress on reward processing, starting with adults without psychiatric diagnoses, then progressing to adults with schizophrenia and then to children and adolescents at risk of developing schizophrenia. Most prestigious of all, she received a highly competitive 2015 Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, which covers three years of graduate school tuition, money for dissertation research, worldwide opportunities in professional development, funding for travel and access to an NSF supercomputer.

“When I saw that I’d gotten the fellowship, I was so excited, I danced around my room,” says Frost, who worked long distance with Strauss to draft the grant application during the summer of 2014. “This is an incredible next step for me, being able to pursue this research that I fell in love with so young. Studying schizophrenia, you never know what you’re going to see, because it’s such a heterogeneous disorder.

“I’m a very curious person, and I’ve always been fascinated by the way the brain works,” she continues. “There are so many opportunities to cover unknown territory. And I’ve always been extremely driven. Driven to achieve, driven to learn, driven to help people. This just fits right in.”

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joy Hallmark began conducting research in high school. Now, she studies treatments for Parkinson’s disease in a Binghamton University laboratory. 

Parkinson’s is treated with a compound called Levodopa, or “L-dopa,” which causes abnormal involuntary motions after prolonged use.

Hallmark works with Christopher Bishop, an associate professor of psychology, to test several compounds that may allow Parkinson’s to be treated without this side effect. They rely on an animal model, observing the effects different Parkinson’s treatments have on rats’ body movements.

“The thing that attracted me most about this research was the fact that it was translational, so what you do in the lab applies in the field,” says Hallmark, who plans to pursue a doctorate or go to medical school after graduation. “We take what we’re learning now, and we can apply it by making new drugs and helping people.”

For the past year, Hallmark has been researching two compounds to see how they would affect Parkinson’s patients. As a part of the Undergraduate Research Center’s Summer Scholars and Artists program, Hallmark completed an eight-week fellowship with a postdoctoral student studying the serotonin system and its relationship to Parkinson’s.

“I’ve always had an interest in neurodegenerative disorders, so it was cool to come here and find Dr. Bishop’s lab and be able to take my interest a step further,” Hallmark says.

When she was in high school, the Queens native studied Alzheimer’s disease for three years at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine as part of the Intel Science Talent Search program.

Hallmark’s “prolonged interest” in medicine began even before that, though. “From a young age, I always wanted to be challenged,” she says. “I used to sit in the medical section at Barnes & Noble and just read the medical dictionary and learn new terms that I didn’t know.”

Bishop says Hallmark seemed like a great fit for his lab when they first met, and her work since has been “a testament to that fit.”

“She has demonstrated a commitment and growing knowledge base that has made her not only increasingly autonomous, but a true asset,” Bishop says. “Joy has proven herself to be an excellent young scientist, and her trajectory is outstanding.”

Hallmark says her passion for studying neuroscience stems from her curiosity and her willingness to explore uncharted territories. “The brain, I think, is just so intricate and there are so many things that we have yet to know about it,” she says. “I love going into the unknown and trying to figure things out.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I found a few preliminary studies that showed a correlation between chronic Lyme and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia,” says Davis, now a junior majoring in integrative neuroscience. “There was some strong evidence, but they were very basic studies, mainly done by one person about 10 years ago. I felt compelled to do more research, because I wanted to understand it better.”

Working with Garruto and doctoral candidate John Darcy, Davis surveyed people whose Lyme disease had progressed from the acute stage to become a chronic condition. In the 200 surveys that have come back so far, she has seen links by sex, with women outnumbering men by about 10 percent, and between chronic Lyme and people with family histories of neurodegenerative disorders.

“There are some definite trends with symptoms of pre-neurodegenerative disease, and with a bias toward females, which is consistent with the literature,” says Davis, who expects to receive another hundred responses before analyzing the results later this semester. “I plan to look at both, and though it’s not our main focus, we’re hoping to find information that could tell us why females are more likely to get chronic Lyme than males.”

In the rest of her work on Garruto’s team, Davis talks with survey participants, maps the tick population around campus and assesses whether there are specific behaviors that increase the risk of being bitten by ticks. “Sarah is a researcher with a lot of strengths,” says Garruto, a research professor of biomedical anthropology. “She’s bright, dedicated and inquisitive, with significant experience working in the field of neurology. That’s been the central theme of her academic training and her clinical experience. Though no one can really predict at this stage, I expect Sarah to wind up in the field of neurology.”

Davis, who grew up on a farm in Greenville, N.Y., and whose mother has recovered from acute Lyme disease, estimates that she has been bitten by ticks 20 to 30 times. But that isn’t going to stop her from trying to find out more about the disease.

“I really enjoy doing this research,” she says.  “It’s different from sitting in a classroom, because I’m able to go out on my own, listen to people tell their stories and discover things through my own process.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”