Three of the grant winners — Jeremy Blackburn, Aravind Prakash and Mo Sha — are assistant professors in the Computer Science Department. The others are Emrah Akyol, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering; Jessica Hua, associate professor of biological sciences; Nicholas Gaspelin, assistant professor of psychology; and John Swierk, assistant professor of chemistry.

It’s the campus’ most successful year ever with the NSF program, says Bahgat Sammakia, vice president for research. “We’re excited about these CAREER winners,” he says. “They’re all outstanding scholars and educators, and they’re poised to do work that will make a significant impact on our campus and beyond. It’s especially impressive that three of the winners come from a single department, and I look forward to seeing how we can learn from the model established by our colleagues in computer science.”

Some of the projects have begun already; others will start within the next year:

• Akyol’s project, A Holistic Framework for the Analysis of Information Dynamics in Human Networks, began in February with $596,295 in funding.
• Blackburn received $517,484 in support for his project, Towards a Data-driven Understanding of Online Sentiment, which began May 1.
• Gaspelin was awarded $708,780 for his project, Understanding the Relationship of Covert and Overt Attention Using Concurrent EEG and Eye Tracking, which begins Aug. 1.
• Hua’s project, due to start in March 2022, received the largest grant in this group, $947,030. It’s titled Evolutionary Disease Ecology — Can Evolutionary Responses to Environmental Change Modify the Biodiversity-Disease Relationship?
• Prakash was awarded $499,893 for his project, Binary-Level Security Via ABI-Centric Semantic Inference, which will begin Oct. 1.
• Sha’s project, Advancing Network Configuration and Runtime Adaptation Methods for Industrial Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks, which started in March, received $500,000.
• Swierk received $630,000 for his project, Mechanistic Investigation of Photoredox Reactions, which begins July 1.

Emrah Akyol

According to classic theories of communication, the sender and receiver have the same goals. Both want to share whatever the message is, as free of errors and interference as possible.

But what if they have different goals? With our 21st-century technology increasingly stitched together using Wi-Fi or 5G networking, competing companies could try to prioritize their messages or otherwise seek an advantage.

Akyol has ideas about how to solve those concerns, and they involve using game theory to level the playing field again. He has three key goals:

• Investigate communication and compression problems between senders and receivers with differing objectives, cognitive limitations and biases.
• Examine models on the evolution of opinions and their applications when creating polarization, such as on social media.
• Explore truthful data-gathering strategies in behaviorally biased information networks.

Akyol expects increasingly “misaligned” intentions as smart homes connect with appliances or smart vehicles interact on busy interstates. How will, say, Ford and Tesla cars talk to each other with a certain level of trust?

Akyol believes his research could also help to mitigate confirmation bias by offering intervention strategies for social media platforms.

Because the combination of game theory and machine interaction is mostly uncharted territory, Akyol is looking forward to the discoveries ahead in his research. “It’s exciting because we are studying from scratch,” he says.

Read more about Akyol’s project.

Jeremy Blackburn

Discussions happening on social media drive a lot of public discourse and news coverage. Some people use platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit to make positive connections, but others prefer to sow misinformation and hate.

Given the popularity of such platforms, it can be difficult for researchers to wrap their heads around what is being shared and how it affects our opinions. Blackburn devises ways to make online content easier to gather and sort.

His project includes four objectives:

• Create a multiplatform social media dataset, developing tools to leverage prior experience in large-scale data collection to perform continuous identification and collection of multimedia data from emerging social media platforms.
• Develop data-driven techniques to understand coded language used in social media, both text and images.
• Develop a system for rating the sentiment of content by comparing pieces rather than looking at them individually.
• Explore user and community-level modeling of online sentiment.

Although this technology to monitor online sentiment could have many uses, Blackburn has a specific goal.

“We could better understand violent content or hate speech online that is very coded, or we could identify misinformation so that people can’t hide this type of behavior by using just images,” he says. “That’s my personal passion and the reason why I’m developing it.”

Read more about Blackburn’s work.

Nicholas Gaspelin

As we go about our day, our eyes collect visual data that our brain sifts through. How does your brain know which visual stimuli require immediate attention, and how does attention really work? That’s what Gaspelin hopes to find out.

A cognitive neuroscientist, Gaspelin explores the relationship of attention and eye movements using concurrent electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking.

His research concerns whether certain kinds of visual stimuli can automatically distract us. There are times when we need to notice sudden stimuli to avoid danger, he notes.

Gaspelin would like to know whether the brain processes behind attention are initiated even before eye movements are physically generated. We move our eyes all the time during visual search, whether glancing about for road hazards or looking for a can of soup in the store.

Measuring the brain processes of attention before eye movements will require some technical innovations — namely, synchronizing an EEG machine with specialized infrared cameras called eye-trackers.

“Understanding the basic mechanisms of visual attention really is crucial to making society function efficiently,” he says. “If we could understand how to develop better visual warning signals — for example, if we could understand how to better control motor vehicle operators’ attention or better control children’s attention in a classroom — we could end up having a much better society as a whole.”

Read more about Gaspelin’s project.

Jessica Hua

Hua’s project seeks to answer a broad question: Why are some communities more susceptible to disease than others? Generally, communities with higher levels of biodiversity are expected to be less vulnerable to disease. But that’s not always the case.

As a graduate student, Hua discovered that wood frog populations respond to pollutants in two ways: Some always express high levels of pollutant tolerance while others only “turn on” pollutant tolerance if they detect pollutants in the environment. She built on that work during a postdoctoral fellowship, exploring whether the strategies led to different costs.

Her new project asks: Do differences in pesticide tolerance strategies influence why biodiversity does not always protect communities from disease?

This work provides a different perspective on the relationship between biodiversity and disease. Typically, biodiversity brings to mind the range of species that make up a healthy ecosystem. But diversity also exists within species. This variation may play a role in community disease outcomes, but our understanding of it is limited.

Hua’s project also features a citizen science program.

“Because this grant focuses on how environmental change can have cascading consequences on disease, we get the chance to show people how interconnected the world is,” she says. “…I hope that this education component will provide such an opportunity to show how protecting the environment and biodiversity could directly affect things like disease transmission and our health.”

Read more about Hua’s work.

Aravind Prakash

Imagine someone handing you a fancy cake and asking you to figure out the recipe as well as the ingredients’ origins. That process is similar to the research Prakash does with computer software. And yes, it can be as challenging as it sounds.

Prakash uses binary analysis techniques to understand the inner workings of a piece of software and to identify potential holes that could let hackers in.

“One problem with software today is having bugs in the programs that can lead to vulnerabilities,” he says. “There is a pressing need for accountability of software that we use. Although we use software by a particular vendor, the actual coding may have been outsourced to a third party. … When we factor in countries or other actors with a vested interest in intentionally introducing vulnerabilities into software, it becomes extremely important to establish provenance.”

Because defenders often don’t have access to the original source code for proprietary reasons, analysis of the industry-mandated application binary interface (ABI) can provide better information for consumers to decide the security of the software.

Prakash became interested in binary analysis as a graduate student.

“It is one of the harder topics in computer science,” he said. “You have very little information to go by. In principle, the binary contains all the information a processor needs, but what the processor consumes is very different than what humans can make sense out of.”

Read more about his project.

Mo Sha

Manufacturing and processing plants increasingly rely on automation to reduce costs and keep things running smoothly. A sensor takes a reading, a controller decides the right course and an actuator carries out the task.

However, the two main industrial wireless standards that specify how to connect those sensors, controllers and actuators — WirelessHART and ISA100 — were developed nearly 15 years ago. Technological advancements have been rapid since then, and much of the day-to-day network management has been guesswork by human operators.

Sha is studying more efficient ways to run industrial wireless networks.

“Traditionally, 40 or 50 years ago, a manufacturer would use cables to connect everything, but cables are too expensive to deploy and maintain, and they are very inconvenient when you want to add a new process requirement,” he says. “So now companies are trying to use wireless technology to replace all those cables.

Sha plans to use machine learning to provide new methods to optimize network performance. By cutting down on human error, Sha sees networks that are more efficient, more secure and better at responding to problems.

“I’m hoping that the outcome of my research can contribute to the post-pandemic recovery for the manufacturing and processing industries,” he says. “It’s been so hard for them because of social distancing, and some plants may be shut down due to high infection rates. This new tactic will decrease human involvement in the network management process.”

Read more about Sha’s work.

John Swierk

Set into motion by light, photoredox reactions forge new chemical bonds that are difficult to create with traditional laboratory techniques. Used in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals, this process can lead to the creation of new drugs.

There’s only one problem: No one knows exactly how photoredox reactions work.

Enter Swierk, whose lab focuses on the intersection of light and chemistry, and particularly how light can drive chemical reactions.

“There has been very little work on actually understanding what happens on an atomic or molecular level when the reaction absorbs light — what are the steps that you go through to form the bond,” he says. “On the one hand, this chemistry works and it’s being used in industry. On the other hand, we don’t understand how it’s working.”

The pharmaceutical industry is particularly interested in photoredox reactions, which have grown in importance during the past decade or so. There are other potential applications, too; this type of catalysis can, in principle, be used for any kind of small molecule synthesis, such as in the energy sector.

Learning more about how the process works may lead to faster reaction rates, the development of new products and increased product yields.

Swierk’s project also has an educational focus: aiding in the transition of community college students to the academic rigor of a four-year school. “We’re trying to do a better job of creating a more equitable, inclusive environment that can support student success,” he says.

Read more about Swierk’s work.

Reporting by Chris Kocher and Jennifer Micale.

School readiness scores show boys outperforming girls in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects. “If we look at boosting rich conversation with open-ended questions and associations related to STEM, that might help drive equality,” says Erin Jant, a visiting assistant professor of psychology at Binghamton University. She will continue her collaboration with the Sciencenter in Ithaca, N.Y. this fall, and start her research this spring at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore.

The Sciencenter holds private, monthly family engagement nights for caregivers and 3- to 5-year-olds enrolled in Head Start, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services program that promotes school readiness for kids ages 5 and under from low-income families.

“We’ve been working with Head Start for a long time, and we knew that children were successfully learning about science,” Sciencenter Executive Director Michelle Kortenaar says. “We wanted to create a national model but we needed to prove it. I knew of Erin and her research in how children learn, so I was super excited when she reached out to us shortly after she moved to the area. She’s as interested in our questions as she is in her own research questions.”

With 1,700 agencies in communities across the nation providing Head Start services to more than a million children every year, Jant’s research could have a significant impact.

Sciencenter’s Head Start event includes hands-on activities, such as manipulating weights, comparing sizes, measuring tools or working with magnets. “It allows the children to explore and build those science process skills, but the conversations they have with their caregiver are so important,” Jant says. “We’ve seen how the type of conversation can change how much is remembered from the experience.”

The families participating in Jant’s research will be assigned at random to one of four groups:

• baseline or the control group (families aren’t given any prompts and are just observed)
• elaborative (caregivers are given prompts to ask open-ended questions like “How do you think we should start?”)
• association (caregivers are given prompts to ask questions like “How is this like the magnets on the refrigerator at home?”)
• combination (caregivers are encouraged to ask both elaborative and association questions)

Families will be recorded as they are playing and interacting with the hands-on activities. Two weeks later, they’ll record a conversation at home as children independently participate in a specially constructed problem-solving task.

“We’re looking at whether the parents are still using conversational prompts they were given and what the child’s memories are,” Jant says. “Are they making those connections from the special activities during the problem-solving task? Which aspects of the museum interactions are critical for learning and remembering?”

Both science centers will follow the same model, allowing Jant to study rural versus urban settings and populations. “We want to look at the interactions across the two spaces and learn what pieces of this program are critical to the space,” she says. “How much of the whole space is being explored? Is it better to keep the hands-on science activities just to first-floor level activities, or does that not matter for engagement?”

Since the start of the pilot, Jant has relied on a team of 12 students from her lab to carry out data collection and to code audio and videotapes. “They are the driving force for this project’s success for sure,” she says, adding that she hopes to connect with Baltimore-area university students interested in research to assist her in the spring. “I think it would create a unique collaboration for my students as well. We could have joint lab meetings and it would expand their network.”

Along the way, he took an internship in Germany, co-founded the College Progressives, built a wheelchair for a cat and conducted research in the clean room at Binghamton’s Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM).

“A lot of people say, ‘Follow your passion.’ I mean, there’s a point to that,” Cadwell says. “But for me, I’ve considered college like a financial investment. I should evaluate what the return would be. That’s partly why I chose engineering. I also thought technology was a really good way to make a large impact on the world, from a humanitarian perspective. I did do something I was interested in, but I was also concerned with making sure I can do something that’s marketable.”

Cadwell decided to go to a SUNY school after his physics teacher at Whitney Point High School told him about the New York State STEM Incentive Program, which provides tuition awards to New York residents attending college in state. He settled on studying electrical engineering at Binghamton with the idea that he could one day design solar panels or medical equipment.

As a sophomore, Cadwell took a class on semiconductors and began learning more about the intersection of engineering and materials science. He enjoyed the subject so much that he served as a course assistant for that class as a junior.

He learned about the CAMM when it appeared on a list of possible senior capstone projects. Every project was given a budget, but that one was listed with zero dollars.

“Now I know they’re not going to give us a project that has no funding,” he says. “So I was thinking that maybe that’s a blank check. Maybe this project has a lot of money and a lot of importance. And I was kind of right about that because we easily spent a few hundred dollars on that project.”

CAMM researchers create flexible electronics by printing with metals on plastics using a roll-to-roll system. The CAMM is also the New York node of NextFlex, a federal initiative to advance flexible hybrid electronics manufacturing, and home to the Center for Flexible Hybrid Medical Device Manufacturing, designated a Center for Advanced Technology by the state.

Cadwell’s senior design group, working under the direction of CAMM Director Mark Poliks, built an inspection platform for use at the CAMM that relied on lights and a microscope camera to detect scratches or dust on rolls of printed electronics.

“One of the challenges is that once you deposit the metal or the insulator, you need to inspect it to see if it’s clean enough,” Cadwell says. “And if you’re patterning wires onto these rolls, you would also want to check and see if the wires are well-formed or if one of the wires is not connected.”

The experience opened new doors for Cadwell, who decided to continue at Binghamton for a graduate degree. The choice was made easier when he received support through the National Science Foundation’s S-STEM Scholarship (Scholarship in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Program.

With help from Poliks, Cadwell also lined up a three-month internship at Applied Materials in Germany the summer after he finished his undergraduate work.

As a grad student, Cadwell’s research focused on printed radio frequency (RF) electronics. “That’s basically anything wireless,” he says. “Like Wi-Fi radio or anything that you might think of with the Internet of Things or smart appliances.”

Applications could include tags on products so a retailer could have a complete inventory of everything in a store at any given moment. Printed RF sensors could also be attached to a bridge or an airplane to make it easier to monitor vibrations. Such sensors are expected to make it easier and less expensive to monitor patients’ heart rates on a continuous basis, too.

Some of Cadwell’s projects with Poliks involved creating simple radio frequency components using aerosol jet printing. The process is akin to the inkjet printers found in many home offices, though it requires far more precision, and the researchers are using silver nanoparticles rather than the kind of ink you’d get at Staples.

The group created RF components including antennae using metals printed on plastics. These flexible components’ performance was measured, with promising results.

“Once we confirm that we can make the components, then we can put the components together to make devices,” Cadwell says. “But first, we wanted to verify that the components would be able to perform well enough.”

Scott Miller, director of technology for NextFlex, says Cadwell was a critical part of the DataCube project undertaken by Binghamton University, NextFlex and other partners in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory.

“Ryan’s leadership has been clear in the project from the time he joined,” Miller says. “He has demonstrated technical expertise as well as the ability to plan and organize work and collaborate with a diverse team.”

Cadwell accepted a position with a design division of Anaren/TTM just before the coronavirus pandemic began and moved to Syracuse so he could begin work in July.

Anaren makes electronic components for companies such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. The firm’s radar and satellite communications technology has military applications; customers also include cell phone companies.

Poliks, empire innovation professor of engineering, worked in industry for decades and says Cadwell is well prepared for the job. “It has been a privilege to work with Ryan over the last three years,” Poliks says. “He developed expertise in radio frequency design, modeling, fabrication and testing and made significant contributions to several of our research programs.”

Parents’ behavior is one factor in a long list of underlying mechanisms that can affect childhood development, but little is known about the way these behaviors influence mother-infant attention. This link has become a focus of Foster’s research.

“One theorized mechanism through which depression develops and is maintained is through attention bias — how people pay attention to and disengage from certain emotional information such as facial expressions,” Foster says. “We see attention bias in adults with depression. We see it in adolescents and children, but we know less about infants.”

The results from the studies conducted so far seem to show that depression is too complex to rely only on attention bias, since outcomes vary greatly family to family. Foster says other mechanisms beyond attention bias, including environment and genetics, may also play a part in conferring risk factors.

Since the fall of 2017, when Foster joined the Mood Disorder Institute after earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Cornell University, understanding infants’ needs has been key to her research. As a second-year graduate student studying clinical psychology, she has written several papers on the subject and worked with a number of families and pediatrician offices within the lab.

Brandon Gibb, a professor of psychology at Binghamton University and the director of clinical training for the Mood Disorder Institute, says Foster is a smart and motivated part of the team, working toward a common goal: reducing the risk for depression, however it may present itself.

“She’s just a really warm, caring and nice person. And it makes her an even better team member,” Gibb says. “I think one thing [about Claire] is the sheer joy she has when she starts talking about doing infant research. One, because I think she enjoys it so much, but also because she recognizes how important it is.”

Foster recently received a 2019 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which will effectively fund the next three years of her schooling and proposed study, as well as expand her professional outreach and opportunities.

Since its founding in 1951, the competitive fellowship has supported more than 50,000 STEM students. Foster is the latest of three students and a former lab manager at the Mood Disorder Institute to be awarded the fellowship.

The relationships and factors that influence depression and attention bias in children are what Foster hopes to learn more about with her research in the upcoming years. Since she first became interested in clinical psychology, Foster has been driven to help people through her studies. This need led her to volunteer in Romania after learning about the treatment of institutionalized orphans. It also informed her work at the Yale Child Study Center, where she studied autism, and at the Cornell University B.A.B.Y (Behavioral Analysis of Beginning Years) Lab, where she studied as an undergraduate.

“I think the most important thing was the implications for families, how this information can impact people’s lives. Because I feel there is sometimes a disconnect between research and what families get in treatment,” Foster says. “If I can help improve our understanding of how these things develop, then we can better understand how to treat them.”

Tara P. Dhakal, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, was awarded a five-year, $500,000 NSF CAREER grant for his study “Toward Twenty Year Lifetime: Hermetic Sealing for Perovskite Solar Cells.” The proposal was one of just 11 to be funded in a field of 150 proposals.

“Most solar cells are made from silicon and, while those solar cells are highly efficient, they have their limitations,” says Dhakal, who also serves as interim director of Binghamton’s Center for Autonomous Solar Power.

His work focuses on solar cells made with perovskite, a crystalline mineral found in nature that has shown the potential to create solar cells that are just as efficient as the silicon-based type.

“Unfortunately, the current versions of perovskite solar cells are typically fabricated with toxic lead,” Dhakal says. He wants to replace lead with non-toxic germanium.

“Germanium and lead both come from column 14 on the periodic table,” Dhakal says. “Other researchers have tried, without success, to use tin for the same reason but I’ve found evidence that germanium has a better chance of success.”

If he is able to replace the lead in the perovskite solar cells, they could prove to be more environmentally friendly than other solar cells.

However, even with the lead removed, there is another issue that could prevent perovskite solar cells from being deployed for an extended period of time.

That’s why Dhakal’s study will also be looking at ways to make perovskite solar cells last longer.

“Lead perovskite solar cells have only lasted for several months under ideal laboratory conditions,” he says. “With my proposed sealing techniques, I predict that module lifetimes could be greater than 20 years.”

With Dhakal’s seal on the perovskite solar cells, they could have the same shelf life that silicon solar cells do. Without lead and with this sealing, the cells will become more practical for use — which Dhakal says will facilitate a wider reach for solar power.

“Silicon makes a robust solar cell but one thing it misses is flexibility,” he says. “The perovskite solar cells could be made on fabrics or plastics, which would make solar power much more accessible.”

Dhakal, who did his undergraduate work in Nepal, came to Binghamton as a research scientist in 2010 after earning a doctorate at the University of Florida.

“Skin acts as a physical, chemical and microbial barrier. It also helps regulate temperature and enables mechanoreception: the ability to sense touch,” says Guy German, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering whose research focuses almost exclusively on the body’s largest organ.

“[There is] a diverse population of microorganisms that naturally reside on your skin,” he says. “When [skin] becomes ruptured, its barrier function is lost, leaving underlying living tissue exposed to harmful pathogens. These pathogens can cause a variety of diseases and infections.”

German will continue his research into skin with a five-year, $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Early Career Development (CAREER) program. His project – “Understanding the Multi-scale Failure Mechanics of Human Skin with Age, Ultraviolet Photodamage and Bacterial Growth” – formally begins in July.

“My first reaction to learning about the award was a combination of happiness that I could support more graduate student research and excitement because the award will enable my lab to explore a new research area that I’m passionate about,” German says. “Overall, this project aims to support up to two graduate students over the five years.”

The fundamental research will explore how aging, ultraviolet light and bacteria weaken skin, cause wrinkles and increase the risk of skin rupture. The results will provide a better understanding of the biomechanical aging process, the onset of skin diseases that could be caused by bacteria in the skin microbiome, and new approaches in skin-based drug delivery in creams and ointments. Some of the results may also have applications related to flexible electronics and energy harvesting.

Much of the current work in the field focuses on macro-testing equipment and treating skin as a homogenous material, but skin is heterogeneous at many length scales, German says, so he plans to look at the tissue microscopically. Experiments will combine immunostaining, mechanical manipulation, high-speed imaging and traction force microscopy to show how skin degrades under a variety of conditions.

The National Science Foundation’s CAREER grants support early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education while leading advances in their fields. German joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2013.

One the biggest challenges for psychologists studying why some adolescents handle stress well while others don’t is that there’s no answer on whether lab studies and real-world studies are looking at the same phenomenon. That’s why Elizabeth “Cope” Feurer, recipient of a 2016 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, will spend the next three years studying whether current laboratory methods of researching stress reactivity reflect the way adolescents experience stress in the real world.

“This is going to help us identify different mechanisms that may explain why some adolescents are more reactive to stress than others,” says Feurer, 24, a Binghamton University doctoral student.

One test places adolescents who have volunteered for the study in a chat room. They’re told the other participants are peers their age and they have to create a profile that’s representative of how they see themselves. They can then choose whether or not to interact with the other “peers” in the chat room.

“What happens is they’re either getting accepted or rejected by their peers,” Feurer says. “We’re looking at people’s brain waves and we’re looking at different neural responses — different electrical signals in their brains — when they are presented with information that they’ve either been accepted or rejected by a virtual peer.”

The other experiment sounds even more, well, stressful: “We tell them they have to give a speech about their ideal job in front of a panel of judges,” she says. “And essentially the judges give no positive feedback, very blank faced, giving stressful cues like, ‘You still have time, you need to keep going.’ Also, we ask them to count backwards out loud by 17s, starting with the number 2023. And we have judges who say, ‘You need to be faster. That’s incorrect, you need to start from the beginning.’”

Feurer says this type of experiment is important because people’s responses in this situation may help researchers predict how they will respond to other kinds of stress.

The drive to understand whether lab results match real-world results is crucial, says Brandon Gibb, Feurer’s advisor and a professor of psychology at Binghamton. “Isolated studies of one aspect of a phenomenon are no better than the old story of blind men trying to understand an elephant by focusing on only one part of the animal,” he says.

“To truly test our models, we must determine whether they generalize to phenomena outside the lab, ideally reactions to real-world stressors,” he says. “Cope’s project does exactly this, using state-of-the-science approaches.”

Feurer became interested in adolescent stress during her undergraduate career at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. When she joined a research lab, she noticed that some adolescents reacted to stress better than others, and she wanted to know why.

This curiosity and empathy make Feurer “great to have in the lab,” Gibb says. “Cope is a careful thinker, exceptionally motivated and able design innovative studies to address key research questions. … She’s exactly the type of student that every professor hopes to have.”

Jeffrey Mativetsky, assistant professor of physics, will receive more than $525,000 over five years for the work, which is to begin in July 2016. His research centers on the relationships between nanoscale structure and electrical function in organic materials for solar cells and electronics.

“One of the main things holding back the use of solar cells is the cost associated with them,” he says. “Organic solar cells provide a pathway toward low-cost, clean energy. Organic materials open new possibilities because they are lightweight and mechanically flexible, making it possible, for example, to integrate them into curved surfaces.”

Organic materials can also be processed near room temperature, Mativetsky notes, which is another factor that makes them attractive for flexible electronics.

Mativetsky, who blends principles of physics, chemistry and engineering in his research, says he’s motivated by a desire to work on systems that are relevant to society. He’d like to see solar cells integrated into disaster relief tents, for instance.

In his laboratory, students work at a 16-foot-long, nitrogen-filled glovebox as vacuum pumps vibrate and several solutions swirl in vials on a countertop stir plate. The glovebox maintains an environment a bit above atmospheric pressure, with less than 1 part per million of oxygen and humidity. Mativetsky has two atomic force microscopes, and his team uses additional equipment at Binghamton’s Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory.

Mativetsky received seed funding through Binghamton’s Transdisciplinary Areas of Excellence program, which encourages work across multiple fields of inquiry and counts smart energy as a special area of interest. The preliminary results obtained by Mativetsky with fellow Binghamton physicist Joon Jang and chemist Alistair Lees provided a foundation for the NSF proposal. “We made it to the start line,” Mativetsky says. “Now we can do the research we set out to do.”

The core of that research will focus on molecule-based nanowires, filaments that are far, far thinner than a human hair and which often have special properties not found in materials at larger scales. Mativetsky is especially interested in how electric charge moves through these nanomaterials.

“We’re investigating the fundamentals of how nanoscale structuring affects charge photogeneration and charge transport,” he says.

Mativetsky believes these nanowires could improve organic solar cell performance and enable the manufacture of flexible solar cells that are thinner than a sheet of paper. Such solar cells might be less efficient than traditional ones made with silicon, he says, but they could produce more energy per gram of material.

Mativetsky, a native of Montreal who earned a doctorate in physics from McGill University in 2006, held post-doctoral fellowships at the Supramolecular Science and Engineering Institute in France and at Princeton University before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2012.

He is already the recipient of another $300,000 NSF grant, which supports research into graphene oxide with potential applications in flexible electronics, energy storage, sensors, composite materials and biomedical engineering.

“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.”

Connemara ponies, dotting pastures all over western Ireland. The ponies were bred, ridden and shown by a broad swath of Irish society: girls, middle-aged professionals, retired men in their 60s and 70s.

Brown switched her focus from archaeology to socio-cultural anthropology and began spending summers in Ireland. Now a doctoral candidate at Binghamton University, Brown received a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship and is spending the 2014-15 academic year in Ireland working to understand how the Connemara pony parallels Irish culture.

“The pony is used, like a lot of things in Ireland, as a symbol of its modernity and its past,” Brown says.

The Connemara was bred centuries ago as a stout farm worker, round-bodied and with strong legs to withstand sinking into a peat bog. The well-tempered, sure-footed work animal was perfect for an agrarian society, Brown says.

“People have said to me that Connemara ponies were tough because the people were tough,” she adds.

After World War I, Ireland began to industrialize, and the breed morphed with it. Owners began to use the Connemara as a riding pony, rather than a work horse. The breed grew taller and more horse-like.

About 20 years ago, Ireland saw an economic boom that propelled it to the world stage as the “Celtic Tiger.” Connemaras suddenly became show ponies. They grew popular, with 17 international breeding societies.

The Celtic Tiger collapsed in 2008, and Ireland went from one of the fastest-growing economies in the world to one of the hardest-hit. A people that had begun to re-define itself in a modern world had to sell the ponies that changed with it.

With new, international, expectations, the pony has begun to morph again, away from its working roots and into a sleeker, lighter pony. Not everyone in Ireland likes the change. “The pony that was kept strong scrambling around the hills of Connemara is now kept stabled,” Brown notes.

“We don’t realize how much the animals we have shape our lives,” she says. “It’s important when we try to understand people that we don’t forget their animals.”

Thomas Wilson, professor of anthropology at Binghamton, serves as Brown’s adviser. “She is trying to tie aspects of the local cultural economy to the international economy,” he says. “Scholars in the west of Ireland think she’s onto a good thing.”

The pony, like the culture, faces competing forces — international expectations vs. local tradition. The pony reflects Ireland’s changing place in world culture, Wilson says: “Ireland is a lens in which to see the world.”

And the Connemara pony, Brown says, “is integral to Irishness.”

A new $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program will enable Stephen Levy, assistant professor of physics, to study how DNA travels through carbon nanotubes.

“You can picture it like spaghetti being sucked through a straw,” he says.

A nanotube is a cylinder made from a sheet of carbon that’s just one atom thick. Fluids travel through these tiny tubes differently than they do through a large pipe, though scientists don’t know exactly why. Some experts hope that nanotubes will lead to a next-generation method of sequencing DNA. Nanotubes may also help scientists understand some aspects of how small molecules are transported into cells.

Levy has developed a way to study one carbon nanotube at a time. Other labs study thousands at once, or use electrical observations of how DNA moves through nanotubes. Levy’s team has developed a way to conduct electrical, optical and fluorescent observations of single-stranded DNA molecules at the same time. His lab has also pioneered a fabrication technique that makes it possible to integrate carbon nanotubes within small fluidic channels.

Levy, who received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Richmond, earned a doctorate from the University of California Santa Barbara, where he did graduate work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He also did a post-doctoral stint with the University of Chicago at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. After that, Levy essentially switched fields, leaving particle physics behind and studying biophysics for four years at Cornell University before joining Binghamton’s faculty in 2010.

Today Levy draws on principles from physics, biology, chemistry and materials science in his research. He’s particularly interested in how DNA, the genetic material found in nearly all living things, travels through these nanotubes. The information in DNA can be thought of as a code of four chemical bases. These four bases pair up in different combinations. Some combinations — or “markers” — are unique to certain animals or molecules and can be used to identify them.

Levy’s research could enable the electrical detection of particular molecules. For instance, a sensor at a post office could be programmed to search for a specific DNA marker. “If you can read where that marker is, it’s almost like a bar code,” Levy says. “You don’t want to sequence every piece of schmutz that goes through there because it takes a long time and it’s fairly expensive. But if you have a quick way of identifying a dangerous molecule, that’s valuable.”

A Binghamton University researcher aims to slash the energy used by computing systems ranging from smart phones to data centers.

A new $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will help launch Timothy Normand Miller’s ambitious new “introspective computing” project. The funding comes from the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, which awards the NSF’s most prestigious grants in support of new researchers.

Miller said manufacturing variations present a severe — and worsening — challenge for computer systems. Semiconductor chips produced by the same factory do not perform identically, which means systems are designed to accommodate the worst chips.

He envisions using machine learning to predict a chip’s performance. “When you bring a chip online for the first time, it will monitor itself and dynamically adjust its own behavior,” Miller said. “The chip will make sure it does the right thing on its own. That would improve not only energy efficiency but also the lifespan of the chip.”

What makes that such a big deal? Energy efficiency in chips is critical to extending the operation time of battery-powered devices, and it’s a huge factor in the cost of running larger systems, including data centers.

Current power-management solutions focus on large systems, said Miller, an assistant professor of computer science. His plan is to work at the chip level, offering more sophisticated control and a means of scaling the solution up to address systems of a variety of sizes.

Engineers assume worst-case conditions in designing computer systems, Miller said. These assumptions are built into a “guard band” that ensures the system will work for 10 years even with the worst possible chip from the factory, even if the voltage is too low and even when the temperature is too high.

“That safety margin accounts for about 70 percent of the energy used by a modern microprocessor,” Miller said. “What we want is to have the safety margin be the minimum it has to be so that the circuit will operate reliably.”

With a narrower guard band, he said, a chip could be 2.5 times faster or deliver the same performance using only a third as much energy. And with machine learning, a chip can reach an ideal tradeoff between performance and reliability, adjusting continuously over its lifespan.

Miller, who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2012 after earning a doctorate at the Ohio State University, worked in private industry for more than 15 years.

He said other disciplines — cognitive science, linguistics and experimental psychology, in particular — inspired this direction in his research. The patterns of thought and engineering habits he cultivated while working in the private sector continue to help him, too. “I learned a lot from industry about doing the engineering part of this job,” he said. Miller said he often writes code to put ideas to the test quickly and enjoys helping students debug programs.

He is developing a short course for high school students that offers an analogy to introspective computing. Students will be challenged to come up with the careful scheduling required to operate a 22nd-century smart home with a restrictive amount of solar power and a set of activities that must be accomplished each day.

Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center in Energy-Efficient Electronic Systems’ primary support will come from the center members with whom researchers will work on projects of mutual interest. Fifteen companies representing the entire supply chain for data centers — from hardware manufacturing and software development to end-users — have signed up as members. The list includes industry leaders such as Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, Commscope, Bloomberg, General Electric, Corning Inc., Endicott Interconnect Technologies, Emerson Network Power and Emerson Delaware Valley Liebert, Verizon, Comcast and Steel Orca.

“The center will address energy efficiencies in a way that has not been tackled before,” said Bahgat Sammakia, interim vice president for research at Binghamton University and E3S director. “By looking at energy efficiency problems holistically — that is, from all angles and across many disciplines — the center will provide the kind of answers that leaders in the electronics industry are looking for. Each of the center’s academic partners has expertise in a particular area and by tapping into these individual strengths, we will collectively find the answers to some of the industry’s most challenging practical problems.”

Binghamton University will be the focal point for this highly collaborative effort; partners Villanova University and the University of Texas at Arlington will have support centers on their campuses as well.

“The Villanova College of Engineering and the Villanova research team are thrilled to be part of the NSF I/UCRC E3S Center. The center gives us an unprecedented opportunity to marry our deep expertise in thermal management of electronic systems with our rapidly emerging expertise in energy sustainability as we seek innovative solutions to energy efficiency in data center design and operation,” said Alfonso Ortega, associate dean for Graduate Studies and Research, and the James R. Birle Professor of Energy Technology at the Villanova College of Engineering.

Focusing initially on data centers, which are becoming one of the nation’s biggest energy-guzzlers, the new center will seek ways to allow electronic systems to monitor and regulate the amount of energy they use. As it stands, the energy spent on running data centers in the United States is about 2.5 percent of the total national energy expenditure, which is enough to power a couple of medium-sized cities for most of the year.

As the number of data centers increases due to growing demand for online services for everything from medical records to shopping, the need for greater energy efficiencies is becoming even more apparent. Lessons learned from reducing energy consumption in data centers will not only save millions of dollars, but will offer solutions to practical energy consumption problems in all areas of the electronics industry — from cell phones and tablets to gaming consoles and e-commerce.

The University of Texas at Arlington has been focusing on data center cooling for a number of years, said Dereje Agonafer, UT Arlington mechanical and aerospace engineering professor and site director for the center.

“The center allows us to significantly expand our mission in energy-efficient systems by focusing on a broad range of multi-disciplinary and collaborative research topics, including air side economizers, sustainability, effects of airborne contaminations on data center equipment, and cooling technologies for future high density interconnect devices,” Agonafer said. “Working with our consortium members gives us leverage into implementing our research activities in products.”

In addition to providing solutions to some of today’s most challenging energy-efficiency problems, the center is looking to the future by providing industry-relevant training opportunities.

“The I/UCRC E3S center is committed to strengthening the United States’ competitiveness in the electronics industry,” said Kanad Ghose, professor and chair of the Computer Science Department at Binghamton and E3S site director. “By attracting talented and motivated students to work with outstanding researchers and industry leaders, we can train the next generation to be the kind of broad-based scientists and engineers that the industry is going to need in the future.”

The center will convene its first official meeting in December 2011 to review an initial lineup of research projects that industry center members have identified as promising. Projects under review include activities associated with energy-efficient scheduling of workload, servers and cooling systems, the design of micro-scale servers, analyzing the effects of airflow and dynamics, and compact models activities. Work on these projects will begin as soon as they have been matched with teams of I/UCRC E3S researchers.

“The NSF I/UCRC Center for Energy Efficient Systems will play a key role in establishing deep partnerships between industry and academia,” said Kushagra Vaid, general manager of datacenter hardware engineering at Microsoft. “Our goal is to jointly deliver breakthrough concepts for next generation cloud infrastructure. Microsoft is proud to be on the advisory board for this research center.”

Roger Schmidt, IBM Fellow and chief engineer for data center energy efficiency at IBM Corp., is equally supportive of the new center.

“This I/UCRC represents a true partnership between industry and academia,” Schmidt said. “It deals with a critical issue for industry, namely the escalating energy budget in data centers. This partnership will allow us to conduct research that is both timely and transformative in close partnership with academia.”

“A device such as this can be used by soldiers in the field, in disaster relief and in the hospital setting for treating wounds that take months or years to heal,” Farnam said. “Limbs that may otherwise become infected and have to be removed can be saved, and lives can be saved.”

Farnam’s research is funded by a fellowship called the IGERT, or Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship. The National Science Foundation awarded $2.5 million to Binghamton University, Cornell University and Albany’s Wadsworth Center. From 2007 to 2012, Binghamton’s $500,000 portion of the award supports student research focusing on the medical applications of flexible electronics.

Mary Beth Curtin, associate director of the Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging Center (S3IP), said this the first time Binghamton has received an IGERT award. “There’s a lot of promise in flexible electronics — it’s a brand-new field,” she said. “That’s one reason why this award is so exciting for our students.”

The project at Binghamton is led by professors Bahgat Sammakia and Omowunmi Sadik, each of whom nominates graduate students to be funded by the IGERT. For the students, that means a $30,000 yearly stipend in addition to tuition coverage, an expenses-paid study-abroad experience and funding for research materials.

IGERT fellow Nian Du’s work is spurred by rising concerns over the environmental impact of silver nanoparticles — microscopic bits of metal used in a variety of medical applications as well as consumer products. Once touted as wonderful applications of modern technology, nanoparticles’ potential to enter the water supply and penetrate human tissue now worry scientists. If they do turn out to be harmful, Du plans to be ready with a substance that can detect and filter nanoparticles.

Leo Zheng, Binghamton’s newest IGERT fellow, is working with Farnam on the mechanics of the smart bandage. He will design a flexible sensor that can be used to detect undesirable bacteria in places such as public water supply piping.

Although Farnam, Du and Zheng work independently on their research, they certainly aren’t working alone. Along with the IGERT fellows from Cornell and the Wadsworth Center, they take a myriad of classes, from analytical chemistry and biology to materials science and marketing. As a key aspect of the program, fellows from disciplines as diverse as chemistry, biophysics, mechanical engineering and neuroscience gather for seminars and webinars to discuss their research and exchange ideas.

James Turner, research scientist at S3IP and co-writer of the IGERT application, explained that such multidisciplinary collaborations “open up a wealth of possibilities, by bringing together multiple science and engineering approaches to solve a problem in a unique way that maybe wouldn’t otherwise be possible.”

The program’s interdisciplinary nature makes her current research more effective, Du said. “I will have a broader background than others when I graduate,” she added, “and this will give me more preparation for all kinds of jobs.”

IGERT fellows are also learning to collaborate on a global scale through international internships. As part of the IGERT, Farnam is working in Sydney, Australia, with a researcher who specializes in making coatings that prevent microbial buildup on items such as medical implants and contact lenses. “This way I can learn a lot about the biological side of my research, since I specialize in the mechanics,” he said. “In addition, I get to experience how things are done in a different educational system and by a research group in a different field than mine.”

Turner said this global view is a real advantage. “To have students with the experience to interact with people from different cultures, who may have different priorities and perspectives on the world and the role of science in that world, is extremely important,” he said, “and will be more so in the future.”

The IGERT has lead to research collaborations with several departments at Cornell, Curtin said, and this has improved overall research quality. She said that the world of science is seeing a trend toward multi-institutional and multidisciplinary collaboration. “That’s a good thing,” she added, “because it has helped Binghamton to develop partnerships across the nation, which infuse our area with new and different viewpoints.”