Order, the oldest of three siblings, always knew he wanted to work with children. He also had a deep curiosity about developmental disabilities, but it wasn’t until the Long Island native came to Binghamton University that he decided to combine these interests. Now he’s a junior majoring in psychology with a concentration in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and a minor in education.

“I always had an interest in understanding behavior,” Order says. “In regards to ASD, that was introduced when I got to Binghamton and that’s where my interest piqued, but prior, I did a lot of work with children with developmental disabilities through a few programs they had at my high school. I always had a lot of involvement volunteering with kiddos and it’s something I’m very passionate about.”

Before college, Order didn’t have a particular interest in any one disability. It wasn’t until he met his mentor, psychology Professor Jennifer Gillis Mattson, that he decided to focus on autism. The duo have worked together on two large projects within the Institute for Child Development (ICD), where Order is a teacher’s aide and writing a program evaluation report with graduate student Jessica Granieri.

The report focuses on his independent research project for the Summer Scholars & Artists Program, a unique examination of the use of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) strategies and devices. Order wanted to gauge how well children would use the devices in a naturalistic environment, like a playground, instead of a classroom.

Because many autistic children have communication difficulties or are non-speaking, at the institute, most students use AACs to make requests and answer questions from those around them. AACs can range from apps on iPads and mobile devices to whole communication boards or small binders containing multiple pictures and words, all of which allow a child to use digital or physical pictures, symbols and sentences for communication. But bringing a tablet or binder on slides, swings and other playground equipment can be a safety hazard and get in the way of the fun.

Order wondered if there was a way for children to communicate about their playground experiences without having to go back and get their AAC device. He noticed that some playgrounds had added communication boards to be more inclusive, but it was unclear if adding them would be helpful to children at the institute, given the limited research about their use.

Order worked closely with the institute’s speech language pathologists (SLPs) to develop AAC supports available throughout the playground and to examine what types of additional support might be needed.

At the end of the summer, Order’s research concluded with an unexpected finding — that just having AAC supports available (even if children know how to use them) does not facilitate use of the supports for communication. The staff needed to be trained in encouraging the students to communicate using the AAC supports on the playground. Once this happened, there was much more communication success.

“Derek was involved in all aspects of this project. He made all of the materials, consulted frequently with the SLPs, collected data, problem-solved the inevitable hiccups in applied work, and evaluated the outcome of the project,” Gillis Mattson says.

Although the experiment was conceptualized and conducted by Order, his proudest achievement at the institute is the friendships he has made with children.

“Genuinely, regardless of the research — which I am grateful for — I have always just loved interacting with the kids and building rapport,” Order says. “I work in a classroom with 3- to 5-year-olds and 9- to 10-year-olds, and the relationships with the kids are so pure and they make me so happy. The thing I love the most is just hanging out with them, but if I can also do research that might aid them in some way and help foster independence, I am quite fulfilled by that.”

Order plans to pursue a doctorate in school psychology following graduation. One of his larger goals for his research is to find more ways to support and amplify the voices of self-advocates in the ASD community, while also encouraging continued learning for teachers and school administrators. He believes everyone should be willing to meet children with autism halfway, as opposed to trying to make them behave more “typically.”

Beyond the institute, Order has also found success as a peer consultant with the Fleishman Center for Career and Professional Development. He helps students with resumes and cover letters, along with advising first-year psychology majors about what steps they should take to reach their goals effectively.

“If you’re interested in research or getting involved, go and talk to people, go talk to your professors,” Order says. “If I didn’t go to Dr. Gillis’ office hours and talk about what I wanted to do after college, my life would be totally different. Experience doesn’t just fall from the sky, I had to put myself in the position to get lucky. It’s important to talk to the pros, those who know and feel what you’re going through!”

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.”

Her research involves understanding how people with psychopathic personality traits obtain “successful outcomes” — such as achieving occupational success (i.e., promotions, awards) or getting away with “bad behavior” (i.e., being unethical or having criminal behaviors).

The I-Corps program provides a month-long intensive course where participants discover the commercial potential behind their research or innovation and what their ideal customer base might be. It is designed for faculty, students, postdocs, researchers and startups with a research project that has real-world applications, a prototype or an early-stage product or technology.

The regional program provides a $3,000 grant to conduct customer interviews and further any prototypes; the national program provides a $50,000 grant.

Welsh’s work is conducted under the guidance of Mark F. Lenzenweger, distinguished professor of psychology, in his laboratory of experimental psychopathology. Together they co-authored “Psychopathy, charisma, and success: A moderation modeling approach to successful psychopathy,” which was recently published in the Journal of Research in Personality.

“Some psychopathic individuals who have been quite successful have been described as charming or charismatic,” Welsh says. “We wanted to know if charisma serves as a protective or moderating factor that allows psychopathic individuals to be more successful. Our most recent project suggests that psychopathic individuals who are highly charismatic are able to get away with ‘bad behavior’ and avoid punishment more often than psychopathic individuals who are less charismatic.”

Before joining the I-Corps program, Welsh thought her research, if used in a screening tool, might attract the interest of law enforcement, human resources and other hiring departments. After holding 20 customer discovery interviews with people from various industries, she found that her first adopters would likely be talent acquisition and recruiting agencies or staff who screen candidates for senior- and executive-level positions for moderate-sized to large organizations.

Anyone involved in personality science, organizational behavioral/industrial psychology or personnel selection and business administration scholars will find Welsh’s research to be instructive and rich with insights, Lenzenweger says.

“I see Emma making notable contributions to our understanding of psychopathy that will influence how many of the leading workers in the area will conceive of this disorder,” he says. “She is an engaged and creative emerging psychological scientist who brings her own ideas to research challenges, and this emphasis on originality makes her a clear standout.”

Welsh, who did her undergraduate work at New York University, says she appreciates how Lenzenweger encourages his graduate students to generate original and creative ideas. “Working with Mark has been absolutely wonderful because he encourages you to pursue your passion,” she says. “He wants his students to build their own program of research.”

Welsh, who grew up in Alpharetta, Ga., is staying open-minded about where her career path may take her.

“My findings through the I-Corps program have shown me that my research has a lot of potential industry applications, so the job I might want may not exist yet. I may need to create it. There is a gap and I can fill it,” she says. “I love both my clinical work and my research, so I hope to be able to continue to do both and merge my interests.”

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.

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.”

“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.

And her busy schedule is that much more relevant when her clinical work involves populations at risk for relationship distress.

“I noticed a lot of resilience in people that experienced pretty horrible things in their life,” Balderrama-Durbin says. “And I became very interested in wanting to understand how humans are able to manage things that one might think to be completely horrific — traumatic events — and somehow come out of the other side.”

An assistant professor of psychology, Balderrama-Durbin earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Colorado and a doctorate from Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on couples exposed to acute stressors, such as veterans or sexual minorities. Partner violence, infidelity and stigma, as well as external trauma such as car accidents or military combat, can all affect how couples function.

Her Couple Adjustment to Stress and Trauma (CAST) lab works to understand ways these problems can be addressed, in prevention or intervention, before they result in violence or prolonged suffering. Her published work includes research on post-traumatic stress disorder and couple therapy, which she continues to work on through her most recent studies.

One project attempting this goal is a five-session, 30-minute intervention targeting traumatic stress symptoms and problematic drinking. It works closely with primary care doctors and is to be administered in parallel with physical health check-ups.

Another study beginning this summer aims to collect data on lesbian, gay and bisexual pairs who face discrimination as a result of their sexual identity, as well as how they navigate potentially hostile environments.

If the process works, she plans to develop a reliable way for people to access the resources they need at the speed and intensity that their unique situations require.

“I don’t like to do research for research’s sake,” Balderrama-Durbin says. “I like to do research for the benefit of the population by which I’m doing the research on. It’s such a shame to think that a lot of our research studies sit there in journals and don’t actually inform practice. I hope to at least personally facilitate that change by translating it and testing it.”

This approach translates to her students, who say that Balderrama-Durbin cares deeply for the populations she studies and the people closest to her. For example, this fall she will participate in the AIDS Ride for Life, a 102-mile charity ride benefiting the Southern Tier AIDS Program.

“She’s constantly striving to learn as much as she can about her field and the surrounding fields’ relevance to what she studies, and she uses that to inform her research direction,” says Seigie Kennedy, one of her graduate students at the CAST lab. “We’re working together for my dissertation using eye-tracking, and she’s so invested in helping me to be able to use this new paradigm our lab has not used before. She’s a very supportive supervisor.”

As much as her students appreciate her, her ability as the head of a team comes across when she speaks about them.

“What makes me passionate about this, about research and about this position, is that mentoring others in their research is incredibly rewarding. Without my team, the work would not get done,” Balderrama-Durbin says. “If I were doing it by myself, it wouldn’t be any fun at all.”

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.”

The Binghamton University senior received a prestigious National Science Foundation grant to live with a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder in Syracuse last summer.

“It was such an amazing project,” says Shaw, a double major in psychology and human development. “Too often I think researchers are separate from the population they are studying. It was great to hear the perspective of the veterans and to collaborate with them.”

The NSF funds intensive summer programs where students live at other universities to conduct research. Shaw was with four other students and five veterans, and says that her roommate was one of the strongest people she’s ever met. Shaw says the veteran, who is in her late 20s, had been on tour for about six years and has faced a multitude of hardships not obvious to others.

“Due to sandstorms, the air quality is deemed unlivable in some of the countries our veterans are deployed,” Shaw says. On top of the trauma caused by war itself, there is a whole different struggle of being a woman in the military, she says.

Right after her graduation this week, Shaw will present her research in Boston at the Association for Psychological Science conference. Her project focuses on attachment and the effect of social support on veterans who have PTSD.

“Everyone always makes fun of me because I pick the dark stuff, but I’m really interested in trauma and human resilience,” Shaw says.

Shaw, who grew up in North Babylon, N.Y., studies in two research labs at Binghamton. She works in a sex and gender lab under the supervision of Ann Merriwether, lecturer in psychology and human development, and Sean Massey, associate professor in women, gender and sexuality studies. She conducts both independent and group projects there. Shaw also works in the Couples Adjustment to Stress and Trauma Lab (CAST) under the supervision of Christina Balderrama-Durbin, assistant professor in psychology.

In the sex and gender lab, Shaw says, she had a lot of freedom to explore her interests and pick her own research topic. Her honors thesis focuses on intoxicated hookups and confidence in consent.

“It’s really interesting to look at consent on a scale because most studies on consent have a black-or-white answer,” Shaw says. “But there is a gray area. Only about 21 percent of people were absolutely confident that they gave consent in their last hookup in which alcohol was involved. A lot of people fall in the 2 to 5 range on a scale from 1 to 7.”

Shaw became interested in trauma when she interned for the Interpersonal Violence Prevention Program during her first year at Binghamton. She was an educator on campus about sexual assault and bystander intervention, as well as serving as an advocate for those who were sexually assaulted. Now she is an intern at Rise – Comprehensive Domestic Violence Services, in Endicott, N.Y.

“My goal for the future is to understand how we foster resilience,” Shaw says. “Some people have the ability to overcome such intense trauma and it motivates me to want to help others do the same.”

As lead tutor for the University Tutoring Services, president of the Psi Chi International Honor Society, and business manager for the Student Association Ink, Shaw knows a lot about balancing a busy schedule. She says she gets joy out of being surrounded by people and learning from them.

“A lot of being a leader is clearly communicating with people all the time,” Shaw says. “You have to trust that you have a good team. Organization is so important in every aspect of life, especially if you want to be a leader.”

Shaw plans to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology at the University at Buffalo, where she will study alcohol and PTSD.

She says she’s grateful for the great friendships she made in Binghamton.

“I’ll always remember just sitting in my kitchen with my friends,” Shaw says. “We started this thing where we record each other randomly, like a cooking fail or something, and we call the videos #everydaymoments so that we’ll always have them.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

“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 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.”

Brandon Gibb, associate professor of psychology and director of clinical training at Binghamton University, said he’s interested in genetic and environmental factors that may contribute to anxiety and depression. Identifying such factors early — he’s studying 7- to 11-year-olds — may make it easier to figure out which children need extra help before they hit the turbulence of adolescence.

The study will zero in on “attentional biases,” which occur when children and adults focus their attention too much on, or have difficulty pulling their attention from, something negative or threatening in such a way that it affects their mood for a prolonged period.

“We like to think of things in evolutionary terms,” Gibb said. “It’s an advantage, if you see something threatening in your environment, to pick up on it quickly so you can either fight it or run away. However, if you are constantly looking out for danger even when you are in an objectively safe environment, that can lead to problems with anxiety.  With depression the attentional bias appears to be different; there’s no bias in where you initially attend. But once you get stuck on something negative, then you have a hard time pulling yourself away from it.”

As Gibb embarks on this four-year study, with $2.9 million in support from the National Institute of Mental Health, he’s also wrapping up an earlier project. In that study, 255 children and their mothers were assessed every six months for two years. The team is still analyzing its data, but Gibb said it’s already clear that children whose mothers have experienced depression have a higher risk of being depressed themselves. Their lives also have a lot more stress. “If you have a mom with a history of depression,” he said, “your life is more stressful: at home, at school and with your peers.”

That project has informed the new one, and Gibb said he and his colleagues hope to find out more about which components of attention are disrupted in depression and anxiety. “We’re trying to tease apart what’s unique to one or the other as well as what’s shared by both disorders,” he explained.

The researchers will look at the combined influence of a number of genes operating within brain regions thought to underlie these patterns of attention and mood. Gibb’s team includes colleagues at Stony Brook University, Providence VA Medical Center, Rhode Island Hospital and the University of California, Davis. All of the research subjects will be drawn from the Binghamton area, with the other researchers focusing on the genetic testing.

This study fits into a broader effort in psychology, in which disorders have historically been diagnosed based on clinical observations. Now, the field is trying to base diagnoses not only on such observations but also on findings from genetic and neuroimaging research. “We think attention is a key mechanism that cuts across current diagnostic boundaries,” Gibb said.

Suicide is the third-leading cause of death among 10- to 14-year-olds and 15- to 24-year-olds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gibb said he’s motivated by the need to do more than document that problem; he wants to do something about it.

“We know that kids get on a developmental trajectory, and we know it’s a lot easier to change that trajectory the earlier you catch it,” he said. “Both risk and resilience start early.”

How do you spot depression or anxiety in a child? First, you have to differentiate normal ups and downs from more enduring problems. “Everyone will have a really anxious day or a really sad day every once in a while,” Gibb said. “But when it lasts for weeks on end and interferes with school work or friends or something else, we know it’s a problem. In kids, with depression and to some extent with anxiety, it may show itself as irritability more than sadness or fear. That’s the only real difference from how depression or anxiety looks in an adult.”

There are promising interventions, he added. But most of them are in use with adults because these disorders aren’t as well understood in children.

“In the 1980s, there was a lot of discussion about whether kids could even get depressed,” Gibb said. “Now we know they can, and we’re trying to figure out what to do about it. With these early markers, we can spot the kids who are at risk and do something.”