“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.

Jacob Gordon, a senior majoring in integrative neuroscience, spent the past three summers documenting flies’ relationships with sugar consumption and stressful environments.

Drosophila melanogaster, or common fruit flies, are the focus of Gordon’s research in Pavel Masek’s behavioral neurogenetics lab. These flies often serve as model species in research; they’re small, inexpensive to maintain and have a short enough life cycle to provide ample data. While seemingly ideal, working with these subjects nevertheless requires immense patience.

Gluing flies onto slides for observation in a way that won’t harm the insects can be frustrating, but Gordon persevered.

“The students, at the beginning, are not always perfect,” says Masek, an assistant professor of biology. “And if they are not perfect, the flies use this, and they really physically peel themselves off [the slide]. … The fact he doesn’t get really discouraged; this is a huge plus.”

Masek said Gordon’s work was key to understanding that the flies peel themselves off due to stress, causing the flies to expend more energy.

When Gordon first joined Masek’s lab, he didn’t expect to be given his own project, much less be able to author a paper by the time he graduated. “I expected that I’d probably be working under a grad student most of the time,” he says. “I was really pleased to find out that I would be able to have my own project.”

His work in the lab compared free-walking flies to glued-down flies, and it became clear that even when both sets had not been fed, the glued flies consumed more sugar. He believes the stress of being restrained is what led the flies to increase their sugar consumption.

Gordon plans to finish his paper this year and he hopes that his publication will not only build upon earlier research, but also affirm current methods of monitoring fly activity.

“I think it’s really important to research on lab techniques because these are the foundation of more important research,” he says.

Gordon, who is applying to medical school, expects to volunteer locally during the spring semester while finishing his research. Outside the lab, the Falmouth, Maine, native works as a medical scribe, serves as vice president of the Student United Way and teaches piano to fellow students.

His biggest takeaway from his research experience? Everything matters, and you may end up creating ripple effects that can change what’s currently known.

“These little things can seem boring, but they are important,” he says. “When explaining my research to someone, they may say, ‘Oh who cares’ because it’s hard to see the practical application, but the practical application is that this little change could affect all the research that comes after.”

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.”

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now the Binghamton University faculty member has co-edited a textbook that will aid students and professionals in designing field studies of stress. James worked with a former student, Gillian H. Ice, on Measuring Stress in Humans: A Practical Guide for the Field, which was published last month by Cambridge University Press.

Their focus is on non-invasive techniques that can be used outside the laboratory. “As an anthropologist,” James said, “I ask, ‘Why mimic real life in a lab if you can measure people as they go about their day?’”

Ice, James’ colleague, teaches at the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine. Their book offers guidance on topics ranging from the best ways to collect saliva and urine to working with special populations including pregnant women and the elderly. It also will help researchers conceptualize what they want to study.

The book’s contributors all consider stress a dynamic process that happens in real life, James notes. And an integrated evaluation of that process makes the most sense to him. This sort of research may be in its infancy, but James already sees implications for doctors, health psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists, among others.

James’ interest in human stress goes back to his days as a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University. He worked on a portion of the Samoan Migration Project that focused on cultural transition and whether it’s stressful when people migrate to a more modern society. That was the first time he had to design a model for measuring stress.
“I had to develop a plan for how to do this,” he said, “because at that juncture, nobody was doing it.”

Later, at what’s now the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, James was involved in some of the first research studies that made use of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring. In these projects, subjects wear a blood pressure cuff attached to a small device that records readings taken every 15 minutes during a 24-hour period.

Such studies have helped to prove that readings taken in a doctor’s office do not capture someone’s “normal” blood pressure and, in fact, that people’s blood pressure fluctuates throughout the day as well as throughout their lives.

While ambulatory blood pressure monitoring was developed to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of hypertension, or high blood pressure, James put the device to a different use.
“I saw its potential in terms of evaluating stress in real life,” he said. “The idea here was to tie together those behaviors that people actually do that tend to be stressful to an increase in blood pressure so you could see how they ended up having that heart attack. You’re looking at an adaptive process, but not in a medical way.”

James recruited working women for some of his first experiments in the late 1980s and found that mothers had higher blood pressure readings at home with their children than they did at the office. His findings were featured in The New York Times Magazine and Mademoiselle, among other publications.

“I pretty much had to invent a new methodology and conceptualization of exactly how you study the biological responses to stress dynamically — not in a lab, but when people are out there in real life — their biological stress responses to the things they are doing,” James said. “Because ultimately, from a health perspective, those are the things that are contributing to mortality.”

James, who joined Binghamton’s faculty in 1998, has more recently turned his attention from hypertension and heart disease to cancer, especially breast cancer. Genetics likely account for about 10 percent of breast cancer cases, and it is unknown what’s behind the other 90 percent. Since stress has been proven to affect immune function and there are known viral causes of cancer, he postulates that the stresses of everyday life may contribute to cancer development by altering immune function, exposing women to cancer-causing agents.
He’s collaborating with researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, looking at biological stress markers and whether they’re different for women who have family histories of breast cancer. Their research so far has found that endocrinological stress responses are indeed accentuated in women who have a mother or sibling with breast cancer.