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May 12, 2021 Scientists at Stony Brook University, the University of Vermont and Dartmouth College have been studying mercury uptake into the food chain during the winter, and how mercury uptake may change in the future, as climate conditions change. The study, which was awarded $149,930 over two years by the Lake Champlain Sea Grant, began in May 2020 and will continue through February 2022, according to Roxanne Karimi, an adjunct assistant professor at Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS). Scientists worked through the pandemic to find out what happens to mercury, a common contaminant found in fish, as the fish food chain continues to operate during the winter. They have been collecting samples from Lake Champlain near the U.S.-Canadian border — at St. Albans Bay and Mississquoi Bay — attempting to find out whether mercury changes in chemical form and concentration in the water, lake sediments, and organisms that are in low in food chain, such as mussels. The information will indicate whether mercury is readily taken up into the food chain, including fish, during the winter compared to other seasons. “So far, we have found that methylmercury, the more toxic and biologically available form of mercury, occurs in the water — in dissolved form — in concentrations that are similar to those in other seasons,” Karimi said. “At this point, it is too early to tell whether there is a consistent pattern, or whether winter concentrations are consistently higher or lower than in other times of year.” Karimi noted that the predominant assumption was that mercury bioavailability decreases in winter due to lower temperatures, but this has not been adequately studied. “So far, our preliminary results counter that assumption, and our project will see how it ultimately holds up,” she said. “We will also examine how changes in winter climate conditions, such as changes in temperature and ice cover, might enhance or diminish mercury availability and uptake into the food chain in the future.” The scientists will also use data from the field to predict how fish mercury levels will change with climate. Key to answering this question is the ice cover during the winter, which is expected to decrease in thickness and duration as the climate warms. These factors influence how mercury and lake food chains function, and whether future climate conditions will enhance or diminish mercury buildup in fish in the future. The results from this project will provide the information necessary to predict changes in fish mercury levels, overall health value for human consumption, and inform fish monitoring and advisory policies. Karimi is the lead and sole investigator at Stony Brook, while SoMAS colleague Maureen Murphy provides outreach on the human health risks of mercury in fish to the public. The co-investigator is Andrew Schroth from Vermont, while Vivien Taylor at Dartmouth provides research support.   Click here to read the original article

May 7, 2021 Last Fall, the Office of the Vice President for Research, (OVPR) in partnership with the Institute for Engineering-Driven Medicine (IEDM) and the Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC) at Stony Brook University (SBU) launched the COVID-19 Research Collaboration Series. Each session focused on developing collaborations between researchers and included two talks about active COVID-19 research projects at Stony Brook University with an opportunity for discussion following the presentations. The series was announced and managed by the Office of Proposal Development (OPD) after confirming faculty interest in a series focused on collaborations for COVID-19 research projects. For each session, OPD paired two researchers around a common thematic discussion topic. The first session was held on November 5, 2020, and was followed by eight additional sessions, scheduled once every 2-4 weeks. The series concluded on April 29, 2021 with a special talk by guest speaker Dr. Jason McLellan from The University of Texas at Austin. “We launched this series as a follow up to a special initiative COVID-19 seed grant program to draw attention to the critical research that is addressing urgent healthcare challenges and the far-reaching social impacts of the pandemic in real time. Stony Brook University researchers are making incredible scientific advances in this space, and increasing collaborations are key to the continued progress of their research,” said Dr. Richard Reeder, Vice President for Research. The program received a terrific response from the Stony Brook University research community, with faculty participants from the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Business, the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the School of Dental Medicine, the School of Health Technology and Management, the School of Nursing, the School of Medicine, and the School of Social Welfare. Seventy-two SBU faculty members registered for at least one session in the fall semester, and 80 SBU faculty members registered for the spring semester sessions. A few of the sessions were open to faculty from other State University of New York (SUNY) institutions and about 50 external faculty participated throughout the series. “Modern science is often done at the interfaces between traditional fields, especially for challenging problems like COVID-19. This series made it much easier to navigate the impressive breadth of research at Stony Brook and find collaborators with similar goals but complementary skills,” said Dr. Carlos Simmerling, Marsha Laufer Professor of Physical & Quantitative Biology. Recordings of select presentations are available for viewing on OPD’s Stony Brook Research Youtube Channel. Below is the full list of COVID-19 Research Collaboration Series sessions: Breaking Down COVID-19Thursday, November 5, 2020Talk 1: Computational models of the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein suggest possible routes to viral inactivation, Dr. Carlos SimmerlingTalk 2: Accelerating nanobody discovery to target SARS-CoV2, Dr. Ed LukVIDEO The Impact of COVID-19 on CommunitiesThursday, November 19, 2020Talk 1: The COVID-19 Pregnancy Experiences (COPE) Study: a prospective program of research on pandemic stress, perinatal stress, and their impacts on women and children, Dr. Heidi PreisTalk 2: Disability in the Time of COVID-19, Dr. Brooke EllisonVIDEO Predicting Disease Spread and SeverityThursday, December 10, 2020Talk 1: Classification and Severity Progression Measure of COVID-19 Patients Using Proteomic and Metabolomic Sera, Dr. Pawel PolakTalk 2: Monitoring novel coronavirus in sewage as an early warning system to detect hidden outbreaks and track disease prevalence in communities, Dr. Arjun VenkatesanVIDEO Developing COVID-19 TechnologiesMonday, December 14, 2020Talk 1: AI-enabled lung analyzer for Detection and Characterization of COVID-19, Dr. Jerome Liang VIDEOTalk 2: Personal smart phone-integrated virus sensors and mobile app for rapid and accurate saliva screening and option to share results with businesses before entering common space, Dr. Matthew Jacobs VIDEO Computational Approaches to Study COVID-19Thursday, January 28, 2021Talk 1: Meta Analysis of COVID-19 Combining Multiple Omics Data Sets, Dr. Wei Zhu VIDEOTalk 2: The Analysis of Binding SARS-CoV-2 to Various Substrates, Dr. Peng Zhang VIDEO Psychosocial Impact of COVID-19 and Implications for Well-BeingMonday, February 8, 2021Talk 1: Behavioral Underpinnings of Vaccine Hesitancy and Implications for Vaccine Acceptance, Dr. Stacey Finkelstein VIDEOTalk 2: Effect of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic on the Academic, Career, Mental, Psychosocial, and Physical Functioning of the SBU Community, Dr. Brady D. Nelson VIDEO Models to Predict and Control COVID-19Thursday, February 25, 2021Talk 1: Using Demographic Pattern Analysis to Predict COVID-19 Fatalities on the US County Level, Dr. Klaus Mueller  VIDEOTalk 2: Pandemic Control in ECON-EPI Networks, Dr. Marina Azzimonti VIDEO Impacts of Social DistancingThursday, March 11, 2021Talk 1: The Impact of Social Distancing During the COVID-19 Outbreak on Mental Health and Substance Use Outcomes: Examining Risk and Protective Factors in Young Adult Populations in New York, Dr. Sana Malik & Dr. Ijeoma Opara VIDEOTalk 2: Psychosocial Impact of COVID-19-Induced Social Isolation (PICSI) on Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Longitudinal Study, Dr. Matthew Lerner & Alan H. Gerber VIDEO COVID-19 Life Cycle: From Viral Infection to Novel TherapeuticsMonday, March 22, 2021Talk 1: Viral Infection and Initiation of Thrombosis, Dr. Miriam RafailovichTalk 2: Targeted Degradation of SARS-CoV-2 Proteins, Dr. Peter TongeVIDEO Structure-based Design of Coronavirus Vaccine AntigensThursday, April 29, 2021Structure-based Design of Coronavirus Vaccine Antigens, Special guest speaker Dr. Jason S. McLellan, The University of Texas at AustinVIDEO Click here to read the original article

May 5, 2021 STONY BROOK, NY, May 5, 2021 – Stony Brook University has been ranked No. 39 among all U.S. universities in the QS US University Rankings 2021, moving up from No. 45 last year and placing in the top 5.5% nationwide. The University is also ranked as No. 5 among all colleges and universities in New York State. In addition to improving from #45 in 2020 to #39 in 2021, Stony Brook: Ranks #6 in the country on the diversity and internationalisation index Ranks #13 in the country among public universities Ranks as the #1 public university in New York The rankings are based on weighted scores in the categories of Employability, Diversity and Internationalization, Learning Experience and Research. Stony Brook’s strong showing is due in part to its high score in the category of Diversity and Internationalization, in which it ranks No. 6 nationally. This category includes the following indicators: gender pay gap, faculty gender diversity, ratio of undergraduates receiving Pell grants, students’ ethnicity, number of Fulbright students and ratio of international students. The QS World University Rankings: USA, is part of a subset of the QS World University Rankings, last published in June 2020, in which Stony Brook was ranked #373 globally and #68 in the U.S. The annual QS World University Rankings: USA is designed to assess how well universities are responding to the social, intellectual and economic challenges of our time. Universities are ranked according to research performance and career outcomes as well as a range of indicators assessing each institution’s social impact and attempts to foster equitability. Such indicators include gender pay gap, faculty gender diversity, ratio of undergraduate students receiving Pell Grants, and retention rate. The methodology also evaluates universities based on the efforts they are making to support the 17 UN Sustainable Development goals. Click here to read the original article

April 28, 2021 STONY BROOK, NY, April 28, 2021 – Scientists from Stony Brook University and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior have pieced together a timeline of how brain and body size evolved in mammals over the last 150 million years. The findings, published in Science Advances, show that brain size relative to body size—long considered an indicator of animal intelligence—has not followed a stable scale over evolutionary time. The international team of 22 scientists, including biologists, evolutionary statisticians, and anthropologists, compared the brain mass of 1400 living and extinct mammals. For the 107 fossils examined—among them ancient whales and the most ancient Old World monkey skull ever found—they used endocranial volume data from skulls instead of brain mass data. The brain measurements were then analyzed along with body size to compare the scale of brain size to body size over deep evolutionary time. “A big surprise was that much of the variation in relative brain size of mammals that live today can be explained by changes that their ancestral lineages underwent following the mass extinction and other cataclysmic events,” says Jeroen Smaers, an evolutionary biologist, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University, and first author on the study. “This includes evolution of the biggest mammalian brains, such as the dolphins, elephants, and great apes, which all evolved their extreme proportions after the climate change event 23-33 million years ago.” According to the study, “big-brained” humans, dolphins, and elephants, for example, attained their proportions in different ways. Elephants increased in body size, but surprisingly, even more in brain size. Dolphins, on the other hand, generally decreased their body size while increasing brain size. Great apes showed a wide variety of body sizes, with a general trend towards increases in brain and body size. In comparison, ancestral hominins, which represent the human line, showed a relative decrease in body size and increase in brain size compared to great apes. The authors say that these complex patterns urge a re-evaluation of the deeply rooted paradigm that comparing brain size to body size for any species provides a measure of the species’ intelligence. Smaers points out: “At first sight, the importance of taking the evolutionary trajectory of body size into account may seem unimportant. After all, many of the big-brained mammals such as elephants, dolphins, and great apes also have a high brain-to-body size. But this is not always the case. The California sea lion, for example, has a low relative brain size, which lies in contrast to their remarkable intelligence.” By taking into account evolutionary history, the current study reveals that the California sea lion attained a low brain-to-body size because of the strong selective pressures on body size, most likely because aquatic carnivorans diversified into a semi-aquatic niche. In other words, they have a low relative brain size because of selection on increased body size, not because of selection on decreased brain size. “We’ve overturned a long-standing dogma that relative brain size can be equivocated with intelligence,” says Kamran Safi, a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and senior author on the study. “Sometimes, relatively big brains can be the end result of a gradual decrease in body size to suit a new habitat or way of moving—in other words, nothing to do with intelligence at all. Using relative brain size as a proxy for cognitive capacity must be set against an animal’s evolutionary history and the nuances in the way brain and body have changed over the tree of life.” The study further showed that most changes in brain size occurred after two cataclysmic events in Earth’s history: the mass extinction 66 million years ago and a climatic transition 23-33 million years ago. The authors conclude that efforts to truly capture the evolution of intelligence will require increased effort toward examining neuroanatomical features, such as brain regions known for higher cognitive processes. “Brain-to-body size is of course not independent of the evolution of intelligence,” emphasizes Smaers. “But it may actually be more indicative of more general adaptions to large scale environmental pressures that go beyond intelligence.” Click here to read the original article

April 19, 2021 Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering Team Receives $2.4 Million ARPA-E Award The team in the Engineered Microstructures and Radiation Effects Laboratory (EMREL), led by Professor Lance Snead as the Principal Investigator (PI) and co-PI’s, Professor Jason Trelewicz and Professor David Sprouster, has been awarded $2.4 million from the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program, an agency tasked with promoting and funding research and development of advanced energy technologies. All three investigators are part of the Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, and Professor Trelewicz is also a core faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. The award is part of a grant program focused on the development of fusion energy science and technologies that would lead to a safe, carbon-free, and abundant energy source for developed and emerging economies, specifically the joint Office of Fusion Energy and ARPA-E initiative Galvanizing Advances in Market-aligned Fusion for an Overabundance of Watts (GAMOW). “The ARPA-E award process is extremely competitive and requires demonstrating leading-edge research and solutions,” said Fotis Sotiropoulos, Dean, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “I’m incredibly proud of Lance and the EMREL team’s work in this important area of research for our College and the University.” The project, ENHANCED Shield: A Critical Materials Technology Enabling Compact Superconducting Tokamaks, addresses a key issue facing the next generation of small, high-field fusion reactors. Specifically, with the significant progress made in the development of High Temperature Superconductor (HTS), the magnetic field strength required to drive a fusion plasma has been greatly enhanced allowing for much smaller, more economic systems. However, as the system becomes smaller, damage to magnets becomes a serious concern.  This Stony Brook project aims to solve that problem through development of a new class of shield materials to protect the magnets, thus enabling compact fusion systems. According to Snead, the current superconducting magnets we know, the ones that work at cryogenic temperatures, are typically shielded by common engineering materials such as water and steel, perhaps with a bit of other materials layered in. The water, like any material with hydrogen, is good at shielding neutrons, while steel or heavy materials like lead are what you would use for X-rays or gamma rays.   “It’s all pretty low-tech but works just fine for the larger machines. The problem comes in when you don’t have a lot of real estate to work with and water is not a coolant option,” he says. The solution being proposed by the EMREL for compact fusion devices is to fabricate composited structures which simultaneously shield neutrons and gamma-rays.   The proposed innovation will pursue two classes of engineered composite materials, one with a metal matrix and one with a ceramic matrix. The metal matrix is considered a more mature technology and will be applied in lower temperature application while the ceramic matrix composite is targeting higher temperature application. Of note is that the ceramic matrix composite owes its base technology to a breakthrough made by the Stony Brook team under an ongoing ARPA-E grant work which demonstrated fabrication of dense magnesia materials at temperatures hundreds of degrees lower than previously seen. This has allowed, as taken advantage of here, the inclusion of high neutron absorbing metal hydride materials within a magnesia composite structure.     The team includes Professor Steve Zinkle in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and Dr. Ethan Peterson of the Massachusetts of Technology. The project is also joined by two privately funded commercial fusion ventures: Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Tokamak Energy. Click here to read the original article

April 15, 2021 The first two vaccines approved for battling COVID-19 in the United States use a relatively new approach — injections of simple packets containing mRNA, a genetic material that instructs our cells to make coronavirus spike proteins. But the technology for generating sufficient amounts of those mRNA packets dates back to the 1980s, when F. William Studier, a former adjunct professor of biochemistry at Stony Brook University who was, at the time, also a senior biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, developed a way to harness the molecular machinery of a very different virus. In the 1980s Studier, the late senior scientist John Dunn, and their group in Brookhaven Lab’s Biology Department completed sequencing and annotating the genome of the T7 bacteriophage. T7 is a virus that infects E. coli bacteria and commandeers those cells to make copies of the virus. Having the complete genome sequence helped the scientists understand how T7 genes and other elements work together to reproduce many copies of the virus. Shortly thereafter, Studier and his team found a way to direct T7’s prolific copying capability toward making things other than more T7s. They cloned the T7 RNA polymerase — the enzyme that transcribes DNA genes into messenger RNA (mRNA), which instructs cells which amino acids to link up to build a particular protein. The team then used this T7 RNA polymerase along with a powerful T7 promoter (a genetic element that serves as a “start” signal for gene transcription) to produce large amounts of RNA from almost any gene. These RNAs could be used directly, such as in mRNA-based vaccines, or delivered to ribosomes (cells’ protein-making factories) to be translated into proteins, as in the T7 expression system. At manufacturing plants run by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, T7-derived promoters and enzymes crank out kilograms of spike-protein mRNA at a time — leaving our own cells to do the protein-making part after a dose of instructions is injected into our arms. “T7 was not a well-studied bacteriophage when I came to Brookhaven in 1964,” Studier said. “I was using it to study properties of DNA and decided also to study its molecular genetics and physiology. My goal, of course, was to understand as much as possible about T7 and how it works.”  Cloning the gene for T7 RNA polymerase in 1983 was particularly difficult, Studier noted. “Others had tried and failed. Companies had asked me if we had it,” he said. “We had the DNA sequence then, and I thought that I understood why the cloning had failed and how to remedy the problem.” Studier worked with others at Brookhaven Lab — Parichehre Davanloo, then a postdoctoral fellow, and Alan Rosenberg, a senior lab member — to tackle the challenge. Dunn purified the T7 RNA polymerase and showed that it produces large amounts of RNA. Barbara Moffatt, then a graduate student, worked with Studier to turn these discoveries into the T7 expression system. “The Brookhaven Lab patent attorney knew what we were doing and we filed what I think was the first patent at Brookhaven under the Bayh-Dole Act” — a law passed by Congress in 1980 that allowed institutions and grant recipients to patent and license rights to inventions stemming from government-funded research, Studier explained. The rest is history. The T7 expression system went on to become Brookhaven Lab’s most successful technology, with research labs around the world using it and hundreds of companies licensing the technology to make products. And although the patents have now expired, T7 is still the go-to system for biochemists everywhere. “I had wondered casually if T7 RNA polymerase might be involved in making the RNA vaccines,” mused Studier. “Basic research is almost always useful, and I’m pleased that my work has been helpful in obtaining powerful vaccines against this pandemic.” Click here to read the original article

April 1, 2021 Stony Brook University President Maurie McInnis has invited the university community to recognize those Seawolves who went above and beyond to help each other stay safe during the pandemic. The message reads as follows: Starting my tenure at the beginning of the pandemic, I couldn’t have predicted how challenging my first year as President would be. But at the same time, I couldn’t have predicted the incredible way our community members kept each other’s spirits alive, our mission intact, and our sense of responsibility and accountability strong. So many Seawolves went above and beyond to help each other stay safe during the pandemic while our essential workers responded to the emergency. So many individuals joined together in a demonstration of talent, hard work, and togetherness. Click here to read the original article 

April 1, 2021 Stony Brook Computer Science Professor Aruna Balasubramanian has been selected to receive a Google Research Scholar Award for her research on accessibility using wearable devices. Google’s Research Scholar program funds world-class research by early-career professors. Balasubramanian will use the award for her research project, “AccessWear: Ubiquitous Accessibility using Wearables,” to considerably improve the accessibility of smartphone applications so they are more usable for users with motor disabilities and vision impairments. Her research focuses on the area of mobile systems and networking. Balasubramanian has previously won a Google Research Award in 2016 and has won several other awards, including a VMWare early career award, an Applied Networking Research Prize and more recently the ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award. Click here to read the original article 

March 26, 2021 Stony Brook University has placed two subjects in the top 100 in the U.S. News & World Report 2021 rankings of the Best Global Universities. The subject of Psychiatry/Psychology climbed to 63 in the publication's global rankings, which places Stony Brook in the top 16 percent of the 416 universities ranked for 2021. Physics placed 70th among 911 universities ranked for 2021,  placing Stony Brook in the top 8 percent globally. “To be recognized in the top 16 percent of universities globally for psychiatry and psychology is a reflection on the strong, solid relationships we continue to foster among our colleagues in Psychiatry and our collaborators in Psychology,” said Ramin Parsey, MD, PhD, professor and chair, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health. “Over the years, we’ve recruited many world-class researchers such as Christine DeLorenzo, PhD, known for her work with mood disorders and Alzheimer’s; Anissa Abi-Dargham, MD, known for her work with schizophrenia; and Scott Mueller, PhD, known for his work with substance use disorders. As our faculty and graduate students will attest, we’ve long been committed to building and supporting a diverse, inclusive and welcoming research culture where our teams thrive. Click here to read the original article 

March 23, 2021 Benjamin S. Hsiao, distinguished professor, and Priyanka Sharma, research assistant professor, both from the Department of Chemistry at Stony Brook University, received the Creativity Prize — which is awarded to water-related interdisciplinary work — in the ninth Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW). They were recognized at the PSIPW Virtual Awards Ceremony on March 22. The PSIPW is an internationally renowned scientific award established in 2002 by H.R.H. Crown Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz. It recognizes innovative research aimed at finding solutions to today’s global water-related challenges. Hsiao’s team has developed adsorbents, coagulants and membrane materials from sustainable, biomass-sourced nanocellulose fibres along with numerous practical applications that promise to provide effective water purification for off-grid communities of the developing world. Their work also involves the development of environmentally friendly biomass extraction processes to produce these low-cost cellulose nanofibers for use in energy-efficient industrial water treatments, desalination and heavy metal removal, capable of reaching a performance/price ratio of more than 10 to 100 times better than existing commercial systems.  Click here to read the original article 

March 23, 2021 On March 18, representatives from Stony Brook University and AT&T joined Suffolk County Sheriff Errol D. Toulon Jr. and County and Babylon Town officials to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Sheriff's Transition and Reentry Team (START) Resource Center and announce the first community-based START Resource Center satellite location in Wyandanch, NY at the new headquarters for the non-profit Spin the Yard, Inc.  In September, Sheriff Toulon successfully began expanding the START Resource Center into the community when he launched the Family Reunification Initiative in partnership with the Stony Brook University’s School of Social Welfare with the support of AT&T. The program pairs Stony Brook’s social work student interns with county inmates and their families, with an emphasis on addressing the unmet needs of children with incarcerated parents. The interns will now also work with clients at Spin the Yard’s new Wyandanch location. The START Resource Center offers a range of practical transitional services for people leaving the county jail, including employment assistance, connections to housing, treatment and mental healthcare, clothing, food, pandemic advice, and much more. It is staffed by correction officers and human service volunteers from the non-profit community. “Sheriff Toulon has embraced a culture of corrections that should be a national model for reform, said Dr. Frances Brisbane, Vice President for Health Sciences and Workforce Diversity at the School of Social Welfare. “The START Resource Center provides the foundation from which law enforcement and the community can truly work in unison to protect public safety, provide treatment for justice involved individuals, and address the unmet needs of their children and families. Stony Brook University is pleased to be a partner in this important work.”   Click here to read the original article 

Yanhong Annie Liu and Scott Stoller, professors in the Department of Computer Science within the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences Stony Brook University, have been awarded a four-year $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their research project, “Configuration for Assurance: Safe, Live and Secure Distributed Systems.” Distributed systems — where multiple computers communicate with each other by sharing messages — are an essential part of our modern lives, from large databases and social networks to telecommunications and mobile systems. Whether for distributed transactions or distributed storage, including contact tracing during the current pandemic, distributed algorithms are at the core. Algorithms are what direct computer programs to take steps to solve problems. They must be precise, reliable and efficient to achieve their goals, and this is at the heart of Liu’s decades of research. Click here to read the original article 

March 19, 2021 Stony Brook University President Maurie McInnis has announced that Commencement ceremonies will be safely held on campus and in person in May. Ten individual ceremonies will be held Wednesday, May 19 through Friday, May 21, hosted by the individual schools and colleges. All of the ceremonies will be held outdoors at LaValle Stadium, rain or shine, and all ceremonies will be livestreamed and recorded. Click here to read the original article   

March 17, 2021 Eight students from Stony Brook University have received the first-ever SUNY Graduate Research Empowering and Accelerating and Accelerating Talent (GREAT) award,  which provides $5,000 to each student in flexible funds for research expenses, professional development and supplemental stipend support. The recipients have all won national recognition for their research from prestigious graduate fellowship programs sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. A total of 22 students received the award. The eight Stony Brook students are: Erica Bower, Marine and Atmospheric Sciences Gabrielle Elise Kamm, Chemistry Madani Ahmed Khan, Chemistry Tori Peña, Psychology Margaret Ellen Shevik, Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology Jennifer Susan Thalappillil, Pharmacological Sciences John Connor Williams, Biomedical Engineering Priscilla Edinam Yevoo, Neurobiology and Behavior   Click here to read the original article 

March 16, 2021     Two students from Stony Brook’s MFA in Television Writing program have won coveted Television Academy Foundation Writing Fellowships. Mallory Baysek, a first-year student, won in the Drama category with her Good Fight spec, A Clusterf*ck of Karens, which explores themes of racism, privilege and cancel culture.     Click here to read the original article