Stony Brook University SUNY Korea

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 

March 11, 2021 What You Need to Know, When You Need to Know It   Good News on Vaccines: Expanded Eligibility   We are pleased to share the good news that new groups of employees are now eligible for COVID-19 vaccines based on updated NYS Department of Health COVID-19 Vaccine Program guidance.     On Wednesday, March 10, the age requirement for individuals in NYS moved from 65 to 60 years old.   Also on March 10, in-person essential employees working on campus became eligible.   And as of Wednesday, March 17, eligibility expands further to include all public-facing public employees, including essential public-facing building service workers.   We will continue to make you aware of opportunities as they arise. For your part, please check your eligibility and sign up for an appointment through the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) Eligibility website, where appointments are listed for our on-campus site at the R&D Park as well as other State vaccination locations. And speaking of locations …   More Good News: More Vaccination Sites   As supplies from the federal government and, in turn, New York State, continue to become more readily available, the Governor’s Office announced 10 new vaccination locations,  including one at our Southampton campus. Details to follow on when this site will open and specific location information.   Good News Aside … Please Continue to Keep Us Safe   With more people getting vaccinated, certain relaxing CDC restrictions and warmer weather tempting a lot of us to perhaps ‘drop our guard’ a little in the COVID-19 battle, please don’t. We stayed open, and accomplished all we did, by practicing healthy habits and following important protocols. And that will be our best path forward.   Even if you are vaccinated, we still require ongoing testing to ensure the health and well-being of our entire campus community. We also continue to emphasize the importance of all of the following ‘best practices’ until SUNY guidance suggests otherwise:   - Wash your hands or use sanitizer when soap and water aren’t available.   - Maintain a physical distance of at least six feet from other people.   - Wear a mask at all times, including in classrooms, conference rooms and other spaces, even when six feet social distancing exists.   - Cover coughs and sneezes and avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth. - Clean and disinfect frequently touched surfaces in your workplace every day. - Avoid using other people’s phones, desks, offices, tools and equipment. - Sanitize shared items after use. - Stay home if you’re sick. - Avoid large gatherings. 

March 9, 2021 Nancy Krisch, clinical assistant professor in the School of Health Technology and Management’s Department of Physical Therapy, has been awarded the Adopt-A-Doc scholarship from the Academy of Physical Therapy Education (APTE).   Krisch is a PhD candidate in the Curriculum, Instruction and Science of Learning Program in the Department of Learning and Instruction within the Graduate School of Education at University at Buffalo. Her dissertation working title is “Exploring Health Literacy in Entry-Level Physical Therapist Professional Curricula” — a mixed methods study that uses a self report survey of faculty and students related to consensus recommended health literacy practices to inform the qualitative strand, which consists of faculty and student interviews and analysis of curriculum documents. Adopt-a-Doc is a national award started in 2000 by APTE to support degrees in physical therapy education. There are a maximum of three awards given out per year. The award includes a $3,000 scholarship to offset tuition or doctoral research costs and reimbursement of Academy annual dues for that year. The award is normally given in person at the APTE’s annual conference, but this year it was done virtually. Krisch began teaching as an adjunct at Stony Brook in 2013 and received a full-time faculty appointment in 2016. In 2019, she became one of the directors of Clinical Education. She teaches Foundations of Inpatient Care and Neuroscience for Physical Therapy and is a lab instructor in Adult Neurological Assessment. Her primary scholarly interests include health literacy and optimizing communication between clinicians and patients. Her other varied interests include telehealth practice, interprofessional education, outcome measure properties and utilization, the use of simulation in healthcare education, and ongoing developments in concussion prevention, detection and treatment among youth athletes. Previous recipients from Stony Brook who have won the award include Kyle Hewson in 2007, clinical associate professor and chair of Physical Therapy, and Susan Miale in 2019, clinical associate professor and director of Curriculum and Professional Development. Two other faculty received the award and have since moved on to other programs: Anita Santasier (2004) and Jamie Greco (2019). Click here to read the original article