The UN Holds Sessions on World Oceans Week
Stony Brook University
The Simons Foundation, a philanthropy working to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences, today announced a historic $500 million endowment gift to Stony Brook University during a news conference at the foundation’s Manhattan headquarters. This monumental gift — the combined largesse of the Simons Foundation and Simons Foundation International — is the largest unrestricted donation to an institution of higher education in U.S. history.
A new method than enables researchers to dial up or tone down the amount of a certain metastatic protein inhibitor (BACH1) within a cell could provide a new path in cancer research that reassesses the effectiveness of protein inhibitors to treat disease.
Stony Brook’s Simons STEM Scholars Program has signed its first-ever cohort of incoming students after a rigorous selection process. Roughly 800 erudite applicants were considered in a series of interviews and symposiums to determine the finalists.
Stony Brook University will honor the life and legacy of eminent paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician Richard E. Leakey by hosting “Africa: The Human Cradle: An International Conference Paying Tribute to Richard E. Leakey” from June 5 - 9, 2023 at the university’s Charles B. Wang Center. The Turkana Basin Institute (TBI) and Stony Brook are hosting the conference, in partnership with the National Geographic Society. Thought leaders from around the world will celebrate the immeasurable, life-long contributions by Leakey to furthering the appreciation of Africa’s centrality in the narrative of human evolution.
A new technique to measure the expansion rate of the Universe may serve as a tool to help scientists more accurately determine the Universe’s age and better understand the cosmos. An international team of researchers that includes two Stony Brook University professors highlighted their data based on the technique in a paper published in Science.
Sian Piret, PhD, in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, has received a $1.4 million grant from the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases to investigate a certain metabolic process called BCAA catabolism that is known to occur with acute kidney injury, but its exact role remains unknown.
A scientific project that compares the genomes of 240 living species of mammals has identified transposable elements (TEs) – genes that can change their position within a genome, creating or reversing mutations and thus altering a cell’s genetic identity – as a crucial area of study to help uncover the evolutionary process of mammals and to better understand biodiversity.
Stony Brook University graduate student Fanny M. Cornejo has been named the winner of the newly-created “Emerging Conservationist Award" presented by the Indianapolis Prize. This award recognizes professional wildlife conservationists, biologists and scientists under 40-years of age who are working to make strides in saving animal species from extinction. Cornejo was selected from among 10 finalists and will receive $50,000 provided by the Kobe Foundation to continue Yunkawasi’s conservation work.
A new groundbreaking image from one of the world’s most powerful telescopes that reveals the most detailed map of dark matter distributed across one quarter of the sky, and deep into the cosmos, offers scientists a perspective that may lead to new methods to demystify dark matter. The research that led to the image, completed by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, also provides further support to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which has been the foundation of the standard model of cosmology for more than a century.
The United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory’s (BNL) newly appointed director, theoretical physicist JoAnne Hewett, will be joining Stony Brook University as a tenured faculty member in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics. Hewett is the first female director to lead BNL.
A team of scientists from the Renaissance School of Medicine (RSOM) at Stony Brook University have identified a distinct role of retinoic acid, a metabolite of vitamin A, during the immune response of the gut.
A study led by a team of computer scientists at Stony Brook University and published in Nature Digital Medicine presents a unique approach using artificial intelligence (AI) and social media posts to predict opioid mortality rates. The findings revealed that an AI algorithm that was able to surprisingly predict opioid death rates going back to previous years and actual rates.
An international scientific team led by Stony Brook University paleontologist Andrew J. Moore, PhD, has revealed that a Late Jurassic Chinese sauropod known as Mamenchisaurus sinocanadorum sported a 15-meter-long neck. The details will be published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology and provide fresh insights on the evolution of the iconic sauropod body.
While previous studies have focused upon identifying potential school shooters, little is known about the mental health and associated characteristics of students who make threats in schools. A study by Stony Brook child psychiatry experts uncovers the wide range of psychiatric diagnoses, learning disorders, educational and treatment needs of this population.
For the past few decades, Dr. Iwao Ojima has been working in his Stony Brook University Department of Chemistry Laboratory to develop next-generation anti-cancer agents. One of these agents – a second-generation taxane conjugate (called NE-DHA-SBT-1214) – has shown great promise against solid tumors – particularly against colorectal cancer.
A team of Stony Brook University researchers believe they created a new method to significantly improve burn assessment. They are employing a physics-based neural network model that uses terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) data for non-invasive burn assessment. Details of their method are published in a paper in Biomedical Optics Express.
A new study by Stony Brook University researchers published in the journal Global Change Biology demonstrates that warming waters and heat waves have contributed to the loss of an economically and culturally important fishery, the production of bay scallops.
A new study by Stony Brook University researchers showed there is indeed a strong relationship between what we eat early in life and food preferences in adults. This relationship depends the effects of our early experience with food has on the brain. The work is published in Science Advances.
A new study by a team of international scientists including Liliana M. Dávalos, PhD, from Stony Brook University, reveals that it would take three million years to recover the number of species that went extinct from human activity on Madagascar. Their findings are published in Nature Communications.
A published study that assessed anxiety and depressive symptoms in pregnant women from seven Western countries during the first major wave of the Covid-19 pandemic shows that stress from fears about Covid-19 led to anxiety and depressive symptoms above normal levels.
An international group of marine scientists has published a letter in Science that is a call to action for policy makers, government agencies and ocean conservation groups to take major steps to preserve Egypt’s coral reefs, which generate billions of dollars annually from tourism and tourism-related commerce.
Researchers at Stony Brook University have developed a way to simulate sea spray aerosols in tanks that mirror ocean conditions, allowing them to determine the organic compounds associated with and released by marine microorganisms, and discover clues to the role of these compounds as ice forming particles.
The world will need to deploy renewable energy at an unprecedented speed and scale to reduce carbon emissions that are drive climate change. The option of solar energy promises to play a crucial role especially if the price of production continues to decline. A study published in Nature supports this concept.
The Stony Brook World Trade Center Health and Wellness Program has received $147 million of new federal funding to expand and build upon its multiple healthcare services for WTC responders.
In a study that analyzed nearly 19 million publicly available tweets from 2019 to 2021, researchers found consistently that as the number of Covid-19 cases and deaths increased, fewer tweets about climate change -- another urgent global issue -- occurred.
This afternoon, Stony Brook University President Maurie McInnis, delivered the 2022 State of the University to students, faculty, staff, elected representatives and local community members. President McInnis shared recent achievements by the university community as well as her vision for the institution going forward.
Scientists seeking the connection between gravitational forces deep in the Earth and landscape evolution discovered that deep roots under mountain belts trigger dramatic movements along faults that result in collapse of the mountain belt and exposure of rocks that were once below the surface.
Advancing extreme-scale science is essential to the enhancement of many applications in computational science. Supartha Podder, PhD, of Stony Brook University, who studies quantum advantages in solving computational tasks, received a two-year DOE grant to study the power of quantum witnesses.
Stony Brook University is proud to announce that Judith Brown Clarke, PhD, Vice President for Equity & Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, has been appointed to the Board of Directors for the National Fitness Foundation. She will serve from 2022 to 2028. The appointment was announced by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. Brown Clarke was also voted in as the Chair of the Board for the next two years.
Stony Brook University has hired the inaugural executive director of the Stony Brook Simons STEM Scholars Program. Erwin Cabrera, a researcher and higher education administrator who has led initiatives with similar aims, will develop this undergraduate program intended to bolster pathways to STEM careers for underrepresented students. Cabrera will join Stony Brook on Oct. 3.
A study of wild geladas provides the first evidence of clear and significant maternal effects on the gut microbiome both before and after weaning in a wild mammal. This study suggests the impact of mothers on the offspring gut microbiome community extends far beyond when the infant has stopped nursing.
Stony Brook University, recently named as a flagship in the State University of New York system, has seen a significant increase in its ranking in the U.S. News & World Report 2023 Best Colleges ranking. The university moved up 16 places and now stands at #77 among national universities from its previous ranking of #93. It also moved up seven places, jumping to #31 from #38 among public universities. This is the highest ranking Stony Brook has achieved in the history of this publication. This is the first time that Stony Brook has been ranked the #1 public university in New York without tying with another university.
A published study of 1,899 pregnant women nationwide representing all 50 states reveals that during the Covid-19 pandemic if a pregnant woman had lower socioeconomic status and/or were African American, she was less likely to have the intention of taking a Covid-19 vaccine or actually receiving it.
World renowned experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate Barry Barish, PhD, will be joining Stony Brook University to serve as the inaugural President’s Distinguished Endowed Chair in Physics beginning in the fall semester of 2023. Professor Barish shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the observation of gravitational waves with the historic Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment. This research proved the ripples in the fabric of space and time that were predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years earlier. Professor Barish is also the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Today scientists from Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) announced the culmination of a decade of science in a paper published in Frontiers in Marine Science, an international peer-reviewed journal, which describes a novel restoration approach used in Shinnecock Bay that has led to a 1,700 percent increase in the landings and densities of hard clams in that estuary, along with the expansion of seagrass meadows and the end of harmful brown tides – a result that brings the Shinnecock Bay back to its 20th Century glory for shellfishing and the result may serve as a shining example of a process to restore other estuaries around the country and world.
A study that assessed the brains of 99 World Trade Center (WTC) responders showed that WTC responders with cognitive impairment (CI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have a different presentation of the white matter in their brains compared to responders with CI without PTSD.
A study by a team of scientists including three from Stony Brook University proposes a novel method to search for new particles not currently contained in the standard model of particle physics. Their method, published in Nature Communications, could shed light on the nature of dark matter.
Stony Brook University scientists provide researchers investigating the evolutionary past of ancient hominins an important and foundational message in a paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution. That is – conclusions drawn from evolutionary models are only as good as the data upon which they are based.
A study that surveyed cancer screening data included in medical journals worldwide from January 2020 into December 2021 showed significant decreases in the number of screenings for breast, colorectal and cervical cancers during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A new biomedical research tool that enables scientists to measure hundreds of functional proteins in a single cell could offer new insights into cell machinery. Details about the cyclic microchip assay method are published in the journal Nature Communications.
Gábor Balázsi, PhD, and his research team in the Laufer Center and the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Stony Brook University are embarking upon a new way to research cells, the building blocks of life and often triggers to disease when their behavior changes.
Understanding why and how chemotherapy resistance occurs is a major step toward optimizing treatments for cancer. A team of scientists including Markus Seeliger, PhD, of the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, believe they have found a new process through which drug resistance happens.
A full day of dialogue and scientific presentations by national experts concerning problems and solutions associated with wastewater, nitrogen pollution, PFAS forever chemicals, treatment of drinking water, next generation clean water technologies and other topics will take place during the Clean Water Symposium.