Stony Brook Research

New Inititatives and Recent Accomplishments

One Day, Biodiversity May Save Lives
Two highly distinguished researchers lead the NIH-funded Drug Discovery and Biodiversity Program: Patricia Wright, Anthropology, executive director of the University's Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments and a member of the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration and Conservation Trust, and Iwao Ojima, director of the NYSTAR-supported Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery at Stony Brook, who is noted for developing a more easily administered synthetic alternative (now in clinical trials) to the blockbuster anti-cancer drug Taxol.

Based in the tropical rain forests surrounding 107,500-acre Ranomafana National Park, for whose creation Prof. Wright has been honored by the Malagasy government, the project will seek new drug therapies for human disease in what Prof. Wright calls Madagascar's "unique and endemic biodiversity." Malagasy researchers will conduct preliminary assessments of botanical samples from local plants targeted by traditional healers, and promising extracts will be sent Prof. Ojima's Institute for further analysis. A critical project goal for NIH is seeking alternative local economic resources to discourage the ongoing habitat destruction that results from farmers' quest for additional rice and corn farming capacity. The Biodiversity Program recognizes that 40-50% of currently used drugs have an origin in natural products and, with support from NIH, NSF and the USDA, encourages efforts to examine the medicinal potential of the earth's plants, animals and microorganisms before enduring habitat destruction and the resulting diminishment of biodiversity remove these resources forever.

How Much Does It Hurt?
Arthur Stone, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, leads the collaboration that made Stony Brook one of only six institutions to have received a grant under the "Re-engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise" rubric of the new NIH Roadmap. The $3.9 million, 5-year project, which includes Neurology faculty and private practitioners, will focus on "Dynamic Assessment of Patient-reported Chronic Disease Outcomes." It will carry forward Dr. Stone's pioneering use of emerging computer technologies to capture people’s real-life experiences on a moment-to-moment basis using Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and other technologies to reduce memory biases. Hundreds of academic and pharmaceutical studies have now been conducted with methods developed a decade ago by Dr. Stone and his colleagues.

The new initiative is designed to create standard ways of measuring symptoms in order to facilitate accurate comparisons among studies. Currently, measurements of pain, fatigue, and other chronic disease symptoms are usually based on patients’ memories over relatively long periods of time – a week, a month, or longer – that often exceed people’s ability accurately to recall their experience of symptoms, creating the need for alternative measures that Prof. Stone and his colleagues will endeavor to fill.Valid and reliable assessment of symptoms is a critical area for medical research and practice: without accurate symptom information so they can evaluate which treatments are effective it is difficult if not impossible to assess new treatments.

Space Medicine Offers Help for Earthlings, Too
The National Space Biomedical Research Institute, which is funded by NASA, announced earlier this year that a technology development team on which Prof. Yi-Xian Qin is a senior leader is developing a real-time, high-resolution, portable imaging device, the Scanning Confocal Acoustic Diagnostic system, or SCAD, that will use scanned, confocal ultrasound to produce, non-invasively, high-quality images of bone and tissue, helping physicians to determine the rate of loss and plan treatment options and manage bone health. Studies of cosmonauts and astronauts who spent months on space station Mir revealed that space travelers can lose, on average, 1-2% percent of bone mass each month because of microgravity, which causes bone loss in critical areas and leaves bones susceptible to fracture upon return to Earth. The results of the project will not only support planned space station activity and potential extended space flight in the future but could also help Earthbound populations, including the 10 million people in the United States who suffer from bone loss in the form of osteoporosis, according to the National Osteoporosis Foundation.

Mars Exploration
Stony Brook’s members of the Rover scientific team, led by Geosciences Prof. Scott McLennan, a sedimentary geologist, participated with their team colleagues in analyzing and interpreting the unexpectedly rich streams of data and reporting mission results to the public. The mission extension made it possible to add graduate students Nicholas Tosca, Joel Hurowitz and Brian Hahn as student collaborators and they sojourned at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and took an active role in mission operations, including the design and implementation of science plans for Rover activity, giving them the unparalleled educational opportunity to work at the absolute cutting edge of planetary exploration. Beginning in January, 2005, a Stony Brook undergraduate, Scott Perl, was added to the science team as a student collaborator.

Cassini Images of Saturn's Moon, Titan
Stony Brook alumna Carolyn Porco, '74 (BA Physics), imaging team leader for the Cassini mission to Saturn and director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, helped bring back images that were up to 100 times more detailed than images obtained from earth-based telescopes, and provided key new information about Titan's surface and atmosphere. Photo: Images of Titan's atmospheric haze layer, courtesy of Nature.

Pulling Up the Drawbridge
Gallya Lahav, Political Science, was recognized by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grants Competition, one of only 26 awardees nationwide whose proposals were selected among 492 submitted from around the world. She received the maximum award for an individual grant, which will be used to support her very timely research and writing on "The Privatization and Devolution of Immigration Control in Liberal Democracies: Non-State Actors, Security, and Civil Liberties," focusing on the proliferation of non-state actors at the local, international and private levels, and examining new strategies for privatizing and devolving immigration implementation in liberal democracies.

Understanding East Timor
David Hicks received a Fulbright Scholarship to return to East Timor and continue his research on the that troubled country’s political history and also to advise on developing higher education programs and institutions. In addition to his research on politics, ritual and belief, and kinship, Prof. Hicks has found time to serve on two occasions for the Carter Center monitoring the United Nations’ oversight of the elections of 1999 and 2001. He has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Discovery and Innovation