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IN THIS ISSUE:
BUILDING A CENTER OF EXCELLENCE
HOPES FOR A HIGH-TECH HARVEST
BATTLING “BUGS” AND BACTERIA
TURNING THE TIDE ON CATASTROPHE
BINGHAMTONRESEARCHB i n g h a m t o n U n i v e r s i t y / S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Y o r k / 2 0 0 6 - 0 7
HEAT BRINGING THE
Ramped-up research
initiatives are giving a
lift to local and regional
economies, advancing
national interests and
launching promising
careers across the
disciplines
pg. 4 Calming the Cultural CacophonyAsian and Asian American Studies program helps students succeed in global village
BINGHAMTON RESEARCH
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CONTENTS2About Binghamton Research
3Messages
4Calming the cultural cacophonyAsian and Asian American Studies program helps students succeed in global village
8Five Es = better math, science teachingCenter strives to meet the critical need for top-quality K-12 instructors
16Vanquishing villainous virusesHuman immune system inspires new approach to computer security
FEATURES
20Bringing the heat
Cover Story: Ramped-up research initiatives are giving a lift to local and regional economies, advancing national interests and launching promising careers across the disciplines
12Beyond all reason
Human learning, behavior might be more mechanistic than rational
38Taproot of excellence
Binghamton plugs into international research grid as small-scale electronics powerhouse
48High water
Rising tide of losses signals need for changing land use in vulnerable areas
28From paperweight to pixelsThe digital revolution in research administration
32New hope for a high-tech harvestFaculty start-ups and spin-offs find safe haven in ITC pre-incubator
34“Flexing” its research musclesBinghamton takes a new approach to lab design and management
44Sending slime packingResearcher finds key to biofilm breakup
52Weathering the stormNurse urges heightened awareness, preparation for calamity
56Helping neighborhoods help themselvesEvolutionist strives to understand communities in a new way
60Where the baloney meets the roadScholarship and the marketplace
63In Brief
B i n g h a m t o n U n i v e r s i t y / S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y o f N e w Y o r k / 2 0 0 6 - 0 7
Editorial StaffEditorial TeamSusan E. Barker, Rachel Coker
Contributing WritersSusan E. Barker, Rachel Coker, Merrill Douglas, Sandra Kazinetz
Copy Editing John Wojcio, Katie Ellis
Art Direction and DesignMartha P. Terry
PhotographyJonathan Cohen, Diogenes Agcaoili Jr., Kathryn Deuel, iStock ImagesCover: Gerald Dorland
IllustrationsAshok Subramanian, iStock Images
Binghamton UniversityLois B. DeFleurPresident
Gerald SonnenfeldVice President for Research
Christopher RitterAssociate Vice President for University Communications and Marketing
Susan E. BarkerExecutive Director of Research Advancement
Gregory DelviscioDirector of Publications
Binghamton Research is published annually as a joint project of the Division of Research and the Office of University Communications and Marketing.
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to: Binghamton Research, Office of University Communications and Marketing, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, New York 13902-6000.
Binghamton University is strongly committed to affirmative action. We offer access to services and recruit students and employees without regard to race, color, gender, religion, age, disability, marital status, sexual orientation or national origin.
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ABOUT BINGHAMTON RESEARCH
NEW YORK STATE CENTER OF EXCELLENCESmall Scale Systems Integration Packaging Center (S3IP)Director: Bahgat Sammakia
ORGANIZED RESEARCH CENTERSCenter for Advanced Information Technologies (CAIT)Director: Victor Skormin
Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM)Director: Bahgat Sammakia
Center for Advanced Sensors and Environmental Systems (CASE)Director: Omowunmi Sadik
Center for Applied Community Research and Development (CACRD)Director: Allison Alden
Center for Cognitive and Psycholinguistic Sciences (CaPS)Director: Cynthia Connine
Center for Computing Technologies (CCT)Director: Kanad Ghose
Center for Developmental Psychobiology (CDP)Director: Norman Spear
Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender (CHSWG)Co-Directors: Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin
Center for Integrated Watershed Studies (CIWS)Director: Joseph Graney
Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture (CPIC)Director: Maria Lugones
Center for Leadership Studies (CLS)Director: Francis Yammarino
Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT)Director: Wayne Jones
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS)Director: Karen-edis Barzman
Center for Research in Translation (CRIT)Director: Rosemary Arrojo
Center for Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education (CSMTE)Director: Thomas O’Brien
Center for the Teaching of American History (CTAH)Co-Directors: Thomas Dublin and Daniel Lerner
Center for Writers (CW)Director: Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Center on Democratic Performance (CoDP)Director: Michael McDonald
Clinical Science and Engineering Center (CSEC)Director: Kenneth McLeod
Institute for Materials Research (IMR)Director: M. Stanley Whittingham
Institute for Primary and Preventative Health Care (IPPH)Director: Gary James
Institute of Biomedical Technology (IBT)Director: John G. Baust
Integrated Electronics Engineering Center (IEEC)Director: Bahgat Sammakia
Linux Technology Center (LTC)Director: Merwyn Jones
Public Archaeology Facility (PAF)Director: Nina Versaggi
Roger L. Kresge Center for Nursing Research (KCNR)Director: Gale Spencer
INSTITUTES FOR ADVANCED STUDIESFernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems,
and Civilizations (FBC)Director: Richard E. Lee
Institute for Asian and Asian American Studies (IAAAS)Director: John Chafee
Institute of Global Cultural Studies (IGCS)Director: Ali Mazrui
www.binghamton.eduresearch.binghamton.edu
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At the University, our scholars’ minds are constantly humming, giving off the sparks that ignite
ideas in such diverse fields as microbiology and information security.
From David Davies’ work with biofilms, which could transform health care, manufacturing, shipping
and pharmaceutics, to Victor Skormin’s immune system-inspired approach to computing,
our researchers are setting the pace for inquiry and discovery. They’re also raising the alarm
about land use and disaster preparedness in the wake of devastating hurricanes and the need
to improve science and mathematics education as part of important national debates with far-
reaching impact.
The tools and facilities available to these researchers are more advanced than ever. Consider the
flex labs at our Innovative Technologies Complex, which are designed to be adapted quickly to
new projects and to foster multidisciplinary work. State-of-the-art technology and facilities support
creativity and innovation, which in turn attract additional faculty, staff and students.
We are pleased to share these exciting stories with our colleagues, friends and supporters and
hope you’ll enjoy learning about the many ways that Binghamton University continues to question
and challenge existing knowledge.
A MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT
LOIS B. DEFLEUR
Like the parts of a suspended mobile, many aspects of today’s world are interconnected, and, as such,
advances in any arena often provoke reactive change in others. Few arenas, however, possess the transformative
potential of research. Within and across the disciplines, research, scholarship and creative activity do more
than just spur reactive change. They spark innovation, ignite invention and provide the fuel to define — or
redefine — the future.
New ideas and perspectives, new solutions to problems and new technologies and products — all of these
are research dividends that significantly reshape the way we interact with each other and our environment. But
each new research-inspired revelation also further informs and enhances the very activity from which it sprang.
New questions materialize. New pathways of inquiry reveal themselves. New tools of observation and analysis
take shape. And all such innovation opens up new creative possibilities and economic opportunities.
At Binghamton University, our commitment to research is clear, and as the cover of this issue of Binghamton
Research suggests, we are, in every sense of the phrase, “bringing the heat.” In a competitive research
climate, this year’s 24 percent rate of growth in our research heralds the enterprise and dedication of our faculty
researchers and of the graduate and undergraduate students who assist and learn from them. Twenty new
patent applications signal their ingenuity and inventiveness. The opening of the biotechnology research building
at the Innovative Technologies Complex, the designation of Binghamton University as a New York
State Center of Excellence in Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging and the state’s
commitment of $66 million for the design and construction of a second science and engineering
research building at the ITC portend well for our future.
The “heat” generated by the creative engine of Binghamton research gives a lift to regional
economies, advances national interests and launches promising careers within and beyond the
academy. We trust you will enjoy reading about a sampling of the important work going on here.
A MESSAGE FROM THE VICE PRESIDENT FOR RESEARCH
GERALD SONNENFELD
MESSAGES
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CALMING THE CULTURAL
CACOPHONY
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For a soldier seeking the trust of civilians in Kabul, a salesperson courting a client in Bangalore or diplomats forging an agreement over dinner in Seoul, greater understanding yields greater success.
A S I A N A N D A S I A N A M E R I C A N
STUDIES PROGRAM HELPS STUDENTS
S U C C E E D I N G L O B A L V I L L A G E
America’s prosperity and security in-creasingly depend on how well we can communicate with people of other na-tions. With that in mind, in January 2006, President Bush launched the National Security Language Initiative, a plan to dramatically increase the number of U.S. citizens who speak languages con-sidered critical, such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Farsi and Hindi. The initiative will support language instruction in kindergarten through the university level and fund programs to train foreign language teachers.
Perhaps even more than gaining foreign language skills, understanding other cultures is crucial for success in an ever-more-interconnected world. “The size of your vocabulary or the correctness of your grammar is trumped by your ability to deal with someone as a sympathetic cultural interactor,” said H. Stephen Straight, vice provost for undergraduate education and international affairs at Binghamton University.
Binghamton’s Asian and Asian American Studies (AAAS) program is poised to take a leading role in the movement
for greater intercultural understanding. Historically an undergraduate program, AAAS recently added an institute of advanced studies. The new Institute for Asian and Asian American Studies could open opportunities to increase the undergraduate offerings within AAAS, perhaps add a graduate program and support interdisciplinary faculty research.
For example, “there are some faculty who are looking to put together a mini-conference next year on issues of gender studies in South Asia,” said John Chaffee, professor of history and director of AAAS. Researchers with expertise in diverse areas might also collaborate on such subjects as migrations and the Asian diaspora, art history and Chinese and Japanese film, he said.
AAAS evolved from Binghamton Uni-versity’s East Asian Studies program, which for many years focused mainly on China and Japan. Responding to strong student demand in the early 1990s, the program added an Asian American Studies component. This was considered
a temporary measure until the Univer-sity gained the resources to develop a freestanding Asian American Studies program. But toward the end of the decade, “we decided that this marriage of convenience could be turned into a strength,” Chaffee said.
Few other universities have put the two fields of study under one roof, but the combination reflects current reality for Asians in the U.S. and in Asia, Chaffee said. “Those Asians who come to this country certainly become Americans, but in many cases they maintain their ties to Asia. In some cases, they go back and forth frequently. We find all kinds of very interesting social patterns in terms of how they negotiate the two cultures.” At the same time, “Asia itself is becom-ing increasingly globalized. The idea that you can compartmentalize Asia geo-graphically, and say all we’re concerned with is studying Asia in the Asian con-text, no longer makes so much sense.”
Seokyung Han, a doctoral candidate in philosophy, interpretation, and culture who earned a graduate certificate in
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UNDERSTANDING OTHER CULTURES
I S C R U C I A L F O R S U C C E S S I N A N
EVER-MORE-INTERCONNECTED WORLD.
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AAAS, has come to appreciate the global nature of cultural diffusion. In her dissertation, she is examining didactic texts and illustrations created in Korea, China and Japan in the 15th through 17th centuries to learn how ideas are transmitted among cultures. To fulfill the Asian American Studies requirement for AAAS, she studied how Asian literature and American literature influence one another. While she chose that topic purely because it piqued her interest, eventually, “I recognized the fact that this is part of my [PhD] study, too,” she said. “There is some kind of common denominator” among the mechanisms of cultural transmission.
In 2006, Han and two other graduate students created their own milieu for intercultural exchange, organizing an off-campus exhibit of work by contemporary artists from China, Korea and Japan.
A $1.75 million grant from the Freeman Foundation has helped AAAS greatly expand its program since 2002. Today, it offers an undergraduate major and minor, a graduate certificate and a com-munity internship program in New York City. Participating faculty come from the departments of German, Russian and East Asian Languages; History; Art History; Sociology; English; Philosophy; Anthropology; Economics; Management and Human Development.
The Institute for Asian and Asian American Studies has plans for even further expansion, including numerous community development and outreach activities. AAAS is also collaborating with the Department of Public Admin-istration to develop a joint five-year
BA/MA program and to incorporate the graduate certificate in Asian and Asian American Studies into the master’s in public administration.
The National Security Language Initia-tive could also hold promise for increas-ing Binghamton’s offerings in Asian language and culture. “We’ve been eye-ing that program, especially with our desire to expand in South Asian lan-guages,” Chaffee said. He hopes that the federal initiative might someday offer resources in that area, and also help sat-isfy the huge demand for more classes in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
Courses in Asian languages are taught in the University’s Department of German, Russian and East Asian Languages but AAAS maintains a close relationship with that department.
Because AAAS already offers so many courses that promote the understanding of Asian and Asian American culture, Binghamton University now can focus on exactly what the National Security Language Initiative calls for: expand-ing instruction in critical languages, said Straight. “But we’ll be putting that in a context, thanks to John, that has a much greater chance of success than if we simply had the strength in lan-guages.” A student who learned Hindi at Binghamton, for example, could also explore how people who grew up speak-ing that language interact with other people and cultures, within India and around the world.
“What we’re already doing,” Straight said, “can set the stage for success in these other areas.”
A M E R I C A ’ S
P R O S P E R I T Y
AND SECUR ITY
I N C R E A S I N G LY
DEPEND ON HOW
W E L L W E C A N
C O M M U N I C AT E
WITH PEOPLE OF
OTHER NATIONS.
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At least since Oct. 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik and began the space race, leaders in government, business and academia have wor-ried over the performance of U.S. students in math and science — and over how the nation’s standing in the world would be affected by it.
CENTER STRIVES TO MEET THE CRITICAL NEED FOR TOP-QUALITY
K-12 INSTRUCTORS
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Today, that concern is as urgent as ever, and Binghamton University is stepping to the forefront of efforts to improve science and math instruction in U.S. schools, said Thomas O’Brien, associate professor in the School of Education and director of Binghamton’s Center for Sci-ence, Math and Technology Education (CSMTE).
In 2006, the National Science Board re-ported that U.S. students were at or near the bottom among the 29 member na-tions of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that took part in a study of how well 15-year-olds use math and science knowledge.
In an effort to explain and help reverse such a poor showing, the NSB, which is the governing body of the National Sci-ence Foundation, took a close look at the ranks of U.S. science and math teachers.
“The number of certified science and math teachers at the middle school and high school levels is down, science education for pre-service teachers at our nation’s education schools appears to be less rigorous compared to other subjects, and elementary teachers do not feel qualified teaching science,” the board concluded.
O’Brien agrees. “There’s a need for updating a lot of teachers who are in
the field,” not only in terms of recent scientific developments, but also in “pedagogical content knowledge, the intersection between pedagogy with the particular discipline,” he said.
Although they have mastered their sub-ject areas and care deeply about their students, many public-school teachers face a challenge in teaching science and math because their training isn’t informed by the latest research, O’Brien added.
Binghamton’s CSMTE, an organized re-search center, brings faculty and gradu-
ate students from Binghamton’s School of Education, Harpur College of Arts and Sciences and Watson School of En-gineering and Applied Science together with practicing teachers for professional development programs. The aim is to raise the level of math and science edu-cation and enhance the use of technol-ogy in public-school classrooms.
CSMTE’s science programs expose teachers to a concept called the Five E Cycle — “Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluate,” O’Brien said.
Relying only on “Engage” — enlivening lessons with hands-on activities — isn’t the way to make sure students absorb new concepts, he said.
The most effective format for instruction is instead the integrated content unit, “a sequence of linked activities, some of which could be book learning, some of which could be a hands-on lab, some of which could be a computer simulation,” followed by an assessment, he added.
Teaching math and science is especially challenging for many instructors in kin-dergarten through seventh grade. Unlike their colleagues in eighth grade and high school, these teachers aren’t required to specialize in a content area, said C. Beth Burch, a professor in the School of Education. They may have taken one or
CSMTE’s science
programs expose
teachers to a
concept called the
Five E Cycle —
“Engage, Explore,
Explain, Elaborate,
Evaluate.”— Thomas O’Brien
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two mathematics courses in their entire college careers, she said.
Burch’s husband, Paul-William Burch, assistant research professor of education, leads a CSMTE-affiliated project called Teacher Leader Quality Partnership (TLQP). Beth Burch and Jean Schmittau, associate professor of education, are co-principal investigators in the project.
Supported by a $1.1 million grant from the New York State Education Depart-ment, the four-year TLQP project is a partnership among Binghamton Uni-versity, SUNY Albany, the Sage Col-leges, Mount Saint Mary and The Col-lege of Saint Rose. So far, it has provided 165 middle-school math teachers and selected fourth- and fifth-grade teachers in small-city and rural districts in New York state with professional training ses-sions that focus on teaching math.
“In many cases, the grant is not only teaching methods for how to teach it, but teaching the math itself,” deepening teachers’ understanding of the concepts so they can better convey them to stu-dents, Beth Burch said.
Schmittau, a specialist in math education, provides the math content for teachers who attend the sessions at Binghamton University, including teachers from the Binghamton City School District.
Meetings are marked by a great deal of lively discussion and collaboration, Paul-William Burch said. The program gives teachers “the opportunity not only to talk to each other about what has been suc-cessful” in the classroom, “but to engage speakers and university educators.”
TLQP trains participants to share what is learned in the seminars with col-leagues in their schools. And since part of CMSTE’s mission is to focus on the needs of girls, students of color and students who are economically disad-vantaged, TLQP offers “equity training” through the Albany-based New York State K-16 Alliance.
Other CSMTE programs in progress or recently completed include the $1.3 million Enhancing Education Through Technology program, which is funded by a grant from the New York State Educa-tion Department and provides computer equipment and training to teachers in the Binghamton City School District; a $150,000 Klee Foundation Award, which supports five science and five math edu-cation students in Binghamton’s master of arts in teaching program; and eco-logical investigations at the University’s Nature Preserve, which brought 480 Binghamton seventh-graders to campus for science field trips, using $6,200 from the Stephen David Ross University and Community Projects Fund.
While many colleges and universities operate teacher education programs, few of them “place as much emphasis on research-informed pedagogy at the program level,” O’Brien said. And while many programs use public schools as student teaching venues, they don’t necessarily offer much to those schools in return. Binghamton’s School of Education models a different approach and “has a long record of serving area schools,” he said.
Ron Fisher, assistant superintendent for secondary instruction and personnel at the Union-Endicott Central School District, agrees.
“They’re integral partners with us, in terms of providing professional development for our teachers, as well as providing opportunities for their students to work in the schools,” he said.
O’Brien feels confident CSMTE’s ap-proach will add up to better math and science education. By working with public schools, promoting ongoing dialogues and training, better preparing new teachers and helping classroom teachers to employ research-informed teaching practices, the center seems to have devised a formula that promises to help spur a resurgence in U.S. math and science education.
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HUMAN LEARNING, BEHAVIOR MIGHT BE MORE MECHANISTIC THAN RATIONAL
Beyond all reason
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People might have a lot more in common with Pavlov’s dogs than any of us would care to think. Learning might be a far more mechanical, even automatic, process than most of us — most notably modern-day educators — dare to imagine. And even if a student can’t recite the times tables, that doesn’t mean he didn’t “learn” them.
These rather startling assertions only hint at the profound implications of a growing body of work by Ralph R. Miller, distinguished professor of psy-chology. Miller’s work, which for more than 37 years has earned continuous federal sponsorship, deals both with animal conditioning and human deci-sion making. It is opening new windows on understanding the complex cognitive processes involved in acquiring, retriev-ing and using information to make deci-sions. And it is calling into question the common belief that human behavior is a function of rational thought.
“We don’t think the view of the rational mind as the basis of behavior is illu-minating,” Miller explains. And even if there is such a thing as rational thought, there is certainly no good explanation for how exactly it works.
In fact, assertions about the rational mind, Miller says, often amount to varia-tions on the Homunculus Argument, which attempts to explain thought and behavior by positing that we have in our head an agent capable of rational thought — essentially a “little person,” or homunculus, who helps us make choices and reason our way through life. Most psychologists and philosophers have disavowed such accounts on the premise that to explain rational thought in such a way is circular reasoning. Rather than defer to our ability to reason, Miller studies the cognitive mechanisms and processes underlying reasoning in humans and animals.
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Miller is an internationally prominent experimental psychologist whose current project, “Associative Determinants of Performance,” is funded by a five-year, $1.4 million research grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.
But he is probably best known for es-tablishing the foundation of temporal coding theory. While the name sounds off-putting, it is essentially a theory rooted in the proposition that the hu-man mind is mechanistic rather than rational — that what goes on in it can be explained through physical and biologi-cal causes, many of which hinge on the timing of sensory input we receive.
In essence, temporal coding theory sug-gests that in Pavlovian conditioning or associative learning, the timing of stimuli in connection to one another is not just important but integral to the association that results. In other words, receiving the food soon after the bell goes off doesn’t just catalyze learning. The contiguity or timing of these two events in relation to each other is actually encoded as part of the association. This theory is a radical departure from traditional views and has helped over the past two decades to change the direction of research in the field of associative learning.
Miller’s theory also takes another dra-matic step away from traditional think-ing concerning the role of rewards and punishments, and asserts that if the tim-ing between the conditioned response and the unconditioned response is close enough, nothing more is needed for an
association to be made. Good contiguity, it says, is sufficient for the formation of an association.
It also asserts that temporal coding is critical in determining what behav-ior a cue will elicit, or if and when the behavior is elicited, and perhaps more important, that temporal information from independent episodes can be inte-grated to effectively create an association between two disparate events, events that were never directly paired.
For example, if rats learn that pressing a lever produces a tone and, subsequently, with the lever removed, hear the tone right before they are fed, as soon as the lever is reintroduced, they press it with radically increased frequency. Presum-ably, they’ve associated the tone with the delivery of food and have arrived at the conclusion that the lever causes the tone and that pressing it will get them more food, even though there was no direct association between the food and the lever. This is just one of the many ex-periments in which Miller has explored how humans and rats attribute causality, or the relationship between cause and effect. While rats differ from humans in
their approaches to complex tasks, there is little difference across the species in terms of such basic processes as influ-ence-associative learning and causal judgments, he said.
Rats, of course, cannot tell us how they think. But by watching how they at-tempt to control effects by manipulating potential causes, we can draw conclu-sions about their perception of causal-ity. And, as it turns out, rats, as in the situation above, behave in ways that are completely analogous to humans: both can arrive at causality without trial-and-error training. Because coming up with different explanations for such analogous behavior just doesn’t fly from a scientific perspective, Miller said he is forced to conclude either that rational thought has little to do with rat or hu-man behavior, or that rational thought processes are also widespread among non-human species.
Seen through the lens of his theory, re-sults such as these begin to explain how something that might appear to involve a rational thought process is actually the result of purely mechanistic processes. Miller’s opinion is that the rats aren’t “reasoning out” the connection between the lever and the food, but are instead quite mechanistically calling upon tem-poral information from two independent learning episodes to create a meaningful association between events that were not directly paired.
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Unlike most theories of associative learning, temporal coding theory also maintains a clear distinction between learning and the behavioral expression of that learning. Miller believes, in fact, that learning itself is ultimately an au-tomatic process. He likens the mind to a garbage pail.
“Everything goes into it, and the real questions are about the conditions under which we are going to be able to retrieve and make use of things,” he said.
“The problem is not so much about what you learn, but rather, what you can retrieve and how you use the information.” Again, our mathematically challenged student might have “learned” the times tables just fine, thank you, but for a variety of reasons might not be able to access that information.
Miller’s research also distinguishes between information processing that occurs during training and processing that occurs at test. His findings here contradict and reverse what he describes as the general view in academia that initial learning is a complex chore for an organism and that once something is learned, translating that information
into behavior later on is relatively trivial. He thinks instead that learning is rela-tively simple, and that complexity arises in retrieving and using that which has been “encoded.”
“The conditions of testing are absolutely crucial to what is going to be retrieved,” Miller says, “with much better recall produced by matching conditions of re-trieval to conditions of training.
“This is fine,” he adds, “if you can con-trol conditions of retrieval as you can in a laboratory. But in the real world, we don’t control them to any great extent. Hence, we should try to match the conditions of training to the conditions of retrieval, as imposed by real-world situations.”
In successful 19th-century classrooms, Miller said, the focus was on teach-ing students by introducing them to problems drawn from the real-world experiences they would encounter when
they left school. A math test, for instance, might ask them to determine, based on the measurements of a wagon, the optimal size of hay bales to be transported in it.
Today, teaching often takes a more ab-stract approach, but Miller’s research suggests that educators who focus on trying to teach students to “think” might be misguided. There might be a small, highly elite part of the population that can benefit from training with abstrac-tions, he said, but the vast majority of people learn better when training is specific to a real application.
“We tend not to generalize from how to solve one task to being able to solve parallel tasks that are superficially quite different,” he said.
Teaching to the test, which is another common approach these days, could, ac-cording to Miller’s research, be a better strategy — but only if the tests are based on real-world problems. Medical and business schools that are increasing the use of case studies to train students by exposing them to real-life problems and conditions are, according to his research, on the right track.
Ralph Miller is an internationally
prominent experimental
psychologist whose current
project, “Associative Determinants
of Performance,” is funded by a
five-year, $1.4 million research
grant from the National Institute
of Mental Health.
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HUMAN IMMUNE SYSTEM INSPIRES NEW APPROACH
TO COMPUTER SECURITY
anquishingillainous
iruses
In a twist of Orwellian proportion, the human immune system might hold the key to halting the spread of computer viruses.
A pioneering technique developed by a team of Binghamton researchers goes existing virus-detection software one better.
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Malware is an area of intense interest to the computing community worldwide, and for good reason. According to Con-sumer Reports, computer viruses did at least $5.2 billion in damage last year, or about $109 per individual victim.
The immune system-simulating mal-ware-detection technique is the second spin-off of ongoing Binghamton re-search investigating biologically inspired methods in computer security. The first spin-off, a book titled Immunocomputing, won widespread acclaim for laying the mathematical foundation for applying immune methods in computing.
The Binghamton team is led by Dis-tinguished Service Professor Victor Skormin, director of the Center for Advanced Information Technologies and a co-author of the book. It includes Associate Professor Douglas Summer-ville and doctoral students Alexander Volynkin and James Moronski.
By exploiting the ability to self-replicate — generally a signal that software is up to no good — the new technique mimics the human body’s response to a biological intruder and detects even previously unknown malicious software — or “malware.”
“When it comes to computer
security, it’s an arms race.
Each time you come up with a
new way to defend a computer
network, the bad guys come
up with a new way to attack
it. This could go on forever.”
— Victor Skormin
“Victor is an innovator. He’s very cre-ative,” said Joseph Giordano, computer scientist at the Air Force Research Labo-ratory in Rome, N.Y. “He’s pushed this biologically inspired network defense thinking — and when you really come down to it, it’s a new way of thinking.”
The U.S. Air Force has already invested about $1.5 million in this research, and Skormin expects that figure will surpass $2 million in the near future. His long-standing relationships with the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Rome laboratory have laid the foundation for the partnership and helped boost Binghamton’s profile in the area of information assurance.
“Malicious biological tissue has very specific malicious genes,” Skormin ex-plained. “A gigantic percentage of the genetic material in this tissue is the same as in healthy tissue, but it has some spe-cific genes that make it malicious. This way of thinking led me to the concept of detecting the gene of self-replication in computer programs. It is very unlikely for a legitimate program to self-replicate. But a virus or computer worm self-repli-cates because it’s the only way to create an epidemic that would maximize its destructive impact.”
The functionality of legitimate software can be traced through so-called “system calls, ” which enable different parts of
will see the big picture, ”Skormin said. “When you see the whole network reporting on attempts to self-replicate, this means that you will know if a distributed, evolving attack takes place.”
The immune system provides an exam-ple of a distributed defense mechanism relying on highly specialized self-repli-cating “anti-viruses.” Skormin and his team intend to replicate this approach in a computer network. The trick at such a large scale will be spreading an anti-virus without exhausting the net-work resources; therefore, the key issue is the definition of a complex negative feedback mechanism governing this process.
Skormin and his team will begin with a limited-size network, but he’s confident the approach has far wider applications.
“Even the Internet could rely on this,” he said.
Binghamton’s researchers hope to find a corporate partner to help commercialize the technique. Skormin has also begun talks with Wall Street representatives who envision applications for the banking industry.
“The advantage of what we do is that we’re not looking back into the history of known attacks,” he said. “We’re developing techniques that will help to oppose previously unknown viruses.”
Giordano noted that the Air Force appreciates each of these innovations. “The way we are today in an information society, ideas get generated rapidly and we have the tools to experiment,” he said. “Things like this may make it to the market sooner than we all think.”
Skormin likes to joke that he and his team have excellent job security because there’s such creativity on each side of the infor-mation assurance battle. “When it comes to computer security, it’s an arms race,” he said. “Each time you come up with a new way to defend a computer network, the bad guys come up with a new way to attack it. This could go on forever.”
In computer security, a computer
virus is a self-replicating computer
program that spreads by inserting
copies of itself into other executable
code or documents. A computer virus
behaves in a way similar to a biological
virus, which spreads by inserting itself
into living cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus
into the program is termed an “infection,” and the infected
file, or executable code that is not part of a file, is called a
“host.” Viruses are one of the several types of malicious
software or malware. In common parlance, the term virus
is often extended to refer to worms, trojan horses and other
sorts of malware; viruses in the narrow sense of the word
are less common than they used to be, compared to other
forms of malware.
While viruses can be intentionally destructive, for example,
by destroying data, many other viruses are fairly benign or
merely annoying. Some viruses have a delayed payload,
which is sometimes called a bomb. For example, a virus
might display a message on a specific day or wait until it
has infected a certain number of hosts. A time root occurs
during a particular date or time, and a logic bomb occurs
when the user of a computer takes an action that triggers
the bomb. The predominant negative effect of viruses is
their uncontrolled self-reproduction, which wastes or
overwhelms computer resources. — From Wikipedia
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The immune system
provides an example of
a distributed defense
mechanism relying
on highly specialized
self-replicating “anti-
viruses.” Skormin and
his team intend to rep-
licate this approach in
a computer network.
the computer system to communicate. Each system call has 40 attributes. Malware invokes the same system calls, but with different sequencing. Skormin sees amino acids as a parallel, in that typical cells and biological intruders have the same basic composition but are sequenced differently.
The Binghamton researchers looked at the combination of attributes to identify signatures that indicate the incontro-vertible mark of malware: self-replica-tion. They then created a program to monitor system calls and their attributes and alert the user if there are signs of self-replication. The user can decide to delete the program — or, if it’s believed to be legitimate, to let it run.
The Binghamton team intends next to apply this idea to a network of comput-ers. They are in the process of build-ing a testbed that will emulate a large computer network with up to 2,000 hosts and a number of servers. They’ll be able to deploy malware and other information attacks to investigate the proliferation of self-replicating software and assess its impact on the network. They’ll also evaluate possible defensive mechanisms.
In essence, the Binghamton software will try to detect problems in individual machines and then report them to the server. “From the server level we
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We’re in the late innings. An increasingly competitive economic and sponsored research climate finds successful, research-active faculty being courted by top universities with the same fervor professional teams bring to the recruitment of promising athletes to play on major-league baseball diamonds.
Anxiously checking the bases and finding them loaded, the world is turning to its academic bullpen, where institutions of higher learning are warming up to take on the challenges ahead.
But contracts have been renegotiated. It’s no longer possible to remain aloof — not in the skybox and not in the dugout. Where they did exist, ivory towers have long since gone the way of Ebbets Field. When it’s to the exclusion of other contributions, even coaching the bases from the sidelines borders on being called foul. Though the performance and preparedness of individuals are vital to the team’s success, much more than pedagogy is expected and required from players on the higher-education club.
So now, with the competition becoming ever more keen, veteran closers — institutions with long and storied histories of academic and research excellence — and energetic, nimble, rookie colleges and universities, eager to prove their worth, sense the importance and the enormity of what they are being asked to do.
Curves have been thrown, not to mention wild pitches. Crises seem to come out of left field, one after the other. But when facing heavy hitters, the bullpen needs to be focused and strong. And while today’s potential all-stars of academe are expected to continue to do what they do so well — educate and explore — they’re expected to step up to the plate in many other ways as well.
They are being asked to captain the team. They are being tapped to re-energize the game by generating ideas, technologies and products that advance local, national and global economies. They are being recruited to help even the score and level the playing field by solving pressing social and political problems around the globe. Ultimately, to help save the day, they are being signed by the global community — not just to teach others how to play or appreciate the nuances of the game, but to themselves suit up and play — skillfully.
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T O W A R D B E T T E R U N D E R S TA N D I N G
While raising its aspirations across the continuum of research, scholarship and creative activity, Binghamton University research is pumping up local and regional economies, advancing state and national interests and teaching students how they can do the same.When the going gets tough, the tough get going. In the parlance of baseball, that often boils down to the club manager putting in a call to the bullpen for a relief pitcher capable of “bringing the heat.” An esoteric reference to a blindingly hot fastball, it didn’t take long for Wall Street advertisers, business executives and throngs of non-sports-minded people the world over to adopt the saying as shorthand for “raising your game.”
That, according to community partners and its own box scores, is exactly what Binghamton University has been doing in recent years, particularly as concerns its research initiatives. But raising its own game isn’t the only effect of Binghamton bringing the heat with ramped-up research, area business people said. Like the burner on a hot air balloon, when the University brings the heat, regional economies and quality of life are elevated as well.
Roberta Rivero, vice president for quality management at United Health Services, where Binghamton University researchers are partnering to improve hospital protocols and practices, credits Binghamton’s burgeoning research programs with enhancing the regional economy, fostering “brain draw” to the community, generating local revenue and increasing cultural diversity.
T O W A R D I M P R O V E D Q U A L I T Y O F L I F E
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THE UNIVERSITY’S
STRATEGIC PLAN,
“EXCELLENCE IN
A CLIMATE
OF CHANGE,”
UNDERSCORES
THE INSTITUTION’S
COMMITMENT
TO SYNERGISTIC
AND INNOVATIVE
COUPLINGS OF
RESEARCH AND
UNDERGRADUATE
EDUCATION.
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institution of higher education, one that combines an international reputation for research, scholarship and creative endeavor with the best undergraduate programs available at any public university,” calls for and commits resources to achieve a doubling of sponsored research activity over the next five years. Quantifiable evidence affords strong support for the claim that the research environment at Binghamton is already vital and growing. In the past decade, sponsored research activity more than doubled. This past year alone, the University posted a 24 percent increase in sponsored research awards.
Meanwhile, the University has also seen significant growth in technology transfer activity. With its posting of a 53 percent increase in licensing income this past fiscal year, the University staked its claim as second in this category in the entire 64 campus State University of New York (SUNY) system.
Notably, Binghamton was also the only SUNY institution to post an increase in licensing income on the year, with the other leading universities seeing declines of from five to 80 percent. University research has also spawned nine new start-up companies, and last year led to a 45 percent increase in invention disclosures and to the filing of 20 patent applications, up from just eight the year prior.
The main significance of these numbers, said Eugene Krentsel, director of technology transfer and innovation partnerships, is not necessarily in the absolute numbers, but in the trends they represent. In a period of generally flat federal research funding, and when other SUNY schools are seeing a dramatic waning in the creation of new knowledge and its transfer to the marketplace, Binghamton is clearly bucking the trend. During the past several years, New York state has recognized and lent significant
support to the University’s successful blending of research and undergraduate excellence. The University received $15 million in state funds to renovate its Innovative Technologies Complex, $21 million to design and build a University Downtown Center and $66 million for the design and construction of a new science and engineering research building. The University has also received federal earmarks totaling about $11 million to support ongoing research projects and won a national competition leading to its selection by the United States Display Consortium as a Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing. That move was accompanied by the award of more than $13 million in first-generation roll-to-roll (R2R) electronics manufacturing equipment, establishing Binghamton as home to the world’s first prototype manufacturing and testbed line.
Electronics is a major strength at Binghamton, and one the University has leveraged across the disciplines, culminating most recently with the designation of its Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging program as a New York state Center of Excellence.
But research at the 887-acre campus spans the disciplines and more and more often draws upon the expertise of faculty from across the disciplines to form unique research teams addressing urgent world problems.
Because of the interdisciplinary nature of some of today’s most pressing questions — questions involving human genomics, materials science, cell biology, bioengineering and biomedicine — these cross-disciplinary connections regularly develop into permanent working relationships.
Binghamton faculty have formalized these relationships through the Cen-ter of Excellence, a host of organized
COVER STORY
Cynthia Giroux, technology director of thin films and surfaces research at Corn-ing, and Sandeep Tonapi, project leader of micro- and nanostructure technolo-gies at GE, agree. University research, both said, is key to spurring the economy and keeping bright young professionals in the area.
“Under President DeFleur, the University has flourished, garnered increased funding from state and federal sources and strengthened ties to industry,” Giroux said. “With linkage to quality companies through its centers and consortiums, this then allows graduates to be linked to industries in the area.”
“We feel that BU research in the areas of small-scale systems integration and packaging, flexible electronics, and electronics packaging is crucial to the region’s economic growth and vitality,” Tonapi agreed. “BU’s participation in these globally competitive areas with very high potential for economic growth complements the industry’s growth and provides the critically needed young workforce in science and engineering.”
Since its inception in 1946 as Triple Cities College, the University has changed significantly. From its roots as a four-year liberal arts college with a reputation for superb undergraduate education, it has evolved into an excellent doctoral research university, with a broad range of liberal arts and professional programs, all carefully designed to preserve and build upon its traditional undergraduate excellence.
The University’s strategic plan, “Excel-lence in a Climate of Change,” under-scores the institution’s commitment to synergistic and innovative couplings of research and undergraduate education.
The plan, which “arises from the vision of a truly distinguished and unique
research centers and three institutes for advanced studies.
These organizations, which offer equip-ment and expertise that may be accessed by faculty across the disciplines and by members of the community who need specialized services, are one of the Uni-versity’s most important links to larger local, regional and global communities.
Ultimately, however, the University’s research success depends on the contri-butions and commitment of individual faculty. And there, the game is being raised as well.
Toward better understandingAssistant Professor Leo Wilton, for instance, was chosen for a prestigious fellowship with the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California at San Francisco. Over the course of three summers, he will lay the foundation for a multimillion-dollar research grant proposal. His central goal is to address the disproportionate HIV/AIDS infection rate among people of color.
Wilton, who holds appointments in the Department of Human Development as well as with Africana Studies in Harpur College of Arts and Sciences, will study body image and how it interfaces with HIV risk behaviors among black gay men. Issues he will consider include race stress, gay stress and internalized homophobia.
Forty-six percent of black gay men are HIV-positive, Wilton said. “In terms of the nation, we’re in a crisis,” he added.
In the School of Management, Francis Yammarino and other researchers have been given $160,000 to complete work driven by the changing nature of the U.S. Navy’s mission, equipment and technology. Yammarino and his team
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are helping to develop a database that will match Naval personnel and their skills with the numerous tasks the Navy may undertake and the kinds of people needed to fulfill them.
When the project is completed, a Naval officer will be able to go to a computer, answer a series of questions about the tasks he or she has been assigned and receive a list of skilled people appropriate for the mission.
“The thing that makes all of it work is leadership,” said Yammarino, who noted this project may eventually be part of a much larger reorganization of the entire Department of Defense.
A distinguished professor of manage-ment and director of the Center for Leadership Studies, Yammarino has partners at SkillsNet in Texas as well as at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Central Florida.
Toward improved quality of lifeAnother new study led by researchers at Binghamton University’s Decker School of Nursing is looking at ways to improve heart-healthy behaviors among rural women. The work is funded by a three-year, $150,000 grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research.
Rural women may not be at higher risk for cardiovascular disease than the rest of the population, but they do face particular challenges. For instance, they were among the last groups in the country to start smoking — and they’re among the last to quit.
“I’ve seen a lot of the issues firsthand,” said Associate Professor Pamela Stewart Fahs, a native of Kentucky and director of Binghamton University’s O’Connor Office of Rural Health Studies. “I’ve also seen what socio-cultural aspects of rural living both protect and cause problems for those citizens.”
The study will involve a total of 176 women ages 45-65 at moderate to high risk for cardiovascular disease. Half will be from Delaware County in New York and the other half will be from a rural Virginia county.
Researchers will use two techniques in an effort to encourage study participants to be physically active, eat at least five servings of fruit and vegetables daily and not smoke. The first technique, called community intervention, will be available to all of the women in the study. The second technique, a series of nursing interventions, will be part of the program for half of the study participants.
Toward a safer worldResearchers at Binghamton University are also exploring a first-ever opportunity to determine if chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer can be spread to humans who ingest “infected” meat. Ralph M. Garruto, professor of biomedical anthropology, is heading up a study to monitor the health implications for a group of people who are known to have consumed venison infected with CWD. Recently discovered in both wild and captive deer herds in New York, CWD is similar to mad cow disease in that it concentrates in the spinal cord and brain, and is caused by a virtually indestructible mutated protein called a prion.
“We don’t know if CWD can be transmitted to humans,” Garruto said. “So this group, some of whom we know for sure ate infected meat, offers us a unique opportunity. I’m hoping the study will allow us to determine if this disease can affect humans in the same way mad cow disease has been shown to cause neurological disease in those who consume infected beef.”
The study focuses on a group of people who attended a sportsmen’s feast in
T O W A R D A S A F E R W O R L D
COVER STORY
THE UNIVERSITY
RECEIVED $15
MILLION IN
STATE FUNDS
TO RENOVATE
ITS INNOVATIVE
TECHNOLOGIES
COMPLEX, $21
MILLION TO
DESIGN AND BUILD
A UNIVERSITY
DOWNTOWN
CENTER AND
$66 MILLION FOR
THE DESIGN AND
CONSTRUCTION OF
A NEW SCIENCE
AND ENGINEERING
RESEARCH
BUILDING.
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“THE IDEA IS, IF
YOU’RE GOING
TO GO INTO
BUSINESS, CHANGE
THE WORLD.
DON’T JUST DO
SOMETHING
MUNDANE. EVEN
THOUGH A START-
UP IS ALWAYS
GOING TO START
SMALL, YOU
SHOULD HAVE
AND HOLD ONTO
THE VISION THAT
IT COULD BE
SOMETHING BIG.”
— Kenneth McLeod
T O W A R D A N I N V E N T I V E F U T U R E
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Verona, N.Y., in 2005. At least some of the attendees, who had a choice of entrees, consumed venison from a deer infected with CWD. Upon hearing of the dinner, Garruto approached the Oneida County Health Department to determine if it would assist in a scientific examination of the people who ate the meat. The study will monitor the health of the participants over six years.
Because of another research project, child pornographers will soon have a harder time escaping prosecution. Thanks to a stunning new technology that can reliably link digital images to the camera with which they were taken, in much the same way that telltale scratches are used by forensic examiners to link bullets to the gun that fired them, the rug will be pulled from under a common ploy used by child pornographers to raise “reasonable doubt” about their guilt.
“The defense in these kind of cases would often be that the images were not taken by this person’s camera or that the images are not of real children,” said Jessica Fridrich, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. “Sometimes child pornographers will even cut and paste an image of an adult’s head on the image of a child to try to avoid prosecution.
“But if it can be shown that the original images were taken by the person’s cell phone or camera, it becomes a much stronger case than if you just have a bunch of digital images that we all know are notoriously easy to manipulate.”
Fridrich and two members of her Binghamton University research team, Jan Lukas and Miroslav Goljan, are co-inventors of the new technique, which can also be used to detect forged images.
The three have applied for two pat-ents related to their technique, which
provides the most robust strategy for digital-image forgery detection to date, even as it improves significantly on the accuracy of other approaches.
Toward an inventive futurePassing on to students not only the education but also the scholarly and en-trepreneurial mindset that gives rise to this level of imagination, ingenuity and invention are a very real goal of Bing-hamton University’s research enterprise, even at the undergraduate level.
Kenneth McLeod, director of the University’s nascent bioengineering department, for instance, focuses on teaching his students how to bring “magic” into their senior research project. The year-long project challenges teams of four to six students to identify an existing technology that can be tweaked or redirected so as to serve as the basis for a start-up business addressing a niche need in the mar-ketplace. The “magic” he refers to is drawn from a principle promoted by Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and one of the original Apple Computer employees responsible for the successful marketing in 1984 of the first Macintosh. The term speaks to the catalyzing energy of finding and tuning into the world-altering potential of your product while fashioning your business or making a pitch to potential investors, McLeod explained.
“The idea is, if you’re going to go into business, change the world. Don’t just do something mundane. Even though a start-up is always going to start small, you should have and hold onto the vision that it could be something big.
“What I really try to emphasize is that students shouldn’t focus on high-technology,” McLeod added. “It takes roughly one human generation for a new technology to be incorporated into products that are commonly used. So
if you’ve got 25 to 35 years, go ahead and start a company based on new technology. But most people don’t.”
Once students settle on their product and marketing strategy, they must complete and present a business plan to a team of judges who are positioned as potential investors.
The approach is considered bioengineer-ing, McCleod said, because it challenges students to do exactly what nature does to create new, more successful life forms: “Use what’s already out there.”
Students in last year’s first graduating class said the research project changed their worldview and gave them a new sense of possibility in their lives, more so than any of their traditional studies.
“In a practical way, we’ve been taught a language to be able to talk to all the different disciplines,” said Michael Brown, who graduated last May with a double major in bioengineering and philosophy. “We’ve done research, we can read the research, we can interpret it, we can digest it, we can present it.”
Giya Abraham, who landed a teaching job even before graduation last May, agreed. She can’t imagine not pursuing her newfound interests in entrepreneurship and business after being introduced to the “magic” during her senior project.
“With our experience, felt like we could go anywhere,” she said. “That has definitely changed my outlook on my future. It’s really been great. The door just opens in your mind.”
It’s a door that Brown and Abraham said they and 25 of their classmates will waste no time walking through, helping to ensure that Binghamton research will keep on bringing the heat into the next decade and beyond.
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The digital revolution
in research administration
From paperweight to pixel
s
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If five or 10 years have passed since an emeritus faculty member last sub-mitted a research grant application, he or she probably wouldn’t recognize the process today. Initiated by a move to streamline govern-ment during the Clinton administration, and fueled by rapid advances in tech-nology and electronic communications, the way federal-sponsored funding agencies — places such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the National Endow-ment for the Humanities — do business with campus research administrators and the faculty they support has changed significantly during the past decade.
And the changes at all levels of spon-sored research funding and administra-tion just keep coming.
Federal mandates, for instance, call for all federal agencies to have transitioned to an all-electronic submission process by summer 2007. All agencies will also need to have their program announce-ments available for electronic response via a unified and aptly named website, Grants.gov, by then.
Changes such as these don’t just affect the Washington end of the equation. They also mean that all applications submitted by Binghamton faculty will have to be prepared and submitted electronically, an eventuality for which Binghamton University’s Office of Research Development Services (RDS) has been preparing for years.
“What we tried to do was become part of any type of demo group we could,”
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said Lisa Gilroy, director of Research Development Services. “That allowed us to get a head start so we knew the ins and outs, and the quirks in the system. That way, when we worked with our faculty, we knew what to expect.”
This year, to make the transition even smoother, Binghamton University is adopting, in cooperation with the other three uni-versity centers in the State University of New York system, a system known as Coeus. Developed at MIT and named after the Greek Titan Coeus, god of intelligence and deep, searching questions, the system allows for total online proposal manage-ment.
“Say we’re submitting to the NIH,” Gilroy said. “We go in and tell the system which specific program announcement we’re submitting to. Then it will collect and deliver to us all the nec-essary forms and information related to that announcement. On their end, faculty can forward things to us, and we can go online and see if their information is complete and ensure that they’ve met the guidelines.”
Coeus also facilitates required institutional electronic reviews, including those by department chairs and deans. Until just
months ago, that part of the application process still required walking proposals around campus to obtain administrative reviews and signatures, Gilroy added.
Though Gilroy’s office has gone by several different names since she began working at Binghamton as a grant and contract administrator in 1988, the mission of Research Development Services has remained essentially the same throughout the years. The role of the office is to help faculty identify funding opportunities; assist with proposal preparation, review, negoti-ate and accept awards; and assist with award administration.
Statistics suggest it’s a role the office performs well. Sponsored research funding applications have increased from $40 million in 1996 to slightly more than $110 million last fiscal year. In that same time, awards also more than doubled — from $16 million to $34 million.
Meanwhile, in the post-9/11 era, compliance issues have grown increasingly complex and challenging, and Binghamton has seen a burgeoning of multidisciplinary and multi-institutional proposals, which by their nature are more demanding to prepare than single-investigator applications. But because
“Success tends to ease even the scariest of transitions.”
— Lisa Gilroy
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of the expertise embodied in its staff, and supported by advances in research administration practices and new technologies, the size of the Research Development Services staff has remained essentially unchanged during the past decade, Gilroy said, managing more than double the results with the same number of people.
Last January, along with much of the Division of Research, RDS moved to the Innovative Technologies Complex, a shift that significantly enhanced the physical size of the office, as well as the space it now affords faculty working on grant proposals.
“I can remember on more than a few occasions before we moved having faculty camp out at our desks to work on their proposals with us on deadline,” Gilroy said. “We were already doubled up or in very small offices as it was, but we had no-where else for faculty to work.”
Now Research Development Services includes a private office for every grant and contract administrator and a comfortable faculty resource room, complete with six PCs and one Mac workstation.
Looking back, had the only goal of President Clinton’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government — the 1993 program that set in motion many of the changes in research administration — been to cut back on paperwork to avoid cutting down trees, the program would still have to be rated a huge success, Gilroy said.
She remembers well the challenges she and her colleagues faced 10 years ago.
“Back in 1996, the electronic age hadn’t quite hit us yet, so we spent a lot of our time preparing all these paper grant applications for faculty,” she said. “Many of the forms from sponsoring agencies were provided to us in packets or booklets, where we had to rip out the form and throw it in the typewriter to complete.”
But that wasn’t the tough part, Gilroy said.
“Let’s take an NSF application for example,” she said. “A basic NSF would allow you 25 pages of project narrative, plus the forms. So you were looking at a good half-inch stack of paper when the documents were compiled.”
So “big deal,” you might be thinking. “A half-inch?”
And then with perfect comedic timing, Gilroy delivers the punch line.
“They required us to send anywhere from 22 to 30 copies.”
Even that, it turns out, was likely a cakewalk compared to the preparation of a National Endowment for the Humanities application.
“While the application for some agencies, such as the NEH, might not have been that long, they wanted appendices of ev-ery faculty publication,” Gilroy said.
“So some of our very successful, prominent faculty would give us publications in stacks maybe 2 or 3 feet high.
“And we had to send two or three copies of those as well.”
It has been said that most humor has its roots in the truth, so it’s no surprise that in 1996 Gilroy and her colleagues often joked that the defining moment of a great day in the office was finding a good, sturdy copy-paper box that had been left for recycling by someone in a neighboring office.
Still, Gilroy also recalls feeling wary about electronic research administration when talk of it first started up.
“Oh, how times — and attitudes — do change,” she now says.
“Success tends to ease even the scariest of transitions.”
Last January, along with much of the Division
of Research, RDS moved to the Innovative
Technologies Complex, a shift that significantly
enhanced the physical size of the office, as well
as the space it now affords faculty working on
grant proposals.
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Seeds of economic diversity, vitality and growth are germinating on the second floor of Binghamton University’s biotechnology research building at the Innovative Tech-nologies Complex.
FACULTY START-UPS AND SPIN-OFFS FIND SAFE HAVEN IN ITC PRE-INCUBATOR
New hope for a high-tech harvest
There, administered by the Office of Technology Transfer and Innovation Partnerships, the University’s new Start-Up Suite is filling up with nascent companies, rooted in the invention and industry of faculty and graduate student researchers, and working to commer-cialize discoveries in the life sciences and enabling technologies.
“I think it’s astonishing that at the end of the last fiscal year [2005-06], the University had seen the start-up and continued operation of seven companies that depend on technology that was generated here,” said Eugene Krentsel, director of technology transfer and innovation partnerships. “For a school this size, this is amazing.”
“IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MANY TIMES
YOU FAIL . . . ALL THAT MATTERS IN
BUSINESS IS THAT YOU GET IT RIGHT
ONCE. THEN EVERYONE CAN TELL
YOU HOW LUCKY YOU ARE.” — Mark Cuban
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Not all of the University’s spin-off com-panies, the ranks of which had expanded to nine at the time this article was writ-ten, are located in the Start-Up Suite in the life-sciences research building at the ITC. Only companies with a direct relationship to life-sciences research are eligible to be considered for space in the new facility.
And while not all University spin-offs are still located in the Southern Tier, a majority of them are, which is good news from a regional economic development perspective.
“We hope these companies grow to the point where they will be launched into the community and hire people,” Krentsel said. “That would be wonderful.”
But beyond the regional economic potential, there are other important benefits to be gained as a result of the University’s commitment to provide bright minds with outlets beyond the bounds of academe, Krentsel explained.
“Part of the benefit is economic develop-ment, but the Start-Up Suite also gives us an opportunity to provide certain outlets to a particular type of faculty member we are trying to retain and attract.
“Some researchers want not only to make an impact within academia, but also hope to change the world far beyond the bounds of the campus by seeing their work translated into the creation of new, marketable products, technologies or services — or by positioning their graduate students to do so,” Krentsel said. “This is a terrific opportunity for those faculty,” he added.
More than a few new faculty members specifically inquired about or requested access to facilities such as those the Start-Up Suite provides before deciding to come to the University. Its existence
can also be expected to be a key factor in making Binghamton more competitive in future faculty recruitment efforts.
“We’re talking about people who are academic stars — people we want to recruit, people everyone wants to recruit,” Krentsel said. “And this is something we can offer to them that some other schools probably can’t or won’t.”
The Start-Up Suite, which provides low-cost space and business support services to approved, spin-off enterprises, can house up to eight new companies at a time. Already the suite is close to half-full with companies hoping to capital-ize on bioengineering, chemistry and nanotechnology research done at the University.
As Start-Up Suite residents, in addition to their designated office space, compa-nies have access to a conference room, a workroom replete with all new office equipment (high-speed copier and color printer, scanner, fax machine, fridge, microwave, coffee machine, etc.) and a receptionist.
NSC Technology, one of the first occupants of the Start-Up Suite, focuses on the development of materials for chemical and biological sensors and fuel-cell catalysts. These are an off-shoot of C. J. Zhong’s research. The company’s CEO is Zhong’s former post-doctoral student, Jin Luo.
“WE HOPE THESE
COMPANIES GROW
TO THE POINT
WHERE THEY WILL BE
LAUNCHED INTO THE
COMMUNITY AND
HIRE PEOPLE.”— Eugene Krentsel
“This is an exciting new adventure, and many things are not yet immediately clear,” said C.J. Zhong, as-sociate professor of chemis-try, and the chief academic consultant and adviser to NSC Technology.
What is absolutely clear, Zhong said, is that faculty, students, the University and
businesses will benefit from the creation of the Start-Up Suite.
“NSC Technology develops enabling sciences and technologies that start out in our research labs and aim at commercial products for applications in energy, biomedical devices, envi-ronment and human health,” he said. “The Start-Up Suite provides an im-portant vehicle to facilitate this impor-tant stage of transition. The company benefits from having the office and conference rooms for its scientists and engineers to effectively interact with faculty and student researchers in R&D, and to interact with public or private agencies or companies of interest in regard to financial and commercial management.
“The University benefits from the tech-nology transfer and the further advance-ment of research, both on campus and as part of its industrial partnerships.”
In the competitive global marketplace, just as in the laboratory, luck will always play a crucial role and no venture will ever be risk free. But by providing faculty with the opportunity to try their hands at business, while their feet remain planted in the relative safety of their established careers as academics, Krentsel said the University intends to improve the odds that cutting-edge research will find its way more quickly into the marketplace and people’s lives.
Working in a dark, dank, cavernous laboratory, with only the aid of a fortuitous lightning strike and his faithful assistant Igor, Dr. Frankenstein, one of popular culture’s most fabled fictional researchers, supposedly discovered the very secret of life.Modern life-science researchers are tackling challenges of near equal complexity, but that’s where the similarity ends. Today’s biomedical, biotechnology and bioengineering researchers are helping to improve quality of life, enhance health care, ensure homeland security and enable exploration of the universe, and the interlocking supports that help to advance their research bear no resemblance to cinematic stereotypes of old.
Which is why Binghamton University researchers and admin-istrators are so excited about the addition of 37,000 square feet of new state-of-the-art laboratory space at the Innovative Tech-nologies Complex, said Stephen Gilje, associate vice president for research.
The new facilities comprise 30,000 square feet of core facilities and flexible laboratory space, as well as two new bioengineering teaching labs, and a 7,000-square-foot clinical science and engineering research facility in the life-sciences research building. Core facilities house common pieces of equipment, including autoclaves, tissue-culture equipment and a high-powered computer lab. Flexible laboratories are designed with as much of the infrastructure as possible — plumbing, electricity and HVAC — in the ceilings, and are furnished with lab benches that can be readily moved with a motorized hand-truck.
This new approach to design and management of laboratory space allows the University to quickly respond to the expansion
BINGHAMTON TAKES A NEW APPROACH TO LAB DESIGN AND MANAGEMENT
“FLEXING” ITS RESEARCH
MUSCLES
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and contraction of particular research programs, and permits individual researchers or groups of researchers to add or re-move equipment or change the laboratory configuration in a matter of days rather than months, Gilje said.
“This is just what we needed when we needed it,” he added.
The University, which hopes to double its research activity over the next five years, last year saw a 24 percent increase in spon-sored research activity, despite a dearth of laboratory space and a flat federal funding profile for research.
“WORKING IN SUCH SPACE
NOT ONLY BETTER ENSURES
FACULTY SUCCESS IN
ATTRACTING SPONSORED
FUNDING BUT ENHANCES
THE ACADEMIC CREDIBILITY
OF THEIR WORK.”
— Stephen Gilje
35
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The new facilities for biomedicine, bioengi-neering and biotechnol-ogy research officially opened in October 2006, with the completion of the first biomedical and biotechnology research suite. Laboratories in the facility are equipped with many pieces of cutting-edge equipment and modern laboratory benches and are designed with flexibility and collaboration in mind, Gilje said. They are also helping the University to recruit bright young faculty and graduate students — and that can only help to advance the University’s research initiatives, he added.
To optimize their chances for success in today’s competitive re-search climate, junior and senior life-science researchers alike need a number of other supports that the ITC labs will provide. Perhaps first among them are opportunities to engage in cross- and multidisciplinary collaborations, said Gerald Sonnenfeld, vice president for research.
Sonnenfeld ought to know. He is an eminent immunologist whose research into the effects of stress on the immune system has multiple sponsors, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He is engaged in collaborative projects with colleagues at home and abroad, including a recent collab-oration with Dr. Karen Burg of Clemson University, with whom Sonnenfeld is trying to develop, through tissue engineering, lymphoid tissue that will allow testing of new vaccines even before they are used on animals or humans.
In a world where advances in technology and knowledge are blurring the lines and leading to an enmeshment of major sci-entific disciplines, collaboration is critical to researchers who want to stay at the leading edge of inquiry, Sonnenfeld said.
“Science has progressed and changed so that now research techniques that apply to one area are often useful across the board. That means today, if I want to be a good immunologist, I have to know about proteomics, genomics, bioengineering, chemistry and physics, where 20 years ago I didn’t have to know much about these things,” he said. “As a researcher, the greatest benefit to me of these new facilities is the potential for collaboration that they afford. It’s a very powerful tool to have.”
Omowunmi Sadik, professor of bioanalytical, materials and environmental chemistry, and director of the Center for Advanced Sensors and Environmental Systems, agrees.
“Our group is working with industrial sponsors to utilize flexible substrates for fabrication of new sensors and devices,” she said. “Our activities rely on the need to interact directly or indirectly with other ITC occupants, such as the Center of Excellence, and incubator companies with interests in commercialization. This
could foster innovation in the area of sensors and environmental monitoring, and help translate sensor research into finished products.”
Modern research programs also demand ready access to high-end computers and assay equipment, and the availability of state-of-the-art, environmentally controlled, vibration-free laboratory space — space that can be quickly adapted to the new directions and priorities that regularly spin off from the discovery of new knowledge. Working in such space not only better ensures faculty success in attracting sponsored funding but enhances the academic credibility of their work, Gilje said.
The new ITC labs offer all of the above, and do so in a build-ing where involved faculty also find ready access to technology transfer services designed to help them protect and/or com-mercialize the intellectual property they develop; translational research support that can help them explore business oppor-tunities; and a Start-Up Suite that facilitates pre-incubation of new companies arising out of faculty research.
Any faculty whose work is externally funded, related to biomedicine or biotechnology and potentially marketable within five years through the development of new products or processes is eligible to apply for lab space at the ITC.
What’s more, faculty with other science and engineering research interests can anticipate access to similar facilities in the not-so-distant future, Gilje noted.
“I’m very excited at the prospect that this building is not the end, that we will also be developing another building compa-rable to this for science and engineering,” he said. “Hopefully it will be modeled on this successful building and will just add another layer of expansion onto our programs.”
The University received $6 million in state funding to design the proposed science and engineering building, and last year was tapped to receive an additional $60 million to construct it at the 21-acre Innovative Technologies Complex. Construction is expected to begin in 2007 and to be completed by 2011.
“AS A RESEARCHER, THE
GREATEST BENEFIT TO ME OF
THESE NEW FACILITIES IS THE
POTENTIAL FOR COLLABORATION
THAT THEY AFFORD. IT’S A VERY
POWERFUL TOOL TO HAVE.”
— Gerald Sonnenfeld
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When senior researcher Ken-neth McLeod was recruited to Binghamton in 2002 to start a new bioengineering depart-ment, he faced an enormous challenge: no laboratories and very little office space.
All that changed with the opening of the Innovative Technologies Complex, where bioengineering has found a home, replete with mod-ern offices and thousands of square feet of laboratory space, including a new Clini-cal Science and Engineering Research Center.
“We’re growing by leaps and bounds now,” McLeod said. “When you’re trying to recruit research-active faculty, it’s very different to be able to show somebody an actual lab and an office rather than to have to say, ‘Someday in that building we’re going to have those things.’”
The bioengineering department, which graduated its first class last year, now has 16 faculty on its roster. Joined by four colleagues from the Decker School of Nursing — Sarah Gueldner, Geraldine Britton, Caro-lyn Pierce and Debra Bohunicky — they are tackling a host of research challenges, not just in laborato-ries, but also in the Clinical Science and Engineering Research Center.
“My experience in the clinic has been fantastic,” said Craig Laramee, research assistant professor. “The facilities in the CSERC have allowed me to quickly set up and investigate new protocols for my research, without wasting time searching for space or equipment. Beyond optimizing our use of resources, the clinic has also helped to foster a collaborative environment, which I think is essential as we are increasingly challenged by complex diseases.”
Laramee’s research focuses on the identification of biomarkers for human diseases such as Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) using high-technology approaches. Specifically, he works with surface-en-hanced laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight
(SELDI-TOF) mass-spectroscopy technology.
Other areas being addressed in the clinic include smoking cessation, diabetes, edema, osteoporosis and two large-muscle studies, one looking at the musculature of the lower leg to develop new fibromiography techniques, and another, working in collaboration with a group of physical therapists, to accomplish proof of concept on an easy, quantitative measure of muscle force.
“Given that we only opened in February or March of 2006, the center really ramped up nicely,” McLeod said.
Though he and others in his department work with equipment such as atomic-force microscopes and measuring devices that require vibration-free space, McLeod said the new ITC facilities afford something even more valuable.
“For what I do, I’m a pretty simple engineer-type person, and space is space,” he said. “To me, state-of-the-art space means there are really good people there to collaborate with.”
That being the case, the research facilities at the ITC are clearly state of the art, he added.
The Clinical Science and Engineering Research Center (CSERC)
INSTITUTE OF MATERIALS
RESEARCH (IMR)
CENTER FOR ADVANCED
SENSORS AND ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS (CASE)
CENTER FOR ADVANCED
MICROELECTRONICS MANUFACTURING
(CAMM)
THE INTEGRATED ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING
CENTER (IEEC)
CENTER OF
EXCELLENCE
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Taproot of excellence
It’s lofty language. But with the official naming of Binghamton University’s Small Scale Systems Integration and Packaging program as a New York state Center of Excellence (COE), the region can expect to see a lot more than idle talk, according to several of the COE’s industry partners.
From its impact on research and development in next-generation electronics, which is likely to lead to totally new products and processes, to its role as a magnet for student and faculty recruit-ment, creating a significant brain trust in the region, the COE won’t just be a nice addition, they said, but will help to make Binghamton a vital nerve center in the technology race.
Endicott Interconnect Technologies played a key supporting role in the founding of the Small Scale Systems and Integration Packaging Center, and the technology-based company is confident it will see a significant return on the investment of time, manpower and space that has gone into its partnership with the University, said Mark D. Poliks, senior advisory technologist and director of research, development and intellectual property for the company.
BINGHAMTON PLUGS INTO INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH
GRID AS SMALL-SCALE ELECTRONICS POWERHOUSE
Excellence.With origins dating back to 1350 and its Latin root cellere, meaning to rise high, excellence is defined as the fact or state of excelling; superiority; eminence.
“EI’s relationship with the Center of Excellence brings new capability and plans for developing new technologies that may be used to unlock new markets and business opportunities. It gives us the ability to attract a talented workforce because it offers highly technical, leading-edge work that translates into good paying jobs,” Poliks said.
“Developing essential process tech-nologies and manufacturing know-how so that components can be produced more efficiently, at higher yields and at a lower cost, makes us more competitive in the marketplace.”
The COE is dedicated to the creation and development of new electronic applications that will enhance the way people live and interact with their sur-roundings, said its director, Bahgat Sammakia. As such, it will also serve as a center of economic acceleration, speeding the translation of technology into commercial applications, he said.
“Infrastructure is half the battle in terms of both federal and industrial funding, so having unique capabilities that comple-ment your research is extremely impor-tant,” Sammakia said. “There’s nothing I can think of that’s more important.
“You can have the most talented faculty in the world but if they can’t build anything, it would be very hard for them to compete. Research today requires big labs and multidisciplinary teams working in these big labs and doing very challenging things that are really at the cutting edge. You can’t do the same thing in an office using a computer.”
Located in the biotechnology research building at Binghamton’s 21-acre In-novative Technologies Complex, the center brings together partners from government, industry and academia, providing unique opportunities for col-laborative projects. Those projects will advance the frontiers of microelectronics research and development by address-ing challenges in small-scale systems design, development, prototyping, process development and manufacturing for the microelectronics industry, Sammakia said.
That means work at the COE will likely find its way into applications in medical diagnostics and treatment, defense and homeland security, flexible displays and electronics, computers and telecommu-nications and a broad range of new or improved consumer products.
“This lab is really exciting because it serves our research, it serves our companies, it will enhance economic development and activity in the region, it provides expanded educational opportunities for the student, especially for graduate students, and again, it’s a one-of-a kind lab. There’s nothing like it in this area,” Sammakia explained.
In about 8,000 square feet of laboratory space, filled with $21 million in state-of-the-art analysis equipment, the COE coalesces and builds upon the intellectual resources of several of Binghamton University’s organized research centers, including
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Bahgat Sammakia
the Integrated Electronics Engineer-ing Center (IEEC). Internationally re-
nowned for its research in electron-ics packaging, the IEEC, a New
York state Center of Advanced Technology, has a history
of advancing basic re-search and working with companies to respond to trends within the electronics industry.
Binghamton’s newly de-veloped Center for Ad-
vanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM),
a national roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing research and
development center, will also be engaged with and embraced
by the COE. The CAMM is dedicated to demonstrating the feasibility of R2R electronics manufacturing by acquiring prototype tools and establishing pro-cesses capable of producing low-volume, testbed products. That augments the analytical lab of the COE by providing manufacturing capability.
“The COE demands that we excel at different levels,” Sammakia said. “It’s not enough anymore to just be a very strong advocate of industry, working very closely with them in solving their problems and even doing the research for them. We will, of course, continue to do that, but I really think we have to be ‘the best’ at research in this field, moving from responding to industry trends to leading the trends, defining the trends.
“I would anticipate that by the middle or end of this year the lab will be a hub of activity. There should be all kinds of
scientists and engineers from higher education and industry working side by side.”
Sandeep Tonapi, advanced process engineering manager at GE, another of the center’s partnering industries, agrees with Sammakia’s assessment.
“We expect the COE to significantly add to the physical and intellectual infrastructure at Binghamton, which in turn will enable a broad spectrum of industrial partnerships,” Tonapi said. “This will be at the heart of New York state growth in high technology and emerging technology areas.”
First-rate facilities and equipment and a critical mass of researchers all combine to position the COE to begin changing the face of the electronics industry within the next decade. And closer to home, the existence of such resources promises to enhance the vitality of the regional economy by positioning companies to be more competitive in a keenly contested international marketplace.
“Without these things you really can’t get anywhere in today’s technology, especially in small-scale systems,” Sammakia said. “You really need very difficult analysis done to understand why things are working or not working and how to correct or optimize the design.
“When you think about what we’re building, it will really enable the existence of small and mid-sized companies in this region, companies that are unable to afford this type of infrastructure and would otherwise either run into trouble
“The Center of Excellence is dedicated to the
creation and development of new electronic
applications that will enhance the way people
live and interact with their surroundings.” — Bahgat Sammakia
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Roll-to-roll material
or have to relocate or go and do all their work out of the region.”
The COE laboratory was established under a business model so that its operations would be to a large degree self-supporting. All the costs in the lab will be driven and covered by the research conducted there, and industries and sponsored researchers will pay set fees for access to the lab. Primarily, the lab affords University and industry researchers unprecedented access to analytical equipment, including two transmission electron microscopes that permit investigation and examination at near atomic-scale, down to a few nanometers.
“Binghamton was uniquely positioned with a foundation upon which some-thing like this could be built,” Sammakia said. “We had a lot of it, and we were missing some additional, very expensive and very difficult tools to get. By getting them, we’re really completing our ana-lytical capability.”
The impact of the COE is already being felt as it brings together companies that were previously affiliated only with the IEEC or the CAMM. These new busi-ness-to-business relationships are likely to create the kind of dynamic energy that readily translates into local prosper-ity, Sammakia said.
“And we’re absolutely hoping that be-cause of the COE, we’ll establish the kind of relationships that result in our local companies suddenly getting na-tional attention,” he added.
Cynthia Giroux, technology director in thin films and surfaces research at
Corning, said establishing the Center of Excellence at Binghamton will add to the prestige of the University, attracting even higher-quality students and faculty.
“Competitive edge in industry is built upon a good college and/or graduate education,” Giroux said. “Without a solid foundation in fundamental physical and chemical principles, it’s just impossible to win any technology race.”
Recruiting faculty to the COE research team is critical to the center’s success, Sammakia agreed. Some of that can and will be done among existing faculty, he said.
“People like faculty in materials science, sensors, engineering, computer science, all of those are a natural fit,” he said. “And if we really think carefully, we should be able to find ties to people in psychology, and even ties to people in art and history. If you think, for instance, about work on abating terrorism, it’s not just about hardwired sensors. There are all sorts of psychological, historical and cultural considerations to factor into that kind of project.”
Especially in regard to external faculty recruitment efforts, the COE improves the odds that Binghamton will attract top-notch candidates, Sammakia said.
“This puts us in a position that, when we are hiring faculty, they look at us and say, ‘This University has the same kind
First-rate facilities and equipment and a critical
mass of researchers all combine to position
the COE to begin changing the face of the
electronics industry within the next decade.
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Innovative Technologies Complex
of equipment that I would get access to in a major university like Stanford or Cornell,’” Sammakia said. “And so we’re already able to attract very talented world-class faculty who are joining us because they know they’ll not only have access to these tools, but actually more ready access, because on a campus of our size, they’ll experience less competition for lab time.”
Ultimately, the most likely effects of the COE will be accelerating the move of technology from the lab to the market-place and then also supporting technol-
ogy in the marketplace in a way that makes it more commercially viable.
“It’s wonderful to ship things quickly,” Sammakia said, “but when they fail, you can’t get around the fact that you have to understand why, and that understand-ing will be enabled by the ITC lab.
“People who have ideas and want to build prototypes can come and build them. And, if they want to understand and analyze them, people who have prototypes or products, no matter where they’re building them, can come to us.”
Kodak
BAE Systems
IBM
General Electric
Philips
Corning
Universal Instruments
Endicott Interconnect Technologies
Lockheed Martin
Texas Instruments
United States Display Consortium
Cornell University
Army Research Laboratory
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Arizona State University
Analog Devices
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Key Center of Excellence Partners
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Sending slime
packingDavid Davies has discovered and is synthesizing a molecule that could help put one of the most virulent “terrorist cells” in all of nature out of business.
Biofilms are complex aggregations of bacteria marked by the excretion of a protective and adhesive matrix, which is why these bacterial colonies are commonly referred to as slime.
Davies, an associate professor of biology at Binghamton University, has isolated a compound that will cause biofilm colonies to disperse, thus leaving individual bacteria up to 1,000 times more susceptible to disinfectants, antibiotics and immune functions, will likely mean a sea change in health care, manufacturing, shipping and pharmaceutics over the coming years. It will most certainly drive worldwide biofilm research in new directions.
The small molecule Davies is working with appears to be one of the few known examples anywhere in nature of a com-munication signal that remains effective across species, family and phyla. In fact, though the evidence isn’t yet in on that, Davies predicts the compound may also prove to have communicative effect even across bacterial kingdoms.
“I consider this the Holy Grail of re-search in biofilms,” he said. “It’s a new paradigm in the way we look at how bacteria regulate their behavior.”
Davies’ prominence in his field was already secured when he showed in the
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“ I CONSIDER THIS THE HOLY GRAIL OF RESEARCH IN BIOFILMS. IT’S A NEW PARADIGM IN THE WAY WE LOOK AT HOW BACTERIA REGULATE THEIR BEHAVIOR.”— David Davies
Sending slimeRESEARCHER
FINDS KEY TO BIOFILM BREAKUP
late 1990s that bacteria “talk to one another” through cell-to-cell com-munication and that such sig-naling is key to biofilm forma-tion. Davies discovered the molecular medium of that communication in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a biofilm-forming microorganism that is arguably the most common organism on the planet.
Since that time, building on Davies’ work, others in the field have characterized two other molecular signals, or autoinducers, that are key to various phases of bacterial development cycles either within a particular bacterial species or across species.
The dispersion autoinducer Davies is now investigating has shown itself to be effective in dispersing biofilms containing Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Streptococcus mutans (strep), Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Staphylococcus aureus (staph) whether those bacteria exist in a pure or mixed-culture biofilm.
“We’ve also tested it on undefined mixed cultures that we just got from the air and the water in the lab, and it worked on that, too,” he said.
The dispersion-inducing molecule provokes ge-netic and physiological changes in the biofilm bacteria, causing them to disperse and return to a planktonic state. In lay terms, Davies has discov-ered at the very least how to tell four of the most problematic organisms around to pack up and get out of Dodge. And in so doing, the bacteria become easier to kill than the average mosquito.
“There have been a lot of people working on finding a dispersion autoinducer, and it’s been a very tricky thing to nail down,” Davies said of his most recent breakthrough.
“But we now have a way of isolating and purifying the compound, and we should soon be able to synthesize it so we can make it in higher concentrations.”
Ask any bac-teria. There is strength — not to mention mischief and worse — to be found in com-munity. And Davies’ discov-
ery of the naturally occurring molecule that sig-nals them to forsake the security of a biofilm and disperse is decidedly bad news for them. That’s because, although when traveling alone in plank-tonic form they are of small consequence and generally easy to manage even with antibacterial hand soaps, when they form biofilms, bacteria seem to gain super powers.
And just like super villains unable to control their nefarious urges, biofilms are more often than not up to no good from a human perspective. Biofilms develop almost anywhere that water and solids, or solids and gases, meet, which means they are virtually everywhere. They are formed when in-dividual microorganisms embed themselves in a gelatinous structure of their own making, so in human terms the characteristic “slime” of bio-films, which comprises organic polymers that can grow to several centimeters thick and cover large areas, spells all kinds of big trouble.
Biofilms, for instance, fog your contacts, help to rot your teeth and cause or complicate outcomes in a host of diseases from ear infections and ulcers to colitis and cystic fibrosis. They are a leading cause of hospital infections and non-healing wounds, and were even at the root last summer of corrosion that forced the replacement of 16 miles of the Alaska pipeline. As a result of that incident, 400,000 barrels a day of production from the largest oil field in the United States was suspended. The indefinite shutdown, at a cost equal to 8 percent of U.S. petroleum output, led to immediate increases in the price of crude oil, and drove up fuel oil and gasoline prices.
The annual worldwide costs of biofilm infection and remediation are in the high billions of dollars, even according to the most modest estimates, and they are costs borne by industries and consumers alike.
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JUST LIKE SUPER VILLAINS UNABLE TO CONTROL THEIR NEFARIOUS
URGES, BIOFILMS ARE MORE OFTEN THAN NOT UP TO NO GOOD FROM
A HUMAN PERSPECTIVE.
Name a manufacturing process and biofilms are probably a serious and costly issue. They have even been discovered in pipes at factories produc-ing prepadine, the anti-bacterial, iodine-based solution that doctors swab on patients to “prep” them for surgery.
Biofilms’ resilience and unusual resistance to remediation stem from a combination of mechanisms, including such things as restricted transport of antibiotics through the biofilm, reduced metabolic activity of biofilm bacteria and such physiological resistance mechanisms as the use of membrane pumps to remove antibiotics from inside the cell, Davies said.
But even in nature, biofilms will disperse when environ-mental condi-tions become adverse. If sources of nu-trition run low or waste prod-ucts build up, bacteria within a biofilm com-munity “save” t h e m s e l v e s by breaking free of the bad situation, turning on some genes and turning off others, and returning to a planktonic state.
By homing in on the regulatory device that he thinks leads to their natural dispersion, Davies not only seems to have found the key to inducing biofilm dispersion at will, but might also have solved one of the older mysteries in microbiology.
Biofilms will not grow in a flask — no matter how many bacteria you put there. They require a flowing system — water, tears, saliva, a pipeline, etc. — and nutrients. But against all intuition and previous thinking, turning up the flow in a pipe or stream doesn’t shear off or break up biofilms. It only produces more robust biofilms. And Davies now thinks he knows why.
“I think this dispersion molecule is just some-thing naturally produced with growth. And the idea is that the flowing liquid will wash out the dispersion-inducer molecule, so the faster the flow rate, the less the inducer molecule builds up in the biofilm, and the biofilm gets bigger and bigger and bigger,” he says.
“So, in fact, if you have a batch system, like in a flask, the inducer molecule can’t get washed away. Instead it builds up so much that you can’t grow any biofilm at all.”
Davies feels certain his discovery will dramatically change the way infections are treated.
“I think people will start induc-ing dispersion to disaggregate biofilms and, then, treat them concur-rently, and with signifi-cantly greater efficacy, with antibiotics.”
He envisions his discovery first making its way to market
as a topical treatment for cuts, lacerations and minor burns, perhaps even as an additive in ad-hesive bandages.
But his major interest, and something he hopes to turn his attention toward in earnest in the coming year, is the area of non-healing wounds. Davies watched his diabetic great-aunt lose both of her feet to amputation after bacterial biofilm infections set in.
“If we can treat those kinds of wounds and clear up the infection, they will heal. We know that from wound debridement studies,” he said. “I really think we can make a difference with these people, and if that was the only thing we did, it would be worth everything we’re doing.”
IN HUMAN TERMS THE CHARACTERISTIC “SLIME” OF
BIOFILMS…SPELLS ALL KINDS OF BIG TROUBLE.
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Rising tide of losses signals need for
changing land use in vulnerable areas
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With meteorologists forecasting an extended, decade-long period of more and bigger tropical storms and hurricanes, a Binghamton researcher hopes to help coastal regions better withstand devastating winds and flooding by shaking up established thinking about building practices and land use.Burrell Montz, professor of geography and environmental studies and graduate director of the Geography Department, focuses on the social, political and economic factors that shape land-use decisions, both before and after natural disasters. She concurs with Max Mayfield, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Tropical Prediction Center at the National Hurricane Center, who has said, “Preparedness remains essential. The most accurate forecasts are only beneficial when people react by taking the necessary steps to save their lives and property.”
From Montz’s perspective, life and property might be better protected if more thought was given to the steps taken in the weeks, months and years before a storm makes landfall in a region.
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Conventional wisdom — and even Florida building code, for in-stance — holds that larger, more modern manufactured homes are safer than smaller, older ones. But Montz, who has studied flooding in and beyond the U.S. for nearly three decades, says recent research, based on computer mapping and statistical analysis of 500 manufactured homes in four Charlotte County, Fla., mobile-home parks, calls that assumption into question.
Manufactured homes are increasingly popular with snowbirds and retiring baby boomers throughout the South, and are par-
ticularly popular in Florida, where they represent about 12 percent of all homes. In the region where Katrina wreaked the most damage — parts of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas — be-tween 6.9 and 15.8 percent of homes were manufactured homes, the Census Bureau reported.
Montz and one of her students, Matt Zayatz ’06, examined what happened to manufactured homes in Charlotte Coun-ty when Hurricane Charley pummeled Florida in 2004. They found not only that the bigger, newer homes didn’t always fare better, but that even their orienta-tion on lots — whether they faced into, away from or in the direction of prevail-ing winds — made no real difference.
Montz doesn’t expect people to simply stop living along the coast. After all, those areas are some of the most beauti-ful places in the country. But because her findings seem clear, she wants people who live in areas at risk for major wind damage or flooding to understand the dangers and have plans for evacuation and recovery; simply making homes bigger won’t necessarily make them less vulnerable.
Even in homes far from the coast, people are at risk if they live in hurricane alleys, Montz said. “Many hurricanes are more of a wind event,” she said, “so storm surge isn’t what’s causing the damage.”
All of which points to a need for emergency managers, as well as homeowners, contractors and legislators who create building codes, to reconsider accepted approaches to risk management.
Montz’s work has important implications for U.S. taxpayers. Florida counties alone received about $3.3 billion in federal
“The question,” she said, “is who makes the decisions and who influences them? We want to keep people from making bad decisions because of a lack of information. We want them to go in with their eyes open.”
On average, a north Atlantic hurricane season produces 11 named storms, six of which would likely become hurricanes, two of them major. In 2005, the Atlantic hurricane season — with a record 28 storms, including 15 hurricanes — blew by those aver-ages without a backward glance. Seven of that season’s hurri-canes were con-sidered major, and a record four, including Katrina, hit the United States. And we cannot forget those af-fected in previ-ous years.
This was no fluke, according to the NOAA, which warns that more and stronger storms, along with greater chances of landfalls, are the hallmark of a naturally occurring cycle of increased hurricane ac-tivity that has been unfolding in the Atlantic since 1995. Caused by the interaction of a t m o s p h e r i c and oceanic conditions, in-cluding warm ocean waters, low wind shear and the pattern of easterly winds coming off the west coast of Africa, such cycles typically last 20 to 30 years or longer. At best, the current cycle is only about halfway through. In the face of unprecedented coastal population growth, this is a recipe for disaster, particu-larly with so little understanding of things such as what makes for a safe residence.
“We want to keep
people from making bad
decisions because of a
lack of information.”
— Burrell Montz
JON
AT
HA
N C
OH
EN
/T
HE
NE
W Y
OR
K T
IME
S
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disaster aid during the 2004 hurricane season. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Federal Emergency Management Agency distributed nearly $6 billion in aid to individuals and families affected by the storm’s fury.
If there is an upside to a major storm like Katrina, it is the attention it has brought to the issues of land use in disaster-prone areas, Montz said. She incorporated the storm and its aftermath into her classroom discussions. But she finds the politics surrounding recovery efforts in New Orleans distracting. Many Americans seem to believe that the racial and economic inequities Katrina revealed are unique to New Orleans, but that’s just not the case, she said.
A concern for lower-income, less-informed coastal residents drives her interest in the development of public policy that can better protect them and their homes. That may require adapt-ing and revising building codes. But it might also involve such things as getting TV meteorologists to use more accessible or direct language to relay the threat as storms barrel toward the coast. It might also involve educating community leaders to value good sense over die-hard stoicism or ill-advised neigh-borhood loyalty.
“The Weather Service keeps saying, ‘If we can give people more warning, they’ll have more time to react.’ But not if they’re not going to react in the first place,” Montz said. “People are getting more and more weather information. But they don’t understand it any better.”
Essentially, Montz would like to see less bravado and more focus on what she calls “rebuilding with intelligence.” That would mean acknowledging that parts of New Orleans are so prone to flooding that they should not be rebuilt.
“The officials involved need to understand the rebuilding process and have better, more equitable rules,” she said, “so that the most vulnerable populations don’t get put in the most vulnerable areas by default.”
Montz traces her interest in hurricanes back to the experience her family went through in the wake of Hurricane Agnes in 1972. Their home, like thousands of others in northeast Pennsylvania, was flooded when the Susquehanna River spilled over its banks. A summer was lost to cleanup efforts, and Montz has not forgotten how much worse many of her family’s neighbors fared.
Today, technology such as geographic information systems (GIS) and even Google Earth helps Montz and other research-ers in her field document changing land use. But the technol-ogy can’t yet provide a human context for those changes.
Montz now wants to look for new methods to help predict how, when and why people decide whether to return to their homes after a natural disaster. She’s working with a Binghamton systems scientist, Associate Professor Sarah Lam, as well as geographers Graham Tobin of the University of South Florida and Brent Yarnal of Penn State University and anthropologist Linda Whiteford of the University of South Florida to build a decision model that reflects the dynamics of post-disaster decision making. As part of that project, the researchers plan to examine the importance of a social network as well as people’s perceptions of natural hazards and risks.
One thing about the study is already certain: The need to better understand how people perceive and respond to hurricanes and related natural disasters isn’t likely to blow over any time soon.
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WEATHERING THE STORM
NURSE URGES
HEIGHTENED
AWARENESS,
PREPARATION
FOR CALAMITY
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She has seen houses ripped from their foundations, elderly people evacuated from their homes without their medications and rescue dogs whose feet were burned in the rubble of the World Trade Center.Laura Terriquez-Kasey comes by her understanding of disasters the hard way — through working at New York City hospitals, serving in the U.S. Army and reserves, and spending more than six years as a member of a disaster medical assistance team, or DMAT, a specialized group mobilized by the Depart-ment of Homeland Security in catastrophic emergencies.
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“DISASTERS ARE
INEVITABLE, AND
WHEN IT COMES TO
SURVIVING AND
RECOVERING FROM
THEM, THERE’S
LIKELY NO SUCH
THING AS TOO
MUCH PLANNING.”
— Laura Terriquez-Kasey
A clinical lecturer at Binghamton University’s Decker School of Nursing with 35 years of nursing experience, Terriquez-Kasey thinks it’s time to raise and respond, at local, regional and national levels, to the same pressing disaster-related questions she routinely poses to her students.
“What do we do about it?” “How could this be prevented?” “What can we do better?”
As she organized the annual disaster drill on Binghamton’s 887-acre campus last spring, Terriquez-Kasey called upon her experience and devised a hauntingly prescient scenario: several weeks of rain would flood Floral Park and Lourdes Hospital in Binghamton. The Universi-ty’s Events Center would be needed as a shelter for special-needs patients and the elderly. As the drill began, her clos-ing instructions to the team were plain and — as unfolding events would prove — prophetic: “It is critical we plan for such an event as it is perfectly plausible this could occur in this community.”
Just weeks later, the drill proved a dress rehearsal, as torrential rains caused a precipitous rise in the Susquehanna, Delaware and Chenango rivers, breach-ing 500-year floodplains, closing an area hospital, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands and sending nearly 2,000 evacuees from throughout Greater Bing-hamton to a Red Cross shelter estab-lished at the University’s Events Center.
Several weeks later, as Terriquez-Kasey sat in her office amid books such as Toxic Terror, The New Killer Diseases and Confronting Catastrophe, and reviewed lecture notes punctuated with stark pictures of the disasters she has seen, it was clear that she took no personal sat-isfaction from being dead-on accurate about the scenario she selected for last May’s disaster drill. But something else was also clear: She knows that if there is a silver lining to be found in the deluge that caused catastrophic flooding of the region, or in events ranging from Hur-ricane Katrina to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it is in the likelihood that such events will sharpen our focus on disaster management.
“We as a nation need to change the way we think about preparation,” she said. “We have that syndrome: ‘It’s not going to happen here.’”
She added: “I see disaster education as a mission because many lives could be saved if we could better educate people. The community itself has to be educated. I think we need to get our heads out of the sand regarding safety issues. People don’t have a healthy respect for nature — and we should.”
Never content to just talk the talk, Ter-riquez-Kasey advocated, even early in her career, for more disaster education for the Army nurse corps, where she ran courses and conferences while in the military. When she worked at Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooper-stown, N.Y., in the late 1990s, she put together central New York’s first haz-ardous materials response team. And now, at Binghamton, she continues to expand on and enhance the value of her personal DMAT experiences by sharing them with interested audiences.
That sometimes means presenting in-formation about the disasters she has seen to government and nursing groups. It also often means tying her real-world experiences into the content of the two online graduate-level courses she teaches. One of those courses focuses
Laura Terriquez-Kasey
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on disaster preparation for community and public health nurses; the other on emerging threats, with a focus on such biohazards as flu epidemics and plague.
Terriquez-Kasey’s courses draw pre-med students and graduate-level nurses from as far away as the Canadian border and were developed with funding support from the Department of Health and Hu-man Services. Her two existing courses will soon be joined by a third course focusing on chemical and radiation threats. All are a sign of her commitment to trying to raise our communal level of vigilance by educating next-generation healthcare providers to the sweeping scope of large-scale disasters.
In 2005, for example, Terriquez-Kasey and her 200-member DMAT rotated into the disaster zone in 35-person teams to help victims of Hurricane Katrina, the costliest and one of the most dangerous storms in U.S. history. Although far from Binghamton’s campus, she made sure that her students remained engaged in and learned from the events in the storm-ravaged South. Using a laptop computer, she regularly posted photographs and news articles on the Web, along with journal-style remarks, and assignments that asked the students to think like disaster-management professionals.
“I wanted them to see the other side of the coin,” she said, “not just what the news was giving them.” That insider’s perspective put students in touch, for
instance, with the emotional and ethical tensions experienced by on-site nurses and doctors as they anxiously awaited permission to go into New Orleans and other affected areas, where security issues threatened to turn emergency workers into secondary victims of the chaos.
The bottom line, from Terriquez-Kasey’s vantage point, is that disaster planning has never been more important. Better-prepared nurses and better-educated community leaders can forge a new path as the nation comes to grips with its vulnerability, both to terrorists and Mother Nature, she said.
Her recent experiences led her to believe healthcare workers must pay particular attention to the special needs of geriatric patients following disasters. What she saw after Katrina intensified her concerns.
“My concern is, how can we help these patients cope and better prepare?” she said. “We need to have a better plan for them.”
Shut-ins, cancer patients and others with chronic diseases should keep on hand a medical history summary, a list of medications and a small supply of extra pills, she said. Those who must rely heavily on the help of friends and relatives should always keep a small suitcase packed and ready to go.
Patients and healthcare providers alike would also be better off if they could acknowledge the important roles of religion and culture in recovering from a disaster, she said. Medical personnel must see how important faith can be to patients recovering from a catastrophic loss, and they need to let patients talk openly about those beliefs. In addition, emergency responders need to feel that they can draw on their own faith to pull through what they see while responding to a catastrophe.
They also need to take breaks to drink water and cool off, as well as find ways to share the emotional strain. Members of her DMAT, Terriquez-Kasey notes, usually take 24 hours to decompress after a deployment before returning to their families. They need time to think and talk about what they’ve seen and find ways of reconciling that with their day-to-day lives.
“We’re seeing tremendous numbers of patients,” Terriquez-Kasey said. “Psy-chological support is a major issue for us, just like it is for them. You realize later you’re still reverberating from what you saw, so inundated with things that had happened.”
Ultimately, Terriquez-Kasey said, it’s time we all accept and embrace an inescapable reality: Disasters are inevitable, and when it comes to surviving and recovering from them, there’s likely no such thing as too much planning.
“WE AS A NATION
NEED TO CHANGE
THE WAY WE
THINK ABOUT
PREPARATION.”
— Laura Terriquez-Kasey
HELPING NEIGHBORHOODSHELP THEMSELVES
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Now imagine taking the unlikely position that none of that has anything to do with how you and your neighbors view your-selves and the world around you — no impact on the choices you are likely to make, nor any effect on the major outcomes in your life.
EVOLUTIONIST
STRIVES TO
UNDERSTAND
COMMUNITIES
IN A NEW WAY
Wherever you live, take a moment and look around. Whether it’s in a gated community, a neighborhood plagued by gang violence, a large urban center where the only broad divides are those between “the haves” and “the have-nots,” or a small, tight-knit rural village where neighbors know each other by name, consider the influence the “environment” within your neighborhood has had on your development and the development of others in your community.
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That’s exactly what David Sloan Wilson thinks too many social scientists and researchers from across the disciplines have been doing — studiously divorc-ing their subjects from their social environment and relentlessly focusing on individuals, stripped of their com-munal context.
Wilson is a distinguished professor of biological sciences with a joint appoint-ment in anthropology at Binghamton University and founder of EvoS, the University’s unique interdisciplinary Evolutionary Studies program. His latest project, which aims to under-stand and improve the quality of life in the city of Binghamton on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, will emphasize the value of understand-ing people in the broader context of their communities. It’s an all-too-obvious point, he says, but one that unfortu-nately still has to be made.
“You can’t just study people, you have to study people in their social environ-ments,” Wilson said. “These are such basic insights; it’s a scandal that they would need to be pointed out and that still a very small fraction of research is of this sort.”
Wilson’s project teams Binghamton University faculty members with city school district officials and Binghamton residents, with the goal of measuring variables that influence quality of life in the community, so that where needed, appropriate interventions can be de-signed with neighborhood leaders.
took a survey in May 2006. On a scale of 1 (not at all or rarely) to 4 (almost always or extremely), they responded to statements such as “I take responsibility for what I do,” “I feel good about the future” and “I have adults who are good role models for me.”
The questions were divided into five categories representing the contexts of a child’s life: personal, social, family, school and community. A single score was calculated for each context. There was substantial variation among indi-viduals as well as among neighborhoods when the data was plotted in terms of the students’ residential locations.
While Search Institute collaborates with many communities, the Binghamton Neighborhood Project is the first to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to visualize and study variations in developmental assets on a neighborhood basis. GIS is a collection of computer hardware and software for capturing, managing, analyzing and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. A method known as kriging extrapolates among the data points to produce a continuous surface of hills and valleys representing variation in the developmental assets.
“The patterns illustrated on the maps reflect very complex social processes that we do not yet fully understand,” Wilson said. “Before something can be understood, it must be visualized. These maps provide a first step toward understanding and
“YOU CAN’T JUST STUDY
PEOPLE, YOU HAVE TO
STUDY PEOPLE IN THEIR
SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS.”
— David Sloan Wilson
Working in collaboration with Search Institute, an independent nonprofit organization devoted to promoting healthy children, youth and communities, Binghamton researchers are collecting data on “developmental assets” that Search Institute has identified as requisite to the development of young people who are healthy, caring and responsible. Included among these qualities are “external assets,” such as caring neighborhood and school climates and family involvement and support, and “internal assets,” such as reading for pleasure, honesty and motivation to achieve.
Binghamton City School District Su-perintendent Peggy Wozniak said the idea of developmental assets isn’t a new one. Educators know that relationships with children are important. Though the district works with the University on a variety of initiatives, and Wozniak has worked with Search Institute for years, the district has never before brought this sort of neighborhood focus to the issue, she said.
“There’s a lot that goes into students achieving,” Wozniak said. “When you look at students in poverty … it’s this idea of resiliency. Why do some kids make it and some kids don’t when they come from these challenging environments? The difference can be relationships with adults. Relationships in the bigger picture is community, not just school.”
About 2,000 children in sixth through 12th grades in the Binghamton schools
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improving the welfare of our community by helping us visualize how the underlying parameters vary on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.”
GIS allows the infor-mation about devel-opmental assets to be combined with any other spatially based information, such as U.S. Census statistics or information about the physical landscape. Working with Binghamton University’s GIS center, Wilson has also developed a user-friendly Web interface that enables anyone to create maps of Binghamton.
“This information can be analyzed from any theoretical perspective, but evolutionary theory is especially well suited for studying organisms in relation to their environment, including the human organism,” Wilson said. “The important thing is to study people from all walks of life in the contexts of their everyday lives.”
EvoS establishes a multidisciplinary framework for studying evolution in biology and all human-related subjects. Wilson’s own research focuses on coop-eration and altruism as behaviors that can be evolutionarily successful under certain conditions. The Binghamton Neighborhood Project dovetails per-fectly with his prior interests, he said.
But EvoS and its intellectual community of more than 50 faculty members are
also well positioned to address a range of other important issues with the same database. And the University’s innovative Center City Coordination program, or C3, has the community partnerships to take the data and help residents act on it, said Allison Alden, director of C3.
“When we look at community devel-opment, we like to consider from the residents’ perspectives what are their priorities, their goals, their strengths,” she said. “And it’s very difficult to get that information.”
She sees the Binghamton Neighbor-hood Project as an important first step in bringing together comprehensive community information. It’s also an unusual chance to ask young people di-rectly about what they want and need.
“Youth in particular is an interesting age group to focus on right now, and this will help us do that,” Alden said. “I’m interested in looking at meaning-ful opportunities for young people to become engaged in their community. Not just a volunteer project, but a way to really use their own talents.”
David Sloan Wilson, distinguished professor of biological sciences and founder of EvoS, the University’s unique interdisciplinary Evolutionary Studies program
Search Institute
has compiled
the following list
of 40 assets it
considers essential
for young people to
be healthy, caring and
responsible.
EXTERNAL ASSETS:Family support, positive family
communication, other adult
relationships, caring neighborhood,
caring school climate, parent
involvement in schooling,
community values youth, youth
as resources, service to others,
safety, family boundaries, school
boundaries, neighborhood
boundaries, adult role models,
positive peer influence, high
expectations, creative activities,
youth programs, religious
community and time at home
INTERNAL ASSETS:Achievement motivation, school
engagement, homework, bonding
to school, reading for pleasure,
caring, equality and social justice,
integrity, honesty, responsibility,
restraint, planning and decision
making, interpersonal competence,
cultural competence, resistance
skills, peaceful conflict resolution,
personal power, self-esteem, sense
of purpose and positive view of
personal future
FACULTY ESSAY
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Where the baloney meets the road
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FACULTY ESSAY
I first ran across the word almost 30 years later, when, early in my career as a doctoral student, I was assigned a Psychology Today reading with the curious title, “Bafflegab Pays.” In the article, author J. Scott Armstrong, a marketing professor at Wharton, offered this direct advice: “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”
In the years since, the street translation of this advice has become part of the lexicon of most American workers: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with __. “ You know the rest.
But Armstrong’s bafflegab suggestion didn’t seem to be offered as irreverent, tongue-in-cheek advice. Instead, his article provided compelling data to support the wisdom and efficacy of employing bafflegab in academic settings, and seemed to warrant serious attention, particularly from doctoral students whose academic careers would depend on convincing journal editors of their research competence.
In his research, Armstrong found a direct correlation between how difficult articles were to read and comprehend, and how the journals they appeared in were respected among academ-ics. In other words, when professors ranked the prestige of management journals, the top-rated journal was the hard-est to read, the lowest-rated journal, the easiest. And when Armstrong rewrote some passages from the hard-to-read, highly ranked journals to make them easier to read, those same professors now rated the easier-to-understand ver-
sions less competent than the difficult versions, even though their conceptual content had been carefully preserved.
Excited by the thought that I had just been handed the key to success in academe, I embarked on my own bafflegab journey. I quickly found, however, that there were strong forces aligned against me.
Almost immediately it became clear that when it came to writing unintelligibly, doctoral students did not enjoy the same perception of competency that Armstrong had reported among professors. His observations notwithstanding, my adviser spared no opportunity to tell me that I made no sense.
Later, and much to my dismay, I realized, too, that my PhD committee actually expected me to be able to explain how my esoterically titled dissertation, “The Effects of Reference De-pendence on Decision Difficulty,” could inform the practices of real-life managers.
Later still, as a new, tenure-track faculty member, I again realized that when my students asked me what exactly I did for a living, I would need to have an adequate and understandable response at the ready. Bafflegab wasn’t going to suffice.
As management education enters the 21st century, at least three forces further challenge how we conduct and, more important, communicate our research to our stakeholders.
SCHOLARSHIP AND THE MARKETPLACE
In 1952, in a pique over bureaucratic language, then-assistant general counsel for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Milton Smith coined the word “bafflegab.” He was at a loss to other- wise characterize the incomprehensibility, ambiguity, verbosity and complexity of the language being used by those bombastic folks over at the Office of Price Stabilization.
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FACULTY ESSAY
Subimal Chatterjee is professor of marketing, School of Management, Binghamton Universi-ty. He teaches courses at the undergraduate, graduate and executive levels in consumer be-
havior, customer satisfaction, marketing management, product management and e-commerce. Chatterjee’s research investigates consumer decision making and how consumer judgment and choice can be altered
in predictable ways by manipulating the decision task and context. In recent articles, he has studied how the persuasive power of different market signals can vary depending on the nature of market competition and the type of consumer. Chatterjee’s work has appeared in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Production and Operations Management, Organization Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and Journal of Consum-er Psychology. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and Marketing Science Institute.
First, media rankings of business schools, such as those by Business Week and U.S. News & World Report, affect administra-tors, alumni, donors and especially prospective students who see a devaluation of their degrees with lower rankings. The influential Business Week rankings, for example, give 90 percent weight to their survey of graduating students and recruiters, and 10 percent weight to faculty publications. Although a BW ranking may not be the true measure of a school’s quality, and could be tempting schools to “look good rather than be good,” there is, nevertheless, an urgent need to find a way to express our research that is intelligible and responsive to the market.
Second, executive education is a strong component in the strategy of business schools and requires, if not an outright, fundamental shift from research to teaching, at least a need to develop materials that are relevant to the practice. When ex-perienced managers sit in the classroom, their question is how can they use what we teach to improve their business. Such questions, once again, challenge us to look at our research in practical ways.
Third, as business schools embrace more and more interna-tional students, the resulting diversity challenges us to examine the cross-cultural implications of our research. Now the task encompasses extending the research into newer cultures where consumers hold different values and mindsets.
Here then, is where the baloney meets the road, and bafflegab, no matter how brilliant it might sound, just won’t cut it. As I strive for simpler language and more relevance for my research, I have learned at least three valuable lessons.
First, I think about how my research can have an impact on others. For example, its esoteric title notwithstanding, my dissertation simply said that consumers had a more difficult time choosing between disliked alternatives than choosing
between liked alternatives. The challenging task was to think of situations when consumers are forced to choose between bad options (when for example, they cannot afford the more expensive, latest technology gadget and are forced to choose between the old-generation alternatives) and figuring out how one could reduce the difficulty of such decisions.
Second, I try not to think of research and teaching as a zero-sum game, i.e., the more time I spend on research the less time I spend on teaching and vice versa. I always make it a point to include my research in my teaching. Not only has this made me strip the research of all its bafflegab components, my students have often provided insightful comments that have added to the richness of my research and follow-up papers. For example, the pain felt by one of my students when the University Book-store took back a discount that had mistakenly been credited to her purchase prompted me to think about the implications and roots of this marketplace reality: Even unexpected (and undeserved?) gains are mentally coded as losses if they are not realized.
Third, I try to think from the simple to the complex, and not the other way around. My research on the role of film critics on box office performance stemmed from a simple observa-tion of my own behavior. I blindly follow the recommendation of Joe Morgenstern, the film critic of The Wall Street Journal. Although this is not a bad strategy — after all, Morgenstern won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for his reviews of the new films of 2004 — it intrigued me about the role of critics in general, i.e., if they merely predict your taste, or actually influence it, and has spawned substantial research on my part.
The results of that research? In plain language, critics — like professors who can clearly communicate the focus and results of their research — appear to have influence in the marketplace.
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IN BRIEF
$13.2M SOFTWARE DONATION BOOSTS ENGINEERING PROGRAM
UGS Corp., a global provider of product
lifecycle management software and services,
donated software with a commercial value of
$13.2 million to Binghamton University. The in-
kind grant, announced in August, is the largest
in University history.
Texas-based UGS will provide digital
manufacturing simulation software from its Tecnomatix suite of products, which
companies use to improve the ergonomics of product design and workplace tasks.
The software will enable students in industrial and systems science engineering to
create digital humans of various sizes in virtual environments, assign them tasks and
analyze their performance.
UGS earlier provided the University with grants of 3D computer-aided design (CAD)
software, which has been made available to all students in the Thomas J. Watson
School of Engineering and Applied Science.
“This software will provide Binghamton University undergraduate and graduate
students with the same tools used in product innovation efforts by some of the
world’s leading global manufacturers,” said Charles R. Westgate, dean of the
Watson School. “A wide range of Fortune 100 and Global 50 companies use UGS’
software and solutions, so having our students gain experience with this cutting-
edge technology will prepare them to be leaders in a global work environment.”
BOOK RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT FRENCH HISTORY
Howard Brown challenges accepted views about one
of the most important periods in French history with his
book Ending the French Revolution.
In it, Brown argues that the revolutionary era didn’t end
until 1802 and that the period, sometimes considered
an inspiration for its liberal democracy, was permeated
by violence and a disregard for democracy and the rule
of law.
“This finding will change people’s ideas about the period,”
he said.
The revolution, which began in 1789, is generally considered to have ended with
Napoleon’s rise to power in 1799. But Brown said the true end comes with the
beginning of Napoleon’s dictatorship three years later.
Until then, he argues, France’s first constitutional republic was still struggling to find
ways to balance personal freedom with security concerns in the midst of the worst
crime wave in modern French history.
The 2006 book, winner of the Walker Cowen Memorial Prize in 18th-century studies,
was a decade in the making. Brown’s most exciting discovery was a cache of some
500 boxes of military court records that had never been catalogued.
AIR FORCE TAPS PROFESSOR AS “YOUNG INVESTIGATOR”
A Binghamton faculty member is one of
21 scientists and engineers nationwide
who submitted winning proposals
through the Air Force’s new Young
Investigator Research Program.
Assistant Professor Scott Craver will
receive about $300,000 in funding
during the next three years. His work
focuses on information security.
Craver, who holds bachelor’s and
master’s degrees from Northern Illinois
University, earned his doctorate in
electrical engineering from Princeton
University in 2004 and joined the
Binghamton faculty that year.
Grant recipients must show exceptional
ability and promise for conducting
basic research. The program will foster
creative basic research, enhance early
career development and increase
opportunities for the young investigators
to recognize the Air Force mission and
related challenges in science and
engineering.
Much of Craver’s work focuses on
digital watermarks, in which information
is secretly embedded in a file. These
watermarks can be used to provide
proof of ownership or as copy-
protection devices; they could also be
used to send covert messages.
Craver’s work through the Air Force
grant will be relevant to any security
that relies on a detection algorithm,
including face-recognition and
thumbprint-recognition systems.
“You’re basically trying to circumvent
an alarm system,” he said.
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IN BRIEF
GEOGRAPHERS COLLABORATE ON BOOK, CONFERENCE
Geographers Eugene Tettey-Fio and John Frazier don’t have to look far for examples
of how race and ethnicity are changing the face of America. And they didn’t struggle
to find contributors for their latest book, either. It grew directly out of a successful
conference they put together.
Race, Ethnicity, and Place in a Changing America, published in 2006 by Binghamton
University’s Global Academic Publishing, draws on the 2004 Race, Ethnicity and
Place Conference held at Howard University. But it’s not merely the proceedings of the
convention; the writers recast their papers in language suitable for undergraduates.
The timely volume includes essays on topics ranging from health and health care
to anti-predatory lending legislation and pieces focusing on places such as Buffalo,
the Texas Panhandle and Washington, D.C. The book explores major themes in
geography, including how humans interact with their environment and help shape it
as well as migrations and how they affect people’s origins and destinations.
Frazier, a professor, and Tettey-Fio, an associate professor, both contributed pieces
in addition to editing the book.
NEW LINUX CENTER AIDS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
The new Binghamton University Linux
Technology Center (LTC), one of just
a few research programs in the nation
dedicated to Linux and the associated
open-computing software, focuses
on improving research in Linux-based
and open-computing applications by
drawing together key competencies
from the University and industry leaders
IBM Corp. and Mainline Information
Systems Inc.
Unlike proprietary systems such as
Windows, Linux and all the underlying
code are available to the public without
any restrictions or licensing fees.
Students and faculty from the Thomas J.
Watson School of Engineering and
Applied Science as well as the School
of Management will provide research
expertise and gain hands-on contract
and development experience.
The center is the brainchild of the
Southern Tier Opportunity Coalition
(STOC) and member Len Santalucia,
an IBM executive who grew up in
Endicott and graduated from the
School of Management in 1973.
Merwyn Jones, an IBM computer
scientist, serves as director of the LTC,
which is based on campus.
STOC leaders expect that by expanding
the open-computing knowledge base,
the LTC will foster job creation and
economic growth in the Southern Tier
and beyond.
ANTHROPOLOGIST WINS HONOR FROM PEERS
Michael A. Little, distinguished profes-
sor of anthropology, will receive the
Charles R. Darwin Award for Lifetime
Achievement in Physical Anthropol-
ogy from the American Association of
Physical Anthropologists in April.
Little, 69, who taught briefly at Ohio
State University after earning a doctor-
ate from Pennsylvania State University,
joined the Binghamton faculty in 1971.
He and Neville Dyson-Hudson, now an emeritus professor of anthropology at Bing-
hamton, took on a major project in Kenya.
Their 15-year initiative in the Turkana region incorporated social, biological, biomedical
and ecological elements and remains the most significant study of pastoral nomads
ever completed. The work led to a synthesis volume, titled Turkana Herders of the
Dry Savannah, published in 1999 by Oxford University Press.
Although the researchers eventually won support from the National Science
Foundation, they had trouble getting funded because the multidisciplinary nature of
the work meant many specialists didn’t know what to make of it.
“Now everybody uses the term multidisciplinary,” Little said. “But then it was very
difficult.”
Today, Little’s research focuses on the history of his profession.
pg. 38Taproot of excellenceBinghamton plugs into international research grid as small-scale electronics powerhouse
BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY’S
SMALL SCALE SYSTEMS
INTEGRATION AND PACKAGING
PROGRAM — A NEW YORK STATE
CENTER OF EXCELLENCE (COE)
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