Scientific Synergy

By Liza N. Burby

The STAR detector at the RHIC is one of the only instruments in the world capable of studying conditions similar to those of the early universe.

For nearly three decades, Stony Brook University (SBU) faculty and students have advanced scientific discovery through a special, collaborative relationship with one of the nation’s top research facilities, Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).

In 1998, SBU partnered with Battelle Memorial Institute to create Brookhaven Science Associates LLC (BSA), which competed for and won the contract to manage and operate BNL for the Department of Energy (DOE). This symbiotic relationship with BNL continues to provide SBU access to the most cutting-edge scientific equipment and the brightest researchers, helping to support Stony Brook’s mission as a Tier 1 research university to pursue discoveries to make a global impact.
“Because of Stony Brook’s proximity — less than 20 miles from campus — and close relationship with BNL, many of our faculty have established joint research projects that leverage the capabilities of both institutions. Notable examples include the development of new energy storage technologies by Distinguished Professor Esther Takeuchi’s team and the creation of communication testbeds for quantum networking by Associate Professor Eden Figueroa’s physics group, both areas that will enable future advances in critical technologies,” said Rich Reeder, associate vice president for Brookhaven National Laboratory Affairs.

“Stony Brook’s longstanding and extraordinarily productive partnership with Brookhaven National Lab offers our faculty and students the chance to more deeply explore their fields, push the boundaries of science and make discoveries today that could transform our tomorrow,” said Carl W. Lejuez, executive vice president and provost. “The collaborations between Stony Brook and Brookhaven researchers helps demonstrate the immeasurable contribution of scientific and academic research to society and the world.”

The collaboration is further enhanced by joint faculty appointments between BNL and SBU, which allows a researcher to hold a position at both institutions, enabling collaborations, access to facilities, student mentorship and shared research goals, according to Reeder, whose Office of Brookhaven Lab Affairs manages the joint appointment program.

“As a research university, all our faculty are supposed to carry out research and scholarly activities and many of them do their research at Brookhaven, and that’s true for graduate students and postdocs as well,” he said, adding that currently there are about 22 of these joint appointments working on specific projects and more than 40 others working with some of the researchers at BNL as part of their own research portfolio at Stony Brook.

Meet four of the jointly appointed faculty who are advancing research in a wider array of areas to make lives better.

Karen Chen-Wiegart uses a range of complementary X-ray techniques in her materials science research.

Sharing a Privilege
Karen Chen-Wiegart, an associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, said she gets excited when she talks to her students because she was once like them. While she was pursuing her PhD in material science engineering at Northwestern University, her thesis project was funded through Argonne National Laboratory, working at its Advanced Photon Source. In 2011 she came to BNL as a postdoc and became a staff scientist at its National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) in 2014. She joined the faculty at SBU in 2017 while holding a joint appointment with NSLS-II at BNL.

“I had the reverse experience in that I was first a Brookhaven scientist collaborating with Stony Brook people, specifically two excellent graduate students from my current department,” she said. “Once I became faculty here, I continued my joint role. While I really enjoyed it, I did not realize what a privilege it was when I was just starting as a student for material science to be able to use the cutting-edge X-ray technology to characterize and understand materials in such a collaborative environment. It was very exciting, and I want to translate that to my students at Stony Brook, with the tools now even more complex, faster and better.”

Chen-Wiegart said her group’s work involves X-ray imaging and microscopy, as well as multimodal analysis, particularly on nanostructured materials, and energy-related materials like batteries, thermal energy storage and molten salts. All these research topics share a common theme: understanding how materials change, whether under processing conditions or during operation.

“One important focus is the basic understanding of material properties across multiple time and spatial scales. They will lead to more elegant methods for designing novel devices that benefit society,” said Chen-Wiegart. “However, understanding rapid changes at a small scale in a material is challenging. This is why we use NSLS-II. It offers unique capabilities with a bright X-ray source to capture the changes of materials. In particular, we are taking a so-called ‘multimodal approach,’ using a range of complementary X-ray techniques at different experimental stations, known as beamlines, to provide a more holistic view of this process.”

She said through the joint appointment, user programs and collaborative projects, students in her group are actively doing experiments at BNL.

“They use many different techniques at NSLS-II and at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN). It’s really a great opportunity, not only for the students to learn the technique and conduct research, but also for this very interdisciplinary collaboration environment,” she said. “Students’ career growth is also excellent because they get to learn directly firsthand with the scientist. They collaborate with the scientists and discuss data analysis and scientific interpretation. They build a strong collaboration themselves between our group and Brookhaven.”

Pavlos Kollias and his SoMAS students use this advanced radar antenna, located on campus, to observe storms.

Analyzing in the Clouds
Pavlos Kollias is considered a world leader in the application of advanced radar technologies to address a wide range of fundamental scientific challenges, including cloud and precipitation microphysics, convective dynamics and cloud lifecycle studies. He is a SUNY Empire Innovation Professor in Stony Brook’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) and has had a joint appointment with the Environmental Science and Technologies Department at BNL since 2016. Kollias is also a core member of BNL’s Center for Multiscale Applied Sensing, a multidisciplinary center that focuses on acquiring, analyzing and interpreting measurements from networks of sensors in highly heterogeneous areas, including complex urban and coastal locations and renewable energy facilities.

At SBU, Kollias leads the radar science group that is interested in smart sensing using the multisensor agile adaptive sampling cyberinfrastructure, and the use of satellite and phased-array radars in weather and climate research. BNL scientists and engineers also participate in the research activities of the radar science group.

Thanks to his joint appointment, Kollias said he can “combine the experience of BNL scientists with the enthusiasm and energy of graduate students and early career scientists at SBU to really push the limits of developing new capabilities of measuring extreme weather, measuring things that change rapidly in the atmosphere that could not be able to capture before.”

Kollias and his SBU/BNL group are developing a smart sensing system for atmospheric research, an autonomous laboratory — which he said is similar to self-driving cars — that relies on sensor fusion to decide when and where to sample the atmosphere. Kollias conducts research with SoMAS students on campus using electronically scanning radars that were first developed by the military for tracking hard targets like airplanes and missiles. He said these advanced radar antennas look like flat-screen TVs that can swing from left to right instantaneously to observe storms.

Pavlos Kollias and his SoMAS students with their Radar Science truck.

Another current project at BNL is what he calls “the cloud in the box” or “the cloud chamber,” which he’s been working on for four years with funding from the National Science Foundation and the DOE. They’re developing a three-story box — 10 x 10 x 30 — as a cloud control environment.

“It is a laboratory where you can control the environment and form a cloud,” Kollias said, adding it is a one-of-a-kind project that will have global implications. “It will be a facility accessible to everybody, not just U.S. domestic scientists. We study clouds and storms from space using satellites and from the ground using the advanced surface observatories of the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement facility. But having the ability to form clouds in a controlled environment and study them using advance sensors offers distinct advantages.”

Kollias is currently working with BNL on imaging radars that can measure the clouds in the chamber without disturbing them. Overall, this partnership provides impactful academic components, Kollias said. “My students benefit from a very strong research collaborative environment. They are exposed to my own experiences and research and to my colleagues from Brookhaven. With the research we do with Stony Brook and Brookhaven, we’re pushing science and technology forward.”

Dongyan Tan uses cryo electron instruments to study molecular details at an incredibly small scale.

Revolutionizing Drug Development
Dongyan Tan, a biochemist and structural biologist, is the only joint appointment whose home is in the Renaissance School of Medicine (RSOM). An assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacological Sciences, she’s conducting research at BNL’s Laboratory for BioMolecular Structure (LBMS), which she helped to establish five years ago. It now operates as a national user facility, which means it’s available to be used by scientists worldwide and has cryo-electron instruments like cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM).

Tan, a 2022 recipient of the Early Career Research Excellence Award from RSOM, studies how the shape and structure of large molecules influence their function. Her research focuses on chromatin, a complex of DNA and proteins, and how changes in its structure help control gene activity during normal development. To explore this, she uses cryo-EM, an advanced imaging technique that reveals molecular details at an incredibly small scale. She said that beyond deepening our understanding of gene regulation, her work has practical applications in drug development, particularly in identifying potential targets for cancer treatments. By capturing detailed images of these drug targets, Tan said she aims to understand their function and how drugs can be designed to interact with them more effectively.

“These studies help us understand how genes are controlled, which is a highly complex and dynamic process,” Tan said. “Using cryo-EM, we can generate high-resolution images of proteins to better understand their roles in cells. This information also aids drug design. By pinpointing how drugs bind to proteins, we can explore ways to improve treatments.”

In addition to her research, Tan is actively involved in educational and outreach activities at SBU and BNL. She specialized in single-particle cryo-EM, a key technique in her field, and serves on the LBMS committee as a local expert. She also teaches workshops at BNL and lectures at an annual course.

Since joining Stony Brook in 2016, Tan has utilized the university’s 200-kV electron microscope for cryo-EM studies — “but having access to a high-end microscope nearby is a big draw for me.” She also highlighted the strong collaboration between BNL and Stony Brook, including a joint proposal system to allow faculty to apply for cryo-EM instrument time.

“It’s a pretty good relationship,” Tan said. “Since BNL established its own cryo-EM center, they have this open access mechanism to allow researchers to apply for time on the instrument. Many faculty at Stony Brook are excited to take advantage of this resource.”

Navid Vafaei-Najafabadi is a prominent participant in the field of advanced accelerator technology.

Laser Focused
As a prominent participant in the field of advanced accelerator technology, Navid Vafaei-Najafabadi has many responsibilities. He’s a facility scientist with the Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) at BNL, where he said his research is ideally served by the laser and particle beam sources. In that role, he assists the ATF director with assessing priority research directions and upgrade paths for the ATF facilities. He does this through periodic science planning workshops and engaging with the user and broader scientific community.

As an associate professor in the university’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, which he joined in 2016, Vafaei-Najafabadi also has a research program at ATF in which students explore the interaction of high-power lasers with matter at BNL.

He explained that his research interests lie at the intersection of accelerator physics, laser physics and plasma physics.

“Plasma, often referred to as the fourth state of matter, consists of ionized atoms or molecules, where electrons and ions are not bound to each other and can freely move,” Vafaei-Najafabadi said. “The interaction of tera-watt-class lasers with plasma generates forces that are thousands of times stronger than those that can be sustained by ordinary, neutral matter.”

His research objective is to harness the enormous forces generated in laser-plasma interactions to develop compact sources of high-energy particles (primarily electrons) and X-ray radiation. These particles have applications in creating medical isotopes, for example, for cancer treatments, either through X-rays or through particles directly, he said. “And there are industrial and national security applications like creating high-energy radiation that you can use to scan shipping containers that are coming into the country.”

For all this research, the laser source at ATF is incredibly distinctive, Vafaei-Najafabadi said. “It can create high-power laser pulses with long wavelengths, and it’s really the only facility in the world that is operating at this high-power level in this wavelength regime. Moreover, it is one of only a handful of facilities worldwide where laser- and particle-beam sources can be brought together in an interaction point.”

As accelerator science progresses, Vafaei-Najafabadi said, Stony Brook and BNL together “are in a unique place to study the physics of laser-driven particle acceleration through investments by the Department of Energy at BNL to upgrade the laser pulse to higher power at this very favorable wavelength, but also at Stony Brook. The university is staying at the forefront of research through investments that we’re making in infrastructure at Stony Brook and also through the work that BNL is doing.”

Another responsibility for Vafaei-Najafabadi is representing Stony Brook and BNL as the chair of a new organization called BeamNetUS. It is supported by DOE and is sponsoring beam time and access to nine particle-beam facilities around the United States, including ATF at BNL. “This is especially valuable for outsiders who may find it difficult to go through these sophisticated user programs to get access to these facilities. The BeamNetUS organization is intended to simplify access to these facilities and provide particle-beam access for research or technological development,” he said.

Top photo: Rich Reeder, whose Office of Brookhaven Lab Affairs manages the joint appointment program, with four professors who also do research at BNL.

Liza N. Burby is the features editor and an award-winning journalist.