TO CATCH A KILLER
Drones, coupled with advances in computer chip manufacturing and the advent of artificial intelligence, have transformed research. Binghamton computer scientist Jayson Boubin’s lab, for example, uses sensitive dronemounted cameras to perform tasks ranging from detecting algal blooms in lakes to locating landmines in conflict zones.
8
Powering a greener future
Academic–industry partnerships fuel future innovations.
12
To catch a killer
Cancer detection gets a boost from new technology.
18 A career-defining boost
Catch up with four of Binghamton’s NSF CAREER award winners.
24 Eye in the sky
Drones accelerate research in archaeology, agriculture and more.
32
Making remote work work
Researchers explore leadership, teamwork in virtual settings.
38
Reimagining forensics
New techniques advance challenging cases.
3 / Welcome 4 / News briefs
5 / Faculty accolades 46 / Inventors 48 / In the news
FEDERALLY DESIGNATED RESEARCH CENTERS
New Energy New York
An Economic Development Administration Build Back Better Regional Challenge awardee, Regional Tech Hub designee
The NSF Energy Storage Engine in Upstate New York
National Science Foundation Regional Innovation Engine designee
Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems
A National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center
Developmental Exposure Alcohol Research Center
A National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Alcohol Research Center
New York Node of the Next Flex Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Institute
A Department of Defense Manufacturing Innovation Institute
BINGHAMTON’S S3IP CENTER OF EXCELLENCE INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING CENTERS:
Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing Center for Autonomous Solar Power
Center for Energy-Smart Electronic Systems
Center for Heterogeneous Integration Research in Packaging Integrated Electronics Engineering Center
BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY ORGANIZED RESEARCH CENTERS
Center for Advanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging Science
Institute for AI and Society
Binghamton Biofilm Research Center
Center of Biomanufacturing for Regenerative Medicine
Center of Biomedical Technology
Center for Cognitive Applications
Binghamton Center of Complex Systems
Center for Development and Behavioral Neuroscience
Center for Healthcare
Systems Engineering
Center for Information
Assurance and Cybersecurity
Center for Imaging, Acoustics and Perception Science
Bernard M. & Ruth R. Bass Center for Leadership Studies
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Center for Research in Advanced Sensor Technologies and Environmental Sustainability
Center for Writers
Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences Office of Research and Scholarship
Natural Global Environmental Change Center
Public Archaeology Facility
Tick-borne Diseases Center
BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY INSTITUTES FOR ADVANCED STUDIES
Center for Community Schools
Center for Israel Studies
Center for Korean Studies
Human Rights Institute
Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities
Institute for Asia and Asian Diasporas
Institute for Evolutionary Studies
Harriet Tubman Center for the Study of Freedom and Equity
Watson Institute for Systems Excellence
Binghamton University offers students a broad, interdisciplinary education with an international perspective and one of the most vibrant research programs in the nation. Binghamton, designated an R1 “very high research” institution by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, is consistently ranked among the top 50 public colleges in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The campus serves more than 18,000 students annually and has more than 145,000 alumni.
EDITORIAL
EDITOR
Rachel Coker, researchmag@binghamton.edu
ART DIRECTION AND DESIGN
Martha P. Terry
PHOTOGRAPHERS
Wasim Ahmad, Jonathan Cohen, Casey Staff and Ningfei Zhang
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Anthony Borrelli, Ethan Knox, Chris Kocher, Katie Liu and Jennifer Micale
COPY EDITORS
Eric Coker, Carolyn Haley and John Toon
MAGAZINE TEMPLATE DESIGN
Binghamton University Creative Services Department
ILLUSTRATORS
Patrick Rosche, The British Library and iStock.com artists CreativaImages, danijelala, elenabs, Happy_vector, Liliboas, natrot, Olga Yastremska, omyos, Oscar Requejo, seijiroooooooooo, studiogstock, THP Creative, Velvet R and wildpixel
BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY
PRESIDENT
Harvey G. Stenger
INTERIM VICE PRESIDENT FOR RESEARCH
Lisa Gilroy
VICE PRESIDENT FOR COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING
Greg Delviscio
Binghamton Research is published annually by the Division of Research, with cooperation from the Division of Communications and Marketing. © 2025 Binghamton University. Permission is granted to use part or all of any article published here. Appropriate credit and a tearsheet are requested. The views presented are not necessarily those of the editors or the official policies of Binghamton University. The University does not endorse products or services referenced in these pages.
POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Binghamton Research, Office of Research Advancement, PO Box 6000, Binghamton, NY 13902-6000.
Member of University Research Magazine Association
FROM THE INTERIM VICE PRESIDENT FOR RESEARCH
This is an exciting and dynamic time for research and scholarship at Binghamton University.
Our faculty experts play a vital role in generating new knowledge, contributing solutions to some of the most pressing problems of our time. Research on our campus has the potential to improve cancer detection and establish new practices for forensic science. It may change the way we think about building teams that can work remotely with greater success. And our early-career scientists have exciting ideas about topics ranging from materials science to the teaching of sign language.
Recent policy changes at the national level have the potential to reshape the research landscape. With expertise across the disciplines and a collaborative nature, Binghamton’s scholars are prepared to adapt to challenges, pursue diverse opportunities and continue with research that addresses critical needs.
For nearly 40 years, I have had the privilege of supporting Binghamton research, working alongside dedicated faculty, staff and students to foster innovation and secure funding. This experience has given me a deep appreciation for the complexities of research as well as for the remarkable impact it has on society.
As we move into a new academic year and face the challenges that may lie ahead, I have no doubt that Binghamton researchers will continue to use their passion for discovery to transform lives and shape the future.
Lisa Gilroy
Engineer S.B. Park serves as director of the Integrated Electronics Engineering Center, which was recently re-designated by New York state as a Center for Advanced Technology.
ELECTRONICS RESEARCH CENTER GETS $1M ANNUAL BOOST FROM NEW YORK
A Binghamton University research institute that partners with industry to advance electronics manufacturing has been re-designated by New York state as a Center for Advanced Technology. The designation comes with $1 million in annual funding for the next decade.
The Integrated Electronics Engineering Center supports innovative research that benefits companies and academia alike. The center’s industry partners present real-world problems, which students, staff and faculty members aim to solve through research in advanced laboratories on campus.
“The depth of industry-hardened technical talent in the IEEC leadership team, combined with enhanced IEEC assembly manufacturing capability and its extensive network of New York partner agencies, has enabled innovative electronics packaging solutions for new and existing New York companies,” says IEEC Director S.B. Park, a SUNY distinguished professor of mechanical engineering.
The IEEC, part of the S3IP Center of Excellence at Binghamton, has had an economic impact of $2.1 billion on New York state since 1993. During that time, the IEEC has aided companies in the retention and creation of more 2,500 jobs.
Founded in 1991, the IEEC has been a Center for Advanced Technology since 1993. Empire State Development, which manages the CAT program, requires the center to reapply for the status every 10 years.
NEW CENTER LEVERAGES AI TO BENEFIT SOCIETY
Binghamton University recently established an Institute for AI and Society that taps into the power of Empire AI, the most powerful academic research computer in the country.
Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a program providing $5 million to eight SUNY campuses, including Binghamton, to engage diverse disciplines and communities, broaden AI development to prepare students for the future, and advance the use of AI for the public good.
“Investing in AI within the SUNY system is an investment in our students to expand their knowledge about what the future will bring,” Hochul says. “We are not just preparing students for AI — we’re shaping how AI serves society, ensuring it strengthens communities and our economy.”
Empire AI is a consortium of public and private universities in New York building a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence computing center at the University at Buffalo, scheduled to open in 2026.
Associate Professor Jeremy Blackburn, who will serve as the director of Binghamton’s Institute for AI and Society, sees AI as a tool to gain a large-scale, quantitative understanding of disinformation, harassment campaigns, extremism, risks to children and antisemitism. Until recently, hardware limitations made it impractical to analyze the sheer amount of data his work explores.
“Previously, it would have taken nearly 20 years to run our experiments on even a sample of the billions of social media data points we collect yearly,” says Blackburn, a faculty member in the School of Computing. “By pooling resources from New York state and the member universities to build something more powerful, I can complete my research on online antisemitism in a matter of weeks. It is hard to overstate just how much more this increase in computing power will allow me to accomplish.”
Jeremy Blackburn
HISTORIAN RECEIVES PRESTIGIOUS HARVARD RADCLIFFE FELLOWSHIP
Historian Leigh Ann Wheeler, who is working on a biography of activist Anne Moody, is the author of two previous books, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 and How Sex Became a Civil Liberty.
After the publication of her memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi, civil rights activist Anne Moody was everywhere.
In 1968, the American public was enthralled with her account of growing up as an impoverished Black girl in the Jim Crow–era South, published when she was only 28.
And then she vanished.
Binghamton University History
Professor Leigh Ann Wheeler has taught Moody’s book and always wondered how Moody’s story evolved. Now, she’s finishing her own book answering that mystery, with help from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
The fellowship brings together scholars from around the world to
spend a year focusing on their work, while connecting with each other and with Harvard faculty. Radcliffe received 1,677 applications for 50 fellowship slots this year.
Moody was born in 1940, the daughter of sharecroppers. She became involved in activism in the early 1960s, including a protest at a Woolworth’s lunch counter that received national attention. She had left activism by the time she started working on her book.
“She didn’t really want to be famous,” Wheeler says. “She found the attention she was getting to be quite a burden.”
Hounded by the press, Moody fled the United States for Europe. Still, she surfaced occasionally; she went on speaking tours in the 1980s, visiting colleges where her book was taught.
“She was delighted to see that it was still having an impact,” Wheeler says. “She really wanted it to reach white people in particular, and she felt especially rewarded when she received letters from white students who told her how it had changed their views and understanding of race in the U.S.”
But clues as to Moody’s ultimate whereabouts didn’t start trickling out until after her death in 2015.
At Harvard, Wheeler will tackle the last several decades of Moody’s life, a difficult period marked by fragile mental health. She hopes that the book will lead to more opportunities to reconsider the impact of racism and honor Moody’s activism.
Wheeler has copious sources, including Moody’s journals.
“I have stuff that few biographers are lucky enough to have,” she says. “It’s a great asset for my work, but it’s also overwhelming.”
SCHOLARS WIN NSF’S MOST PRESTIGIOUS GRANT
FOR EARLY-CAREER RESEARCHERS
Six Binghamton University faculty members received more than $4.4 million in National Science Foundation CAREER awards to pursue groundbreaking research in materials science, language learning, high-tech manufacturing and more. A seventh brought a grant from his previous institution.
Ana Laura Elías Arriaga (Physics) aims to perfect her method of “one-pot synthesis” that stacks super-thin layers to create new material properties. The materials could be used to build better microchips and batteries.
Sung-Joo Lim (Psychology) plans to explore different ways to promote language learning in adults. The findings could tap into a new pathway toward greater brain plasticity.
Fuda Ning (SSIE) will create better tungsten alloys using extrusionbased sintering-assisted additive manufacturing — or more colloquially, 3D printing. It could lead to stronger materials in industries from outer space to medicine.
Jia Deng (Systems Science and Industrial Engineering) plans to develop a manufacturing process that uses a tiny tool to etch patterns on materials. The technology could enhance the performance of nano-electronics for a wide range of nextgeneration applications.
Qianbin Wang (Biomedical Engineering) is going to investigate what causes glaucoma and potential ways to detect and treat it early. He and his team have found that as glaucoma progresses, a certain type of neuron becomes overactive.
Yincheng Jin (Computing) will design wearable technology that can use facial recognition and artificial intelligence to improve how people learn American Sign Language in real time.
Jifu Tan (Mechanical Engineering) received a CAREER Award while a faculty member at another school. He models the formation and rupture of blood clots in the bloodstream as part of a larger effort to combat cardiovascular disease.
Physicist Ana Laura Elías Arriaga, a 2025 CAREER award winner, is pioneering a novel method of building atomically thin materials from scratch.
The awards are part of the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development Program, which identifies academics who have the potential to serve as role models and leaders in research and education. Binghamton faculty received more CAREER awards than any other SUNY school in 2025.
Donald Hall, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, expressed gratitude for these faculty members’ contributions to the campus community.
“This award routinely recognizes brilliant and hardworking faculty members who grow to become internationally respected leaders in their fields,” Hall says. “These six individuals are going to make our world a better place through their research and scholarship.”
Four of this year’s CAREER award winners at Binghamton are assistant professors in the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering
and Applied Science, and two are assistant professors in the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences.
The Division of Research’s Office of Strategic Research Initiatives supports faculty members submitting funding proposals and hosts an annual NSF CAREER Commit-toSubmit workshop series.
“These CAREER awards reflect the talent and drive of Binghamton University’s earlycareer faculty,” says Michael Jacobson, executive director for the Office of Strategic Research Initiatives. “These projects will have significant social impacts, from improvements in people’s daily lives to the development of advanced technologies and processes that will support our nation’s industries. These awardees will also play a significant role in shaping the next generation of researchers through their STEM education and outreach efforts.”
Academic-industry partnerships fuel new innovations and technologies
By Katie Liu
“We are optimizing the ways we synthesize the materials. There are a lot of parameters we have to tune. They all have consequences on the performance of the battery material.”
— Chemist Hao Liu
The technique used to visualize the winding helix of our DNA can also parse out impurities in the cathode materials that may power the next generation of batteries.
But before that, the students in Hao Liu’s Binghamton University lab must go back to the mortar and pestle. Grinding down white grains of lithium salt and black nickel manganese hydroxide powder until they form a homogenous gray, they then compress these precursor materials under a hydraulic press until they form a pellet no bigger than a penny.
That goes into a cubeshaped furnace about the size of a small computer monitor, its heating adjustable with just a few tweaks. Picture a kitchen oven, except when the metal glows red hot in
this particular furnace, it reaches temperatures higher than 1,000 degrees Celsius.
After the sample has been fired like a ceramic in what’s called the calcination process, then sufficiently cooled, students then grind it back into powder, where they can finally analyze the results of their work through a technique called X-ray diffraction.
“If you know Watson and Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the structure of DNA, they used the same technique in the 1950s to understand its structure,” says Liu, an assistant professor of chemistry. “That’s the same technique we use to check the structure of the material we synthesize, whether it’s pure or if there are some impurities.”
These experiments are part of a collaboration
between Liu and Virginia-based battery startup Fermi Energy. The partnership is one of nine R&D projects supported by $1.6 million from the National Science Foundation Energy Storage Engine in Upstate New York. Under this grant, Fermi Energy and Binghamton University work together to advance the performance of manganese-rich cathodes in lithium-ion batteries.
Batteries power everything, from the smallest ticking watches to electric vehicles, with lithium-ion batteries rapidly growing ubiquitous. But current methods of manufacturing lithium-based batteries are costly and time-consuming, hindering the broader adoption of greener technologies such as electric vehicles. Batteries that use materials like manganese face the threat
of dissolution into the liquid electrolyte bridging cathode and anode.
Fermi Energy aims to disrupt this status quo, creating a new technique for mixing and manufacturing battery cathodes to address these challenges. The company’s novel dry coating technique could enable a single-step calcination process, all while using a cheaper and more environmentally friendly mineral in place of traditional nickel and cobalt.
Fermi Energy was one of four companies to participate in the inaugural cohort of New Energy New York’s ChargeUp Accelerator, the nation’s only program dedicated to battery startups.
Liu’s expertise and previous research on lithium-ion batteries came in handy as he struck up a collaboration with Fermi Energy’s co-founder and CEO Ray Xu. Liu and his students are seeking the
ideal balance of materials, between manganese powder and lithium salts, to create the most effective battery, in the most efficient and low-cost manner.
“Currently, we are optimizing the ways we synthesize the materials. It sounds easier than it actually is — I mean, you just heat it up,” Liu says. “But there are a lot of parameters we have to tune: for example, the duration of the heating step, how high you heat it up to, and what kind of chemical precursor you have to use for that step. They all have consequences on the performance of the battery material.”
Liu, who won the NSF’s prestigious CAREER award for his sodium-ion battery work in 2022, is no stranger to the scientific curiosity and freedom that drive academic research. But industry-based R&D is unique: faster-paced, with
Chemist Hao Liu’s team partners with battery startup Fermi Energy on an R&D project supported by the Binghamton University–led NSF Energy Storage Engine in Upstate New York.
more concrete metrics and goals to meet.
“This is a more clear and technical target, without necessarily having a deep understanding of why when you do x, you get y,” Liu says. “We get that out of the way, and then we are just doing quite a bit of experimentation, and then we look for parameters where we could optimize.”
Working in such an environment can also be fulfilling in a different way.
“The industry gives us perspective on what are the things that industry needs, and your work would have a very quick impact,” Liu says. “Once you, for example, optimize this electrolyte additive, or you’ve made this process work, then we see an immediate impact in applications and products.”
Bridging the gaps between what goes on in academic labs and the startup world is part of
a larger dream coloring Binghamton’s growing battery ecosystem, a coalition of universities, entrepreneurs, government agencies and community organizations that are coming together to boost U.S. innovation and manufacturing in energy storage.
Even students have opportunities to gain crucial experience in the clean tech sector, from those conducting material synthesis in Liu’s lab to undergraduate interns in programs such as New Energy New York’s Student Startup Experience. Fermi Energy is a participating company there, too.
An academic and an innovator, Liu is curious to see where Fermi Energy’s invented dry coating
process will go in the industry.
“I would imagine, if this works out, then this could be a viable way of reducing the cost for these high-quality batch materials,” he says.
By now, Liu and his students have already achieved a baseline against which they can begin testing new precursor materials and parameters. Their grant with the NSF Energy Storage Engine ends in January, but Liu anticipates future collaborations will still be in store — not just with Fermi Energy, but the initiative as a whole.
“With the Engine, we see with other startups what problems they have in hand and how we can help them solve them,” Liu says.
POWERING AMERICA’S BATTERY FUTURE
Liu’s own interest in batteries stems from childhood. Where he grew up in China, disposable batteries were expensive. His father bought rechargeable batteries to power his toys instead — but still, they died too quickly. That experience offered motivation that stuck with him all the way through his undergraduate career, as he chose between studying solar cells or batteries.
“Batteries are the perfect playground for a lot of things,” he says. “It’s not just chemistry, but physics and engineering. It’s quite interdisciplinary, so there are a lot of things about the material that we do not know, and there are a lot of challenges that still remain to be solved.”
By centering battery innovation and production in America, a regional coalition led by Binghamton University aims to address critical supply chain and manufacturing challenges.
• New Energy New York, established in 2022 with support from the Economic Development Administration’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge and New York state, enables technology innovation, community engagement, workforce development and supply chain improvements.
• America’s Battery Tech Hub, a designation awarded in 2023, expands on NENY’s goals. It aims not only to catalyze regional economic development but also to be a national leader advancing the battery industry.
• The NSF Energy Storage Engine in Upstate New York, established in 2024 with support from the National Science Foundation and New York state, drives next-gen research, innovation, technology and workforce development.
TO CATCH A KILLER
CANCER DETECTION GETS A BOOST FROM NEW TECHNOLOGY
Cancer is among the leading causes of
death
worldwide. These Binghamton researchers leverage technology to improve detection.
By Chris Kocher
hemist Chuan-Jian “CJ” Zhong never expected to get into the cancer detection field.
Twenty years ago, thanks to funding from the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, he and his team developed super-small sensors with nanoscale olfactory films for detecting molecules in the air. The plan was to install them in the cockpits of jet fighters to alert pilots about dangerous levels of noxious gases from burning fuel or other sources.
This effort soon led Zhong’s team to collaborate with researchers who have pattern recognition and medical expertise and to explore the sensors for potential noninvasive breath detection of diabetes. A few years later, Zhong read about other researchers using his nanofilms as an “artificial nose” to detect other health conditions like lung cancer by analyzing patients’ breath for signs of illness.
“We thought, ‘Hey, since we have been working this sensor for a long time now, we should also do that,’” he says — and that pivot has led to innovations and fruitful collaborations on and off campus.
“Right now, cancer screening is a CT scan, a blood test or other methods that are timeconsuming and sometimes even invasive. We want to take a breath sample and diagnose: cancer or no cancer.”
— Chemist CJ Zhong
Zhong, a SUNY distinguished professor of chemistry, is among the researchers advancing cancer detection at Binghamton University. From lasers sorting healthy tissue from tumors to artificial intelligence sifting through mountains of DNA data, investigations at Binghamton could benefit millions of people worldwide.
In Zhong’s lab, tables are filled with an array of equipment for chemical screenings and other experiments. Among them sit a few early prototypes of the breath analysis machine — none of them with Wi-Fi internet capability, he points out. (Later versions will get this sorted.)
Every few weeks or so, one of Zhong’s doctoral students drives to the Cooper University Hospital in Camden, N.J., to pick up breath samples. The plastic bags filled with air come from patients who have cancer at various stages as well as some control samples. A partner hospital in China also sends its results online.
To use Zhong’s cancer-detection prototype, a patient blows into the device, sending the breath’s volatile compounds across the sensors. If the cancer biomarker is detected, it
Chemist CJ Zhong and his colleagues hope to use tiny sensors as an “artificial nose” that could detect cancer using patients’ breath.
creates an electrical signal that can be read on a portable, wireless device.
In addition to the sensor, hardware and electronics, the system also requires a database of information that the system can read. For that, Zhong’s team collaborates with Professor Shuxia “Susan” Lu from Binghamton’s School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering, who is an expert in database pattern recognition. Along with building a bank of information through data aquisition using the wireless sensor, this part of the project involves using AI to analyze the data.
Zhong sees the short-term goals for this project as straightforward ones: “Number one, we’re going to need a major grant. Number two, we need more patient samples, so we’ll continue to work with doctors to collect them. The problem is, it’s not like everybody’s coming to the doctor at the same time — one today, two tomorrow, then four the next week. The samples are spread out over many days, which makes it very hard to collect them.”
Looking further out, he would like to expand the development of the wireless platform on two fronts. One involves placing it in doctors’ offices for routine collection of breath samples, and other is a further-miniaturized version of the sensor that can be read by a
cellphone, so people could check their breath regularly for any questionable combination of chemicals or earlier signals of cancer.
Two students are working on selling the personal breath-checker idea to potential investors through the University’s Excellence in Entrepreneurship and Discovery (EXCEED) Program, which looks to advance innovative research through funding, personnel support and entrepreneurship training.
“Right now, cancer screening is a CT scan, a blood test or other methods that are time-consuming and sometimes even invasive,” Zhong says. “We want to take a breath sample and diagnose: cancer or no cancer. This gives a patient an early warning to go to a doctor to double-check.”
A BLOOD TEST FOR MALIGNANCY
More than 1.5 million Americans are diagnosed each year with solitary pulmonary nodules (SPNs). These abnormalities in the lungs, often found during routine X-rays or CT scans, are isolated groups of cells up to 3 centimeters in size.
Many SPNs are benign, but figuring out which ones are malignant isn’t easy. One method is to scan patients again in three to six months so the nodules can be rechecked. If they’ve grown or changed, there’s a risk it may be a malignant lesion and cancer cells already are traveling through the bloodstream to other parts of the body.
Biomedical engineer Yuan Wan is developing a faster, less painful way to diagnose malignant abnormalities in the lungs.
Another method is to do tissue biopsies, but those can be painful and difficult, because the nodules are relatively tiny. Missing the target and taking surrounding healthy cells instead can lead to misdiagnosis.
When both cancer specialists and imaging doctors find it hard to tell if a nodule is harmless, the doctor will take a close look at everything about the patient, from age and smoking history to workplace factors and results from other tests. Then, the patient and doctor will decide together if starting treatment right away is the best path.
Yuan Wan, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Binghamton, is developing a faster, less painful way to diagnose malignant SPNs. In 2022, he received
Biomedical engineer Fake “Frank” Lu has concentrated his work on gliomas, which are among the deadliest kind of brain cancer.
a five-year, $2.4 million grant through the National Institutes of Health’s prestigious MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) Award. The program supports experienced researchers as well as early-stage investigators such as Wan.
Wan’s project focuses on analyzing extracellular vesicles, which are small sacks of proteins, lipids and nucleic acids that cells secrete for intercellular communication. A patient would give blood, and the vesicles would be extracted from the plasma and enriched using specially designed microfluidic devices.
Wan aims to reduce detection time so that patients know within a week whether their SPNs should be removed.
He hopes the research leads to wider analysis of the vesicles for DNA mutations caused by cancer. “Doctors will be able to tell which drug is perfect for a patient and can effectively kill the cancer cells,” he says. “They also can use the information to see whether the patient’s cancer is still progressing.”
Wan’s research group is also trying to narrow the number of patients who would need this test, so labs are not overwhelmed.
“We need to be precise in selecting those who truly require the EV test,” he says. “Imaging can reveal lung nodules in many patients, but if all of them were to get liquid biopsies, the turnaround time would become very long, increasing the financial burden on both patients and insurance companies.”
The University of Pennsylvania’s Medical Image Processing Group is working with Wan’s team to analyze 3,000 CT scans using artificial intelligence, scoring lung nodules based on their size and shape to figure out how likely they are to be cancerous. If a nodule’s score goes above a certain point, that patient would be recommended for the EV test.
Wan is seeking funding to purchase more CT image data, because the more samples they have, the better the AI does. When tested on a third-party public database with around 800 CT imaging datasets, the program achieved over 90% in both sensitivity and specificity for diagnosing cancerous lung nodules.
“The goal is to use this additional data to further train our program and improve its performance,” he says. “We want to combine our AI-based imaging diagnosis with the EV test to see if this diagnostic strategy is effective.”
LASER-GUIDED SURGEONS
When you shine light on an object, the wavelengths that reflect back are almost but not quite the same. On the quantum scale, a tiny number of photons transfer energy to the material’s molecular chemical bond, very slightly changing their color.
Raman scattering — named after Nobel Prize–winning Indian physicist C.V. Raman — is not something that can be seen with the naked eye, but sensitive equipment can spot the shades of difference.
Fake “Frank” Lu, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Binghamton, uses the phenomenon to distinguish cancer cells from normal cells, since each scatters light differently. He sees the technology as safer than CT scans and X-rays, which use a potentially more dangerous form of radiation.
“This is a very clean technology that drives the chemical bond vibrations,” Lu says. “You turn off the laser, and the vibration stops. Nothing happens except a little thermal energy deposit. There’s no break in chemical bonds. There’s no electron loss. The tissue and the proteins will recover after this very short period of excitation.”
Lu has concentrated his research on gliomas, which are among the deadliest kind of brain cancer and cause 80% of all malignant brain tumors. In 2020, he received a $433,000 grant from the NIH to develop his method of label-free stimulated Raman scattering imaging that uses the properties of lipid droplets. The microscopic organelles are essentially packets of fat and oils that play multiple metabolic functions in healthy cells. It has proven difficult to study them in living specimens.
“A cancer cell contains a lot of lipid droplets, and they have been largely ignored in traditional pathology,” Lu says. “Chemical fixation and histological staining usually remove the lipid droplets. We have a perfect technology to image these droplets in their fresh, native condition in live cells.”
To differentiate healthy brain cells from cancer cells, doctors currently have two choices. One is to put pathologists on standby during surgery so they can do an immediate analysis, an option that Lu calls “very demanding, very stressful” because it can take
a half-hour or longer to prepare the tissue samples and offer guidance. Alternately, the surgeon can close the patient and wait for a comprehensive pathology report, which could show the tumor has not been fully removed and another procedure is required.
If Lu can perfect his technique, he sees two quicker and less expensive alternatives. Surgeons could collect a tissue sample, and a technician could examine it using a Raman scattering imaging machine right in the operating room. Maybe even better, OR staff could slide a laser probe through an endoscopy tube into the brain itself, like someone scanning a dark cave with a flashlight.
“More precise operations are important so surgeons are not touching the neuron bundle but still can cut out more of the tumor,” Lu says. “If we have a fresh-tissue pathology approach, the cost and the time for surgeries can be significantly reduced, and surgeons can have more success.”
BUILDING THE DATA INFRASTRUCTURE
What if we already have the answer to cancer detection (and treatment), but we just haven’t unlocked it yet? Empire Innovation Professor Nancy Guo thinks a lot about this possibility, and artificial intelligence may hold the key.
During the past 10 years, it has become routine for American doctors to order DNA testing for patient tumors to determine if they have certain mutations and, if so, to help set the best course of treatment.
“The U.S. is the only country in the world with health insurance that covers a patient’s complete genome sequencing for advanced cancer patients,” says Guo, a faculty member in Binghamton’s School of Computing. “If you can justify it to improve patient care, the insurance will pay for it — so it can be earlier in their treatment. Patients don’t have to wait until the cancer already has spread everywhere to take the test.”
However, only a small fraction of that DNA information is analyzed for those conclusions. There are about 25,000 genes in the human genome, and identifying which ones are the most important for curing diseases is a monumental task.
“Machine learning and artificial intelligence have not been fully applied to analyze this kind of [DNA] data. The data is there at the hospital and everybody pays for it, but it’s underutilized. I think this is a perfect time, and there is a pressing need.”
— Computer scientist Nancy Guo
That’s where bioinformatics can help.
“Machine learning and artificial intelligence — all of these techniques — have not been fully applied to analyze this kind of data,” Guo says. “The data is there at the hospital and everybody pays for it, but it’s underutilized. I think this is a perfect time, and there is a pressing need.”
Guo has led multidisciplinary research into AI with funding from the NIH, the National Science Foundation and corporate partners.
Using the latest tools for genome analysis and drug treatment, she has leveraged technology and infrastructure for detecting and fighting cancer.
For instance, one genetic test she helped to develop for lung cancer patients — now under review by the Food and Drug Administration — can predict whether tumors will return or metastasize. She and her team started thinking about how the same test could be an early warning before an official diagnosis.
“We took the gene assay we developed and tested against published data, and we said, ‘Can this go earlier?’” she says. “Maybe
a suspicious nodule was detected, and after a biopsy we compare the tissue with normal tissue and make a prediction whether the patient has lung cancer or not. It can even be earlier than that, before a nodule is detected. We are also developing biomarkers in liquid biopsies.”
In clinical cohorts, the test shows about 95% accuracy for lung and breast cancer, although more research is needed.
Advancing Guo’s vision for precision medicine requires investments of money and expertise, as well as full (anonymized) access to DNA testing data from healthcare providers. She believes the potential discoveries could revolutionize cancer detection and accelerate drug development to make personalized medications a reality.
“It won’t be easy, but at least it’s not 10 years ago or 15 years ago when you didn’t even have the data,” she says. “The data is there. We just need to build this infrastructure. It needs to be multidisciplinary with a lot of collaboration, so that is a challenge. If we all work together, though, we can achieve it and then beyond.”
Computer scientist Nancy Guo hopes artificial intelligence will improve cancer detection and treatment.
A CAREERDEFINING BOOST
The NSF CAREER award is the agency’s most prestigious early-career grant. Catch up with four of Binghamton’s CAREER winners to see where they are now.
By Katie Liu
Tracy Hookway did not intend to become a professor. When she returned to school to pursue a doctorate, she thought it would be in preparation for an industry job. As long as she landed somewhere in the biomedical engineering space, she would be happy.
But then her graduate school mentor spotted her knack for working with students and asked her a simple question: “Have you ever thought about staying in academia?”
Later, as Hookway continued pursuing her studies, she worked with her advisor to transform an empty space into a bustling lab. She saw in her mentor a future where she could do the same thing.
Tracy Hookway, today an associate professor of biomedical engineering, won a CAREER award in 2023.
“It was very eye-opening when she suggested it. It hadn’t even crossed my mind,” she says. “And from then on, I was sold.”
Now, Hookway is among Binghamton’s recent National Science Foundation CAREER award winners. The grant supports her research that grows live, beating heart tissue and neurons from what used to be skin cells — insights that could eventually lead to new drug therapies.
The CAREER award is the NSF’s most prestigious grant, given to early-career faculty with the potential to become leaders in research and education. During
the past 20 years, Binghamton’s research portfolio has grown steadily and the number of faculty receiving such grants has grown with it.
Binghamton’s first CAREER award went to the Department of Biological Sciences in 1995, supporting the study of thale cress plants. Since then, funded projects have touched on numerous topics, from sodium-ion battery innovations to the development of serverless computing.
Nearly 50 Binghamton scientists and engineers have now received a CAREER award. Some have gone on to be among the top-cited
researchers in the world, while others are at the beginning of their journeys. Four of these researchers, each in a different career stage, looked back at the burning questions they were chasing in their grants — and the curiosities that still remain, whether two years or two decades later.
A STARTING POINT
Chuan-Jian “CJ” Zhong, SUNY distinguished professor of chemistry, was one of Binghamton’s early CAREER recipients. Winning the award in 2004, he studied chemical
Chuan-Jian
“CJ” Zhong, today a SUNY distinguished professor of chemistry, received a CAREER award in 2004.
grant led to another evolution in my energy-related research — clean energy conversion such as fuel cells and hydrogen batteries.”
Zhong’s nanoscience research has grown in tandem with the burgeoning field, jumpstarting multiple companies and transforming into lab modules that are still used today, fueling hundreds more students’ own scientific pursuits. Most recently, he was named a SUNY distinguished professor, the system’s highest rank afforded to faculty who have contributed significantly to their fields.
But only a couple of decades ago, winning a CAREER grant was rare news at Binghamton. Those who received the prestigious award would often leave for another position, says Bahgat Sammakia, distinguished professor of mechanical engineering and former vice president for research.
reactions of gold in the nanoscale — thousands of times tinier than the diameter of a single human hair. His findings laid the groundwork for his later design of many different chemical sensors and catalysts, from devices that can detect human diseases from breath alone to environmental monitoring to parse out pollution. The millions of nanoparticles that comprise even a speck of surface area in a device are critical in increasing its potential interactions with targeted compounds and sensitivity.
“The scientific advancements from the CAREER grant have since become 50% of my research, from then to now,” says Zhong, who has accumulated nearly 30,000 citations of his published work. “Part of the
Over time, the tides began to shift. Binghamton invested in research infrastructure while recruiting new faculty in STEM fields eligible for NSF support. Today, the University is home to multiple federally recognized research centers and enrollment has increased to about 18,000 students. All this, on top of more grants submitted and awarded.
Twelve junior faculty members won CAREER awards in 2021 and 2022, a third of them in computer science.
“CAREER awards are reserved for the top 20, 25% in the field,” Sammakia says. “The fact that we can win so many speaks a lot for how far Binghamton has come.”
Guangwen Zhou, SUNY distinguished professor of mechanical engineering, was one of two faculty members who won a CAREER award in 2011. While reactions like oxidation happen constantly, such as whenever a metal is exposed to water vapor, much of what happens on the fundamental level is unknown.
To investigate this, Zhou beamed electrons through oxide samples, peering at the dancing, changing atoms using a unique in-situ method of transmission electron microscopy. He has received nationwide recognition and funding for follow-up projects, ongoing today, based on that very technique.
Now, Zhou stands among the top 2% of researchers in the world for his work on atomic-scale oxide reductions, according to a Stanford University study. His research results have also become the basis of new graduate courses and teaching tools, including a virtual microscope.
“All [the data] can be used as case studies, examples to show students the capability of the tools and also how the tools can help us understand fundamental problems,” Zhou says. “This project helped me produce a lot of research results, and those results feed into my teaching of case studies.”
Zhou applied for a CAREER grant around two years after he joined the faculty, and he received the award on his second attempt. Physicist Pegor Aynajian had just finished building his new lab and a scanning tunneling microscope lab from the ground up when he applied for and received a CAREER grant in 2017.
Driven by a fundamental curiosity to understand nature, Aynajian focused his research on unconventional superconductivity, or the ability for certain materials, at ultra-cold temperatures, to conduct electricity without resistance.
Aynajian’s big question, though, was how electrons interacting with each other become superconducting within materials, and whether it was possible to tweak them to do that near room temperature. It will take longer to fully understand the mystery of superconductors, but Aynajian’s project offered some important insights, including how
electronic interactions can produce orders that actually compete with and destroy superconductivity.
“Despite this being one of the hottest topics in condensed matter physics of the past 40 years, we still do not have a theory that can explain whatever is going on here,” he says.
Aynajian currently also investigates quantum materials called magnetic topological insulators, which are bulk insulators whose surfaces form a single atomic layer
Pegor Aynajian, now an associate professor of physics, received a CAREER grant in 2017.
of perfect metals. Similarly to superconductors, electrons can move on their atomic surfaces without dissipating.
“Every experiment or project you do leads to new projects,” Aynajian says. “The projects I do today will define what I’m going to do in the next couple of years.”
The CAREER grant itself is five years long, and many young professors gun for it as a top priority.
“When you get going, there are these prestigious awards that you
Guangwen Zhou, now a SUNY distinguished professor of mechanical engineering, won a CAREER award in 2011.
hear about that are worth your time trying to apply to and crafting your plan, because it does two things,” Hookway says. “Obviously, getting funding is amazing — it allows us to do the research and work on the project. But when you think about things in terms of your career and laying it out, really, you’ve built a roadmap for five years and then beyond that.”
In the grand scheme of an entire academic lifetime, one of constant new questions, directions and
occasional detours, Zhong says, five years feel like a blip.
“The CAREER grant is really called a starting point,” Zhong says. “It’s also a bridge to new starting points.”
FINDING THE RIGHT ROAD
Bacteria can contaminate and kill young cells, samples could be too thick for electrons to pass through, and even the vibrations of a door closing could disrupt the
experimental process — the latter, at least, in Aynajian’s case.
To visualize electrons in quantum materials like superconductors, you must bring a piece of atomically sharp metal an atom’s width away from the surface of a material, then scan it for days. Any disruption, be it from a swinging door or a loud clap, could disrupt this precarious experiment. Acoustically and electrically isolated from the University, Aynajian’s lab is as cold and clean as deep space. Experiments are conducted not by hand, but with mechanical grips. Dropping even one item requires students to break the vacuum of the lab and warm it from frigid outer space cool to room temperature in order to pick it up — which could delay the process up to two weeks.
These pressures have not stopped Aynajian’s students from tackling the challenge.
“Students at Binghamton are smart, and they learn fast,” he says. “They are reliable. They know how to run a delicate and challenging experiment. They learn from their mistakes, and they try not to repeat the same mistakes.”
But sometimes, more daunting than all that could go wrong is putting ideas to paper. It was difficult at first for Hookway to find a roadmap that clicked, and she scrapped an early version of her CAREER project. Through Binghamton programs like Commit to Submit, Hookway received support that enabled her to create a successful proposal.
“You don’t want to just be writing to write,” she says. “You want it to be something that really embodies what you’re motivated by.”
The NSF receives thousands of project proposals every year, and among heaps of grants, only about 500 CAREER proposals are awarded annually. In such a competitive field, one must find a unique idea and believe in it.
PATRICK ROSCHE
“I always emphasize to the young people who come to do scientific research: Finding your own niche is very important,” Zhong says. “Something you believe strongly in, not just something you see everybody else is doing.”
Zhong is no stranger to the pushback that can come with piloting a novel idea, having experienced his share of rejections and rewrites. One of Zhong’s early NSF proposals to study gold nanoparticles was turned down. It came back with one comment: that gold, the material that became central to his CAREER project later, was too expensive and impractical to use.
“At the time, because you so strongly believe in what you have, when you meet this immediate resistance, in some way that helps you,” he says. “Because in the end, how do you convince the reviewers?”
LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING FORWARD
More than 20 years after he received his CAREER award, Zhong has become a distinguished professor, inventor and entrepreneur. One of five Binghamton faculty members who have been elected as a National Academy of Inventors fellow, Zhong has more than 22 patents under his belt. Around half of them relate to the sensors for which his grant supplied foundational research.
“I didn’t envision what I’m doing today, all the licensed technology and patents. But I do know one thing’s clear,” he says. “If I work out this fundamental chemistry, I should have even more opportunities to explore.”
Yet, beyond licensing his technology and founding startups, Zhong says it’s his students who have become his greatest achievements. Some have become professors; others aim
“EVERY EXPERIMENT OR PROJECT YOU DO LEADS TO NEW PROJECTS. THE PROJECTS
I DO TODAY WILL DEFINE WHAT I’M GOING TO DO IN THE NEXT COUPLE OF YEARS.”
— Physicist Pegor Aynajian
for high-impact publications the moment they join his team.
“When the students raise this bar, then you have to keep going,” he says.
Zhou, almost 15 years out from when he received his CAREER award, now serves as the deputy director of Binghamton’s materials science and engineering program, as well as associate director of the Institute of Materials Research. His work continues illuminating the mechanisms behind everyday processes like corrosion and could pave the way for more sustainable manufacturing technologies.
But for Zhou, he considers those early days chasing after fundamental knowledge to be his most significant accomplishment.
“If I look back at my publications and papers, one thing I feel proud of is that basically nearly every paper we have published includes a clear mechanistic insight,” he says. “There’s always a fundamental understanding at the core of our work.”
Meanwhile, Hookway, who is nearly halfway through her CAREER
grant, received tenure this year. Inspired by the outreach she has done in her project through the development of biomedical engineering-themed gaming modules, she’s looking to write more education-focused grants.
“I guess I didn’t totally know what the vision of my future was early on, but I am very happy I am where I am,” she says. “I love my job. I love how I can come in every day, and no two days are the same. I love seeing growth in the students I’m teaching and mentoring and seeing the process of them being very new to things, to leading research projects by the time they leave my lab. Watching that evolution is fantastic and hits home for me.”
As her lab expands and more students venture off, she likes to say, “Once in the Hookway lab, always in the Hookway lab.”
While funding isn’t unlimited, and scientific work always comes with its challenges, here, Aynajian says Binghamton faculty continue to make the best from what they get. There are still unanswered questions lingering from his CAREER grant he’d like to address, from the role of magnetic fields in shaping a system to whether it’s possible to play with the spins of electrons — all of which would require high magnetic fields and much lower temperatures to solve.
But as for his project, approaching a decade from the day he received news of its funding, Aynajian says he would not change much of what he has done.
“These are things I was going to do, regardless of whether I got the funding or not. As long as I had enough money to buy helium and pay students, then I was going to do those experiments,” Aynajian says.
“The CAREER award made it possible, and quickly. But even if I hadn’t had that award, I would have continued doing all these experiments.”
The
drone revolution accelerates research in archaeology, agriculture, robotics and more
By Jennifer Micale
n the screen, a crisp image takes shape: a stone landscape worthy of Escher, with massive faces emerging from shadows and cracks.
Binghamton University anthropologist Carl Lipo zooms in and more details come into view: the jutting noses and chins of the massive Easter Island statues known as moai, still in the quarry where they originated. There are no good maps of the nearly inaccessible volcanic crater, with its high, steep walls — that is, until now. A swipe of the finger, and the image changes angles — an interactive and nearly perfect
three-dimensional map, worthy of science fiction.
“With a drone, we were able to systematically map this at 30-meter increments to create a centimeterlevel, precise three-dimensional model. There are 22,000 photos stitched together with software,” Lipo explains. “In some ways, it’s actually better than being there.”
Early drones and satellites couldn’t produce the resolution needed for the project on remote Rapa Nui, Easter Island’s native name. To capture the data, the drones needed to fly methodically over the site, with 80% of each
Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, was called Te Pito o te Henua, “the navel of the world.” Its cultural center is the quarry for the island’s famous statues. This photo, captured with drone technology, shows the coastline with the quarry forming the figurative navel.
University
image overlapping with the next, providing the software with multiple points to create the model.
Drones, coupled with advances in chip manufacturing that have allowed for the miniaturization of computing technology and the advent of artificial intelligence, have transformed research. At Binghamton University, drones are being used to detect landmines and agricultural pests, map lost battlefields, repair infrastructure — and even to find you a parking space.
“It’s a gateway to looking at things from different disciplinary perspectives,” says Adam Mathews, an associate professor of geography
and Fulbright Fellow who recently worked with geologists in Ireland to map and examine peatlands.
The drone revolution
While affordable drones are a recent innovation, the value of a bird’s eye view is as old as time.
“From a conservation ethic, as an archaeologist, you want to impact the record as little as you possibly can. Every time you dig a hole, you’re destroying the thing that you’re trying to study,” explains Lipo, a professor of anthropology and associate dean for research and programs for Harpur College of Arts and Sciences.
Binghamton
anthropologist Carl Lipo uses drones to create detailed maps as part of his exploration of Easter Island.
In the early days, that meant leveraging aerial photography. The U.S. Department of Agriculture began systematically mapping North America farmland in the 1930s — which proved a boon to archaeologists and geographers.
Remote locations such as Rapa Nui, however, lack aerial photography and satellite imagery typically doesn’t have the fine detail needed for research. Early in his career, Lipo used kites and then small blimps, equipped with a digital camera and a radio-controlled mechanical hand to press the shutter button. There are no helium tanks on the island, so researchers ended up using hydrogen from the local weather station.
“We had this bomb flying above us and powerlines overhead,” Lipo remembers. “It was risky, although we were able to get some photos.”
Lipo began his research on the island in 2005; the first drones hit the consumer market in 2007. The early ones were home-built and fragile affairs that had to be flown manually. Jayson Boubin, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton, had his start with them in high school, when he built
and flew quadcopters as a hobby.
The technological landscape changed when DJI released the Phantom 1, the first consumer drone. Unlike earlier drones, the next generation largely piloted itself. Camera and sensor technology developed in tandem, expanding to multispectral sensing, LIDAR and more. Technologies such as optics, processors and improved hyperspectral and multispectral cameras have allowed for more versatile applications.
“We’ve seen significant improvements in onboard computation,” explains Boubin, holding up a Raspberry Pi.
The palm-sized circuit board is essentially a small computer that easily fits onboard a drone. Add a tensor processing unit — which looks like a small silver box — and the same palm-sized circuit board will be a bit heavier, but much faster and capable of machine learning workloads.
“We’re able to do onboard, real-time three-dimensional SLAM, which we weren’t able to do 10 years ago at all,” says Boubin, using an acronym for simultaneous
localization and mapping. “As the hardware is improving, the software is also improving.”
Digital cameras encode information as red, green and blue (RGB) pixels, which capture certain wavelengths of light while disregarding others. Because of low resolution, a typical RGB camera would make it difficult to determine whether a surface was composed of metal or cloth, for example. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) cameras encode light on a much finer, more detailed scale. The problem: These cameras generate massive amounts of data, enough to fill a flash drive in around 30 seconds. To solve this, that data must be processed in real time — as quickly as it’s generated.
Boubin has been working on the problem for the past few years, and his lab is the only one in the world currently up to the task. Data from drone-mounted HSI cameras can detect harmful algal blooms in the Finger Lakes, landmines in conflict zones and even World War II battlefields hidden under the tree canopy.
“In the old days, we imagined what we could do but we could never get there,” Lipo muses. “And now you press a button and it goes up; the drone flies back and forth and lands itself. You download the data into the computer, which builds you a three-dimensional map.”
Maps and models
Adam Mathews, an associate professor of geography, has used drones to map and examine peatlands with colleagues in Ireland.
Three-dimensional maps and models are crucial to many kinds of research. Thomas Pingel, an associate professor of geography, uses them to gauge the effects of global warming in cities and the relationship between surface and air temperatures. Drones equipped with thermal cameras allow him to register those temperature gradations in high detail.
With an off-the-shelf commercial drone, Pingel and graduate student Sharifa Karwandyar use artificial
Yong Wang, an associate professor of systems science and industrial engineering, sees numerous applications for drone-based technology, ranging from parking enforcement to package delivery systems.
intelligence to detect landmines in camera images, a strategy that may someday save lives around the world. Another project, spearheaded by graduate student Peter Vailakis, uses drones to track deer in the campus Nature Preserve. Deer blend in with the environment, so they are difficult to discern in a static image. Instead, researchers watch through the camera as the drone flies a pre-programmed route; when a deer is spotted, the drone switches to manual control and is steered closer to the target.
In collaboration with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, Lipo and Pingel have used dronemounted LIDAR to map former World War II battlefields in Guam and the Solomon Islands to determine where fallen soldiers may still lie. In a further development, they are working with Boubin, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry Chuan-Jian “CJ” Zhong and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Laure Spake to build
a “digital nose” that would allow drones to detect human remains. Decomposing bodies produce organic molecules such as putrescene, which cadaver dogs can detect at low levels. These molecules persist over long periods of time and are detectable for hundreds of years under certain conditions. In addition to battlefields, this research could also contribute to forensic cases, helping locate victims of accidents or crimes.
“One of the reasons why people aren’t found is because they were lost in forested, rugged terrain,” Lipo says. “What we need are drones that can go into those landscapes and map underneath the vegetation.”
A drone flying under the canopy requires a top-notch sensor suite to determine obstacles, artificial intelligence to make complex navigational choices — and SLAM. While computationally heavy, simultaneous localization and mapping enables a drone to both determine and
remember its location in respect to the objects around it.
In a video created by Zain Nasir ’22, MS ’24, today a machine learning engineer focused on cancer research, a drone flies over the courtyard outside the Engineering Building. But the black-and-white landscape is pocked with specks of light: The program is identifying structuring features of the landscape.
The light gathers on the corners of pavers and the canopy of a slender tree.
“A feature isn’t just an object. It’s a collection of gradients that are resident in the image that usually represent a corner of the object or some piece of it,” Boubin explains. Outside of built environments, SLAM becomes more challenging; forests grow and change, and branches blow in the wind. Working with Pingel, Boubin is using LIDAR scans as an intermediate SLAM map to locate, for example, the
“A lot of the most interesting science is motivated by actual applications and by stakeholders. Interacting directly, seeing what the problems are and how to solve them — that’s what I want to do with my life.”
— Computer scientist Jayson Boubin
Thomas Pingel, an associate professor of geography, uses drones to gauge the effects of global warming in cities.
To watch a short video, scan this QR code.
A NEW GENERATION OF RESEARCHERS TAKES FLIGHT
When Research Assistant Professor Joe Panzik pulls out the drones, the quiet students — the ones who typically choose seats in the back of class — suddenly switch on.
About 300 students join Binghamton’s First-year Research Immersion program every year; 30 of them end up in Panzik’s environmental visualization lab, where they are split into teams working on projects related to environmental surface issues and observations.
Drones are a key tool; students are trained in their use during the spring semester, starting with basic takeoffs and landings.
“They use drones to practice creating digital maps and 3D images that they can then import and look at in different ways,” Panzik says. Working in partnership with faculty members, student researchers have used drones to monitor seasonal change in the Nature Preserve,
looking for spectral signatures in the foliage to determine tree health. Others use drone-mounted thermal imaging equipment to count deer, or ground-penetrating radar and magnetometers to detect unexploded ordnance or water table levels.
For students of all ages, drones can deepen learning and increase engagement. Before his arrival at Binghamton, Associate Professor of Geography Adam Mathews used drones and hands-on play to teach middle school students about topographic mapping and reinforce geographic concepts.
“Just talking about latitude and longitude might not be that interesting to students,” he says.
“But demonstrate the use of a drone and put Play-Doh or LEGO in their hands, they’ll be excited to follow along.”
“We’re trying to develop algorithms to use drones efficiently so farmers can save energy and save money. Eventually, they won’t need to go into the field to monitor the conditions.”
largest trees in the Nature Preserve. This data then allows the drone to formulate an initial trajectory amid the trees, using SLAM processing to avoid collisions.
“Flying under the canopy is the next big frontier,” Pingel says.
Solving problems
Drones can do more than create better maps. Someday, they may repair solar panels and wind turbines, deliver packages, find parking spaces — or ticket you for parking in the wrong one.
Research from Yong Wang, an associate professor of systems science and industrial engineering, functions as a proof of concept, showcasing the possibilities of drone-based technology. Take parking, for example. In one scenario, a campus safety officer opens the trunk of their vehicle to release several drones, which methodically travel up and down campus lots, scanning license plates and checking them against the parking registry. If the number isn’t found, the system would alert a technician to issue a parking ticket.
In another application, drones scan the lot for open parking spaces, which are then relayed to drivers using an app. There are still
— Mechanical engineer Kaiyan Yu
some kinks to work out, Wang notes; the algorithm students tested to map those spaces failed to detect double-parked cars and sometimes mistook the sidewalk for a parking space.
His lab has also done work in hybrid delivery systems, in which drones work in concert with a driver to deliver packages. Back at the warehouse, drones can conduct inventories more accurately and efficiently than human beings, signaling the manager when supplies are running low. Drones are also more efficient at inspecting solar panels and wind turbines, using both color and thermal imaging to detect areas in need of repair.
“In this case, you can send the technician there; they don’t need to inspect each panel but focus on the ones with potential damage. You can increase your efficiency and reduce your labor workload,” Wang says.
Routing strategies need to consider a drone’s limited battery life; after around 30 minutes, a unit needs to recharge. Wang’s lab is looking at how routing strategies can accomplish the needed work, while taking the drone’s energy needs into account.
So is Kaiyan Yu, an associate professor of mechanical engineering
who uses drones in a range of robotics-based projects. In one complex robotic operation to repair highway cracks, drones monitor traffic from above and signal ground-based robots that place signs or traffic cones. Another robot is then used to detect and fill the surface cracks.
Yu is working on a National Science Foundation proposal to use robot teams in agriculture in collaboration with Boubin, School of Computing Associate Professor Shiqi Zhang and local farmers. In this system, low-flying drones are deployed to monitor field health. When a problem is detected — say the crops need pesticide, fertilizer or water — the drone emits a signal. Ground-based robots may be summoned for a closer look at the problem area, or to apply the needed treatment.
“We’re trying to develop algorithms to use these tools efficiently so farmers can save energy and save money,” Yu says. “Eventually, we will be able to monitor crops at set periods of time. They won’t need to go into the field themselves to monitor the conditions.”
Yu’s role is to optimize the use of robots in decision-making and overcome logistical challenges — namely, the robot team’s timing and
energy consumption. To address this, researchers need to optimize the planning of where and when robots should be deployed for field monitoring.
Also on the agricultural front, Boubin’s focus is the spotted lanternfly, an invasive species with the potential to devastate orchards and viticulture. Using drones to detect pests is challenging, he notes; as airborne vehicles, drones are loud and displace the air, which can disperse the insects they’re trying to detect.
Detecting the lanternflies as egg masses — before they hatch
into short-lived adults — is a better solution. Researchers are using machine learning to identify these egg masses, with the help of farmers from around the country.
“A lot of the most interesting science is motivated by actual applications and by stakeholders. I can collect data and send it back to a farmer, or I can find landmines for removal or spotted lanternflies so someone’s vineyard doesn’t get infested,” Boubin says. “Interacting directly, seeing what the problems are and how to solve them — that’s what I want to do with my life.”
Kaiyan Yu, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, uses drones in a range of robotics-based projects.
oom meetings are piling up in your calendar. Ping! Your supervisor just messaged you, asking for a quick update on a project.
Later, a frustrated co-worker wants to hop on a video call to walk through the process for posting on your organization’s website; it’s too complicated to explain via email.
Does any of that sound familiar?
The COVID-19 pandemic forced many businesses and organizations into remote work. In the years since, what began as a safety measure has, in certain ways, reshaped workplace culture. Many workplaces have restored in-person schedules; in others, remote or hybrid options have had mixed results.
Researchers at Binghamton University are investigating the advantages and challenges of remote-work practices from different angles, leaning into their expertise in areas such as leadership development or navigating complex systems. Keenly aware that
students are entering a workforce with new expectations about the dynamics of office life, Binghamton researchers are beginning with basic questions:
• How can we build virtual teams to optimize creativity and the flow of ideas?
• What’s the most effective way to stand out as a leader in virtual workplace settings?
• Can you manage virtual teams as effectively as in-person groups?
• How can companies make workfrom-home practices sustainable?
The most obvious benefit of a virtual work environment is enhanced flexibility. It has improved accessibility for employees by reducing travel and encouraging a healthier work–life balance, says Hiroki Sayama, distinguished professor of systems science and industrial engineering and an expert on complex group dynamics.
“There are things you can accomplish more effectively online and things that work better in person,”
Sayama says, “so instead of viewing it as one option being better than the other, managers would benefit by looking at which option is best suited to meet the objective.”
A study published in January 2025, co-authored by Sayama and Shelley Dionne, dean of Binghamton’s School of Management, offered insights into how people should be organized to develop the best ideas. Larger teams of people with diverse backgrounds tend to produce more conservative — almost “safer” — ideas because everyone vetted them from their own areas of expertise, according to the study. Those who interacted with fewer group participants felt more isolated, but they also produced stronger ideas.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has documented the potential staying power of remote-work practices. It found the percentage of remote workers in 2021 was higher than in 2019, and major industries — including finance, technical
services and corporate management — still had more than 30% of their employees working remotely in 2022.
A Pew Research Center survey showed that three years after the pandemic, 35% of workers with jobs that could be performed remotely were still working from home full time.
“How much innovation happens in virtual settings compared to face-to-face settings? It depends; there’s increasing scientific evidence that we’re perhaps missing in virtual meetings many of those ‘serendipity’ moments that could have happened if you’re in the physical office, bumping into people throughout the day and having those smaller conversations that help generate ideas,” Sayama says. “In virtual settings, it’s easy to focus more on the prescribed agenda items, logging off once the meeting is over, instead of those random connections that could lead you in new directions.”
“ Hybrid models are probably the most effective, because you still have some people in the same room to directly engage with others in a conversation.”
—
Chou-Yu “Joey” Tsai, author of a study on cultivating leaders in virtual
teams
Chou-Yu “Joey” Tsai, Osterhout associate professor of entrepreneurship, co-authored a 2024 study on cultivating leaders in virtual teams.
Standing out in a virtual crowd
Sitting around a table as a group makes the banter between team members feel more natural. You can read a person’s facial cues and gauge how others respond to ideas.
The same can’t always be said if you’re in a virtual meeting. Osterhout Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship Chou-Yu (Joey) Tsai, who co-authored a study in 2024 on cultivating leaders in virtual teams, says dominating a team discussion in a virtual setting doesn’t necessarily make a person a better leader. In virtual teams, where people cannot pick up on nonverbal cues as easily,
a person’s responsiveness to other team members plays a significant role in whether they’re perceived as a leader.
But for that leadership to be effective and teamwork to be successful, Tsai adds, all the group’s participants must also speak up.
“Hybrid models are probably the most effective, because you still have some people in the same room to directly engage with others in a conversation. That can’t happen in purely virtual teams, so unless you have a specific role assigned to everyone involved in the virtual team collaboration, it might not function as effectively,” Tsai says. “At the same time, we found the best
way to mimic those essential social cues in a virtual setting is to directly state your reaction or what you’re thinking instead of just your facial expression.”
But there’s another layer to ensuring remote or hybrid workplaces achieve positive results, and it’s the backbone of research by School of Management doctoral student Yu Wang. By digging into remote-work practices used to varying extents by 200 of the top law firms across the United States, she’s learning how these approaches could impact human capital, firm productivity and employee satisfaction.
As a strategic policy, Wang says, working from home helps companies
Working in virtual or hybrid settings can offer unique advantages and raise new challenges. Here are some research-backed ways to work from home more effectively:
Create a workspace: Designate a clear area where you can focus on work-related tasks to separate work and personal time.
Communicate: Maintain frequent and clear communication with your colleagues and your supervisor, and respond promptly to any questions or issues that arise. Schedule time for video chats with colleagues when you’re able.
Stick to a routine: Follow a daily schedule that helps you structure your time and stay on task.
Set goals: Plan goals to accomplish each day and over the course of a week to help ensure projects and assignments are completed as required.
Maintain work–life balance: Take regular breaks for exercise, limit screen time and prevent burnout. Make time to engage meaningfully with family, including supporting household responsibilities.
reduce costs such as rent and operational expenses, which can prove valuable for employers in high-cost city centers.
Wang’s research has led her to believe businesses can benefit from optimizing their remote-work policies, even though there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” solution. If it’s implemented properly, she says, a remote or hybrid approach could expand job applicant pools and be especially beneficial for some groups, such as pregnant women and people with disabilities.
“Providing remote or hybrid options helps organizations retain talent, especially in industries such as law firms or technology, where employees value autonomy a lot,” Wang says. “Allowing companies to access a broader client base without needing to build new physical offices could also help them unlock new
market opportunities while avoiding increasing costs.”
A generational shift and looking ahead
When lockdowns prompted by the pandemic sent employees home, students also had to adapt to learning in remote classroom environments. While this shift reshaped how students approach learning, it also influenced their expectations about flexible work schedules.
Tsai views the continued use of remote or hybrid work as an opportunity for educators to cultivate interpersonal skills that might be conveyed more naturally in person but could make a more substantial impact in virtual settings. He has also noticed that the current generation of students is
more acclimated to socializing online through social media platforms, so it’s no surprise that they might instinctively prefer a meeting on Zoom.
“If we don’t reinforce those skills and show how to integrate those in virtual settings, you could run the risk of people losing a sense of meaning to their work,” Tsai says. “It can be much harder to mimic the close mentorship among colleagues in a virtual space; you don’t learn from your co-workers in the same way, and if you do learn, it’s at a much slower pace.”
This trend could easily continue for a decade or longer as the younger workforce becomes more entrenched, Sayama says, potentially clashing with the viewpoints of older managerial generations.
However, one avenue he’s exploring is how the emergence of artificial
Professional, scientific, and technical services
Finance and insurance
Management of companies and enterprises
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Estimated U.S. employees with bachelor’s degrees working remotely in 2025
Employees in U.S. who work remotely some hours (2025 estimated)
Estimated U.S. employees with advanced degrees working remotely in 2025
Hiroki Sayama, distinguished professor of systems science and industrial engineering and an expert on complex group dynamics, studies how people should be organized to develop the best ideas.
intelligence (AI) systems might enhance or exploit virtual work environments.
Whether it’s AI-driven transcription services or using AI in communication algorithms, tools could help improve efficiency in remote workplaces, as long as they don’t completely replace human connections. Sayama says a similar dynamic arose when email became a mainstream asset, and for the younger generation, integrating online technology into the workplace has become routine.
Looking ahead, the trick will be recognizing when AI should serve as an asset and not a replacement.
“If we’re meeting face-to-face, there’s little room for AI to intervene,” Sayama says. “But as online working environments drive more transition in the coming years, we will likely see more automated communication processed by algorithms.”
Organizations could ensure the long-term success of work-fromhome practices by establishing effective mentoring and support systems, Wang says. These could include cross-location communication mechanisms to help employees stay connected, build trust and strengthen team cohesion regardless of where they work.
“To make working from home a sustainable strategic practice, organizations need to go beyond simply ‘allowing’ employees to work remotely by also providing strong internal management support,” Wang says. “This includes leveraging human resource systems to ensure that remote employees have equal access to growth and career development opportunities, such as promotions, training, performance management and recognition.”
“ There’s increasing scientific evidence that we’re perhaps missing in virtual meetings many of those ‘serendipity’ moments that could have happened if you’re in the physical office.”
— Hiroki Sayama, an expert on complex group dynamics
with skin, bones and ancient DNA
By Ethan Knox
At Binghamton,
forensic science
isn’t just being studied — it’s being reimagined, one collaboration at a time
hy do our fingers and toes wrinkle in the water?
Biomedical engineer Guy German was intrigued by this question. Starting with the fact that his father worked with London police as a “frogman” — a trained scuba diver who recovers victims from the water — and ending with his research into human skin, German’s work feels like a natural fit for the field of forensics.
“Skin was the starting block in the evolution of using forensic identification,” says German, an associate professor at Binghamton. “Biometrics was in its infancy. Pre-fingerprints, pre-DNA testing, identifying a perpetrator was incredibly difficult. These tools made it easier — are there other, modern ways to make it easier to identify remains that we don’t know or use yet?”
The world of forensics is complex, growing and full of myths about effective tactics, especially those for identifying remains. At Binghamton, researchers are finding ways to apply their unique expertise to investigate such methods from new angles:
• German’s work could improve the process for identifying human remains in the water or make fingerprinting a more operational science.
• Laure Spake, an assistant professor of anthropology who studies child growth and development, works with her students on improving methods for estimating traits of the biological profile, especially age at death; advancing knowledge of gunshot trauma in the skeleton; and understanding how forensic anthropologists are involved in post-conflict humanitarian mass grave exhumations.
• Matthew Lunn, a clinical assistant professor and director of the forensic health program, focuses on ensuring the appropriate standards of care are followed for the next generations of forensic professionals.
• Matthew Emery, research assistant professor of anthropology, has adopted a novel approach to identify archeological or environmentally damaged bodies through a technique previously used for extracting ancient DNA.
Why study these areas so closely? It’s important to understand what’s working and what isn’t in forensics, says Lunn, and critiquing ongoing research helps the field ensure its verifiability.
Understanding why now-standard practices — such as the integration of technology in crime scene investigations and doll reenactments for infant deaths — are effective will also help the field continue to provide reliable results, he adds.
“Unfortunately, what we find in forensic science is that ‘what people know’ isn’t necessarily consistent with the literature,” Lunn says. “Continuing to build up that literature and making that applicable and digestible for people who are working in the field is essential.”
For German, there are more connections between his research and forensics than might meet the eye.
His personal history and fascination with human skin inspired him to investigate another part of the body that is unique to individuals, the patterned microchannels in skin at other anatomical sites, such as the knee, back of the hand, forehead and feet. Most recently, German’s research team employed its unique focus area to investigate a forensic myth surrounding how fingers and toes wrinkle in water.
Despite the misconception that they form due to the tissue swelling with water, wrinkles actually result
from vasoconstriction, or the blood vessels in skin shrinking. If blood vessels remain stationary, German’s team posited, would the wrinkles return in the same pattern?
“We found the finger wrinkles are completely repeatable,” German adds. “Since the blood vessels don’t move, the pattern stays the same. We theorized that they could be used as an additional forensic tool.”
This work could be used for identification of aquatic workers and cadavers. It could also apply to non-invasive mapping of complex blood vessel patterns and designing new and bio-inspired high-friction surfaces for improving a person’s grip underwater.
German thinks the most useful way to apply this work is in identifying perpetrators via partial prints, which are much more common than full prints. Wrinkles can prevent identifiable fingerprints from appearing on surfaces; if you induce constriction, or include those lines in fingerprinting beforehand, it would be an added level of identification.
“If you saw a partial print that went wavy, you could say this person has probably just got out of the water or had a shower or
Despite the misconception that they form due to the tissue swelling with water, a Binghamton research team found that wrinkles result from vasoconstriction, or the blood vessels in skin shrinking.
Biomedical engineer Guy German’s research may improve the process for identifying human remains in the water.
washed their hands. If you had a partial at the site that was wrinkled, that’s limiting information,” German says. “But we think if you stick their hand in water for five minutes and replicate the partial print, now you’ve got solid evidence, because it’s repeatable.”
But, he says, skin is complicated, because it adapts to its environment, so additional research is required. He thinks adding new data points — especially repeatable ones — is a key to advancing forensic science.
Practicability can also be an important factor in criminal investigations or remains identification, and where DNA might take a long time to be evaluated, some additional infrastructure around fingerprinting in the field could speed up the process.
“There is no magic computer that has all the fingerprints or some database that stores it. Sometimes, there’s a lot of hard work behind identification — you’re looking at a very complicated system with millions, if not billions, of data points,” he says. “The more information that you have in your arsenal, the better. If you have 11 ways to get a solution, you could just choose the easiest, most applicable one. This work is adding an additional dimension to where forensics could go.”
Laure Spake, a practicing biological anthropologist, worked in the field and the lab before coming to Binghamton. Her research interests include child skeletal growth and development, along with the biological impacts of socioeconomic and health inequalities.
Spake’s lab focuses on forensics, and her team’s work may help better identify remains and crime scene events. To do this research, the scientists must start somewhere a bit untraditional: a police gun range. Doctoral student Alexandra Semma Tamayo experimentally shot deer bones with a local sheriff’s department.
“Then, we worked with Binghamton’s Analytical and Diagnostics Laboratory to micro-CT scan the bones after they were shot,” Spake says. “From that, we can recover high-quality information about different fragments, how they fracture and where they’re positioned relative to each other.”
Essentially, the team hopes to reconstruct less well-known fracture patterns, to learn more about why and how bones break on impact.
Biological anthropologist
Laure Spake’s team hopes to reconstruct less well-known fracture patterns to learn more about why and how bones break on impact.
Much of the existing literature on gunshots, Spake says, addresses injuries to the skull, rather than the body’s legs and arms, known as long bones.
FORENSIC HEALTH PROGRAM
Binghamton’s Decker College of Nursing and Health Sciences offers an online forensic health program to undergraduate and graduate students. There is also an undergraduate minor and an advanced graduate certificate in forensic health. For more details, scan this QR code.
Skulls are straightforward when it comes to fracture patterns; the bone is smooth and has a regular, spheroid shape. Long bones are more complicated: Even in a controlled environment, the thickness of the bone can differ depending on where it is struck, and there are other aberrations, too. Additionally, the circumstances causing an injury are basically limitless.
“It could be any kind of instrument, direction of force or amount of force applied,” Spake says. “The intrinsic quality of the skeleton itself is also a factor — and all of the above are challenges to identification and reconstruction.”
If these experiments are successful, she says, then knowing exactly how such fractures unfold could help forensic investigators figure out where a shooter was standing, or which victim was struck first.
“Evidence about directionality of the shot has been instrumental, for example, in proving that civilians were shot from back to front — one
party massacring another — when the narrative had previously been that there was armed conflict where people were engaging each other on both sides,” she adds. “It’s important for correcting that narrative.”
This is especially important to Tamayo, who is from Colombia, where she worked as a full-time forensic anthropologist. Her research connects to her fieldwork; she first began long bone research while identifying people from the civil conflict and political unrest between guerilla militias and government groups in her home country.
This also has an important American parallel: Most large-scale shootings are perpetrated with military-style rifle ammunition, the same used in civilian warfare and civil conflict. In fact, directionality interpretation has been used in mass shootings in the past, but it’s not well-founded scientifically, Spake says. They hope to change that.
This project is one of many that may improve the validity and reliability of previously well-regarded forensic methods. Often, Spake says, methods evolve as a way of supporting one outcome or professional opinion versus another,
“ It’s highly critical that we continue to build the literature and better understand injury patterns, biomedical markers, DNA analysis and more things of that nature.”
— Matthew Lunn, director of Binghamton’s Forensic Health Program
but they haven’t been scientifically tested. Bite mark analysis, tread mark or tire mark analysis, even the use of cadaver dogs — these all have inconsistent success rates, but they’re often used as evidence.
While working to improve the depth of existing literature, she thinks that integrating new methods, like artificial intelligence to quickly classify data, would be useful. She’s confident deeper study of other research areas could improve forensics, too. From pathology to grave sensing via ground-penetrating radar to entomology, the field can still advance.
“Where we are now investing more resources, and where we should continue to do so, is spaces like taphonomy — understanding decomposition and how to estimate time since death — as well as bone weathering post-decomposition and understanding things like trauma in the skeleton. How do we interpret the circumstances of events that leave marks on bone?”
Matthew Lunn has a variety of forensic experience: He is a former vice president of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators and former board-certified
medicolegal death investigator. He earned his master’s degree in criminology from Regis University and his doctorate in leadership, research and policy from the University of Colorado; he then went on to work with the Denver Police Department, the Arapahoe County Coroner’s Office and the Iowa Office of the State Medical Examiner, before going into teaching.
While Lunn may not be identifying remains any longer, he is teaching the next generation of forensic scientists — and ensuring that the standards of care for the profession are met while doing so.
Early in his career, he worked with federal partners at the National Institute of Justice, National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop standards of practice related to medicolegal death investigation. “The medical legal system across the United States is quite the hodgepodge level of professionalism, in terms of practitioners,” Lunn says.
He continues to do this work while ensuring that the people filling roles here are trained to do so. When he first started out, he says, there
was also a deficit of high-quality literature in the space; that, along with limited training, meant that identification methods were under-researched.
“When that occurs, you have people that fill in that void, and sometimes they do what they think the literature says based on studies in other fields, or they use their experience,” Lunn adds. “Unfortunately, what we find in forensic science is that ‘what people know’ isn’t necessarily consistent with the literature. Continuing to build up that literature and making that applicable and digestible for people who are working in the field is essential.”
These factors, along with greater collaboration and wider availability to experts, have revolutionized the field. But, he says, there’s still a long way to go. His interests include trauma-informed approaches, not only to families and loved ones, but also to professionals working in the field, experiencing a personal toll. He, like Spake and German, expects to see increased use of technology and availability of field testing in the future.
Lunn hopes that people continue criticizing the field’s research;
“ The scientist part of me wants to understand how DNA breaks down and how best we can do the research. But there’s the humanistic side, too, that looks toward the families of unidentified victims. It’s hard to get DNA from bones like that, but this work allows that small chance to become just a little wider.”
— Anthropologist Matthew Emery
bringing light to inappropriately presented findings in court proceedings is essential to a fair and just legal system. But, he says, celebrating the successes are important too. Certain practices, like scene investigation advancements with the use of technology and doll reenactments for infant deaths, allow investigators to better understand the factors that might influence death, and those results go on to inform the field.
“Over the last decade, we’re seeing significant improvements in the literature, via multiple studies that are confirming the findings of some of these original articles. To continue to build that confidence in what we’re saying and what we’re seeing in the field leads to better outcomes,” Lunn adds. “It’s highly critical that we continue to build the literature and better understand injury patterns, biomedical markers, DNA analysis and more things of that nature.”
Matthew Emery’s research reflects his early interest in paleontology, archaeology and prehistory. He hopes to apply ancient DNA and next-generation sequencing methods to highly degraded archaeological and forensic human bones and teeth.
By integrating ancient-DNA-extraction methods with techniques employed in modern forensic DNA laboratories, he seeks to better understand the nature of DNA degradation of human remains, and leverage these “best practices” to obtain degraded DNA from ancient individuals to reconstruct and better understand the lives of our ancestors.
“Paleogenetics has been my favorite tool to employ,” Emery says. “I’m looking to that field because of how adept it is at squeezing blood from stone. In the beginning of these processes, you get small amounts of damaged, fragmented pieces of DNA, and then throwing that pasta at the wall — those little strings of DNA — we get matches to the databases that we currently have, giving us some idea of who the DNA belongs to and what pathogens they might have harbored. From there, we can reconstruct or stitch that DNA back together.”
Originally devised to extract ancient DNA from Ice Age megafauna, these techniques are great when DNA is optimized for modern methods. These protocols allow the “short pieces” of DNA to step in. They are sometimes the only
recoverable strands in instances of fire, chemical damage, environmental insults or age.
In the lab, Emery says, the process starts with crushing bone, which should provide DNA. The problem lies with the fact that it often comes with a host of other organisms from contamination or its environment. To solve this issue and make it possible to sequence the material, the lab engineers create and add “bait” molecules, which “fish” for the individual pieces of interest. These molecules hold a single RNA strand of a close relative of the target, and biotin, essentially a miniature magnet. Through a temperature increase that forces the target DNA strands to decouple, a process called denaturation, those baits can then connect with their complement, in a process called hybridization, and be extracted. This entire process is known as in-solution targeted enrichment.
Emery says these processes are interchangeable.
“They can be used to capture genetic predispositions to developing cancer all the way to reconstructing the mammoth genome or identifying victims in cold cases,” he says.
Matthew
uses a technique developed for extracting ancient DNA to identify archeological or environmentally damaged bodies.
Emery has pursued many paths with this work. His master’s research focused on deciphering the geographic origins of American and British soldiers who died during the War of 1812. He went on to conduct doctoral research at McMaster University, employing ancient DNA analysis to reconstruct the biogeographic origins of pre-Roman and Roman period individuals recovered from southern Italy. More recently, his postdoctoral work at Arizona State University involved extracting DNA from badly burned remains. Through it all, he has worked across disciplines to advance forensic possibilities, even if they cannot yet be used in court as irrefutable proof.
“The scientist part of me wants to understand how DNA breaks down and how best we can do the
research,” he says. “But there’s the humanistic side, too, that looks toward the families of unidentified victims, victims of the wildfires in California and Maui, to the thousands of people that cross into the U.S. on the southern border who end up in the desert and whose remains become completely bleached. It’s hard to get DNA from bones like that, but this work allows that small chance to become just a little wider.”
Whether it’s German’s research into skin wrinkling as a new biometric marker, Spake’s experiments on bone fracture patterns, Lunn’s mission to elevate the standards and training of forensic professionals or Emery’s application of ancient DNA techniques to modern challenges
— each project represents a distinct piece of the forensic puzzle. What ties these researchers together is a shared commitment to rigorous science, innovation and real-world impact.
As Spake notes, progress comes not from working in silos, but from interdisciplinary teams tackling complex problems together. At Binghamton, forensic science isn’t just being studied — it’s being reimagined, one collaboration at a time.
“There’s a lot of different applications for this work,” she says. “You need the geophysicists and the anthropologists and the forensic health scientists to work together and say, here’s our problem. How do we get past it? And that happens here at Binghamton.”
Anthropologist
Emery
INVENTORS
PATENTS AWARDED TO BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY FACULTY IN 2024
Brian Callahan, associate professor of chemistry, patent 12,077,795: Method for Biocatalytic Proteinoligonucleotide Conjugation
Pritam Das, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, patent 12,095,381: Three Phase Bidirectional AC-DC Converter With Bipolar Voltage Fed Resonant Stages
Kanad Ghose, SUNY distinguished professor in the School of Computing, patent 11,883,176: Low-Power Wearable Smart ECG Patch with On-Board Analytics; patent 11,886,914: Energy Efficient Scheduling for Computing Systems and Method Therefor; patent 12,061,677: Secure Processor for Detecting and Preventing Exploits of Software Vulnerability; patent 12,135,598: Apparatus and Method for Efficient Estimation of the Energy Dissipation of Processor Based Systems
Kanad Ghose, SUNY distinguished professor in the School of Computing, and Bahgat Sammakia, SUNY distinguished professor of mechanical engineering, patent 11,985,802: Control Systems and Prediction Methods for IT Cooling Performance in Containment
Kartik Gopalan, professor in the School of Computing, patent 12,093,713: Systems and Methods for Live Update of Operating Systems and Hypervisors within Virtualization Systems
Kartik Gopalan and Ping Yang, both professors in the School of Computing, patent 11,983,079: Recovering a Virtual Machine After Failure of Post-Copy Live Migration
Sha Jin, professor of biomedical engineering, and Kaiming Ye, SUNY distinguished professor of biomedical engineering, patent 11,987,813: Microenvironments for Self-Assembly of Islet Organoids from Stem Cell Differentiation
Alistair Lees, professor of chemistry, patent 11,953,479: Selective Optical Aqueous and Non Aqueous Detection of Free Sulfites
Ronald Miles, SUNY distinguished professor of mechanical engineering, and Shahrzad Towfighian, professor of mechanical engineering, patent 12,091,313: Electrodynamically Levitated Actuator
Alex Nikulin, associate professor of earth sciences, patent 12,055,392: System and Method for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-based Magnetic Survey
Bahgat Sammakia, SUNY distinguished professor of mechanical engineering, patent 11,876,036: Fluid Cooling System including Embedded Channels and Cold Plates
Scott Schiffres, associate professor of mechanical engineering, patent 12,122,120: Additive Manufacturing Processes and Additively Manufactured Products
M. Stanley Whittingham, Nobel laureate and SUNY distinguished professor of chemistry, patent 11,894,550: VOPO4 as Cathode for Sodium Ion Batteries; and patent 12,002,957: ε-VOPO4 Cathode for Lithium-Ion Batteries
Lijun Yin, SUNY distinguished professor in the School of Computing, and Umur Ciftci, research assistant professor in the School of Computing, patent 12,106,216: Fakecatcher: Detection of Synthetic Portrait Videos using Biological Signals
Shiqi Zhang, associate professor in the School of Computing, patent 11,958,183: Negotiation-based Human-Robot Collaboration via Augmented Reality
Zhongfei Zhang, professor in the School of Computing, patent 11,868,862: Semisupervised Autoencoder for Sentiment Analysis; and patent 11,947,622: Pattern Change Discovery Between High Dimensional Data Sets
Chuan-Jian Zhong, SUNY distinguished professor of chemistry, patent 11,987,717: Air-stable Conductive Ink
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Binghamton University patents available for licensing.
Ping Yang directs the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity at Binghamton University. A professor in the School of Computing, she recently received a patent with her colleague Kartik Gopalan for technology related to virtual machines.
GEN Z PARENTS DON’T LIKE READING TO THEIR KIDS
Parents who struggle to read to their children tend to be younger themselves, according to a recent survey. Fewer than half of Gen Z parents called reading to their children “fun for me.” And kids who don’t get a head start reading at home often have trouble catching up to those who do, says Dawna Duff, an associate professor of speech language pathology at Binghamton University.
“Books are a really rich source of learning new words, and if kids don’t have that experience reading at home, they’re likely to come to school knowing less vocabulary — and that makes a big difference in how successful you’re going to be throughout school,” she says.
THIS TINY LIZARD DIVES WITH A NATURAL SCUBA TANK
Water anoles, semiaquatic lizards that are shorter than a pencil, are sought-after snacks among predators in Costa Rican and Panamanian rainforests. Faced with danger, a lizard dives into the water and produces a bubble behind its nostrils that allows it to remain submerged for up to 20 minutes. Lindsey Swierk, a behavioral ecologist at Binghamton University, documented this scuba-diving prowess, but it wasn’t clear whether the adaptation was a function of survival or just a strange side effect of their hydrophobic skin. Swierk found that the bubble allowed this lizard to stay underwater significantly longer than it otherwise could, supporting the hypothesis that it evolved this ability to evade predators.
DARK AGE DETOXES RESEMBLED TIKTOK HEALTH TRENDS
Wellness tips permeate platforms like TikTok on any given day. And while many are little better than pseudoscience, some treatments are based on legitimate practices dating back millennia. According to researchers compiling a database of centuries’ old medical manuscripts, some of today’s social media suggestions aren’t that far off from prescriptions documented in the Dark Ages. “People were engaging with medicine on a much broader scale than had previously been thought,” says Meg Leja, a Binghamton University medieval historian. “They were concerned about cures, they wanted to observe the natural world and jot down bits of information wherever they could in this period known as the ‘Dark Ages.’”
U.S. LOST A FIFTH OF ITS BUTTERFLIES WITHIN TWO DECADES
Butterfly populations in the United States shrank by more than a fifth within two decades, according to a new study. Numbers fell by 22% between 2000 and 2020, according to research by Binghamton University. A third of species saw serious decline, with some losing more than 90% of their populations.
However, the researchers say butterflies may be able to recover if urgent conservation measures are taken. The study, published in the journal Science, measured butterfly “abundance” — the number of individuals of a species within an area. It analyzed 12.6 million butterfly sightings from 76,000 surveys across 35 monitoring programs.
“While the results aligned with global trends, seeing the extent of the decline at such a large spatial scale was sobering,” says Eliza Grames, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University.
binghamton.edu/research
FAST FACTS
with Binghamton faculty
Binghamton University faculty members share their research, expertise and academic experiences in these brief videos. From a robot unboxing to dad jokes, there’s something for everyone!
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