Here’s the March News and Press Wrap-Up from The School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University!

Congratulations to Senior Systems Engineer Mark Lang, AKA Mark The Shark, who received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Professional Service. The 2021 and 2020 winners were honored at an in-person event at the Charles B. Wang Center on February 23, 2022.

 

The 2021-2022 SoMAS Seed Grant winners have been announced! The purpose of the SoMAS Seed Grant program is to encourage, stimulate and support a vital and vigorous graduate research program, to promote innovation, to accelerate the translation of ideas into funded projects, to foster a more entrepreneurial and collaborative approach to securing external research funds, and to advance the strategic research goals of SoMAS.

This year, we received eight seed proposals from groups representing 17 faculty (15 from SoMAS).  An ad hoc committee, organized by the members of the Faculty Council, reviewed each of the proposals submitted in January based on intellectual merit and innovation, strength of the research team, clarity and efficiency of the budget, potential to advance the SoMAS Strategic Plan research goals and additional external funding opportunities created by the funds requested. The Dean then weighed the reviews from the committee and previous success with seed grants when making final decisions.

The four proposals funded this cycle are:
Karine Kleinhaus: Gamete Mediated Mate Choice, Climate Change, and Coral Oocytes: Finding Mr. Right
Mariko Oue and Pavlos Kollias: Tracking the Lifecycle of the Shallow Cumulus Clouds Using a Novel Method for Guiding Radar Observations Using Satellite and Surface Cameras
Roy Price and Carrie McDonough: Development of a UHPLC-QTOF-MS technique for characterization of DOC in hydrothermal fluids
David Taylor, Sharon Pochron and Elizabeth Newman: Pedagogical and Social Interventions to Improve Performance, STEM Retention and On-time Graduation Rates in STEM Freshman at Risk of Failing to Graduate in Four Years: A Step Toward a Scalable Solution
Congratulations to all of the awardees and a special thank you to all of those who participated in the Seed Grant competition. We look forward to seeing the results of the research and to see new, exciting research ideas during the next SoMAS Seed Grant call.

 

Other Press Clips

Brookhaven Lab: Experts Swarm Houston to Track Thunderstorms

  • All of these factors become even harder to understand “in a complex urban coastal environment with significant pollution sources,” says Pavlos Kollias, an atmospheric scientist at Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

Newsday: School Notebook: Jericho High School team wins Long Island Science Bowl

  • A Mount Sinai High School team placed second in this year’s Bay Scallop Bowl, a regional competition that tests knowledge of oceanography and related sciences. It consisted of about a dozen high school teams at Stony Brook University.

CNet: Tech News Endangered Shark Meat Might Be Lurking in Your Pet Food English Headline

  • The issue isn’t limited to Singapore: As a doctoral student at New York’s Stony Brook University in 2019, marine biologist Diego Cardeñosa used DNA barcoding and found scalloped hammerhead and shortfin mako shark meat in canned wet food, dry food and treats he bought online and in supermarkets. Also ran Ceng News, News Net Daily, News Deal, English Headline, Investo Signals, News 7 Trends,

Suffolk Times: NY – Under new program, scientists searching for solutions after bay scallop disaster

  • Stony Brook professor Bassem Allam, a lead investigator on the study, said the selective breeding program will evaluate which scallops fare better under environmental stress. Also ran in Coastal News Today/Riverhead News.

SBU News: Research to Better Understand Air Quality Hits New Heights

  • Led by Paul Shepson, PhD, Dean of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) – who operates ALAR – the project called CHACHA (Collaborative Research: Chemistry in the Arctic-Clouds, Halogens and Aerosols) aims to improve the understanding of atmospheric chemistry in the Arctic that impacts ozone, particulate matter and cloud chemical composition in a rapidly changing Arctic atmosphere. Flights started during winter 2022 and will continue through spring.

The East Hampton Star: Once More Unto the Weeds at Georgica Pond

  • Also at Monday’s meeting, Susan McGraw Keber announced that Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, who monitors water bodies under trustee jurisdiction, including Georgica Pond, will deliver the annual presentation of his research results from the previous year at the trustees’ meeting on April 11.

SBU News: Local climate change podcast gets national audience

  • The original eight-episode podcast was created with help from SBU students and featured researchers from the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

Newsday: Mayor seeks to weed out invasive common reed near Stony Brook Harbor

  • Dahlgard, state environmental officials and Stony Brook University scientist Malcom Bowman recently visited several stands on the harbor’s south shoreline near Smithtown’s Cordwood Park, where Dahlgard hopes to win grants and funding for eradication.

Innovate LI: In memoriam: Lee Koppelman, Island land-use legend – Innovate Long Island

  • Parallel to his lengthy tenure in public service, Koppelman is also known for his work at Stony Brook University, where he served as executive director of the Center for Regional Policy Studies and taught into his final months as a leading professor and professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science.

Newsday: Lee Koppelman, legendary Long Island planner, dies at 94

  • Koppelman was a popular professor at Stony Brook University and director of its Center for Regional Policy Studies. He continued teaching at Stony Brook until last semester, political science department chair Leonie Huddy said.

Newsday/Op-Ed: With Lee Koppelman’s passing, LI loses a regional voice

  • Today’s younger generation of Long Island politicians, developers and activists might not even know Lee Koppelman’s name. But they see his imprint across the region, particularly in Suffolk County — on open space and housing and development, transit and highways, universities like Stony Brook and local municipal and county politics.

Newsday/Op-Ed: Lee Koppelman’s legacy stretches across Long Island

  • This guest essay reflects the views of Richard Murdocco, a former student of Lee Koppelman’s and an adjunct professor of economic development and planning at Stony Brook University.

WSHU-FM/NPR: Lee Koppelman, longtime Long Island urban planner, has died

  • Long Island urban planner Lee Koppelman has died at the age of 94. Stony Brook University, where he taught, confirmed his death Monday.

Times Beacon Record: Lee Koppelman, Long Island planner, dies at 94

  • Koppelman was a professor emeritus at Stony Brook University where he taught until last semester, according to his son Keith, and was the director of the Center for Regional Policy Studies at the school.

New York Times: Lee E. Koppelman, Trailblazing Long Island Planner, Dies at 94

  • Lee E. Koppelman, a planning visionary who during four decades fought to impose a regional agenda for economic development and environmental conservation across Long Island, died on March 21 in Stony Brook, N.Y. He was 94. His death, at Stony Brook University Hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Lesli Ross.

Southampton Press: A Man With A Plan

  • Throughout his 28 years as county planner, he was incorruptible. Richard Murdocco, a former student of Koppelman’s at Stony Brook University, where he later became director of its Center for Regional Policy Studies, has related: “He told me that he would never let anyone take him out to lunch, because he didn’t want to owe anyone anything, or give the perception that he was being swayed.” Murdocco now teaches at Stony Brook. Koppelman’s degrees included a Ph.D. in public administration from NYU.

Times Beacon Record: Koppelman remembered as a pioneer, visionary

  • In addition to his accomplishments in his planning career, Koppelman was a professor emeritus at Stony Brook University, where he taught until last semester, according to his son. In 1988, he was appointed director of the Center for Regional Policy Studies at the school. The center handles research projects including governmental productivity, strategic economic planning and environmental planning.

Marine Technology News: Lander Lab #2: Small Autonomous Landers for Studying the Community Ecology of Nearshore Submarine Canyons

  • Lander Lab will routinely feature field work by researchers from around the world using ocean landers. We begin with the 2021 Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UCSD work of Ashley Nicoll, currently a PhD student at Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, Long Island, New York.

National Geographic: New clues reveal the devastation the day the dinosaurs died

  • The lapilli formed somewhere in this geologic jumble of vapor and dust and then rained down on what is now Mexico, Belize, Texas, and even New Jersey. “They’re forming in essentially an instant of time,” says Gregory Henkes, a geochemist at Stony Brook University in New York and author of the new study.

SBU News: Pew Names Heather Lynch a Fellow in Marine Conservation

  • Heather J. Lynch, PhD, a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the first Endowed Chair for Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS), has been named by The Pew Charitable Trusts as a recipient of the 2022 Pew fellowship in marine conservation.

Times Beacon Record: SBU’s Heather Lynch receives Pew Fellowship in marine conservation

  • Endowed chair for ecology and evolution at Stony Brook University’s Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Lynch was selected as one of six Pew Fellows in Marine Conservation.

Newsday: Peconic Bay scallops are making a late-season comeback

  • Cornell conducts scallop surveys in the fall and spring, but does not do a winter survey because its boats are out of the water for insurance reasons. Cornell is working with Stony Brook University to culture new strains of bay scallops that are more resistant to the warmer waters and disease that some believe could be causing the die-offs.

Newsday: Long Island air pollution exceeds WHO limits, report says

  • Daniel Knopf, a professor of atmospheric science and chemistry at Stony Brook University, said the PM 2.5 is a great health concern worldwide, causing illnesses and deaths. According to WHO, in 2016,around 4.2 million premature deaths were associated with outdoor air pollution.

Southampton Press: Some New Septic Systems Exceeding Expectations, Others Lagging Well Behind

  • Marine biologists from Stony Brook University have said that an average level of just 10 milligrams per liter is probably the level the county will have to reach in the long run to reverse water quality degradation caused by wastewater.

New York Times: Is This the Last Generation to Live on New York City’s Wild Fringes?

  • Donovan Finn, a professor of environmental design at Stony Brook University and a member of the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay, agrees that there are only tough choices ahead. “The question is which is the less difficult option,” he said. “This huge engineering sea wall project that’s going to cost tens of billions of dollars and will have big ecological and other impacts, or uprooting 50,000 or 100,000 families from their homes,” Mr. Finn said. “I think it’s an open question. Neither one is easy. None of this is easy.”

 

Latest Publications

John Bohorquez co-authored a whitepaper on sustainable finance for coral reefs with the Wildlife Conservation Society, launched on March 4th as part of The Economist’s World Ocean Summit.

Victurine, Ray, Meyers, David, Bohorquez, J., et al. 2022. Conservation Finance for Coral Reefs. The Wildlife Conservation Society. Bronx, New York. wcs.org/coral-finance-whitepaper 

McMurdie, L. A., Heymsfield, G. M., Yorks, J. E., Braun, S. A., Skofronick-Jackson, G., Rauber, R. M., Yuter, S., Colle, B., McFarquhar, G. M., Poellot, M., Novak, D. R., Lang, T. J., Kroodsma, R., McLinden, M., Oue, M., Kollias, P., Kumjian, M. R., Greybush, S. J., Heymsfield, A. J., Finlon, J. A., McDonald, V. L., & Nicholls, S. (2022). Chasing Snowstorms: The Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS) Campaign, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

Cao, J., & Chen, Y. (2022). Modeling time-varying natural mortality in size-structured assessment models. Fisheries Research, 250, 106290.

Farhat, S., Bonnivard, E., Pales Espinosa, E., Tanguy, A., Boutet, I., Guiglielmoni, N., … & Allam, B. (2022). Comparative analysis of the Mercenaria mercenaria genome provides insights into the diversity of transposable elements and immune molecules in bivalve mollusks. BMC genomics, 23(1), 1-23.
Brunelle, L. D., Huang, I. J., Angeles, L. F., Running, L. S., Sirotkin, H. I., McElroy, A. E., & Aga, D. S. (2022). Comprehensive assessment of chemical residues in surface and wastewater using passive sampling, chemical, biological, and fish behavioral assaysScience of The Total Environment, 154176.

Latest Seminars

TAOS March 2, 2022 Nicole Riemer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “Particle-resolved modeling: A bridge between scales in aerosol science

Southampton Lecture Series March 2, 2022 Bren Smith, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of GreenWave, “The Least Deadliest Catch“.

OSAC March 4, 2022 Craig Feibel, Rutgers University “Fossil Fish and archaeological sites around Lake Turkana

TAOS March 9, 2022 George Craig, LMU Munich, Germany, “What limits the predictability of weather in the mid-latitudes?

OSAC March 11, 2022 Baoshan Chen, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University “How inorganic carbon cycling buffers Chesapeake Bay acidification in summer.

TAOS March 30, 2022 Sarah Brooks, Texas A&M University “Unraveling Mechanisms Underlying Plankton Blooms and Their Implications for Biogenic Aerosol Properties and Cloud Formation.

OSAC March 25, 2022 Jessica Hua, Professor of Biology at Binghamton University “Disease Ecology in the Face of Global Change