Left to right: Jennifer Karas Montez and Shannon Monnat

The National Institute on Aging (NIA) has renewed two grants, each worth $1.9 million, for research networks led by Maxwell School sociology faculty Jennifer Karas Montez and Shannon Monnat and several external collaborators.

For the first grant, Montez, University Professor and Gerald B. Cramer Faculty Scholar in Aging Studies, is a co-principal investigator and Monnat, professor of sociology and Lerner Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health, is a co-investigator.

Monnat is a co-principal investigator on the second grant. The NIA, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will fund both grants for five years, and the $3.8 million total will be shared across multiple institutions involved in the projects.

The first grant renews funding for the Network on Life Course Health Dynamics and Disparities in 21st Century America, which has been funded for the past 10 years. Montez and Monnat are joined on the network leadership team by Jennifer Ailshire and Julie Zissimopoulos from the University of Southern California, Sarah Burgard and Grace Noppert from the University of Michigan, and Taylor Hargrove and Barbara Entwisle from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The interdisciplinary network of over 100 scholars seeks to accelerate research that will help explain the worrisome trends in U.S. adult health and longevity in recent decades and explain why those trends are most troubling in certain states and local areas.

The second grant will fund the Interdisciplinary Network on Rural Population Health and Aging, which was launched five years ago. Its purpose is to advance research on the factors affecting the health and well-being of rural working-age and older adults within the context of prevailing demographic trends, slow-moving macro-level stressors, and contemporary public health and environmental shocks. Monnat’s collaborators include Carrie Henning-Smith from the University of Minnesota, Leif Jensen from the Pennsylvania State University, John Green from Mississippi State University, and Lori Hunter from the University of Colorado Boulder.

“We are grateful for the National Institute on Aging’s continued support, which not only advances crucial research into U.S. adult health and longevity but also affirms the leadership and scholarship of professors Monnat and Montez,” says Shana Kushner Gadarian, associate dean for research and professor of political science at the Maxwell School. “Their findings will no doubt help inform national and regional population health policy.”

Past research on mortality and health by Montez and Monnat has been supported by the NIA and other organizations. They are principal investigators on the NIA’s , a five-year, $1.8 million award to examine how state policies and counties’ economic conditions since the 1980s have influenced adult psychological well-being, health behaviors and mortality.

Monnat is also principal investigator on a $2 million COVID-related grant funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse with Montez, Douglas A. Wolf and Emily Wiemers as co-investigators. Wolf and Wiemers are professor emeritus and associate professor, respectively, in Maxwell’s Public Administration and International Affairs Department.

Montez is the director of the NIA-funded Center for Aging and Policy Studies (CAPS), co-director of the Policy, Place, and Population Health (P3H) Lab, a faculty associate in the Aging Studies Institute (ASI), and a research affiliate in the Center for Policy Research and the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health.

Monnat is the director of and senior research associate in the Center for Policy Research, co-director of the P3H Lab, Lerner Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health, and a research affiliate in ASI and CAPS.

Story by Michael Kelly

Robert Doyle

, dean’s professor of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and associate professor of medicine and pharmacology at SUNY Upstate Medical University, has been named the inaugural Jack and Laura H. Milton Professor in A&S. A renowned medicinal chemist with an interest in pharmaceutical drug development, Doyle’s cutting-edge research focuses on peptide-based treatments, which offer significant and consistent weight loss and glucose control but without common, negative side-effects such as nausea/vomiting.

One such peptide, called GEP44, is a novel drug that could reduce eating and boost calorie burn, while also controlling glucose levels. With diabetes becoming a global epidemic, GEP44–which prompts users to expend more energy and triggers a switch in the brain to make them feel full–offers a promising approach to managing the disease, which afflicts more than 38 million Americans.

Doyle’s work earned him the 2022 American Chemical Society (ACS) Central New York Section Award in the field of chemistry and chemical engineering, and he was invited to share his findings at the  2023. Among his other awards and honors for his research and teaching, he was the CNY College Educator of the Year (2013), received the Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence at Syracuse (2020) and was awarded the Henning Anderson Prize from the European Society for Pediatric Endocrinology (2022). He has graduated 24 Ph.D. students to date, currently holds three National Institutes of Health (NIH) R01 grants and sits on the NIH ‘Advancing Therapeutics’ review panel. In addition, he regularly reviews proposals from national funding agencies in the U.K., Switzerland, Poland and Denmark.

A&S Dean Behzad Mortazavi notes that Doyle’s excellence in the classroom and the laboratory are benefiting not only the students in A&S, but potentially millions of people around the world. “Professor Doyle exemplifies our ethos of creatively and collectively seeking answers to complex problems, helping to make the world healthier, more hopeful and more humane,” says Mortazavi. “I look forward to the continued advances he and his students will make here in A&S, thanks to the support of the late Laura and Jack Milton, who made this professorship possible, and for which we are profoundly grateful.”

Doyle joined the chemistry faculty at Syracuse in 2005, was promoted to full professor in 2014, and in 2016 was named the Laura J. and L. Douglas Meredith Professor. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Dublin and completed postdoctoral research fellowships at Australian National University and Yale University prior to joining the faculty at Syracuse.

Doyle’s professorship is made possible by a generous contribution from the estate of Laura and Jack Milton. The Miltons graduated from Syracuse in 1951 and were longtime supporters of the University. Laura served as a member of the Arts and Sciences Board of Visitors for many years and Jack was a University Trustee. The couple’s ardent support has fostered numerous educational opportunities, events and lectures, and contributed to the construction of several campus facilities, including the Life Sciences Complex.

Accomplishing that feat every year requires extensive time, dedication and expertise, and in the NIH’s own wording, only those who have “demonstrated competence and achievement in [their] scientific discipline as evidenced by the quality of [their] research accomplishments, publications in scientific journals and other significant scientific activities, achievements and honors,” are invited to take part.

Carlos Castañeda (left) and Jessica MacDonald

Two associate professors of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences, �����Ի���, joined their ranks beginning this summer, having accepted standing memberships in the  and the , respectively.

A standing membership represents a significant commitment of professional time and dedicated energy—one that can be tricky to balance with teaching and research workloads. A member typically spends several weeks reviewing 10 to twelve applications of 60-100 pages each before each meeting, and then prepares a detailed written report and presentation in order to discuss the application with the rest of the committee. Castañeda accepted a six-year appointment, with a commitment to join two of the section’s three meetings each year; MacDonald’s membership is for four years, meeting three times each year.

In return for that commitment, of course, the work promises significant rewards—in the opportunity to contribute to the nation’s biomedical research efforts, while raising the research profile of Syracuse as an institution as well as advancing the professors’ own scientific goals.

“I’ve often found that evaluating and reading grants lets you see what’s happening at the edge of science,” says Castañeda, who joined the Syracuse faculty in 2014, appointed jointly to the departments of biology and chemistry after earning a Ph.D. in biophysics from Johns Hopkins University and doing postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland College Park. “[It’s useful to see] what are new and up-and-coming techniques, and to track where the field is going and what is pushing the next set of scientific questions.”

The section that he is a part of is unique in that it exclusively reviews  grants, which fall within the purview of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and provide funding for laboratories doing broad-based biomedical research. “A lot of basic science grants are reviewed at that institute,” Castañeda says. “My [section] is focused on biochemistry and biophysics, such as understanding how proteins and other macromolecules work.”

MIRA grants are intended to fund a lab for a period of five years, for both established and new- or early-stage investigators. Introduced in 2016, the MIRA program was created to provide funding stability, greater flexibility and higher acceptance rates than more typical R01 project grants. There has been a shift within NIGMS to this model, with an increasing number of MIRA grants funded each year.

MacDonald’s standing membership in the DBD Study Section, which reviews grant applications to study the factors that lead to abnormal brain development and function, dovetails with her own work focusing on how disruptions in genetic and epigenetic mechanisms cause neurodevelopmental and cognitive disorders. The applications reviewed investigate a mix of pre-clinical research on brain development and clinical studies involving human patients.

Before joining the Syracuse faculty in 2015, MacDonald was a postdoctoral fellow in stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University; she earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of British Columbia.

While the specific grants she reviews fall into her areas of expertise, every member of the section sees and hears the details of each application presented. “It gives me a very different perspective on the research,” she says. “My lab is a basic research lab focused on understanding mechanisms of brain development and disorders. Participating in this study section allows me to better understand how to translate our research into clinical studies.”

Both professors have been recipients of NIH funding themselves: MacDonald a  from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke supporting her ongoing research into Rett Syndrome; Castañeda a  enabling him and his team to investigate the underlying cell mechanisms linked to neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). As a pragmatic advantage, they note that participating in the review process helps them to gain a better understanding about what makes a successful grant application—wisdom they can share with their colleagues.

“It’s helpful in the sense that [reading grants] helps you write grants,” Castañeda says. “You can see the best way to tell a story. And as we learn what works and doesn’t work, we can tell other people here at [Syracuse]. Hopefully that will raise everyone’s research profiles.”

Story by Laura Wallis

Park

To boost retention and engagement among students from underrepresented groups, research has shown that mentoring, networking and professional development offered through immersive summer research programs at institutions of higher education encourage undergraduate students to pursue scientific careers. Such experiences also increase the pipeline of students going on to graduate study.

Psychology professor  in the College of Arts and Sciences was recently awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R25 (research education) grant to start the . Park will serve as program director, with professors �����Ի��� serving as associate directors.

The eight-week SU-STAR summer program is available to undergraduate students across the U.S. from underrepresented groups who are interested in biomedical, clinical, behavioral and social sciences research on broadly defined health-related topics.

According to Park, SU-STAR will bring a diverse group of students to campus for structured training opportunities in alcohol and related health research. The program will consist of a seven-week hands-on independent research experience mentored by faculty members, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.

“The rich pool of program faculty with diverse expertise and training backgrounds will offer firsthand learning in research in alcohol and other health behaviors, and related mental health and medical conditions,” says Park.

The program will also include weekly professional development workshops focusing on the graduate school application process and scientific skill-building, seminars with guest speakers from diverse backgrounds presenting their various health research and career trajectories, and weekly social activities to support network building and socialization. The program will wrap up with each student giving a scientific presentation to showcase their summer research.

“The alarming underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities and individuals with socioeconomic disadvantages and disabilities in science is due in part to their low persistence rate in undergraduate education in science,” says Park, who has taught at Syracuse since 2009. “Our hope is that SU-STAR will help meet the nation’s needs for a bigger pool of diverse scientists by enhancing their participation in alcohol and health research training.”

SU-STAR is inspired by the , which is a mentored summer research experience program offered since 2008 for psychology majors and neuroscience integrated learning majors from underrepresented groups. The Department of Psychology faculty’s extensive experiences with the PRIDE program informed the SU-STAR program, and the two programs will continue to collaborate with a shared goal to bring synergistic impacts on scientific diversity and pipeline. Specifically, PRIDE and SU-STAR will be conducted in parallel every summer, and the two programs will offer joint weekly enrichment activities.

SU-STAR is funded by the NIH for the next five years. Learn more about the project on the .

Tripti Bhattacharya, Thonis Family Professor and a member of the Earth and environmental sciences faculty, and Alison Patteson, assistant professor of physics, have been presented with the prestigious honor.

The fellowships recognize “extraordinary U.S. and Canadian researchers whose creativity, innovation and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders,” according to the . More than 1,000 researchers are nominated each year for 126 Sloan Fellowship slots. Winners receive a two-year, $75,000 fellowship to help advance their research.

’s research focuses on and how cells navigate and respond to the physical features of their environment. Through a five-year from the National Institutes of Health, Patteson and her team are currently investigating how the structural protein vimentin affects cell migration. They are also exploring the properties that control the growth of biofilms, which are slimy clusters of microorganisms, including bacteria and fungi, that can adhere to wet surfaces.

uses evidence from the geological past to understand how rainfall will change in the future as a result of global warming. The Sloan Fellowship will support her work using past instances of climate change as natural experiments to explore the fundamental dynamics that shape the response of rainfall to climate change. Using isotopic analyses of plant biomarkers and climate model experiments, her research team seeks to understand how ocean warming patterns are likely to shape rainfall changes in the future.

“I congratulate Professors Patteson and Bhattacharya on being named Sloan Fellows,” says Arts and Sciences Interim Dean Lois Agnew. “In the five years since they joined the College of Arts and Sciences, they have done incredible work in advancing our understanding of the fields of cellular behavior and paleoclimate dynamics. This distinction is a rightful recognition of their innovation and vision in research and teaching.”

Tripti Bhattacharya uses a gas chromatograph, equipment that quantifies concentrations of leaf waxes in ancient sediments.

Rainfall Studies

The Sloan Fellowship comes at a crucial time for her research team, says Bhattacharya. “We are currently working in settings as diverse as western North America, southern Africa and the tropical Andes, and are hopeful that the results of our studies will provide valuable insights that are directly relevant to understanding changes in extreme drought and extreme flooding in the future.”

Since joining Syracuse University in 2018, Bhattacharya has been awarded over $2 million in research funding. Among many distinctions, she was recognized with the University’s Meredith Teaching Recognition Award in 2021 and has been an invited presenter at the American Geophysical Union Annual meeting in 2019, 2020 and 2022. She also served as one of eight leading climate scholars at a workshop organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

Cell Migration, Biofilms

“From identifying and developing therapeutic treatments for cancers and infectious diseases to developing a framework to understand what promotes or hinders the growth of biofilm, this fellowship will help our group be at the forefront of these emerging fields,” says Patteson. The Sloan Fellowship will support Patteson’s research in all these areas, creating new knowledge that will lead to new societal impacts.

The fellowship comes on the heels of a 2023 Cottrell Scholar award for Patteson, which was presented by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. She also has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Rapid Response Research grant to study cellular uptake of SARS2; an NSF EAGER (Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research) award to examine emergent collective behavior of bacteria; and an NSF Collaborative Research grant for her work with biofilms. She has been a faculty member in the Department of Physics since 2018.

Alison Patteson prepares a petri dish as part of her study of biofilms and biophysics. (Photo by Marilyn Hesler)

Leaders of Great Promise

According to the Sloan Foundation, “the fellowships are one of the most prestigious awards available to young researchers, in part because so many past fellows have gone on to become towering figures in science.”

Past recipients include numerous Nobel prize winners and other renowned researchers and scientists. Candidates are nominated by fellow scientists. The winners are selected by independent panels of senior scholars on the basis of research accomplishments, creativity and potential to become a leader in their field. The fellowships are open to scholars in the fields of chemistry, computer science, Earth system science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience and physics.

“Professors Bhattacharya and Patteson are stars in their fields and superb leaders and mentors to their students. Their work in climate science and biophysics is highly regarded and well-recognized,” says University Vice President for Research . “These Sloan fellowships confirm the impact that their research has on the world and shows outstanding promise for future careers. The University and its students are very fortunate that Syracuse is their research and teaching home.”

Maisto

During his nearly 30-year career at Syracuse University, , professor emeritus of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has devoted much of his research to the assessment and treatment of substance use disorders. Continuing that work, Maisto was recently awarded two grants through the (NIAAA) (part of the National Institutes of Health) to address new approaches to chronic health issues. The combined projects, which involve several universities, are supported by over $5 million in federal funding.

HIV Prevention

Through a project titled “,” Maisto and researchers from Boston University and the University of South Dakota hope to advance understanding of how alcohol and other such factors as emotion and cognition combine to affect decisions about sex.

The rate of new HIV infections continues to drop in the U.S. each year, thanks in part to ongoing research and improved prevention methods, but there are still 1.2 million people in the country who are living with HIV. Of that total, infections continue to have a disproportionate impact on certain populations, particularly racial and ethnic minorities and gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM), according to .

With $3.7 million in funding from the NIAAA, Maisto and his collaborators are exploring the mechanisms driving sexual decision-making in men who have sex with men while under the influence of alcohol. The project aims to enhance the effectiveness of behavioral HIV prevention intervention by helping such high-risk (for contracting HIV) populations as MSM develop a better understanding of how alcohol influences sexual decision-making. Through improved prevention, the team hopes to decrease the incidence of HIV among high-risk populations.

Alcohol Use Disorder Recovery

In a second  totaling over $2.1 million, Maisto is collaborating with Robert Schlauch, associate professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, to improve treatment protocols for alcohol use disorder (AUD) recovery. Defined by the NIAAA as a medical condition characterized by an impaired ability to stop or control alcohol use despite adverse social, occupational or health consequences, AUD affects over 14 million adults ages 18 and older in the United States.

Recently, the NIAAA released a new conceptually based definition of “recovery from AUD” to address limitations of past research and stimulate new research. They outline recovery as “a process through which an individual pursues both remission from AUD and cessation from heavy drinking.” Furthermore, “an individual may be considered recovered if both remission from AUD and cessation from heavy drinking are achieved and maintained over time.”

Maisto and Schlauch’s project will be the first to test NIAAA’s new definition using empirical data they gather through a clinical study. Participants seeking treatment from AUD who are chosen to take part in the project will receive 12 weeks of AUD psychotherapy and complete brief assessments and in-person interviews both during and after treatment. The team will use those results to validate the definition of AUD recovery, improve clinical decision-making and generate future research.

Emily Wiemers

Emily Wiemers, associate professor of public administration and international affairs in the Maxwell School, is the principal investigator for a COVID-19-related research project that is expected to receive up to $2.2 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over the next five years.

The project, “Tracing the Health Consequences of Family Support during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” examines how the economic and health effects of the pandemic rippled across generations in American families.

Marc A. Garcia, assistant professor of sociology in the Maxwell School, is a co-investigator, along with I-Fen Lin of Bowling Green State University, Judith Seltzer of the University of California, Los Angeles, and V. Joseph Hotz of Duke University.

The project began in September 2022 and runs through May 2027. The NIH has provided $445,396 in funding for the first year.

Wiemers says the project will create a database of the economic, policy and health care contexts in which individuals experienced the pandemic. It will be linked to two nationally representative surveys of extended families to describe the degree to which family members shared the same challenges during the pandemic and how this affected their ability to help each other with time, money and shared housing.

“The project focuses on the pandemic’s immediate and intermediate effects on health, whether it exacerbated health disparities, and if family support mitigated negative health effects,” says Wiemers.

Wiemers is a faculty associate in the Aging Studies Institute and a research affiliate in the Center for Policy Research and the Center for Aging and Policy Studies. Her work examines intergenerational ties and economic well-being across the life course.

Garcia is a senior research associate in the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion and Population Health, a faculty associate in the Aging Studies Institute, and a research affiliate in the Center for Aging and Policy Studies. He researches physical and cognitive health disparities among older racial/ethnic and immigrant adults and longevity and mortality outcomes among older Latinx subgroups.

“Emily Wiemers, Marc Garcia and their colleagues demonstrate the relevance of evidence-based research to understanding the complex policy issues facing our communities and the nation,” says Dean David M. Van Slyke. “To receive funding from NIH that supports faculty research with the involvement of students to inform and shape how policy makers think about the consequences of health disparities and their impacts is a strong signal of support for the quality of Maxwell scholars and the importance of their work.”

This grant adds to the millions in funding for COVID-related research already garnered by Maxwell faculty in the past two years—much of it from the NIH.

Wiemers is leading a two-year project to investigate the challenges for adult children caring for aging parents. She’s also a co-investigator on a five-year project studying the connection between policy and psychological health, headed by Shannon Monnat, professor of sociology and Lerner Chair in Public Health Promotion and Population Health. The project includes Maxwell co-investigator Jennifer Karas Montez, University Professor and director of the Center for Aging and Policy Studies, and Douglas Wolf, Gerald B. Cramer Professor of Aging Studies.

Garcia, meanwhile, has worked to assess how the pandemic has affected specific segments of the population. For instance, by comparing data on deaths in 2020 and 2021, he found that Blacks and Latinos died from COVID at much higher rates than whites, but some states—New York and Illinois, for instance—were much more successful at reducing that disparity than others, notably California.

Shikha Nangia

After a two-year process spearheaded by biomedical and chemical engineering Professor Shikha Nangia, the College of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) bioengineering program has been awarded a National Institutes of Health Enhancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Educational Diversity (ESTEEMED) Learning and Discovery through Engineering Research at Syracuse (LEADERS) grant.

The grant will help fund a program to recruit and train undergraduates from diverse racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds.

“It’s about enriching diversity in our undergraduate student population,” says Nangia. “This is a carefully designed program to mentor students while improving diversity in our bioengineering program.”

ESTEEMED funding will enable students to be trained in research beginning in their first year and be paid for that research. The program is distinctly designed to consider what students may need from the start. It will include a six-week summer bridge program to help students transition from high school to their first year in college. The students will be supported for research in their second year and transition into the university’s Honors program. The long-term vision is to have a lasting impact by increasing diversity in graduate programs and eventually in bioengineering-related professions.

“This is close to my heart. We want to reach out to students from diverse and disadvantaged backgrounds, meet them where they are, and nurture their talent through a deliberate and focused approach,” says Nangia.

Nangia says she is grateful to Julie Hasenwinkel, co-investigator and chair of the Department of Biomedical and Chemical Engineering, and Danielle Smith, director of the Renée Crown University Honors Program, for working on developing the LEADERS program. Nangia also is grateful for the support of ECS leadership.

“I want to thank Dean Smith and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs Dacheng Ren for their support to this program in making our proposal competitive for NIH funding,” says Nangia.

“When Shikha approached me about this opportunity I was inspired by her passion and vision for the ESTEEMED LEADERS program. I have seen the power of cohort-based programs that focus on mentorship and student success from previous work that I did as associate dean in ECS,” says Hasenwinkel. “I’m very excited to leverage that experience and to work with Shikha and Danielle on this project that is aimed at enhancing the diversity, inclusion, and success of undergraduate students in bioengineering.”

has spent nearly the entirety of her career studying hearing loss in infants. While previous research used clicks and tone bursts to measure infant hearing, her latest project explores hearing response to natural speech.

An NIH grant awarded to CSD Professor Beth Prieve is funding a study on infant auditory response.

The two-year study, funded by a , will make use of a new auditory tool developed by co-investigator Ross Maddox, associate professor of biomedical engineering and neuroscience at University of Rochester Medical Center, that uses spoken words from an “Alice in Wonderland” audiobook to measure infant auditory response to the brainstem and cortex. “I’m very interested in looking at the entire auditory system to understand how humans process sound,” says Prieve, professor of communication sciences and disorders and founder of the Pediatric Auditory Laboratory in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Now we will use actual speech, which is fantastic because we have to the potential to find some differences in babies who might have a language processing problem.”

According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, more than 12,000 babies are born each year with some degree of hearing loss. Prieve, who is both an audiologist and neuroscientist, says the ability to efficiently process spoken speech through the hearing system is critical for learning spoken language. Problems with speech processing ultimately affect academic performance and social interactions. Pre-term infants, specifically, have a higher chance of having language delay, learning disability, autism and hearing loss than infants born at full term, and often one type of problem gets confused with another.

Professor Beth Prieve

Prieve anticipates the data gathered through the study will help untangle deficits in the auditory system from other neurological problems. The project will measure the infant response to both traditional testing methods using short clicks, as well as the new tool using running human speech, testing both pre-term and term infants 5 months old or younger. “We’re laying the groundwork by testing babies without a hearing loss to see what their responses look like,” she says. “From there, we’re hoping to answer some more intriguing and deeper questions in children with known hearing loss and other language-based disorders.”

Alison Patteson (left) and Davoud Mozhdehi

Researchers from the College of Arts and Sciences’ �����Ի��� have been awarded Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) grants from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The funding, awarded to Alison Patteson, assistant professor of physics, and Davoud Mozhdehi, assistant professor of chemistry, supports research that increases understanding of biological processes and lays the foundation for advances in disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention.​

Patteson and Mozhdehi, both members of the , a collaboration of researchers from Syracuse University addressing global challenges through innovative research, are working to learn more about the function and design of proteins that play a key role in diseases such as cancer. Each MIRA award will fund research in their labs over the next five years.

Understanding a Key Structural Protein

Since coming to Syracuse University in 2018, physics professor �����Ի��� have led cutting-edge studies on the structural protein vimentin. Often expressed in a cell’s cytoskeleton during cell motility (movement), vimentin plays a key role in protecting the cell’s nucleus and DNA from damage as it migrates through dense tissue during processes like cancer growth and wound healing. By knowing more about vimentin’s role in protecting cancerous cells as they spread through the body, Patteson says her group’s research could help pinpoint drugs that could slow the growth of cancer.

Collective cell migration through a collagen matrix. The red dots indicate cells’ nuclei enmeshed in an actin filament network (blue). (Photo courtesy of Minh Thanh)

With her , Patteson seeks to broaden understanding of vimentin’s function in cells as they move. She says the grant will help her team tackle three objectives: determine how vimentin affects the cytoskeleton (structure that helps cells maintain shape) during migration; explore how vimentin helps the cell adhere to its surroundings; and identify the mechanisms by which vimentin helps facilitate collective cell migration through the three-dimensional network surrounding cells called the extracellular matrix.

“Our aim with this grant is to understand how vimentin regulates cell motility,” says Patteson. “We’ve seen proof that it does but we don’t understand why.” She says their research will answer important questions including: Why do motile cells express vimentin? And, what advantage does vimentin give to the cell?

“Vimentin is very understudied and this funding will help us answer some big questions about how this protein is influencing the cell and in turn how biological processes such as cancer and wound healing are affected,” says Patteson.

Thanks in part to her MIRA grant, Patteson and her colleagues recently developed one of the first 3D simulations capturing how cells containing vimentin move through body tissue. In the absence of vimentin, their model showed a breakdown of the cell’s nucleus as it moved through narrow channels. In simulations with vimentin, the cell was much more resistant to deformation and the inside of the nucleus and its DNA was protected.

Amy Ellen Schwartz

Amy Ellen Schwartz, professor of economics and public administration and international affairs, is one of two principal investigators for a five-year research project to examine how, over time, COVID-19 has affected children’s health and education in New York City. Maxwell School faculty colleague Michah W. Rothbart is among the co-investigators.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the $3.5 million study is a collaboration by researchers at Syracuse University, New York University and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The team will investigate the effects of vaccine availability and uptake; examine racial, ethnic and income disparities; and explore the role of school and neighborhood resources in shaping outcomes and disparities. The total award to Syracuse is $1.3 million.

Schwartz also serves as chair of the Department of Economics, is the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Chair in Public Affairs and is a senior research associate for the Center for Policy Research. Rothbart is an assistant professor of public administration and international affairs and senior research associate for the Center for Policy Research.

Joining Schwartz as a principal investigator is Brian Elbel, professor of population health and health policy at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. In addition to Rothbart, co-investigators include NYU faculty members David Lee, Lorna Thorpe and Meryle Weinstein, and Sophia Day and Kevin Konty from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Shannon Monnat

Shannon Monnat, associate professor of sociology and Lerner Chair for Public Health Promotion, is the principal investigator for a five-year research project that will examine the impacts of state COVID-19 mitigation policies on adult psychological health, drug overdose and suicide.

Funded with $1.95 million from the National Institutes of Health, the project seeks to identify how the policies U.S. states enacted to combat the spread and adverse effects of COVID-19 may have affected psychological health and mortality from drug overdose and suicide among working age and older adults in both the immediate and longer terms.

“The findings will be essential for informing better policy responses in future pandemics,” says Monnat, who also serves as co-director of the Maxwell School’s Policy, Place and Population Health Lab (P3H), housed within the Aging Studies Institute (ASI).

The study’s co-investigators from the ASI include Jennifer Karas Montez, University Professor of Sociology, Gerald B. Cramer Faculty Scholar in Aging Studies, director of the Center for Aging and Policy Studies and co-director of P3H; Douglas Wolf, Gerald B. Cramer Professor of Aging Studies and professor of public administration and international affairs; and Emily Wiemers, associate professor of public administration and international affairs. David Wheeler, associate professor of biostatistics at Virginia Commonwealth University, will also serve as a co-investigator.

The project will provide novel large-scale data on adult COVID-19 experiences and well-being and use the variation in policy responses across states to shed light on which policies and combinations of policies are consequential for adult psychological health and related mortality, the mechanisms through which policies affect those outcomes and the population subgroups that may have been disproportionately impacted.

Nikhila Krishnan, a Ph.D. student in biology, using the new Zeiss LSM980 confocal microscope. Housed in the Blatt BioImaging Center, the state-of-the-art microscope was acquired thanks to an S10 grant from the National Institutes of Health.

For the first time in Syracuse University’s history, a department has received a prestigious S10 Instrumentation Grant from the National Institutes of Health. The S10 program, which supports the purchase of high-tech instruments to enhance research of NIH investigators, funded the acquisition of a Zeiss LSM980 confocal microscope. The new equipment will provide researchers at Syracuse University with sharp, detailed images of specific sections of cells.

The S10 grant was awarded to George Langford, College of Arts and Sciences dean emeritus and professor emeritus of biology, in collaboration with colleagues at Syracuse University and SUNY Upstate Medical University.

Housed in the Department of Biology’s , which is under the direction of Assistant Professor Heidi Hehnly, the confocal microscope adds to the center’s variety of sensitive instruments. Thanks to many specialized microscopes, researchers have the equipment to investigate a wide range of samples, from microscopic level yeast cells all the way up to whole organisms. The Blatt BioImaging Center’s equipment is available for use with a reservation to anyone at Syracuse University, SUNY Upstate, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and other local institutions.

We recently caught up with Blatt BioImaging Center manager Mike Bates to learn more about the new confocal microscope and how it will benefit College of Arts and Sciences faculty and student researchers.

“At Berkeley I was working on a biomaterial-based platform for cell micropatterning—basically we lay down a pattern and human pluripotent stem cells will grow and differentiate as directed by that pattern. When you have a technology you ask, ‘What can we use it for?,’” says Ma.

Induced pluripotent stem cells, reprogrammed from adult human cells, have the potential to develop into any kind of cells in the human body based on biochemical signaling and cues from the physical environment. That’s where the new technology came in.

Zhen Ma

In talking to some of his physician colleagues at UC Berkeley, Ma learned that very little is known about how various drugs affect the development of a human embryo; there’s no way to test the effects ethically in a living system. That got him thinking about whether this biomaterial system could be used to understand how the heart forms in the earliest phases of development. One of the major applications of cell micropatterning and related biomaterial systems is to develop organoids—tiny, self-organized, three-dimensional tissue cultures that are derived from stem cells. These cultures can be crafted to mimic much of the complexity of an organ or to express selected aspects of that organ, such as producing only certain kinds of cells.

At Syracuse University, Ma set up his lab and got to work developing and refining a cardiac organoid model. Using both biochemical and biophysical cues, stem cells are “trained” beginning with a 600 micron diameter pattern that creates a circular colony of stem cells. They then grow and self-assemble in a 3-dimensional chamber. Knowing that changing the shape of that chamber changes the cues that tell the cells how to develop, Ma sought to mimic the developmental shapes of a human heart as they occur naturally during fetal development. “The first stage in the heart’s development is a linear tube of tissue, so we started there,” he says.

His proof of concept earned a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award of more than $400,000 over five years, to continue to develop what Ma calls “heart embryonic development on a chip.” He says, “The goal is to optimize the biochemical and biophysical cues in the system that allows us to create a consistent model over and over. We want to hold everything constant in these living tissue models so we’re confident that changes result from the outside variable we’re testing.”

Studying how drugs affect fetal heart development hasn’t been feasible in a living system until this technology was developed. As he is developing a consistent model, Ma is now moving forward with testing between 30-40 well-known drugs with the goal of developing a risk classification for medications that might be taken during pregnancy. His research has been boosted by a $2.3 million grant over five years from the National Institute of Children’s Health and Human Development (part of the National Institutes of Health) to evaluate the specific effects of how these drugs might disrupt the formation of the correct three-dimensional structures and the capabilities that cardiac tissue has for contracting and expanding.

“We’re really excited because this could provide a pioneering breakthrough in drug discovery, regulation, and safe prescribing during pregnancy,” Ma says.

Zhen Ma

As a new father himself, Ma understands that doctors don’t really know whether a particular drug might hurt a developing fetus. There have been multiple studies of commonly prescribed drugs, such as antidepressants, on fetal health. Yet there are still many unanswered questions. This means that many women don’t have information they need to make decisions during pregnancy and forces difficult decisions as doctors try to balance risks while ensuring maternal and fetal health.

“It’s really exciting to begin work on the real practical application of this model,” says Plansky Hoang, who completed a Ph.D. at Syracuse University this past year and is now a postdoctoral fellow in the Ma Lab. “There’s the potential to really understand what goes wrong in fetal development that leads to birth defects–whether as the result of exposure to a drug or a genetic factor.” As a postdoctoral fellow, Hoang hopes to better understand how different cell types work in the model and whether it will be possible to model genetic diseases that give rise to congenital heart defects.

Ma’s lab has benefited from the development of the and the collaborations available across the University. He’s collaborating with , assistant professor of biomedical and chemical engineering, on a project that was awarded one of BioInspired’s first six seed grants. Their goal is to create microgels, materials formed from a network of crosslinked polymers, that will enable them to develop a synthetic model of a blastocyst—one of the earliest structures formed in mammalian development. Because this is the point in development where human embryonic stem cells begin to differentiate, the ability to develop a synthetic model could have many uses in basic scientific research. The goal of BioInspired seed grants is to fast-track promising research ideas, funding proof of concept or preliminary studies allowing faculty to generate the data that will result in external funding.

“The more we can work on this technology, the more applications it may have,” says Ma. “Combining materials and living systems is opening doors to solving problems with applications we couldn’t have imagined just a decade ago.”

This research is funded by National Science Foundation, Award# 1943798 and National Institutes of Health/DHHS, Award #1R01HD101130-01.

Heidi Hehnly (Please note, this image was taken prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and does not reflect current public health guidelines.)

A key process during the development of an embryo is tissue morphogenesis, where the number of cells in an organism increase through cell division and tissues begins to take shape. Heidi Hehnly, assistant professor of biology, has been awarded a from the National Institutes of Health for her group’s research to determine the mechanisms behind the formation of tissues with a lumen, which is a hollow passageway. Organs with these tubular passageways include the heart, kidney and gastrointestinal tract.

The placement of these organs in an organism are determined through left-right (LR) patterning. When that process gets disrupted, it can result in developmental disorders such as . Hehnly and her team will identify the role of cell division, specifically the last stage known as cytokinesis, during tissue development of the Kupffer’s vesicle (KV), the organ responsible for LR patterning in the zebrafish.

They hypothesize that the structure that connects daughter cells during the last stages of the cell division process is essential to helping the cells “decide” where lumen passageways should form. That structure is also crucial for determining when to extend small hairlike cilia into that luminal space within a developing tissue. The left-right beating movement of these cilia within the KV lumen play an important role in establishing precise left-right asymmetry in the developing embryo.

The team’s results may identify molecular targets for treatment of developmental disorders associated with LR patterning defects, such as situs inversus, where major visceral organs are reversed or mirrored from their normal positions, and heterotaxy, where internal organs are not arranged properly in the chest and abdomen.

In addition, identifying the cellular mechanisms associated with cilia formation will likely pinpoint the cause of certain ciliopathies, which are human disorders that arise from the abnormal function of cilia that extend from the top of the cell into the lumen. Patients suffering from these disorders can experience defects in LR asymmetry, congenital cardiac defects, and/or formation of cysts in multiple organs.

This is the second NIH grant at Syracuse University, the first being a that expands upon Hehnly’s research program into the origins of ciliopathies. She also received a $562,000 grant from the Department of Defense to research the role of a protein called Polo Like Kinase 1 (PLK1) in prostate cancer.

The human body is made up of trillions of cells. Within each cell are proteins which help to maintain the structure, function and regulation of the body’s tissues and organs. When cells are under stress, as in response to heat or toxins, certain proteins within the cell condense into liquid-like droplets called condensates. These droplets can be thought of as a form of quality control allowing the cell to minimize the effects of the stress condition.

Carlos Castañeda (Please note, this image was taken prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and does not reflect current public health guidelines.)

Cases of abnormal condensate formation or persistence have recently been linked to neurodegenerative diseases like ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and cancer. Thanks to a , Carlos Castañeda, assistant professor of biology and chemistry, and his team will investigate the regulation and dysregulation of condensates using biophysical and cell biology approaches. This research may lead to determining what causes diseases like ALS.

To function properly, cells depend on proteins to do their jobs. When a protein mutates, it can cause adverse medical conditions. The protein Castañeda and his team are studying is called Ubiquilin-2 (UBQLN2), which is part of many protein quality control pathways in the cell. Improper functioning of UBQLN2 can result in protein clumping or aggregation, which can potentially cause cells in the nervous system to die. These abnormal protein aggregates are markers for neurological diseases like ALS.

Mutations in UBQLN2 are known to be linked to ALS. Castañeda and his team, including Heidi Hehnly, assistant professor of biology, are hoping to learn how and if these ALS-linked mutations disrupt assembly and disassembly of UBQLN2-containing condensates in cells, as well as what regulates the liquidity of UBQLN2 condensates. By understanding the molecular mechanisms behind UBQLN2 condensates, the team could discover more about what leads to diseases like ALS— and potential ways to cure them.

Joseph Ditre

Joseph Ditre, associate professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, has received a $1.3 million grant to develop a program to target interrelations between pain, hazardous drinking and the use of prescription opioid medications.

When it comes to preventable death in the United States the third leading cause is hazardous drinking, which is defined as a pattern of alcohol consumption that increases risk for harmful consequences. For people with chronic pain, rates of hazardous drinking are significantly higher. Many individuals suffering from chronic pain are prescribed opioids, which when mixed with alcohol may lead to dangerous and potentially fatal health effects. Since opioids and alcohol are each central nervous system depressants, combining the two can drastically slow breathing and lead to coma. According to a study in the , approximately 12 percent of daily opioid users drink alcohol within two hours of taking their medication.

Ditre will create the first computer-based intervention technique to address hazardous drinking or concurrent use of alcohol and opioids in the context of chronic pain, thanks to the (part of the National Institutes of Health).

The innovative method is known as a personalized feedback intervention (PFI) and will offer patients individualized feedback in a matter of 20 to 30 minutes—all through a computer or smartphone. This treatment may ultimately be delivered to patients in the privacy of their own home and comes at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a dramatic rise in telemedicine between patients and health professionals.

“PFIs are portable, readily adaptable to a variety of mobile health formats (smartphone app), easy to implement, and can be delivered to a large number of patients, which will reduce the patient-provider burden,” says Ditre.

Each PFI provides a baseline questionnaire and turns those answers into a personalized feedback presentation. The goal of the PFI is to increase the patient’s motivation and intention to reduce drinking and reduce the frequency of concurrent alcohol and prescription opioid consumption.

“The intent of the PFI is to develop discrepancy between continued hazardous drinking and alcohol-opioid co-use behaviors and stated goals for pain management,” says Ditre. “It will also challenge patients’ beliefs that drinking is an adaptive pain-coping strategy. Demonstrating that a single, brief, integrated, computer-based intervention can simultaneously address hazardous drinking and prevent concurrent use of alcohol and prescription opioid medication would provide a novel, impactful and highly disseminable intervention that is needed and easily implemented across a variety of healthcare settings.”

This work builds on previous research in the College’s Pain and Addiction Research Lab, where Ditre serves as director. He and his colleagues successfully developed a brief, integrated computer-based PFI for tobacco smokers with comorbid HIV and chronic pain that focused on increasing readiness to quit smoking and helped patients confront the misuse of prescription opioids. These and other projects provide a conceptual and practical basis to inform the development of a new integrated computer-based PFI for hazardous drinkers with chronic pain.

Ditre’s new study that targets interrelations between pain, hazardous drinking and use of prescription opioid medications represents an important step in the larger landscape of developing effective strategies for reducing hazardous drinking, particularly among underserved populations with coexisting diseases. It could soon prove to be a highly useful and relevant treatment to millions of people around the world.

Beth Prieve

Prieve and Linda Hood, professor of hearing and speech sciences at Vanderbilt University, were recently awarded a five-year, $3 million grant by the National Institute on Deafness Research and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), one of the institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to study and measure auditory responses among newborns. More than $1.4 million of the grant will be used by Prieve and her team of researchers at Syracuse. Prieve and Hood, who will serve as co-investigators on this study will be conducting the same set of measures at each of their sites. They will then combine the collected data to analyze a larger sample size.

“Hearing problems are prevalent in preterm infants, but other neurological deficiencies are also widespread, and often one type of problem gets confused with another,” says Prieve, who also serves on the neuroscience studies faculty. “We anticipate the data gathered through our study will help us untangle deficits in the auditory system from other neurological problems. Ultimately, preterm infants with a wide variety of conditions will be tested, and we anticipate that the results will be informative to the scientific community, and directly impact intervention decisions for infants and toddlers.”

Prieve says this research will be a team effort and has enlisted the help of Steven Gross, a neonatal and pediatric expert at Crouse Hospital in Syracuse. Prieve and Gross will enroll preterm infants cared for in Crouse’s neonatal intensive unit into the study. Researchers will then measure auditory responses from these newborns as they grow and will examine how they relate to and predict language outcomes at two years of age. The results from this study are expected to improve the scientific and clinical knowledge of various auditory measures and couple the auditory measures to language and developmental outcomes, ultimately influencing the fields of audiology, neonatology, pediatrics, speech-language pathology and early intervention.

“Understanding the causes of variability in auditory neural responses is critical for effective diagnosis of hearing problems and evaluation of neural integrity early in life,” Prieve adds. “Our research will improve the healthcare of these infants by accelerating the identification of behavioral delays earlier in life, while supplying parents and providers with improved information earlier, so they can make more efficient and timely rehabilitation decisions.”

Prieve joined the Syracuse faculty in 1990. She earned a Ph.D. in audiology and hearing science from the University of Iowa and a master’s degree in audiology from the University of Minnesota. She has licensure in New York to practice as an audiologist. A highly decorated scholar, Prieve was named a fellow of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in 2009 and received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the New York State Speech-Language-Hearing Association in 2004. A prolific publisher, her work has been featured in a variety of scientific journals, including Ear and Hearing; Hearing Research; Pediatrics; the Journal of the American Academy of Audiology; and the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.

“Beth has dedicated her career to improving how we identify hearing loss in infants and young children,” says , professor and chair of CSD. “This a challenging population to work with because they cannot simply raise their hand when they hear a beep, and these children often have other health problems. However, early intervention of a child’s hearing loss is critical.  Beth played a key role in getting the universal newborn hearing screening program started in New York, and she has sat on several national committees to establish best practice guidelines to test young children. This grant will allow Beth to take her passion for pediatric audiology to the next level. The results of her collaborative work with Dr. Hood on this grant will directly influence how we test and recommend intervention for hearing-impaired infants and toddlers in the future.”

Kate Lewis

“To receive an NIH R01 award is a great honor,” says Lewis. “I am particularly excited about this research as it has the potential to facilitate the development of more effective treatments for spinal cord injuries and neuronal diseases that affect locomotion or sensory perception. If our research improves the quality of life for even one person, it will be a job well done.”

The results from this research will significantly increase knowledge about how spinal neurons are specified and form functional neuronal circuits within the spinal cord. “The results should have a huge impact on the fields of developmental neurobiology and neural stem cell biology, leading the way toward new treatments for spinal cord regeneration and repair following traumatic injuries,” says , the Beverly Petterson Bishop Professor of Neuroscience and professor of biology. “I am very proud of Kate and congratulate her on this substantive accomplishment.”

Lewis, who previously served as a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, joined in 2010. Since arriving at Syracuse she has raised more than $4 million in extramural funding, including grants for her specific lab and collaborative grants with other researchers at SU and internationally. Her research interests include the specification and patterning of spinal cord interneurons, the formation of functional neuronal circuitry and the evolution of spinal cord patterning and function. She earned a Ph.D. from University College London and went on to continue her postdoctoral studies at the University of Oregon.

“Kate continues to make the Department of Biology proud,” says , biology professor and chair of the department. “This particular research is especially important work and could unleash a variety of treatments and relief to those suffering from some of the most severe spinal cord injuries and debilitating diseases. I look forward to reading the results of Kate’s latest round of research.”

Natalie Russo

The statistics are staggering and the impact on children and their families can be overwhelming. But, one psychologist in is preparing to embark on a significant research project that may generate insights that will positively impact children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). , who joined SU’s in 2011, was recently awarded more than $2 million from the (NIH) to study ASD, a group of developmental disorders that affects one out of every 88 children.

“I am truly honored to have the opportunity to study ASD further and hope the findings of my research can help us better understand how individuals with an ASD experience the world,” says Russo, an expert diagnostician of children with autism and neuroscientist. “I hope this work will contribute to earlier diagnosis and to tailored interventions that can help mitigate the sensory issues that some individuals with ASD report as interfering with their day-to-day functioning.”

The goal of Russo’s research is to discover how both strengths and weaknesses in the manner in which individuals with ASD process the sensory world interact with one another by looking at behavioral symptoms and performance on sensory tasks, as well as the brain physiology underlying task performance.

“This research has the potential to uncover objective biomarkers that can be used to diagnose ASD, and also to identify subgroups of individuals with autism who might benefit from different types of interventions,” says Russo. “I think it is important to uncover not only weaknesses but also strengths that are unique to individuals with an ASD, and to help individuals with an ASD capitalize on those strengths to help mitigate some of the more difficult aspects associated with this diagnosis.”

The NIH, part of the , is the nation’s medical research agency. Russo’s grant is funded through the “Biobehavioral Research Awards for Innovative New Scientists” program, designed to provide a highly select group of early stage investigators funding to conduct innovative research and explore new approaches to address pressing challenges in mental health research.

“This prestigious grant award from NIH provides strong recognition of the strength and innovation of Professor Russo’s research program,” says Peter Vanable, chair of the psychology department. “It’s a huge honor for our department and for our school psychology program. The award extends our department’s outstanding track record of success in obtaining NIH grant support.”

Russo holds a Ph.D. from McGill University and completed her clinical internship at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she trained with faculty at the TEACCH Autism Program.

A rendering of the Vitamin B12 and PYY3-36 conjugate (Illustration by Damian Allis)

A chemist in has received a federal grant to study the oral administration of PYY3-36, a peptide that inhibits food intake by naturally switching off one’s appetite. The project is said to have major implications for people struggling with obesity and associated diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

, associate professor of chemistry, has been awarded $221,000 by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. His project will last for two years, with the option of a third, and will involve , a pediatric endocrinologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

The award comes on the heels of a landmark decision by the American Medical Association to categorize obesity as a disease requiring a “range of interventions,” including weight-loss counseling, medication and surgery.

“Obesity is one of today’s leading health challenges—not only in North America and Europe, but also in Asia and Australia,” says Doyle, whose expertise spans chemistry and biology. “The prevalence of obesity among children and adolescents is of particular concern, despite public health education and initiatives.”

At the heart of Doyle’s project is PYY3-36, a gut hormone that presumably supports the long-term benefits of bariatric surgery—currently, the only effective long-term exogenous treatment for obesity.

Doyle plans to utilize vitamin B12, which supports functioning of the brain and nervous system, to help protect and carry PYY3-36 through the gastrointestinal tract.

“We will trick the digestive system into carrying our peptide [PYY3-36], along with the B12,” says Doyle, who also holds faculty appointments in biology and biochemistry. “PYY3-36 will then send messages between the intestine and the brain, as well as in the brain, itself, telling you when you’re full. That’s why it’s called the ‘satiety peptide.’”

Since pharmacotherapy is merely an adjunct treatment for obesity management, the race is on to develop novel anti-obesity drugs that are safe and effective.

Doyle believes that orally effective therapy—particularly involving PYY3-36’s appetite-suppressing properties—may be the way forward.

“Ultimately, we want to develop an oral formulation that takes advantage of our bodies’ own appetite-control elements,” he says. “But first, we need to study its effects.”

Doyle, who earned a Ph.D. from Trinity College in Dublin, joined SU’s faculty in 2005. Since then, he has produced award-winning research that may lead to new treatments and diagnostic tools for diabetes and cancer. Much of his work, such as the utilization of B12 to orally deliver proteins, draws on chemical or systems biology research.