Stony Brook Honors Distinguished Doctoral Students at Annual Colloquium

Five graduating doctoral students whose research covers environmental health, regenerative medicine, energy storage, neonatal disease and advanced mathematics were honored on May 18 at the Distinguished Doctoral Colloquium.

The annual event, held in the Student Activities Center, celebrates recipients of the President's Award to Distinguished Doctoral Students, the university's highest honor for graduate students. Each awardee presented their dissertation research to an audience of family members, faculty, staff and students, translating their research into accessible talks that discussed the depth of their work and its potential real-world impact.

"This year we had 21 nominees for this award category," said Celia Marshik, dean of The Graduate School and vice provost for graduate education. "When you think about the fact that those are the students that each program thinks are their very best students, it's a highly competitive pool. To be here today means you aren't just the cream of the crop, you're the very top of the cream."

Marshik noted that the event asks students to explain dissertations that often span hundreds of pages and years of work in a way that anyone in the room can understand. "Dissertations are hundreds of pages," she said. "And they're full of highly technical jargon. And we ask people to make that presentation intelligible to a general audience."

The first presentation came from Meroona Gopang, a doctoral student in public health whose research examines how environmental metal exposure may contribute to cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's disease-related dementia.

Her research explored how exposure to metals such as arsenic, cadmium and lead may contribute to chronic disease, drawing on data from large international cohorts as well as the World Trade Center responder population. She explained that while cardiovascular disease and dementia continue to rise globally, environmental exposures are often overlooked in discussions of public health risk factors.

"One aspect that has been overlooked across the years is the environmental exposures, specifically metals," she said. "This is where my research comes in." Gopang also focused on a major methodological problem in environmental epidemiology: how to accurately measure metal exposure using urine samples that may vary widely in dilution. Her dissertation compared six different statistical adjustment methods across multiple cohorts to determine whether commonly used approaches could be producing biased findings.

"The measurement accuracy matters," Gopang said. "If we are providing biased results through unreliable methods, it's going to provide risk estimates which are not true and which could lead to policies which may not be useful for the people and the health care system."

Sai Aishwarya Abasolo, from biomedical engineering, discussed her research focused on creating "woven bone organoids" using stem cells. Her work centers on woven bone, an immature but highly active stage of bone formation that naturally occurs during embryonic development and fracture healing.

"You can think about woven bone as a template for further bone development," Abasolo explained. Using human stem cells, Abasolo's team engineered miniature bone-like structures designed to mimic the architecture and behavior of woven bone. The resulting organoids demonstrated prolonged viability and stronger osteoblast activity than previous models. When implanted into skull defects in mice, the organoids also promoted greater bone regeneration over time.

"Not only do these organoids display greater viability and osteoblast activity, they're also able to promote bone repair," Abasolo said. "All of these are potential advantages for downstream applications and also for clinical translation in the future as well."

Varun Kankanallu, a doctoral graduate in chemical and molecular engineering who now works at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, then discussed his research focused on aqueous zinc-ion batteries, a potential alternative to lithium-ion batteries that uses water-based electrolytes and earth-abundant materials such as zinc and manganese.

"Right now our reliable options for energy storage systems are lithium-ion batteries," Kankanallu said. "But the challenge we have with these is that they have thermal runaway." Using advanced synchrotron X-ray techniques, Kankanallu studied how battery materials evolve during repeated charging cycles, allowing researchers to observe structural changes in real time. His work revealed how water and hydrogen ions play a larger role in battery performance than previously understood, while also identifying structural changes that contribute to battery degradation over time.

"If we are able to control this hydrogen ion availability and optimize structural reversibility, we can obtain long-term performance of the system," he said.

Cuilee Sha, a student in the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) and molecular and cellular pharmacology program, discussed her research examining necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), a devastating inflammatory gastrointestinal disease that affects premature infants.

"It is an inflammatory gastrointestinal disease that's characterized by damage to the intestinal wall that allows for bacteria translocation and a massive systemic inflammatory response," Sha explained.

While advances in neonatal medicine have improved survival rates, many infants who survive NEC continue to face severe long-term complications, including neurological impairments. Sha's research focused on understanding how inflammation originating in the gut may contribute to changes in the developing brain.

"We're interested in understanding the connection and relationship between NEC and some of these neurological complications, with the goal of preventing some of these sequelae and ideally improving quality of life for these patients after they survive," she said.

Using a graded mouse model that mimicked varying levels of disease severity, Sha's team identified elevated inflammatory cytokines in both the bloodstream and brain tissue, along with changes in brain immune cells and synaptic signaling that may contribute to long-term cognitive effects. Her findings suggested that NEC may alter the maturation of synaptic receptors in the hippocampus, potentially contributing to learning and memory deficits later in life.

The final presentation of the morning came from mathematics doctoral student Spencer Cattalani, whose dissertation explored complex cycles and symplectic geometry, an advanced mathematical framework rooted in the study of motion and dynamical systems. Beginning with the geometry of Euclid and the planetary models of Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, Cattalani traced the evolution of geometry into modern mathematical physics.

"I'm a geometer," he said. "And the basic reference for geometry is Euclid's Elements." Cattalani's research focused on "complex cycles," generalized geometric structures that combine recurrence and topology in new ways.

"My thesis work studies generalizations of these that combine the recurrence here and the pseudoholomorphic curve," he said. "I studied these and using them I was able to answer several questions and proposals posed by Gromov himself." Audience members asked whether mathematics might eventually have applications ranging from cosmology to artificial neural networks.

Marshik spoke of the range of research represented across the five presentations and the opportunity the event creates for scholars from different disciplines to engage with one another.

"I do think that is the power of this event," Marshik said, "that we get together across both east and west campus, hear from our really amazing doctoral students from both campuses, and get to engage in one another in a way that we don't normally get to. You really see that we have such bright minds working across those different programs."

- Beth Squire