Announces Construction of 50 MW Solar Power Plant and NSLS II
Today was an extremely interesting day to be an employee at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Governor David Paterson made a special visit and announced some extremely good news on site to the laboratory employees. The core elements of his talk focused on the funding, development and construction of the National Synchrotron Light Source II and the construction of a new 50 Megawatt (MW) solar panel plant at the laboratory. These are both exciting new developments and display a strong commitment by the federal government to researching and deploying new technologies. There was also mention of a possible additional 400 MW solar power plant to be funded by private investors. Governor Paterson was accompanied by Senator Brian Fowley (NYS Senate), Assemblyman Mark Alessi , Brookhaven National Laboratory Director Sam Aronson and a representative from LIPA. According to past state audits, NY has been directed to implement alternative energy technologies to provide electricity for the region, and this solar power plant will accomplish that. Specifically, a solar power plant will be used to providing power to the new NSLS II, though I beleive there is potential for expansion in the future. This is a major breakthrough and will provide thousands of jobs for the Long Island regional economy in construction, real estate, retail sales, science, education and alternative energy research and development. Much of the engineering and construction will be accomplished my local firms who are hiring individuals form New York and Long Island to do the work.
Last week on Wednesday, February 4th 2009 the Stony Brook University Center for Inclusive Education, Graduate Student Organization (GSO), and the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate hosted highly a successful event at the Stony Brook University, Charles B. Wang Center. The occasion was a film screening of the documentary “Naturally Obsessed” made by Richard and Carole Rifkind. I had seen this film a few months prior at Brookhaven National Laboratory at the NSLS where I work, and spoke to the Rifkinds afterwards. I told them it would be great to come to Stony Brook University and do a screening for the grad students who would really love it.
It was a fairly large project, and required a lot of communication and advanced planning. Three months prior to the event I had requested $650 funding from the GSO to provide food for the event and an honorarium for the Rifkind’s. Here is a copy of my proposal to the GSO.Working with the CIE was a true pleasure and they provided almost unlimited support. Their director helped me advertise all over with a campus wide email, a posting on the University’s front page, the career center’s website, and emails to all the GSO senators. I sent personal invites to many professors and several of them came. Michael Hadjiargyrou from the Department of Biomedical Engineering was able to participate in our discussion following the showing along with Dean of the Graduate School, Lawrence Martin. In the end, it was a huge success and a lot of fun. We had over 130 attendees come in for the movie and discussion afterwards.
There was one glitch, which was out of our control. The DVD froze two times when it was playing, and on the second time, it did not start again. Everyone was left hanging! So finally someone went back there to see what was happening and they guy just hit the skip forward track button and went to the next scene so we missed like 10 minutes. I was pretty crushed by that, especially since for me, every minute of that movie is like amazing. And the scene it jumped to came a little bit out of nowhere, but everyone understood what was going on. The Q&A session was also a little nerve racking, but I had prepared before hand with Richard Rifkind and had questions lined up. They went over well and the discussion was thought provoking.
I asked one question that everyone loved: “If you were pretending President Obama was sitting here with us, what are five things you would tell him that you think are important regarding the future of science and education”. We got some great responses which I hope to post later.
This week, I am writing the final portion of my PhD Qualifying Exam for the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Stony Brook University. The topic requests that I develop a source of stem cells which can be delivered into the brain of Parkinson’s disease patients using an engineered biomaterial. Right now, I am doing fairly well on page 25 with about 10 pp left to write. There is a lot still to do. In summary, the project involves creating a new lines of embryonic stem cells from cloned blastocysts generated by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Briefly, SCNT involves removing the genetic material from an unfertilized egg and inserting a donor cell and applying electric voltage inducing parthogenesis – the spontaneous fertilization of embryos. From here, one can dissect the parthogenetic SCNT embryo and extract embryonic stem cells. These can be differentiated into dopaminergic neurons and implanted into the brain. That is the part I’m working on now!
