On his syllabus for a course called Realism and Climate Fiction, Mike Hill includes two texts that don’t — on their face —seem like obvious choices for a class exploring the emergence of cli-fi as a literary genre.

One is Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road and the other is Robinson Crusoe, the 1719 novel about a shipwrecked sailor, which not only pre-dates the cli-fi genre by about 300 years but also the modern notion of the novel.

Mike addressed both in a part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit. 

The Road is on your syllabus. You don't get told in that book what happened. You’re vividly experiencing the aftermath of some cataclysm through a father and son, but it's not explicitly a climate book. Why do you teach that book, and what do you teach about it?

MH: I really, really love that book for so many reasons, and it is not a climate fiction book, but it is one that allows us to tell a history that precedes climate fiction that connects with the lineage. That's the way genres work. Sometimes they organize things in retrospect. I think about a novel like Robinson Crusoe. It’s very much an ecological kind of fiction. Although in the same way it would not have been called a novel in 1719 when it was written, it would not have been called a climate fiction novel until now. 

For me, it's a way to make a point about how literary value changes over time and how genres, different kinds of writing, as they are invented can help us rethink older text that we can learn to read in a new way. [Crusoe] focuses on, as he calls himself, somebody who's of the middle-lower area in life. Somebody who has all these early modern ambitions about making it big in the world and not being an aristocrat — those Enlightenment kinds of principles. But at the same time, that ambition leads him out into the world in such a way that puts him in really intimate connection with the environment.

The Road is not a cli-fi text; however, it has to do exactly with those themes you were talking about before regarding good guys and bad guys. Do you remember the relationship between the father and the son? First of all, they're nameless. It’s placeless, but it has a very profound sense of place. The narrative technique is very minimalist — a lot of just one word back and forth. It's like a Waiting for Godot meets I don't know what — Mad Max or something, right? And what the child is asking the father very often is: Are they good guys? Are they bad guys? And sometimes they can't tell, and sometimes they get mistaken as bad guys by good guys and vice versa. So there is that slippage too, in terms of how to survive, how to do better, how to do well. 

That novel could have ended with the death of the father, and we would've had a gloomy, unequivocally gloomy, text. But it doesn't. It continues. And in fact, there's a really interesting, very experienced, scarred-up survivor that comes in and gets in contact with the son after he has had this very reverential scene with his father. And the novel really begins where it ends. They say, “What are we going to now do out in the world?” And the prose opens up. It's no longer that minimalist kind of back and forth. And it seems to me to end with possibility,

It's uplifting?

MH: Well, I don’t know. At least it's not so down-putting that we stop in a fit of gloom. I think the ambiguity maybe is where the hope lies, to the extent there's hope. Because we don't want a hallmark ending, either. These aren't utopian forms of fiction. Neither are they dystopian. And so there is a sense of possibility. We have these futures that exist simultaneously. One is of existential doom, and the other is about survival and possibility. 

Go deeper

Mike explores the ecological themes in Robinson Crusoe more deeply in this article: “Close Reading at a Distance: Genre, Realism, and Ecology in Robinson Crusoe" 

He mentioned a lot of books during our conversation, including: Goat Days by Benyamin, Animal's People by Indra Sinha and Playground by Richard Powers.

He also mentioned Dan Bloom’s work to popularize the term cli-fi in the literary world. Bloom’s website documents those efforts.

Doom & Bloom Books has even more.

Mike’s most recent book is On Posthuman War: Computation and Military Violence, which explores “how demography, anthropology, and neuroscience have intertwined since 9/11.” His next volume in that project will be called Ecologies of War: Climate Change, Literary Realism, and Political Violence.

Episode credits

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Interview and episode notes by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist
Photo by Brian Busher
Hosted and written by Erin Frick

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

If you’ve heard Havidán Rodríguez speak publicly, odds are you’ve heard him say the phrase, “it’s always a great day to be a Great Dane.” It’s his thing.

But there’s another phrase he says a lot, often in connection with the story of how college transformed his life.

“And this,” he emphasizes as he concludes the anecdote, “is the power of higher education.”

The point of telling the story about his path from auto mechanic to disaster researcher to university president is not the singularness of his own success. The point is that when you look at the good that higher education — and especially public higher education — produces, his path is not exceptional at all. 

It’s not: “Look what I did.”  

It’s: “Look what you can do.”

That’s one of the reasons Omar Yaghi’s story also resonates so deeply with him. Born in Amman, Jordan, in a family of little means, Yaghi moved to the United States as a child, enrolled in Hudson Valley Community College and eventually graduated from UAlbany with bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Last year, he won the Nobel Prize. 

Yaghi’s research on metal-organic frameworks has the potential to improve the lives of people across the planet by helping clean toxic pollution from water, or harvesting moisture from desert air.

That makes Yaghi more than just one of UAlbany’s most distinguished alums. It puts him at the convergence of two themes central to higher education’s case for why it’s still worthy of public support and investment: College changes the lives of individuals who go on to help make our world cleaner, healthier and safer for millions of others.

That is the power of higher education.

Nearing a decade as president of one of the most diverse public research institutions in the country, Rodríguez has made carrying that message to a broader audience a focus of his presidency.

Go deeper

As part of his work to increase understanding of the importance of university research, Rodríguez recently joined the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Presidents and Chancellors Council on Public Impact Research. Read more about the council's work.

UAlbany also consistently ranks among the top institutions nationally for the social mobility of its graduates.

If you want to hear more, you can register to attend Rodríguez’s Spring University Address, scheduled for 3:30 p.m. on April 14 in the Campus Center Ballroom.

Our first episode of The Short Version was about Omar Yaghi’s research on metal-organic frameworks and the message his Nobel win sends to UAlbany students. Listen to it here.

MIT Technology Review also published an excellent explanation of his work. [Subscription required]

Episode credits

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photo by Patrick Dodson
Hosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

If you’ve found your way to a podcast inspired partly by Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show and haven’t yet seen it, be sure to check it out so you can understand the full context of our conversation with José.

And if you also missed the controversy swirling around the performance, Rolling Stone is a good place to start unpacking that. The Conversation also had a good explainer.

But this didn’t start with Bad Bunny. During our conversation, José mentions a 1978 musical collaboration between Panamanian singer Rubén Blades and Puerto Rican trombonist Willie Colón, an album called Siembra, that he said in many ways foreshadowed the message of a hemispheric American identity highlighted by the flag bearers at the end of Bad Bunny’s performance. 

Specifically, it was the song "Plástico" from that album. The roll call begins around the 6:00 mark.

As José noted, the roots of that message go back much further — at least as far back as 19th-century Cuban writer José Martí, who before he was killed in the island’s fight for independence wrote an 1891 essay on the topic titled Nuestra America, which translates to “Our America.” Read it in English, or its original Spanish.

José also mentioned the work of musicians Ray Barretto and Eddie Palmieri, and the poem "Arte poética" by Jorge Luis Borges.

We asked José to share a few favorite examples of the music he spoke about, including the plena songs he described as “the people’s newspaper.” Here’s the short version of his playlist:

1. "Cortaron a Elena" ("Elena was cut"): "A contemporary version of a plena with a full orchestra. Originally plenas were sung with an ensemble consisting of three hand drums, a güiro an accordion and a guitar.”
    
2. "Deshaucio" ("Eviction"): "Bomba Sicá with orchestra. Sicá is a variety of the traditional bomba rhythm which is played by three barrel-size drums, a cuá, and a maraca. A cuá is a bamboo tube struck with wooden sticks. A maraca is a hollowed gourd with seeds inside, traversed by a stick that serves as a handle.”
    
3. "El negro bembón"/("Big Black Lips"): "This is a guaracha, which derives from the Cuban son. The son traditionally is played by a conjunto consisting of guitars, trumpet, bongos and sometimes a double bass. This contemporary version comes about when guitars are replaced by the piano, with trumpets, timbales and conga drums added to the ensemble."

Go deeper

The bilingual version of José’s book, Con la Música a Otra Parte, was released earlier this year.

If you want to hear José perform, he’s also president of Jazz/Latino, Inc., a nonprofit that promotes appreciation of jazz and Latin jazz by organizing performances around the Albany area.

He’s also written extensively about the political experience of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States, specifically in the northeast. Read more about his political science scholarship.

Episode credits

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photo by Zach Durocher
Hosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

We couldn’t interview the director of UAlbany’s Career Center without asking him for his top tips on how to approach career exploration — or re-exploration if you find yourself at a crossroads.

Here’s Noah’s list of must-dos:

1. Understand the flexibility and breadth of options that your major creates. What transferable skills does it develop? What careers have alumni pursued with this degree?
    
2. Explore different industries and careers within those industries. 
    
3. Conduct informational interviews with professionals in many fields. Connect to UAlbany alums through the UAlbany Career Advisory Network (UCAN) or LinkedIn. The world of work is constantly changing, and seeking out advice and knowledge about careers from industry professionals is critical.
    
4. Gain hands-on experience as early as possible through experiential learning opportunities. This could include, but is not limited to, internships, research, volunteer and service learning.

Noah also had an interesting perspective on how the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of in-person professional exposure and experience — and why even people who embrace the comfort and flexibility of hybrid work benefit from being in the office. 

He also noted that many people's objections to return-to-work directives may be more about their aversion to commuting than actually working in a traditional office environment.

Here’s what Noah had to say in a part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit.

With remote or virtual work becoming more widely accepted since COVID, have you seen this shift in students’ or even just young professionals’ understanding of office space or office dynamics or even company dynamics?

NS: There’s a lot of talk that offices are bringing people back five days a week. Meanwhile everyone I talk to is not going back five days a week. What's funny is the biggest complaint I heard during COVID from students was those students who I think we thought would actually enjoy the work from home, they did not want it. The ones I talked to were like, “No, I'm looking for mentorship in the office. I have questions. I'm looking for advice. No one's around.” And I think that was a real struggle because you and I being able to sit across the table here from each other, the conversation's very different than if it were through a computer. And so for our students, I talked to a bunch who said, “I'm going into the office, and I'm walking around and it's ghost town.” For a lot of them, that opportunity to be in the office, to connect with a mentor, to ask questions, to get immediate answers has really benefited them. 

Don't get me wrong. Once they're situated, they love their hybrid. For most people I find it's not actually going to the office. It's getting to the office. Once I'm at the office all good. It's the act of actually getting to the office, and I commute about 45 minutes. Once I'm here, great. Most people I know are still on a hybrid schedule.

Go deeper 

Noah mentioned several other important resources in our conversation. Here’s how you can find them:

UAlbany Career and Professional Development Center

Handshake, a professional networking site that students can access with their UAlbany Single Sign-on

The calendar of upcoming Job & Internship Fairs

Students can make appointments with Career Advisors using EAB/Navigate

Episode credits 

Research and interview by Amy Geduldig
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist 

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

The longer version 

Annalisa’s lab is working to understand how the brain processes spatial awareness — both to inform medical advances for dementia research and to advance technologies seeking to mimic the efficiency of the human brain. Here’s a look into how her team uses mouse models to answer these questions.

AS: Genetically, mice are surprisingly similar to humans. In our studies, we allow them to navigate through space, and we have them run on a treadmill that has different cues that indicate different environments. For example, there are portions with grass, there are portions with different textures or different colors. As the mice move, we record the electrical activity of cells within the hippocampus called “place cells” that encode cues that tell us where we are. This allows us to monitor how place cell formations change in mouse models with different diseases. 

One thing that we have found is that allowing neurotransmitters (chemicals used by the brain to communicate) to travel further in the brain tissue is a key mechanism that facilitates our perception of space. If changes in brain structure like those seen in Alzheimer’s disease block or prevent neurotransmitters from travelling where they need to go, this affects our ability to perceive where we are.

How do you know that what you see in mice can accurately be mapped onto a human brain and connected to neurodegenerative diseases?

AS: We never know that for sure; it’s more of an inference than a certainty. It's difficult because we cannot do these types of studies in healthy versus unhealthy human volunteers. Clinical trials are limited in how many people can be involved and they take a very long time. Instead, we can use mice to repeat these experiments across a larger population, which we can follow through time in healthy and diseased states and make predictions. In the future, clinicians could see whether our predictions are accurate or not. 

Studies like these are really important for informing new ways to manage dementia. If we can find therapies, either pharmacological or behavioral, that can delay the progression of the disease and keep the patients in a clear state of mind for longer— if I could achieve that in my lifetime, that would be a huge success.

What do you think it will take to answer these questions?

AS: Right now, everyone is talking about artificial intelligence and how AI could help us solve this sort of question. While AI is booming, it's also environmentally and energetically hungry. At this pace, we can't sustain the developments, so what can we do? The solution is to go back to the brain to learn how it allows us to be so intellectually complex at the energetic cost of a dim light bulb.

It can be easy to think that there's no hope, but we have to overcome that. When I was a kid, there was an environmental concern about how much light we were using and then LEDs were developed. But oftentimes, when you think that there's no solution, the solution is there and it's innovation.

Go deeper

Look inside Annalisa’s lab to see how her team is building novel tools to study how the brain works and how it is affected by neurodegenerative disease. 

Learn more about the biology of Alzheimer’s and how the disease takes hold in this Q&A. 

Annalisa’s work was among six projects to recently receive funding as part of the SUNY Brain Institute. Learn more in this Times Union coverage about SUNY’s $10 million, cross-campus investment in neuroscience, featuring insights from Annalisa. 

Episode credits

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 

Photo by Zach Durocher 

Hosted and written by Erin Frick

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

The title of Bryan Early and Togzhan Kassenova’s forthcoming book on the financing and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is evocative: Banks and The Bomb.

The bomb. As in, the atomic bomb.

But wait… Is that something we’re still worried about? Is the spread of nuclear weapons still the biggest threat to global peace and security in 2026? Certainly, it’s been in the news a lot following the June 2025 U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and, more recently, the lapse of a major arms-control treaty between the U.S. and Russia that, among other things, capped the number of nuclear warheads in circulation.

The answer is complicated, and Bryan did a great job explaining why in a part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit. 

We also asked him if the rise of cryptocurrencies is interfering with the ability of governments and banks to use the financial system to police illicit weapons transactions. 

Here’s what he had to say.

Without being alarmist, what concerns you most about the technology that's trying to get out and that people are trying to jailbreak these days?

BE: I would say nuclear weapons are the technology we're most concerned about because they have the greatest potential destructive impact. Chemical weapons have kind of the lowest threshold for use because there are a lot of dual-use chemicals. I don't know if you've watched Breaking Bad, but he makes phosgene [a poison gas] through his meth-making process. He also — well, I don't want to give away the plot — but he also develops a biological weapon and uses it at the end of the series through his knowledge of chemistry. You can use chemistry to build weapons, but developing sophisticated, dedicated chemical weapons is much harder to do. What I would say I'm more worried about right now from a proliferation perspective are some of these unmanned aerial vehicles or unmanned underwater vehicles.

There are a lot of ways that unmanned systems are being weaponized and used in warfare in places like the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, where we've gained a greater appreciation that civilians using off-the-shelf technology can build pretty dangerous conventional weapons. And you can put a chemical weapon on it; if you have a biological agent, you can put that on it. A nuclear warhead's going to take something bigger. But you can get some pretty dangerous off-the-shelf capabilities that aren't really being regulated very well — or really at all for some of the lower-range aerial systems. And so that's one where if a non-state actor wants to use that and wants to acquire these capabilities, the threshold is pretty low. Are they going to be able to carry off a severe attack directly? No. But if you attack a vulnerable piece of infrastructure at the right place or at the right time, you can do a lot of damage.

What happens when transactions move outside the banking system? Does crypto’s existence, and the way it is used, undermine the ability of the financial system to be a watchdog?

BE: Crypto has been an amazing boon for countries subject to economic sanctions, like North Korea, because it has provided them with a way to operate outside of the traditional financial system and to engage in large-scale financial transactions that are by design meant to make it harder for governments to track the parties involved. What's been interesting about North Korea from our case research is that crypto is not only a way to move money, it’s a target of fundraising. 

The North Koreans are able to steal and hack crypto wallets or the virtual asset service providers that are facilitating transactions. And so North Korea is able to raise millions, and even billions, of dollars through these thefts. Once they have the money, they use the crypto ecosystem to launder those funds. They could take their funds to mixer sites or decentralized exchanges. The decentralized exchanges turn it from Ethereum into Bitcoin. Once it's changed into Bitcoin, they can then take it to a mixer site that mixes the funds through a bunch of different accounts, and then they're transferred on to other wallets. So they're able to steal funds within this ecosystem, then launder the funds. 

There are ways at the other side of the system, when they actually try to cash out, that you can use financial systems that are being regulated, or crypto asset providers that are being regulated similar to financial institutions, to employ due diligence to scrutinize transactions. But this has been one of the real big challenges over the last five- to 10 years — that proliferators are able to use these channels to raise funds and move funds.

Go deeper 

Learn more the Project on International Security, Commerce, and Economic Statecraft.

Read about its work across the globe.

Bryan’s previous book, Busted Sanctions: Explaining Why Economic Sanctions Fail, was published in 2015.

Episode credits 

Research by Maggie Hartley 
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Mario Sotomayor
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist 

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

Lately, Cecilia Levy’s contributions to LUX-ZEPLIN’s hunt for direct evidence of dark matter come in the form of computational physics — that is, the extraordinarily complex analysis of the data coming out of the dark matter detector. (As a postdoc, Levy also contributed to its assembly and commissioning.)

Cecilia's data analysis work begs a more fundamental question: How would we know dark matter if we found it? What would the data say about a thing we cannot see? 

We got deep into these cosmic weeds in a portion of our conversation that did not make the final edit but is nonetheless fascinating.

One programming note: You’re going to read a lot about xenon below. If you’ve heard of it before, you probably know that xenon is considered a noble gas — an element that does not chemically interact with much. It’s used inside LUX-ZEPLIN as a liquid, in part because it’s very dense and helps shield the inside of the detector from cosmic interference.

Here’s how Cecilia explained what happens next:

When you're looking at the data that comes out of the detector, what are you seeing that makes you say, “Aha! A WIMP just crashed into our xenon!”? What does that look like?

CL: The data analysis on something like this is absurdly difficult. Please understand that it's not just like, “Oh, boom, there was a little spike on an oscilloscope,” and we know we just detected the WIMP. It doesn't work that way at all. 

You cannot actually detect the WIMP itself. What you detect is its interaction with the xenon nucleus. Imagine a billiard ball collision. One ball is dark matter; the other is a xenon nucleus. So you're playing pool, and the dark matter interacts with the xenon and then goes on its merry way. It's gone. But because it's deposited some energy into the xenon, the xenon has recoiled. And with this recoil, you get light, and then you get a little bit of electrical charge. 

We look at this light, and then this charge, and we move it up into our xenon and make it interact again with other xenon atoms to get secondary light. What we're looking at is really the light that is being produced in our detectors. The xenon is what we call our target material. It's not the actual detector. The detector is all the light sensors around it. So the target material is what's going to say, “Hey, boom, there was an interaction.” And then all the light detectors say, “Okay, was there a flash of light in here? That's how we know.

Annoying question. 

CL: Go ahead.

Why is that direct evidence and not indirect evidence? Because you're detecting the light, right? Light is an indicator of an interaction in a place so quiet that it almost certainly had to be dark matter. But you didn’t see the dark matter. You saw the light produced by its crash. 

CL: Because you can’t see it!

Because it’s dark matter.

Right, you can’t. That's the whole conundrum here. If we could see it, we wouldn't have to do all this. And this is something that's really important to understand in physics. There are a lot of indirect things like that. Because very seldom do you actually see exactly what you’re looking for.

[gestures to her eyeglasses]

OK. Right now my glasses are on the table. You see them, you think immediately in your mind, “This is a direct detection of my glasses on the table,” correct?

Yes.

CL: Okay, well, I'm going to turn that argument against you. I'm going to say, “Actually, you do not see my glasses. What you see is the light from my glasses arriving into your eyes, which are the detector.”

Okay.

CL: Same thing. We call this direct [detection of dark matter] because what we are looking at is a direct interaction of a dark matter particle with our xenon nucleus. In our case, it's direct because there is a direct collision

And you can see the light.

CL: And I can see the light. The same way that you can look at my glasses because you see the light from my glasses.

Go deeper 

Read about the latest results from UAlbany’s contributions to the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment

Check out this video from the Sanford Underground Research Facility to see what the LZ detector looks like and how they got it a mile deep into the mine. 

There are more photos here from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is leading the project.

Episode credits 

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Patrick Dodson 
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist 

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

Beyond her research on emergency management and technology, DeeDee also works on enhancing climate resiliency in coastal regions. 

In 2023, DeeDee was selected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to serve as Ocean Decade Champion, which led her to attend the 2024 IOC/UNESCO Ocean Decade Conference in Barcelona. The summit spotlighted research that integrates natural, social and technological disciplines toward a shared mission of building coastal resilience. 

We asked DeeDee about takeaways from this experience.

DBG: "The experience was invaluable. I've noticed a growing divide between STEM and social sciences when tackling complex problems. While we often call for data-driven, STEM-focused solutions, many questions, like why people behave as they do or how to drive change, require qualitative, social science perspectives. 

Solving complex problems, like climate change, poverty, or expanding STEM education, requires more than one discipline. Funding mechanisms should reflect this and support truly inclusive, community-engaged research."

In addition to being a respected scholar in disaster preparedness, DeeDee is one of many UAlbany faculty members focused on ensuring that what she learns in her lab is translated to the real world, where that knowledge can help people.

DeeDee’s research on individual and household emergency preparedness shows that organizations struggle to teach the public how to deal with disasters in part because there are not enough opportunities to practice in immersive ways. To address this, her startup company Almanta developed a game called “All Hazards.” Played using a VR headset, the game allows the user to roleplay their way through a disaster scenario. The result, she says, is not just building tech for agencies, but building more prepared and resilient communities, one household at a time.

Almanta won runner up in the UAlbany Innovation Center’s Research and Innovators Startup Exchange (RISE) pitch competition in Fall 2025, winning $15,000 in seed funding. 

Go deeper

Discover the work DeeDee is undertaking with her team at the Extreme Events, Social Equity, and Technology Lab.

Learn more about DeeDee’s experience testifying before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging about emergency preparedness and response.

Watch a video that captured DeeDee’s team as they tested their wearable VR tech with test users in Brooklyn, N.Y. 

Episode credits

Hosted and written by Erin Frick
Interview, research and additional writing by Mike Nolan
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photo by Brian Busher 

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

Michael Christakis has led UAlbany’s Division for Student Affairs and Enrollment as vice president for 11 years. But he’s been part of the unit for going on 27, and he started in the same way many people do — through Residential Life. 

Mike was a graduate hall director at Alumni Quad, which, when it comes to creating a sense of belonging —the topic of this week’s episode — may be one of the most challenging assignments on campus.

It’s axiomatic at UAlbany that Res Life is a training ground for some of the best problem solvers you’ll meet, and those problem solvers often later go on to work in many other divisions beyond Student Affairs.

But why is that? What is it about being an RA that prepares you for just about anything?

We asked Mike that in a part of our conversation that didn’t make the final edit.

We sort of joke on campus that anybody in any unit across the campus who's good at getting things done typically started in Res Life.

MC: Correct. 

And we joke about it, but it's also kind of true.

MC: It's so true.

You can go down the list of all the people who are in jobs that have nothing to do with Res Life, but who are organized, good project managers, identify a problem, identify resources. I don’t know what it is about Res Life.

MC: When you're in Res Life, I mean you're quite literally a Jack of All Trades. Even at certainly a large Residential Life program like we have at UAlbany, you're doing a little bit of everything. You're doing a little bit of programming, you're working with a key shop to cut keys, you're doing room damage assessments, you're doing some conduct and some discipline, you're doing some education outside the classroom, you're doing it all. And invariably in the Student Affairs space in particular, those are usually the largest units, even at small places. The Residential Life staffs are huge given the size of our housing program. So you've also got more people that are engaged in that work. And I would agree with you, I think some of the best tacticians on college campuses often come out of Residential Life.

Go deeper 

Read more about the launch of Thrive UAlbany

Check out the full suite of Thrive UAlbany resources and programming

Read The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 Advisory on the Health Effects of Social Connection and Community 

…and The New York Times’ recent reporting on what’s weighing on college students’ minds today.

Even deeper: In 2021, UAlbany was among the first universities in the U.S. to sign the Okanagan Charter as a Health Promoting University.

Episode credits 

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Brian Busher 
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist 

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

The journal prioritizes “contributions that examine the political economy of food, healthcare, energy, telecommunications, transportation, education, or recreation provisioning.” 

One of the fascinating things about Robert’s work is how it connects his professional contributions as a respected scholar of Mesoamerican cultures (the Maya being one of the tally stick examples his article explores) to political and economic questions that feel very relevant today. 

In that spirit, we had to ask him how his argument for the origins of money — that its value is intrinsically tied to demand created by government tax debts — intersects with the rise in the last 15 years of cryptocurrencies, which are often celebrated as means of private exchange free from government intervention.

The answer, he said, has a lot to do with what gives people trust that money has any value at all. Here is what he had to say. 

OK, you're invited to explain your findings at a crypto conference. Is that ending with standing ovation or are you getting heckled off the stage? Folks who have adopted the ethos of crypto, of how and why it came to be, do you think they would be excited about your argument or…?

RR: Carl Menger, who is the father of Austrian economics, has quite a famous paper where he basically says money is a big Ponzi scheme, essentially, and that everyone's just passing off the money until someone figures it out.

Crypto is money in the sense that frequent flyer miles are money. I mean, if you take your frequent flyer mile catalog, you probably wouldn't have a very healthy diet, but you probably could live from everything in that catalog and get clothing and food and everything. But you probably wouldn't want your retirement to be denominated in frequent flyer miles, right?

I’d get heckled off the stage at the crypto conference because their idea of money is the Carl Menger view: It's all a big Ponzi scheme and the only reason it has value is because people keep using it. 

And if they stop, it'd be like a game of musical chairs, and some people are going to be out lots of money. So they would argue, I think, that government money is the same. And what I'm saying is that private money like crypto is very different than government money. Government money is backed by taxation, which creates a demand for it. Private money is not. 

In the ancient world, many of the trading organizations were based on religious and ethnic groups, partly because there was an internal trust within those groups of people and a social ramification for violating that kind of trust. Now blockchain in the crypto case is a good accounting measure, an independent accounting measure, and blockchain technology is quite impressive. But there's no inherent value to cryptocurrencies. And so it is an alternative source or an alternative means of exchange or creation of value that is not based on anything. It's based on aspiration or on hope that it will be worthwhile or it will be valuable in the future. So crypto folks wouldn't like this.

Go deeper 

Read more about Robert’s work as an anthropologist, including the Soconusco Archaeological Project, which examines the development of agriculture and social stratification in Mexico’s Chiapas state and neighboring Guatemala.

Also check out UAlbany’s Institute for Mesoamerican Studies.

Episode credits 

Research and writing by Michael Parker 
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Patrick Dodson 
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist 

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

Max Turner is among many UAlbany faculty members whose work blends artificial intelligence tools with other scientific disciplines — in his case, fly neurobiology focused on understanding how vision works in the brain. 

Max was among more than two-dozen AI-focused faculty members recruited to UAlbany with the help of new state funding several years ago as part of the largest cluster hire in University history to support UAlbany's Al Plus Initiative. 

His work uses artificial intelligence to make sense of the enormous amount of complex, multidimensional data collected as his lab watches how individual neurons in fly brains fluoresce in response to visual stimuli in the lab's mini-movie theater — and how the flies react physically by moving across a fly-sized treadmill. 

It's not actually a treadmill so much as it's a tiny foam ball suspended by a stream of air and marked in such a way that a camera can record the ball's movement and correlate those movements with what the fly saw. You can watch it for yourself in this brief clip.  

For all this data to make sense, Max and his students need to know what the fly was reacting to. What did it see? How do we know what flies see? Are they shown big, color photos of over-ripe bananas? (No.)

We asked Max this in a portion of our conversation that didn't make the final cut. 

How do you decide what those visual inputs look like? It seems to me have you have to know, sort of, what a predator looks like to a fruit fly in order to simulate that.

MT: "I think it starts by thinking about what natural fly behavior looks like. What do flies do with their visual systems? We don’t show flies human-inspired visual stimuli. They don’t watch movies or read books. We don’t show them those things. We show them things that we think flies use their vision for, and practically speaking it helps in designing stimuli to know that flies have pretty bad spatial resolution, meaning they have kind of chunky, pixelated vision. They’re really fast. They have really fast vision but very low spatial acuity. So we don’t need super high-resolution images of a very realistic-looking predator. You could just show a big dark spot that gets bigger at the right trajectory, at the right speed, and they’ll think, ‘Oh God, that’s a dragonfly or whatever, let’s get out of here.’” 

As Max noted in our conversation, other common model species for scientists studying vision are mice, monkeys and Zebrafish. But what sets Drosophila melanogaster apart, he said, is that we have a full connectome — that is, a complete wiring diagram of the brain. 

Why are you a fly guy and not a Zebrafish guy?

MT: “I’m a fly guy because I like getting into the biological mechanisms — the genes, the neuron types. We have a connectome. For a neuron that I’m interested in, I can find all that neuron’s inputs, all of its outputs. I have the genetic tools to record activity in that neuron, activate that neuron, silence that neuron in a way that’s just not possible in any other model species."

Not even Zebrafish?

MT: Not even Zebrafish.

Go deeper 

Learn more about Turner Vision Lab. 

If you want a deep dive into why Drosophila melanogaster became such a widely used model species in science, this article in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences is a great place to start.

Episode credits 

Research by Erin Frick
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Patrick Dodson 
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist 

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

For many people drawn to careers in atmospheric science, their curiosity is kindled by a formative weather event during their youth — a blizzard or flood that leaves such an impression that they spend their adult lives chasing the mysteries in the clouds and wind.

But for Kara, it was as much about the math.

“I knew I liked math. I knew I liked science. And I thought, ‘Meteorology seems cool,’” she reflected on her decision to pursue it as an undergraduate major. “I thought I was going to be a forecaster, but then I realized I didn’t like forecasting. But I always really liked the fundamental math, the calculus.”

As she pursued her PhD in meteorology, Kara also quickly recognized the centrality of computer science to the work she hoped to do.

“The coding and the computer programming was always my most favorite part of graduate school and anything I did in undergrad — writing software or writing programs. When I got my job here at UAlbany, I knew I wanted to spend more time learning the best ways to write code. 

I still understand the fundamental physics, but I also just loved the programming part of it. Because I wanted to do all those things and develop software and take all this interesting data and do something with it, I started taking computer science classes. This past May, I actually earned my bachelor’s degree in computer science from UAlbany and, right before our conversation, I just came from my first master's-level class. So I’ve really been developing a robust background in computer science and seeing how I can use computer science as a tool — and AI as a tool —to enhance my research and the research of those in my center. I really like the mixture of the two, and I also realize that a lot of my peers, especially when I was an undergrad, and now a lot of students, kind of struggle with the computer science component because it wasn’t built into the curriculum. We weren’t taught coding. But literally every single thing we do, every project we have — unless you’re out there counting raindrops on leaves — you are doing some level of computer programming. And it’s not just our field. It’s any scientific field or beyond.”

Kara is uniquely suited to run ASRC’s AI/machine learning lab because she understands the fundamentals of both the atmospheric and computer science at work.

“You don’t want the computer model making predictions that aren’t grounded in reality,” she said. “You want the actual predictions to be tied to the laws of physics.” 

Go deeper 

Learn more about Kara’s research interests and UAlbany's Atmospheric Sciences Research Center

Go inside UAlbany’s xCITE Lab

Read how Carly Sutter, a graduate student in Kara’s lab, used machine learning to analyze road conditions based on traffic camera images

Explore ASRC’s history on top of Whiteface Mountain

And watch a daily time-lapse video from ASRC's perch on the roof of New York

Campus news 

• Dozens of UAlbany Researchers Among World’s Top 2% of Scientists
• The Princeton Review Names UAlbany to Mental Health Honor Roll for Second Year
• Chemistry Professor Honored with Prestigious American Chemical Society Award

Upcoming events 

• 12/9: Holiday Greeting Card Unveiling & Community Coffee Hour
• 12/10:Build-a-Budget Workshop with Thrive UAlbany
• 12/13: Women’s Basketball vs. Boston University

Explore everything happening on campus with the University at Albany Events Calendar

Episode credits 

Research and interview by Mike Nolan
Headlines by Erin Frick
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Patrick Dodson 
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist 

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

When we spoke with Taylor, he had already completed his first field practicum, a core component of the Master of Social Work program, at the Pride Center of the Capital Region.

The Albany-based non-profit is dedicated to serving the LGBTQ+ community, offering counseling, peer-led support groups and events. They also offer trainings, which became a focal point of Taylor's experience. This is what he said:

“Part of my field practicum involved going into schools and delivering trainings to teachers, superintendents, school counselors — really anyone working in a school setting. These trainings focused on gender and sexuality and were designed to help them understand what their students might be experiencing and how they can create affirming, loving environments within their classroom for queer students. And it wasn’t just for students who identify as LGBTQ+, it was also about making learning equitable for all students. How do we meet everyone's social and emotional needs? I was formerly an educator, so getting to speak to my former colleagues was really enriching for me. I could see the lights go on in some of the teachers’ heads who want to help and want to serve but aren't necessarily sure how to support and affirm their queer students.”

What is your top tip for educators seeking to make their classrooms more inclusive?

“One of the simplest things I love to say is to have something in your classroom that signifies that you are an ally. That could be a pin, it could be a flag on your desk, it could be a magnet. It could be including your pronouns in your syllabus or putting your pronouns on the board or in an email signature. These sorts of visual cues are really helpful to students because then students can think, “Ok, I know this teacher is going to respect my pronouns or respect my preferred name,” or “I can talk to my teacher about my relationships, no matter what they look like.” 

Those visual cues are a really good starting point. It's very simple and you don't have to think about it every day. The item is just there, and it represents your willingness to learn, your willingness to listen, and your willingness to love them no matter who they are.”

Go deeper 

Learn more about how the School of Social Welfare uses professional actors to help students prepare for client interactions. 

Watch a video featuring Taylor together with fellow advanced standing Master of Social Work student Gabriella Audino and Assistant Director of Field Education Monique Ivey.

Discover UAlbany’s Master of Social Work program at the College of Integrated Health Sciences. 

Episode credits 

Interview by Erin Frick  
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photo by Scott Freedman  
Written and hosted by Erin Frick  

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

Morgan spoke to us as a representative of a larger cluster of scientists and scholars at UAlbany thinking about how the next generation of computers can take inspiration from the human brain. 

His work with that team of biologists, psychologists, mathematicians and nanoscale engineers underscores a truth many scientists have long understood: the problems we care most about, such as how to live long and age well, will not be solved by researchers in one discipline alone. 

Neuromorphic computing is a prime example.

“These fields are really starting to blur together in ways that certainly, when I started my career 25 years ago, wasn’t the case,” Sammons said. “At the fundamental level many scientific fields are remarkably similar. And there’s certainly a group of people who say, ‘Well, every field is just math when it comes back to it.’ 

But when we think about the people designing computer chips, or we think about people who are doing sustainable engineering, or mechanical or electrical engineering, or nanotechnology, many of them know biology. Many of them have done biology in the past. So often they’re drawn toward problems that are biology or life sciences- related.”

Part of that, he said, is innate human interest in the problems that affect us personally. 

“There’s a huge push on campus for healthy aging — the idea that getting older is something that all humans must confront. So you need to bring all these disciplines together. Whether or not there are similarities between what I do and what a computer engineer might do, or a computer scientist might do, we all come together on the fundamental societal problems. That’s why things like UAlbany’s AI Plus Initiative are so successful. Because everybody touches it, and it will impact everything we do. 

It’s not just the scientists doing drug discovery or trying to understand DNA sequences. It’s also the English professors analyzing hundreds of millions of works over the span of time and understanding grammar and structure; it's our philosophers sitting down and thinking about, ‘How does this impact our society?' Whether it’s just AI generally or the more specific part that we’re talking about — creating new computer chips, which is pretty niche — AI is going to touch a lot of people’s work.” 

Go deeper

Learn more about Morgan's day job as part of UAlbany's RNA Institute studying, as he puts it, "what it is about our DNA that makes us who we are."

Recently, that work included a collaboration with fellow RNA scientists to study how our cells respond to and fight off diseases like Zika virus — and how that might help develop better treatments in the future.  

Visit the Sammons Lab

Morgan also mentioned UAlbany’s AI Plus Initiative and Center for Healthy Aging

Campus news

• IBM Announces New AI Hardware and Seven New Joint Research Projects with UAlbany
• UAlbany Unveils New First-Generation Scholars Lounge in the Taconic Building
• Christina Phillips Tapped as Interim AVP for Facilities Management

Upcoming events

• 11/20: Indulge your love of French at La Pause Cafe
• 11/21: Explore Italian language and culture at the Italian Table
• 11/21: Join the AI Plus Institute for 2025 Foundational AI Day

Explore everything happening on campus with the University at Albany Events Calendar

Episode credits

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Headlines by Erin Frick
Hosted and written by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published a stunning scoop [subscription required] alleging that server hardware designed and sold by the California company Supermicro to more than two-dozen major tech and government clients was compromised with malicious chips installed at the behest of Chinese intelligence. Those hardware trojans, the scoop alleged, gave China backdoor access to snoop — or worse — on what those networks were doing.

The story was met with immediate, forceful denials from tech companies, including Supermicro and Amazon Web Services — with Apple CEO Tim Cook going so far as to call it “100 percent a lie.” U.S. and British intelligence said they saw no evidence to contradict the denials. Supermicro said a third-party investigation of its hardware found nothing suspicious.

But Bloomberg stood by the story and followed up, three years later, with another report alleging that China’s targeting of Supermicro was known to U.S. defense and intelligence officials for a decade. 

We asked Sanjay for his take on the controversy and the fallout since — and whether there might be other explanations for what happened.

Jordan: The Supermicro report was explosive, but the tech companies denied it — and western intelligence services said they had no reason to doubt the denials. What do you make of that? 

Sanjay: The allegation was that the trojans were not in the original design by Supermicro, but when the hardware was manufactured in China and came back, the hardware had those trojans on there. The denials could be for a variety of reasons. They could be for economic reasons —that they don’t want everybody to panic “Oh my god, all of our chips are tainted.” The second is there could be an error in the detection as well — whether or not the trojans were really present or they were a different artifact or natural defect in how the chips were manufactured. A lot of things could happen. 

Bloomberg stands by the report, even to today, and there were other rumors that these were actually present. But I’m not going to go against the tech companies or our own intelligence. If they say they did not exist, for whatever reason, I would want to believe that they did not exist.”

Go deeper  

Learn more about Sanjay Goel's cyber defense expertise, including the prestigious NSA certification for the Massry School of Business' Digital Forensics program as a National Center of Academic Excellence. 

Sanjay also serves as research director at the UAlbany-based New York State Center for Information Forensics and Assurance.

UAlbany's College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity was also recently designated a National Center of Excellence in Cyber Defense by the NSA. 

The College of Nanotechnology, Science, and Engineering (CNSE), meanwhile, has deep expertise on microelectronics R&D and fabrication, including the capability to design and manufacture chips embedded with malicious trojan hardware for testing.

Sanjay is working with colleagues in CNSE to develop a testbed that will enable researchers to fabricate and study malicious chips to make them easier to find. 

Campus news

• $50M Life Sciences Research Building Expansion to Boost RNA Institute
• UAlbany to Purchase Former College of Saint Rose Residence Hall
• UAlbany and Albany Med Health System to Launch B.S. in Nursing Program

Upcoming events

• 11/14: NYSWI's "Telling the Truth in a Post-Truth World"
• 11/15: STEM & Nanotechnology Family Day at ETEC (sold out/waitlisted)
• 11/15: Great Danes (football) vs. the Towson Tigers, 1 p.m. @ Casey Stadium

Explore everything happening on campus with the University at Albany Events Calendar

Episode credits 

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

We asked Michael Yeung about his favorite bits of boron lore. He did not disappoint.

Even if the first one may be apocryphal, it would make a great techno spy thriller.   

"There was an old story that I heard about how we had a spy in the Soviet Union who was monitoring their rocket launches, and how they noticed that all the rocket plumes were green. The CIA immediately concluded that the Soviet Union was making boron-based missiles to hit the U.S. (boron is one of the few elements that burn green), and got a lot of labs in the U.S. to work on boron chemistry because we didn't want to be outranged in the Cold War. Turned out in the end that the fuel that the Soviet Union was using was just contaminated by the OTHER element than burns green (copper), and that was what made the rocket plumes look green. It was great for universities, though!"

OK, but what does Chernobyl have to do with it?

"The reason why boron chemistry exists today is because of nuclear power. The U.S. was building a bunch of nuclear reactors during the Cold War, and so we made A LOT of boron (it absorbs neutrons and is used as a control rod to prevent reactors from melting down, i.e. Chernobyl, where the boron control rods got stuck). Because we made so much boron during the Cold War, the U.S. decided to ship the excess boron to research labs to see if they could make anything useful out of it, which was another reason why boron chemistry was really popular in the '60s. We're trying to make it hot again." 

Go deeper

Learn more about how Michael's research group is blending traditional and advanced computational chemistry to unlock the spiciest traits of boron compounds.

Read their recent publication in the The Journal of the American Chemical Society. 

Visit Yeung Lab @ UAlbany

Episode credits

Research and interview by Erin Frick
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman & Brian Busher
Photos by Brian Busher
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

Jeremy Feldblyum is not just an accomplished chemist and teacher; he holds a bachelor of music from the University of Maryland in piano performance. The intermingling of science and art — and the possibility of one inspiring the other — carries poetic potential too strong to ignore. So of course, we had to ask: Is tuning a MOF like tuning a piano?

Here's what Jeremy said:

"Many people ask if there’s a connection between my music and science, and I always have the disappointing answer that as far as I know, I have not found a relationship between the two. Even the music I listen to in my office is not piano music. That would be too distracting. 

When I studied piano during undergrad, I played at a level that made me happy — after much struggling and a lot of time in the practice room. That kind of work ethic and obsession that I actually first had in music, not so much in chemistry, helped me to shift gears when I got to graduate school. I knew I had to lay music aside — not completely — but that I had to let that go a little bit to give myself time and space for science, which I threw myself into wholeheartedly. And I would say that up to that point, my passion in music set my science back a little bit. I probably did not study chemistry quite so much as I should have as an undergraduate. But as a graduate student, I had the work ethic. I knew how to be obsessed with something, and I threw myself into chemistry feet first. By the end of graduate school, I was quite happy. I felt, finally I could do research successfully. And I didn’t have to be miserable while doing it, as many grad students are. So perhaps that work ethic is the closest relationship between them. But otherwise, music just makes me happy, and when I’m happy, I do my science well."  

And while chemistry might have the spotlight for the moment, Jeremy still finds time to play — even with his hands full.

"I have two very young kids now, and so I'm learning some left-hand repertoire while I'm holding the baby in the other arm."

Go deeper

Learn more about the Feldblyum Group

Read a MOF Nobel explainer with Jeremy

Here from Omar Yaghi directly via the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Campus news

• Seal of Excelencia reaffirms UAlbany's commitment to Latino and Latina student success
• UAlbany hits high note with gift of music from Republic Records founders
• RNA Institute shares $6.5M NIH award for Wellstone muscular dystrophy research center

Upcoming events

• 11/10: NANOvember: Neuroscience Nanotechnology with Janet Paluh
• 11/10: Women's basketball vs. Dartmouth @ the Broadview Center
• 11/11: 2025 CEHC LEGO Challenge

Explore everything happening on campus with the University at Albany Events Calendar

Episode credits

Research and interview by Erin Frick 
Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Written and hosted by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

The Short Version is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing at the University at Albany, which is part of the State University of New York.

Comments, ideas, suggestions? 

Send them to mediarelations@albany.edu and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.