The Statesman 4-3-17

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Monday, April 3, 2017

Volume LX, Issue 24

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The Statesman celebrates its 60th anniversary By Mike Adams Contributing Writer

Sixty years after The Statesman was first founded, reporters and editors from the past and present gathered at the Hilton Garden Inn to celebrate the campus paper’s diamond anniversary. “Stony Brook is bound by very little tradition,” Executive Director of Alumni Relations for Stony Brook, Matthew Colson, said.. “If there’s one thing that has been a constant through all this change, it’s The Statesman telling the stories of everything that has happened on campus.” Looking back at their formative years, many of those in attendance recalled how their time at The Statesman shaped their lives and careers going forward. “This is a really overwhelming experience for me,” David Joachim ‘93, now a financial crimes editor for Bloomberg News, said. “I found myself at The Statesman. It wasn’t just I found my career, I found who I was.” The Statesman is the oldest organization in Stony Brook’s history, having been established as The Sucolian in 1957 when the then-State University College on Long Island opened in Oyster Bay. Prior to the 2006 establishment of the university’s School of Journalism, the campus paper served as the only training ground for student

ARACELY JIMENEZ / THE STATESMAN

The National Residence Hall Honorary held the second annual Scale Smash for Body Positivity on Wednesday, March 29 in the Academic Mall. At the event, students were encouraged to demolish scales with sledgehammers. journalists, save for a few isolated reporting classes. “In those days, there was no journalism program on campus,” Jonathan Salant, Statesman editor-in-chief from ’74-’75 and Washington correspondent for The Star-Ledger in New Jersey, said. “If you wanted to do journalism, you had to do Statesman. The joke was I got my degree in political science, but my major was Statesman.” Time and time again, the alumni from the early days of The Statesman Continued on page 3

Race for USG executive VP will go into runoff election

By Rebecca Liebson Assistant News Editor

After weeks of campaigning, the new leaders of Stony Brook’s Undergraduate Student Government have been decided, with the exception of the race for executive vice president, which ended in a tie. The Party Next Door secured five of seven executive branch positions. Ayyan Zubair will take over as president, Alex Bouraad as treasurer, Justine Josue as vice president of Communications & Public Relations, Katherine Colantounias as vice president of Clubs and Organizations, and Nicole Olakkengil as vice president of Academic Affairs.

“I feel so humbled by the trust that the student body has placed in me.” said Zubair. He went on to acknowledge the hard fight put up by his opponent, Lydia Senatus. “It is a testament to the diversity and inclusion on campus that your two candidates for president were a black female and Muslim guy. Lydia is a great student leader and I hope to work with her in the future for the betterment of the student body.” From the LIT party, Jaliel Amador will take on the position of vice president of Student Life & Programming.

News

Continued on page 3

Stony Brook participates in research competition

By Rawson Jahan Contributing Writer

On Feb. 27, a research team from Stony Brook Medicine showcased its skills in STAT Madness, a virtual bracket-style contest in which medical schools, universities and research institutions compete to prove that they have the best innovation in science and medicine. Alberto Perez, Ken A. Dill, Joseph A. Morrone and Emiliano Brini represented the team from Stony Brook’s Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology. Dill serves as the director of the center. The group of researchers entered its article, “Blind protein structure prediction using accelerated free-energy simulations,” published in the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science Advances on Nov. 11, 2016. “It’s awesome that the research done at Laufer Center has been recognized among the best in life science innovations,” Nancy Rohring, the administrative director of the Laufer Center, said. “It says a lot about the high caliber research done here at Laufer Center and SBU.” The Stony Brook team’s research has brought about a method involving pharmaceutical applications. The method gives a way to predict a protein structure needed to create a rational drug design.

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It predicts this structure in a way that bioinformatics cannot, using Modeling Employing Limited Data. MELD uses a Bayesian inference, which is a mathematical approach that helps scientists avoid anything that isn’t a real protein when searching through the body. It is necessary to find these real proteins so that scientists can predict their structure. “We can’t just wait for the computer to try all possibilities – it would take longer than the age of the universe,” Perez, a Ph.D. student at the Laufer Center, said. “So instead, we use what we know about proteins, they’re compact, make secondary structure and hydrophobic residues are likely to interact with each other,

and this helps us hop from place to place, avoiding many possible shapes that wouldn’t look like real proteins.” The team’s findings took them to the second round of the competition, where Stony Brook lost to Weill Cornell Medicine’s team on March 6. Cornell’s research team authored “A Data-Driven Approach to Predicting Successes and Failures of Clinical Trials” published in the Journal of Cell Chemical Biology The article explores a computational approach that predicts the failures of clinical trials. “We made it to the round of 32 contestants. Our Twitter skills were lacking,” Perez said. “In particular,

Continued on page 3

ANNA CORREA / THE STATESMAN

Ken Dill, Ph.D., left, and Emiliano Brini, Ph.D., right, are members of the team that competed in STAT Madness. Opinions

Sports

War correspondent comes to campus.

Cuisine and Confessions comes to Staller.

Time to cut down on the computer.

Women’s Lax sweeps weekend.

MORE ON PAGE 3

MORE ON PAGE 6

MORE ON PAGE 9

MORE ON PAGE 12

Roy Gutman sheds light on conflicts in Syria.

Performers transformed the stage into a kitchen.

Why we should lessen our daily screen time.

Seawolves notch a win over top-5 opponent.


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