Dr. Harvey Kushner, chair of LIU’s Criminal Justice department, gave his expert opinion in a recent Newsday article on recent changes to New York state law for individuals charged with misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies. The new policy will mean that most of these people will forgo bail and be released. Kushner shared findings from his studies, which compared Long Island crime rates with suburbs of Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit and Dallas. Each had crime rates significantly higher than Long Island. Kushner theorized that the lingering sense that crime is rampant comes largely from a 24-hour news culture and smartphones.
College Football’s Dream Invitation
Grant Ibeh, a graduate student defensive back on the LIU football team, earned an invite to the 2020 Dream Bowl, a College Football All-Star Showcase. The game features some of the top players from across the country and includes seniors or graduate students that have exhausted NCAA eligibility. Moreover, it gives prospects the opportunity for National Football League scouts to see their talents in-person. Ibeh becomes the sixth LIU student-athlete invited to the Dream Bowl, which began operations during the 2016 season.
The Face of New York’s ‘40 Under 40’
For her remarkable career achievements and public service, LIU alumna Farah Louis (BA in Journalism, ’06) made the cover of City & State New York magazine’s special “40 Under 40” issue. This summer Louis retained her City Council seat representing the 45th District in Brooklyn, with more than 50 percent of the total votes cast in the election. She also received the endorsement of Mayor Bill de Blasio. Prior to running for public office, Louis worked as an administrative coordinator at Mount Sinai. She also served as the Executive Vice President for the Haitian American Caucus from 2009-2013.
PBS Airs Documentary by LIU Film Professor
PBS added The Long View, a documentary by Susan Zeig, chair of LIU’s Department of Communications and Film, to its Learning Media Collection. The documentary aired more than 700 times on PBS stations across the country during the month of September. The Long View chronicles two Oakland high schools and their community of students, families and teachers. It provides an up-close look at the strengths and challenges of urban schools and communities throughout the country.
Transforming Students into Business Professionals
For the second year in a row, Long Island University hosted Virtual Enterprise International’s (VE) “Business and Entrepreneurship Leadership Conference” at the Post campus. More than 1,500 of the top high school students from across the country attended the event. Students pitched their business ideas to executives from industry leaders and top startups, who served as judges and guest speakers. The University awarded $1,750 in supportive funds between the top three ranking firms.
Centenary Conference a Sensational Success
The Theodore Roosevelt Institute (TRI) at Long Island University held a special centenary conference to celebrate the legacy of America’s 26th president. National experts on Roosevelt shared scholarly insight on his charismatic personality, forward-thinking policy and enduring influence. Guest speakers included: Karl Rove, Colombian Ambassador Francisco Santos, Historian Jorge Orlando Melo, Michelle Krowl, Susan Sarna, Todd Brewster, Geoffrey Cowan and Dr. Michael Cullinane. The three-day event also featured a film festival, breakout sessions and presentation of the Roosevelt Medal to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
LIU Professor Anait S. Levenson Helps Host International Conference on Medicinal Plants in India
Unlocking the healing power of plants to combat human diseases is a personal mission for Dr. Anait (“Ana”) Levenson, M.D., Ph.D., who has devoted years of research to this vital area.
At LIU Pharmacy since 2016, Dr. Levenson has been studying how bioactive compounds found in grapes and blueberries could lead to the cure of prostate and breast cancer. As a professor at the proposed new College of Veterinary Medicine at LIU Post, pending its accreditation, she’ll continue her work in this growing field.
Her intense interest in this subject recently drew her along with hundreds of the world’s other top researchers to convene in northern India at the foothills of the Himalayas for the second International Conference by the American Council for Medicinally Active Plants (ACMAP) together with the International Conference on Medicinal, Aromatic and Nutraceutical Plants from Mountainous Areas. The conference, held in February, was jointly arranged by the ACMAP, USA, and the Graphic Era (Deemed to be University), Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India.
“We are just beginning to understand the potential these plants could have for our health,” Levenson said.
Representing LIU, she chaired the “Human Health and Plants” session and was a keynote speaker as well as one of the organizers. A former vice president of ACMAP, Levenson continues to be an active member of its Board of Directors. Three years ago, ACMAP organized the first international conference in Lima, Peru.
“Both Peru and India are places where people have been using plants for medicinal purposes for thousands of years,” Levenson said. “These countries have those traditions but they lack the technology to work with them. Whereas we Americans have the technology and the researchers, but we lack that tradition.”
Her keynote lecture was titled “Chemopreventive and Therapeutic Effects of Stilbenes in Prostate Cancer.”
“Stilbenes are naturally occurring polyphenols (compounds) found in food and plants,” she explained. “Resveratrol found in grapes and red wine is the most widely studied stilbene compound with diverse pharmacological properties including anticarcinogenic effects. Another natural stilbene found mostly in blueberries is resveratrol’s cousin, pterostilbene, which also possesses anti-inflammatory, antioxidative and anticancer properties that can be used for chemoprevention and/or therapy in cancer. Pterostilbene exhibits more potent biological effects than resveratrol due to subtle differences in its molecular structure.”
Interestingly, she pointed out that India has a very low rate of prostate cancer, which she believes could be due to the preponderance of curcumin from turmeric in their diet. “A lot of studies do show that curcumin has anticancer, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties,” she said.
Although cancer is Levenson’s specialty, she wanted to emphasize that the scientific gathering was not a “cancer conference. It was about bioactive molecules from food and plants that can be used in treating different diseases.”
One of the most interesting connections Levenson said she made at the conference was meeting Professor Oliver Kayser, who is doing cannabis research at TU Dortmund University in Germany. He is also an Editor-in-Chief of Planta Medica, an international journal of natural products and medicinal plant research.
“He’s not a cancer cell and molecular biologist like me. He’s a medicinal chemist,” Levenson said, adding that she believes that multidisciplinary collaborations that bring a unique set of skills and a combined expertise in different areas of science are the key for new discoveries and successful research projects. Cannabinoids (CBD and THC) could be made into “more potent anticancer agents. This is what I want to study.”
Adding to the urgency of the conference was the prospect that climate change could wipe out many plants used in traditional medicine before scientists have the chance to examine their molecular structure in depth.
“We can’t allow these plants to die out,” she said, adding that one of the themes of the conference was a Himalaya farmers’ forum. “We have to study them more because they can offer us new compounds that we could use to cure diseases like diabetes and cancer. We don’t want to be too late!”
By all accounts, the conference was an overwhelming success. Levenson especially enjoyed meeting the Indian university students. “The students were very inspired and very enthusiastic,” she exclaimed. “We felt like celebrities!”
Now in the planning stages, the next ACMAP conference may take place thousands of miles away—in New Jersey. “We can’t go international all the time,” Levenson lamented. “It’s very, very hard to put together.”
But she has no doubt that the promise these plants hold makes it all worth it in the end.
LIU Student Newspaper ‘The Pioneer’ Wins Top Honors at Press Club of Long Island’s Awards Dinner
The Pioneer, the student newspaper of the LIU Post campus, won first place in the hotly contested College Newspaper category in the Press Club of Long Island’s annual Media Awards competition, which took place on June 6 before a crowd of almost 240 people gathered at the Watermill Caterers in Smithtown.
The award for Best College Newspaper was presented to co-editors-in-chief Jada Butler and Ashley Bowden and to The Pioneer’s staff.
Professor Carolyn Schurr Levin, The Pioneer’s faculty advisor, called the University’s achievement “incredible news.”
“This category has, for a long time, been dominated by Stony Brook, Hofstra and Adelphi,” she explained. “We knew what we had to do to win an award in this category. We improved our website, our social media and our copyediting, and we varied the content in the paper, among other things. We finally won third place in this category in 2016. We won second place in this category in 2018. This year is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the Pioneer has ever won first place for Best College Newspaper.”
“It’s really great that the high standards and the professionalism that we built into The Pioneer has been recognized and we’ve gotten this award for best college newspaper,” exclaimed Ashley Bowden, who is doing an internship this summer at a real estate publication in her hometown of Chicago. “It’s a real honor. I’m really proud of it.”
“I’m grateful to PCLI for acknowledging the hard work we’ve put into our newspaper,” said Jada Butler, who is doing an internship at Vice Media in Brooklyn this summer. “I’m also beyond proud of our staff for persevering through the many challenges we faced this year with reporting the harder news on campus. In the end, it was incredibly rewarding to see the real impact, action and dialogue that was created because of it.”
Jada Butler and Josh Tolentino, assistant features editor, also won first place in Narrative-Sports Reporting for “Game Changer: Athletics Becomes ‘OneLIU,’” which talked about the merger of the University’s sports departments to compete in Division 1 of the NCAA.
He just graduated in May.
Karis Fuller won second place in Narrative-Sports Reporting category for her story, “Post and Adidas: Match Made in Heaven,” which recounted how the company is sponsoring the athletes’ uniforms and other sports equipment. Fuller, who also just graduated in May, was on the swim team. She is from England.
As Professor Schurr Levin said, “It was a very good night for The Pioneer.”
LIU Professor Daniel Hanley’s Insightful Research Reveals How Nesting Birds Behave
An international team of researchers led by LIU Post Biology Professor Dr. Daniel Hanley has used a new experimental approach to study how birds evaluate whether an egg in their nest belongs to them or whether it was left by a freeloader—apparently an all too common practice in the bird world. His groundbreaking work has been drawing increasing attention in scientific circles.
Birds’ eggs can range in color from blue-green to brown, and can often be speckled. Traditional theory assumes that if the impostor’s egg appears quite similar to their own eggs, then the bird will likely accept it, but if it differs dramatically, then the bird will reject it.
A recent study led by Dr. Hanley, which was published in the prestigious peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Royal Society B, under the auspices of the world’s oldest independent scientific academy, discovered that host birds in Europe and North America actually respond to some colors more strongly than to others. It seems that hosts—what the foster parents are called—really “dislike” brown eggs and remove them at a much higher rate than blue-green eggs, despite how different they appear from their own eggs.
“They’re basically kicking out all eggs that are brown and accepting all eggs that are blue, which completely changes how we understand the theory,” explained Dr. Hanley.
In another new paper by Dr. Hanley and his colleagues, Hanley’s team discovered that these same behaviors are also exhibited by an unrelated bird host that lives in South America. These findings illustrate that humans have a lot to learn about how wild birds use color information in their decision making.
In their recent paper published in The American Naturalist, Dr. Hanley and his colleagues, Dr. Mark Hauber (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Tomáš Grim and Karel Gern, studied how the common blackbird responds to an unprecedented range of colors. Since birds can see far more colors than humans can perceive, Dr. Hanley and co-author Karel Gern made a bird-specific color wheel to make paints for coloring artificial eggs. They manipulated the three main components of color: hue, saturation (i.e., intensity) and brightness. Dr. Hanley found that birds responded strongly to a greater scope of colors than had been previously tested. The researchers also found that the components of color interacted in the birds’ perceptual space. For example, birds may respond to some hues only when they are intensely colored.
Armed with this new information, Dr. Hanley and his colleagues will probe the subtle differences in color perception among birds around the world. The nearly 10,000 species of birds have a wide range of evolutionary histories and ecologies, which have led to unique perspectives that this research group plans to explore. In this way, birds may finally show the authors their true colors.
LIU Post Graduate Maria Salazar Is Named Grand Marshal of Port Washington Memorial Day Parade
Maria L. Salazar (Post ’19, B.A. in Art Therapy), a U.S. Marine Corp veteran, has been picked by Port Washington’s VFW Post to be the Grand Marshal in the 2019 Memorial Day Parade.
“We are all so proud of her. I can’t say enough good things about her,” said John Baptisto Fiore, commander of VFW Post 1819.
Salazar is currently the Junior Vice Commander for VFW Post 1819 in Port Washington, as well as the Madam Commandant for the Father Vincent Capodanno Marine Corps League Detachment in Manhasset.
“It’s a great honor for me to be nominated by my fellow veterans, especially because I’m young and I’m a female veteran,” said Salazar. “It makes it that much more special to me because I feel that they respect me and they accept me.”
Born in Peru in 1980, Salazar moved to the United States with her family in 1992 and settled in Bridgewater, N.J. After the terrorist attacks on 9/11, Salazar enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps.
According to the VFW, she completed boot camp in Parris Island, S.C., the following August. She graduated from Marine Combat Training in Camp Geiger, N.C., and was given the Honor Grad award from Maintenance Management School at Camp Johnson, N.C., where she earned the meritorious rank of Lance Corporal Veteran. In November 2002, Salazar reported to her first unit, 6th Motor Transport Battalion, H&S Co., in Redbank, N.J. Her military occupation was logistics specialist.
In January 2003, Salazar’s unit was deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. An eight-month deployment, she turned 23 years old while being deployed. In 2011, having served nine years, Salazar was honorably discharged with the rank of Sergeant, E-5.
Upon entering the civilian sector, Salazar became a fitness and dance instructor, based mostly in central New Jersey. In 2012, Salazar moved to Maspeth, Queens, with her spouse Nathan Jefferson and daughter Alyssa. The following year, the family welcomed the arrival of twins, Izabella and Nathanyel. In 2015, Salazar and her family made Port Washington their home.
In 2016 Salazar enrolled at LIU Post, where she pursued a bachelor’s degree in art therapy with a focus in ceramics and art history. She graduated on May 10, 2019, with honors and also was inducted into SALUTE, a Veterans National Honor Society for outstanding academic achievement.
“The reason why I decided to go back for art therapy was because one of my corporals committed suicide,” she explained. “We had no idea that he was feeling that way. So, that pushed me to go back. I totally believe in the motto of the Marine Corps, which is Semper Fidelis. I want to continue to serve my veteran community.”
Salazar plans to pursue her master’s in art therapy and counseling from LIU Post in the fall. Her goal is to provide much needed support to the veteran population battling mental health wounds.
Salazar was awarded the National Defense Service Medal, the Iraq Campaign Medal, Armed Forces Reserve Medal, Sea Service Deployment Medal, and The Marine Corps Overseas Service Medal, as well as a Presidential Unit Citation. Besides being active in her local VFW Post, Salazar volunteers with many community veteran organizations such as Team RWB, Marine Corps League, Veteran Artists Program, and the Women Veterans Art Project.
The Port Washington Memorial Day parade starts at 10 a.m. on May 27 at the Paul D. Schreiber Senior High School on Campus Drive and heads down Main Street to the Town Dock.