In this episode, Danny recounts his experience as an expert witness in a murder trial evaluating two competing sets of crime scene photographs of blood stains. What the photos showed (or didn’t) was a potentially significant detail in the case. 

More important for this conversation is the context: The photographs were originally shot on 35mm film and therefore theoretically beyond the reach of the digital and AI manipulation we fret so much about today.

But as Danny explained to the court and us, the notion that analog photos depict reality any more than digital ones has always been fantasy. What we think we see in photos, then and now, is as much about us, what we are told about them, and the innumerable unknown choices — like how to balance the colors in the image — made by those who produced them.

There seem to be parallels there to the so-called "CSI Effect," in which jurors' casual knowledge of forensic science fueled by popular culture has been blamed for creating unrealistic evidentiary standards in their minds while deciding actual cases. (This may or may not be true.)

Danny had more to say about his courtroom experience, and the way photographic evidence is used and interpreted in courtrooms more generally. The rest of the story, edited and condensed below for brevity, is worth a read. 

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DG: When developing a photo, there's such a thing as a standard color balance. However, there are a lot of things that affect the color temperature — the light under which it was photographed and if there was a window open at the time. There are a lot of things that affect decisions about exposure and shadows and highlights. I looked at the two sets of prints in this case, and I would not have balanced either set of prints the way they were balanced. 

The prosecution’s were way red. The defense’s were way cyan. The true, or at least the aesthetically correct, balance was somewhere in between. We also have to keep in mind that a photograph of something is not the thing itself. That's to say that you can't point to things in that frame and say what they are. It's a photograph of something. It's something that looks like a garage floor, and it's something that looks like some kind of stain. 

To make the leap to say not only what it is — what that substance is — but how old it is and how it got there, that's something we should laugh at. But this is the police and a forensic photographer. And they're official — they're experts. The jury hears this and believes they know how they use photographs. They hold it up like a window to reality and look and say, “I got it. See, this happened.”

At one point, the judge got frustrated with me. I had the viewing filters that a person uses to make color decisions about which way photographs should be developed. And if you stare through it — you hold a magenta filter up to your eye and you stare through it — eventually it looks fine. Your brain is adjusting in real time. Printers know you have to flash it in front of your eye — on, off, on, off, on, off — and then look at a card that tells you what to do. Dial in 10 points of magenta, or take it out. I showed the judge: here, look —motor oil, blood, motor oil, blood. And he's like, “You got one of those that makes it look like the Easter Bunny?” 

I said, “Well, no, I'm not saying that anything's possible. I'm saying that the argument that this represents unmediated truth is insane. It's a depiction. It's an abstraction. It's a two-dimensional photographic record of the way something looked at a time with all these other executive decisions that came into play.”

Check out Danny's personal website to learn more about his art, specifically Job/Security, a collaboration with UAlbany English Professor Edward Schwarzschild that examines the expanding U.S. homeland security sector through interviews and photographs.

He and Schwarzschild were interviewed about that project seven years ago on another UAlbany podcast.

Back to the topic at hand: Photography’s crisis of confidence is not new, and for evidence of that Danny pointed to the discovery that one of the most iconic photos in U.S. history —the flag raising on Iwo Jima —doesn’t show exactly what people thought it did for 70 years. 

Another striking wartime photo —Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War —has also inspired skepticism about its reported location and context.

For a more contemporary example, Danny pointed to the way photography, videography and AI shaped the public’s understanding of what happened during this year’s immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, in which two people were shot and killed by federal law enforcement.

If you haven’t yet, you should also check out last week’s episode of The Short Version on 19th-century spirit photography with Associate Professor of English Erica Fretwell, which perfectly set the stage this conversation.

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Interview by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist 
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 [email protected] and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

There were so many interesting threads to this conversation that we couldn't include in the final edit, including Erica's take on whether folks in the 19th century knew William Mumler might be a grifter (yes) — and whether that really matters (maybe not).

Why do you think spirit photography took off? Were people not aware that technological trickery was being used?

EF: It actually was controversial from the beginning. In fact, William Mumler went on trial in 1869 for fraud. So from the get-go, it was controversial. People were immediately saying, “This is a hoax.” This is the era also of P.T. Barnum, so lots of trickery. But then there are also people saying, “No, this is real.” Those who believed it were primed in two ways. One, they probably were already what we called Spiritualists. Spiritualism was a religious movement that started in Rochester, New York, in the 1840s but really took off around the Civil War. Spiritualism is this religious belief that the living can communicate with the dead, that the dead do not leave, that their souls, in some way, remain on Earth with us. 

So already you have people who are open to this Spiritualist idea that the dead live among us and that we can access the dead. Combine that with the Civil War, America's bloodiest war to date. People were never not reading in the newspapers about the massive death toll or experiencing it themselves with family dying. We have Mathew Brady's Civil War photography being disseminated through mass media — images of deceased soldiers killed in battle. And so people would be especially primed to want to believe in these spirit photographs, both because of this already prevalent Spiritualist idea, not shared by everyone but widespread enough, that the living can communicate with the dead, and by the sheer toll of death, and how many people were experiencing grief on such a scale and trying to grapple with what this all means.

What are some famous spirit photographs you discovered during your research?

EF: The most famous one by far is Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her deceased husband, Abraham Lincoln. This was taken in 1872 by Mumler. His reputation was already somewhat besmirched by the fraud trial from 1869, but if anyone has seen the Broadway show, Oh, Mary!, or knows much about Mary Todd Lincoln, she was very invested in the Spiritualist idea that you can communicate with the dead. So I think that was probably one of the more striking photos I saw. That photo was actually the one that got me thinking I really need to look into not just the technology behind the spirit photograph, but I also wanted to know what's the philosophical or scientific or religious principles that need to be in place for a spirit photograph to exist? And some of those principles that need to be in place are the Spiritualist idea that the living can communicate with the dead. If we didn't have Spiritualism, we wouldn't have spirit photography.

What’s the deal with aura photos?

EF: The colors these aura photos have go back to a kind of offshoot of Spiritualism that developed in the late 1800s and early 20th century. This was an offshoot called Theosophy, and it was started by a woman named Helena Blavatsky, who is American but spent a lot of time in India, and she more or less appropriated some Hindu and Indian religious beliefs in chakras and various kinds of belief systems, and came up with these colors. Theosophy believes in the unity of souls — we're all a universal human soul, everyone is connected through energetic matter. This all comes back to this Spiritualist idea of the soul as energetic matter, which we see happening in aura photography. So these pictures pick out the energetic matter and then the colors that are associated with particular kinds of electromagnetic waves, those colors are rooted in Blavatsky's theosophical philosophy of individual chakras and energy fields.

Erica also shared some of her favorite articles about spirit photography, including this 2017 Smithsonian Magazine article about what happened when an esteemed photographer and skeptic sat for a photograph in Mumler’s studio, and this 2019 History.com article on what became of Mumler after his 1869 trial for fraud. 

The Smithsonian Magazine article was adapted from The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost, a historical nonfiction book about Mumler written by Peter Manseau. 

Seeing Ghosts: A Brief Look at the Curious Business of Spirit Photography discusses the techniques employed by spirit photographers to create their images.

Spirit Photography and the Occult: Making the Invisible Visible looks at the role played by imaging technologies such as photography and X-rays in the history of the supernatural, and how photographers and scientists tried to use images to reveal a hidden world.

The Alice Austen House Museum published a brief history on aura photography and its connection to Helena Blavatsky’s 19th-century Theosophy.

Shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association first book prize, Fretwell’s 2020 book, Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling, explores the history of psychophysics and how the science of the five senses offered late-19th century writers new conceptual foundations for representing lived experiences of racial and gender difference.  

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman and Zach Durocher
Interview and written by Bethany Bump

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 [email protected] and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

Sustainability conversations aren't just about high-minded principles of environmental stewardship. At their core, they are conversations about the mundane, largely unseen building systems that make our climate-controlled lives comfortable every day..

They’re also about policy choices and the political will to make important changes.

UAlbany’s Central Plant, for example, provides heat and hot water to much of the Uptown Campus through gas (and sometimes oil)-fired boilers that pump water at extremely high temperatures and pressures. Hot — as in in 385°F hot.

We got a closer look at that system and the people who maintain it in 2024 when a cracked weld in one of those high-pressure pipes forced the system offline for about 22 hours.

Occasionally leaky pipes aside, that fossil fuel-hungry technology represents the past. If UAlbany and SUNY are going to meet the carbon-reduction goals of New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, big changes need to be made. 

To that end, Indu and her colleagues across UAlbany and SUNY are working on ambitious decarbonization plans that would dramatically cut fossil fuel usage by electrifying heating, cooling and hot water delivery on campus. The University is currently seeking $37 million in state funding for the next phase of that project, which would include geothermal wells and new electric chillers and heat exchangers. 

That work would be in addition to plans for a new satellite Energy Hub and geothermal field serving UAlbany’s proposed Health Innovation & Technology Building on the other side of campus, which would help sustainably heat and cool adjacent buildings on the Academic Podium home to advanced research facilities. 

We already have a model for success. ETEC, UAlbany’s newest and first fully electric research and teaching complex, opened on the Harriman State Office Campus in 2021 and requires no on-site burning of fossil fuels.

In 2023, ETEC was named Green Building of the Year by the U.S. Green Building Council of Upstate New York.

Fittingly, ETEC is also home to most of UAlbany’s climate researchers and the students who will study climate change in the future.

What’s in a name?

To folks in Albany sustainability circles, Indu is a familiar name and face. And if you’ve worked with her (or just listened to this podcast), you’ve noted she goes simply by Indu — no last name, despite the fact that U.S. immigration officials (and our campus email system) have occasionally tried to assign her one. Typically it appears as “Lnu.” But that’s not Indu's last name; it's just an abbreviation for “Last name unknown.”

In part of their conversation that did not make the final edit, Indu explained to Maggie what her name means and its connection to her home in Tamil Nadu, India's southern-most state.

Indu: My full name is Indumathi, which means the light from the moon. I don't have a last name. My father decided against giving any of his children a last name because he did not want our last name to be associated with a caste, which it would have been. He did not want that. So I grew up my entire life with one name, and had no problems. But when I decided to come here to get my master's degree and I went to apply for a visa, the U.S. system would not allow a person with no last name because how else do you track this person? So they assigned me the last name “Lnu.”

UAlbany's Office of Sustainability has a wealth of information about sustainability on campus, including an online dashboard that tracks campus energy usage by building.

UAlbany’s decarbonization efforts have been supported by the New York State Energy Research Development Authority and were recently recognized by the New York League of Conservation Voters.

In 2024, UAlbany was cited as a top performer in the Sustainable Campus Index by the Association for the Advanced of Sustainability in Higher Education (ASHE). You can read UAlbany’s latest report here in ASHE’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System.

In 2022, UAlbany completed the largest rooftop solar array in the entire SUNY system.

UAlbany's first geothermal building, Liberty Terrace Apartments, opened in 2012.

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 
Photos by Patrick Dodson
Interview by Margaret Hartley
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 [email protected] and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

In this week’s episode, Arun discussed how DNA nanostructures can be used for biotech as well as data storage. We asked about other applications being explored in the broader field of nanotechnology. As it turns out, materials science is fertile territory. There’s also growing interest in developing DNA barcodes.

ARC: Imagine a store where vegetables, produce or other plant or animal-based food items, all of which contain DNA, could be scanned using the DNA sequence within the item itself in lieu of a sticker. Why would this be helpful? Well, for one thing, this is an example of developing an alternative material, in the sustainability sense. Globally, we’ve already used up more materials than we should, so DNA is an alternate material that doesn’t cause environmental harm. And, since DNA is biodegradable, we don't have to worry about creating even more waste, or removing something that contains chemicals from our food before we consume it. These stickers might not seem like a big environmental problem, but they are made of plastic and glue and chemicals, so if we can use a different material instead, especially one that’s also biocompatible, that could be a good thing. And it’s not just about stickers; the bigger point is exploring DNA as a sustainable material that could potentially benefit other applications. 

I’m still picturing a futuristic grocery where you fill your cart, walk out the door, and everything is scanned, priced, and paid for automatically… 

ARC: So, yes, that’s the literal “barcode” connection. We can also extend the concept to disease diagnostics, though here the “barcode” becomes more of a visual signifier than a traditional barcode as we know it. 

For example, consider a strep throat or pregnancy test where the result readout consists of one or two lines to indicate positive or negative. I mentioned before how DNA data storage operates in binary – 1s and 0s – so we can use this system to indicate a positive or negative result for a given condition. This is something I worked on previously with Ken Halvorsen at the RNA Institute. We created a DNA-based assay where the result is a series of vertical lines, and each line encodes for a specific disease biomarker. The reason we did this is because we wanted to create a test to detect more than one biomarker or more than one disease in a single go. This could be especially helpful for DNA or RNA-based diseases which often require a complex assessment of multiple biomarkers to make a diagnosis. The readout for our assay took the form of five or six lines, each line representing presence or absence of a particular biomarker. Those lines, together, resembled a barcode. 

When it comes to creating DNA shapes, it doesn’t sound like much is off the table design-wise. For one, you mentioned DNA bunnies. What gave rise to the nano rabbit? 

ARC:The nanoscale bunnies were first made in Bjorn Hogberg's lab at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden in 2015. At the time, it was the first demonstration of making mesh-like structures using DNA and played a key role in advancing the technology that we’re working with today. (This Science Friday episode explains more.)

So, nano means small. Like really, really small. It takes trillions of DNA nanostructures to form a 3D DNA crystal, which only becomes possible to see with the help of a microscope. Take a look at some examples of DNA crystals from Arun's lab.

Arun mentioned his soft spot for pop culture references in academic works including journal titles (this one’s for the Potter fans). He even wrote an op-ed on the topic, published in the journal Matter. As for how to use a movie reference to help science make sense? Arun's own Fifth Element connection passed peer review muster. 

One of Arun’s first paths of nano-exploration as a grad student focused on studying DNA’s “handedness”. Learn more about what that means, and how it recently led Arun’s team to challenge long-held truths about the structure of DNA.

Together with UAlbany’s Associate Professor of Biology Cheryl Andam, Arun initiated the “Goggles and Galleries” science + art event series late last year. Check out student artwork on display at that event. You can also view a gallery of Arun’s journal cover art here.

Take a look inside Arun’s lab at UAlbany’s Life Sciences Research Building and learn more about his research and art.

Audio editing and production by Scott Freedman 

Photos by Patrick Dodson 

Interview 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 [email protected] and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

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. 

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. 

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.

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 [email protected] 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.

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]

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 [email protected] 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:

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.

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 [email protected] 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:

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.

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

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 [email protected] and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.

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.

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. 

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 [email protected] 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.

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.

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 [email protected] and be sure to put The Short Version in the subject line.