Research 
Highlights... 
 
 

Families find hope in BNL research.  See below.

 

Hughes, of DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories site in Livermore, Calif., and her research pals met at a scientific conference almost a decade ago, and just four years ago, while working with a Chinese colleague in Denmark, they found a way to more quickly measure the materials’ crystalline pattern. This pattern resembles a 3-D mosaic of cells with different crystal orientations. 
“We’re trying to measure and quantify what we see in a structure,” she says, “so we can put it into an equation. We need to capture differences and similarities that influence behavior.” 

This is important because the process of forming metals changes microcrystalline patterns that impart mechanical properties, such as strength and ductility, to the metal piece. Metalworking to improve grain structure and texture has long been studied and practiced. Eventually, the microstructure might be predicted so that desired material properties can be engineered. 

Hughes, who has studied aluminum and aluminum alloys, nickel and nickel- cobalt, copper, iron, and stainless steel (such as that used in gas bottles or table flatware), is entering the third year of a Laboratory-Directed Research and Development grant to study recrystallization of metals in a multiscale materials model. 

Part of this work is also being conducted under DOE’s Center of Excellence for the Synthesis and Processing of Advanced Materials with Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest national labs. 

In Denmark, Hughes works with Qing Liu in a group led by Niels Hansen, head of the materials department at Risø National Lab. She also collaborates with Daryl Chrzan, a former Sandian now working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley; John Wert and Doris Kuhlmann-Wilsdorf of the University of Virginia; and Julian Driver of the Ecole Nationale Supererieure des Mines de St. Etienne in France. 
 

Sandia’s Darcy Hughes studies microstructures of metals and alloys.

Submitted by DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories. 
 

Reporters clamored for interviews with him, eager to find out how a European epilepsy drug called GVG might also stop addiction to cocaine, or other substances from heroin to nicotine. The press conference, Dewey’s first, was jammed with TV cameras. 

But even as the news hit the airwaves and the headlines, Dewey found himself besieged with requests from another quarter—the families and friends of drug addicts, desperate for anything that would help their loved ones.

Hundreds of letters, e-mails, faxes and phone calls poured in. Heartbreaking stories of lives thrown away because of drugs mixed with pleas to sign up daughters, sons and brothers for the first clinical trials of the new therapy. He responded personally to them all. 

It’s now been over a month since the team of scientists from BNL and several universities published their exciting findings, which capped many years of careful animal studies. And though the first clinical trials will only take a few carefully selected patients, they are close to starting. In several months, they will provide the first indications of whether GVG will work. 

Meanwhile, Dewey has returned to his laboratory at Brookhaven’s Center for Imaging and Neurosciences, working with others to find out more about how GVG and similar strategies could stop other addictions. 

The father of two also finds time to speak at local schools, using the vivid scans of addicts’ brains made at BNL to show students the physical damage that using drugs could do to them. It’s an ounce of prevention that’s worth just as much as the pound of cure he’s also working to provide. 

Submitted by DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory