Donald Moore ’76, Biology, Pre-med, a former attending physician at New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, has been appointed by Governor Kathy Hochul to serve on SUNY Downstate’s community advisory board, along with seven other individuals.

The board is part of an historic investment by Governor Hochul and the state legislature of $300 million in capital funding and $100 million in operating funding for the modernization and revitalization of SUNY Downstate, and is tasked with making recommendations to develop a “reasonable, scalable, and fiscally responsible plan for the financial health, viability, and sustainability of SUNY Downstate Hospital and SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University.”

Moore, an award-winning, Brooklyn-based physician who previously ran an independent primary care practice, has advocated for the best care for his patients and improvements in healthcare public policy. He is a member of the Dyson College Advisory Board at Pace University and has been actively engaged with his alma mater, including participation in the Dyson Dialogues and as an adjunct professor of biology.

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Science Matthew Aiello-Lammens, PhD, was quoted in a LoHud article on extreme weather conditions, and specifically, the recent wildfires in New York State, and whether these are expected to be annual occurrences or represent a rare coming together of atmospheric conditions.

Aiello-Lammens said, “The new normal isn’t necessarily droughts or floods. The new normal is really the unpredictability of extreme events. It’s hard to know whether you’re going to get a drought year versus a flood year. But with the way climate is changing, the thing that we are confident about is that the extremes are becoming more frequent. What we’re not confident about necessarily yet is how to predict these extremes.”

The article also addressed whether conditions in New York forests are similar to or different than those out West, an area of the country that is quite familiar with wildfires, with Aiello-Lammens adding that they don’t different dramatically.

“They’re all fire prone ecosystems,” he said. “Here, there are plenty of accelerants–scrub oak and pitch pine–that can spread fire quickly and they’re surrounded by dense forest of hardwood trees. It just happens to be that we see a fair amount of precipitation in the Northeast. So, when you have these periods of dry spells, you’re bound to get these fires. Warm, dry conditions are good for drying out the leaf material that’s dry and dead. And they’re good for moving fire once it gets going."