Digital Commons Network^™

Preliminary Investigations Into Endospanin Expression In Zebrafish, Brittany Gray

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This study investigated endospanin expression in zebrafish by performing western blots to identify which tissues expressed endospanin. A feeding study was also conducted to see if endospanin expression varied in fed versus unfed fish. After tissues were dissected, protein assays were performed on homogenized tissues and then gels were run using gel electrophoresis. The primary antibody rabbit anti-endospanin peptide was used on the finished blots. Chemiluminescence was then used to visualize the blots using GeneSnap software. Endospanin expression was evident in heart, liver, and ovary tissues. The feeding study showed that endospanin expression in liver tissue was not significantly different …

Modification Of Bacterial Cellulose Using Organosilanes To Enhance Cell Adhesion And Growth, Kristi Ferrato

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In this project, drying bacterial cellulose (BC) to maintain its structural integrity, and treating BC with organosilanes 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES) and (3-Mercaptopropyl)trimethoxysilane (MPTMS) as well as with various concentration of gelatin to increase the cells per area was studied. Drying BC with hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) by soaking the BC in ascending concentrations of ethanol and HMDS did not protect the structural integrity of the BC grown in lab but did for the BC grown in Dr. Siriporn Taokaew’s lab. Freeze drying also did not fully protect the structural integrity as the BC was placed in a freezer for several hours at -20oC …

Sports Nutrition Newsletters, Michelle Dilling

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of my project is to teach athletes that nutrition is important to their performance, to introduce them to new topics, and to separate fact from fiction by citing evidence-based research. Additionally, the purpose of my project is to design a template for this newsletter that can be used to continue publications.

A Chronology Of Diet And Habitat Use In The Florida Manatee (Trichechus Manatus Latirostris): Insights From Stable Isotope Analysis, Malia Smith

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Florida Manatee (Trichechus manatus latirostris) is a threatened species that primarily feeds on marine and estuarine seagrasses. Over the past several years, the seagrass coverage in the Indian River Lagoon has varied due to human influence and algal blooms. This led to an unusual number of manatees dying and potentially, to remaining manatees shifting their diets. It can be difficult to decipher why or how diets shift, however, creating a timeline using stable isotopes can help address this challenge. Red blood cells from live Florida Manatees were analyzed for stable carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur isotope ratios. All …

Three Essays On Financial Collaboration In The Government And Nonprofit Sectors, Saerim Kim

Theses and Dissertations--Public Policy and Administration

The primary objective of this dissertation is to study the management of public and nonprofit resources and financial risk. Governments will be able to use its findings to continue to provide public services in collaboration with other sectors, including the nonprofit sector. Nonprofit financial self-sufficiency and sub-award grant mechanisms between the government and nonprofit sectors are two primary areas to be examined. This dissertation consists of three essays. The first investigates how the diversification of nonprofit revenue portfolios influences extreme revenue risks; the results show that the chance of extreme revenue loss increases when revenue sources are highly correlated to …

Assessing Preservation Priorities Of Caves And Karst Areas Using The Frequency Of Endemic Cave-Dwelling Species, Eugen Nitzu, Vlaicu Marius, Giurginca Andrei

KIP Articles

Endemic and rare species as bioindicators of habitat vulnerability were used to develop protection and management plans for biotope prioritization (mainly islands habitats, lava tubes or groundwaters). Due to their narrow distribution, the endemic species (species confined to a restricted geographic area) are more susceptible to ecological disequilibrium and habitat loss than the widespread ones. Consequently, endemics become endangered in the context of ecological disturbance caused by anthropogenic pressure, making them suitable candidates to assess environmental preservation needs. Taking into consideration that most of the stygobitic and troglobitic species are endemic and confined to specific karst areas, based on their …

Conceptual Framework For A Curriculum In Social Change, Iris M. Yob

Journal of Sustainable Social Impact

Colleges, universities, and many high schools are expressing their mission in terms of creating social change or contributing to the common good. Such a mission suggests that if they are going to graduate students who will fulfill this mission, they will need to consider how they will best prepare students to do this. The conceptual framework for a curriculum in social change in this article offers a holistic approach, taking into account what a student should know, be able to do, and what values and attitudes should be nurtured. To that end, the article identifies three competencies in the knowledge …

Global Stability And Traveling Wave Solutions For A Two-Competing-Prey And One-Predator Lotka-Volterra Model, Cuiping Wang

Dissertations

This dissertation consists of four chapters. In Chapter 1, I give an introduction of background, models to be investigated, and main goal of this dissertation. In Chapter 2, I study the space homogeneous model. The existence and local stability analysis of nonnegative equilibrium points in three cases, as well as the sufficient and necessary conditions for the existence of the positive interior equilibrium point are geiven in Section2.1. In Section 2.2, I perform a careful analysis to show the global stability of the boundary equilibrium point at which two prey coexist with extinction of predator for case 1. In Section …

Privacy And Outrage, Jordan M. Blanke

Journal of Law, Technology, & the Internet

It is not an understatement that technology has dramatically altered virtually every aspect of our life in recent years. While technology has always driven change, these changes are occurring more rapidly and more extensively than ever before. We are fully entrenched in the world of Big Data, the Internet of Things, and Smart Cities – and we are never going back. As always, society and its laws must evolve, but it is not always an easy process.

The notion of privacy has certainly changed in our data-driven world and continues to change daily. While it has always been difficult to …

European’S ‘Right Of Discovery’ To The American Continent And The Connection To The Marshall Court’S Removal Of Native American Sovereignty Through The Marshall Trilogy Cases, Kathryn Less

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Mathematical Curves In The High School Classroom, Magdalena Zook

Masters Essays

No abstract provided.

Changing Minds Or Transforming Social Worlds? Re-Envisioning Media Literacy Education As Feminist Arts-Activism, Margaret Louise Mcgladrey

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

This dissertation project seeks to address the sociological processes, dynamics, and mechanisms inflecting how and why U.S. society reproduces a sexually dimorphic, binary gender structure. The project builds upon the work of sociologists of gender on the doing gender framework, intersectional feminist approaches to identity formation, and hegemonic masculinity and relational theories of gender. In a 2012 article in Social Science and Medicine presenting contemporary concepts in gender theory to the health-oriented readers of the journal, R. W. Connell argues that much public policy on gender and health relies on categorical understandings of gender that are now inadequate. Connell contends …

Growing Economic Possibility In Appalachia: Stories Of Relocalization And Representation On Stinking Creek, Kathryn Engle

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

This project explores the agricultural heritage and current social landscape of the Stinking Creek community of Knox County, Kentucky, and the legacy of the local nonprofit organization the Lend-A-Hand Center. Through participatory research, this project presents a reflexive account of the Lend-A-Hand Center Grow Appalachia Gardening Program examining the diverse economy of the Stinking Creek watershed and possibilities for new economic imaginings and post-coal futures for central Appalachia. This dissertation includes an oral history project, a theoretical examination, and an ethnographic reflection, bridging several literatures in the fields of agricultural history, Appalachian Studies, Participatory Action Research, research within the diverse …

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Urbanormativity And Rural Located Private Higher Education, Jonathan Jared Friesen

Theses and Dissertations--Sociology

As urban areas have come to increasing dominate the social landscape, rurality is often defined in negative ways such as being backwards, simple, or even deviant. Urbanormativity is a theoretical approach developed to capture the normative and structural impacts and implications of privileging the urban. The result is not only the construction of urban as correct and positive and rurality as abnormal and backwards, the cultural ideology impacts the structural flow of resources which negatively impacts and results in a marginalization of rural areas.

The primary question motivating this research is how does urbanormativity shape the interactions between rural towns …

Research Games In Structural Biology, Nic Vigilante

Alison Scott Ricker Research Award

As problems in structural biology and bioinformatics have become increasingly complex, innovative new com-putational methods have been proposed and implemented. Of these methods, research games are unique in how they privi-lege human intuition over algorithmic verification in certain steps of the research process; researchers in structural biology have developed a number of research games since 2008 to utilize human pattern recognition and spatial manipulation skills. Players are not expected to have any scientific knowledge, as the game interfaces abstract the relevant problems from their biological contexts, and they are not reimbursed or incentivized in any way apart from methods such …

Local Loss And Spatial Homogenization Of Plant Diversity Reduce Ecosystem Multifunctionality, Yann Hautier, Forest Isbell, Elizabeth T. Borer, Eric W. Seabloom, W. Stanley Harpole, Eric M. Lind, Andrew S. Macdougall, Carly J. Stevens, Peter B. Adler, Juan Alberti, Jonathan D. Bakker, Lars A. Brudvig, Yvonne M. Buckley, Marc Cadotte, Maria C. Caldeira, Enrique J. Chaneton, Chengjin Chu, Pedro Daleo, Christopher R. Dickman, John M. Dwyer, Anu Eskelinen, Philip A Fay, Jennifer Firn, Nicole Hagenah, Helmut Hillebrand, Oscar Iribarne, Kevin P. Kirkman, Johannes M. H. Knops, Kimberly J. La Pierre, Rebecca L. Mcculley

Plant and Soil Sciences Faculty Publications

Biodiversity is declining in many local communities while also becoming increasingly homogenized across space. Experiments show that local plant species loss reduces ecosystem functioning and services, but the role of spatial homogenization of community composition and the potential interaction between diversity at different scales in maintaining ecosystem functioning remains unclear, especially when many functions are considered (ecosystem multifunctionality). We present an analysis of eight ecosystem functions measured in 65 grasslands worldwide. We find that more diverse grasslands—those with both species-rich local communities (α-diversity) and large compositional differences among localities (β-diversity)—had higher levels of multifunctionality. Moreover, α- and β-diversity synergistically affected …

Metabolism And Gas Phase Reactions Of Peroxide Explosives Using Atmospheric Pressure Ionization Mass Spectrometry, Kevin Colizza

Open Access Dissertations

The toxicity or pharmacodynamics of many of the nitrated explosives have been well documented. Trinitrotoluene (TNT) is known to cause liver toxicity while nitrate esters (nitroglycerine) are known vasodilators. One class of explosive that has been on the rise due to the ease of manufacturing from household products are the peroxides. Of particular interest are the cyclic peroxides used for many home-made explosives (HME): triacetone triperoxide (TATP) and hexamethylene diamine triperoxide (HMTD). Very little is known about the toxicity or potentially beneficial effects of these compounds. This may be primarily due to the difficulty in detecting or working with these …

Effect Of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (Nafld) On Hepatic Drug Metabolism Enzymes In Human, Rohitash Jamwal

Open Access Dissertations

Significant changes in dietary habits have led to a rampant increase in metabolic disorders. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one such disorder characterized by the excess buildup of fat in hepatocytes of people who drink little or no alcohol. If not managed, NAFL (simple steatosis) progress into nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) and further deteriorate to cirrhosis leading to severe illness or even death. Drug disposition proteins (enzymes and transporters) in liver control the systemic exposure of drugs and xenobiotics in human and drive the efficacy as well as adverse events in the body. Therefore, it is critical to address the …

Vascular Cognitive Impairment And Dementia: The Importance Of Mixed Pathologies From Mouse Models To Humans, Alex Marian Helman

Theses and Dissertations--Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry

Age-related neurologic disease is a significant and growing burden on our society. Although the largest share of research effort has typically been devoted to the common neurodegenerative illnesses (such as Alzheimer’s disease, or AD), the reality is that nearly all cases of neurodegenerative disease possess elements of mixed pathology. Vascular contributions to cognitive impairment and dementia (VCID) is a complex form of dementia, combining aspects of vascular disease and other forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease. This pathology is heterogeneous and can include cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), hemorrhages, white matter infarcts, and changes to the neurovascular unit. Given the …

Controlling Platelet Secretion To Modulate Hemostasis And Thrombosis, Smita Joshi

Theses and Dissertations--Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry

Upon vascular injury, activated blood platelets fuse their granules to the plasma membrane and release cargo to regulate the vascular microenvironment, a dynamic process central to platelet function in many critical processes including hemostasis, thrombosis, immunity, wound healing, angiogenesis etc. This granule- plasma membrane fusion is mediated by a family of membrane proteins- Soluble N-ethyl maleimide Attachment Receptor Proteins(SNAREs). SNAREs that reside on vesicle (v-SNAREs) /Vesicle-Associated Membrane Proteins(VAMPs) interact with target/t-SNAREs forming a trans-bilayer complex that facilitates granule fusion. Though many components of exocytic machinery are identified, it is still not clear how it could be manipulated to prevent …

Minority Stress And Mental Health Among Transgender Persons, Elizabeth Alice Sapareto

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Transgender people, a minority population, are at increased risk for negative health and mental health consequences. Profound societal discrimination and stigmatization lead to systemic institutional barriers and lack of access to health care services. Research with lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations shows a strong association between minority stress and mental health; however, there is a gap in research for the transgender population. This study, based on theories of minority stress, positive psychology, the biopsychosocial model, and the transgender model, was conducted to clarify this relationship for the transgender population. Four research questions were proposed. A final sample of N = …

Leadership, Organizational Turnarounds, And Gil Hodges's 1969 New York Mets, John Rebecchi

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The impact of the 2008 global financial crisis, shifting market demands, and prolonged underperformance has forced organizations to devise and implement turnaround strategies or risk business failure. Researchers have pointed to the importance of leadership in the turnaround process, yet there are a limited number of research studies identifying characteristics of successful turnaround leaders. Using the full range leadership model, the purpose of this nonexperimental, ex post facto study was to examine the leadership style of Gil Hodges, manager during the 1969 New York Mets successful turnaround season and explore the organization's culture and climate. Data were collected using the …

Marital Status And Burdensomeness As Risk Factors Of Suicide Ideation In Poststroke Patients, Froso Andreou

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Suicide ideation, suicide attempts, and suicide (SISAS) are increased in poststroke patients, yet not everyone who has suffered a stroke is at risk for SISAS. Two risk factors for SISAS, marital status and burdensomeness, may be of particular relevance to poststroke patients. The majority of poststroke patients have a disability that may require help from a family member with basic functions such as dressing and bathing. It was not known if being married decreases risk of SISAS for stoke victims as shown in studies with nonpoststroke subjects or increases risk for SISAS due to its influence on feelings of burdensomeness. …

Effects Of Chemotherapy On Motivated Behavior And Opioid Reward In Rats, Luke P. Legakis

Theses and Dissertations

Paclitaxel, vincristine, oxaliplatin, and bortezomib are cancer chemotherapy drugs with adverse effects that include chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain (CINP) as well as depression of behavior and mood. In the clinical setting, opioids are often used concurrently with or following chemotherapy to treat pain related to the cancer or CINP, but repeated opioid exposure can also increase the risk of opioid abuse. This dissertation evaluated the effect of chemotherapy treatment on motivated behaviors and opioid reward in rats. The main findings of this evaluation are as follows: (1) Chemotherapy, at doses that produce robust and sustained mechanical hypersensitivity produce only weak or …

Polyanthroponemia: A Pursuit Of Mystery, Magdolene Dykstra

Theses and Dissertations

I wish I could believe in something. Having grown up in a religious household, I have continually teetered between faith and doubt. Landscapes seen and unseen are my last source of awe; here my doubt is suspended – for a moment. Using unfired clay, I create alternate landscapes inspired by sublime philosophy. The sublime experience is born in a sense of amazement linked to fear of something beyond our understanding or control. The amazing intricacy of microbiology, a whole universe existing alongside and inside us, fascinates me. The abundance of unfamiliar life in my work triggers a cautious curiosity. My …

Neuroscience Minor, Biological Sciences

Program Revisions/Additions

No abstract provided.

Relationship Between Exposure To Phthalate And Obesity In The United States, Gladys Chidiebere Ezem

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Obesity is a public health problem. The global obesity problem has been attributed to unhealthy diet, inactivity, and hereditary factors. However, phthalates may also contribute to the obesity epidemic. The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to examine whether there was a relationship between exposure to phthalates and obesity among adults 18 years and older in the United States. The theoretical framework was based on the socioecological model. The quantitative, cross-sectional design, and data analysis were based on the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2011-2012 database. Descriptive statistics and multiple regression analysis were used to analyze the association between …

Onchocerca Volvulus: The Road From Basic Biology To A Vaccine., Sara Lustigman, Benjamin L. Makepeace, Thomas R. Klei, Simon A. Babayan, Peter Hotez, David Abraham, Maria Elena Bottazzi

Department of Microbiology and Immunology Faculty Papers

Human onchocerciasis - commonly known as river blindness - is one of the most devastating yet neglected tropical diseases, leaving many millions in sub-Saharan Africa blind and/or with chronic disabilities. Attempts to eliminate onchocerciasis, primarily through the mass drug administration of ivermectin, remains challenging and has been heightened by the recent news that drug-resistant parasites are developing in some populations after years of drug treatment. Needed, and needed now, in the fight to eliminate onchocerciasis are new tools, such as preventive and therapeutic vaccines. This review summarizes the progress made to advance the onchocerciasis vaccine from the research laboratory into …

The Relationships Between Older, Physically Impaired Men And Their Pets., Jennifer Hughes Williams

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The present study examined older male adults' lived experiences with pet ownership. There is robust literature on older adults and the human-animal bond, but presently there are no qualitative phenomenological studies that focus solely on older physically impaired males who live alone and the relationships they have with their pets. With the guiding framework of biopsychosocial theory and using intensive interviews, 10 older males (65+) who suffered from some physical impairment discussed the relationships they have with their pets, and how their companion animals affect their physical, emotional, and social health. All interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed for themes. …

Impaired Cardiorespiratory Fitness Following Thoracic Radiotherapy, Justin M. Canada

Theses and Dissertations

Cancer (CA) is the second leading cause of death in the United States preceded only by cardiovascular disease (CVD). Over the past 30 years, the 5-year survival rate for all cancers combined has increased by more than 20%. This improved survival rate is due to early diagnosis and advances in treatment involving a multimodality treatment approach that includes radiotherapy [RT] with about half of all CA patients receiving some type of RT sometime during the course of their treatment. Cardiotoxicity is one of the most important adverse reactions of RT and leads to a meaningful risk of CVD-related morbidity and …