Digital Commons Network^™

Expression Pattern Of The Hifα-Family In Equine Chorioallantois During Pregnancy And Placental Pathology, Yatta Boakari, Hossam El-Sheikh Ali, Gustavo Henrique Doná Rodrigues Almeida, Kirsten E. Scoggin, Claudia Barbosa Fernandes, Sophia Panelli Marchio, Mats H. T. Troedsson, Ana Claudia Oliveira Carreira

Maxwell H. Gluck Equine Research Center Faculty Publications

Equine placental dysfunction impairs fetal growth and disrupts pregnancy outcomes. Despite many advances in diagnosis, the molecular pathophysiology of equine placentitis and premature placental separation remains poorly understood. However, the hypoxia-inducible factor (HIF-α) pathway is related to placental hypoxia, and its modulation in placental diseases has been shown in other species. Therefore, we hypothesized that in conditions marked by equine placental dysfunction, oxygen deprivation in the chorioallantois membrane triggers the activation of the HIF-α pathway, which is related to molecular alterations associated with placental insufficiency. Accordingly, we compared the expression of HIF1A, HIF2A, HIF3A, and HIF1AN genes in equine chorioallantois …

Teaching Kitchen Safety Using A Modified Coach In The Kitchen Curriculum Paired With Behavioral Skills Training Procedure With Young Adults With High Functioning Autism, Ryan Michael Groeneweg

Dissertations and Theses

Few intervention studies address the needs of young adults with high‑functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as they transition toward adulthood. This study used a single‑subject multiple‑baseline design across participants and skills to evaluate the effects of a modified Coach in the Kitchen curriculum paired with Behavioral Skills Training (BST) on the acquisition of kitchen safety behaviors. Three adults with high‑functioning autism were taught task‑analyzed steps for safe use of a kitchen peeler, knife, and hot liquids. Instruction incorporated modeling, rehearsal, feedback, prompting, and strategies for generalization and maintenance. Performance was measured as the percentage of safety steps correctly completed during …

From Rwanda To Montreal To Cedar Lake, Shane Niyonzima, Beverly Matiko

Lake Union Herald

No abstract provided.

Major Grant Received For Online School Psychology Program, Andrew Francis

Lake Union Herald

No abstract provided.

A Meta-Narrative Review: Advancements In Mycobacterium Tuberculosis And Their Impact On Healthcare Professionals, Nadine Duran, Mehwish Khalil, Alexandria Ramirez, Link Summers-Perry, Mary Coolbaugh-Murphy, Denise Juroske Short

Research Methods Poster Session 2026

No abstract provided.

Advanced Practice Radiation Therapy: A Needs Assessment In Texas, Jennifer Navas, Vanessa Sorto, Cindy Tran, Rachel Gallagher, Ramsi Rodriguez

Research Methods Poster Session 2026

No abstract provided.

Evaluating Robustness Of Let-Optimized Proton Therapy Pelvic Plans​, Savannah Demus, Christopher Rosas, Colton Schubert, Ella Peterson, John Low, Jamie Baker, Luis Perles

Research Methods Poster Session 2026

Assessing robustness of linear energy transfer (LET)-optimized pencil beam scanning (PBS) proton therapy plans for whole pelvis irradiation treatment (WPRT) of anal cancer.

A Meta-Narrative Review: Digital Analysis Of Stained Tissue Slides Influences Diagnostic Accuracy And Quality Control In Histology, Sofia A. Alvarado, Linh N. Dinh, Brooklyn S. Johnson, Marisol Palacios

Research Methods Poster Session 2026

No abstract provided.

​​The Effect Of Bacteroides Species Dysbiosis In Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease: A Meta-Narrative Review, Janiece Chan, Ashlyn Kerns, Katherine Truong, Jazmin Ysaguirre, Mary Coolbaugh-Murphy, Denise M. Juroske Short

Research Methods Poster Session 2026

No abstract provided.

A Meta-Narrative Review Of Histological Evaluation As The Gold Standard For Lung Adenocarcinoma Diagnosis Using Ttf-1 Biomarkers, Sebastianz P. Nguyen, Ariana C. Fonseca, Sylvia Zavala Rideaux

Research Methods Poster Session 2026

No abstract provided.

Meta-Narrative Review: The Role Of Pen-A And Other Genetic Mutations In Ceftriaxone-Resistant Neisseria Gonorrhoeae, Elizabeth Calderon, Alejandra D. Coreas, Bereniz A. Esmeralda, Jianne A. Peregrino, Denise M. Jursoke Short, Mary Coolbaugh-Murph

Research Methods Poster Session 2026

No abstract provided.

Harding University Spring Sing Program 2026

Spring Sing

Program for the 2026 Spring Sing performance at Harding University

Theme: Destinations

Host & Hostesses: Miriam Bennett, Callie Disch, Weston Eades, and Isaac Linnett

The Disability History Of Brown V. Board Of Education, Britney R. Wilson

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In 1952, two years before the Supreme Court of the United States decided Brown v. Board of Education, Black deaf students in Washington, D.C., who had been prohibited from attending the local school for white deaf students and forced to go to school in Maryland, won the right to be educated in their hometowns in Miller v. Board of Education of District of Columbia. Brown is heralded as one of the most important racial justice cases of all time. It overturned Plessy v. Ferguson’s longstanding “separate but equal” mandate and ruled that the segregation of students based …

Bad Parenting On Trial: How Gender, Race, And Class Shape Parental Responsibility Prosecutions And Laws For School Shootings, Makayla R. Foust

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

In 2021, James and Jennifer Crumbley became the first parents in the United States to be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in connection with their son’s school shooting that killed four people and injured multiple others. As school shootings continue to devastate communities across the country, prosecutors are increasingly holding parents criminally liable for their children’s actions. This development raises fundamental questions about justice, accountability, and the limits of criminal liability. While these laws aim to curb gun violence by enforcing parental accountability, they will disproportionately affect marginalized communities, particularly along gender, racial, and socioeconomic lines. As legal precedent expands, …

Dignity By Design: A Human-Centered Framework For Ethical Ai, Armin Tadayon

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 has triggered a global arms race–both among private technology companies and between nation states–for dominance in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). If this nascent technology, which is permeating every aspect of our lives as more companies across multiple sectors deploy it for a variety of functions, malfunctions or behaves in unanticipated ways, it can severely affect individuals in their day-to-day lives with broader consequences for society at large. As such, as AI permeates every aspect of our lives, and in some instances, begins to replace humans and human decision-making, it is imperative …

Chevron Deference, Prospective Gay Parents, And The Need For A Centralized Child Welfare System, Mantas Grigorovicius

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

For over four decades, Chevron deference allowed federal agencies to exercise considerable discretion in interpreting laws, enabling them to implement broad regulatory agendas. This deference was pivotal for administrative agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), in shaping public policy. However, in 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to overturn this precedent, shifting power from agencies to courts and potentially reshaping the regulatory landscape. This Article examines the implications of this change within the context of child welfare, focusing on HHS’s role in foster care. As states often rely on taxpayer-funded private child-placing agencies to …

Imprisoned Without A Verdict: The Constitutional Crisis Of Pre-Trial Solitary Confinement, Symone R. Gibbs

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Kalief Browder’s name endures as a chilling reminder of the human cost of pre-trial solitary confinement. His story reveals the constitutional paradox and moral failure at the heart of this practice: Individuals who remain legally innocent are subjected to one of the harshest punishments the state can impose. This practice strips people of their liberty twice over, first through incarceration itself, and again through prolonged isolation that inflicts devastating psychological harm. Despite its severity, the use of solitary confinement against pre-trial detainees remains largely overlooked in legal scholarship and reform, even as it undermines the presumption of innocence, exacerbates systemic …

Fecal Microbiota Transplantation Modulates Gut Microbiota And Lipid Metabolism To Reduce Diarrhea In Low-Birth-Weight Neonatal Calves, Zhanhe Zhang, Duo You, Donglin Wu, Xintong Li, Yang Jia, David L. Harmon, Ming Xu

Animal and Food Sciences Faculty Publications

This study aimed to elucidate the mechanism by which colonic fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) improves lipid metabolism in low-birth-weight neonatal calves via modulation of the gut microbial ecosystem. In a completely randomized design, seventy newborn Holstein calves (1 day old, 32.63 ± 3.13 kg BW) were assigned to two groups (35 calves/treatment; 30 females and 5 males per group). A healthy calf was used as a fecal donor. A 10% fecal bacterial suspension was prepared and administered colonically (50 mL, twice daily for 5 days). All calves were fed the same milk replacer and weaned using a step-down protocol at …

Previsit Ai: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation For Patient Readiness In Clinical Encounters, Rolande Umuhoza

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

With healthcare systems under growing pressure from rising patient volumes and shrinking consultation windows, improving how patients communicate with physicians has become essential to delivering quality care. Yet patients routinely arrive at appointments unable to clearly describe their symptoms, recall their medical history, or articulate concerns, contributing to miscommunication, diagnostic inefficiency, and pre-visit anxiety. This study introduces PreVisit AI, a conversational system designed to address this gap through structured, knowledge-based patient preparation. The system is built on a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture combining HuggingFace sentence embeddings (all-MiniLM-L6-v2), a Chroma vector store, and Google’s Gemini language model over a curated seven-document …

Dordt Launches Nurse Practitioner Program, Sarah Moss

The Voice

No abstract provided.

Three Faculty Members Begin Retirement, Jennifer Vermeer

The Voice

No abstract provided.

Lessons Of The Body, Sarah Moss

The Voice

No abstract provided.

Parents’ Differential Perception Of Siblings’ Risky Play, Emma Smith

Master’s Theses

Parents differentiate their perceptions of risk between first- and second-born children. This study used a mixed methods approach for a novel comparison of parents’ views of risk between their first- and second-born children. Parents in the United States (n = 175, 111 mothers and 63 fathers, M age = 36), all with two biological children (excluding twins) between the ages of 3-10 (first-born M age =7; second-born M age = 5) answered self-report survey measures, including the Tolerance of Risk in Play Scale (TRiPS) and subsections of the Parent Supervision Attributes Profile Questionnaire (PSAPQ), in which they expressed their tolerance …

Vision-Language System Using Open-Source Llms For Consent And Instruction Gestures In Medical Interpreter Robots, Tung Ngo, Emma Murphy, Robert Ross

Conference papers

Effective communication is vital in healthcare, especially across language barriers, where non-verbal cues and gestures are critical. This paper presents a privacy-preserving vision-language framework for medical interpreter robots that detects specific speech acts (consent and instruction) and generates corresponding robotic gestures. Built on locally deployed open-source models, the system utilizes a Large Language Model (LLM) with few-shot prompting for intent detection. We also introduce a novel dataset of clinical conversations annotated for speech acts and paired with gesture clips. Our identification module achieved 0.90 accuracy, 0.93 weighted precision, and a 0.91 weighted F1-Score. Our approach significantly improves computational efficiency and, …

Built On Bundles, Backed By Evidence: Improving Icu Outcomes Through Infection Prevention, Camille Dietrich, Claire Larson, Ann Ngo, Liyat Shenkute, Emma Smith

Bachelor of Science in Nursing Senior Synthesis

No abstract provided.

Accuracy Of Pulse Oximeters Across Varying Skin Pigmentations, Dylan Che, Carrina Chu, Carmen Eng, Justin Nguyen, Katherine Praywell, Gaby Ugarte

Bachelor of Science in Nursing Senior Synthesis

No abstract provided.

Around The Clock Care: Understanding The Health Impacts Across Nursing Day And Night Schedules, Brooke Anderson, Liz Nguyen, Megan Oshiro, Nikki Sales, Tiffany Takiguchi, Arianna Mae Umayam

Bachelor of Science in Nursing Senior Synthesis

No abstract provided.

Patient-To-Nurse Ratios In Immigration Detention Centers: Effects On Patient Mortality, Zoe Adler, Elinor Bowen-Keyes, Azalea Groleau, Natalie Salsman, Julie Smith

Bachelor of Science in Nursing Senior Synthesis

No abstract provided.

Climate-Related Environmental Exposures And Adverse Birth Outcomes: An Epidemiological Study In Maryland, Michelle D. Jones

Integrative Learning Experience (ILE) Theses

This study examined the relationship between environmental exposures, specifically heat and air quality, and adverse birth outcomes across Maryland. Using an ecological, correlational study design, the analysis found that while higher temperatures and cooling degree days were initially associated with increased rates of low birth weight (LBW) and infant mortality (IM), these relationships did not remain significant after adjusting for sociodemographic factors. Instead, poverty emerged as the strongest and most consistent predictor of both LBW and IM, with rural residence also linked to higher LBW rates and urban residence appearing protective against IM. The findings suggest that social determinants of …

Addressing Barriers Towards Preventative Osteoporosis Care Among Women, Mallory Kingsley

Integrative Learning Experience (ILE) Theses

This paper is a review of Osteoporosis, the impact that it has on women, and determining if there is a need for preventative care to reduce the burden of disease on patients. Data from NHANES 2017-2018 was reviewed and statistical analyses were conducted. The variables of interest were gender of the participant, with possible barriers to care of the highest level of education, and ethnicity of the participant. These were the chosen variables as current literature has been unable to determine if there is a role between Osteoporosis/ fragility fractures and race/ethnicity or education levels. One limitation of this analysis …