Digital Commons Network^™

Perspectives Of Hispanic/Latina Women Ages 60 And Over On The Impact Of Single Motherhood And Their Long-Term Financial Well-Being, Tess Juno Anselm

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Unmarried women over the age of 60 continue to experience disproportionate rates of adult poverty in the United States, while families headed by single mothers experience the highest poverty rates. This study explores the long-term impact of single motherhood on financial wellness through the perspective of Hispanic/Latina women ages 60 and over who have experienced single motherhood in Massachusetts. A transdisciplinary study, it utilizes intersectionality as a theoretical framework, employs feminist standpoint informed inquiry methods to document lived experiences through in-depth interviews, and engages diffraction as a mode of praxis as it intra-acts with narratives and explores the systems and …

The Black Box Of Enrollment Management: The Influence Of Academic Capitalism And Values Of The Public Good, Kamala C. Kiem

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

The study addresses the widening income and racial access gap in higher education resulting from enrollment management teams’ operationalization of academic capitalism. The study focuses on the local, micro level, emphasizing how enrollment management leadership teams make sense of enrollment management, recognizing that enrollment management and the work of enrollment management stakeholders exist within an organizational space encompassing the values of both public good and academic capitalism. Using a case study methodology and critical sensemaking theory, the research explored how academic capitalism and values of the public good shaped enrollment management leadership teams’ sensemaking and sensegiving as they enacted decisions, …

Unapologetic! Leading In White Spaces: A Critical Race Grounded Theory Study About The Experiences Of Black Women College Presidents At Four-Year Predominantly White Institutions And Gendered Racisms’S Influence On Their Leadership Approach, Damita A. Davis

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

For higher education to be responsive to the changing national and student population, its leadership must be “reflective of the world around it, (which) will be key to managing the challenges of today and the unknown challenges of tomorrow” (American Council on Education, 2017, para. 4). Unfortunately, despite the increasing diversity of the student body, college presidents remain primarily white; therefore, maintaining a limited view of leadership. Centering the experiences of Black women as a “strength to build, develop, and perform leadership” (Lloyd-Jones, 2016, p. 66), and understanding their ways of knowing, is an important step for postsecondary education in …

Lsd1-Mediated Epigenetic Reprogramming Driving Prostate Cancer Progression, Zifeng Wang

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Prostate cancer (PCa) is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men worldwide. Alterations in epigenetic regulation of gene expression have emerged as key contributors to PCa development, treatment resistance and disease progression. My thesis focuses on investigating the role of lysine-specific demethylase 1 (LSD1), a critical histone modifier, in mediating epigenetic reprogramming that drives PCa progression. The dissertation comprises three projects that elucidate the mechanisms by which LSD1 can regulate PCa progression. The first project shows that LSD1 can activate the PI3K/AKT pathway in PCa cells independent of its well-established androgen receptor (AR) coactivator function. The study identifies the …

Addressing Health Crises Through Courts? Climate Litigation In Latin America, The Right To Health And Vulnerable Populations, Thalia Viveros Uehara

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

As Latin America faces increasing climate-related health crises that disproportionately affect populations experiencing poverty and social exclusion, it becomes increasingly urgent to realize the most vulnerable's right to health. While the region's new constitutionalism (NLAC) has made progress in protecting this right, it has only recently begun to intersect with climate change law through rights-based climate litigation. This dissertation takes a transdisciplinary multi-methods research approach to answer the following question: How do health crises emerge within, and how are they addressed by courts through, domestic climate litigation in Latin America? Specifically, it examines how health concerns for vulnerable populations are …

Racial Justice Inc.: Deconstructing The Enactment Of Racial Justice In Dei/Social Justice-Focused Higher Education And Student Affairs (Hesa) Graduate Programs, Lorena Fuentes López

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Despite efforts of faculty in Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) programs focused on social justice/Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) to provide equitable educational experiences for their students, studies on these programs have shown that students of color continue to face racialized experiences in the classroom (Harris & Linder, 2018; Linder et al., 2015). This dissertation employed a multiple case study to examine two HESA master's programs with a specific social justice/DEI mission and integrated the voices of both faculty and students. Using intensive interviewing, document analysis, and class observations, the goal of this study centered on understanding the extent …

The Impact Of Campus Culture On Undergraduate Civic Engagement Outcomes, Kevin M. Kraft

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

One purpose of higher education is to prepare students to participate in a democratic society. This mission is particularly relevant today as the institutions of democracy and the ideas that underpin them are in recession. Despite this, evidence shows that higher education is not achieving its stated goal of fostering civic engagement. The creation and maintenance of an institutional culture can be an effective way to teach civic engagement.

The Carnegie Community Engagement Classification (CEC) signifies that a college or university has institutionalized community engagement. By comparing student civic engagement outcomes at institutions that earned the classification to a control …

The Impact Of Historical Trauma, Self-Compassion, And Resistance Against Racism Among African Americans, Darrick Scott

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

For African Americans, historical trauma is described as collective psychological, emotional and cognitive distress, producing an intergenerational impact through repeated experiences of oppression that both stems from slavery and continues into the present day through patterned experiences of racism (Williams-Washington & Mills, 2018). The current study explored the association between historical racial trauma, resistance and empowerment against racism, self-compassion, and internalized racism, and symptoms of depression in a sample of 100 African American adults. Due to low internal reliability of the measure, self-compassion in the context of historical trauma could not be examined. The study included exploration of simple correlations, …

Dataset Of Optical And Electronic Properties For Mos2-Graphene Vertical Heterostructures And Mos2-Graphene-Au Heterointerfaces, Sanju Gupta, Panagiota Pimenidou, Miguel Garcia, Shivanshi Das, Nicholas Dimakis

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Publications

The computational and experimental data presented in this paper refer to the research article "First-Principles Calculations Integrated with Experimental Optical and Electronic Properties for MoS2-graphene Heterostructures and MoS2-graphene-Au Heterointerfaces". The computational data includes structural information, electronic and optical properties, and data to calculate the work functions for various molybdenum disulfide and graphene heterostructures and their heterointerfaces with gold. The optical properties calculations include the frequency-dependent dielectric function, the refractive index, the reflectivity, the extinction coefficient, and the energy loss function. These properties were calculated using the independent particle approximation (IPA). As for the experimental optoelectronic properties, we measured photoluminescence spectra …

Programmable Processing-In-Memory Core And Cluster Design And Verification, Namita Bhosle

Theses

The surge in demand for semiconductors and AI-driven applications has led to an amplified requirement for swift and efficient semiconductor design production cycles. These shortened cycles, however, pose a challenge as they reduce the time available for complex chip design and verification, consequently increasing the likelihood of producing error-prone chips. Current research concentrates on utilizing a Lookup Table (LUT) based pPIM (Programmable Processor in Memory) technology to deliver efficient, low-latency, and low-power computation specifically tailored to 4-bit data requirements, ideal for repetitive and data-expensive AI algorithms. This thesis presents the user-defined Generation 2 pPIM, a redesigned and enhanced version of …

Biomimetic Aerosol Exposure System For In Vitro Human Airway Exposure Studies, Samantha Emma Sarles

Theses

Tobacco use remains the number one cause of preventable death in the United States, disproportionately affecting residents of rural areas, people who are financially disadvantaged, and adults who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. The impact that electronic cigarettes will have on public health is not yet fully understood. Combinations of electronic cigarette products, human airway geometries, and user behaviors create barriers to understanding products’ interaction with the human airway and their health effects. Current in vitro emissions systems, also called smoking robots, lack biomimicry, use unrealistic flow conditions, produce unrealistic aerosol dose, and provide inaccurate bio-mechanical cues to cell …

Analyzing The Atomic And Electronic Structures Of Oxide Heterostructures For Electrolyte Applications In Solid Oxide Fuel Cells, Jason D. Rakowsky

Theses

Perovskite oxide heterostructures have key applications in technologies such as solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), batteries, solar cells, etc. because of novel properties at the interface. Although it is well-known that this is caused by lattice mismatch and misfit dislocations, the role defects play in enhancing certain properties is unknown. We have investigated SrTiO$_3$ (STO) and BaZrO$_3$ (BZO) structures because they both experience novel oxygen vacancy formation which is desired for high ionic conductivity applications such as the thin film electrolyte of a SOFC. Through explicit density functional theory calculations of four STO/BZO interfaces, electron migration, oxygen vacancy formation energies, …

Text Restoration In Palimpsested Historical Manuscripts Using Deep Learning Methods, Anna Starynska

Theses

Historical palimpsests are manuscripts that have more than one layer of text, where the original text was erased, and subsequent layers overwritten. For many centuries, palimpsested text of ancient manuscripts was considered impossible to recover. Nowadays, with new technology, such as multispectral imaging, under some portion of electromagnetic spectrum illumination, the overwritten text can become visible again. This peculiar property of faded ink and some traditional signal processing methods had already helped recover text from numerous manuscripts. Nevertheless, even showing the best performance, existing methods can only enhance the visibility of the text but not eliminate the effects of occlusion …

Optimized Generative Pre-Training Eeg To Sentiment Classification (Ogptsc), Amira Hassan

Theses

This research aims to revolutionize electroencephalogram (EEG) analysis by proposing and developing an innovative method for sentiment classification, introducing the groundbreaking "Optimized Chat Generative Pre-training EEG to Sentiment Classification (OGPTSC)." This novel approach harnesses the power of Generative Pre-training (GPT2) as the vocabulary language model while utilizing an intelligent hyper-parameter selection method to fine-tune and optimize the model's performance. Extensive testing is conducted on a widely recognized dataset to evaluate the OGPTSC's prowess, demonstrating its exceptional capabilities in sentiment classification. Notably, this research extends its scrutiny beyond the OGPTSC by applying the same hyper-parameter selection technique to well-established models such …

Spectral Broadening Effects On Pulsed-Source Digital Holography, Steven A. Owens, Mark F. Spencer, Glen P. Perram

Faculty Publications

Using a pulsed configuration, a digital-holographic system is setup in the off-axis image plane recording geometry, and spectral broadening via pseudo-random bit sequence is used to degrade the temporal coherence of the master-oscillator laser. The associated effects on the signal-to-noise ratio are then measured in terms of the ambiguity and coherence efficiencies. It is found that the ambiguity efficiency, which is a function of signal-reference pulse overlap, is not affected by the effects of spectral broadening. The coherence efficiency, on the other hand, is affected. As a result, the coherence efficiency, which is a function of effective fringe visibility, is …

Cation Leak Through The Atp1a3 Pump Causes Spasticity And Intellectual Disability, Daniel G Calame, Marwan Shinawi, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

ATP1A3 encodes the α3 subunit of the sodium-potassium ATPase, one of two isoforms responsible for powering electrochemical gradients in neurons. Heterozygous pathogenic ATP1A3 variants produce several distinct neurological syndromes, yet the molecular basis for phenotypic variability is unclear. We report a novel recurrent variant, ATP1A3(NM_152296.5):c.2324C>T; p.(Pro775Leu), in nine individuals associated with the primary clinical features of progressive or non-progressive spasticity and developmental delay/intellectual disability. No patients fulfil diagnostic criteria for ATP1A3-associated syndromes, including alternating hemiplegia of childhood, rapid-onset dystonia-parkinsonism or cerebellar ataxia-areflexia-pes cavus-optic atrophy-sensorineural hearing loss (CAPOS), and none were suspected of having an ATP1A3-related disorder. Uniquely among known …

Striatal Mglu5-Mediated Synaptic Plasticity Is Independently Regulated By Location-Specific Receptor Pools And Divergent Signaling Pathways, Yuh-Jiin I Jong, Yukitoshi Izumi, Steven K Harmon, Charles F Zorumski, Karen L Ómalley

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Metabotropic glutamate receptor 5 (mGlu

Exploring Hand And Upper Limb Function In Patients With Inclusion Body Myositis (Ibm), Stephanie Hunn, Lindsay Alfano, Michelle Seiffert, Conrad C Weihl

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Inclusion body myositis (IBM) is an inflammatory myopathy characterized by progressive weakness of knee extensors and finger flexors. Many patients lose independence with fine motor tasks; however, a gap remains as to how these deficits correlate with performance on functional outcome measures. We describe functional hand impairments as measured by performance-based outcome measures in a cross-sectional sample of 74 patients with IBM. Subjects completed a series of outcome measures (Functional Dexterity Test (FDT), Performance of the Upper Limb (PUL), and Sollerman Hand Function Test (SHFT)) alongside a collection of patient reported outcomes (PROs). Assessments were compared to standard IBM measurements, …

Decision-Making For Pediatric Cervical Spine Imaging After Blunt Trauma: Investigating Team Dynamics In The Emergency Department, Megan E Gregory, Annie Truelove, Fahd Ahmad, Daniel Corwin, Leah Tzimenatos, Scott J Oglesbee, Martin J Herman, Julie C Leonard

2020-Current year OA Pubs

OBJECTIVE: Cervical spine imaging decision-making for pediatric traumas is complex and multidisciplinary. Implementing a risk assessment tool has the potential to reduce variation in these decisions and unnecessary radiation exposure for pediatric patients. We sought to determine how emergency department-trauma team dynamics may affect implementation of such a tool.

METHODS: We interviewed (pediatric and general emergency physicians, trauma surgeons, neurosurgeons, orthopedic surgeons and ED nurses at 21 hospitals to ascertain how team dynamics affect the pediatric cervical spine imaging decision-making process. Data were coded following a framework-driven deductive coding process and thematic analysis was used.

RESULTS: Forty-eight physicians, advanced practice …

Induction Of Cancer Neoantigens Facilitates Development Of Clinically Relevant Models For The Study Of Pancreatic Cancer Immunobiology, Usman Y Panni, Michael Y Chen, Felicia Zhang, Darren R Cullinan, Lijin Li, C Alston James, Xiuli Zhang, S Rogers, A Alarcon, John M Baer, Daoxiang Zhang, Feng Gao, Christopher A Miller, Qingqing Gong, Kian-Huat Lim, David G Denardo, S Peter Goedegebuure, William E Gillanders, William G Hawkins

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Neoantigen burden and CD8 T cell infiltrate are associated with clinical outcome in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). A shortcoming of many genetic models of PDAC is the lack of neoantigen burden and limited T cell infiltrate. The goal of the present study was to develop clinically relevant models of PDAC by inducing cancer neoantigens in KP2, a cell line derived from the KPC model of PDAC. KP2 was treated with oxaliplatin and olaparib (OXPARPi), and a resistant cell line was subsequently cloned to generate multiple genetically distinct cell lines (KP2-OXPARPi clones). Clones A and E are sensitive to immune checkpoint …

Genomic Risk For Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder In Families Densely Affected With Alcohol Use Disorders, Stacey Saenz De Viteri, Emma C Johnson, Vivia V Mccutcheon, Kathleen K Bucholz, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified genetic markers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in civilian and military populations. However, studies have yet to examine the genetics of PTSD while factoring in risk for alcohol dependence, which commonly co-occur. We examined genome-wide associations for DSM-IV PTSD among 4,978 trauma-exposed participants (31% with alcohol dependence, 50% female, 30% African ancestry) from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism (COGA). We also examined associations of polygenic risk scores (PRS) derived from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC)-PTSD Freeze 2 (N = 3533) and Million Veterans Program GWAS of PTSD (N = 5200) …

Prescribing Patterns For Sodium-Glucose Cotransporter 2 Inhibitors: A Survey Of Nephrologists, Tripti Singh, Tingting Li, Didier Mandelbrot, Brad C Astor, Ali Poyan Mehr

2020-Current year OA Pubs

No abstract provided.

Loop-And-Let-Go Technique For The Management Of Symptomatic Large Colonic Lipoma, Syedreza Haider, Matthew Peller, Vladimir Lamm, Ahmad Najdat Bazarbashi

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Video 1We depict (1) identification of a large lipoma in the sigmoid colon; (2) radial echo endoscopy confirming diagnosis; (3) removal with the loop-and-let-go technique; (4) ex vivo demonstration of the technique; and (5) an interval follow-up demonstrating healing of the lesion.

Resolvin D1 Prevents Injurious Neutrophil Swarming In Transplanted Lungs, Wenjun Li, Hailey M Shepherd, Yuriko Terada, Ashley E Shay, Amit I Bery, Andrew E Gelman, Kory J Lavine, Charles N Serhan, Daniel Kreisel

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Neutrophils are the primary cell type involved in lung ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI), which remains a frequent and morbid complication after organ transplantation. Endogenous lipid mediators that become activated during acute inflammation-resolution have gained increasing recognition for their protective role(s) in promoting the restoration of homeostasis, but their influence on early immune responses following transplantation remains to be uncovered. Resolvin D1, 7

Shephard: A Modular And Extensible Software Architecture For Analyzing And Annotating Large Protein Datasets, Garrett M Ginell, Aidan J Flynn, Alex S Holehouse

2020-Current year OA Pubs

MOTIVATION: The emergence of high-throughput experiments and high-resolution computational predictions has led to an explosion in the quality and volume of protein sequence annotations at proteomic scales. Unfortunately, sanity checking, integrating, and analyzing complex sequence annotations remains logistically challenging and introduces a major barrier to entry for even superficial integrative bioinformatics.

RESULTS: To address this technical burden, we have developed SHEPHARD, a Python framework that trivializes large-scale integrative protein bioinformatics. SHEPHARD combines an object-oriented hierarchical data structure with database-like features, enabling programmatic annotation, integration, and analysis of complex datatypes. Importantly SHEPHARD is easy to use and enables a Pythonic interrogation …

Harm Reduction: A Missing Piece To The Holistic Care Of Patients Who Inject Drugs, Nathanial S Nolan, Sarah M Fracasso Francis, Laura R Marks, Susan E Beekmann, Philip M Polgreen, Stephen Y Liang, Michael J Durkin

2020-Current year OA Pubs

BACKGROUND: The rise in injection drug use (IDU) has led to an increase in drug-related infections. Harm reduction is an important strategy for preventing infections among people who inject drugs (PWID). We attempted to evaluate the harm reduction counseling that infectious diseases physicians provide to PWID presenting with infections.

METHODS: An electronic survey was distributed to physician members of the Emerging Infections Network to inquire about practices used when caring for patients with IDU-related infections.

RESULTS: In total, 534 ID physicians responded to the survey. Of those, 375 (70%) reported routinely caring for PWID. Most respondents report screening for human …

Courage-Als: A Randomized, Double-Blind Phase 3 Study Designed To Improve Participant Experience And Increase The Probability Of Success, Jeremy M Shefner, Timothy M Miller, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

No abstract provided.

Proteomics Of Adjacent-To-Tumor Samples Uncovers Clinically Relevant Biological Events In Hepatocellular Carcinoma, Hongwen Zhu, Li Ding, Et Al.

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Normal adjacent tissues (NATs) of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) differ from healthy liver tissues and their heterogeneity may contain biological information associated with disease occurrence and clinical outcome that has yet to be fully evaluated at the proteomic level. This study provides a detailed description of the heterogeneity of NATs and the differences between NATs and healthy livers and revealed that molecular features of tumor subgroups in HCC were partially reflected in their respective NATs. Proteomic data classified HCC NATs into two subtypes (Subtypes 1 and 2), and Subtype 2 was associated with poor prognosis and high-risk recurrence. The pathway and …

Impact Of Donor Age And Relationship On Outcomes Of Peripheral Blood Haploidentical Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation, Aaron Pruitt, Feng Gao, Elisa De Togni, Hunter Cochran, Sonia Godbole, Michael Slade, Ramzi Abboud

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Here we describe a retrospective analysis of outcomes in 299 patients who underwent peripheral blood haplo-HCT with PTCy from July 2009 through May 2021 and their association with donor characteristics. Patients had mostly acute leukemias and high or very high DRI. Multivariate analyses were conducted examining OS, NRM, relapse, cytokine release syndrome, acute and chronic GVHD. Donor characteristics included age, sex, relationship, ABO status, CMV status, and HLA match grade. Our analysis revealed increasing donor age was associated with higher NRM (compared to age <30; age 30-44 HR, 1.65; P = 0.110, age >44 HR, 1.80; P = 0.056) but lower relapse risk (compared to age <30; age 30-44 HR, 0.61; P = 0.034, age > 44 HR, 0.71; …

Music Can Be Reconstructed From Human Auditory Cortex Activity Using Nonlinear Decoding Models, Ludovic Bellier, Anaïs Llorens, Déborah Marciano, Aysegul Gunduz, Gerwin Schalk, Peter Brunner, Robert T. Knight

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Music is core to human experience, yet the precise neural dynamics underlying music perception remain unknown. We analyzed a unique intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) dataset of 29 patients who listened to a Pink Floyd song and applied a stimulus reconstruction approach previously used in the speech domain. We successfully reconstructed a recognizable song from direct neural recordings and quantified the impact of different factors on decoding accuracy. Combining encoding and decoding analyses, we found a right-hemisphere dominance for music perception with a primary role of the superior temporal gyrus (STG), evidenced a new STG subregion tuned to musical rhythm, and defined …