Digital Commons Network^™

Gandy Dancer 11.2, Gandy Dancer

Gandy Dancer Archives

Gandy Dancer is a literary magazine, publishing fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and visual art. We invite submissions from student writers and artists at all of the SUNY campuses. Edited by students at SUNY Geneseo, Gandy Dancer is published twice yearly. For more information, visit www.gandydancer.org. Gandy Dancer 11.2 is the twenty-first issue, published Spring 2023.

The Association Between Rape Myths And Continued Contact With The Perpetrator Following Sexual Abuse, Jainee Smith

Student Theses

Sexual violence is a widespread phenomenon. The term rape myth was first coined in 1980 by Martha Burt, and she defined it as “prejudicial, stereotyped, or false beliefs about rape, rape victims, and rapists” (Burt, 1980 p. 217). These myths, as well as any continued contact after a sexual assault, often lead to victim blaming, making it more difficult for victims to report any sexual assault. While rape myths were developed based on adult sexual assault, some research suggests that they also applied to child sexual abuse. This study will explore and expand the literature on rape myth acceptance and …

Effects Of Prenatal Pesticide Exposure On The Fetal Brain And Placenta Transcriptomes In A Rodent Model, Corina Lesseur, Kirtan Kaur, Sean D Kelly, Karen Hermetz, Randy Williams, Ke Hao, Carmen J Marsit, W Michael Caudle, Jia Chen

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Organophosphate and pyrethroid pesticides are among the most extensively used insecticides worldwide. Prenatal exposures to both classes of pesticides have been linked to a wide range of neurobehavioral deficits in the offspring. The placenta is a neuroendocrine organ and the crucial regulator of the intrauterine environment; early-life toxicant exposures could impact neurobehavior by disrupting placental processes. Female C57BL/6 J mice were exposed via oral gavage to an organophosphate, chlorpyrifos (CPF) at 5 mg/kg, a pyrethroid, deltamethrin (DM), at 3 mg/kg, or vehicle only control (CTL). Exposure began two weeks before breeding and continued every three days until euthanasia at gestational …

Surgeons’ Knowledge Regarding Perioperative Pain Management In Patients With Opioid Use Disorder: A Survey Among 260 Members Of The American College Of Surgeons, Caroline E Crocker, Romana Sharmeen, Thu T Tran, Amir M Khan, Wen Li, Joseph L Alcorn

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Surfactant protein A (SP-A) has important roles in innate immunity and modulation of pulmonary and extrapulmonary inflammation. Given SP-A has been detected in rat and human brain, we sought to determine if SP-A has a role in modulating inflammation in the neonatal mouse brain. Neonatal wildtype (WT) and SP-A-deficient (SP-A

Clinically Stable Covid-19 Patients Presenting To Acute Unscheduled Episodic Care Venues Have Increased Risk Of Hospitalization: Secondary Analysis Of A Randomized Control Trial, Joseph Bledsoe, Scott C Woller, Maria Brooks, Frank C Sciurba, Jerry A Krishnan, Deborah Martin, Peter Hou, Janet Y Lin, Andrei Kindzelski, Eileen Handberg, Bridget-Anne Kirwan, Elaine Zaharris, Lauren Castro, Nancy L Shapiro, Carl J Pepine, Sarah Majercik, Zhuxuan Fu, Yongqi Zhong, Vidya Venugopal, Yu-Hsuan Lai, Paul M Ridker, Jean M Connors

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: Assessment for risks associated with acute stable COVID-19 is important to optimize clinical trial enrollment and target patients for scarce therapeutics. To assess whether healthcare system engagement location is an independent predictor of outcomes we performed a secondary analysis of the ACTIV-4B Outpatient Thrombosis Prevention trial.

METHODS: A secondary analysis of the ACTIV-4B trial that was conducted at 52 US sites between September 2020 and August 2021. Participants were enrolled through acute unscheduled episodic care (AUEC) enrollment location (emergency department, or urgent care clinic visit) compared to minimal contact (MC) enrollment (electronic contact from test center lists of positive …

“Speechless, Placeless Power”: Affect And Trauma In Moby-Dick And “Bartleby, The Scrivener”, Lauren Colandro

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and “Bartleby, the Scrivener” contain affectively unsound figures such as Captain Ahab and Bartleby that seem to disrupt larger narrative functions, both developing these characteristics in response to prior trauma. However, narrators are not privy to the extent of their feelings because of their idealistic attachments to the disruptive figures. This thesis examines the commonalities of Melville’s disruptive characters in both stories using affect theory, as well as how their disruptions illuminate the effects of repressed trauma in an increasingly capital-driven society.

Recovering Pearl: Utopian Projections In Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", Evan Weiss

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Much of the recent scholarly criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter aims to demonstrate the novel’s function as an allegory for Hawthorne’s anti-reformist (and especially anti-abolitionist) views at the height of the antebellum crisis. This commitment to revealing Hawthorne’s conservatism tends to cast the novel’s major figures as pieces within a self-balancing paradigm of good (intentions) and evil (acts) that ultimately symbolizes the author’s preference for inaction on the major political and humanitarian issue of his time—slavery. Curiously, however, the character of Pearl, Hester Prynne’s “wild,” “bird-like” child who dominates nearly every scene in which she appears, is almost …

The Key Role Of Social Media In Students’ Understanding Of The Rhetorical Situation, Olivia Montine

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Gen-Z students have been chastised repeatedly for their lack of attention span, addiction to social media, and inability to complete tasks in school in the manner of generations past (Richtel). It would not be productive to attempt to reform the way current college students process information, as their upbringing has largely altered their attention span and methods of content consumption. Older modes of understanding on how to write in a college composition class do not take this into account. What if the method of instruction professors utilized shifted to better meet the capabilities of college students in 2023? To answer …

Placing A Bid: A Comparison Of The Traditional Marketplace (Stocks) And Non-Traditional Markets (Nfts), Nieh, Haley

Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal

Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) are exploding in the marketplace and are not losing momentum anytime soon. Artists, athletes, celebrities, and even brands and luxury houses are rolling out NFTs. With this excitement, a great deal of profit is being generated; the market cap of NFTs is expected to grow from $3 billion in 2022 to $13.6 billion in 2027 (a compound annual growth rate of 35 percent).1

Blockchain technologies are an empowering platform for democratization of financial instruments and transactions. Cryptocurrency has received some regulation from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but clarity and regulation of NFTs have …

On The Six-Cornered Snowflake, Jackson Hescock

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

On the Six-Cornered Snowflake, named after Johannes Kepler’s 1611 essay on geometrically covering surfaces, is both the title of both my final thesis work and essay. Beginning with an inquiry into the nature of hand-made object as intrinsically valuable, my earlier sculptural work surrounding quilting is broken down and considered as a form of reverence for the American object. This is partly achieved through a comparison to traditional Japanese packing techniques and how my own assembly mirrors and converses with the graceful and sensitive packing of Japanese hand-made goods. Early 20^th-century flight experiments are also hand-made objects of …

Experimental Investigation Of Non-Hermiticity In Quantum Systems, Maryam Abbasi

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The investigation of quantum systems in experimental setups involves interaction with the environment, which introduces channels of dissipation. These systems can be described by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, capturing the effect of gain and loss. Realizing these systems in classical cases demonstrates interesting phenomena such as topological features in the optical and mechanical domain, energy transfer, and enhancement in sensing. The primary focus of this thesis is the realization of the non-Hermiticity in a quantum system. To accomplish this, we harness multiple energy levels of an anharmonic superconducting circuit with coupling to an engineered bath to investigate the static and dynamic …

Bioinformatic Tools To Alleviate The Annotation Bottleneck Within Precision Oncology, Erica Kay Barnell

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

In the era of advanced ability to perform complex genomic sequencing, precision oncology has been adopted as the ideal paradigm for optimization of outcomes for patients with cancer. However, despite technological advances in all aspects of the massively parallel sequencing pipeline, the application of precision oncology to every clinical workflow has been unattainable. Suboptimal adoption of custom medicine within oncology is attributable to the annotation bottleneck, which currently demands inordinate manual and computational requirements for completion. Alleviation of the annotation bottleneck requires co-development of bioinformatic strategies and analysis knowledgebanks to automate variant identification and variant annotation for clinical utility. The …

Multi-Scalar Contributions To Sex Differences In Brain Tumor Incidence And Outcome, Lauren Broestl

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Nearly all complex human diseases exhibit some degree of sex difference in incidence, age of onset, disease severity, and/or response to treatment. Sex differences are observed in a wide range of nervous system disorders, including neurodevelopmental disorders, psychiatric diseases, neuroimmunological disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, and central nervous system (CNS) tumors. Males have increased incidence rates for most CNS tumor types. Sex differences in brain tumor incidence rates are observed in studies from around the world, across a wide range of cultures, in both pediatric and adult populations, and even extend to other species. Males also have decreased survival from brain tumors, …

Assessment Of Cross-Protective Responses To Emerging Variant Viruses, Rita Elaine Chen

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Viruses pose a great threat to human health. Outbreaks and pandemics due to different viruses occur in all areas of the world. Two viruses, which emerged globally in the 1980s and in 2020, that are still causing ongoing pandemics in 2021 are dengue virus (DENV) and severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), respectively. These viruses circulate widely and currently infect hundreds of millions of people. Immunity from a previous infection may confer protection against subsequent infection of a related virus. Thus, understanding the degree of cross-protection can help define correlates of protection that are necessary to determine which people …

Leveraging Protein Dynamics To Drug Filovirus Protein-Nucleic Acid Interactions Using Simulations And Experiments, Matthew Alberto Cruz

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Drug discovery targeting protein nucleic acid (PNI) and protein-protein interactions (PPI) remains a difficult task. How to identify druggable conformations and discover compounds binding to these conformations is an unsolved problem. Here, I describe how we apply computational and experimental approaches to probe the conformational landscape of a key immune antagonist protein from the Zaire ebolavirus. Viral Protein 35 (VP35) binds to the viral pathogen associated molecular pattern, double stranded RNA (dsRNA), and blocks activation of the interferon (IFN) response. Long time scale molecular dynamics simulations reveal that VP35 adopts an alternative conformation which opens a pocket absent in experimental …

Socrates The Expert, Jeremy Samuel Henry

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

I argue that an account of recognizing experts can be drawn from the dialogues of Plato in which Socrates is engaged in the activities he describes in the Apology, that he is an expert in recognizing experts, and that this supports his argument that no one can be an expert in ethics. I also show that his account contains a decision procedure for recognizing experts and a view about the nature of expertise (from which that procedure is derived) that is very plausible for his purpose.

Essays On Inheritances And Entrepreneurship, Martina Ivanova

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation lays out new evidence on the relationship between inheritances and entrepreneurship and the dynamics of business formation. While the existing literature is split on whether liquidity constraints pose a real threat to the formation of new businesses, this study contributes to the debate by addressing the endogeneity problem between inherited wealth and entrepreneurship. The main results lend support to the liquidity constraint theory, indicating that receiving an inheritance boosts the likelihood of owning a business by about 3% for the average individual, which translates to a 21% increase in the probability of entrepreneurship over the baseline. Chapter 1 …

New Methods Of Selectivity Using Electrochemistry, Qiwei Jing

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This project has been working on introducing new type of method to induce chemoselectivity into electrochemical reactions by modifying the surface of an electrode and then confining chemical reactions to the region of the reaction close to that surface. The goal is to translate the extremely high levels of site-selectivity seen in chemical reactions on a microelectrode array into a tool for preparative synthetic reactions.As a proof-of-principle experiment, Pt-anode was coated with a diblock copolymer that is known to have an affinity for pyrene groups. The electrode is then used in the oxidation of two alcohol substrates: one having the …

Cognitive Explanations Behind The Lack Of Public Support For Climate Action, Jordan Hale Mcallister

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Studies show that the primary barriers to climate action support are cognitive ones, and yet it is not clear how people’s climate perceptions influence their support. Key perceptions’ effects remain either disputed or unidentified in the literature, so there is no established theory explaining the drivers of climate action support. I argue that people’s climate perceptions—including of others’ climate actions, climate change impacts, and climate change severity and timing—have effects that align with conventional assumptions of rational behavior. By running survey experiments and statistical analyses on data from both the US and Europe, I show that perceptions’ effects on support …

Evolutionary History Of Populations Of Pleistocene Homo With A Focus On East Asia, Catherine Mclean

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Understanding the evolutionary history of our species is a key objective of paleoanthropology, yet the pattern of hominin evolution in East Asia remains uncertain. This research aimed to evaluate the relationships and evolutionary history of East Asian hominin paleodemes through the Pleistocene. Recent descriptions of Pleistocene East Asian hominins reveal a high degree of morphological variability, mosaics of primitive and derived traits, regionally predominant characteristics, and late surviving archaic morphologies. This study tests two hypotheses explaining the complexity of the East Asian hominin record: 1) Continuity with Hybridization, and 2) the existence of Multiple Hominin Lineages. These models were tested …

Two-Dimensional Field Effect Transistor, Yimeng Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

As silicon-based field-effect transistors (FETs) approach their physical limits with channel lengths approaching 5 nm, the search for new semiconductor materials that can surpass this limit has become urgent. Two-dimensional layered semiconductor nanomaterials, represented by graphene, have emerged as promising candidates due to their unique physical, mechanical, and chemical properties. Unlike traditional silicon-based FETs, two dimensional (2D) layered nanomaterials are held together by van der Waals forces between layers, with no dangling bonds on the material surface, which can effectively address the short-channel effect issue faced by traditional silicon-based FETs. However, unlike traditional silicon-based FETs, which have matured fabrication systems, …

A General-Purpose Software Platform For Closed-Loop Neuromodulation, William Engelhardt

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Implementing closed-loop neuromodulation therapies is a challenging and expensive endeavor. It requires developing software capable of acquiring signals from a bio-signal amplifier, analysis of these signals, and initiation of precisely timed stimulation, all of which need to be accomplished in real-time with very low latency. Developing this software is difficult, as it requires a wide range of expertise ranging from interfacing with hardware to real-time signal processing. Even when successfully implementing such a system for one set of hardware, it often then only works within the laboratory that conceived it. This is because of the inherent heterogeneity in the devices …

Dual Color Optogenetic Control For Analyzing Cardiac Function In Drosophila, Jiantao Zhu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Prolonged consumption of carbohydrate-rich diets and immobile lifestyles frequently cause metabolic disorders and obesity and, as a result, may lead to progressive heart dysfunction among broad social groups of the population. Drosophila melanogaster serves as an essential model organism in cardiovascular disease research due to conserved physiological and genomic traits shared with humans, its genetic and molecular toolbox versatility, and cost-effective maintenance. Here, we combine optogenetics and optical coherence tomography to study cardiovascular function in D. melanogaster. A new optogenetic pacing system has been developed, employing a transgenic line carrying two opsins: ChR2 and NpHR2.0. A custom-built hardware setup …

A Novel Mrna Delivery Strategy Employing Adenovirus Piggyback Mrna Binders Via Catcher/Tag Molecular Glue, Kexin Geng

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

mRNA-based therapeutics open a new era for the prevention and treatment of a wide range of diseases. However, existing mRNA delivery vehicles have limited repertoires for dendritic cell targeting and intranasal administration which are two paramount delivery pathways of significant advantages for treating cancer and infectious respiratory diseases. Adenovirus (Ad) with well-deciphered viral genomes and intensive-studied structure biology has been developed for DCs-targeted cancer vaccines and intranasal COVID vaccines. In light of these virtues, Ad presents as the “off-the-shelf” tool possessing well-defined manufacturable capabilities and translatable feasibility that perfectly complements the current limitations of mRNA delivery. In this study, we …

3-Dimensional Visualization Of Cardiac Plaque Mapping Data, Phan Ly Vy Nguyen

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) of one of the most prevalent cardiac arrythmia in humans, and also the most studied arrythmias due to its high association with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. Diagnosis of AF, which is highly dependent on the observation of the irregular signal in the atria, is often challenging since AF is often asymptomatic at the onset. There has been a lot of effort in exploring different cardiac mapping techniques to understand the dynamics of AF for better intervention. This study aims at developing a MATLAB interface that assists the development of a cardiac plaque mapping data acquisition system in …

Preparing Non-Human Primates To Study Hand-Eye Coordination In Frontal Eye Fields (Fef) During Delayed Movement Task, Juliusz Cydzik

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Preparing Non-Human Primates to Study Hand-Eye Coordination in Frontal Eye Fields (FEF) During Delayed Movement Task by Juliusz Cydzik Master of Science in Biomedical Engineering Washington University in St. Louis, 2023 Professor Lawrence Snyder, Chair Hand-eye coordination enables humans and non-human primates to use their hands and eyes to perform various tasks. We are interested in coordination at the systems level, where saccades and reaches are encoded. The parietal reach region (PRR), situated at the posterior end of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and overlapping portions of the medial intraparietal area (MIP) and V6a, is commonly attributed …

Restoring The Mechanoresponsiveness Of Aged Bone To Mechanical Loading, Christopher John Chermside-Scabbo

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Osteoporosis—a disease of low bone mass and a predisposition to fracture—remains a pressing public health burden. Osteoporotic fractures occur in 1 in 3 women and 1 in 5 men over the age of 50, at a cost of more than $22 billion annually in the US. To prevent osteoporotic fractures, we need additional strategies to increase bone formation and reverse the disease. A potent strategy to increase bone formation is mechanical loading. However, with aging, bone becomes less responsive to the same stimulus. Because we do not fully understand the age-related decrease in bone mechanoresponsiveness, we have been unable to …

Putting Attentional Control On The Map: An Investigation Of Meaningful Boundaries And Context-Specific Control, Jackson Stuart Colvett

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

People can learn and adopt relaxed or focused control settings based on the likelihood of conflict at specific inducer locations, then flexibly retrieve those control settings at nearby unbiased diagnostic locations. Importantly, people can learn that multiple distinct contexts predict conflict, such as specific locations or regions of space (e.g., all locations in the upper left). In realistic visual scenes, meaningful boundaries that demarcate objects or areas of space serve as an important signal that the area inside the boundary is distinct from the area outside the boundary. Recent research (Colvett & Bugg, 2022) indicated a role for meaningful boundaries …

Zfp36 Family-Mediated Post-Transcriptional And Bhlhe40-Mediated Transcriptional Regulation Of T Cell Responses, Melissa Erin Cook

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

T cells are potent immune responders and cytokine producers. Appropriate regulation of T cell-derived cytokines is needed to allow enough production to coordinate immune responses but restrict excessive production to limit tissue damage. Herein, we explore post-transcriptional and transcriptional control of T cell cytokine production in multiple contexts. We find that during homeostasis, CD4+ and CD8+ T cells require the collective functions of the ZFP36 family of RNA-binding proteins (ZFP36, ZFP36L1, and ZFP36L2) to negatively cytokine production. Triple deletion of ZFP36 family members exclusively in T cells results in a spontaneous and lethal autoinflammatory syndrome not present when deleting any …

Studies And Applications Of Two-Phase Ligand Exchanges On Cadmium Selenide Nanoplatelets, Chenguang Ji

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents two-phase ligand exchanges on CdSe NPLs, and the applications of two-phase ligand exchanges to achieve interchange between L-type, Z-type and bound-ion-pair X type ligation on wurtzite CdSe NPLs. Post-synthetic ligand exchange is an important emerging method for optimizing the physical, catalytic, and spectroscopic properties of semiconductor nanocrystals. However, ligand exchanges conducted with small, polar, or charged ligands produce nanocrystals that are not dispersible in nonpolar liquids. Two-phase ligand exchange with immiscible polar and nonpolar liquids allows transfer of the nanocrystals from the nonpolar to the polar phase upon ligand exchange, in which stable nanocrystal dispersions are formed. …