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Using chanarin-dorfman syndrome patient fibroblasts to explore disease mechanisms and new treatment avenues
No full textAbstract Background Chanarin-Dorfman syndrome (CDS) is a multisystemic autosomal recessive rare disorder. CDS is caused by variants in the abhydrolase domain containing 5 (ABHD5) encoding gene (CGI-58), which ultimately leads to excessive lipid storage, and therefore a high abundance of cellular lipid droplets (LDs). Although the molecular etiology of the disease was described many years ago, no treatment for CDS is currently available. Results To further characterize the molecular basis of the disease and to uncover new treatment avenues, we used skin fibroblasts originating from a young patient diagnosed with CDS due to a homozygous nonsense mutation. We show that dysfunctional ABHD5 does not only affect LDs, but also influences other metabolic-related organelles; the mitochondria and peroxisomes. Additionally, we found that expressing functional ABHD5 in CDS patient cells reduced LD number. Finally, we developed and applied a high content-based drug repurposing screen based on a collection of ∼2500 FDA approved compounds, yielding several compounds that affected LD total area and size. Conclusions Our findings enhance the understanding of the dysfunction underlying CDS and propose new avenues for the treatment of CDS patients
Vaccination models of delivery for refugees and migrants: a global scoping review
No full textAbstract Background Refugees and migrants face inequities in healthcare and vaccination access. Diverse vaccination programs have been implemented globally among refugee and migrant populations targeting vaccine hesitancy and other barriers to vaccination. The aim of this scoping review was to provide an overview of current models of vaccination delivery of COVID-19 and other vaccines to inform best practices of vaccine delivery for refugee and migrant populations. Methods A scoping review was conducted according to PRISMA guidelines. Eleven electronic databases, including SCOPUS, Embase, Medline, and Web of Science, as well as grey literature, were searched with keywords including: ‘COVID-19’, ‘vaccines’,’immunizations’, ‘refugees’, ‘asylum seekers’, and ‘migrants’. The search included all studies published between January 2000 and October 2023 to capture COVID-19 and other vaccine models of delivery. The main outcome was models of delivery of COVID-19 vaccines and other vaccines for refugee or migrant populations. Models of vaccination delivery were reviewed and analyzed with the 2022 World Health Organization’s Strengthening COVID-19 vaccine demand and uptake in refugees and migrants: An operational guide (2022 WHO Guide) as a guiding framework. Results A total of n = 11,825 unique studies were identified through database searches. Thirty-three (n = 33) studies were included in this review. Fifteen studies (n = 15) related to the COVID-19 vaccine and eighteen studies (n = 18) focused on other vaccines. Studies were mainly implemented in high-income countries with the majority from the United States (n = 17). Studies targeted various migrant groupings (i.e., migrants, immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers), ethnic groups, and age groups globally, including various underserved populations including migrant populations. There was general alignment with most of the 2022 WHO Guide priority action areas across both COVID-19 and other vaccine studies, pointing to ongoing understandings of the importance of administratively accessible and culturally/linguistically appropriate models of vaccine delivery for refugee and migrant populations. Increasingly dominant approaches in the COVID-19 pandemic include multipronged strategies with wide community and multisectoral collaborations to co-design strategies addressing barriers. Additionally, COVID-19 vaccination models increasingly utilized innovative social media and customization strategies, including targeted communication campaigns responsive to misinformation. Although there are increased calls for the use of data to design and evaluate interventions, notable gaps remain in the collection, use and reporting of data used to conduct interventions. Conclusions Findings summarize vaccination models of delivery for COVID-19 and other vaccines for diverse refugee and migrant populations globally. Healthcare professionals, policy makers, and vaccination campaign planners can draw and build from strategies employed in other settings as aligned with WHO priority actions to increase equitable access to vaccines for refugee and migrant communities. Further collection and use of disaggregated and real-time data to inform and evaluate customized strategies for specific migrant groups is recommended to improve understandings of equitable vaccine delivery models
Modifiable Lifestyle Behaviours for Cutaneous Malignancy Prevention in Solid Organ Transplant Recipients: A Scoping Review Protocol
No full textBackground: Solid organ transplant recipients are at a markedly increased risk of developing skin cancers due to long-term immunosuppressive therapy. Although preventive research in this population has primarily focused on ultraviolet (UV) protection and dermatologic surveillance, the extent and nature of the available evidence on broader modifiable lifestyle behaviours and interventions related to skin cancer prevention in solid organ transplant recipients have not been comprehensively mapped.
Objective: The objective of this scoping review is to identify, map, and describe the extent of research on modifiable lifestyle behaviours and interventions related to the prevention or modification of cutaneous malignancy risk among solid organ transplant recipients.
Eligibility criteria: This scoping review will include peer-reviewed literature of all study designs that meet the following criteria: (1) involve adult solid organ transplant recipients in the post-transplant setting; (2) examine modifiable lifestyle behaviours and/or lifestyle-focused interventions related to the prevention or modification of cutaneous malignancy risk; and (3) are conducted within the context of post–solid organ transplant care.
Methods: This scoping review will be conducted in accordance with the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) methodology and will be reported in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. A systematic search of Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science, CINAHL, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials will be undertaken using relevant subject headings and keywords. Study selection and data extraction will be managed using Covidence, with screening performed independently by two reviewers
Enabling Sustainable Refrigeration in the Peruvian Amazon: An Integrated Energy, Environmental, and Economic Assessment
No full textRemote communities in the Peruvian Amazon struggle to store food and medicines safely because they lack reliable cold chains. This capstone examines whether sustainable refrigeration can improve health outcomes and livelihoods in this context. Three refrigeration pathways were compared: solar-powered compression systems (Amped EasyFreeze), propane absorption, and grid-tied compressors, across three use cases: vaccine storage, fish freezing, and flash-freezing. A cradle-to-use life cycle analysis assessed energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and net present costs in Ucayali, with collaboration from Star Energy and IDESC. Results show that solar compression units deliver reliable off-grid cooling for clinics and small-scale fisheries with near-zero emissions and competitive long-term costs when battery storage and financing are available. Grid compressors provide the highest efficiency and can support high-throughput flash-freezing where electricity is stable, and carbon intensity is low. Propane units serve as a backup option but face high fuel costs and emissions. Barriers remain, including high up-front solar costs, LPG supply challenges, and limited rural grid reliability. Targeted deployment models, such as pay-as-you-go and cooperative ownership, can mitigate these constraints. This research provides evidence-based recommendations for matching technologies to use cases and contributes to Sustainable Development Goals 3, 7, and 13
Assessing Family Policy and Child Wellbeing Outcomes Through an OECD Lens: A Detailed and Comprehensive Comparative Analysis of Canada with two Nordic Welfare States
No full textA growing body of research highlights the critical role of family and child policy in shaping child well-being outcomes. While many high-income countries have made substantial progress in these areas, Canada continues to underperform on several international indicators related to child development and wellbeing. A comprehensive comparative analysis with these countries provides an opportunity to identify gaps in Canada’s current approach and offer evidenceinformed recommendations to strengthen its family support system.
Building on this objective, this capstone project offers a comparative, descriptive analysis of family policy and child well-being outcomes in Canada, Finland, and Sweden. The analysis uses OECD data to examine social expenditures on family benefits and core areas of family policy, including parental leave, early childhood education and care (ECEC), child maintenance, taxbenefit neutrality, and cash transfers. These policies are assessed alongside a range of indicators reflecting children’s material conditions, physical health, cognitive development, and socialemotional well-being.The study found significant weaknesses in Canada’s current policy configuration relative to the two Nordic nations, ranging from low in-kind expenditure and a sharply income-tested Canada Child Benefit (CCB) to gaps in parental leave access for same-sex and adoptive families, fragmented ECEC and child maintenance systems, and a less neutral tax-benefit system. While outcome data were limited in some areas, the available results suggest Canada is performing comparatively poorly in cognitive development and social-emotional well-being outcomes, with greater variation observed among vulnerable populations. To address these challenges, the report highlights the importance of expanding public investment in early childhood services, strengthening parental leave design to promote inclusivity and gender equity, and reforming cash benefits to provide more consistent support throughout childhood. Together, these reforms can help Canada move toward a more integrated and inclusive family policy system
Where Histories Meet: Indigenous and Settler Encounters in the Toronto Area
No full textWhere Histories Meet traces the histories of the Toronto region’s Indigenous peoples and their relations with settlers, focusing on the period from the colonial treaties of the 1780s to the Indian Act of 1876. Created in consultation with five local First Nations, this groundbreaking study brings archival records, oral memory, and the voices of Indigenous Elders and knowledge keepers into respectful dialogue to understand the colonial dynamics that still structure Indigenous-Canadian relationships today.
Beginning with a deep history of Indigenous presence in the region, Victoria Freeman explores the significance of the Toronto Carrying Place portage route and how treaties and changes to the land through agriculture, logging, milling, and settlement impacted local Indigenous Nations. She reveals how the building of Yonge Street facilitated government and missionary attempts to transform Indigenous peoples into Christian farmers and how immigration and Indigenous dispossession were fundamentally linked.
Freeman highlights the creative ways that Indigenous communities sought to resist, subvert, or adapt to increasing government control, even as they were increasingly isolated on small reserves. She explores the differing interpretations among local First Nations regarding past conflicts and agreements that profoundly shape present-day struggles over land claims, consultation, and revenue-sharing.
Where Histories Meet tells the stories of individual people, their families, and their wider networks, revealing the interconnections between Indigenous peoples and settlers in the fur trade, warfare, treaty-making, missionization, and governance. Freeman presents the past in its full complexity, without homogenizing Indigenous or settler experiences or perspectives
Full waveform inversion and uncertainty quantification for robust subsurface monitoring in the energy transition
No full textFull-waveform inversion (FWI) is a powerful method for estimating subsurface properties that govern seismic wave propagation, and it is increasingly recognized as a key technology in the global energy transition. Despite its potential, the practical deployment of FWI is hindered by several factors, for example, the limited subsurface illumination imposed by acquisition geometry, the influence of noise, and non-repeatability across repeated seismic surveys in geo-monitoring with FWI. These challenges reduce both the resolution and the reliability of FWI results, ultimately limiting confidence in model interpretation. In this thesis, I present approaches for addressing such issues and mitigating their impact, thereby improving the robustness and applicability of FWI for energy-transition-related monitoring and characterization tasks. Seismic-while-drilling (SWD) is a well-established technique that is widely discussed in geothermal-related applications. This technique can offer a promising opportunity to en-hance FWI by providing unique and transmissive ray paths during drilling, and thus can improve subsurface illumination and enrich FWI models. Conversely, FWI can supply SWD with auxiliary subsurface images that support real-time monitoring of the drilling process. An additional need during drilling is the continuous monitoring of drill-bit positions and drill-bit–rock interactions, which could be incorporated into the FWI framework as additional inversion variables. In this thesis, I propose novel approaches to integrate source-related unknowns into FWI and develop algorithms capable of jointly estimating source properties and subsurface physical models. Using this framework, I investigate how the additional ray paths from SWD can improve FWI results and how FWI can, in turn, be used to estimate drill-bit source characteristics in SWD applications. Due to the inherent nonlinearity of FWI, the resulting models carry a substantial degree of uncertainty. This uncertainty becomes even more pronounced in time-lapse FWI, which is increasingly recognized as a vital tool for geophysical monitoring. The amplified uncertainty poses a significant challenge for accurately quantifying temporal variations in subsurface models. I integrate two advanced yet computationally efficient uncertainty quantification approaches into the time-lapse FWI framework. One of them is from the sample-based family, and the other is from the variational inference realm. Using synthetic experiments with varying acquisition geometries and noise levels in the time-lapse seismic surveys, I evaluate and compare the performance of these two methods. Based on these comparisons, I provide recommendations regarding their practicality and applicability in realistic monitoring scenarios. Finally, I develop a 3D FWI framework for delineating more spatial changes in the sub-surface. Compared to 2D approaches, 3D FWI incorporates more realistic wave physics, enabling an improved representation of subsurface changes over time. I validate this frame-work through numerical experiments designed using a widely studied time-lapse dataset. In addition, I extend the targeted nullspace shuttle method to 3D FWI to suppress inversion artifacts arising from non-repeatability in time-lapse seismic surveys, and thus reduce the challenges in the interpretation. The results demonstrate the strong potential for achieving reliable 3D time-lapse FWI under realistic and relatively sparse acquisition constraints
Predicting Artificial Turf Stiffness using Wearable Sensors and Machine Learning
No full textArtificial turf stiffness affects performance and injury risk, but current testing devices are costly, inefficient, and limited in coverage. This thesis developed and validated a wearable sensor and machine learning system to predict turf stiffness as a
practical alternative. Five turf surfaces with distinct stiffness levels were tested with 50 athletes performing walking, running, and jumping. Shoe-mounted IMUs and pressure insoles captured biomechanical data. Machine learning models, including an ensemble of Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Gradient Boosting, as well as a 1D-CNN, were evaluated with Leave-One-Subject-Out cross-validation and validated on a professional field. The walking movement proved to contain the most valuable information for prediction performance and was used solely for final modelling. The ensemble achieved the highest performance, classifying five stiffness levels with 74.0 ± 9.1% accuracy and 99.8 ± 0.1% adjacent class accuracy. Regression models predicted continuous stiffness values with good fit (R² = 0.836 ± 0.085). The 1D-CNN reached 64 ± 5.1% accuracy, showing moderate generalization compared to feature-based models. Generalization testing on McMahon Stadium’s professional field confirmed strong agreement with gold-standard devices, with 96.5% of trials correctly classified and regression outputs closely matching mechanical measurements. Athlete surveys revealed inconsistent perception of stiffness, highlighting the need for objective monitoring. Wearable-based machine learning enables accurate, scalable, and cost-effective prediction of turf stiffness, providing a practical tool for real-time monitoring and field managemen
Bridging Energy Security and Climate Goals in Oil and Gas Countries: (A Legal Roadmap for Expanding LNG as a Low-Carbon Marine Fuel)
No full textAs international climate policies become more stringent, the maritime sector faces increasing pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A key obstacle is regulatory arbitrage, where strict environmental rules in regions such as the European Union drive shipping operations toward jurisdictions with weaker enforcement. This undermines the effectiveness of global climate objectives. The Persian Gulf region must balance its dependence on fossil fuels with international decarbonization obligations. As a leading exporter of oil and gas, it needs to maintain energy security while advancing toward low-carbon transitions. LNG presents a practical opportunity to reduce maritime emissions, but achieving this requires coherent and enforceable legal frameworks. This thesis employs doctrinal and comparative legal methods to analyze inconsistencies between maritime and energy law. It recommends the creation of regional legal pathways and governance frameworks in the Persian Gulf to regulate LNG as a marine fuel, close enforcement gaps, and align national laws with global climate commitments
Spin Lifetime Mechanisms in Erbium-Doped Fiber for Quantum Network Applications
No full textErbium-doped silica fiber (EDF) is evaluated as a telecom-band quantum-memory platform via spectral hole burning at millikelvin temperatures. We map spin-population decay versus temperature (about 7 to 2400 mK) and magnetic field (0 to 200 mT), revealing two relaxation components above about 80 mK and, at about 7 mK, a third, ultra-slow component enabling more than 9 h population storage under optimized field. The relative component weights are nearly condition-independent, consistent with distinct ion classes. A single phenomenological model, combining Er-Er flip-flops, a TLS-mediated direct process with field and temperature scaling, and a Raman-like term, fits all data using shared exponents while allowing mechanism weights to vary between classes. We also observe a Lorentzian-to-Gaussian hole-shape crossover below about 80 mK, pointing to changing broadening mechanisms. These results establish long-lived spin-population storage in standard EDF and delineate a practical operating window. They motivate denser measurements across the below-80 mK crossover, isotope-resolved tests, and complementary optical-coherence studies