Washington University Medical Center
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Dobbs before Dobbs: Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, and the Public Rehearsal of Gendered Privacy
Get PDFThis thesis argues that a gendered double standard for privacy emerges during Clarence Thomas’s and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings — a logic Thomas and Kavanaugh later codify when limiting women’s reproductive rights in the 2022 Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’ s Health Organization. While some critics have previously explored the way privacy operates in Thomas’s hearings, scholars have written far less about how the public and private spheres get invoked in Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. Using critical discourse analysis, I examine Thomas’s and Kavanaugh’s construction of privacy during both hearings, and investigate how Thomas’s and Kavanaugh’s obfuscated rhetoric during their confirmation hearings WUSTL_OS_Contributor_License_Undergrad_20240722.docx Page 3 of 2 rehearsed the logic that they ultimately used to codify gendered privacy in Dobbs. In the wake of Dobbs, women face violations of sexual privacy, digital data privacy, and medical privacy, consequences that follow Thomas’s and Kavanaugh’s strategic claims and evasions during their confirmation hearings. Highlighting the shifting gendered logics of privacy from performances during both confirmation hearings foregrounds Thomas’s and Kavanaugh’s unsurprising decisions to ultimately revoke women’s right to privacy and autonomy in Dobbs
GO: The Race Against Resignation
Get PDFHow do we go about deriving meaning in the information age, when culture has replaced society, decentering religion? My art practice seeks to answer this with storytelling, specifically in how archetypes can connect mythology, history, and personal narrative to build a functional personal mythology. Through painting fantastical portraits collapsing the compositions of Christian iconography with contemporary motifs, the installations tell strange and humorous narratives. My thesis piece focuses on the marathon, in the context of the original myth of Pheidippides, the common misconceptions about this myth, the infamous 1904 St. Louis Olympic marathon, the 1978 Boston Marathon, and my experience training for the 2025 St. Louis GO! Race. My work typically does include some aspect of personal narrative, and while I consider this essential to the process, the final piece is meant to stand without it, open to interpretation. In this project, that aim was put to the test. After experimenting with the modularity of my works and sustaining an injury that inhibited me from completing the race, it was only through looking back on the strange, funny, and energetic piece as something I was no longer part of that I was able to recontextualize what I had experienced and find a new message within the marathon
Adler, Asterios, & Maus
Get PDFAdler, Asterios, & Maus examines how small visual decisions in illustrations make up a language. And when the dialect changes from the predominant one in a graphic novel, something novel happens. A scene or specific quality gets the spotlight. It also explores how these visuals tie to Adlerian psychology and El Refaeian ideas on autobiography, behavior, and emotion. It identifies through two interesting grpahic novels- Asterios Polyp by David Mazzuchelli and Maus by Art Spiegelman- how these ideas can be used to understand ourselves. It intensely zeroes in on specific moments of visual language shift. Some of these change range from simple elements like color or line weight or more complex elements like visual metaphors and tropes. Asterios Polyp and Maus make interesting and truly innovative decisions that add nuance to already compelling stories. We\u27ll also dabble in and apply a scholarly analysis as we describe the perceived emotions and behaviors of characters.
Ultimately, I claim that creative close looking and engagement with layered, emotional characters in these two graphic novels provides us with an avenue to process our emotions. Mazzuchelli, Spiegelman, El Refaie, and Adler implore us to look closely, move slowly, and make intentional decisions in our lives
Illuminating Design: Developing a Wand Workshop
Get PDFThe goal of the independent study is to develop a workshop that educates users on how to solder a basic electronic system to develop their own light-up wands and work on a mechanical lamp project. The workshop developed in this independent study includes various functional prototyping aspects to consider, such as tolerances, material to material interactions, and design for manufacturability. The background involved conducting online research focused on battery configurations and wand designs. This research identified that the most effective method for illuminating the LED wand was to arrange the AAA batteries in series, and the design used for the final wand was made as a single body with a cover to better access the electronics while keeping the circuitry in place. In addition to the workshop development, a mechanical lamp prototype was developed. Ultimately, the independent study culminated in the delivery of the workshop itself, aimed at assessing the effectiveness of conveying soldering instructions in an engaging and educational format. The workshop itself details various information regarding soldering, electronic components, and component interactions. Participants are then provided with the opportunity to apply the knowledge gained to fabricate their own custom wand from scratch. In addition to the wand workshop, the beginnings of a mechanical lamp were developed as a starting point for the long-term project
Evaluating the Impact of Initial Injury Severity on Post-Traumatic Joint Contracture in a Rat Elbow Model
Get PDFPost-traumatic joint contracture (PTJC) is a common complication following elbow injuries, often leading to stiffness, pain, and impaired limb function. A simple elbow dislocation model in Long-Evans rats has been validated to replicate clinical PTJC. However, real-world elbow trauma frequently involves more complex injuries such as chronic instability or fracture dislocation. The objective of this study was to evaluate outcomes of two newly developed, more severe elbow injuries in vivo for the first time. A three-tiered injury model of increasing severity was implemented: Tier I (simple dislocation), Tier II (instability), and Tier III (fracture dislocation). Mechanical hyperalgesia thresholds, forelimb strength, gait, and elbow range of motion were assessed. Results showed that all injury groups exhibited significantly reduced mechanical hyperalgesia thresholds and forelimb strength ratios compared to controls, but no significant differences were observed between the three injury groups. These findings suggest that despite increased initial injury severity, PTJC outcomes were largely similar among dislocation, instability, and fracture injury models. Limitations include small sample sizes and ongoing data collection for gait, ROM, and post-mortem analysis. This study is an important step in understanding how different injury mechanisms contribute to PTJC progression and may inform future clinical strategies for prevention and treatment
Josephson Junctions: Fabrication and Applications for the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment
Get PDFThe observation of axions could revolutionize the world of physics. Through microwave frequency cavity readout of the photons associated with these axions, the ADMX project at WashU utilizes multiple different forms of the Josephson junction (JJ), a superconductive circuit element. The physics behind the JJ are essential to understanding its operation for resonant cavity readout in addition to parametric amplification. Parametric amplifiers produced using JJs can approach the signal-to-noise ratio set by quantum mechanics, and prove essential for the amplification chain used by the ADMX experiment for axionic detection. The limits of these amplifiers are set by the noise tuning source used for calibration. This tuning device can be used to solve for the intrinsic gain and added noise present within the amplifier, which defines the effectiveness of the amplifier. Multiple models for a tuning device, based upon different models of noise, will be analyzed. Also discussed is the fabrication behind the tunnel junction-based noise source, in addition to the Dolan bridge procedure and corresponding physics used for design of experiment and parameter manipulation
AI Ethics, Law, and Policy
Get PDFAI technologies promise many benefits, but they can also have significant negative impacts on human health, safety, well-being, and fundamental rights. This chapter explores the different governance tools that have been considered for guiding developments in AI in socially beneficial ways, examining the relevance of ethics, law, and policy. Each of these approaches offer tools to address these concerns; however, each has limitations, and none provides a complete solution in itself. Statements of ethical principles can articulate high-level values and goals to guide behavior but are usually quite vague and difficult to operationalize. They also lack any enforcement mechanism. In contrast, legal rules are enforceable through court action and offer a way to compensate those suffering actual harms. However, the complexity and opacity of AI poses challenges to legal liability regimes by making it difficult to parse questions of causation and culpability. In addition, legal rules may not keep up with the rapid evolution of AI technologies. Policy tools are more flexible and forward-looking, and can help to anticipate and prevent harms, but may be ineffective if they lack robust standards or fail to require meaningful accountability from those who develop and deploy AI tools. Because each strategy has strengths and limitations, preventing social harms from the application of AI will require leveraging all three types of tools in complementary ways
From Kent State to L.A.: Echoes of a Dark Past in Protest Crackdown
No full textTrump\u27s decision to deploy the National Guard against anti-deportation protesters is sadly familiar after other attacks on the First Amendment
Engineering Dendritic Cells with a Chimeric Antigen Receptor for Enhanced Antitumor Function
No full textImmunotherapies, such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cells and immune checkpoint blockades (ICB), have transformed hematologic malignancy treatment options but have not had similar impacts on solid tumors (1, 2). These treatments are limited to finite target antigens or require a patient’s own primed antitumor T-cell population, respectively (3, 4). To overcome these limitations, we engineered conventional type 1 dendritic cells (DCs) with an antitumor binding, toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) signaling CAR to harness the DCs ability to cross prime a broad repertoire of antitumor CD8 T-cells. In vitro, the CAR-DC lead to increased tumor uptake, DC maturation, and cross-priming of tumor-reactive CD8 T-cells. CAR-DCs lead to complete rejection of an orthotopic solid tumor model with heterogenous CAR target expression. The antitumor T-cell population from CAR-DC treated mice showed an improved T-cell response against more than one endogenous tumor antigen, increased activation, and more robust persistence of tumor-reactive clones