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A Content Analysis of Engineering LibGuides, Research in Progress
No full textLibGuides, a content management system provided by the Springshare company, is a commonly used tool for aggregating library resources by topic. While their use is practically ubiquitous in academic libraries, the content, layout and pedagogical approach of these guides varies widely. Before making a concerted effort to update and improve the engineering LibGuides at our university, we are conducting a content analysis to discover current trends in the composition of engineering LibGuides at other R1 institutions. In this work in progress, we have started with an analysis of the Chemical Engineering guides to gain insight into their contents and make decisions to guide the further data collection of our entire data set. In addition to surveying the specific content included in these guides, we will analyze how it is presented pedagogically; whether it is user-centered or learner-centered. Our study considers LibGuides from 50 R1 institutions, including the top 20 from the US News and World Report 2023-2024 Best Engineering Schools and a random sample of 30 other institutions. Each guide analyzed was saved as a PDF in the summer of 2024 and uploaded to NVivo for coding of the layout, content, and pedagogy used in the guide. This presentation will discuss our findings thus far and how we will use this pilot analysis to move forward with the full analysis; in particular, the goal is to optimize the coding process and address any issues that arise and adjust our study accordingly. By examining the pedagogical approach behind these guides we can identify areas where they can be better aligned to meet the needs of our students, ensuring that resources are not only accessible but also supportive of their learning experience. This addresses Equitable Access to Information and Library Services and Transforming Libraries, which are both ALA Key Action Areas. In addition, by using a systematic method of analysis we are not allowing our personal beliefs to interfere with our research results
A Dual-Cup Reverse Shoulder Replacement Improves Impingement-Free Motion
No full textBackground Advances in reverse shoulder arthroplasty (RSA) design have improved functional outcomes, which approach those of the anatomic total shoulder arthroplasty (aTSA) in certain patients. However, restoration of motion, especially functional internal rotation, remains a concern following RSA. A novel dual-cup RSA design1 was developed to improve impingement-free range of motion. The passive motion of the dual-cup RSA is compared to that of a commercially-available RSA design in a cadaveric model. Methods , Five fresh-frozen cadaveric upper extremity specimens were included in the study. The scapula was rigidly fixed, allowing for isolation of glenohumeral joint motion. The novel dual-cup RSA design was tested with and without a flanged component. The dual-cup has an outer diameter of 36 mm, articulates with a 32+4 mm glenosphere, and provides 6 mm of glenoid lateralization. A 32+4 mm lateralized glenosphere and a 36+6 mm lateralized glenosphere served as controls. Measurements of motion were performed using an electromagnetic tracking device and modes of impingement were recorded. An Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test was performed with a post-hoc Tukey test to compare the relative changes in range of motion among groups. Results The dual-cup (without flange) design improved external rotation (ER) at 0° abduction by 20.9° and improved IR by 11.5° compared to the 32+4 mm control (p Discussion The dual-cup design improves all rotational motions relative to control models except internal rotation with an abduction angle reaching or exceeding 45°. The dual-cup design improves impingement free motion, including functional internal rotation, without additional lateralization in this study. The dual-dup with flange design eliminates impingement of the humeral cup on the glenoid neck without significantly affecting most motions relative to control models.https://doi.org/10.1053/j.sart.2024.12.00
Investigating The Role of E.Coli Fumarase In Bacteriophage Replication
No full textBacteriophages are viruses that specifically infect and hijack Escherichia coli's metabolic processes to proliferate, ultimately destroying the host cell in the process. The Tricarboxylic Acid Cycle (TCA Cycle) is a multi-step aerobic enzyme-catalyzed pathway that occurs in the cytoplasm of E. coli and is responsible for generating the electron-carrier molecules NADH and FADH2 which are crucial for generating ATP for the cell in future steps of cellular respiration. The E. coli genes, sdhA, fumA, fumB, fumC and mdh, encode enzymes that catalyze different reactions that are necessary for the TCA cycle.
We hypothesize that the removal of these genes would negatively impact the growth rate and ATP levels of E. coli and, as a result, inhibit or slow the replication of bacteriophage. To determine the effects of the removal of these genes, enzyme assays, comparative growth curves of the knockout strains, and plaque assays of bacteriophage replication were measured and investigated. Furthermore, we quantified the knockout’s effects by collecting lysis curves as well as performing an ATP assay using bioluminescence.First-Year Innovation and Research Experience (FIRE) at the University of Maryland, College Par
Bridging Gaps: Creating Workshops for STEM Librarians at the University of Maryland
No full textSTEM Librarians face unique challenges serving their constituents, and many students and current STEM librarians feel unprepared to address them. Past research suggests that many of these challenges come from a lack of education in their subject specialty, a need to be interdisciplinary across the sciences and research methods, and not having the proper context for issues in STEM. As an MLIS student interested in serving the sciences, I was curious to know if those issues were being addressed by the STEM Librarians at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD). This project sought to identify and address those challenges through a series of interviews and workshops.
All six librarians employed at UMD’s STEM Library were interviewed in-person and via Zoom about their educational and work experiences, and the communities they serve. They expressed a wide variety of needs; some needs, like those surrounding open data and data visualization, were already being addressed by other departments on campus. However, other needs, such as improving outreach and engagement techniques and improving faculty understanding of student use of artificial intelligence, were not already being directly addressed.
Taking this information, under the guidance of Lindsay Carpenter from Research Education, I developed two workshops: the first is aimed at understanding and teaching STEM faculty about how to talk to their students about artificial intelligence. STEM faculty have a unique relationship with artificial intelligence but, according to their Librarians, do not understand how their students are engaging with it. This workshop seeks to bridge that gap for faculty so they may better understand how to talk to their students about this new technology. The second workshop brings subject specialists at the University of Maryland, College Park together to hear from panelists about their outreach experiences, in-person at the STEM Library. The panel includes a mixture of librarians and a representative from the Libraries’ Communications department
Cell-Free Fluorescent Riboswitch Biosensor to Detect CA-125 in Blood
No full textEndometriosis is a debilitating chronic illness characterized by the appearance of uterine tissue outside of the uterus, primarily within pelvic regions such as the ovaries or fallopian tubes, which can cause severe pain, pregnancy complications, and infertility in severe stages. Diagnosing endometriosis is only certain with laparoscopic surgery, an invasive procedure that is often inaccessibly expensive for patients, which can leave those with the condition undiagnosed and suffering for years. Due to necessity of minimally-invasive, cheaper diagnostics for endometriosis, it has been hypothesized that a biosensor targeting CA-125—a protein biomarker that correlates with the presence of endometriosis and ovarian cancer—could be used as a screening tool for endometriosis. In this study, we constructed and assembled a riboswitch-based biosensor with a fluorescent protein intended for use within a cell-free expression system (CFES) to detect for heightened levels of CA-125 in whole blood samples; tested in a CFES, fluorescence was inconsistent across samples with and without CA-125: a sample with the riboswitch & 41 nM CA-125 exhibited negligible difference compared to a sample with only the riboswitch, while a sample with the riboswitch & 410 nM CA-125 exhibited the lowest fluorescence
QUANTUM ERROR CORRECTION FOR LOGICAL FERMIONIC AND BOSONIC SYSTEMS
No full textRobust storage and manipulation of quantum information in realistic quantum devices remains one of the central challenges in realizing practical quantum computation. To resolve this problem, the quantum error correction (QEC) is proposed as a technique to perform robust encoding and operations in noisy and realistic quantum devices. In the quantum realm, two fundamentally different types of particles—fermions and bosons—exhibit distinct behaviors. This dissertation explores two directions of QEC tailored to these particle types: (1) encoding logical fermionic modes into physical qubits, and (2) homological encoding of logical bosonic systems into physical bosonic systems.
The first part is about encoding logical fermionic systems into physical qubit systems, a process known as fermion-to-qubit mapping. These mappings arise in a variety of contexts, including condensed matter physics, high-energy physics, and quantum information more recently. While many encoding schemes have been proposed over the past two decades, the relationships among them have remained unclear. Using the tools from quantum error correction and topological orders, it can be shown that various known fermion-to-qubit mappings in two dimensions are equivalent up to Clifford deformations. This work is based on Ref.~\cite{chen2022equivalence}.
The second part is about bosonic codes, that encodes logical bosonic systems with finite and infinite dimensional Hilbert space into physical bosonic systems with infinite dimensional Hilbert space. The first half of this section investigates connections between two important bosonic systems: quantum oscillators and quantum rotors. By compactify a real line , a logical rotor can be encoded in a physical oscillator which corresponds to a partial Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) encoding. Conversely, the Fock basis of an oscillator (indexed by ) can be embedded into the angular momentum space of a rotor (indexed by ). These two embeddings allow us to unify and relate various bosonic codes, including the GKP codes on rotors and oscillators, homological rotor codes, and rotation-symmetric bosonic codes. This work is presented in Ref.~\cite{xu2024multimode}.
The second half of this section addresses the open problem of systematically constructing bosonic quantum codes, which is more challenging than for qubit systems due to the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. By generalizing homology to integer homology, a family of bosonic quantum codes, called tiger codes, is introduced. The codewords of tiger codes are continuous superpositions of bosonic coherent states, forming stripe patterns in the phase space torus. The tiger code framework encompasses a variety of known bosonic codes, such as two-component cat, pair-cat, dual-rail, two-mode binomial, various bosonic repetition codes, and -like quantum codes. Moreover, several tools from -homology can be extended to the integer domain, including hypergraph-product codes, which are widely used to construct low-density parity-check codes. Using the hypergraph-product over integer, a topological bosonic code is constructed, which is not a concatenation between few-mode bosonic code and qubit topological code. This work is based on Ref.~\cite{xu2024letting}
COLONIA MAXIMILIANO: A NEW BARRIO IN EL SALVADOR
No full textThis thesis explores designing a modern barrio in San Miguel, El Salvador, through vernacular architecture. It addresses the urgent housing crisis by proposing sustainable, affordable, and intergenerational housing typologies grounded in cultural identity. The goal is to reduce overcrowding and improve living conditions while adapting traditional Latin American barrio aspects to meet community needs and urban challenges. By using local materials, passive design, and traditional spatial strategies, the project links architectural design with broader urban planning goals. The master plan combines diverse housing types, green spaces, and essential services to support social cohesion and adaptability. This research presents vernacular architecture as a forward-looking, sustainable approach to urban development in San Miguel. El Salvador
Children of a Lesser God
No full textChildren of a Lesser God is a novel-in-progress that traces the past and present of the Traorefamily—new Malian arrivals in the U.S. by way of post-war Algeria—as well as the lives of their
immigrant friends, neighbors, and adversaries. This submission represents the
rst third of the ongoing
project.The included section, titled Ordinary Grief, follows Fatima, the mother, as she loses her sense of self
and descends into loneliness and mental illness; Issa, as he struggles with social isolation; and Mariam,
as she grapples with the cost of assimilation and acceptance into American society. The novel as a
whole follows the Traore children as they lose their mother to immigration-induced suicide, forcing
them to navigate life unmoored—disconnected from both their homeland and the woman who once
anchored them
Invention and Sentiment in the Landscape Paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin
No full textThis dissertation examines the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). These artists, successful and admired during and long after their lifetimes, spent most of their careers in Rome where they painted for local patrons and for clients across Europe including popes, kings, cardinals, and princes. Claude and Poussin knew each other for decades, went on sketching trips together, and shared some patrons in common. While these artists appear together in previous scholarship, this dissertation is the first in-depth comparative study of them as innovators in the genre of landscape. This analysis affords a new understanding of their artistic intentions and contributions.I compare the circumstances around the creation of Poussin’s and Claude’s paintings—their artistic training, their sources, their patrons, their processes—and connect these to the operation of poetic conceits and sentiment in their paintings. In considering how Poussin and Claude painted for their most consequential patrons, I demonstrate that these artists deliberately crafted their paintings to achieve specific rhetorical and emotional effects. While elucidating Claude’s and Poussin’s significant differences, I also demonstrate areas of convergence between them, and I propose points of mutual influence, especially around inflection points in their oeuvres. I show the relevance of a variety of ancient and early modern sources for Poussin and Claude, including the pastoral poetry of Virgil and Ovid and of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers Torquato Tasso, Giambattista Marino, and Jacopo Sannazaro, which had laid the foundation for the expression of sentiment in landscape settings. Tasso and Marino elevated the use of poetic conceits, which Poussin made central in his own work, and which I establish were also important for Claude
Ethyl Cellulose-Ethanol-Benzoporphyrin Derivative-Lipiodol (ECE-BPD-Lipiodol) an Image-Guided Therapeutic Formulation for Localized and Locally Advanced Cancer
No full textLocalized and locally advanced cancers (LLACs) represent a critical stage for therapeutic intervention, offering curative potential and prevention of metastatic progression. However, current treatment modalities face significant limitations due to anatomical constraints, organ-level restrictions, and patient-specific factors, necessitating innovative approaches. This work presents the development and optimization of Ethyl Cellulose-Ethanol-Benzoporphyrin Derivative-Lipiodol (ECE-BPD-Lipiodol), a novel image-guided therapeutic formulation that integrates ethanol ablation and photodynamic therapy (PDT) with advanced CT imaging capabilities. Building on the previously established ECE-BPD formulation, Lipiodol, a radiopaque agent, was incorporated to enable precise 3D visualization and monitoring of therapeutic depots, addressing the limitations of fluorescence imaging. Systematic optimization identified that a 6% ethyl cellulose (EC, w/w) concentration and a 25% Lipiodol (v/v) ratio are ideal for maintaining sol-gel transition, localized therapeutic retention, and sufficient radiopacity for CT imaging. Characterization studies confirmed the formulation’s PDT activation potential, robust imaging capabilities, and therapeutic retention properties. ECE-BPD-Lipiodol represents a promising innovation for advancing locoregional therapies and improving outcomes in LLACs