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Safeguarding Personal Information Collected Through Signals Intelligence (June 30, 2023).
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TLISI 2023: Helping Students in Distress
No full textDuring the 2020–2021 school year, more than 60% of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem, according to the Healthy Minds Study, which collects data from 373 campuses nationwide. In another national survey, almost three quarters of students reported moderate or severe psychological distress.
This increase in demand has challenged institutions to think holistically and take a multifaceted approach to supporting students. Students are increasingly relying on professors for mental health assistance. Faculty can play an important role in student mental health by acknowledging mental health challenges and promoting and being liaisons to support resources, which challenges long-standing perceptions that it’s “not part of the job”.
A new report found that a majority of faculty are eager to support students in mental and emotional health distress, and welcome the guidance from their institutions on how to best help them.
The goal of this workshop is to provide guidance for faculty on how to support students in mental health distress. More specifically, this workshop will help faculty to recognize signs of mental health distress, feel comfortable to discuss mental health issues with students, know how to set boundaries, be familiar with mental health resources on campus, and appropriately connect students to further help
Tweeting Advice and Consent: How Congress Talks About Supreme Court Nominations and Legitimacy Online
No full textM.P.P.The Supreme Court’s role in American politics has become increasingly salient over the last several years. The relationship between the Court and Congress has always been complex, relying on mutual dependence and belief in the judicial branch’s legitimacy, but Congress’s role in confirmations has been a flashpoint in recent times. This paper considers how Congress navigates its duty of advice and consent through the way they communicate with the public. Using all tweets from sitting members of Congress during the confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barret and Ketanji Brown Jackson, I examine how members champion or question the legitimacy of the Court, the nomination process, and the nominee herself. By coding each tweet for its legitimacy-related content, I find that both parties play a role in questioning the Court’s legitimacy, even when the ideological balance of the Court is not at stake in the nomination. Additionally, the way the parties question legitimacy is different. These findings have implications for the study of Congress, the Supreme Court, parties, and polarization
Brain Activity in Children and Adolescents With and Without Math Learning Disability
No full textPh.D.Math disability (MD) or developmental dyscalculia is a prevalent learning disability (LD) that affects children’s ability to learn basic arithmetic skills. A variety of factors have been shown to support math learning, including numerical magnitude processing, which is impaired in MD and may represent a core deficit that leads to poor math ability. However, it is not known how the parietal and frontal brain regions subserving arithmetic and magnitude processing are related to one another and to successful math learning in those with LDs. Additionally, a small body of research suggests that MD may stem from a broader impairment to the dorsal visual stream which affects both visual motion processing and math ability. In this dissertation, I present two studies, which address the hypothesis of a dorsal visual stream deficit in MD and the hypothesis that arithmetic and magnitude processing are linked in the brain in those with low math ability. First, I demonstrated that brain activity in area V5/MT during visual motion processing does not correlate with math ability nor does it differ between children/adolescents with MD and controls. Secondly, I assessed brain activity during both arithmetic and magnitude processing before and after a successful math intervention in children/adolescents with LDs. The results showed that activity during arithmetic and magnitude processing overlaps in parietal and frontal regions, correlates with behavioral performance, and jointly decreases in medial frontal lobe in response to intervention. Together, these results indicate that children/adolescents with MD do not have a broad dorsal visual stream deficit but do show a relationship between arithmetic and magnitude processing which is related to the mechanism of math learning. Through these findings we shed light on the factors that are critical in supporting math skills and the successful treatment of math disability
Teaching Anglophone Literature to Non-Native Students: Challenges and Solutions
No full textM.A.Teaching English-language novels to non-native speakers poses unique difficulties that traditional teaching approaches cannot address. These challenges include not only language barriers but also the need to analyze unfamiliar literature and culture, which students may not have been introduced to in their prior education. As a result, students are expected to memorize and repeat knowledge without developing their literary skills. This thesis investigates these challenges and the limitations of the traditional approach, emphasizing an alternative student-centered, reflexive learning method. It suggests using Toni Morrison's novel Beloved as a primary text, which can provide non-native students with a better understanding of the cultural and social contexts that often shape literature. Through critical analysis of characters’ cultural logic and elements that shape social structures, students can develop their skills and engage meaningfully with the material
The Effects of International Monetary Fund Programs on Food Security
No full textM.P.P.Since 2020, three compounding crises, namely the economic downturn from the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have disrupted global food systems, undoing previous progress towards the ‘Zero Hunger’ Sustainable Development Goal and leading to increasing food insecurity. The 2022 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World Report estimates that 2.3 billion people were moderately or severely food insecure in 2021. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has joined several international organizations in issuing urgent calls for action to address the global food crisis, offering policy advice and financing support to this end. With growing literature showing that IMF interventions can have unintended negative consequences in borrowing countries, I set out to investigate the effects of IMF programs on food security with the objective of generating empirical evidence to inform policy as the world navigates through the food crisis in the coming years. Using various time and country fixed effects regression models, I found a robust, statistically significant, negative relationship between IMF programs and food security. While it is not possible to determine how much of the worsening food security can be attributed to the IMF program itself and not to the underlying economic crisis the IMF was called upon to address, my results have three central policy implications: they underscore the importance of sound macroeconomic governance frameworks and policies to achieve stability at the macro level without compromising well-being at the micro level; they attest to the already recognized need to adapt food systems to make them more resilient to external shocks; and they reiterate popular demands to continue rethinking and redesigning IMF interventions to minimize unintended negative consequences and protect the most vulnerable sectors of society
Epigenetic Regulation in Cancers: PRMT1-Driven Development of Gemcitabine Resistance through Modulation of MAFF/BACH1 Chromatin Dynamics in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC)
No full textPh.D.Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is associated with severe prognosis due to late diagnosis and therapeutic resistance. Here we show that PDAC cells undergo progressive reprogramming of the global epigenetic landscape during the process of acquiring chemoresistance. Through an epigenetic inhibitor screen, we identified Protein Arginine methyltransferase 1 (PRMT1) as a central driver of chemoresistance in PDAC. Genetic or pharmacological inhibition of PRMT1 impaired adaptive epigenetic reprogramming, sensitized PDAC cells to Gemcitabine and other commonly used chemo drugs, and delayed the development of acquired resistance both in vitro and in vivo. Mechanistically, we find that PRMT1, through its enzymatic activity, limits the accumulation of small bZIP transcription factor MAFF in the nucleus, and the assembly of chromatin-bound MAFF/BACH1 heterodimeric complexes following Gemcitabine treatment. Genetic silencing of MAFF heightened the resistance of PDAC cells to Gemcitabine in the presence or absence of PRMT1 inhibitors. Cut&Tag chromatin profiling of H3K27Ac, MAFF and BACH1 suggests a pivotal role for MAFF/BACH1 in orchestrating global epigenetic reprogramming during the course of acquiring Gemcitabine resistance. Supporting the clinical relevance of our findings, predicted PRMT1 and MAFF/BACH1 genes signatures based on our Cut&Tag analysis were able to distinguish Gemcitabine-resistant from Gemcitabine-sensitive PDAC patient-derived xenografts according to expression changes induced by Gemcitabine. Together, our study reveals a novel epigenetic regulatory axis involving PRMT1 and MAFF/BACH1 that modulates Gemcitabine response, which could potentially be exploited for improving therapeutic response in advanced PDAC
