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Journal of African Christian Biography: v. 7, no. 4: Booklet, no cover (A4 format), print-ready
No full textThe full issue of Journal of African Christian Biography: v. 7, no. 4 is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/2144/4524
An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of the lived experiences of eight gay cisgender PK–12 music educators
No full text2025In this study, I examined and described the lived experiences of eight gay music educators teaching in PK–12 public schools in the United States. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), I sought to examine and understand the complexities of participants’ lived experiences and how the participants made meaning of those experiences. Highlighted in this study are the challenges and contexts that gay music educators face within the structures of patriarchal and heteronormative educational environments. Using semi-structured interviews, the participants disclosed how they made meaning of their lived experiences as gay, cisgender males who were also music educators. Using IPA, I elicited from the participants their interpretation of—and perspective on—their personal, professional, and social relationships. I uncovered the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and idiographic effects of working as a music educator in a public school system where White patriarchal and heteronormative values have long predominated. In turn, the examination of the lived experiences of these eight gay music educators is essential for aiding educational policymakers and administrators in shaping policies and practices supportive of a specific minority group while also encouraging the need for the study of other minority groups through this research method
Microwaves for bi-modal neuromodulation: mechanisms and translation
No full text2025Electrical neuromodulation, the current clinical standard, is invasive, expensive, and prone to malfunction. A broad range of electromagnetic waves have been investigated for noninvasive neuromodulation, but existing methods are limited by the tradeoff between penetration depth and spatial precision. Microwaves in the 0.1 – 6 GHz range are widely used for telecommunications and can penetrate to the deep brain. Microwaves have been shown to nonthermally modulate neural activity, but the acute bioeffects remain unclear and under-studied. Additionally, microwaves alone do not provide sufficient spatial precision to modulate target neurons without affecting surrounding tissues. In this thesis, we have developed two miniature microwave resonators – the split-ring resonator (SRR) and the microwave-powered injectable neuromodulation implant (MINI) – which generate enhanced microwave fields with submillimeter spatial precision. With the SRR and the MINI, microwaves at dosages below the safe exposure limit are shown to modulate neuronal activity. First, we employ the microwave resonators to demonstrate bi-modal neuromodulation via thermal and nonthermal mechanisms. Next, using the microwave resonators, we perform electrophysiological recordings of neurons exposed to microwaves to elucidate the differential effects of pulsed and continuous microwaves on neurons. Finally, we demonstrate an application of precision microwave neuromodulation in an in vivo model of epilepsy
Dataset for article: the chemical identification of cochineal production tools in archaeological environments: preservation, degradation, and contamination
No full textA live-cell reporter to track Drosophila innate immunity reveals heterogeneity in NF-κB activation and target gene expression
No full text2025Conserved NF-κB signaling pathways are critical for shaping innate immune responses across species. Yet, we lack a complete understanding of how pathway elements generate diverse responses to varying stimuli. Defining the origins and consequences of this heterogeneity can improve strategies for predicting and managing infection outcomes. Drosophila melanogaster is a powerful model organism for studying innate immunity due to its conservation of key signaling pathways and lack of adaptive immune response masking. In this dissertation, I develop and use live Drosophila S2* reporter cells to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of the IMD innate immune pathway, which responds to Gram-negative bacterial cues and activates the NF-κB transcription factor Relish. I engineer single-cell reporters that simultaneously track Relish and transcription of antimicrobial peptide (AMP) genes under its control. Using this system, I discover distinct categories of Relish spatiotemporal dynamics, governed in part by pre-stimulus cell states, and show that these behaviors predict transcriptional outcomes. I further demonstrate that AMP gene enhancer architecture, particularly the number of κB-binding motifs, tunes transcriptional activity, and that AMP expression exhibits gene-specific burst kinetics. Additional experiments rule out oscillatory signaling and rapid protein turnover as sources of heterogeneity, instead implicating negative feedback regulation. Together, this work reveals that NF-κB signaling and downstream transcription in Drosophila innate immunity are both heterogeneous and tunable. These findings establish a new framework for studying innate immune regulation at single-cell resolution and open avenues for cross-species comparisons of immune strategies
Anticyclotomic Iwasawa invariants and congruences of modular forms
No full text2013The main purpose of this dissertation is to examine how congruences between Hecke eigensystems of modular forms on the unit group of a definite quaternion algebra affect the Iwasawa invariants of their anticyclotomic p-adic L-functions. This work can be regarded as an application of Greenberg-Vatsal and Emerton-Pollack-Weston's ideas on the variation of Iwasawa invariants under congruences to the anticyclotomic setting. As an application, based on Pollack-Weston's generalization of Bertolini-Darmon's work, this work establishes infinitely many new examples of the anticyclotomic main conjecture for modular forms, which are not treated by Skinner-Urban's work. The idea comes from the philosophy of congruences developed by Vatsal, Greenberg-Vatsal, Greenberg, and Emerton-Pollack-Weston. We remark that our setting is more general than that of Skinner-Urban's work in two ways. First, the fixed prime p does not necessarily split in the imaginary quadratic field K. Second, our ramification condition on the residual Galois representations is weaker than Skinner-Urban's one. Note that the second condition allows us to deal with the case of positive mu-invariants
Effects of Telehealth pulmonary rehabilitation on social isolation and quality of life among African American and Hispanic patients with advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
No full text2024BACKGROUND: Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a treatable disease that affects millions of people worldwide. Pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) is a treatment option for COPD patients, post exacerbation, with less than 20% referred due to lack of provider awareness and about 2% overall accessing the program. Socioeconomic barriers such as lack of insurance coverage, transportation costs, and access to transportation further prevent access to PR. African American and Hispanic individuals are more socioeconomically disadvantaged than non-Hispanic Whites. These disadvantages lead to poor health which ultimately leads to poorer quality of life and increased social isolation. Telehealth Pulmonary Rehabilitation (TelePR) is one way to bypass certain socioeconomic barriers presented with PR. Studies show that TelePR improves quality of life (QoL). Given the limited research on how TelePR affects social isolation (SI), we sought to explore this relationship, as group exercise during TelePR may help decrease SI. Implementation and maintenance of TelePR is important as it provides a way to bypass some barriers from standard pulmonary rehabilitation (SPR) while improving QoL and decreasing SI.Goal: To assess whether adopting a telehealth PR program can reduce SI and improve QoL among African American and Hispanic individuals with moderate to severe COPD.
METHODS: This study re-analyzed data from Polo et al., (2023) and Hajizadeh et al., (2021) through the lens of SI and QoL. The first step was to complete the onboarding process (taking CITI training, HIPAA training, and Northwell Health orientation) in order to be added to the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research Institutional Review Board (IRB). Participants were recruited from 9 hospitals in the New York region and randomized into the TelePR arm or SPR arm. Data was collected from beginning of the program (day 1), end of the program (8 weeks), 6 months post program, and 12 months post program. CAT score (impact of COPD on individuals), BCKQ score (COPD knowledge), PROMIS-form fatigue score, functional capacity score, and resistance and duration (exercise capacity) on a bicycle (TelePR) or treadmill (SPR) were used to determine QoL for individuals in TelePR and SPR. PROMIS-form SI, companionship, instrumental support, and informational support scores were used to determine SI for individuals in TelePR and SPR. Qualitative interview transcripts were re-read to determine impact of TelePR on QoL and SI. Continuation of exercise post-program by participants was also recorded.
RESULTS: Of 729 initial potential participants, only 67 completed the program (47 for TelePR and 20 for SPR). Contrary to our hypothesis, participants in the TelePR arm had a significant increase in SI as depicted by the PROMIS SI score (P = 0.03). However, TelePR participants also experienced an improvement in QoL, as depicted by the CAT score (P = 0.04), BCKQ score (P = 0.003), PROMIS fatigue score (P = 0.02), and assessments of functional capacity (P = 0.001), and exercise capacity (P = 0.0001 and P = 0.028). With the exception of exercise capacity, SPR had no significant improvement (P > 0.05) in QoL or SI. Most participants did not continue to exercise after the program ended and all improvements in scores reverted back to pre-program levels 12 months post-program. Qualitative interviews provided support that individuals in TelePR felt the program helped them cope and manage their COPD while allowing them to make friendships (in some way decrease SI), but felt abandoned when the program ended.
CONCLUSION: Telehealth Pulmonary Rehabilitation improves QoL and can improve SI but needs to be maintained as seen by the reversion from progress after the Tele-PR finished, the increase in PROMIS SI scores, and specific statements from qualitative interviews with participants.
Funding for PCORI Study: Research reported in this work was funded through a Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute® (PCORI®) Award (1511-33066). The statements presented in this work are solely the responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research® (PCORI®), its Board of Governors or Methodology Committee
Dataset for article: resilience, resistance, coercion: the identification of cochineal production tools in late postclassic-early colonial tlaxcala
No full textNeuron-astrocyte calcium dynamics in fear learning and memory
No full text2024Memory is one of the most extensively-studied phenomenon in neuroscience as it provides the basis for our day-to-day human experience. A continued unmet need is understanding how memory processing can go wrong, whether in the degeneration of our ability to form or access memories (i.e. dementia) or in maladaptive memory processing (i.e. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder). Animal models have enabled tremendous insight into the molecular and systems-level underpinnings of healthy and pathological memory states that advance our understanding of the human condition. Within the memory field, the primary focus has traditionally been on how neuronal activity within regions such as the hippocampus enable the formation, consolidation, maintenance, and extinction of episodic memories, i.e. the memories of our personally experienced events defined along what-where-when dimensions. While the majority of this work has focused on neurons despite extensive work indicating that memories recruit heterogenous cell types, recent work has supported the idea that astrocytes, a type of glial cell, are active modulators of learning and memory processes ranging from fear encoding to spatial navigation. To expand upon this growing literature, we investigated the role of astrocytic calcium dynamics using multiple imaging modalities within the amygdala and hippocampus, in an effort to understand how they may be intimately interacting with neurons to enable higher-level cognitive processing.To that end, my thesis puts forth three experiments that link the activity of neurons and astrocytes to cognition and behavior. In the first experiment, we recorded real-time astrocytic calcium dynamics in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) across contextual fear conditioning (CFC), recall and extinction using single-color fiber photometry. We showed that BLA astrocytes robustly responded to foot shock during CFC, resulting in persistent changes in calcium activity across subsequent days compared to controls. Additionally, astrocytic calcium dynamics became correlated with freezing epochs during CFC and recall only in mice that received foot shocks, and this activity became uncoupled across extinction days. Further, chemogenetic inhibition of BLA fear ensembles had no effect on astrocytic calcium activity or freezing behavior. The results of our first experiment revealed that astrocytes play a real-time role in the acquisition and maintenance of contextual fear as it relates to behavior. Our second experiment then sought to understand how artificial stimulation of fear affects intra-hippocampal neuron-astrocyte dynamics as well as their behavioral consequences. Here, we utilized a combination of activity-dependent labeling strategies in the dentate gyrus (DG) and in vivo fiber photometry of neurons and astrocytes in ventral CA1 of the hippocampus (vCA1) across fear acquisition, natural recall and artificial reactivation of a fear memory or engram. In line with our first experiment, both cell types in vCA1 displayed shock-responsiveness during CFC, with astrocytic calcium events uniquely modulated. Optogenetic activation of a DG-mediated fear engram was sufficient to induce calcium dynamics in neurons and astrocytes that were akin to those displayed during natural recall. Further, these dynamics in both cell types were coupled to fear-related behaviors, such as freezing, during both natural and artificial reactivation of fear. These findings provide the first evidence of neuron-astrocytic coupling as a shared mechanism that enables both natural and artificially-induced memory retrieval, as well as the behavioral expression of fear. The final experiments sought to investigate how astrocytes contribute to contextual fear learning and memory at the single-cell level, enabling a higher-resolution understanding of our previous findings. To accomplish this, we performed freely-moving one-photon calcium recording of dorsal CA1 (dCA1) astrocytes as mice underwent CFC and a subsequent day of contextual recall (Context A; Cxt A) or novel context exposure (Context B; Cxt B). Further, we performed the first longitudinal registration of astrocytes using one-photon imaging to enable analysis of their dynamics across learning. We showed that astrocytes respond to aversive foot shock with sequential calcium activity, akin to that displayed by hippocampal time cells. Notably, these sequences reappear during contextual recall (Cxt A) but not novel exposure (Cxt B), and seem to be driven by reactivated astrocytes across days. Our ongoing work will characterize these sequences across days and explore how they may be coupled with the behavioral expression of fear. These preliminary findings suggest that astrocytes may be involved in temporal coding and provide the first evidence that sequential activity during recall may serve as a memory-specific retrieval process. In summary, my dissertation work presents evidence for the active role of amygdalar and hippocampal astrocytic calcium in the real-time processing of fear learning and memory as it relates to behavior
Investigating the retinovasculature as a gateway to understanding psychosis
No full text2024BACKGROUND: Previous studies have primarily investigated retinovascular changes in the macula of individuals with psychosis, with few studies examining early course psychosis (ECP) and no studies examining widefield views of the macula. This study aims to explore retinovascular changes in ECP using widefield retinal imaging and to investigate their relationship with clinical/cognitive domains.
METHODS: ECP (n=23) and healthy controls (HC, n=15) underwent widefield (up to 6mm) swept source optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA) imaging (Zeiss Plex Elite 9000) for both eyes (OU) (right [OD], left [OS]) for full retinal, superficial, and deep layers, as well as the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) and Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia (BACS). Images were processed with Zeiss’ Advanced Research and Innovation Network algorithm. Retinovasculature was compared between groups using general linear models for vessel density (VD) and perfusion density (PD), with a significance threshold of p<0.1. Partial Spearman correlations were conducted between retinovascular and clinical/cognitive measures.
RESULTS: In ECP, significantly lower OU VD and PD were observed compared to HCs within the inner ring and 3 mm circular region in superficial and deep layers, and this effect was primarily observed in OD. Significantly smaller VD and PD was observed in the deep central area in OU and OS in the ECP vs. HC group. In ECP, smaller deep central VD in OU was significantly associated with increased verbal memory scores while lower superficial VD and PD in inner ring and 3 mm circular regions in OD were correlated with poorer executive function. Orthogonal effects were also found between the ECP and HC groups, when comparing their BACS adjusted scores. In the ECP group, lower superficial and deep VD and PD was associated with better cognitive performance.
CONCLUSIONS: Lower widefield retinovascular measures exist in ECP, and perfusion in the superficial or deep layers of the eye are associated with opposing cognitive observations. These findings suggest that while retinovascular measures are lower in superficial and deep layers of the eye, they have differential relationships with cognition with the superficial layer potentially being a marker of poorer cognitive performance in ECP