Puerto Rican Cultural Arts and Expressive Arts Therapies: Mental Health and Collective Resilience Post-Hurricane Maria

The research aimed to study how integrating Puerto Rican popular cultural arts with the expressive arts therapies could assist the recovery process post Hurricane Maria. During post-disaster recovery efforts, access to formal psychological services are not always viable to survivors and the services available are usually not enough to cover the demand. The literature review examined the relationship between: mental health in the aftermath of natural disasters; cultural relevancy within the field of psychology in Puerto Rico; resilience in post-disaster communities; and psychosocial community interventions. Findings encouraged for programing for Puerto Rico’s psychosocial recovery from Hurricane Maria, or any future natural disaster, to reach vulnerable populations. For example: low socioeconomic communities, children, adolescents, older adults and those with less access to formal mental health services. In addition, psychosocial interventions should be ethno-culturally focused and place-based, and work within a critical-cultural and de-colonial framework towards resilience. Lastly, findings encourage for local community organizations to be trained in trauma-informed approaches in order to achieve greater mental health outreach. That way, they can assist in the recovery process by facilitating emotionally supportive environments and the use creative resources for the collective processing of traumatic events

Healthy learning environments

A good school environment is paramount to the performance and health of the pupils and teachers. However, the quality of school buildings in the Netherlands is in general not so good, with 80% of them not complying with good practices for the indoor environment, while having high energy costs. When tackling these issues, School Boards around the country have two options: building new facilities, or upgrading the existing ones. Although they usually prefer new buildings, municipalities around the country are promoting the alternative. This presents opportunities for the sustainable renovation of potentially thousands of buildings, to make them not only energy efficient, but with a high quality indoor environment as well; Energy efficient schools with good indoor environment are at the heart of the project “Developing a model for the balance of energy use and indoor environment quality in school buildings”

Indigenous Adolescent Girls\u27 Empowerment Network (IMAGEN)

The Population Council has developed and tested a cache of tools—which can be modified by and for Native communities—for organizations seeking to more intentionally serve girls. The tools allow programs to systematically gauge within their own communities the barriers and opportunities that exist for Native adolescent girls. This realization and opportunity sparked the creation of the Indigenous Adolescent Girls’ Empowerment Network (IMAGEN). The Network was conceived as a means of bringing together Native American–serving organizations that have the enthusiasm and capacity to adopt, document, and share evidence from programs that build on Native girls’ innate talents, while addressing the multiple challenges they face. The first steps toward building this network were taken during IMAGEN’s inaugural workshop at the Population Council headquarters in New York City in March 2017, attended by nine participants from six organizations covering different parts of Indian Country

Indigenous Adolescent Girls’ Empowerment Network (IMAGEN): Adapting the Girl Roster™ for Lakota communities

This brief reports on a first-of-a-kind meeting between the Population Council’s GIRLCenter and organizations such as the White Buffalo Calf Woman Society (WBCWS) that work locally with Native American communities to understand the specific needs of adolescent girls in Indian Country. This followed an inaugural meeting of the Indigenous Adolescent Girls’ Empowerment Network (IMAGEN) with its wealth of insight concerning the needs of the Native communities they serve, and the GIRL Center’s myriad programmatic tools and resources that have been tried and tested in global settings for several decades. The IMAGEN Approach is an adaptable process that links these two worlds, with the overarching goal of helping those organizations that are ready to incorporate girl-centered programming do so in a sustainable and impactful way. The brief describes workshops held on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, community insights and lessons learned, and next steps in girl-centered program design

Evaluation of in vitro Toxicogenetic Models for Hepatotoxicity

Numerous studies support the fact that a genetically diverse mouse population may be useful as an animal model to understand and predict toxicity in humans. We hypothesized that cultures of hepatocytes obtained from a large panel of inbred mouse strains can produce data indicative of inter-individual differences in in vivo responses to hepato-toxicants. In order to test this hypothesis and establish whether high-throughput in vitro studies using cultured hepatocytes from genetically distinct mouse strains are feasible, we aimed to: (1) determine whether the near-physiological maintenance of the cells isolated from different mouse inbred strains can be achieved, (2) evaluate whether viability and reproducibility of functionality be attained over subsequent isolations and (3) assess the utility of the model for toxicity screening. Our data suggest that cell function and expression of key liver specific genes of hepatocytes isolated from different strains is comparable. These experiments open new opportunities for high-throughput and low-cost in vitro assays that may be used for studies of toxicity in a genetically diverse population.Master of Science in Public Healt