ADHD as a Lived Experience Amongst BIPOC College Students

This thesis focuses on the perspectives of Black Indigenous and Persons of Color (BIPOC) college students on Attention-deficit/hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The study analyzes scoping strategies, perceived symptomatological differences, and the effects of racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds among BIPOC college students. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 14 participants, I examine the full permeation of ADHD among BIPOC college students, its evolution from pre-diagnosis to the present, and how they navigate the disorder and its treatment. A qualitative analysis of ADHD among minorities in college will not only allow clinicians to understand the distinct struggles of BIPOC with ADHD, but it will also allow them to increase culturally sensitive monitoring and improve appropriate screening and diagnosis for ADHD

Captive Study: The Political, Intellectual, and Ideological Dimensions of Prison Education

This critical ethnographic study examines how education is conceptualized, organized, and experienced at Riverside Correctional Facility, a medium-security men’s prison in rural Pennsylvania. Specifically, it explores how incarcerated students, university faculty and staff, and the superintendent of the prison understand and articulate the purpose of education within prisons; the institutional policies, practices, relations of power, and discursive formations that shape the administration and delivery of education in prisons; and how incarcerated students and university faculty and staff navigate and interpret their roles and relationships within prison education programs. Drawing on theorizations of antiblackness and carcerality, and critical ethnographic data collection methods of interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, this study found that Riverside Correctional Facility’s prison education program functions as a means by which the prison can manage and control incarcerated individuals to maintain institutional order. The study further found that university faculty and staff, as well as non-incarcerated students, are implicated in the reproduction of these carceral logics while simultaneously being objects of surveillance, control, and policing themselves. A central contribution of this study is its provision of empirical evidence of antiblackness in educational settings, particularly within the context of prison education. By documenting how educational programs are shaped by and contribute to broader structures of racialized control, this study advances critical understandings of how antiblackness operates within institutions ostensibly dedicated to learning and rehabilitation

The Boston METCO Program: Recent Alumni Experiences and Educational Equity

This project focuses on contemporary school integration practices by examining, in particular, the Boston METCO (Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity Inc) program and the experiences of its recent alumni. The METCO program, the United States’ longest-running voluntary school desegregation program, was created in 1966 to give students of color from the city of Boston better educational opportunities by busing them to the surrounding suburbs for school. To this day, it is a program meant to expand educational opportunities, increase diversity, and reduce racial isolation, by permitting students from Boston to attend public schools beyond district lines, in the suburbs. My work focuses on recent graduates and examines the impact METCO had on their lives–it is thus an investigation on the ways in which diversity and inclusion initiatives manifest in the lived experiences of the participants. With a qualitative inquiry approach, the study includes bibliographic research on school integration initiatives, racial discrimination in Boston schools, and documentary analysis of the METCO program’s self-presentation, followed by interviewing recent METCO alumni through in-depth, semi-structured interviews. The study shows the varied impact the program had on students’ daily lives, their relationships with teachers and the challenges to their sense of belonging. The findings also suggest institutional dimensions about education equity and inclusion, raising questions not only about busing as a form of contemporary integration, but also about the future of schools\u27 equitable programs and the improvements they need to ensure all students are feeling connected. Such integrative practices and their effect on the students they are meant to serve prompt us to reconsider equity frameworks in K-12 contexts

Setting Up an Institutional OMERO Environment for Bioimage Data: Perspectives from Both Facility Staff and Users

Modern bioimaging core facilities at research institutions are essential for managing and maintaining high-end instruments, providing training and support for researchers in experimental design, image acquisition and data analysis. An important task for these facilities is the professional management of complex multidimensional bioimaging data, which are often produced in large quantity and very different file formats. This article details the process that led to successfully implementing the OME Remote Objects system (OMERO) for bioimage-specific research data management (RDM) at the Core Facility Cellular Imaging (CFCI) at the Technische Universität Dresden (TU Dresden). Ensuring compliance with the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) principles, we outline here the challenges that we faced in adapting data handling and storage to a new RDM system. These challenges included the introduction of a standardised group-specific naming convention, metadata curation with tagging and Key-Value pairs, and integration of existing image processing workflows. By sharing our experiences, this article aims to provide insights and recommendations for both individual researchers and educational institutions intending to implement OMERO as a management system for bioimaging data. We showcase how tailored decisions and structured approaches lead to successful outcomes in RDM practices. Lay description: Modern bioimaging facilities at research institutions are crucial for managing advanced equipment and supporting scientists in their research. These facilities help with designing experiments, capturing images, and analyzing data. One of their key tasks is organizing and managing large amounts of complex image data, which often comes in various file formats and are difficult to handle. This article explains how the Core Facility Cellular Imaging (CFCI) at Technische Universität Dresden successfully implemented a specialized system called OMERO. With this system it is possible to manage and organize bioimaging data sustainably in a way that they are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable according the FAIR principles. We describe the practical implementation process on exemplary projects within scientific research and medical education. We discuss the challenges we faced, such as creating a standard way to name files, organizing important information about the images (known as metadata), and ensuring that existing image processing methods could work with the new system. By sharing our experience, we aim to offer practical advice and recommendations for other researchers and institutions interested in using OMERO for managing their bioimaging data. We highlight how careful planning and structured approaches can lead to successful data management practices, making it easier for researchers to store, access, and reuse their valuable data

On Linear Invariants of Hypergraphs

We introduce linear invariants of hypergraphs as a way to study hypergraphs by their tensor representations. Our primary research goal is to determine what information linear invariants capture about the hypergraphs they arise from. We first investigate the centroid, which is shown to determine the connected components of a hypergraph. Next, we study the derivations of a hypergraph, and use this linear invariant to define a quotient operator $Q_\mathrm{Der}$ on the collection of all hypergraphs. This operator is shown to be a closure operator in that $Q_\mathrm{Der}(Q_\mathrm{Der}(\mathcal{H}))=Q_\mathrm{Der}(\mathcal{H})$ for any hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$. We apply the operator $Q_\mathrm{Der}$ to synthetically generated hypergraphs, exploring what features of a hypergraph it detects, and we discuss how this operator could be applied to hypergraphs arising from real data

Evaluation of Physical and Chemical Stability in Liposomes Composed of Mixed Phospholipids

Liposomes, spherical vesicles composed of lipid bilayers, are widely used in drug delivery due to their biocompatibility, biodegradability, and ability to interact with biological membranes. Despite these advantages, liposomes remain moderately unstable systems, highly susceptible to environmental stressors such as pH fluctuations, ionic strength variations, temperature changes, and interactions with other components. Addressing both chemical and physical instability is essential for translating liposomal formulations from experimental formulation to viable pharmaceutical products. This study investigates the physicochemical characteristics of a mixed-phospholipid system in which one lipid is saturated, and the other is unsaturated (DMPC and DOPC respectively). Liposomes are prepared using thin film hydration, freeze–thaw cycling, and extrusion to yield mostly unilamellar vesicles with diameters of approximately 100 nm. Once prepared, liposomes are exposed to accelerated aging at 70 °C, and aliquots are collected at regular intervals for analysis. Chemical stability was evaluated using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and lipid peroxidation assays, while physical stability was characterized by dynamic and static light scattering (DLS/SLS), UV–Vis transmittance measurements, and cryogenic transmission electron microscopy (cryo-TEM). Results reveal a strong correspondence between chemical and physical degradation, providing evidence that initial physical changes, such as liposome aggregation and fusion, may play an important role in the onset of chemical degradation and highlighting how subsequent molecular breakdown promotes structural disintegration. This study presents these findings and draws conclusions about the role of lipid composition in controlling liposome stability, offering essential insights for future liposome-based drug delivery system design

Social Factors Variably Predict Salivary Cortisol Levels in Tufted Capuchins

Glucocorticoids (GCs) have become a prime focus in studies involving the relationship between psychosocial factors and physiology. For social animals, determining the social variables that relate to both GC release and buffering can help tease apart the complex interplay between the psychological and physiological dynamics of individuals and their communities. A 2019 study found relationships between social factors and hair cortisol in a group of socially housed tufted capuchin monkeys in which social support correlated negatively with cortisol levels while received aggression correlated positively. The present study examined the relationships between similar social measures and salivary cortisol in the same group of capuchin monkeys to test whether these relationships remain constant over time and in different biological matrices. Salivary samples were collected from the group in 2022 and 2023 and median and standard deviation (SD) of GC release were calculated and compared to four social measures of interest (dominance rank, aggression received, social network centrality, and grooming received) which were derived from long-term behavioral observations of the group. SD in 2022 was predicted by two social measures, social network centrality and aggression received, consistent with the results of the previous study, but neither SD in 2023 nor medians of either year were predicted by any social measures. Though methodological differences between this and the previous study may explain the lack of consistency in findings, I highlight the importance of considering changing social dynamics as a significant factor affecting socio-physiological relationships. Additionally, the potential association between long term cortisol exposure and short term cortisol variability is discussed

Optimization of Angiogenesis in 3D Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cell Networks: How Can We Build a More Physiologically Accurate Model?

In tissue engineering, 3-dimensional (3D) experiments are necessary for simulating histological and physiological conditions, and a standardized model is required to effectively consider the mechanobiological effects of various substrates throughout these experiments. Biomaterials can be difficult to integrate into the body without the presence of vasculature to facilitate integration. Endothelial cells are responsible for creating and propagating vasculature under appropriate native tissue or in vitro substrate conditions. This work aimed to develop and refine a 3D vascular endothelial culture on a porcine gelatin scaffold to conduct physiologically relevant in vitro studies utilizing a substrate that resembled the extracellular matrix (ECM) associated with human soft tissues. This model cultured human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) within a porcine gelatin scaffold and evaluated various cell seeding techniques, resuspension concentrations, and incubation periods to develop a robust model for endothelial vasculature growth in 3D. Evaluated culture parameters included scaffold handling and saturation with vascular culture media, one-sided and two-sided seeding of HUVECs into the scaffold, cell resuspension concentrations of 400,000, 600,000, and 800,000 cells in 100 μL of vascular media, and incubation periods of 96, 120, 144, and 168 hours. Confocal microscopy was utilized to document vasculature throughout the scaffolds under each set of culture conditions. The ImageJ Angiogenesis Analyzer toolset was applied to each image and statistical analysis was performed on the results to determine an optimal protocol. The primary metrics of interest assessed in this study were the quantity of vascular junctions, total vascular length, and total master segment length in each representative sample. When analyzed in conjunction, these parameters provided a global overview of the density and interconnectedness of the vasculature associated with each testing condition. Two-sided seeding with scaffold saturation and a resuspended cell concentration of 600,000 cells per 100 μL of vascular media provided the most uniform distribution of vasculature within the scaffold while maintaining an appropriate density that permitted imaging. The 120-hour period associated with the aforementioned parameters yielded the greatest ratio of developed master segment length relative to the quantity of junctions, with an average of 1070 μm of vascular segmentation connected by approximately 15 junctions. These data suggested that the most optimal seeding protocol for endothelial vasculature development and observation using confocal microscopy was seeding 600,000 cells per scaffold, seeding from both sides of the scaffold, and incubating for 120 hours after seeding. It is recommended that all researchers investigating development of a 3D cell culture protocol assess the effects of variation in substrate handling, cell concentration, and network incubation. This standardized protocol will enable global experimentation requiring a consistent vascularized 3D matrix for the investigation of the effects of various external stimuli on endothelial networks

Ian Milligan - Ethics, Emails, and Archives: Using (and Misusing) the September 11 Digital Archive

Ian Milligan spoke with us on the topic of “Ethics, Emails, and Archives: Using (and Misusing) the September 11 Digital Archive.” Minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North tower of the World Trade Center complex on September 11th, 2001, emails and online discussions surged, capturing real-time reactions from shock to speculation about global repercussions. Many of these digital interactions were preserved in the September 11 Digital Archive, an early example of an event-based archive. Despite the invaluable insights offered into collective responses, ethical complexities and practical challenges, including fragmented metadata, inconsistent file formats, and privacy concerns, have significantly limited the use of this collection (scholarly and popular alike

Liberating the Library: Alternative Libraries and Counterpublics

As the current state and future of libraries remains uncertain, scholars across the Library and Information Science (LIS) are emphasizing the need to examine the social, political, and economic conditions and implications of our climate in the context of libraries. Seeing as libraries are situated within, and often reflect, socio political landscapes, this study aims to examine how groups relegated to the margins, develop spaces to intentionally address the needs of underserved communities through unconventional strategies, programming, and materials through what I call, alternative libraries. Through a qualitative exploration of alternative libraries through four different case studies, this research aims to uncover the work and role of alternative libraries through the application of Warner (2002)’s theory on publics and counterpublics. Through interviews, observations, and document analysis, different themes emerged that pointed to the strategies alternative libraries employ to recognize and respond to community needs, empower community members, and navigate the political and economic terrain. From the findings, it was evident that the relationship and interactions between different publics, such as a dominant and counterpublic, demonstrated tensions with neutral frameworks and financial pressures. However, my study offers a deeper analysis into the ways in which these libraries engaged in practices that uplift counternarratives to restructure, reimagine, and reinterpret traditional library protocols, discourses, and dispositions