Aligning Practice to Policies: Changing the Culture to Recognize and Reward Teaching at Research Universities

Recent calls for improvement in undergraduate education within STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines are hampered by the methods used to evaluate teaching effectiveness. Faculty members at research universities are commonly assessed and promoted mainly on the basis of research success. To improve the quality of undergraduate teaching across all disciplines, not only STEM fields, requires creating an environment wherein continuous improvement of teaching is valued, assessed, and rewarded at various stages of a faculty member’s career. This requires consistent application of policies that reflect well-established best practices for evaluating teaching at the department, college, and university levels. Evidence shows most teaching evaluation practices do not reflect stated policies, even when the policies specifically espouse teaching as a value. Thus, alignment of practice to policy is a major barrier to establishing a culture in which teaching is valued. Situated in the context of current national efforts to improve undergraduate STEM education, including the Association of American Universities Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative, this essay discusses four guiding principles for aligning practice with stated priorities in formal policies: 1) enhancing the role of deans and chairs; 2) effectively using the hiring process; 3) improving communication; and 4) improving the understanding of teaching as a scholarly activity. In addition, three specific examples of efforts to improve the practice of evaluating teaching are presented as examples: 1) Three Bucket Model of merit review at the University of California, Irvine; (2) Evaluation of Teaching Rubric, University of Kansas; and (3) Teaching Quality Framework, University of Colorado, Boulder. These examples provide flexible criteria to holistically evaluate and improve the quality of teaching across the diverse institutions comprising modern higher education

Prediction of peptide and protein propensity for amyloid formation

Understanding which peptides and proteins have the potential to undergo amyloid formation and what driving forces are responsible for amyloid-like fiber formation and stabilization remains limited. This is mainly because proteins that can undergo structural changes, which lead to amyloid formation, are quite diverse and share no obvious sequence or structural homology, despite the structural similarity found in the fibrils. To address these issues, a novel approach based on recursive feature selection and feed-forward neural networks was undertaken to identify key features highly correlated with the self-assembly problem. This approach allowed the identification of seven physicochemical and biochemical properties of the amino acids highly associated with the self-assembly of peptides and proteins into amyloid-like fibrils (normalized frequency of β-sheet, normalized frequency of β-sheet from LG, weights for β-sheet at the window position of 1, isoelectric point, atom-based hydrophobic moment, helix termination parameter at position j+1 and ΔGº values for peptides extrapolated in 0 M urea). Moreover, these features enabled the development of a new predictor (available at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/appnn/index.html) capable of accurately and reliably predicting the amyloidogenic propensity from the polypeptide sequence alone with a prediction accuracy of 84.9 % against an external validation dataset of sequences with experimental in vitro, evidence of amyloid formation

Dopamine neurons modulate neural encoding and expression of depression-related behaviour

Major depression is characterized by diverse debilitating symptoms that include hopelessness and anhedonia1. Dopamine neurons involved in reward and motivation are among many neural populations that have been hypothesized to be relevant, and certain antidepressant treatments, including medications and brain stimulation therapies, can influence the complex dopamine system. Until now it has not been possible to test this hypothesis directly, even in animal models, as existing therapeutic interventions are unable to specifically target dopamine neurons. Here we investigated directly the causal contributions of defined dopamine neurons to multidimensional depression-like phenotypes induced by chronic mild stress, by integrating behavioural, pharmacological, optogenetic and electrophysiological methods in freely moving rodents. We found that bidirectional control (inhibition or excitation) of specified midbrain dopamine neurons immediately and bidirectionally modulates (induces or relieves) multiple independent depression symptoms caused by chronic stress. By probing the circuit implementation of these effects, we observed that optogenetic recruitment of these dopamine neurons potently alters the neural encoding of depression-related behaviours in the downstream nucleus accumbens of freely moving rodents, suggesting that processes affecting depression symptoms may involve alterations in the neural encoding of action in limbic circuitry

The Hobby–Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) Survey Design, Reductions, and Detections

We describe the survey design, calibration, commissioning, and emission-line detection algorithms for the Hobby–Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX). The goal of HETDEX is to measure the redshifts of over a million Lyα emitting galaxies between 1.88 < z < 3.52, in a 540 deg2 area encompassing a comoving volume of 10.9 Gpc3. No preselection of targets is involved; instead the HETDEX measurements are accomplished via a spectroscopic survey using a suite of wide-field integral field units distributed over the focal plane of the telescope. This survey measures the Hubble expansion parameter and angular diameter distance, with a final expected accuracy of better than 1%. We detail the project’s observational strategy, reduction pipeline, source detection, and catalog generation, and present initial results for science verification in the Cosmological Evolution Survey, Extended Groth Strip, and Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey North fields. We demonstrate that our data reach the required specifications in throughput, astrometric accuracy, flux limit, and object detection, with the end products being a catalog of emission-line sources, their object classifications, and flux-calibrated spectra

AI is a viable alternative to high throughput screening: a 318-target study

: High throughput screening (HTS) is routinely used to identify bioactive small molecules. This requires physical compounds, which limits coverage of accessible chemical space. Computational approaches combined with vast on-demand chemical libraries can access far greater chemical space, provided that the predictive accuracy is sufficient to identify useful molecules. Through the largest and most diverse virtual HTS campaign reported to date, comprising 318 individual projects, we demonstrate that our AtomNet® convolutional neural network successfully finds novel hits across every major therapeutic area and protein class. We address historical limitations of computational screening by demonstrating success for target proteins without known binders, high-quality X-ray crystal structures, or manual cherry-picking of compounds. We show that the molecules selected by the AtomNet® model are novel drug-like scaffolds rather than minor modifications to known bioactive compounds. Our empirical results suggest that computational methods can substantially replace HTS as the first step of small-molecule drug discovery

Reconstruction of the Scrotum With Bilateral Gracilis Muscle Rotational Flaps in a Patient With Acute Myeloid Leukemia Complicated by Fournier's Gangrene

We describe the case of a 43-year-old male diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia complicated by Fournier's gangrene. Multiple debridements led to the complete effacement of the scrotum, with 360 degrees of exposed testes and a narrow base of suspension. It was decided to reconstruct the scrotum using bilateral gracilis muscle rotational flaps, followed by split-thickness skin grafting from the thigh. The gracilis muscle as a donor flap allowed for the protection and support of the testes and suspensory tissue while achieving an aesthetically pleasing result that resembled the normal scrotum. We hope providers will consider this reconstructive method in future patients who present with similar extensive effacement of the scrotal tissue

Left ventricular assist device placement in the setting of congenital VSD

We describe the management of a 59‐year‐old female with an unrepaired congenital ventricular septal defect (VSD) and end stage nonischemic cardiomyopathy necessitating placement of a left ventricular assist device (LVAD) as a destination treatment. Simultaneous repair of the VSD was performed during the LVAD implantation under a beating heart. The patient remained hemodynamically stable throughout her postoperative course, without signs of hypoxia or cyanosis. Following discharge, outpatient surveillance echocardiogram demonstrated successful VSD closure and no residual shunt

A case of fulminant myocarditis due to COVID‐19 in an adolescent patient successfully treated with venous arterial ECMO as a bridge to recovery

Emerging data suggest an association between severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and the development of acute myocarditis, with children and older adults being most at risk. We describe the clinical course of a previously healthy 12‐year‐old female who rapidly deteriorated into cardiogenic shock and arrest due to coronavirus disease 2019 induced fulminant myocarditis, necessitating venous‐arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation as a bridge to full recovery. This case highlights the importance of early clinical recognition of myocardial involvement, and the benefits of taking a multidisciplinary approach in treating these patients

The Arabidopsis thaliana ABSCISIC ACID-INSENSITIVE8 Locus Encodes a Novel Protein Mediating Abscisic Acid and Sugar Responses Essential for Growth

Abscisic acid (ABA) regulates many aspects of plant growth and development, yet many ABA response mutants present only subtle phenotypic defects, especially in the absence of stress. By contrast, the ABA-insensitive8 (abi8) mutant, isolated on the basis of ABA-resistant germination, also displays severely stunted growth, defective stomatal regulation, altered ABA-responsive gene expression, delayed flowering, and male sterility. The stunted growth of the mutant is not rescued by gibberellin, brassinosteroid, or indoleacetic acid application and is not attributable to excessive ethylene response, but supplementing the medium with Glc improves viability and root growth. In addition to exhibiting Glc-dependent growth, reflecting decreased expression of sugar-mobilizing enzymes, abi8 mutants are resistant to Glc levels that induce developmental arrest of wild-type seedlings. Studies of genetic interactions demonstrate that ABA hypersensitivity conferred by the ABA-hypersensitive1 mutation or overexpression of ABI3 or ABI5 does not suppress the dwarfing and Glc dependence caused by abi8 but partially suppresses ABA-resistant germination. By contrast, the ABA-resistant germination of abi8 is epistatic to the hypersensitivity caused by ethylene-insensitive2 (ein2) and ein3 mutations, yet ABI8 appears to act in a distinct Glc response pathway from these EIN loci. ABI8 encodes a protein with no domains of known function but belongs to a small plant-specific protein family. Database searches indicate that it is allelic to two dwarf mutants, elongation defective1 and kobito1, previously shown to disrupt cell elongation, cellulose synthesis, vascular differentiation, and root meristem maintenance. The cell wall defects appear to be a secondary effect of the mutations because Glc treatment restores root growth and vascular differentiation but not cell elongation. Although the ABI8 transcript accumulates in all tested plant organs in both wild-type and ABA response mutants, an ABI8-β-glucuronidase fusion protein is localized primarily to the elongation zone of roots, suggesting substantial post-transcriptional regulation of ABI8 accumulation. This localization pattern is sufficient to complement the mutation, indicating that ABI8 acts either at very low concentrations or over long distances within the plant body