Presque Isle winter.

Environmental Writing and Great Lakes LiteratureMy yearly trips to Presque Isle have been a significant contribution to my love of the natural world that I’ve had most of my life. My house is in a southern Michigan suburb where most trees are in backyards and the most exciting animal I can readily see is a squirrel. Such surroundings are hardly ideal for developing an interest in nature. When I started visiting Presque Isle, however, I found a landscape that was much wilder than I was used to. Often in the evening during those early visits my grandparents would get my family and me into their van, and we’d drive aimlessly around Presque Isle looking for deer, turkeys, porcupines, and whatever else would cross our path. They’d take us hiking on the trails that they’d made in the woods, which seemed to extend forever through open clearings and thick forest. It was a side of Michigan I didn’t see back home, and I quickly came to prefer a forested landscape to a developed suburb.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64855/1/Haarer_2009.pd

Stormwater Management in Southeast Detroit: Adaptive and Contextually Informed Green Infrastructure Strategies

This master’s project focuses on the planning, analysis, and design of contextually informed green infrastructure strategies for adaptive stormwater management in Detroit. The city has observed significant population loss over the last half century, which puts a strain on the tax base required for the upkeep of stormwater and other key infrastructure services. Aging combined sewer systems in need of maintenance combined with increases in the frequency of extreme storm events related to climate change create a scenario in which finding an adaptive solution to stormwater management is becoming progressively more important. The Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood is located in Detroit’s Lower Eastside and serves as the central study area for this project. The study aims to develop a suite of planning and design concepts for a network of site-based green infrastructure strategies for stormwater management that take advantage of Detroit’s vacant land. Our approach is to create a networked system of a diverse array of green infrastructure stormwater controls. Stormwater management strategies are informed by the surrounding landscape context and respond to site-based opportunities and limitations. Primary research methods include GIS-based hydrologic modeling and studies of Detroit’s combined sewer infrastructure, vacancy data, innovative green infrastructure strategies, and community stabilization plans. A small set of design concepts specific to the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood were also developed to illustrate actionable stormwater management strategies.Master of Science Master of Landscape ArchitectureNatural Resources and EnvironmentUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106566/1/2014 Master Project 701-242.pd

Nonequilibrium spectral diffusion due to laser heating in stimulated photon echo spectroscopy of low temperature glasses

A quantitative theory is developed, which accounts for heating artifacts in three-pulse photon echo (3PE) experiments. The heat diffusion equation is solved and the average value of the temperature in the focal volume of the laser is determined as a function of the 3PE waiting time. This temperature is used in the framework of nonequilibrium spectral diffusion theory to calculate the effective homogeneous linewidth of an ensemble of probe molecules embedded in an amorphous host. The theory fits recently observed plateaus and bumps without introducing a gap in the distribution function of flip rates of the two-level systems or any other major modification of the standard tunneling model.Comment: 10 pages, Revtex, 6 eps-figures, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

First-in-Human Case Study: Multipotent Adult Progenitor Cells for Immunomodulation After Liver Transplantation

Mesenchymal stem cells and multipotent adult progenitor cells (MAPCs) have been proposed as novel therapeutics for solid organ transplant recipients with the aim of reducing exposure to pharmacological immunosuppression and its side effects. In the present study, we describe the clinical course of the first patient of the phase I, dose-escalation safety and feasibility study, MiSOT-I (Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Solid Organ Transplantation Phase I). After receiving a living-related liver graft, the patient was given one intraportal injection and one intravenous infusion of third-party MAPC in a low-dose pharmacological immunosuppressive background. Cell administration was found to be technically feasible; importantly, we found no evidence of acute toxicity associated with MAPC infusions

Somatic mosaicism and common genetic variation contribute to the risk of very-early-onset inflammatory bowel disease

Very-early-onset inflammatory bowel disease (VEO-IBD) is a heterogeneous phenotype associated with a spectrum of rare Mendelian disorders. Here, we perform whole-exome-sequencing and genome-wide genotyping in 145 patients (median age-at-diagnosis of 3.5 years), in whom no Mendelian disorders were clinically suspected. In five patients we detect a primary immunodeficiency or enteropathy, with clinical consequences (XIAP, CYBA, SH2D1A, PCSK1). We also present a case study of a VEO-IBD patient with a mosaic de novo, pathogenic allele in CYBB. The mutation is present in ~70% of phagocytes and sufficient to result in defective bacterial handling but not life-threatening infections. Finally, we show that VEO-IBD patients have, on average, higher IBD polygenic risk scores than population controls (99 patients and 18,780 controls; P < 4 × 10-10), and replicate this finding in an independent cohort of VEO-IBD cases and controls (117 patients and 2,603 controls; P < 5 × 10-10). This discovery indicates that a polygenic component operates in VEO-IBD pathogenesis