Social Work’s Dynamic Role in Oncology: Providing Leadership for Environmental Responsiveness

Social work has a long standing relationship with healthcare. Beginning in the settlement house movement, social workers have provided a dynamic micro, mezzo, and macro role in medical settings. Social work’s ecological systems perspective allows for the inclusion of environmental and social justice factors in healthcare delivery. Ecological theory, epistemologically rooted in social work, is used as a conceptual framework throughout the three products, as the contextual environment is viewed as integral in understanding cancer patient experiences. The first product of this Banded Dissertation is a conceptual article detailing the need for culturally responsive practice methods in oncology care with rural Indigenous people. Oncology systems have increasingly invested in psychosocial care, yet disparities exist in psychosocial oncology care in the context of diverse rural settings. Social workers must become leaders in the healthcare arena in order to advocate and provide essential psychosocial, culturally responsive services to marginalized and underserved people. The second product includes qualitative research methodology with participants who are rural cancer patients in Illinois. The purpose of the second product was to explore psychosocial experiences of cancer patients who reside in a rural community in Illinois. The study used a rural cancer wellness center, Home of Hope, to recruit and interview 18 participants. The interviews were transcribed and organized into recurrent themes, highlighting the unique psychosocial experiences of the rural context. The third product is a commentary calling for an increased presence of the social work profession in the precision medicine movement. Precision medicine is essentially sequencing an individual’s genome in order to develop targeted medical interventions. The professional of social work, the article argues, has work to do in terms of becoming integrated with associated practice and ethics of this movement. This commentary was published in the journal Social Work in May 2016. This dissertation focuses on the intersectional nature of social work’s interface in specialty healthcare – particularly in rural and diverse contexts. The products are connected by the common thread of viewing the healthcare patient as “whole.” Ecological theory, epistemologically rooted in social work practice, values, and ethics, is used as a conceptual framework throughout the three products. The contextual rural environment is integral in understanding patient experiences in order to address healthcare disparities

Social Work’s Dynamic Role in Oncology: Providing Leadership for Environmental Responsiveness

Social work has a long standing relationship with healthcare. Beginning in the settlement house movement, social workers have provided a dynamic micro, mezzo, and macro role in medical settings. Social work’s ecological systems perspective allows for the inclusion of environmental and social justice factors in healthcare delivery. Ecological theory, epistemologically rooted in social work, is used as a conceptual framework throughout the three products, as the contextual environment is viewed as integral in understanding cancer patient experiences. The first product of this Banded Dissertation is a conceptual article detailing the need for culturally responsive practice methods in oncology care with rural Indigenous people. Oncology systems have increasingly invested in psychosocial care, yet disparities exist in psychosocial oncology care in the context of diverse rural settings. Social workers must become leaders in the healthcare arena in order to advocate and provide essential psychosocial, culturally responsive services to marginalized and underserved people. The second product includes qualitative research methodology with participants who are rural cancer patients in Illinois. The purpose of the second product was to explore psychosocial experiences of cancer patients who reside in a rural community in Illinois. The study used a rural cancer wellness center, Home of Hope, to recruit and interview 18 participants. The interviews were transcribed and organized into recurrent themes, highlighting the unique psychosocial experiences of the rural context. The third product is a commentary calling for an increased presence of the social work profession in the precision medicine movement. Precision medicine is essentially sequencing an individual’s genome in order to develop targeted medical interventions. The professional of social work, the article argues, has work to do in terms of becoming integrated with associated practice and ethics of this movement. This commentary was published in the journal Social Work in May 2016. This dissertation focuses on the intersectional nature of social work’s interface in specialty healthcare – particularly in rural and diverse contexts. The products are connected by the common thread of viewing the healthcare patient as “whole.” Ecological theory, epistemologically rooted in social work practice, values, and ethics, is used as a conceptual framework throughout the three products. The contextual rural environment is integral in understanding patient experiences in order to address healthcare disparities

Charged Current Universality and the MSSM

We analyze the prospective impact of supersymmetric radiative corrections on tests of charged current universality involving light quarks and leptons. Working within the R-parity conserving Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model, we compute the corresponding one-loop corrections that enter the extraction of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element $V_{ud}$ from a comparison of the muon-decay Fermi constant with the vector coupling constant determined from nuclear and neutron $\beta$-decay. We also revisit earlier studies of the corrections to the ratio $R_{e/\mu}$ of pion leptonic decay rates $\Gamma[\pi^+ \to e^+ \nu (\gamma)]$ and $\Gamma[\pi^+ \to \mu^+ \nu (\gamma)]$. In both cases, we observe that the magnitude of the corrections can be on the order of $10^{-3}$. We show that a comparison of the first row CKM unitarity tests with measurements of $R_{e/\mu}$ can provide unique probes of the spectrum of first generation squarks and first and second generation sleptons.Comment: 38 pages, 17 figure

Gentrification and Local Restaurants: Chinatown District of Los Angeles In A Digital Age

This paper analyzes the effects of gentrification and the digital age on local restaurants, specifically those in the Chinatown District of Los Angeles, California. To examine the effects of gentrification on Chinatown’s local businesses, I interviewed Daniel Yin of Yang Chow restaurant over Zoom. Yang Chow has three locations, this research centers around their original location in Chinatown. Yin now manages all online communications and was previously an in-person manager. His experience in the Chinatown restaurant business provides insight into this cultural district’s changing business landscape, as his family has owned this restaurant since 1977

Results in Metric and Analytic Number Theory

The following Thesis consists of five chapters. The first three chapters come from Metric Number theory. Chapter 1 discusses algorithms for calculating the continued fraction of algebraic numbers, as well as presenting experimental results on how well algebraic numbers fit well known conjectures on the distribution of their partial quotients. Chapter 2 discusses the Singular and Extremality theories of so called ``well separated Dirichlet type systems''. Chapter 3 presents an effective version of the Khintchine-Groshev theorem for simultaneously small linear forms. The last two chapters are mostly in the area of uniform distribution. Chapter 4 proves a central limit theorem for the count of the fractional parts of imaginary parts of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function within an interval. Chapter 5 discusses the upper and lower distribution functions mod $1$ of sequences of the form $(0.a_na_{n+1}a_{n+2} \dots)_{n \in\mathbb N}$, where the sequence $(a_n)_{n \in \mathbb N}$ has polynomial growth

New Regulators for Quantum Field Theories with Compactified Extra Dimensions. I: Fundamentals

In this paper, we propose two new regulators for quantum field theories in spacetimes with compactified extra dimensions. We refer to these regulators as the ``extended hard cutoff'' (EHC) and ``extended dimensional regularization'' (EDR). Although based on traditional four-dimensional regulators, the key new feature of these higher-dimensional regulators is that they are specifically designed to handle mixed spacetimes in which some dimensions are infinitely large and others are compactified. Moreover, unlike most other regulators which have been used in the extra-dimension literature, these regulators are designed to respect the original higher-dimensional Lorentz and gauge symmetries that exist prior to compactification, and not merely the four-dimensional symmetries which remain afterward. This distinction is particularly relevant for calculations of the physics of the excited Kaluza-Klein modes themselves, and not merely their radiative effects on zero modes. By respecting the full higher-dimensional symmetries, our regulators avoid the introduction of spurious terms which would not have been easy to disentangle from the physical effects of compactification. As part of our work, we also derive a number of ancillary results. For example, we demonstrate that in a gauge-invariant theory, analogues of the Ward-Takahashi identity hold not only for the usual zero-mode (four-dimensional) photons, but for all excited Kaluza-Klein photons as well.Comment: 47 pages, LaTeX, 3 figure

CD133+ liver cancer stem cells resist interferon-gamma induced autophagy

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Ab Initio Phase Diagram of Chromium to 2.5 TPa

Chromium possesses remarkable physical properties such as hardness and corrosion resistance. Chromium is also a very important geophysical material as it is assumed that lighter Cr isotopes were dissolved in the Earth's molten core during the planet's formation, which makes Cr one of the main constituents of the Earth's core. Unfortunately, Cr has remained one of the least studied 3d transition metals. In a very recent combined experimental and theoretical study (Anzellini et al., Scientific Reports, 2022), the equation of state and melting curve of chromium were studied to 150 GPa, and it was determined that the ambient body-centered cubic (bcc) phase of crystalline Cr remains stable in the whole pressure range considered. However, the importance of the knowledge of the physical properties of Cr, specifically its phase diagram, necessitates further study of Cr to higher pressure. In this work, using a suite of ab initio quantum molecular dynamics (QMD) simulations based on the Z methodology which combines both direct Z method for the simulation of melting curves and inverse Z method for the calculation of solid-solid phase transition boundaries, we obtain the theoretical phase diagram of Cr to 2.5 TPa. We calculate the melting curves of the two solid phases that are present on its phase diagram, namely, the lower-pressure bcc and the higher-pressure hexagonal close-packed (hcp) ones, and obtain the equation for the bcc-hcp solid-solid phase transition boundary. We also obtain the thermal equations of state of both bcc-Cr and hcp-Cr, which are in excellent agreement with both experimental data and QMD simulations. We argue that 2180 K as the value of the ambient melting point of Cr which is offered by several public web resources ("Wikipedia," "WebElements," "It's Elemental," etc.) is most likely incorrect and should be replaced with 2135 K, found in most experimental studies as well as in the present theoretical work