Transgressive learning communities: Transformative spaces for underprivileged, underserved, and historically underrepresented graduate students at their institutions

In this article, we propose a new vision of educational development that reimagines how graduate instructors are socialized and professionalized in academic settings. We describe a transgressive learning community that empowers graduate instructors with tools to reveal, mitigate, and disrupt oppressive structures in higher education. Our learning community is founded on critical race and feminist conceptualizations of pedagogical inquiry in its design, implementation, and assessment to serve underprivileged, underserved, and historically underrepresented graduate students. We argue that the intersections of marginalized and graduate student identities create distinct experiences of discrimination, marginalization, tokenism, isolation, and impostor syndrome due to a lack of sustained teaching mentorship within the academy. The transgressive learning community model that we propose in this article functions to create spaces of transgressive and transformational pedagogical engagement for graduate students who exist at the intersections of these identities

Lasting Effects of a Graduate Pedagogy Course on the Development of Teacher-Scholars

While graduate pedagogy courses may result in specific teaching behaviors in the short term, little is known whether these scholarly teaching behaviors and attitudes endure over time. Multiple evidenced-based assessments of pedagogy courses which continue well past the completion of the course can demonstrate the ongoing development of students’ perceptions of teaching and learning and students’ progression as teacher-scholars. This poster summarizes an investigation exploring the lasting effects of a graduate pedagogy course entitled MSCI M620: Pedagogical Methods in Health Sciences. This course has been offered for two semesters and a total of sixteen graduate students from a variety of science-related disciplines enrolled in the course. We examined whether the course caused students to: 1) Develop more complex and refined attitudes regarding student learning; 2) Evaluate their current teaching methods and explore alternative teaching strategies; 3) Assess their teaching effectiveness; 4) Plan to be involved in a public teaching resource network; and 5) Develop lasting attitudes about scholarly teaching

Pervasiveness of Parasites in Pollinators

Many pollinator populations are declining, with large economic and ecological implications. Parasites are known to be an important factor in the some of the population declines of honey bees and bumblebees, but little is known about the parasites afflicting most other pollinators, or the extent of interspecific transmission or vectoring of parasites. Here we carry out a preliminary screening of pollinators (honey bees, five species of bumblebee, three species of wasp, four species of hoverfly and three genera of other bees) in the UK for parasites. We used molecular methods to screen for six honey bee viruses, Ascosphaera fungi, Microsporidia, and Wolbachia intracellular bacteria. We aimed simply to detect the presence of the parasites, encompassing vectoring as well as actual infections. Many pollinators of all types were positive for Ascosphaera fungi, while Microsporidia were rarer, being most frequently found in bumblebees. We also detected that most pollinators were positive for Wolbachia, most probably indicating infection with this intracellular symbiont, and raising the possibility that it may be an important factor in influencing host sex ratios or fitness in a diversity of pollinators. Importantly, we found that about a third of bumblebees (Bombus pascuorum and Bombus terrestris) and a third of wasps (Vespula vulgaris), as well as all honey bees, were positive for deformed wing virus, but that this virus was not present in other pollinators. Deformed wing virus therefore does not appear to be a general parasite of pollinators, but does interact significantly with at least three species of bumblebee and wasp. Further work is needed to establish the identity of some of the parasites, their spatiotemporal variation, and whether they are infecting the various pollinator species or being vectored. However, these results provide a first insight into the diversity, and potential exchange, of parasites in pollinator communities

Glycoproteomic landscape and structural dynamics of TIM family immune checkpoints enabled by mucinase SmE.

Mucin-domain glycoproteins are densely O-glycosylated and play critical roles in a host of biological functions. In particular, the T cell immunoglobulin and mucin-domain containing family of proteins (TIM-1, -3, -4) decorate immune cells and act as key regulators in cellular immunity. However, their dense O-glycosylation remains enigmatic, primarily due to the challenges associated with studying mucin domains. Here, we demonstrate that the mucinase SmE has a unique ability to cleave at residues bearing very complex glycans. SmE enables improved mass spectrometric analysis of several mucins, including the entire TIM family. With this information in-hand, we perform molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of TIM-3 and -4 to understand how glycosylation affects structural features of these proteins. Finally, we use these models to investigate the functional relevance of glycosylation for TIM-3 function and ligand binding. Overall, we present a powerful workflow to better understand the detailed molecular structures and functions of the mucinome