Healthy Kids & Families: Overcoming Social, Environmental and Family Barriers to Childhood Obesity Prevention

Healthy Kids & Families, the applied research project of the UMass Worcester Prevention Research Center, is testing the impact of a community health worker (CHW)-delivered intervention aimed at helping families overcome barriers to childhood obesity prevention. The intervention addresses social, environmental, and family issues that may pose as barriers to healthy choices. The intervention is compared to a comparison condition consisting of a CHW-delivered intervention aimed at helping families improve positive parenting skills. The intervention and comparison condition are identical in format, Both use multiple delivery modalities to maintain novelty and prevent attrition/burden. These include home visits, telephone contacts, print (literacy sensitive newsletters), social media (Facebook), and community events. Parents and children will complete scheduled assessments at baseline, 6-, 12-, 18- and 24-month follow-up. Study participants are 240 parent-child dyads recruited from nine elementary schools. Inclusion criteria include: adult and their K-6th grade children attending a participating school, have access to a telephone, speak English or Spanish, and plan to live in the neighborhood for at least two years. Exclusion criteria include medical condition or advice from a doctor that precludes the child from walking or eating fruits and vegetables. Healthy Kids & Families is being implemented in racial/ethnically diverse underserved communities in Worcester, Massachusetts. Funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it involves a partnership between UMass Worcester Prevention Research Center of UMass Medical School, the Worcester Public Schools, and Oak Hill Community Development Corporation

Healthy Kids & Families: Overcoming Social, Environmental and Family Barriers to Childhood Obesity

Healthy Kids & Families, the applied research project of the UMass Worcester Prevention Research Center, is testing the impact of a community health worker (CHW)-delivered intervention aimed at helping families overcome barriers to childhood obesity prevention. The intervention addresses social, environmental, and family issues that may pose as barriers to healthy choices. The intervention is compared to a comparison condition consisting of a CHW-delivered intervention aimed at helping families improve positive parenting skills. The intervention and comparison condition are identical in format, Both use multiple delivery modalities to maintain novelty and prevent attrition/burden. These include home visits, telephone contacts, print (literacy sensitive newsletters), social media (Facebook), and community events. Parents and children will complete scheduled assessments at baseline, 6-, 12-, 18- and 24-month follow-up. Study participants are 240 parent-child dyads recruited from nine elementary schools. Inclusion criteria include: adult and their K-6th grade children attending a participating school, have access to a telephone, speak English or Spanish, and plan to live in the neighborhood for at least two years. Exclusion criteria include medical condition or advice from a doctor that precludes the child from walking or eating fruits and vegetables. Healthy Kids & Families is being implemented in racial/ethnically diverse underserved communities in Worcester, Massachusetts. Funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it involves a partnership between UMass Worcester Prevention Research Center of UMass Medical School, the Worcester Public Schools, and Oak Hill Community Development Corporation

Retrospective evaluation of whole exome and genome mutation calls in 746 cancer samples

Funder: NCI U24CA211006Abstract: The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) and International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) curated consensus somatic mutation calls using whole exome sequencing (WES) and whole genome sequencing (WGS), respectively. Here, as part of the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) Consortium, which aggregated whole genome sequencing data from 2,658 cancers across 38 tumour types, we compare WES and WGS side-by-side from 746 TCGA samples, finding that ~80% of mutations overlap in covered exonic regions. We estimate that low variant allele fraction (VAF < 15%) and clonal heterogeneity contribute up to 68% of private WGS mutations and 71% of private WES mutations. We observe that ~30% of private WGS mutations trace to mutations identified by a single variant caller in WES consensus efforts. WGS captures both ~50% more variation in exonic regions and un-observed mutations in loci with variable GC-content. Together, our analysis highlights technological divergences between two reproducible somatic variant detection efforts

High Spectral Resolution Infrared and Raman Lidar Observations for the ARM Program: Clear and Cloudy Sky Applications

This grant began with the development of the Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI) for ARM. The AERI has provided highly accurate and reliable observations of downwelling spectral radiance (Knuteson et al. 2004a, 2004b) for application to radiative transfer, remote sensing of boundary layer temperature and water vapor, and cloud characterization. One of the major contributions of the ARM program has been its success in improving radiation calculation capabilities for models and remote sensing that evolved from the multi-year, clear-sky spectral radiance comparisons between AERI radiances and line-by-line calculations (Turner et al. 2004). This effort also spurred us to play a central role in improving the accuracy of water vapor measurements, again helping ARM lead the way in the community (Turner et al. 2003a, Revercomb et al. 2003). In order to add high-altitude downlooking AERI-like observations over the ARM sites, we began the development of an airborne AERI instrument that has become known as the Scanning High-resolution Interferometer Sounder (Scanning-HIS). This instrument has become an integral part of the ARM Unmanned Aerospace Vehicle (ARM-UAV) program. It provides both a cross-track mapping view of the earth and an uplooking view from the 12-15 km altitude of the Scaled Composites Proteus aircraft when flown over the ARM sites for IOPs. It has successfully participated in the first two legs of the “grand tour” of the ARM sites (SGP and NSA), resulting in a very good comparison with AIRS observations in 2002 and in an especially interesting data set from the arctic during the Mixed-Phase Cloud Experiment (M-PACE) in 2004. More specifically, our major achievements for ARM include 1. Development of the Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI) to function like a satellite on the ground for ARM, providing a steady stream of accurately calibrated spectral radiances for Science Team clear sky and cloud applications (Knuteson et al. 2004a), 2. Detailed radiometric calibration and characterization of AERI radiances, with uncertainty estimates established from complete error analyses and proven by inter-comparison tests (Knuteson et al. 2004b), 3. AERI data quality assessment and maintenance over the extended time frames needed to support ARM (Dedecker et al., 2005) 4. Key role in the radiative transfer model improvements from the AERI/LBLRTM QME (Turner et al. 2004) and AERI-ER especially from the SHEBA experiment (Tobin et al. 1999), 5. Contributed scientific and programmatic leadership leading to significant water vapor accuracy improvements and uncertainty assessments for the low to mid troposphere (Turner et al. 2003a, Revercomb et al. 2003), 6. Leadership of the ARM assessment of the accuracy of water vapor observations from radiosondes, Raman Lidar and in situ aircraft observations in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (Tobin et al. 2002, Ferrare et al. 2004), 7. New techniques for characterizing clouds from AERI (DeSlover et al. 1999, Turner 2003b, Turner et al. 2003b), 8. Initial design and development of the Scanning-HIS aircraft instrument and application to ARM UAV Program missions (Revercomb et al. 2005), and 9. Coordinated efforts leading to the use of ARM observations as a key validation tool for the high resolution Atmospheric IR Sounder on the NASA Aqua platform (Tobin et al. 2005a) 10. Performed ARM site and global clear sky radiative closure studies that shows closure of top-of-atmosphere flux at the level of ~1 W/m2 (Moy et al 2008 and Section 3 of this appendix) 11. Performed studies to characterize SGP site cirrus cloud property retrievals and assess impacts on computed fluxes and heating rate profiles (Borg et al. 2008 and Section 2 of this appendix)

Design and methods of the Healthy Kids and Families study: a parent-focused community health worker-delivered childhood obesity prevention intervention

Background: One third of U.S. children and two thirds of adults are overweight or obese. Interventions to prevent obesity and thus avert threats to public health are needed. This paper describes the design and methods of the Healthy Kids and Families study, which tested the effect of a parent-focused community health worker (CHW)-delivered lifestyle intervention to prevent childhood obesity. Methods: Participants were English or Spanish-speaking parent-child dyads (n = 247) from nine elementary schools (grades K-6) located in racial/ethnically diverse low-income communities in Worcester, Massachusetts. Using a quasi-experimental design with the school as the level of allocation, the study compared the lifestyle intervention vs. an attention-control comparison condition. The lifestyle intervention was guided by social cognitive theory and social ecological principles. It targeted the child\u27s social and physical home environment by intervening with parental weight-related knowledge, beliefs, and skills for managing child obesogenic behaviors; and addressed families\u27 needs for community resources supportive of a healthy lifestyle. The two-year CHW-delivered intervention was structured based on the 5As model (Agenda, Assess, Advise, Assist, Arrange follow up) and included two in person sessions and two telephone follow-ups per year with the parent, with a personalized letter and print materials sent after each contact. Parents also received quarterly newsletters, Facebook messages, and invitations to community events. The attention-control comparison condition used the same format and contact time as the intervention condition, but targeted positive parenting skills. Measurements occurred at baseline, and at 6-, 12-, 18- and 24-month follow-up. Assessments included anthropometrics, accelerometry, global positioning system (GPS), and self-report surveys. The primary outcome was child body mass index (BMI) z score. Secondary outcomes were parent BMI; and parent and child diet, physical activity, sedentariness, and utilization of community resources supportive of a healthy lifestyle. Discussion: A CHW-delivered parent-focused lifestyle intervention may provide a translatable model for targeting the high priority public health problem of childhood obesity among low-income diverse communities. If demonstrated effective, this intervention has potential for high impact. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials NCT03028233. Registered January 23,2017. The trial was retrospectively registered

Simulation of CrIS Radiances Accounting for Realistic Properties of the Instrument Responsivity That Result in Spectral Ringing Features

This paper provides a procedure for the simulation of radiances from the U. S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) Fourier Transform Spectrometer to include spectral ringing effects caused by the finite-band, non-flat instrument spectral response to incident radiation. A simulation using a line-by-line radiative transfer model is performed to illustrate the magnitude of the effect and to indicate which spectral channels are likely to be impacted. Comparisons with CrIS observations are made to show that for most channels this effect is negligibly small compared to errors in the radiative transfer calculations but for the longwave edge of the CrIS longwave band and a few other regions, the brightness temperature ringing is significant. While the ringing artifact described in this paper may appear to be removed when Hamming apodization is applied, as is done for the assimilation of CrIS data into Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, it is still present, and its influence reappears if the spectral correlation induced by apodization is properly handled to preserve the information content that derives from high spectral resolution. Inclusion of the instrument responsivity in calculated spectra to properly mimic the observed spectra as defined here eliminates artifacts from this type of ringing. Users of CrIS radiances should consider whether this effect is important for their application

Performance of CrIS on Suomi – NPP

This presentation will review various recent analyses and results of early checkout activities to characterize the performance of CrIS on the NPP satellite