Establishing a Mentoring Program for Health Science Educators in a New Medical School

Purpose: New Medical Schools need mentoring programs to enhance the personal and professional development of mentees and mentors. The need to establish a mentoring support mechanism is critical. This poster will share our progress to date. Methods: A pilot mentoring program was established for junior faculty. These faculty members were paired with an associate professor or professor to serve as mentors for career development and engage in a focused scholarly project over a nine-month period. Typically, the junior faculty is within the first three years of appointment and hold the rank of assistant professor. Each mentee will have 10% protected time for this program. Our mentoring program consists of the following requirements: 1) Develop an Individual Development Plan (IDP); 2) Schedule regular meetings with Mentor; 3)Attend faculty development mentoring activities; 4) Present a draft of a scholarly project; 5) Respond to surveys and evaluations; and 6) Attend the Graduation Ceremony. The mentoring program will be evaluated by mentee performance on Individual Development Plan (IDP), mentee-mentor meeting attendance, mentee participation in mentoring activities, mentee scholarly project presentation, mentor-mentee survey feedback, and mentoring program completion. Results: We will outline the benefits, challenges, and future implications of this pilot mentoring program. Mentors foster the opportunity to excel in academic medicine in clinical, teaching, and research. Mentees will serve as junior faculty champions for future mentees participants of the mentoring program. Conclusion: A mentoring program is critical in Schools of Medicine and Health Science Center. We have seen that with formal mentoring programs, junior faculty have a higher recruitment, retention rate and are committed to the mission and vision of their institution. We will take the lessons learned and address gaps in the planning and implementing this mentoring program for future cohorts

Steps on Establishing a Faculty Development Curriculum for Health Science Educators in a New Medical School

Purpose: New Medical Schools need health science educators, to teach throughout the medical education continuum from basic science to clinical years. The need to establish a defined faculty development curriculum for health science educators will aid in standardizing best teaching practices and build a potential master teacher to move the curriculum toward active learning and innovation. The UTRGV SoM is a distributed campus, to achieve increase outreach we will offer synchronous and asynchronous online faculty development during the pandemic. This poster will share our progress to date. Methods: A pilot, faculty development program, was established from faculty needs assessment data, teaching observations, and student evaluations was rolled out in FY 2020. A designated faculty development curriculum was recommended to faculty and provided via synchronous and asynchronous viewing through videos and PowerPoints on a designated Blackboard site. The advancement of the continuum of best teaching practices will be measured by sessions completed, faculty feedback, and comparison of prior F2F faculty development data for 2016-2019. Results: We will present how this need-based curriculum session is delivered and received for best teaching practices among health science educators. We will discuss the cost of establishing the program, return on investment, advantages, and barriers to online implementation in a distributed campus during a pandemic. Conclusion: There is a need to improve faculty development opportunities that are interactive, self-directed, and offered online. These recommendations could result in increased synchronous and asynchronous faculty development attendance and learning and, in turn, increased student academic achievement

Project Florida: Federated Learning Made Easy

We present Project Florida, a system architecture and software development kit (SDK) enabling deployment of large-scale Federated Learning (FL) solutions across a heterogeneous device ecosystem. Federated learning is an approach to machine learning based on a strong data sovereignty principle, i.e., that privacy and security of data is best enabled by storing it at its origin, whether on end-user devices or in segregated cloud storage silos. Federated learning enables model training across devices and silos while the training data remains within its security boundary, by distributing a model snapshot to a client running inside the boundary, running client code to update the model, and then aggregating updated snapshots across many clients in a central orchestrator. Deploying a FL solution requires implementation of complex privacy and security mechanisms as well as scalable orchestration infrastructure. Scale and performance is a paramount concern, as the model training process benefits from full participation of many client devices, which may have a wide variety of performance characteristics. Project Florida aims to simplify the task of deploying cross-device FL solutions by providing cloud-hosted infrastructure and accompanying task management interfaces, as well as a multi-platform SDK supporting most major programming languages including C++, Java, and Python, enabling FL training across a wide range of operating system (OS) and hardware specifications. The architecture decouples service management from the FL workflow, enabling a cloud service provider to deliver FL-as-a-service (FLaaS) to ML engineers and application developers. We present an overview of Florida, including a description of the architecture, sample code, and illustrative experiments demonstrating system capabilities

Outcomes are in the Eye of the Beholder: The Influence of Affective Dispositions on Disconfirmation Emotions, Outcome Satisfaction, and Enjoyment

The purpose of the current research is to examine the influence of affective dispositions and the sequencing of affective and cognitive responses to mediated entertainment. Affective dispositions are manipulated so as to match a liked competitor against one who is disliked. The results indicate that viewers’ emotional responses and assessments of satisfaction with a win or loss were dependent on competitor liking. A hedonic reversal occurs in viewer disconfirmation emotions (relief and disappointment) and satisfaction judgments based on outcome desirability. A desirable (undesirable) outcome was one in which a liked (disliked) competitor won or a disliked (liked) competitor lost. We also find evidence of mediated moderation such that competitor liking moderates the mediating effect of relief and disappointment on outcome satisfaction following an outcome. Outcome satisfaction, conceptualized as a cognitive judgment in our model, is then positively related to viewer enjoyment of the overall experience. Additionally, our hypothesized model was found to outperform two competing models. The results elucidate the complex intertwining of affect and cognition in predicting viewer enjoyment of mediated entertainment.Keywords: outcome satisfaction, emotion, affective dispositions, enjoymentKeywords: outcome satisfaction, emotion, affective dispositions, enjoymen

It's not whether you win or lose; it's how the game is played: the influence of suspenseful sports programming on advertising

The current research investigates the interplay of program suspense, game outcome, advertisement placement, and ad execution on viewer reactions to advertising embedded in sports programming. In support of excitation transfer theory, results indicate that ad emotional response, attitude toward the ad, and attitude toward the brand are heightened immediately following a suspenseful sporting event. In addition, when considering both program suspense and game outcome, only program suspense was found to influence ad responses. Findings also indicate that congruency between program suspense and ad suspense moderates the influence of programming on responses to advertising such that an effect is found only in the context of suspenseful programming with suspenseful advertising

Proteomic analyses of Urine Exosomes reveal New Biomarkers of Diabetes in Pregnancy.

ObjectiveTo evaluate 24 hour urine exosome protein content changes among pregnant US subjects with diabetes and obesity during early pregnancy.MethodsThe exosome proteome content from 24 hour urine samples of pregnant subjects with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM, N=8) and pre-gestational Type 2 diabetes (PGD, N = 10) were compared with control samples (CTRL, N = 10) obtained at week 20 of pregnancy. Differences in exosome protein load between groups was identified by liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry, analyzed by linear regression in negative binomial distribution, visualized in MetaboAnalyst (version 3.0), and validated by western immunoblotting.ResultsAt the 20th week of pregnancy, we identified 646, 734 and 856 proteins in exosomes from 24 hour urine samples of patients from the CTRL, GDM and PGD groups, respectively. S100 calcium binding protein A9, damage associated molecular pattern (DAMP) signal, was found to be significantly increased in both GDM and PGD subjects. In GDM subjects the peptide counts for S100A9 protein independently correlated with maternal obesity and macrosomia of the newborn infants. Early to late pregnancy developmental changes in the GDM group were shown to utilize pathways and protein expression levels differently from those in PGD or CTRL groups.ConclusionsUrinary exosome proteomic analysis non-invasively provides insights into maternal changes during diabetic pregnancy. Exosome biomarkers early in pregnancy can be potentially used to better understand pathophysiologic mechanisms of diabetes at a cellular level, and to distinguish between gestational and pre-gestational diabetes at the pathway level. This information can aid intervention efforts to improve pregnancy outcomes in women with diabetes

The Effect of Suspense on Enjoyment Following a Desirable Outcome: The Mediating Role of Relief

Although endemic to many forms of media entertainment, suspense represents a paradox for enjoyment because it is experienced as an aversive state. Three studies are presented across two media contexts demonstrating how outcomes to suspenseful episodes affect viewers’ relief. Study 1 shows that relief is elicited only when a film’s outcome is unambiguously favorable and under such conditions is positively related to enjoyment. No such relationship was found given an ambiguous outcome. Study 1 provides evidence that relief is distinct from other affective responses (i.e., positive and negative affect, surprise) that may be present following suspense. Studies 2 and 3 use competitive contests as a context and provide evidence that relief mediates the effect of suspense on enjoyment. Study 2 shows that the previously positive effects of suspense and expectation disconfirmation on enjoyment are obviated in the presence of relief. Study 3 varies suspense in real time across 14 simulated races. Also manipulated are affective dispositions toward the racers and race outcome. The results reveal that relief mediates the effect of suspense on enjoyment, but only when the outcome favors a preferred competitor. The research enhances our understanding of the intertwining of cognition and affect in the enjoyment of suspense

Autologous stromal vascular fraction therapy for rheumatoid arthritis: rationale and clinical safety

Advancements in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) treatment protocols and introduction of targeted biological therapies have markedly improved patient outcomes, despite this, up to 50% of patients still fail to achieve a significant clinical response. In veterinary medicine, stem cell therapy in the form of autologous stromal vascular fraction (SVF) is an accepted therapeutic modality for degenerative conditions with 80% improvement and no serious treatment associated adverse events reported. Clinical translation of SVF therapy relies on confirmation of veterinary findings in targeted patient populations. Here we describe the rationale and preclinical data supporting the use of autologous SVF in treatment of RA, as well as provide 1, 3, 6, and 13 month safety outcomes in 13 RA patients treated with this approach

Who ate all the pies? The importance of food in the Australian sporting experience

Australians watch live sport in large numbers and traditionally consume high quantities of meat pies, chips and beer within stadiums. However the food and beverage preferences of stadium-attending Australian sports fans are not well understood, particularly in comparison to their North American and European peers. This paper utilised a survey-based approach to understand the satisfaction of fans of Australia’s national Rugby Union team with stadiums in Australia. While food and beverage offerings were found to be a particular point of dissatisfaction the price and service quality were found to be of greater concern than the healthiness of these. The study also drew on the researchers’ observations and knowledge of recent Australian stadium redevelopments to examine how the traditional offerings may be changing. We conclude that in order to attract greater attendances from a wider market, stadiums in Australia need to provide more varied, higher quality, healthy food and beverage offerings that are both affordable and easy to eat

TRY plant trait database - enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits-the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants-determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait-based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits-almost complete coverage for 'plant growth form'. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait-environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives