An Examination of Faculty and Staff Collaboration and Relationships In Higher Education

Collaboration between academic and student affairs professionals is an important means of increasing student success; however, historical divides between these units have made implementation of these efforts challenging. This quantitative study sought to evaluate the perceptions of faculty and student affairs staff towards collaborative efforts and toward one another within a single campus of a comprehensive regional university within the southeast. Findings show that while both faculty and staff value collaborations and believe they positively impact student success, these units do not experience equitable voice and responsibility within collaborative efforts when conducted. Additionally, differences were found in enjoyment of collaborative efforts and how various traits impacted willingness to collaborate. Significant differences were also found in the perceptions faculty and staff hold toward one another, both in perceptions of the roles and within relational descriptors. Finally, this study identified that interpersonal relationships and perceptions do in fact relate to willingness to collaborate, but do so in differing ways for the two employee classifications. Implications for institutional leadership and recommendations for future research are provided

Inquiry as Practice: The Pathway to Redesigning an Educational Leadership Doctoral Research Seminar Series

As faculty of an educational leadership doctoral program (EdD) aligned with the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED) principles, we acknowledge the importance of inquiry to develop scholarly practitioners. Applying the tenet of Inquiry as Practice, our EdD faculty critically examined the doctoral curriculum to explore ways to effectively prepare our doctoral students to learn and apply research methodology meaningfully. This essay details how the review of our research curriculum led to a pedagogical and curriculum redesign of our research seminar series. This revised research seminar series culminates in a course offered every fall/spring semester in the final two years of the program and intentionally has different faculty members teaching each course. We have utilized a backward design to create the themes/content of these seminar courses to better prepare students for their dissertation research

Pass/fail grading in medical school and impact on residency placement

Objective: There is a trend toward using pass/fail (P/F) grading in the first 2 years of medical school as it has been noted to improve student well-being and academic performance is not negatively impacted. It is important that medical students are afforded the best medical education possible to prepare them for residency placement. Thus, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of P/F grading in medical school on residency placement. Methods: This study compared archival residency match data from two medical school classes. The Class of 2016 had tiered grading and the Class of 2017 had P/F grading in the first year of medical school. Doximity’s Residency Navigator was used to rank the residency programs and an independent samples t-test was calculated to determine if residency rankings differed by class. Results: The findings showed no statistically significant differences in residency placement when comparing a cohort of medical school graduates with tiered grading to a cohort with P/F grading in the first year of medical school. Conclusion: These findings may be useful to medical education leaders when making decisions about grading systems. Medical education leaders should consider implementing P/F grading into the first year of medical school

Hormonal Signal Amplification Mediates Environmental Conditions during Development and Controls an Irreversible Commitment to Adulthood

Many animals can choose between different developmental fates to maximize fitness. Despite the complexity of environmental cues and life history, different developmental fates are executed in a robust fashion. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans serves as a powerful model to examine this phenomenon because it can adopt one of two developmental fates (adulthood or diapause) depending on environmental conditions. The steroid hormone dafachronic acid (DA) directs development to adulthood by regulating the transcriptional activity of the nuclear hormone receptor DAF-12. The known role of DA suggests that it may be the molecular mediator of environmental condition effects on the developmental fate decision, although the mechanism is yet unknown. We used a combination of physiological and molecular biology techniques to demonstrate that commitment to reproductive adult development occurs when DA levels, produced in the neuroendocrine XXX cells, exceed a threshold. Furthermore, imaging and cell ablation experiments demonstrate that the XXX cells act as a source of DA, which, upon commitment to adult development, is amplified and propagated in the epidermis in a DAF-12 dependent manner. This positive feedback loop increases DA levels and drives adult programs in the gonad and epidermis, thus conferring the irreversibility of the decision. We show that the positive feedback loop canalizes development by ensuring that sufficient amounts of DA are dispersed throughout the body and serves as a robust fate-locking mechanism to enforce an organism-wide binary decision, despite noisy and complex environmental cues. These mechanisms are not only relevant to C. elegans but may be extended to other hormonal-based decision-making mechanisms in insects and mammals

De-Novo Transcriptome Sequencing of a Normalized cDNA Pool from Influenza Infected Ferrets

The ferret is commonly used as a model for studies of infectious diseases. The genomic sequence of this animal model is not yet characterized, and only a limited number of fully annotated cDNAs are currently available in GenBank. The majority of genes involved in innate or adaptive immune response are still lacking, restricting molecular genetic analysis of host response in the ferret model. To enable de novo identification of transcriptionally active ferret genes in response to infection, we performed de-novo transcriptome sequencing of animals infected with H1N1 A/California/07/2009. We also included splenocytes induced with bacterial lipopolysaccharide to allow for identification of transcripts specifically induced by Gram-negative bacteria. We pooled and normalized the cDNA library in order to delimit the risk of sequencing only highly expressed genes. While normalization of the cDNA library removes the possibility of assessing expression changes between individual animals, it has been shown to increase identification of low abundant transcripts. In this study, we identified more than 19000 partial ferret transcripts, including more than 1000 gene orthologs known to be involved in the innate and the adaptive immune response

Preclinical modeling of lower-grade gliomas

Models for human gliomas prove critical not only to advancing our understanding of glioma biology but also to facilitate the development of therapeutic modalities. Specifically, creating lower-grade glioma (LGG) models has been challenging, contributing to few investigations and the minimal progress in standard treatment over the past decade. In order to reliably predict and validate the efficacies of novel treatments, however, LGG models need to adhere to specific standards that recapitulate tumor genetic aberrations and micro-environment. This underscores the need to revisit existing models of LGG and explore prospective models that may bridge the gap between preclinical insights and clinical translation. This review first outlines a set of criteria aimed to address the current challenges hindering model development. We then evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of existing preclinical models of LGG with respect to these established standards. To conclude, the review discusses potential future directions for integrating existing models to maximize the exploration of disease mechanisms and therapeutics development