Unpacking challenges in student-faculty partnerships on Departmental Action Teams

This paper is a case study analysis of one student-faculty partnership working to enact departmental change. Students as Partners (SaP) is an approach in which students and faculty work in partnership on the co-design of a curricular or institutional change effort. Our team implements SaP through Departmental Action Teams (DATs), which are facilitated teams of faculty, students, and staff within a single STEM department working on an issue related to undergraduate education. In our research, we aim to understand the ways in which SaP becomes enacted in DATs. Through analyzing interviews with student and faculty members of a single DAT, we construct a case study of the complexities and challenges of student-faculty partnership. We find that members of a partnership can hold different views of that partnership. Underlying these differences are differing views about their joint work as well as differences in the visibility of power dynamics. In self-critically analyzing the ways in which we mitigated and reproduced power dynamics, we reflect on our project’s areas for growth

Developing the DELTA: Capturing cultural changes in undergraduate departments

Departments are now recognized as an important locus for sustainable change on university campuses. Making sustainable changes typically requires a shift in culture, but culture is complex and difficult to measure. For this reason, cultural changes are often studied using qualitative methods that provide rich, detailed data. However, this imposes barriers to measuring culture and studying change at scale (i.e., across many departments). To address this issue, we introduce the Departmental Education and Leadership Transformation Assessment (DELTA), a new survey aimed at capturing cultural changes in undergraduate departments. We describe the survey’s development and validation and provide sugges-tions for its utility for researchers and practitioners

NKT cells coexpressing a GD2-specific chimeric antigen receptor and IL15 show enhanced in vivo persistence and antitumor activity against neuroblastoma

Purpose: Va24-invariant natural killer T cells (NKT) are attractive carriers for chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) due to their inherent antitumor properties and preferential localization to tumor sites. However, limited persistence of CAR-NKTs in tumor-bearing mice is associated with tumor recurrence. Here, we evaluated whether coexpression of the NKT homeostatic cytokine IL15 with a CAR enhances the in vivo persistence and therapeutic efficacy of CAR-NKTs. Experimental Design: Human primary NKTs were ex vivo expanded and transduced with CAR constructs containing an optimized GD2-specific single-chain variable fragment and either the CD28 or 4-1BB costimulatory endodomain, each with or without IL15 (GD2.CAR or GD2.CAR.15). Constructs that mediated robust CAR-NKT cell expansion were selected for further functional evaluation in vitro and in xenogeneic mouse models of neuroblastoma. Results: Coexpression of IL15 with either costimulatory domain increased CAR-NKT absolute numbers. However, constructs containing 4-1BB induced excessive activation-induced cell death and reduced numeric expansion of NKTs compared with respective CD28-based constructs. Further evaluation of CD28-based GD2.CAR and GD2. CAR.15 showed that coexpression of IL15 led to reduced expression levels of exhaustion markers in NKTs and increased multiround in vitro tumor cell killing. Following transfer into mice bearing neuroblastoma xenografts, GD2.CAR.15 NKTs demonstrated enhanced in vivo persistence, increased localization to tumor sites, and improved tumor control compared with GD2.CAR NKTs. Importantly, GD2.CAR.15 NKTs did not produce significant toxicity as determined by histopathologic analysis. Conclusions: Our results informed selection of the CD28-based GD2.CAR.15 construct for clinical testing and led to initiation of a first-in-human CAR-NKT cell clinical trial (NCT03294954)

Anti-GD2 CAR-NKT cells in patients with relapsed or refractory neuroblastoma: an interim analysis

Vα24-invariant natural killer T (NKT) cells have shown potent anti-tumor properties in murine tumor models and have been linked to favorable outcomes in patients with cancer. However, low numbers of these cells in humans have hindered their clinical applications. Here we report interim results from all three patients enrolled on dose level 1 in a phase 1 dose-escalation trial of autologous NKT cells engineered to co-express a GD2-specific chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) with interleukin-15 in children with relapsed or resistant neuroblastoma (NCT03294954). Primary and secondary objectives were to assess safety and anti-tumor responses, respectively, with immune response evaluation as an additional objective. We ex vivo expanded highly pure NKT cells (mean ± s.d., 94.7 ± 3.8%) and treated patients with 3 × 106 CAR-NKT cells per square meter of body surface area after lymphodepleting conditioning with cyclophosphamide/fludarabine (Cy/Flu). Cy/Flu conditioning was the probable cause for grade 3–4 hematologic adverse events, as they occurred before CAR-NKT cell infusion, and no dose-limiting toxicities were observed. CAR-NKT cells expanded in vivo, localized to tumors and, in one patient, induced an objective response with regression of bone metastatic lesions. These initial results suggest that CAR-NKT cells can be expanded to clinical scale and safely applied to treat patients with cancer

Synthesis of Self-Assembled Coordination Cages for Biomimetic Catalysis

Enzymes are catalysts found in nature that show high rate accelerations and substrate selectivity compared to synthetic catalysts. The high selectivity of enzymes derives from their active sites. These sites contain functional groups that allow enzymes to bind to substrates of specific shapes and sizes. The high efficiency and selectivity shown by enzymes has prompted chemists to mimic their behavior in a more easily analyzable system. This has led to the creation of synthetic molecules known as self-assembled metal-ligand cages. However, most cages are featureless, and lack the functional groups found in enzymes needed for binding and catalyzing reactions. My research is, therefore, geared towards overcoming the inherent problems faced when modifying these cage molecules with reactive functions. Past studies have shown that twelve internal acid groups can be incorporated in the active site of a cage complex. My research has investigated the factors that affect the reactivity of the acid cage. The reactivity is controlled by both the nature of the nucleophile and size and orientation of the electrophile when bound. Electrophiles that have more bulk around the basic oxygen are activated less effectively, due to being located further away from the cage’s acid groups. Smaller electrophiles show minimal size-selectivity and react at a slower rate. While spherical guests are highly dependent on substitution, flat guests are unaffected by both size and shape differences in the cage. Further research has shown that the acid cage can activate complex, multistep reaction pathway. This is challenging because most reactions performed with artificial enzymes are relatively simple one or two step processes. Results from this study reveal differences in reactivity based on the size and fitting of the intermediate molecule formed inside the cage. Enzymes can also employ “cofactors.” By adding a small molecule acid to an unfunctionalized version of the acid cage, this allows size-selective, acid-catalyzed substitution reactions to occur with faster rates and variable mechanisms than simply with the acid alone. Finally, my research has formed a cage with twelve internal amine groups inside its cavity. The amine functional groups are protonated due to the water created during the assembly process. The internal amines are less basic than normal, when compared to a molecule in free solution. Similar to an enzyme’s ability to control both acidity and basicity of its side-chain in its active sites, this complex can exhibit the same type of control using its internal amines and the cationic superstructure

An Investigation of Chemical Identity Thinking

Chemical identity is a foundational crosscutting concept in chemistry and encompasses the knowledge, reasoning, and practices relevant for the classification and differentiation of substances. Substances are found everywhere – from the chemistry classroom to the kitchen at home – so classification and differentiation of substances is important for everyday decisions as well as challenges that are solved using chemistry. An understanding of chemical identity, then, is essential for scientifically literate citizens in addition to students training to be chemists. A better understanding of how chemical identity thinking develops could be used to inform instruction and education research, with the intent of producing students and citizens who can use their chemical knowledge to reason with in order to practice chemical identity thinking. This thesis characterizes chemical identity thinking from the perspective of chemical identity knowledge and chemical identity practices, both of which contribute to chemical identity thinking. First, the literature is examined for existing research on how students perceive substances and chemical identity, and a hypothetical learning progression for chemical identity thinking is proposed. This is followed by the design of a qualitative instrument, the CSI Survey, to capture the chemical identity practices exhibited by students at a range of education levels (8th grade – 4th year university). The data collected using the CSI Survey are analyzed using content analysis. Eight unique themes corresponding to chemical identity practices (the application of chemical identity knowledge and reasoning) are revealed by this analysis (change, class, composition and structure, function, organism effect, sensory information, source, tests and experimental values). The application of chemical identity knowledge in biochemical contexts by both expert biochemists and biochemistry students is investigated in the final chapter, and the chemical identity knowledge observed in the biochemical contexts is characterized using the eight themes of chemical identity practices. Suggestions are offered on how the products of the research on chemical identity thinking can be used to inform decisions in both instruction and research

A team-based model that catalyzes sustained department-wide change

We developed a team-based model supporting departmental change and ran 17 change teams at two R1 universities between 2014 and 2021, in a wide variety of STEM academic departments. Change team members included faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates. Teams were externally facilitated by project staff for a period of up to two years, and were supported in training internal facilitators to continue the work. Long-term impacts of the change teams were recently investigated by qualitatively analyzing interviews of former team members that took place 1–4 years following the end of external facilitation. In this presentation, we will describe qualitative coding of these rich interviews that illuminate a wide variety of impacts to individuals and departments. We found that most change teams, or another group in the department, sustained change by continuing to work on the change team’s original project. Sustained change frequently included structural changes to departmental curricula or policies, skill development of team members, and the spread of skills or cultural features from the change team to other departmental groups. Participating departments often experienced department-wide growth around the model’s core principles for change, such as engaging “students as partners” or demonstrating “a commitment to equity and inclusion through their work”. In alignment with the WCSE theme of Belonging, this presentation will include an examination of one change team’s work that resulted in both a substantial increase in the enrollment of underrepresented students and an increase in the sense of belonging among department majors

Research on university faculty member\u27s reasoning about how departments change

Research on institutional change says that effective change agents are able to flexibly reason with multiple models for change, depending on their local context and their goals. However, little is known about what it looks like for individuals to draw on and reason with different change models in-the-moment. Within interviews, we invited STEM faculty to discuss specific changes in their department and the process of change in general. This work is part of an ongoing study to understand how to support departmental change through Departmental Action Teams (DATs). Our preliminary analyses suggest that faculty\u27s ideas about change are highly varied and context-dependent. This work will lead to a better understanding of how productive lines of reasoning can be leveraged in DATs and other faculty communities that are trying to create positive change