Tulsa Photovoice: A Participatory Action Research Project

The Tulsa PV project involved collaboration among OU-Tulsa School of Community Medicine (SCM), the Tulsa Area Community Schools Initiative (TACSI), faculty members from the Anne & Henry Zarrow School of Social Work, the Urban Design Studio, and the OU-Tulsa Library. The objectives of the Tulsa (PV) project were broad and varied due to the multiple constituencies. Objectives included:(1) the collection and analysis of qualitative data, both visual and oral, from a geographically distributed sample of Tulsa residents that will reflect their attitudes, perceptions, and behaviors about their communities, particularly those that may be related to health outcomes, (2) provide community residents the opportunity to examine and speak directly about their experiences living within their communities, (3) Provide opportunities for faculty, students, and staff participating in the OU School of Community Medicine Summer Institute to meet with community residents and learn more about their communities through direct experience in a research project (4) Involve teachers and school site coordinators at community schools in a qualitative research study as assistant investigators, and (5) Document and share the information collected with all the institute participants, the scholarly community, and the public.N

A DNA Network as an Information Processing System

Biomolecular systems that can process information are sought for computational applications, because of their potential for parallelism and miniaturization and because their biocompatibility also makes them suitable for future biomedical applications. DNA has been used to design machines, motors, finite automata, logic gates, reaction networks and logic programs, amongst many other structures and dynamic behaviours. Here we design and program a synthetic DNA network to implement computational paradigms abstracted from cellular regulatory networks. These show information processing properties that are desirable in artificial, engineered molecular systems, including robustness of the output in relation to different sources of variation. We show the results of numerical simulations of the dynamic behaviour of the network and preliminary experimental analysis of its main components