Chau Phan Senior Interior Design Exhibit 2015

Even a simplest design has its own character. It does not matter how sophisticated a design is. The matter is your character can be expressed through that design style. I believe the purpose of interior designer is creating a place that reflects client’s personality and making sure to protect their health, safety and welfare

GacA/S signaalraja puudumine mõjutab raaminihke- ja asendusmutatsioonide tekkesagedust Pseudomonas putida KT2440 tüves

GacA/GacS two-component system can be found in Gram-negative bacteria, including enteric bacteria and Pseudomonas. gacS gene encodes for a membrane-bound sensor kinase GacS, whereas a transcriptional response regulator GacA is encoded by gacA gene. The aim of this thesis was to investigate whether the inactivation of the GacA/GacS two-component system could affect mutation frequency in Pseudomonas putida. Two test systems were employed for measuring mutation frequency: chromosomal RifR assay and a plasmidial test system based on lactose degradation. RifR phenotype of bacteria is a result of mutations that decrease the affinity of rifampicin binding to the β subunit of RNA polymerase. This makes this enzyme insensitive to rifampicin. The second test system is based on the monitoring mutations in lacZ gene encoding for β-galactosidase, which turns the tester strains from Lac- to Lac+ phenotype. Usage of both test systems revealed that the inactivation of the gacA gene elevates mutation frequency in P. putida. In estonian: GacA/GacS kahekomponendiline süsteem on kirjeldatud erinevates Gram negatiivsetes bakteriliikides, kuhu kuuluvad ka enterobakterid ja erinevad Pseudomonase liigid. Geen gacS kodeerib membraan-seoselist sensorkinaasi GacS ning transkriptsiooni regulaator GacA, mis saab signaali GacS-lt, on kodeeritud geeni gacA poolt. Käesoleva bakalaureusetöö eesmärgiks oli välja selgitada, kas GacA/GacS süsteemi inaktiveerimine mõjutab bakteris Pseudomonas putida mutatsioonisagedust. Mutatsioonisageduse mõõtmiseks kasutati kahte testsüsteemi: kromosomaalset RifR süsteemi ja plasmiidset laktoosi lagundamisel põhinevat Lac+ süsteemi. RifR fenotüübiga bakterites on tekkinud mutatsioonid, mis vähendavad rifampitsiini seondumist RNA polümeraasi β-subühikuga, muutes sel viisil ensüümi rifampitsiini suhtes tundetuks. Teine testsüsteem põhineb β-galaktosidaasi kodeerivas geenis lacZ tekkivate mutatsioonide tuvastamisel, mis võimaldavad Lac- testertüvedel hakata lagundama laktoosi (Lac+ reversioon). Töö tulemustena selgus, et gacA geeni inaktiveerimine bakteris P. putida põhjustas mutatsioonisageduse suurenemist mõlemate testsüsteemide rakendamisel

Release of Moxifloxacin from Contact Lenses Using an In Vitro Eye Model: Impact of Artificial Tear Fluid Composition and Mechanical Rubbing

Phan, C.-M., Bajgrowicz-Cieslak, M., Subbaraman, L. N., & Jones, L. (2016). Release of Moxifloxacin from Contact Lenses Using an In Vitro Eye Model: Impact of Artificial Tear Fluid Composition and Mechanical Rubbing. Translational Vision Science & Technology, 5(6), 3. https://doi.org/10.1167/tvst.5.6.3Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare the release of moxifloxacin from a variety of daily disposable (DD) contact lenses (CLs) under various conditions using a novel in vitro eye model. Methods: Four commercially available DD conventional hydrogel (CH) CLs (nelfilcon A, omafilcon A, etafilcon A, and ocufilcon B) and three silicone hydrogel (SH) CLs (somofilcon A, narafilcon A, and delefilcon A) were evaluated. These lenses were incubated in moxifloxacin for 24 hours. The release of the drug was measured using a novel in vitro model in three experimental conditions: (1) phosphate buffered saline (PBS); (2) artificial tear solution (ATS) containing a variety of proteins and lipids; and (3) ATS with mechanical rubbing produced by the device. Results: Overall, CH CLs had a higher drug release than SH CLs (P < 0.05) under all conditions. Typically, a higher drug release was observed in PBS than ATS (P < 0.05). For CH, drug release was found to be higher in ATS with rubbing than PBS or ATS (P < 0.05). For most lens types, ATS with rubbing produced higher drug release than ATS alone (P < 0.05). Generally, the release kinetics for all conditions were sustained over the 24-hour testing period, and no burst release was observed (P < 0.05). Conclusions: Moxifloxacin release from a CL into ATS is lower when compared to release into PBS. When mechanical rubbing is introduced, the amount of drugs released is increased. Translational Relevance: Results suggest that sophisticated in vitro models are necessary to adequately model on-eye drug release from CL materials

Human Steroid Sulfatase: Inhibitor Studies and Photoaffinity Labeling

Steroid sulfatase (STS) is considered to be one of the key enzymes contributing to the development of breast cancer. It catalyzes the hydrolysis of inactive sulfated steroids such as estrone sulfate (ES) to inorganic sulfate active steroids such as estrone (E1), a precursor to estradiol (E2), a key stimulator for breast cancer development. Inhibitors of STS are currently being pursued in both academia and industry as potential drugs for treating breast cancer. A series of 4-substituted estrone and estradiol derivatives were examined as inhibitors of STS. Inhibition of STS with 4-FE1, an irreversible inhibitor of STS previously studied in the Taylor group, can be enhanced by introducing a hydrophobic benzyl group at the 17-positon of 4-FE1. As with 4-FE1, the inhibition was concentration and time-dependent. Only 14% of the activity could be recovered after extensive dialysis. Introducing substituents at the 2-position of 4-formyl estrogen derivatives resulted in loss of concentration and time-dependent inhibition and a considerable decrease in inhibitor affinity. Studies with estrogen derivatives substituted at the 4-position with groups other than a formyl revealed that a relatively good reversible inhibitor can be obtained simply by introducing an electron withdrawing group at this position. These types of inhibitors are non-competitive inhibitors suggesting an alternative steroid binding site. A series of estrone derivatives were examined as photoaffinity labels of STS. 4-azidoestrone suflate and 4-azidoestrone phosphate exhibited properties that are suitable for photoaffinity labeling studies with STS. These labels may be useful for ascertaining pathways of substrate entry into the STS active site. 16-diazoestrone phosphate was not a photoaffinity label of STS. 2- and 4-azido estrone and 16-diazoestrone all acted as photoaffinity labels of STS. These compounds may be useful for ascertaining pathways of product release from the STS active site

Antifungal ocular drug delivery via contact lenses using a novel in vitro eye model

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate the potential of contact lenses (CLs) as an antifungal drug delivery device, and to develop an in vitro eye model to test thereof. Methods: The first three chapters focused on developing a CL to function as a drug delivery device for natamycin, the only commercially available antifungal: • In the first experiment (Chapter 3), the in vitro uptake and release characteristics of natamycin from several commercially available CLs were evaluated • In the second experiment (Chapter 4), to improve the release characteristics of natamycin from contact lenses, an attempt was made to incorporate novel drug-encapsulated nanoparticles (Dex-b-PLA) within the CLs • In the third experiment (Chapter 5), an alternative strategy employing the incorporation of cyclodextrin (CDs) within the CL polymer matrix was evaluated as a potential modification to prolong the release of natamycin The second half of the thesis was aimed at developing a sophisticated in vitro ocular model capable of adequately measuring drug release from CLs: • In Chapter 6, the design of a novel in vitro eye model to simulate the physiological ocular environment was outlined • In Chapter 7, this model was used to evaluate the release of the antifungal fluconazole from commercially daily disposable CLs • In chapter 8, as an extension of the developed in vitro eye model, an agar eye model was developed to test the effects of natamycin and fluconazole-releasing CLs on Candida albicans Results Commercial CLs, after drug incubation with natamycin, will release the drug rapidly within the first half hour, followed by a plateau phase. However, when CL materials were loaded instead with natamycin encapsulated within novel Dex-b-PLA nanoparticles, the release duration was extended to 12 hours. Modifying the CL polymer with methacrylated CDs did not significantly improve drug release. On the contrary, high loading of CDs decreased overall drug delivery efficiency, likely resulting from unfavourable arrangements of the CDs within the polymer network. The developed ocular platform, termed Ocuflow, simulates physiological tear flow, tear volume, air exposure and mechanical wear. When this system was used to analyze the release of fluconazole from commercial CLs, the drug release was sustained for up to 24 hours. This observation significantly contrasts drug release observed in a vial, which typically follows a burst-plateau profile. When CLs releasing natamycin and fluconazole were tested on agar eye models that were inoculated with Candida albicans, the growth of the yeast was limited by natamycin-containing CLs. The cell morphology of the yeast also differed noticeably based on drug-lens combinations.   Conclusions This thesis details potential strategies to develop novel CLs for antifungal ocular drug delivery. The Ocuflow system developed from this thesis is highly versatile; not only can it be used effectively to measure drug release from CLs, but it can also be applied to other in vitro analyses with CLs

Antifungal ocular drug delivery via contact lenses using a novel in vitro eye model

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate the potential of contact lenses (CLs) as an antifungal drug delivery device, and to develop an in vitro eye model to test thereof. Methods: The first three chapters focused on developing a CL to function as a drug delivery device for natamycin, the only commercially available antifungal: • In the first experiment (Chapter 3), the in vitro uptake and release characteristics of natamycin from several commercially available CLs were evaluated • In the second experiment (Chapter 4), to improve the release characteristics of natamycin from contact lenses, an attempt was made to incorporate novel drug-encapsulated nanoparticles (Dex-b-PLA) within the CLs • In the third experiment (Chapter 5), an alternative strategy employing the incorporation of cyclodextrin (CDs) within the CL polymer matrix was evaluated as a potential modification to prolong the release of natamycin The second half of the thesis was aimed at developing a sophisticated in vitro ocular model capable of adequately measuring drug release from CLs: • In Chapter 6, the design of a novel in vitro eye model to simulate the physiological ocular environment was outlined • In Chapter 7, this model was used to evaluate the release of the antifungal fluconazole from commercially daily disposable CLs • In chapter 8, as an extension of the developed in vitro eye model, an agar eye model was developed to test the effects of natamycin and fluconazole-releasing CLs on Candida albicans Results Commercial CLs, after drug incubation with natamycin, will release the drug rapidly within the first half hour, followed by a plateau phase. However, when CL materials were loaded instead with natamycin encapsulated within novel Dex-b-PLA nanoparticles, the release duration was extended to 12 hours. Modifying the CL polymer with methacrylated CDs did not significantly improve drug release. On the contrary, high loading of CDs decreased overall drug delivery efficiency, likely resulting from unfavourable arrangements of the CDs within the polymer network. The developed ocular platform, termed Ocuflow, simulates physiological tear flow, tear volume, air exposure and mechanical wear. When this system was used to analyze the release of fluconazole from commercial CLs, the drug release was sustained for up to 24 hours. This observation significantly contrasts drug release observed in a vial, which typically follows a burst-plateau profile. When CLs releasing natamycin and fluconazole were tested on agar eye models that were inoculated with Candida albicans, the growth of the yeast was limited by natamycin-containing CLs. The cell morphology of the yeast also differed noticeably based on drug-lens combinations.   Conclusions This thesis details potential strategies to develop novel CLs for antifungal ocular drug delivery. The Ocuflow system developed from this thesis is highly versatile; not only can it be used effectively to measure drug release from CLs, but it can also be applied to other in vitro analyses with CLs

Enriching Biomedical Knowledge for Vietnamese Low-resource Language Through Large-Scale Translation

Biomedical data and benchmarks are highly valuable yet very limited in low-resource languages other than English such as Vietnamese. In this paper, we make use of a state-of-the-art translation model in English-Vietnamese to translate and produce both pretrained as well as supervised data in the biomedical domains. Thanks to such large-scale translation, we introduce ViPubmedT5, a pretrained Encoder-Decoder Transformer model trained on 20 million translated abstracts from the high-quality public PubMed corpus. ViPubMedT5 demonstrates state-of-the-art results on two different biomedical benchmarks in summarization and acronym disambiguation. Further, we release ViMedNLI - a new NLP task in Vietnamese translated from MedNLI using the recently public En-vi translation model and carefully refined by human experts, with evaluations of existing methods against ViPubmedT5

Implementation of Staff Education to Standardize the Use of Positions During the First Stage of Labor

This project aims to educate labor and delivery (L&D) nurses on effective laboring positions that can aid fetal descent during the first stage of labor. In an L&D unit of a south Bay Area County hospital, there is a lack of standardization of knowledge and practices on laboring positions among the nursing staff. Evidence shows that upright positions and frequent mobility are effective in shortening the duration of labor and minimizing unnecessary cesarean deliveries. Based on the evidence, a project was implemented using verbal education of evidence-based laboring positions. An educational handout was also provided along with a recorded video presentation that can be utilized for staff development training. To evaluate the success of the educational training, staff nurses completed a pre-and post-education survey to gauge their confidence level in implementing the laboring positions. Despite the limited timeframe and small pool of participants, the survey results show a significant increase in confidence levels among the nursing staff after receiving the educational training

Link Prediction for Wikipedia Articles as a Natural Language Inference Task

Link prediction task is vital to automatically understanding the structure of large knowledge bases. In this paper, we present our system to solve this task at the Data Science and Advanced Analytics 2023 Competition "Efficient and Effective Link Prediction" (DSAA-2023 Competition) with a corpus containing 948,233 training and 238,265 for public testing. This paper introduces an approach to link prediction in Wikipedia articles by formulating it as a natural language inference (NLI) task. Drawing inspiration from recent advancements in natural language processing and understanding, we cast link prediction as an NLI task, wherein the presence of a link between two articles is treated as a premise, and the task is to determine whether this premise holds based on the information presented in the articles. We implemented our system based on the Sentence Pair Classification for Link Prediction for the Wikipedia Articles task. Our system achieved 0.99996 Macro F1-score and 1.00000 Macro F1-score for the public and private test sets, respectively. Our team UIT-NLP ranked 3rd in performance on the private test set, equal to the scores of the first and second places. Our code is publicly for research purposes.Comment: Accepted at the 10th IEEE International Conference On Data Science And Advanced Analytics (DSAA 2023

Religious Conversion of the Ethnic Minorities in the South of Vietnam

Religious conversion is a phenomenon that has frequently occurred in human history. As part of religious life, religious conversion reflects fluctuations and changes in social existence, especially changes in the economic, cultural, social, religious factors and one‟s own subjective religious convictions. Religious conversions are taking place in the ethnic communities in Southern Vietnam, but in a context that is space and time specific. So the process of evolution, the nature, dynamics and characteristics of the case of religious conversion here is different and unique. Currently, the study of religious conversion in Vietnam in general and the South in particular, is modest. There have not been many studies regarding case specific religious conversion of people and no studies have done a full assessment of the nature and characteristics of religious conversion on social life in Southern Vietnam as well as forecasted the evolution and impact of the same. This article is intended to present and describe three cases of religious conversion in the south of Vietnam. These are the conversion to Protestantism of ethnic communities Khmer (originating from Cambodia