Chemistry Discipline Day

Please join the RACI Chemistry Education Division (CED) for the 2022 ACSME Chemistry Discipline Day. The event will start with an introduction and outline of the CED and how this division currently serves the chemistry community in Australia. We will then facilitate round table discussions to develop ideas for the Chemistry Education Research (CER) community in Australia to ensure an updated and relevant framework for the CED is in place to support the teaching and learning of chemistry in Australia. This will include breaking out into groups to discuss audience derived topics with the intention of building collaboration opportunities and networking. This event will be of interest to secondary and tertiary chemistry educators, education focused and non-education focused chemistry academics, and undergraduate or postgraduate students with an interest in chemistry education

What does empathy look like to you? Investigating student and staff opinions

Empathy is a key factor in successful human interaction. Many contemporary issues can be linked to a lack of ability for individuals to truly understand the perspectives of those that they interact with. In the context of teaching and learning, if teaching staff cannot truly understand the complex lives of their students, it is likely that students will be unable to reach their full potential and proceed into society as fully realised members of their respective communities (Levin et al., 2012; Robertson et al., 2015; Tudor, 1993). As such, any intervention that increases the ability of teaching staff to connect to the students, benefits not only the student but also the workforce they go on to contribute to (Haertel et al., 1981). What is unknown, however, is how teaching staff perceive their role in this empathic relationship, especially in the sciences (chemistry, biology, physics, etc.). It is additionally unclear how these perceptions are affected by either subject area or the teaching staff’s previous teaching and life experience. This project would seek to interview teaching staff across a range of disciplines in order to unpack their views around empathy and how best to employ it in their teaching practices. Largescale questionaries undertaken with undergraduate students would allow a comparison between the perceptions of students with the teaching staff. Ideally, the results of this project would allow for a better understanding of how empathy can best be supported and embedded into the practices of teaching staff both within a university context but also into all teaching practices across society. REFERENCES Haertel, G. D., Walberg, H. J., & Haertel, E. H. (1981). Socio-psychological environments and learning: A quantitative synthesis. British Educational Research Journal, 7(1), 27-36. Levin, D., Hammer, D., Elby, A., & Coffey, J. (2012). Becoming a responsive science teacher: Focusing on student thinking in secondary science. National Science Teachers Association Arlington, VA. Robertson, A. D., Scherr, R., & Hammer, D. (2015). Responsive teaching in science and mathematics. Routledge. Tudor, I. (1993). Teacher roles in the learner-centred classroom. ELT Journal, 47(1), 22-31.

Using Technology for Community Engagement: Four Key Web-Based Platforms for Adoption in Extension

Extension professionals engage with communities to present programming, find solutions, and disseminate research-based knowledge. While traditional means of communication and face-to-face meetings are still important, the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the ways these professionals connect to their communities. Web-based platforms can provide unique, alternative ways to engage communities in programs, evaluations, and information sharing. Our team of Extension professionals share platforms that create engaged communities by meeting virtual demands

COLLECTING EVIDENCE OF GOOD PRACTICE AND LEADERSHIP IN A TUMULTUOUS TIME

GOAL To deliver an outcomes-focused workshop that guides participants in recognising and communicating potential sources of evidence as part of their teaching practice and leadership. BACKGROUND With the increase in education-focused roles around Australia, many tertiary institutions have established new pathways for recognition, reward and progression. However, the wave of new and transitioning tertiary educators in recent times may be unfamiliar with navigating through these new expectations and pathways. Fortunately, there are many commonalities in the reward and recognition processes for tenure, promotion and awards across institutions and a strong, supportive science education community to share experiences and advice! AIMS In this session, we will share our collective experiences and expectations across a range of Australian institutions. We will highlight proactive approaches to the collection and organisation of teaching and leadership evidence in different teaching and service contexts, paying close attention to the challenges posed by the transition to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through this workshop, we intend to develop strategies that individual participants may employ to build their teaching and leadership portfolios. Participants from all science disciplines and academic levels are invited. DELIVERABLES Through this workshop we aim to facilitate the following: • A landscape view of commonalities in the awards and academic progression requirements across tertiary institutions; • Tips, tricks and strategies for the collection and organisation of teaching and leadership evidence; • Reflection on your own academic portfolio and plans for future evidence collection. WORKSHOP Introduction (15 minutes) We will begin this workshop by breaking down a few of the key expectations of institutions, including important similarities and differences. The promotion and award experiences of some of our most respected members within the science education community will be shared. Workshop task 1 (30 minutes) Participants will be split into small groups (2-3) to spend a short period of time evaluating the impact of different types of evidence. Coming back together, each group will summarise key points from their discussion.   Communicating your evidence (30 minutes) An important step in communicating your evidence is the consider your own, personal teaching philosophy. Through a short activity, this will be explored before splitting into small groups once more to spend time focused, through key prompts, on dot pointing some evidence of impact of their recent activities. Each member of the group will discuss their own experiences and provide each other with feedback regarding additional evidence they might seek and include. Wrap-up (15 minutes) To conclude, we will come together to once more share this experience with the wider group and discuss where-to from here. A set of tips and tricks for collecting and organising evidence will be provided and discussed

CHEMISTRY DISCIPLINE MEETING

The tertiary sector has been rocked to its core by the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent shift to online teaching. One of the areas most impacted has been how we assess our students and the associated challenges relating to academic integrity, quality, and logistics. The 2021 ACSME Chemistry Discipline Day workshop will focus on these challenges and aims to crowdsource ideas for solutions at both an individual and institutional level. This conversation is an extension of a recent workshop at the RACI Chemistry Education Division Symposium and outcomes from this workshop will inform discussions held by our representatives with the Australian Council of Deans of Science (ACDS)

Engineering of Insulin Receptor Isoform-Selective Insulin Analogues

BACKGROUND: The insulin receptor (IR) exists in two isoforms, A and B, and the isoform expression pattern is tissue-specific. The C-terminus of the insulin B chain is important for receptor binding and has been shown to contact the IR just adjacent to the region where the A and B isoforms differ. The aim of this study was to investigate the importance of the C-terminus of the B chain in IR isoform binding in order to explore the possibility of engineering tissue-specific/liver-specific insulin analogues. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Insulin analogue libraries were constructed by total amino acid scanning mutagenesis. The relative binding affinities for the A and B isoform of the IR were determined by competition assays using scintillation proximity assay technology. Structural information was obtained by X-ray crystallography. Introduction of B25A or B25N mutations resulted in analogues with a 2-fold preference for the B compared to the A isoform, whereas the opposite was observed with a B25Y substitution. An acidic amino acid residue at position B27 caused an additional 2-fold selective increase in affinity for the receptor B isoform for analogues bearing a B25N mutation. Furthermore, the combination of B25H with either B27D or B27E also resulted in B isoform-preferential analogues (2-fold preference) even though the corresponding single mutation analogues displayed no differences in relative isoform binding affinity. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We have discovered a new class of IR isoform-selective insulin analogues with 2-4-fold differences in relative binding affinities for either the A or the B isoform of the IR compared to human insulin. Our results demonstrate that a mutation at position B25 alone or in combination with a mutation at position B27 in the insulin molecule confers IR isoform selectivity. Isoform-preferential analogues may provide new opportunities for developing insulin analogues with improved clinical benefits

A Genome-Wide Association Study of Diabetic Kidney Disease in Subjects With Type 2 Diabetes

dentification of sequence variants robustly associated with predisposition to diabetic kidney disease (DKD) has the potential to provide insights into the pathophysiological mechanisms responsible. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of DKD in type 2 diabetes (T2D) using eight complementary dichotomous and quantitative DKD phenotypes: the principal dichotomous analysis involved 5,717 T2D subjects, 3,345 with DKD. Promising association signals were evaluated in up to 26,827 subjects with T2D (12,710 with DKD). A combined T1D+T2D GWAS was performed using complementary data available for subjects with T1D, which, with replication samples, involved up to 40,340 subjects with diabetes (18,582 with DKD). Analysis of specific DKD phenotypes identified a novel signal near GABRR1 (rs9942471, P = 4.5 x 10(-8)) associated with microalbuminuria in European T2D case subjects. However, no replication of this signal was observed in Asian subjects with T2D or in the equivalent T1D analysis. There was only limited support, in this substantially enlarged analysis, for association at previously reported DKD signals, except for those at UMOD and PRKAG2, both associated with estimated glomerular filtration rate. We conclude that, despite challenges in addressing phenotypic heterogeneity, access to increased sample sizes will continue to provide more robust inference regarding risk variant discovery for DKD.Peer reviewe

Physics case for an LHCb Upgrade II - Opportunities in flavour physics, and beyond, in the HL-LHC era

The LHCb Upgrade II will fully exploit the flavour-physics opportunities of the HL-LHC, and study additional physics topics that take advantage of the forward acceptance of the LHCb spectrometer. The LHCb Upgrade I will begin operation in 2020. Consolidation will occur, and modest enhancements of the Upgrade I detector will be installed, in Long Shutdown 3 of the LHC (2025) and these are discussed here. The main Upgrade II detector will be installed in long shutdown 4 of the LHC (2030) and will build on the strengths of the current LHCb experiment and the Upgrade I. It will operate at a luminosity up to 2×1034 cm−2s−1, ten times that of the Upgrade I detector. New detector components will improve the intrinsic performance of the experiment in certain key areas. An Expression Of Interest proposing Upgrade II was submitted in February 2017. The physics case for the Upgrade II is presented here in more depth. CP-violating phases will be measured with precisions unattainable at any other envisaged facility. The experiment will probe b → sl+l−and b → dl+l− transitions in both muon and electron decays in modes not accessible at Upgrade I. Minimal flavour violation will be tested with a precision measurement of the ratio of B(B0 → μ+μ−)/B(Bs → μ+μ−). Probing charm CP violation at the 10−5 level may result in its long sought discovery. Major advances in hadron spectroscopy will be possible, which will be powerful probes of low energy QCD. Upgrade II potentially will have the highest sensitivity of all the LHC experiments on the Higgs to charm-quark couplings. Generically, the new physics mass scale probed, for fixed couplings, will almost double compared with the pre-HL-LHC era; this extended reach for flavour physics is similar to that which would be achieved by the HE-LHC proposal for the energy frontier

LHCb upgrade software and computing : technical design report

This document reports the Research and Development activities that are carried out in the software and computing domains in view of the upgrade of the LHCb experiment. The implementation of a full software trigger implies major changes in the core software framework, in the event data model, and in the reconstruction algorithms. The increase of the data volumes for both real and simulated datasets requires a corresponding scaling of the distributed computing infrastructure. An implementation plan in both domains is presented, together with a risk assessment analysis