Dance/Movement Therapy at an After School Program for At Risk Adolescent Girls in Yonkers, New York

This thesis examines how the addition of dance/movement therapy affected the participants of an afterschool program hosted by The Mary J. Blige Center for Women and Girls in Yonkers, New York. A brief history of the city of Yonkers, focusing on the impact of political changes on the socioeconomic divide, is provided, as is a discussion of Mary J. Blige’s experiences growing up in this urban environment and her decision to open a center for women and children. Through a review of the literature, the effectiveness of afterschool programs in teaching adolescents life skills, building positive and trusting relationships, increasing selfesteem and strengthening impulse control and social skills is examined A case study is presented, describing the author’s experience developing dance/movement therapy groups with adolescent girls attending the center’s after school program

Aptamer-based multiplexed proteomic technology for biomarker discovery

Interrogation of the human proteome in a highly multiplexed and efficient manner remains a coveted and challenging goal in biology. We present a new aptamer-based proteomic technology for biomarker discovery capable of simultaneously measuring thousands of proteins from small sample volumes (15 [mu]L of serum or plasma). Our current assay allows us to measure ~800 proteins with very low limits of detection (1 pM average), 7 logs of overall dynamic range, and 5% average coefficient of variation. This technology is enabled by a new generation of aptamers that contain chemically modified nucleotides, which greatly expand the physicochemical diversity of the large randomized nucleic acid libraries from which the aptamers are selected. Proteins in complex matrices such as plasma are measured with a process that transforms a signature of protein concentrations into a corresponding DNA aptamer concentration signature, which is then quantified with a DNA microarray. In essence, our assay takes advantage of the dual nature of aptamers as both folded binding entities with defined shapes and unique sequences recognizable by specific hybridization probes. To demonstrate the utility of our proteomics biomarker discovery technology, we applied it to a clinical study of chronic kidney disease (CKD). We identified two well known CKD biomarkers as well as an additional 58 potential CKD biomarkers. These results demonstrate the potential utility of our technology to discover unique protein signatures characteristic of various disease states. More generally, we describe a versatile and powerful tool that allows large-scale comparison of proteome profiles among discrete populations. This unbiased and highly multiplexed search engine will enable the discovery of novel biomarkers in a manner that is unencumbered by our incomplete knowledge of biology, thereby helping to advance the next generation of evidence-based medicine