A study of the attitudes of the families of ten patients over sixty years of age requiring placement on trial visit from Boston State Hospital

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

MFA11 (MFA 2011)

Catalogue of a culminating student exhibition held at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, May 6-Aug. 1, 2011. Content includes Introduction / Buzz Spector -- Patricia Olynyk -- Marshall N. Klimasewiski -- John Talbott Allen -- Meghan Bean -- Shira Berkowitz / Maggie Stanley Majors -- Darrick Byers, Bryce Olen Robinson -- Jisun Choi -- Zlatko Ćosić -- James R. Daniels -- Kara Daving -- Andrea Degener -- Kristin Fleischmann / Randi Shapiro -- William Frank / Lawrence Ypil -- Nicholas Kania -- Katherine McCullough -- Jordan McGirk / Aditi Machado -- Zachary Miller -- Esther Murphy / Maggie Stanley Majors -- Kathryn Neale -- Christopher Ottinger / Melissa Olson -- Maia Palmer -- Nicole Petrescu / Melissa Olson -- Lauren Pressler / Randi Shapiro -- Whitney Sage / Aliya A. Reich -- Donna Smith.https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/books/1005/thumbnail.jp

Heterologous Prime-Boost HIV-1 Vaccination Regimens in Pre-Clinical and Clinical Trials

Currently, there are more than 30 million people infected with HIV-1 and thousands more are infected each day. Vaccination is the single most effective mechanism for prevention of viral disease, and after more than 25 years of research, one vaccine has shown somewhat encouraging results in an advanced clinical efficacy trial. A modified intent-to-treat analysis of trial results showed that infection was approximately 30% lower in the vaccine group compared to the placebo group. The vaccine was administered using a heterologous prime-boost regimen in which both target antigens and delivery vehicles were changed during the course of inoculations. Here we examine the complexity of heterologous prime-boost immunizations. We show that the use of different delivery vehicles in prime and boost inoculations can help to avert the inhibitory effects caused by vector-specific immune responses. We also show that the introduction of new antigens into boost inoculations can be advantageous, demonstrating that the effect of ‘original antigenic sin’ is not absolute. Pre-clinical and clinical studies are reviewed, including our own work with a three-vector vaccination regimen using recombinant DNA, virus (Sendai virus or vaccinia virus) and protein. Promising preliminary results suggest that the heterologous prime-boost strategy may possibly provide a foundation for the future prevention of HIV-1 infections in humans

Variations in hydrological connectivity of Australian semiarid landscapes indicate abrupt changes in rainfall-use efficiency of vegetation

[1] Dryland vegetation frequently shows self‐organized spatial patterns as mosaic‐like structures of sources (bare areas) and sinks (vegetation patches) of water runoff and sediments with variable interconnection. Good examples are banded landscapes displayed by Mulga in semiarid Australia, where the spatial organization of vegetation optimizes the redistribution and use of water (and other scarce resources) at the landscape scale. Disturbances can disrupt the spatial distribution of vegetation causing a substantial loss of water by increasing landscape hydrological connectivity and consequently, affecting ecosystem function (e.g., decreasing the rainfall‐use efficiency of the landscape). We analyze (i) connectivity trends obtained from coupled analysis of remotely sensed vegetation patterns and terrain elevations in several Mulga landscapes subjected to different levels of disturbance, and (ii) the rainfall‐use efficiency of these landscapes, exploring the relationship between rainfall and remotely sensed Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. Our analyses indicate that small reductions in the fractional cover of vegetation near a particular threshold can cause abrupt changes in ecosystem function, driven by large nonlinear increases in the length of the connected flowpaths. In addition, simulations with simple vegetation‐thinning algorithms show that these nonlinear changes are especially sensitive to the type of disturbance, suggesting that the amount of alterations that an ecosystem can absorb and still remain functional largely depends on disturbance type. In fact, selective thinning of the vegetation patches from their edges can cause a higher impact on the landscape hydrological connectivity than spatially random disturbances. These results highlight surface connectivity patterns as practical indicators for monitoring landscape health

The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C): Rationale, design, infrastructure, and deployment.

OBJECTIVE: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses societal challenges that require expeditious data and knowledge sharing. Though organizational clinical data are abundant, these are largely inaccessible to outside researchers. Statistical, machine learning, and causal analyses are most successful with large-scale data beyond what is available in any given organization. Here, we introduce the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), an open science community focused on analyzing patient-level data from many centers. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The Clinical and Translational Science Award Program and scientific community created N3C to overcome technical, regulatory, policy, and governance barriers to sharing and harmonizing individual-level clinical data. We developed solutions to extract, aggregate, and harmonize data across organizations and data models, and created a secure data enclave to enable efficient, transparent, and reproducible collaborative analytics. RESULTS: Organized in inclusive workstreams, we created legal agreements and governance for organizations and researchers; data extraction scripts to identify and ingest positive, negative, and possible COVID-19 cases; a data quality assurance and harmonization pipeline to create a single harmonized dataset; population of the secure data enclave with data, machine learning, and statistical analytics tools; dissemination mechanisms; and a synthetic data pilot to democratize data access. CONCLUSIONS: The N3C has demonstrated that a multisite collaborative learning health network can overcome barriers to rapidly build a scalable infrastructure incorporating multiorganizational clinical data for COVID-19 analytics. We expect this effort to save lives by enabling rapid collaboration among clinicians, researchers, and data scientists to identify treatments and specialized care and thereby reduce the immediate and long-term impacts of COVID-19

Social science in a water observing system

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95008/1/wrcr12336.pd

Shelled pteropods in peril: Assessing vulnerability in a high CO2 ocean

The impact of anthropogenic ocean acidification (OA) on marine ecosystems is a vital concern facing marine scientists and managers of ocean resources. Euthecosomatous pteropods (holoplanktonic gastropods) represent an excellent sentinel for indicating exposure to anthropogenic OA because of the sensitivity of their aragonite shells to the OA conditions less favorable for calcification. However, an integration of observations, experiments and modelling efforts is needed to make accurate predictions of how these organisms will respond to future changes to their environment. Our understanding of the underlying organismal biology and life history is far from complete and must be improved if we are to comprehend fully the responses of these organisms to the multitude of stressors in their environment beyond OA. This review considers the present state of research and understanding of euthecosomatous pteropod biology and ecology of these organisms and considers promising new laboratory methods, advances in instrumentation (such as molecular, trace elements, stable isotopes, palaeobiology alongside autonomous sampling platforms, CT scanning and high-quality video recording) and novel field-based approaches (i.e. studies of upwelling and CO2 vent regions) that may allow us to improve our predictive capacity of their vulnerability and/or resilience. In addition to playing a critical ecological and biogeochemical role, pteropods can offer a significant value as an early-indicator of anthropogenic OA. This role as a sentinel species should be developed further to consolidate their potential use within marine environmental management policy making

Human Infection Challenge with Serotype 3 Pneumococcus

Rationale: Streptococcus pneumoniae serotype 3 (SPN3) is a cause of invasive pneumococcal disease and associated with low carriage rates. Following the introduction of pediatric 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) programmes, SPN3 declines are less than other vaccine serotypes and incidence has increased in some populations coincident with a shift in predominant circulating SPN3 clade, from I to II. A human challenge model provides an effective means for assessing the impact of PCV13 on SPN3 in the upper airway. Objectives: To establish SPN3’s ability to colonise the nasopharynx using different inoculum clades and doses and the safety of an SPN3 challenge model. Methods: In a human challenge study involving three well characterised and antibiotic sensitive SPN3 isolates (PFESP306 [clade Ia], PFESP231 [no clade] and PFESP505 [clade II]), inoculum doses (10,000, 20,000, 80,000, 160,000 CFU/100μL) were escalated until maximal colonisation rates were achieved, with concurrent acceptable safety. Outcome measures: Presence and density of experimental SPN3 nasopharyngeal colonisation in nasal wash samples, assessed using microbiological culture and molecular methods, on days 2, 7 and 14 post-inoculation. Results: 96 healthy participants (median age 21, interquartile range 19-25) were inoculated (n=6-10 per dose group, 10 groups). Colonisation rates ranged from 30.0-70.0% varying with dose and isolate. 30.0% (29/96) reported mild symptoms (82.8% sore throat, [24/29]), one developed otitis media requiring antibiotics. No serious adverse events occurred. Conclusions: An SPN3 human challenge model is feasible and safe with comparable carriage rates to an established SPN6B human challenge model. SPN3 carriage may cause mild upper respiratory symptoms

The Science Performance of JWST as Characterized in Commissioning

This paper characterizes the actual science performance of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), as determined from the six month commissioning period. We summarize the performance of the spacecraft, telescope, science instruments, and ground system, with an emphasis on differences from pre-launch expectations. Commissioning has made clear that JWST is fully capable of achieving the discoveries for which it was built. Moreover, almost across the board, the science performance of JWST is better than expected; in most cases, JWST will go deeper faster than expected. The telescope and instrument suite have demonstrated the sensitivity, stability, image quality, and spectral range that are necessary to transform our understanding of the cosmos through observations spanning from near-earth asteroids to the most distant galaxies.Comment: 5th version as accepted to PASP; 31 pages, 18 figures; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/acb29