“After a lot of laughter, comes a long cry.” This old Finnish saying was shared with me by a somewhat distant, but beloved, family friend while I was visiting Helsinki last summer. This notion resonated with me and became the root of my current choreographic research. When I returned to the UW for my final year, I knew I wanted to explore the intense emotion this saying evoked in me and how it could propel a choreographic investigation resulting in a dance work. In 2018, I created a dance, Undertow, that explored the broader idea of nostalgia and its often captivating and drowning effects on people. The choreographic process I utilized in creating Undertow, laid a rich foundation for me to expand upon the idea of nostalgia. I began my research on After Everything with the Finnish saying–– looking for meaning, ideas, and images that stood out to me. Coincidentally, on a visit home I discovered an 8mm film reel from 1968 that had hours of candid footage with my mom and uncle as children on it. The first time I watched it, I was brought to tears as I witnessed these young strangers play and explore. The complex emotions of family, personal histories, and longing for a presence in a history that is not directly mine collided with my reaction to the Finnish saying. This intersection became the focus of my research: exploration of familial nostalgia, relationships, and my planned uprooting after graduation. I cast four incredible collaborative dance artists to conduct this dance research with me, inviting them to explore their own reactions to the saying and nostalgia, so we could begin building a communal vessel of knowledge from which to draw movement material. I presented prompts, discussed ideas, and shared sound to facilitate and generate movement material.

The United States’ major American sports leagues, the NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL, are turning to franchise expansion to increase their presence in the economic and media markets along the West Coast, including the NHL’s expansion to Las Vegas for the 2017 season and future expansion to Seattle for 2021. However, expansion franchises are very difficult to get off the ground since they require new ownership and management structures, buy-in from the local fan base, and are often subject to much higher scrutiny during their first few years than other franchises. Currently, no universal metric exists to determine whether or not an expansion franchises was successful, and it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to convince leagues to expand when they are unable to evaluate the likelihood of success for potential candidate cities. This research analyzed four major factors I identified that contribute to overall success for a team in any sport: financial prosperity, quality of national media coverage, public and local governmental support, and in-game accolades. Using these metrics as a starting point, I created an index that scored prior expansion franchises using a variety of indicators to quantify their overall success. Additionally, I applied this index to select cities currently under consideration for an expansion franchise to serve as a predictor of their potential success. Going forward, the use of this index as a predictive metric will allow leagues to make more informed decisions about the success of future candidates for expansion.

Over the last decade Seattle has seen the most dramatic population growth of any large American city. The accompanying rapid change in urban form of the city has been called staggering by longtime Seattle natives, causing a state of worry not unlike the feeling of solastalgia, a neologism that describes a form of mental or existential distress caused by environmental change. Longtime citizens can be forgiven for feeling as though their home has been irreparably changed in a way that doesn’t name them as a benefactor. But what has the effect of this rapid change had on the homeless community? Can a stable and strong sense of place have positive influences on the day to day lives of the homeless individuals? Can we facilitate a stronger sense of place as part of our response to the homelessness crisis in Seattle? My study examines the link between sense of place and stability in homeless individuals through interviews with individuals from within the homeless community, hearing perspectives from tiny house villages, tent cities, and the streets of Seattle. Through these conversations I demonstrate the impact that sense of place has on social stability, especially in times of rapid change to the urban environment, and how sense of place differs depending on the method of temporary shelter. The resulting study builds a better understanding of the intersectionality of the existential effects of placelessness in the homeless population, the differences between being homeless in a variety of spaces, and the meaning and significance of place making to people without a place.

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) have a high potential, for they can be differentiated into any cell type for regenerative medicine, drug discovery, developmental biology, and disease modeling. However, iPSC’s and their differentiated progeny display an undesired variability in their shape, contractile properties, growth rates, etc. Identifying subsets of phenotypes in iPSCs and their differentiated progeny will allow us to optimize tissue models for research. Here, we generated a rainbow reporter line in iPSCs that can track individual cells as they clonally expand and differentiate while providing phenotypic information. Knocking in four copies of a cassette containing three distinct fluorescent proteins allowed the expression of up to eighteen different colors. However, not all colors were present in equal proportion, increasing the probability that distinct lineages could have the same color. To achieve an equal color distribution, colored cells were isolated by sparsely plating a culture of mixed colored cells. After a week of expansion, individual colonies were picked and imaged under a spinning disk microscope to determine the color of the colony and whether it was single lineage or mixed. Viable cell lines were isolated and frozen in stock. These cells will be examined for markers of cell proliferation, pluripotency, apoptosis and quantitative RNA expression analysis to confirm that the color barcoded iPSCs act the same as non-engineered iPSCs. To date, we were able to create eight color barcoded iPSC lines for further experimentation, increasing the concentration limit of colored cells in non-colored cells by five-fold. The next step will engineer 3D tissues by growing iPSC-derived cardiac cells in a mold to simulate in vivo tissue development. Colored coded cells will allow us to track how the initial location/physical stresses/phenotype of an iPSC-derived cardiac cell in an engineered tissue determines its tissue layer and cell type.

This research focuses on dissecting the molecular mechanism of cardiac regeneration in the animal model, zebrafish, upon a myocardial infarction like injury. Zebrafish are one of the few vertebrates that can fully regenerate their hearts after an injury in 30 days. This phenomenon is not seen in humans, who generate scar tissue after this injury with reduced circulatory efficiency. However, there is evidence that neonatal mice under 7 days old can regenerate their hearts, but this is lost upon adulthood. Determining this pathway is the first step to develop therapeutics in order to provide relief to people suffering from cardiac injuries. In this research, we used chemically ablated transgenic zebrafish to generate a 30% injury. We determined that upon an injury, both the Wnt pathway and the mTOR pathway are sequentially activated and upregulated to restart cardiac proliferation to regenerate the heart. Wnt pathway proteins like Axin and β-catenin are activated 3 days post injury and mTOR proteins like pS6 are activated gradually over 7 days post injury. The inhibition of the Wnt pathway using DKK showed a downregulation of the mTOR pathway and downregulation of cardiomyocyte proliferation. Inhibition of the mTOR pathway using Rapamycin also stopped cardiomyocyte proliferation from occurring. Mass spectrometry data showed a decrease in glutamine and an increase in leucine during the proliferative phase. Since leucine is one of the activators of the mTOR pathway, we see that the glutamine-leucine transporter is also upregulated post-injury. Thus, we show that heart regeneration in adult zebrafish occurs via cardiomyocyte proliferation by using the Wnt and mTOR pathways to upregulate cardiomyocyte proliferation upon injury.

Epigenetic proteins modify the chromatin structure to manipulate gene expression, and dysregulated epigenetic modification in cells has been linked to cancer formation. Previous studies on young female Drosophila have shown that after injury, germline stem cells (GSC) are capable of entering and exiting a protective state called quiescence. When exposed to ionizing radiation (IR), the apoptotic differentiating daughter cells send a protective signal to GSC, resulting in GSC quiescence. This survival behavior of GSCs validates them as a potential model for cancer stem cells, which are a subset of tumor cells that are capable of withstanding traditional chemotherapy through reversible quiescence, resulting in future tumor relapse. To identify genes required for GSC survival, we performed a spatially restricted RNA interference (RNAi) screen. Here we show that two members of the repressive epigenetic regulator complex PRC1, Pc and Sce, are required for entry, while demethylase Utx is required for exit of GSC quiescence. Notably, PRC2 dependent H3K27me3 marks are required for PRC1 function, and Utx is required to erase these PRC2 dependent H3K27me3 marks. Importantly, we detected around a 3-fold increase in H3K27me3 marks in GSC following IR, suggesting that the repressive PRC1-PRC2 dependent complex is critical for entry, and elimination of PRC2 dependent marks is critical for exit from the quiescence state. Furthermore, we show that Trx, a writer enzyme which promotes euchromatin formation through H3K4me1 addition, is required for GSC exit from the quiescent. These data suggest that reversible quiescence in GSC is controlled by specific epigenetic states. In the future, more work is needed to investigate gene specificity of the epigenetic regulation.

Humans are incapable of regenerating a majority of their major organs and tissues following traumatic injury, often resulting in an irreversible loss of function. Tadpoles of the frog genus Xenopus can regenerate multiple tissue types in response to injury, however this capability is lost after metamorphosis. This stage-specific regenerative capacity makes Xenopus a uniquely powerful model for studying factors that promote regeneration. Tadpoles develop ex-utero and do not develop mouths until days after fertilization. Before tadpoles are able to ingest exogenous food, they rely instead on maternal yolk stores for sustenance. A regenerative refractory period has been described in tadpoles of Xenopus laevis, in which regenerative capacity is transiently lost. In this study we describe a similar refractory period in the closely related Xenopus tropicalis, and observe that the onset of the refractory period aligns with the transition independent feeding. Based on this observation, we hypothesized that the lapse in regenerative capacity could be due to a lack of metabolic fuel. We used immunohistochemistry (IHC) against the yolk protein vitellogenin (vit) to study the utilization of maternal yolk stores during tadpole development. We find that yolk localization is dynamic over the course of development, and that it is ultimately is depleted by the onset of the refractory period. We additionally used IHC against phospho-Histone 3 (pH3), a marker of mitosis, to study proliferation during development and regeneration. We found that proliferation declines across development heading into the refractory period, in both uninjured and amputated contexts. Lastly, we successfully rescued both regeneration and proliferative rates by feeding tadpoles after they develop the ability to eat. As a whole, this work articulates that nutritive stress may contribute to the loss of regenerative capability in the refractory period, and that alleviation of this stress promotes regenerative ability in this context.

The Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) is an important epigenetic remodeler in developmental transitions and cell fate determinations. PRC2 is responsible for the addition of H3K27me3 marks that repress developmental gene expression. The catalytic subunit of PRC2 is the methyltransferase (Enhancer of Zeste 2) EZH2 which binds to EED (Embryonic Ectoderm Development) to methylate H3K27 on gene promoter regions. To investigate the requirement of PRC2 in different developmental transitions, a computationally designed protein was utilized to inhibit EED-EZH2 interaction. The novel designed protein is named EED binder (EB) and competes over endogenous EZH2 on the EED binding cleft with 300 times greater affinity than endogenous EZH2. We cloned EB-GFP under heatshock inducible promoter and injected this construct to one cell zebrafish embryos to generate a germ line transmissible insertion. To study the requirement of PRC2 in early developing embryos (0-3dpf), we applied heatshock (HS) on EB-GFP positive and negative embryos. Western blot analysis revealed global downregulation of EZH2 and H3K27me3 in EB-GFP positive, but not control embryos. Additionally, Co-Immunoprecipitation experiments showed EB-GFP binding to EED. Finally, to test the requirement of PRC2 in caudal fin regeneration, adult (5 month old) EB-GFP positive and negative animals were fin-amputated and the regeneration growth rate was measured for 14 days. Our results show that EB-GFP positive fish were able to regenerate their fins faster, resulting in a large fin size compared to either negative or non-HS clutch mate. Overall, we have developed a computer designed inducible PRC2 inhibitory system to study PRC2 function in Zebrafish, at the whole animal level. In the future, we will utilize EB-GFP to explore PRC2 and other epigenetic modifiers that are required for tissue and organ regeneration before and after injury.

Anxiety symptoms are common in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It is unknown whether the neurobiological origins of comorbid anxiety and ADHD symptoms are shared or distinct. The current study addressed this using an event related electrophysiological potential (ERP) component, the error-related negativity (ERN), which occurs after an individual makes a task error. ERN amplitude has opposite associations with ADHD and anxiety symptoms: it is weaker in association with increased ADHD, but greater in association with increased anxiety. We tested whether 1) anxiety symptoms and ADHD have separate neurobiological origins, indicated by greater anxiety being associated with increased ERN in children with ADHD or 2) anxiety and ADHD symptoms share an origin, as evidenced by no effect of anxiety on ERN in children with ADHD. The current study investigated the association between ERN amplitude and anxiety levels in a sample of 7- to 11-year-olds with ADHD (n = 98) and without (controls; n = 26). Participants completed two ERP tasks of varying difficulty. ERP data were segmented around incorrect task responses, and mean ERN amplitude was extracted. Data on child anxiety and ADHD symptoms was collected via parent report. Linear regression analysis was used to estimate the associations among ERN amplitude, severity of anxiety, and ADHD symptoms. Preliminary results (n = 73) indicated that ADHD symptom severity was associated with smaller ERN amplitude (r =.31, p =.007), but anxiety symptoms were not associated with ERN in the ADHD group. Preliminary results indicated that the ERN is not a marker of anxiety in children with ADHD to the same degree it is in controls. This is consistent with shared neurobiological etiology for ADHD and anxiety symptoms in children, which has clinical implications for conceptualization and treatment of anxiety symptoms in childhood ADHD.

Task prioritization, or choosing which order to do tasks, is an essential skill to possess. However, there are no definitive answers to the question of “how” we prioritize tasks. There are numerous factors that are considered in task prioritization, including a vast array of queuing rules (FIFO or First In First Out, EPT or Earliest Processing Time, etc.) However, many of these systematic methods of prioritization don’t account for task complexity. Another common way to prioritize tasks, which will be the focus of this study, is finding the task that seems the closest in time. This perception of Temporal Distance does address task complexity because we balance task complexity and due date when deciding which task is closer or farther away in time. Though individual Temporal Distance Perception is a widely researched topic, there has not been much research conducted on application in a team setting. Prioritizing one’s tasks individually is difficult, but it gets much harder when others’ schedules need to be factored in as well as an individual’s schedule. In addition to this issue of schedule navigation, this research will take place in a multidisciplinary setting, so teammates will not be able to know in detail how long a teammate’s task will take. This too makes it more difficult to choose which task comes first. My research question is this: How does Temporal Distance Perception in a Multidisciplinary Setting affect Task Prioritization in Teams? I am conducting a synthesis of literatures about Task Prioritization, Multidisciplinary Teamwork, and Temporal Distance Perception, as well as creating a data model based off the synthesis. I was sourced the results of team building exercises from NASA’s Human Research Program, which include a variety of real-world examples of how astronaut teams prioritize tasks.

The implications in the connection between the Fifth Amendment and Miranda warnings have been well explored in Miranda v Arizona, highlighting that understanding such rights are relevant during police interrogations. The standardization of administering Miranda warnings before police interrogation becomes a mechanism in which to legitimize the State as well as the system of justice, since doing so becomes a form of checking and balancing the power dynamic between State and individual. The question then becomes, is there an effective way to clearly communicate an individual’s protection under the Fifth Amendment through the Miranda warnings in cases where the individual in question may be inherently more vulnerable, such as a child or a person with intellectual disabilities. In 2016, King County implemented a different set of Miranda warnings catered to juvenile competency. It is also crucial to examine how police are trained to understand the difference in the language in which they are mandated to employ. In this research, I aim to find out what and how the different sets of language of Miranda warnings influence the police’s state of mind. I anticipate on obtaining qualitative data by interviewing the police and other legal actors. First, I will ask police to recall what they are thinking after I have given a word cue in a randomized order to see if they are able to give the same meaning in both the adult and youth version. This should yield a baseline towards how the police are thinking about language. Secondly, my questions will also pertain to the ways in which the police are trained to interact with juveniles. I expect to find from interviews that the component of training is what will change how police perceive juveniles differently, rather than administering the warning.

During the Pleistocene Epoch approximately 13,000 years ago, retreating glaciers deposited several stranded icebergs where the wetlands on the north end of the North Seattle College campus lie today. We collected and analyzed several borehole samples within the Meridian Avenue Basin to determine the stratigraphy and identify organic material found within the basin. The stratigraphy of the basin revealed that these features are a result of Vashon Glaciation during the end of the Pleistocene Epoch. Our subsurface core samples exposed a glacial till-lined basin ranging from 3-9 meters deep with overlying layers of gravelly clay, silt, sand and peat. A carbon date we retrieved from organic material within the peat indicates the sediment was deposited during the last glacial recession. The fill of the Meridian Avenue Basin and the carbon date retrieved indicate that it was created by an iceberg stranded in a shallow, post-glacial lake during the last ice age. Unlike typical kettle basins, load-induced subsidence of this iceberg into saturated lake-floor sediments created its shape and depth. The basin lacks the characteristic outwash depositions seen in kettle lakes and appears to be unique, suggesting the geologic processes which may have created the basin seldom occur and are poorly understood. Researching the origins and stratigraphy of the Meridian Ave basin will help advance knowledge of this possibly rare periglacial phenomenon.

Despite research supporting the efficacy of certain mental health practices, many mental health care providers in community mental health institutions are not utilizing evidence-based practices (EBPs) consistently as their method towards patients receiving mental health care. This is a problem because the patients in need do not benefit from therapies intended to help them. Clinical supervisors (clinicians who provide clinical direction and guidance to less experienced providers) play an important role in how often and how effective clinicians are at implementing EBP’s in their treatments. The purpose of our project is to examine the feasibility and self-reported usefulness of providing case-based consultation to clinical supervisors in supporting the implementation of EBP. We expect that clinical supervisors will report that they benefited from EBP case-based consultations by having an increase in confidence and competence in supervising mental health care providers in their efforts to use EBP. So far, we have successfully recruited 9 clinical supervisors from 9 community mental health organizations. Clinical supervisors completed a pre-survey that tested their comfortability in supervising mental health care providers implementing EBP. In addition to gathering quantitative data via the survey, we are also analyzing qualitative data from transcripts of the consultation calls with the clinical supervisors. After the 6 consultation calls, we expect that supervisors will rate the calls as high in usefulness. We also plan to learn about any barriers or challenges that the clinical supervisors experienced. With the data that we have collected during this pilot test, we hope to conduct further research testing if EBP implementation to clinical supervisors through case-based consultations creates a downstream effect by resulting in an increased level of competency and comfortability for clinicians.  

While some high school students are able to make the transition to higher levels of education, if they so aspire, other students have great difficulty achieving the goal of higher education. This study broadly examines barriers to higher education for students who face challenges graduating from high school and continuing to higher education. For example, students who become truant, attend poorly funded schools, of color, and/or are court-involved face real challenges and barriers in the transition to college. This research explores a variety of sustainable education-driven interventions that have the potential to widen the pathway wherein these populations of young adults can find success in transitioning to a college or university setting. Through multiple interviews with community stakeholders (including governmental, non-governmental, for-profit, and non-profit agencies), I have explored and assessed interventions and programs that are making an impact. These include student to advisor ratios, being surrounded by diversity in leadership positions, family support, neighborhood environments, and additional outside of school influences that ultimately effects these students’ lives every day. Yet, for all these interventions and programs some students still fall through the cracks. There remains a significant lack of equity. This research contributes by drawing attention to the best programs and practices that successfully widen the path for young adults to achieve higher education.

Substantively engaging with local communities is critical to ensuring effective quarantine response and treatment to disease outbreaks. This engagement involves the integration of international-based aid with religious and government leaders to reach affected residents and treat disease while respecting local cultures. Significant gaps in community engagement by international humanitarian organizations were observed during the 2013-2016 West Africa Ebola epidemic. These shortcomings hampered trust in aid collaborators, impacted dissemination of disease information, and disrupted the daily lives and community frameworks of residents. Such issues continue to have relevance as the Kivu Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo enters its third year. This research explores how humanitarian organizations operating in Kivu incorporate community engagement procedures into their work. Institutions such as the World Health Organization and Red Cross are qualitatively analyzed using an evaluation matrix designed to measure the scalability and implementation of community-based integration and participation. Indicators are drawn from official directives and policies. General patterns of cultural understanding and respect of local traditions are observed but vary across organizations. Applying similar collaborative procedures to future epidemics may aid organizational response in engaging affected populations.

Computational protein design is an emerging field that takes advantage of first principles derived from biological protein-protein interactions and explores the protein space that nature has yet to evolve. The Baker Lab developed a software called Rosetta that enables researchers to explore this space and create brand new proteins more stable than those produced in biological systems via evolution. This software has been adapted to take advantage of a concept that exists everywhere in nature- symmetry. Using this concept, I am building higher-order protein assemblies including protein nanocages and three-dimensional protein crystals. Researchers at the Baker Lab have developed a hierarchical approach to engineer these highly symmetric, complex structures. This hierarchical approach involves combining protein building blocks with different symmetric topologies multiple times to facilitate higher-order symmetric assembly of a three-dimensional protein crystal. By breaking up crystal symmetries into their constituent building blocks, we can design these higher-order symmetries with greater accuracy and troubleshoot experimental difficulties by pin-pointing structural deviations along the way. Here, I will describe my experience using this approach to create a protein crystal from symmetric building blocks.

Long-term exposure to traffic-related air pollutants (TRAPs) has been associated with multiple adverse health effects. However, many TRAPs, such as ultrafine particles, are poorly measured and thus their association with health outcomes is difficult to characterize. Our objective is to identify geographic characteristics that distinguish diurnal trends in TRAP concentrations at monitoring sites in order to estimate spatial contrasts in long-term average concentrations. Mobile monitoring (driving to many locations with multiple instruments) permits us to measure many TRAPs at many locations, but these measurements have short durations and may not capture the pollutant’s underlying trends. Therefore, these measurements may not reflect a site’s true long-term average due to our inability to fully sample the diurnal trend of the pollutant. In order to quantify the role of diurnal trends on annual averages, we use hourly measurements of CO, NO₂, and PM2.5 from California Environmental Protection Agency’s (CalEPA) monitoring sites where the true long-term averages are known. Using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to reduce the number of dimensions, we will regress the pollutant levels against the time of day, the physical covariates and their interaction terms. The geographical variables include, but are not limited to, distance to a highway, distance to bodies of water, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and population density. We utilize Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) as our model selection criteria and we assess model performance via leave-one-out cross-validation. We identify the most influential geographic factors that are associated with two to three categories of similar diurnal trends for each pollutant. With these variables, we will be able to group Seattle monitoring sites and distinguish their diurnal trends. Appropriate adjustment for diurnal trends in our mobile measurements will permit us to estimate spatial contrasts more accurately.

Today there are more than 5,000 species of extant mammals that are categorized into three major clades: placentals, marsupials, and monotremes. The deep evolutionary history of marsupials is poorly known due to a fragmentary fossil record. In particular, cranial fossils of the ancient relatives of marsupials (stem marsupials) are extremely rare. The few cranial elements of these taxa that have been found are fragmentary, crushed, or missing major elements. Recently, some more complete cranial fossils of stem marsupials have been discovered at the Late Cretaceous (75 million years ago) Egg Mountain fossil locality in northwestern Montana. My research will describe the morphology of a partial skull of a stem marsupial from Egg Mountain. This delicate skull is encased in a hard siltstone, making it difficult to mechanically remove without damage to the fossil. Instead, we used micro-computed tomography (µCT) to scan the specimen block. Then I used Avizo software to virtually remove the rock and expose the details of the encased fossil. From the resulting files, I will study and describe the cranial morphology in detail. Thus far, we have identified the stem marsupial as Alphadon halleyi. With further study, I hope to (1) expand upon current knowledge regarding the morphology of Alphadon halleyi, (2) make comparisons with other stem marsupials and extant marsupials, and (3) more broadly, incorporate our findings into a phylogenic analysis of early metatherians (the clade that includes stem marsupials and marsupials) that will further elucidate the evolutionary history of marsupials.

Previous studies on plant phenology have found that shifts in the timing of life cycle events are connected to changes in the surrounding climate. Alpine and subalpine wildflowers are of particular interest, considering that the initiation of flowering often depends on the timing of snowmelt, which has been occurring earlier as temperatures warm. However, we often lack the information needed to predict exactly how much wildflower phenology will shift in response to warming. Herbaria, collections of plant specimens collected over the last 100-200 years, have recently been paired with climate data (from the geographic locations and dates of specimens) to examine the relationship between climate and plant phenology. I aim to answer 1) How does climate influence the timing of phenological stages in wildflowers? and 2) Do species vary in their responses according to their average bloom time after snowmelt (e.g. early season vs. late season bloomers)? This study involves five alpine/subalpine species that very in the timing of blooming relative to snowmelt date: Western pasqueflower (Anemone occidentalis), Sitka valerian (Valeriana sitchensis), Sickletop lousewort (Pedicularis racemosa), Rainier pleated gentian (Gentiana calycosa), and Glacier lily (Erythronium grandiflorum). I will access specimen data from the University of Washington Herbarium and the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria. Phenological stage will be recorded with the date of collection, geographic locations will be determined using GEOLocate coordinate and elevation data, and climate conditions will be spatially modeled using ClimateWNA historical records. I predict that there will be an overall trend of earlier flowering for all four species over time, but that species with later bloom times will experience less deviation from their historical average than those with earlier bloom times. This study is significant in providing information that will help the preservation of wildflower meadows in the high mountains of the Northwest.

With the proliferation of online review platforms, user reviews have become an important source of information to consumers about product quality. As a result, the word-of-mouth through online reviews can influence consumers’ purchase decisions and thus a company’s sales. Using the airline industry as a testing field, this study investigates whether online customer reviews can predict the sales of domestic flights or the company revenue of U.S. airlines. We compiled quarterly data from 2015 to 2018 based on three sources: financial reports of nine major U.S. airlines, domestic passenger data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, and online reviews of these airlines on the Consumer Affairs website. We found that the change in the number of reviews (volume) is more useful in predicting changes in revenue and the number of passengers than the change in the average rating (valence). Meanwhile, the predicted relationship becomes statistically insignificant when controlling for other factors such as seasonality. Further, we used sentiment analysis to create an average sentiment of the text of all the online reviews as an alternative measure of the average rating. We found that changes in the average sentiment is not a predictor of changes in airline revenue or the number of passengers. Our current findings and data limitations suggest a variety of promising avenues for future research, where we will expand the time period analyzed, cover a greater number of airlines, include international flights, account for layovers in routes, gather more extensive online reviews, and employ content analysis such as keyphrase extraction to identify trends in the topics of reviews.

In my paper, I would like to research the passive strategies used for thermal control in the traditional buildings in historic Shanghai. House design patterns in 19th century Shanghai known as Shikumen and Lilong used a variety of passive thermal control measures. These vernacular buildings were razed in the modern era, but their passive cooling and heating strategies are still worth studying. The strategies could be utilized in new constructions today in order to reduce energy consumption from fossil fuels. For decades, many architects have studied passive strategies in vernacular architecture and considered their values for design today since historic people use various constructions to mitigate particular climate conditions. Passive strategies from old buildings should not be abandoned or simply conserved as heritage but should be inherited and used in contemporary design. Applying the vernacular aspect of historic design in the context of contemporary Shanghai preserves cultural identity while reducing energy consumption by accommodating the natural way to insulate the building.

This project aims to analyze the sustainable, economic, and cultrual advantages of adaptive reuse with a focus on Seattle’s building reuse known as architectural retrofitting, or rehabilitation.  Adaptive reuse is the act of reusing an existing building or site for a purpose other than which it was originally built or designed for. The impact of carbon emissions, energy use, and waste production from typical construction processes and building use create harmful environmental consequences on the world. As a result, the amount of waste produced, and new material used is less than that of a typical construction project. Through adaptive reuse, cultural, historic, environmental, and economical elements are influenced by renewing historic buildings. Seattle offers potential for more historic preservation and adaptive reuse as many of the historic districts are well loved by the community. However, as Seattle is becoming a technology hub this is causing demolition of buildings and development in many areas. Landmarked buildings in Seattle are protected by the Landmark Preservation Board which prevents demolition of historic landmark neighborhoods and buildings that are significant to the community.   Although not all historic buildings are protected by the Landmark Protection Board, these buildings can offer the opportunity for reuse and an alternative to typical demolition for construction sites. I conducted a literature review of historical documents, academic literature, content analysis of online sources, and historical sources. The potential of adaptive reuse of non-protected historic buildings in the Seattle area offer a sustainable alternative to typical construction and demolition practices.These adapted buildings preserve culture, and history while committing to better greener practices.  This research aims to address the potential of historic buildings for adaptive reuse and its potential.  Adaptive Reuse offers an opportunity to mitigating the negative impacts of climate change, and build sustainable communities otherwise brought from traditional demolition and construction practices.

The World Meteorological Organization predicts the rise in the temperatures will increase by 5-9 Fahrenheit by year 2100. With global warming escalating on such scale and the continuous depletion of the world’s resources, sustainability in the built environment is essential. According to the United States Green Building Council, buildings in the United States contribute to 39% of CO2 emissions and 40% of the total energy consumption. Although net zero buildings like Bullitt Center generate more renewable energy on site than what they use during operation, the embodied energy – the energy that is put into the material sourcing and assembly, is still high in building construction. Positive Impact Architecture (PIA) is architecture that can reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption while contributing to the ecosystem rejuvenation and reversing the effects of global warming. With new technologies, we can make the buildings behave like an entire living organism that responds to change, self assemblies and repairs, gathers renewable power and water for its occupants. This artificially creates ecosystem services that assist in building maintenance and function. At the end of its life cycle, materials of PIA would be able to degrade naturally while providing nutrients to the earth or reused as a habitat for various species. In this project, I am exploring the architectural practices that would integrate ecosystem services in order to contribute to local nature restoration and reverse global warming potential, thus taking a stand against environmental crisis.

Worldwide, there are 153 million orphaned children, and in addition to the trauma of losing a parent, they are also at greater risk for additional traumatic exposure. Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) is proven effective to improve mental health outcomes for trauma-exposed youth in low and middle-income countries (LMIC), however there is a need for implementation strategies to support the adoption and sustained use of mental health interventions in LMIC with limited mental health services. Hence, this study aims to describe implementation strategies used by lay counselors to support the implementation of TF-CBT in school and community settings in Western Kenya. “Pamoja Tunaweza” (PT), a version of TF-CBT adapted to address posttraumatic stress symptoms among orphaned children in Kenya, was delivered by lay counselors, including community health volunteers (CHV) and teachers. After the first year of implementation, stakeholders identified different implementation strategies necessary to implement TF-CBT. Lay counselors and leaders, including Community Health Extension Workers (CHEW) and Head Teachers, developed strategy recommendations to guide future sites implementing TF-CBT. Supervisors (N=5) and a subset of lay counselors (N=10) and leaders (N=10) from the initial sites conducted 6 coaching meetings with subsequent sites initiating TF-CBT delivery. New sites included schools (N=5) and communities (N=5) consisting of CHV (N=15) and teacher (N=15) counselors and their leaders (N=10). During meetings, participants selected implementation strategies from recommendations to develop work plans to support TF-CBT implementation. Work plans and follow-up forms measured the actor carrying out each strategy, temporality, frequency, adaptations, and completion rate of each strategy. Descriptive statistics will be used to describe the characteristics of strategies. Measuring and describing implementation strategies may improve research on methods to enhance implementation and aid organizations in applying strategies to adopt and sustain evidence-based practices. Ultimately, this may improve effective mental health services for children living in LMIC.

Secondary scholarship on life in Iraq during the period of direct rule by the Ottoman Empire from the mid-19th century to World War I is minimal. A few primary historical texts have survived - these “forgotten texts” are largely individual accounts of daily life and business, which illuminate the events of a period of which little has been written. A study of such texts can prove valuable, allowing us to get to know individuals dwelling in Iraq and their lives. In this project, I explore the social networks of Joseph Mathia Svoboda, a British steamship purser living in Baghdad, through a collection of his diaries written between 1865-1908. Due to his family ties, profession, and vibrant social life, Joseph interacts with a wide variety of groups, from family, friends, religious and political leaders, to individuals of diverse backgrounds who he encounters throughout his travels; thus, his writings provide a fascinating viewpoint from which to study the Ottoman Empire. I conduct text and social network analyses of Joseph’s diaries, which involve visually mapping ties between people and analyzing the dynamics of the resulting structures. In my presentation, I will review the use of network analysis and entity detection methods in various contexts, such as literature, history, and the social sciences, and explore how these techniques can be applied to automate the extraction of persons mentioned from the diaries, and then subsequently visualize this information. In particular, I focus on Diary 47 of Joseph Svoboda’s diaries as a case study. In the future, the insights gained from this could be applied to the rest of the collection. As the diaries were written from Joseph’s young adulthood to old age, his narratives provide a unique opportunity to study societal relations in Ottoman Iraq.

We are working on designing, developing, and understanding of an interesting class of magnetic meta-materials comprising of nanomagnets. These nanomagnets when arranged on square tile lattice forms a two-dimensional artificial spin ice which are important for modeling pyrochlore spin ice systems. We are currently engaged developing recipes for preparing thermally active ASI system comprised of permalloy (NiFe alloys). This will allow the system to explore the magnetic phase space configuration more efficiently and to achieve the true ground state of these many body magnetic system compared to conventional field demagnetization. We fabricate permalloy nanomagnets arrays out of thin film permalloy films (of thicknesses 10- 20 nm) following nanolithography processes involving electron beam lithography, metal mask transfer and ion milling process. The devices are fabricated on specially chosen SiN substrates which acts as diffusion barrier while performing post thermal annealing process at high temperatures. The permalloy films are initially tested for different annealing temperatures to analyze for any changes in surface morphology and magnetic properties. From this, a suitable safe range of annealing temperatures are determined and the ASI arrays of different permalloy thickness are subjected to controlled annealing. Once an optimum annealing temperature is found for safe thermal annealing, we subjected devices with different permalloy thicknesses between 10-15 nm to thermal demagnetization. The magnetic configurations in devices subjected to thermal demagnetization are imaged using magnetic force microscopy to determine their equilibrium configuration attained during annealing. Was found that for this thickness range a perfect demagnetization of ASI arrays are obtained in a temperature range of 320-350°C.

Leigh syndrome (LS), the most common type of pediatric mitochondrial disease, has been associated with loss-of-function mutations in genes that encode for proteins in complex 1 of the electron transport chain. Mutations in a gene called NADH dehydrogenase (ubiquinone) iron sulfur protein 4 (NDUFS4) are linked to LS in several groups of patients. Mice carrying a whole body or central nervous system-specific deletion of this gene develop several symptoms reminiscent of those found in humans. Recent studies in our lab showed that knockout (KO) of Ndufs4 in GABAergic interneurons are the key driver of seizures in the mouse model. In this study, we investigated which subtypes of interneurons are the leading cause of epilepsy. We focused on two major subtypes of GABAergic interneurons: interneurons that express parvalbumin (PV), a high-affinity calcium binding protein, and interneurons that express somatostatin (SST), a neuropeptide. PV interneurons make up 40% of GABAergic cells and have faster spike firing patterns when compared to SST cells. We hypothesize that PV neurons will contribute more to seizure susceptibility than SST interneurons because mitochondrial dysfunction is known to affect cells with high firing rates due to their high energy demand. To test our hypothesis, we generated mice with Ndufs4 KO restricted to PV or SST interneurons using LoxP Cre technology. We evaluated the general health of mice and tested their susceptibility to thermal seizures through behavioral checks and thermal induction tests. We found that Ndufs4 KO in both PV and SST interneurons led to seizure phenotypes. However, this gene KO did not have any detectable effect on body weight, motor activity, breathing patterns, physical appearance, and limb extension. A better understanding of mechanisms underlying epileptic seizures will lead to the development of effective treatments for LS-related epilepsy.

There is evidence that the decision to admit patients to the hospital is not always correlated with their medical acuity. Emerging evidence suggests that a patient’s environment or psychosocial support may affect their likelihood of admission. However, there has been no comprehensive description of this body of literature. Given the breadth of this field, completion of a scoping review to map the current literature is warranted. The research question which this scoping review explores is: what factors other than medical acuity have been studied in relation to the physician’s decision to admit adult patients into the hospital? The scoping review method used in this review involves the following steps: identifying the research question, identifying and selecting studies that were relevant, charting and summarising the results extracted from these studies, and lastly consultation with stakeholders in order to add valuable insight. We collaborated with a research librarian to perform a comprehensive search of seven databases (PubMed, CINAHL, PsycINFO, EMBASE, Web of Science, Sociological Abstracts, and Social Science Abstracts) that resulted in 15,571 unique abstracts. A two-step screening process is currently underway. First, each abstract was reviewed independently by two research team members. From this, 1,368 abstracts were selected and are now being reviewed in full-text to confirm appropriateness for inclusion in the final analysis. We will next begin creating a narrative summary to describe the study designs used, factors studied, the terminology used, and outcomes identified. This research will provide a comprehensive view of trends that affect hospitalization and can be used to build new policies for treatment practices to improve healthcare in all communities.

Though there has been significant attention to preventing unnecessary hospital admissions, emerging evidence indicates that some patients who lack acuity of illness warranting admission continue to be hospitalized. In this study, we use a qualitative approach to further explore the hospitalist perspective and determine what factors influence the disposition decision for patients thought not to be appropriate for inpatient hospitalization. All admission calls to the acute care Medicine service at our hospital are logged into a Triage Database on an ongoing basis. This database allows the assessing physician to record a brief written narrative about the case and issues with making admission decisions. Entries were included in the study if admission calls originated from the Emergency Department and if the hospitalist assessed that the degree of patient’s medical acuity did not warrant hospitalization. Three hundred entries met inclusion criteria and were exported to Dedoose for qualitative analysis. A comprehensive codebook was iteratively created through independent coding accompanied by weekly meetings, with a final inter-rater reliability kappa score of 0.79. Using a grounded theory approach, a conceptual model of the admission decision-making process was constructed. We found that many factors are considered during admission assessment, both within and beyond physician control. The decision appears to occur in two distinct steps. First, an initial assessment considers patient factors, unmet medical and social needs, assessment of risk for discharge, and/or system-level barriers. A final admission decision is made after considering the influence of outside pressures such as: emergency department activity, coordination of care, resource constraint, and/or physician disagreements. Some of these factors may strongly outweigh the lack of medical acuity. Future work should investigate how these factors may vary at institutions with differing patient demographics and the effectiveness of possible interventions to alleviate the pressures of non-acute admission assessment factors.

Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is a chronic disease with no known cure. While medications are often effective at managing physical symptoms, RA patients often experience high levels of fatigue. Studies have found that fatigue may be managed through meditation, but little is known about virtual reality meditation’s (VRM) potential to alleviate fatigue. The purpose of this study is to examine the feasibility and acceptability of VRM as an alternative non-pharmacologic intervention for fatigue management in RA patients. This study implements a convergent mixed-methods design to collect patient feedback. Four participants diagnosed with RA were recruited from a local rheumatology clinic. Participants used a VRM headset in their own home over the course of four consecutive weeks. During this time, Patient Reported Outcome Measurement Information System (PROMIS) measures of fatigue, pain, depression, anxiety, physical activity, and mood were taken at baseline and at weekly intervals. Semi-structured interviews occurred at baseline and at the conclusion of the study. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed, and coded using Atlas.ti (v8). The results are currently pending. Expected results include that participants will find VRM both feasible and acceptable for fatigue management, and that participants will report reduced fatigue levels after using the VR device. While studies have explored the use of VRM in the treatment of anxiety disorder, depression or PTSD, this is the first study to examine VRM’s use for managing fatigue in participants with RA. Results of this study will inform future clinical trials using VRM, implementation of VRM into clinical use, and give a better understanding of the patient’s experience of utilizing VRM for fatigue management.