People with autism spectrum disorder experience varying challenges in sharing social-emotional reciprocity and the establishment and maintenance of social relationships (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Having social relationships is important for a variety of reasons, including but not limited to, building and solidifying lifelong skills in conflict resolution, improving self-perception, and promoting healthy emotional and cognitive development (Bukowski & Sippola 2005). There is growing research that has provided characteristics of autistic individuals’ peer relationships and friendships, however, these studies often must approach these complex relationships through a focused lens. In order to better understand the characteristics  of social relationships in this community, we must comprehensively examine this literature base, and to our knowledge, no such literature review exists. Thus, the current project explored 31 studies of autistic individuals’ social relationships with friends, peers, or acquaintances, finding connections in the existing literature including friendship reciprocity, social network centrality, and how severity of diagnosis affects friendships. Results from these studies show that the majority of autistic participants maintain friendships, but there are significant differences in friendship quality, the friends’ characteristics, duration and frequency of interaction, and satisfaction and enjoyment of friendships. Furthermore, several factors can influence how these friendships are formed and sustained, including parental involvement, the participant’s diagnosis and other characteristics, environment, and technology. This review will allow for further understanding of ASD and the social aspects of the disorder, which could have implications for academic supports, clinical interventions, and further research on social relationships among individuals with ASD. 

With the rise of social media and video sharing platforms, many people are turning to sources like Youtube as their main source of information. However, these platforms have become easy targets for misinformation campaigns. Credibility is hard to ascertain on a video sharing platform like Youtube come from the wide base of content creators. On a typical Google search for a topic, the leading sources are usually mainstream-media companies. However, on Youtube, it is significantly easier for an individual person, or channel, to overtake mainstream media and become popular. There is also no standard way for creators to display credibility factors or cite their sources on video-sharing platforms. This leads to creators using a workaround to cite sources or simply foregoing citations all together. The implications of this for viewers is that they are unable to quickly identify the credibility of the source without cross-referencing other places on the web, or lateral reading. Currently, the only standardized information displayed about a channel is its display name, profile picture, subscriber count, and occasionally a verification indicator. The verification indicator, in particular, can be misleading as it only indicates whether a channel is who they claim to be. This project is researching and developing citations for Youtube videos. Video citations will allow creators to display credibility within individual videos and allow viewers to conduct lateral reading with ease. Citations specific to this format could also take on advantages of social media platforms, specifically user ratings and collaborative creation of citations. There are many possibilities in how citations can be introduced that we will explore through this project, each with pros and cons. For instance, sharing and creating credible videos could contribute to the pre-existing communities currently on Youtube through crowd-sourcing citations.

A mesoporous silica (MPS) membrane is an ultrathin permeable material characterized by numerous and uniform embedded pores whose sizes are on the order of 2-3 nanometers. MPS membranes are widely used in a number of research and industrial applications such as biomedicine for the isolation and characterization of macromolecules including DNAs and proteins. Such membranes can be synthesized in a variety of ways including electrodeposition. In our research, we have been developing an electrochemistry-based method for the preparation of ultrathin MPS membranes ranging from 50 to 150 nm in thickness. These membranes are synthesized on an electrode by a novel pulse deposition process and can be transferred onto other solid supports. A highly sensitive single-molecule analysis platform is being developed based on the use of such MPS membranes. We anticipate that our MPS membranes will find extensive use in future applications ranging from single-molecule analysis to high efficiency purification of macromolecules and other small biomolecules of interest.

Code-switching (CS) refers to a multilingual speaker’s alternation between two or more languages in a single context of communicative discourse. It is important to study how children code-switch during narrative production because though there is existing research on code-switching and its prevalence in conversational settings where one may be inclined to code-switch based on conversational needs or factors, there is limited evidence on its prevalence during narrative tasks. Importantly, there is also minimal research on how the occurrence of code-switching may differ with language proficiency. In this study we will answer, (1) In what instances do children enrolled in immersion programs code-switch from Mandarin to English during narrative production? And (2) how are these instances affected by grade level and level of exposure? We hypothesize that as bilingual students progress through the immersion program, prevalence of code-switching during narrative production will decrease as proficiency in Mandarin increases. Thus we expect the number of instances of code switching to decrease as participants’ proficiency scores and their grade level (i.e. 1st, 2nd grade) increases. Participants involved were school-aged (1st-6th grade) children enrolled in a Mandarin-English (ME) immersion program in Oakland, California. Children completed a story-telling task, presented by a native speaker of the language being tested. Mandarin narratives were based on the wordless picture book “Frog Goes to Dinner”. Speech samples were collected and recorded over Zoom and then transcribed on CLAN software. Instances in which individuals of each grade level code-switch during a narrative task were coded from transcripts. We present data on the prevalence of code-switching in a controlled environment. Data collection is complete and analysis is in progress. Code-switching may be indicative of level of proficiency in narrative story telling in a second language (L2) for bilingual students.

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a cancer originating in glial cells in the brain that accounts for more than 60% of all brain tumors in adults. The low survival rate can be attributed to high resistance to radiotherapy due to the hypoxic tumor environment which induces signaling networks in cancer cells that lead to the epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT). EMT gives rise to mesenchymal cancer stem cells (MSC) with a highly invasive phenotype which resists traditional means of therapy. Phospholipid glutathione peroxidase (GPX4), a selenocysteine-containing enzyme that dissipates lipid peroxides, has been shown to regulate pathways that prevent ferroptosis, a unique iron dependent form of cell death initiated by an increase in reactive oxygen species. Disrupting the GPX4 pathway by siRNA-induced gene knockdown induces ferroptosis. Therefore, NPs as a vector for gene therapy may be able to eliminate mesenchymal state stem cells for a more effective treatment. Using hypoxia to induce EMT to develop a cell model for this work, preliminary results from quantitative real time PCR showed a correlation between GPX4 and EMT markers of human glioblastoma cells in hypoxia. GPX4 siRNA were evaluated using commercially available transfection agents on hypoxic and normoxic cells as proof of concept in vitro over a period of ten days. NP mediated delivery of validated siRNA were optimized using different ratios of NP and siRNA. Incubation time was also optimized. Finally, dual therapy of siRNA knockdown and radiotherapy were performed to evaluate sensitization of cells. The capabilities of NPs, along with concurrent radiation therapy, may provide a means to overcome radioresistance in GBM therapy.

Misinformation, media containing misleading or inaccurate information, is an increasingly prevalent and complex issue in society. There has been lots of previous work to classify misinformation, but none have contextualized it in terms of its harms to people, groups, and society. Misinformation can also have disparate harms and impacts on different groups: political disinformation campaigns often target underprivileged groups to attempt to disenfranchise them, while recent coronavirus misinformation has significantly affected marginalized groups. Misinformation may vary in the scope of their societal harm: some harassment may target specific individuals with misinformation, while others can cause a broader societal effect, such as through the loss of trust in public institutions. We propose to develop a taxonomy that classifies types of misinformation according to their potential for harm to aid efforts to address the effects of misinformation effectively. We also start with specific examples from two domains: elections and public health. We aim to interview fact-checkers early about what factors they consider when deciding to fact-check specific content, as they often must triage and select incoming media, and harness their intuitions in terms of potential negative impacts of misinformation. After this, we will develop a survey and survey a broad demographic of people to obtain initial results. From the survey data, we will develop a taxonomy of harms related to misinformation and iterate on the taxonomy with more people to get feedback. Our harm taxonomy can help fact-checkers triage incoming misinformation and prioritize which needs to be checked first. It also offers an explicit characterization of different types of intended harms, which may be useful when considering what kind of response is warranted. Finally, it lays a groundwork for improvement of machine learning systems that could better aid human review.