Peripherally restricted drugs are extremely appealing to drug developers because they remain effective while minimizing adverse side effects such as addiction. This is possible because the drugs stay out of the central nervous system, which allows them to have an impact on the body without affecting the brain. I examined Klight 1.2A transfected Neuro 2a cells under a fluorescent microscope when treated with three different drugs that are thought to be peripherally restricted. Klight is a Kappa opioid receptor agonist sensor that makes the cells fluoresce when they are activated. Neuro 2a cells are a neuroblastoma mouse cell line that is used to study signaling pathways. When I imaged these cells under different drug treatments I quantified the fluorescence. I then compared that quantity to the fluorescence of the cells when treated with U50, a full agonist, at maximal activation. I repeated this procedure for both a high and low drug concentration for each drug. The first two drugs this study examined are Difelikefalin and TP-2021 which are anti-itch drugs from Titan Pharmaceuticals. The third is Asimadonline which plays a role in hot flashes during menopause. My results of these experiments showed significant dose-dependent activation of KLight for all three drugs. These in vitro experiments on plated cells will provide a baseline which can then be compared to the in vivo fluorescence in the brain. In future experiments, when we compare the in vitro and in vivo levels of fluorescence, we can determine if the drugs are peripherally restricted or not.

With age, proteins have an increased tendency to misfold, and the cellular processes that are meant to repair these aggregates begin to lose function. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is partially characterized by the presence of neurofibrillary tangles and beta-amyloid senile plaques. These aggregates have been linked to neurotoxicity and the successive degeneration of neurons. We used a model organism, C. elegans, a nematode that has functional counterparts in humans, a fast life cycle, and transparent body plan. The GMC101 strain of C.elegans expresses the full-length human amyloid-beta protein, and this expression leads to quick and progressive paralysis in animals when they are temperature upshifted to 25°C at the fourth larval stage (pre-adulthood). The goal of this project is to test whether we can extend this model by inducing the paralysis phenotype, and by proxy, beta-amyloid accumulation, when animals are upshifted to a restrictive temperature in mid and late adulthood rather than pre-adulthood. Since AD is primarily a disease of old age in humans, recapitulating the beginning of symptoms in older age animals would make this model more relevant to late-onset AD. Based on preliminary results, we hypothesized that when they are upshifted to a restrictive temperature in mid or late adulthood, animals would paralyze as quickly as they do at pre-adulthood. If true, this would suggest that we can use the GMC101 model as a screening tool for late-onset AD. To test our hypothesis, I shifted animals of the GMC101 and control strain to the restrictive temperature at various adult ages and screened for paralysis using the WormBot system developed in our laboratory. I will describe results from this set of experiments and discuss preclinical screening strategies we are currently pursuing using this model.

Small heat shock proteins (sHSPs) fall into a class of proteins known as protein chaperones, molecular tools that help prevent aggregation, an often-unhealthy phenomenon in which proteins clump together. This protection against aggregation plays a critical role in helping to prevent diseases such as cataracts, and may play a role in preventing neurological diseases associated with protein aggregation such as Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease. Yet little is known about the mechanism by which sHSPs prevent misfolded proteins from aggregating. The study of this mechanism is significantly complicated by the dynamic nature of sHSPs; rather than having just one structure, these protein chaperones fluctuate between several different stable structures. The purpose of this research project was to see what insights into sHSP structure and function could be gleaned by simplifying this dynamic structure. We focused on the central region of a small heat shock protein, known as the alpha-crystallin domain (ACD). Individual ACDs associate to form dimers in an antiparallel fashion, and in doing so form a central fold known as the dimer-interface groove. In a typical wild type small heat shock protein, these ACDs would continuously slide against each other along this groove. We created three distinct cysteine mutations in the ACD of the small heat shock protein HSPB5, producing the R116C, E117C, and F118C mutants. We expected each of these mutant dimers to form a disulfide bond tethering the two ACD subunits of the dimer together at the dimer interface groove, preventing them from sliding against each other, and therefore locking the dimer's central region into one of three distinct conformations. Additionally, we expected the affinities of other proteins for the mutants' dimer-interface grooves to differ between mutants, giving us insight into how the conformational state of the ACD affects its ability to interact with other proteins.

Grasses are a diverse group of plants that play a significant role in many terrestrial ecosystems globally. Despite their importance, very little is known about where and when grasses originated. In particular, it remains unclear in which environment early grasses evolved. Current hypotheses, based primarily on phylogenetic work, suggest that early grasses emerged in closed habitats, such as forests, or in more open habitats along forest margins. However, there is little direct paleobotanical evidence to support either option. To understand the environmental context grasses evolved in, I will be reconstructing canopy openness using phytoliths from Argentinian fossil sites. Phytoliths are microscopic silica bodies deposited in or around plant cells, which can be preserved in the fossil record and used to reconstruct past vegetation. The phytoliths that I am analyzing are from the Las Violetas Formation (57.9-50.6 Ma) of Argentine Patagonia, a rock formation within an area known to hold the oldest records of grass phytoliths in South America. As a proxy for vegetation structure, I am using reconstructed Leaf Area Index (rLAI), which takes the area to perimeter ratio of non-grass phytoliths originated in the leaf epidermis and determines a value that corresponds to how much light passes through a canopy. A canopy with a high leaf coverage correlates to a high rLAI value and vice versa. Based on preliminary rLAI results, I expect to find that ancestral grasses lived in habitats with semi-open canopies, similar to modern shrublands. Investigating the ancestral environment of grasses can help us better understand their evolutionary history and potential environmental drivers that led to their success in terrestrial ecosystems. This information can help us gain insight on the vulnerability of grasses and grass-dominated habitats to environmental changes in the past, present and future.

The Philippines is experiencing a new kind of era ever since the onset of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency. Although the Philippines deems itself as a republic, the president exhibits an authoritarian nature. His tactics, rhetoric, and worldview have garnered attention and controversy, leading to a reevaluation of the country. Despite disagreement and condemnation from human rights groups and other entities, for many people Duterte stands as an effective leader in the Philippines. Even with his brutality, there is a strong presence of approval. In this project, I aim to explore and uncover what makes Duterte such a likable figure among Filipino citizens. A review of the literature reveals many plausible reasons. Duterte veils himself as a ‘common man.’ His efforts to combat the war on drugs are also admirable to many Filipinos; they feel much safer with some of his policies. Initially, my research was supposed to manifest in an academic paper. However, I found that one of my parents shared the same sentiments as other Filipinos. To highlight my findings, I chose to interview my dad and borrowing from the work of Ocean Vuong, I utilized the form of a letter to my father. With this project, I aimed to connect with my dad in hopes of understanding more about my people. Additionally, I was able to hear the genuine thoughts and background of my dad. This brought me closer to my roots, and my dad. This research contributes further to the broader question of what makes dictators and authoritative leaders, such as Duterte, ‘likable’ people to their citizens.  

Within the ethnographies, memories, and archives produced throughout a capitalist empire, the ‘gaze’ has generally been used against the subject, creating narratives which entrench the hegemony in defining the subject to accord with the needs of the dominating culture. The term ‘oppositional gaze’ was developed in 1992 by bell hooks in conversation with Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: the ‘gaze’ is a scopophilic act albeit with the potential to be a radical method for resistance; the oppositional gaze then refers to ‘looking’ as a defiant act to which the actors reclaim a sense of autonomy over the spectator and turn the gaze back upon their oppressors. What makes the act of ‘looking’ so defiant and how this looking translates to an oppositional gaze is the question this project attempts to answer through a close reading of various media and using an array of methods and theories from such disciplines as film studies, ethnography, and data ethics. I build upon the foundations of hooks and Mulvey while asserting that the definition of ‘looking’ goes beyond visual perception and into the act of understanding and perceiving. I apply these theories of the ‘gaze’ and my own explorations of ‘looking’ to juxtapose Rahul Jain’s Machines (2016) and Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) in analyzing its application and limitations. With this project, I hope to impel further discussion on the study of the gaze by compiling demonstrations of its application in various media and its disruption of prevailing narratives.

Cachexia is a debilitating syndrome that accelerates muscle and fat wasting, affecting up to 80% of cancer patients with no current effective treatment. This condition is associated with weakness, fatigue, and poor tolerance to chemotherapy. Recently proposed as a therapeutic option due to its anabolic effects on preserving muscle and adipose tissue, ghrelin has been reported to attenuate Lewis Lung Carcinoma (LLC)-induced weight loss and lipolysis, also partially regulated by its only known receptor growth hormone secretagogue receptor (GHSR-1a). Tumor-induced lipolysis is associated with an alteration of substrate utilization. However, the extent to which these effects of ghrelin relate to substrate utilization (lipid oxidation and carbohydrate oxidation, LO and COX) remains unclear. This project seeks to determine if ghrelin’s effect on LO and COX in the LLC-induced cachexia model is dependent on GHSR-1a. Adult male C57BL/6J GHSR-1a knockout (KO) and wild-type (WT) mice were treated with or without LLC tumor, then injected with vehicle or ghrelin (0.8 mg/kg). Metabolic parameters were evaluated by the Comprehensive Lab Animal Monitoring System, in which I analyzed LO and COX (calculated mean values and performed statistics). Tumor implantation led to an increase in LO and a decrease in COX in tumor-bearing mice. GHSR-1a KO mice had a greater increase in LO compared to WT, highlighting the receptor’s essential role in maintaining normal levels of LO during cachexia, with no genotype effect for COX. Ghrelin did not prevent the LLC-induced response regardless of GHSR-1a expression, hence its mitigating effects for lipolysis in cachexia are not dependent on the regulation of LO or COX. In conclusion, GHSR-1a plays a role in modulating LO in tumor-induced cachexia, and these effects are independent of ghrelin. More studies are needed to further characterize the pathways involved, including alternative receptors of ghrelin or its adjacent mechanisms.

This narrative web experience invites readers to rethink their own relationships with the material world. The piece frames materials within Western monumental structures — the marble pedestal, the bronze figure, and the “living” rock carving — not as inanimate instruments in colonial systems, but as living victims and actors within those very systems. I examine how these materials are treated within the Western monument-making process through alternate frameworks—namely Neolithic, Queer and Indigenous material theories—in order to expose the violences inherent in Western material theory and practice. This piece, structured in a series of web pages, leads the reader through a research narrative strung together from conceptual images, academic text, and instructions for a tactile activity. By highlighting these non-Western and anti-colonial material lenses, I explore how the critical lenses we choose to apply to examine monumental materials can act to liberate them from the inanimacies inflicted upon them and highlight the resistances they mount against monumentalization, prompting a further “dematerialization” of the Western monument. This liberation will allow us rethink the physical and ideological standards that have been established for monumentality and to ideate alternate material forms for future monuments that do not contain, impose, and idolize such colonial violences.

This paper and counter-tour will examine the relationship between tourism, the silencing of Martinican activism in international media, and the legacy of colonialism. Martinique is located in the southeastern Caribbean, and has been colonized by France since the mid-1600s. Victor Schoelcher was a French abolitionist who has received much more credit than he is owed for emancipation in the French Caribbean. The project explores the tourism industry and international media’s role in upholding dominant narratives around Schoelcher that are rooted in white saviorism. The questions this research seeks to answer are: What is the relationship between tourism and schoelcherisme, which is the glorification and mythologism of Victor Schoelcher? How does activism on Martinique that challenges white supremacy and colonialism bring to light truths that the tourism industry attempts to conceal in its messaging? The approach to answer these questions involves critical analysis of tourist websites and brochures. This project will also incorporate social media and publications of Martinican writers and activists. The counter-tour will illustrate how the tourism industry invisibilizes the work of activists to challenge Schoelcher’s material legacy, keeping their work from receiving international attention. This research project will challenge depictions of the island that are interwoven into the tourist industry’s advertisements and Western perceptions of Martinique, and highlight means of resistance to white supremacy and colonialism.

Stereotypes around femininity, as presented to young Women, have historically not been inclusive. Often consisting of single-story one-dimensional white male ideals of femininity. Young Women could either lean into the stereotype or turn away, the dismissal often created new stereotypes due to a lack of strong feminist representation like the “I’m not like other girls” trope. The exposure to these white feminine stereotypes created cracks in a young Woman’s relationship with femininity and what it means to be girl. Causing a shift to anti-feminist and sexist thought while developing internalized misogyny. This presented externally as Women hating behavior that supported the learned mindsets of white men on the sexualization, degradation, and general treatment of other Women. The patriarchal system influenced this young Woman and others across the country in their homes, in their classrooms, each night on television, reinforced on the covers of teen magazines, through the eyes of their fathers and actions of their mothers. This young Woman functioned as a monument to the Patriarchy. Acting for the best interest of the heteronormative white male experience. I was the monument. With a lack of strong feminist representation, I instead turned into a living, breathing, and sometimes ‘preaching’ monument to the patriarchy. Through autoethnography and research of pop culture from the 1990s and 2000s, friends, family, members, and television shows. I will analyze my own experience to identify and understand my journey from anti-feminist to feminist. Answer how I was manipulated by the heteropatriarchy and colonialism to be antifeminist, to hate other Women, and actively cause harm to others based on their expression of femininity. Understanding the way in which I was once an image fighting for feminine oppression to help others unlearn too.

The United States established itself as a cohesive and internally policed nation-state through a process of exclusion through border making and racialized violence. Above all, the construction and regimentation of the state involved practices that sought to naturalize the borders of the United States in order to endow its barriers with an immutable solidity. This solidity was ratified through physical demarcation, legislation and violence directed at those deemed “other,” both human and non-human. By relying on a constructed archive that documents the federally organized Gray Wolf eradication programs in the borderlands of Arizona and new Mexico from 1880 until 1930, I demonstrate how the delineation of the United States/Mexico border was both preceded and continues to be perpetually defined by policies that enact precisely these kinds of exclusionary measures. I will show how this federally mandated dominance over the lives and the habitats of non-human animals was utilized by analogous procedures to surveil and police the border in their effort to bolster and sustain the United States as a settler-colonial state. By revealing otherwise concealed historical insights, I hope to undermine the prevailing conceptions of national boundaries by denaturalizing the illusion of fixed, constant, and enduring lines of demarcation and consequently offer opportunities to envision a world without such divisive separations. Such a vision would allow for the recognition of borders not as sites of inclusion, but as spaces built on methodical exclusion of both human and non-human beings.

Farmworkers often experience substandard housing conditions, including crowding, temperature and humidity variability, and limited cooling access. We investigated how in-home temperature, humidity, bedroom crowding, and cooling impacted sleep duration among Washington State (WA) farmworkers. We hypothesized that elevated sleep temperatures, humidity, and crowding would be associated with reduced sleep duration. In the summer of 2019, 81 orchard and vineyard workers in Central WA participated in a baseline housing characteristic survey, three successive monthly sleep surveys, and three sleep temperature measurements. We assessed housing quality, our exposure of interest, defined as: housing type, air conditioning (AC) availability, crowding (> 2 adults in bedroom) and sleeping room temperature and humidity measured with Kestrel Drops. Our outcome measure was self-reported sleep hours per night. On average, participants were 42 years of age, male (64%), had 3.4 years of agriculture experience, and slept 6.5 hours per night at 76°F and 50% humidity. 45% lived in single-family homes, 11% in apartments, 28% in barracks, and 16% in mobile homes. Average temperature did not differ between housing types. Maximum temperature was greatest in barracks (average max=83.3°F) and apartments (85.0°F) versus single-family homes (79.7°F) and mobile homes (80.1°F). Relative humidity was highest in barracks (55.5%) versus single-family homes (48.9%), mobile homes (44.9%), and apartments (45.7%). Crowding and access to AC also varied with housing type, with 100% of barracks participants and 14% of mobile home participants reporting overcrowding, and apartment participants (100%) and barracks participants (97%) being the most likely to report AC. Participants in barracks reported less sleep per night than participants in single-family or mobile homes (6 versus 7 hours, respectively). We found variation in farmworker housing conditions and reduced sleep duration in barracks. We recommend future research examining the role of housing and workplace characteristics on worker sleep quality.

This project explores the history and power of language in relation to graffiti writer Rammellzee’s philosophy of Ikonoklast Panzerism as well as to his art. Using informal interviews, ethnographic engagement, and close readings relating to Rammellzee and the alphabet’s history, I investigate how the individual can claim the power of language back from colonizers and oppressors through subversive art. I question how Rammellzee’s work can be used to reimagine the alphabet as a tool to deconstruct monuments of oppression and imperialism that are pervasive to society. Rammellzee founded Ikonoklast Panzerism on the idea that each individual letter of the alphabet can be armored and weaponized in order to free themselves from the institutions which wield the power of language over the rest of society. He bases his beliefs in the medieval history of monastic illuminated calligraphy and uses his theories to create art which subverts structures of power. I argue that Rammellzee’s work reveals the potential of individualized power by reclaiming the almighty power of language and challenging the limitations of legibility and standardization. Drawing from concepts such as ethnographic refusal, and from the writing of scholars like Michel-Rolph Trouillot to inform my creative work, this project emphasizes the power of the written word in today’s world and investigates how language can be reimagined and repurposed by each individual. I synthesize my research findings into a creative form that touches on my own relationship to language in academia, and how I can apply Rammellzee’s ideas to my own life.