In the last two decades, Chinese state lenders have been responsible for $153 billion in loans to African countries. Acknowledging assertions in the literature that this lending has had tangible negative effects on debt sustainability in several of those African countries, my research project analyzes the effectiveness of this lending in improving welfare through the financing of energy projects. This represents a first step in answering the broader question of whether official Chinese lending to African nations, in its current state, is worth the accompanying risks.

Combining data from Horn, Reinhart, and Trebesch (2021), William & Mary's AidData Initiative, and other macro-level datasets on national electrification, I build a comprehensive picture of Chinese lending to African energy generation projects, as well as the long-term success of those projects and their effects on national energy outcomes. My analysis will be based in part on descriptive statistics generated from my dataset and in part on an econometric analysis run on the dataset that factors in costs, energy output, and national debt and labor metrics.

This research is expected to yield the result that while Chinese investment is largely effective and prioritizes sustainable energy generation projects, opportunities exist for more accommodative lending practices and greater domestic labor involvement in project implementations.

Mount St. Helens shook local communities and spewed volcanic ash into the sky for two months before it finally had its major eruption. In those two months newspapers eagerly tracked the activity, crafted a story, and relayed it to their audiences. When the mountain erupted on May 18, 1980, the world caught a glimpse of nature’s power and found a dramatic climax to their two-month story. In the immediate aftermath, accounts of what had happened took various forms, ranging from personal hymns to films, with each of them showing a different response to the eruption. These responses showcase a population reconsidering what it means to live alongside nature. Today, forty years later, Mount St. Helens’ story is still being told through a wide array of sources. In my research, I analyze works approaching the eruption, reacting in the immediate aftermath, and those which have come out in memory. I note the content of these sources as well as their framing to construct an analysis of how changing treatment of the Mount St. Helens story reveals society’s approach to nature before the eruption and how that approach changed in response to the events of May 18. I specifically focus on sources consumed and produced by the broader public, such as films and songs, using private correspondence or scientific conferences only as a source of what does not make widespread narratives. This approach encapsulates how people of various communities make sense of living alongside the natural world, and especially how they conceptualize sudden change events like volcanic eruptions. My research uncovers both flaws in the population’s conceptual relationship to nature as well as their tendencies to remember natural events, specifically Mount St. Helens, in a way that maintains or minimally changes the way the see themselves in the world.

Regular physical activity protects against cellular aging, but a recent study found shorter telomere length (TL) in professional swimmers compared to less active controls. Shorter TL is associated with increased cellular senescence and functional decline with age, suggesting swimmers may be at increased risk for age-related morbidity. Previous studies reported competitive swimmers face high levels of psychosocial stress, which, in turn, is posited to accelerate TL shortening. I hypothesize that competitive collegiate swimmers experience increased psychosocial stress, leading them to have shorter TL despite their active lifestyles. I conducted a mixed-methods study to examine whether TL differs between Division-1 and Division-3 National Collegiate Athletic Association, NCAA, swimmers (N=28 respectively) and their non-athlete counterparts (N=15) and if differences in TL is associated with psychosocial stress (Total N=43). Collegiate swimmers face a unique set of stressors to perform for scholarships and professional opportunities while simultaneously continuing their responsibilities as students. Accordingly, I measured overall psychosocial stress (Cohen’s Perceived Stress Scale; PSS) to compare swimmers and non-athletes as well as sports-related psychosocial stress (The Student Athletes’ Motivation toward Sports and Academics Questionnaire; SAMSAQ) to compare D-1 to D-3 swimmers. Further, I conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews to better contextualize how student-athletes perceive how the psychosocial stress they experience impacts their lives and performance. I expect swimmers to report higher levels of overall psychosocial stress (PSS) and have shorter TL compared to non-athletes. Further, I expect that D-1 swimmers will report higher levels of psychosocial stress (SAMSAQ) and have shorter TL compared to D-3 swimmers. There are over 10,000 NCAA swimmers across the country and minimal studies have looked at their physical and mental health simultaneously. This study hopes to highlight the areas we can better support and improve both the physical and mental health of our collegiate swimmers, and NCAA student-athletes as a whole.

Spinal cord injuries (SCIs) produce motor impairments that have devastating consequences for the independence and quality of life of affected individuals. These impairments result from the weakening of connections between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord. Therefore, there is an ongoing need to develop interventions that strengthen corticospinal connections post SCI. Our laboratory focuses on a hybrid intervention that combines intraspinal neuromodulator delivery with use-dependent physical rehabilitation, which increases motor performance after SCI. However, the mechanisms behind this recovery remain relatively unexplored. Our project aims to address this knowledge gap by using evoked potentials (EPs) as biomarkers to quantify the strength of neuronal connections. EPs represent electrical responses in the brain to stimuli. Following a stimulus event, measuring the EP amplitude allows us to assess the strength of neuronal connections. For our experiment, we will implant chronic cortical and spinal microwire arrays in adult rats with chronic cervical SCI and conduct weekly recording sessions before, during, and after a 6-week therapy period. We will then compare changes in the size of EPs recorded during these sessions. We will also assess motor recovery through behavioral scores on a forelimb reach-and-grasp task, which the cervical cord injury directly impairs. We hypothesize that our interventions will strengthen corticospinal connections damaged by the injury, as manifested in a correlation between an increase in EP amplitudes and changes in motor performance. Ultimately, results from our experiments will help us understand how physical rehabilitation and targeted delivery of neuromodulators mediate recovery of the damaged central nervous system. We also hope our project will inform future rehabilitation strategies targeting SCI.

Global cycling of elements like carbon, nitrogen, and iron have key roles in maintaining the biosphere. These and other micro- and macro-nutrients undergo important reduction-oxidation and acid-base transformations in the environment. Biologically, iron (Fe) and manganese (Mn) are utilized by microbes as cofactors in many essential proteins and enzymes including nitrogenase, ferredoxin, peroxidase, cytochromes, and phosphotransferase. These elements (most notably Fe) can often limit microbial growth in large regions of the ocean because of their trace environmental concentrations, or due to structural bioavailability, or competitive microbial uptake and utilization. This can impact key ecosystem and cellular processes, including chemosynthetic carbon fixation at hydrothermal vents, nitrogen species reduction, and metabolic electron transport. Here we use flow cytometry measurements (FCM) to quantify bacteria and archaea from hydrothermal vent plumes along the Southern East Pacific Rise. We compare patterns in microbial abundance with total dissolvable Fe concentrations (predominantly Fe3+, including dissolved and labile particulate Fe) at the same locations. I find that bacterial abundance is most strongly related to trace-concentration of Fe below 400nM, and that similar relationships exist with trace methane (CH₄) and dissolved Mn concentrations. These findings suggest that microbial abundances in vent plumes could be partially explained by trace element and methane distributions, but further research is required to disentangle whether these important substrates are covarying with other biochemical factors impacting microbial growth and metabolism in these dynamic environments.