Teaching STEM concepts to secondary-education students is a challenge, especially with large-scale, abstract concepts such as the degradation of our ecosystems and the impacts this has on communities. One way to address this is to use small-scale examples that exist in “their own backyards”. Thus, the purpose of this project is to develop hands-on experiences […]
A27: A Community Under Siege — Salinity Impact on Phycosphere Communities
The lakes of the McMurdo Dry Valley in Antarctica represent a stable environment with minimal external inputs and highly stratified aquatic ecosystems as a result of perennial ice-covers that prevent wind-mixing and atmospheric gas exchange. This environment imposes various stressors on its microbial communities such as low light, low temperature, and osmotic stress. Microorganisms within […]
C39: Thermophobic Adjuvants for Varying Immune Response with Temperature
Modern vaccines, including some SARS-CoV-2, make use of immune-response eliciting agents called adjuvants. While these compounds are effective at stimulating immune responses, they can have varying effects on individuals who receive the vaccine. One instance of these reactions is a high fever or pyrexia leading to safety concerns and in some cases hospitalization. Here we […]
A26: Phage of Enlightenment: What Has Been Learned from the Isolation and Characterization of Bacteriophages of Microbacterium foliorum and Streptomyces lividans
First-year students in Miami University’s Microbiology 223 and 224 class are among participants at over 100 colleges and universities in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s SEA-PHAGES program. This program is aimed at providing young scientists with an opportunity to carry out discovery-based science. In MBI 223 in the fall 2022 semester, students collected soil and […]
A25: Aligning statistics teaching and statistics usage in undergraduate neuroscience education
Statistics in the field of neuroscience is crucial for comparing brains from distinct populations, studying variability in the structure of the brain, and wrangling data on the large scale that it is gathered today. Requirements for statistics differ when submitting work to various journals, however the common denominator is that you must be prepared to […]
C42: Metabolism of Condensed Tannins by Manganese Peroxidase
Tannin is a chemically stable phenolic compound found in plant leaves, fruits, and roots. It enters the soil from plant detritus, but what happens after it enters the soil is unknown. It has biological importance due to its action as an antioxidant and its ability to precipitate proteins. This unique ability to interact with proteins, […]
C52: A Retrospective Study to Assess an Automated Approach for Navigating Catheter Movements
This general research area utilizes the fields of Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science to solve a real-world problem. Ventricular arrhythmias (VA) are abnormal heartbeats oftentimes associated with morbidity, mortality, and impaired quality of life. They can be treated using catheter ablation, where a tube is guided through one’s heart to destroy the small areas of […]
C43: Zein Nanoparticles Coated with Various Types of Tannin
Zein, a protein found in corn, can form nanoparticles that can be utilized in drug delivery systems. Condensed tannin and hydrolyzable tannin are high molecular weight plant polyphenols that interact strongly with protein, presumably by crosslinking via phenol-peptide hydrogen bonds. Adding a tannin “coat” to zein nanoparticles may protect the particles so they provide a […]
C53: Reanalyzing Korean Genome-wide Association Studies Using a Next -Generation Asian Reference Panel
Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) aim to collect large samples of human genomes from all over the world and study genetic variants or genes associated with human diseases. Since the first GWAS in 2005, it has been quite successful in identifying genetic variants or genes responsible for various complex disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, and diabetes, […]
C54: Estimating Confidence Intervals for Risk Measures in Pareto Tails
Our general research area is focused on determining the two-sided interval estimators for risk measures in modeling loss data. In this case, we are looking at the conditional tail expectation (CTE) for Pareto tails (specifically Pareto I and Pareto II). We use the Delta Method to compute the confidence intervals, and compare the performance with […]