Abstracts

INTRODUCTION: The State of Florida has an incarceration rate of 870 per 100,00 adult residents (Minton et al., 2021). Post-release this population faces a higher mortality rate due to drug overdose by a factor of 3.5, which does not return to the general population baseline even after nine weeks pos...

Gelatin scaffolds that mimic the structure of the Lymph Nodes (LN) can assist in studying the influence of Fibroblastic Reticular Cells, supportive cells in the LN, on peripheral tolerance in Type I diabetes. We fabricated freeze-dried gelatin scaffolds crosslinked with glutaraldehyde using various ...

In December 2019, severe cases of viral pneumonia associated with human-animal interactions were found by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. The main forms of transmission were respiratory droplets and close human contact. It was later determined to be severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavir...

The stress of a cancer diagnosis has adverse effects on the family caregiver's daily diet and subsequent immune health. Such relation may be exacerbated by limited resources, such as income.  Less known is the extent to which daily diet and income relate to immune health of family caregivers of...

Bacteria in humans are becoming increasingly important to modern medicine. They are understood to play roles in hundreds of human systems from mood regulation to metastatic colonization in breast cancer. They even decide what foods you will crave. This study takes a bidirectional approach to underst...

The lack of comprehensive and inclusive sexual education in the United States is a significant public health concern that requires a reimagining of health promotion during the age of social media. This necessity bore The Sex Wrap (TSW), a podcast-based sexual health intervention that aims to fill in...

The vago-vagal reflex is a neural circuit of the tenth cranial nerve involved in the homeostatic regulation of various respiratory and gastrointestinal functions. However, its contribution to blood glucose regulation is not yet fully understood. Focusing on the sensory modality of the vago-vagal loo...

In this project, I discuss the ways in which personal and collective accounts of trauma are transmitted and adapted via Salsa, the most popular and emblematic musical style of Cali, Colombia. As both a tool of resistance and entertainment patronized by cartels, Salsa's complicated history reflects t...

Kinase inhibitors are among the most developed targeted therapies for cancer and serve as a frontline treatment replacing chemotherapy for several B-cell malignancies, including chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). Due to its critical role in the proliferation and survival of B-cells, Bruton's Tyrosi...

In this work a NIR emitting dye, p-Toluenesulfonate (IR-813) was explored as a model precursor to develop red emissive carbon dots (R-CD) for fluorescent imaging.  Current commercial photosensitizers (PS) used in fluorescence-based techniques have glaring limitations.  For example, to achi...

Studying all the supraspinal projecting populations after spinal cord injury has been difficult because sectioning of tissue and analysis of 2D images of a whole brain is time consuming and laborious. We developed methods that can image the whole mouse brain without sectioning using tissue clearing ...

While gastrulation is unique to metazoans, the site at which it occurs is not uniform for all metazoans. Non-bilaterians and bilaterians diverged from an urbilaterian common ancestor, and with that divergence came a change in the site of gastrulation. In observed non-bilaterian taxa, such as Cnidari...

Ten-Eleven Translocation 2 (TET2) mutants are frequently associated with hematopoietic malignancies, specifically myeloid and lymphoid cancers. We performed comparative analyses of patient samples across cancer sub-types to characterize TET2 mutations within lymphoid malignancies. Vitamin C is a cof...

Intimate partner aggression (IPA) is a multi-faceted phenomenon that ranges from severe forms of intimate partner violence to less severe behaviors, common couple violence (Simpson et al., 2007). Communication conflict, which assesses the intensity and frequency of arguments, is often conceptualized...

Vitamin D Reduces the Metastatic Potential of the MG-63 Osteosarcoma Cell Line Osteosarcomas are the most common type of bone tumor, with metastasis to the lungs being the leading cause of death in patients with the disease. Several studies have found a link between the active vitamin D derivat...

Due to high salinity, low pH and anoxic conditions, brine pools are one of the most extreme habitable environments on Earth making them home to unique extremophile microbial assemblages. These assemblages are an oasis of biodiversity in an otherwise bathyal desert. Previous work focused on character...

Hispanics are still 2.5 times more likely to become hospitalized and 2.1 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than non-Hispanic whites. Sexual minority stress compounds this risk for Latinx sexual and gender minorities (SGM), but little remains known about the drivers of COVID-19 vaccine uptake in...

The oral and intestinal microbiota have a proven influence on the pathogenesis of non-communicable chronic digestive diseases related to dysbiosis. Acute periodontitis is a multifactorial disease, caused by various etiological agents, one of these factors is the oral microbiota dysbiosis. This infla...

Little is known about the spatial patterns of household water insecurity and their implications for community water interventions. This study analyzes location data of 250 households surveyed in Arua, Uganda, in August-September 2017 to evaluate correlates and geospatial clustering of household wate...

The lack of access to accurate and comprehensive sexual health education in the United States continues to be a pressing public health issue. The Sex Wrap (TSW) is a multimedia sexual health podcast and social media presence that educates its followers on sexual health and ancillary themes including...

In the United States, many adolescents do not have access to comprehensive sexual education, and instead, receive abstinence-only-until-marriage (AOUM) education. Given the current social and political climate in the United States, LGBTQ+ youth are becoming more likely to be excluded from sexuality ...

A community's built environment plays a tremendous role in the well-being of its members. Access to grocery stores, affordable healthy food options, or a surplus in cheap fast food can significantly affect the health of the individuals living in that area. The purpose of this study is to examine the...