Interdisciplinary – Page 6 – UROP Summer Symposium 2021

Interdisciplinary

Social Justice and the Environmental Movement – Lead Issues in Detroit

Social Justice is an ongoing effort to ensure that people in society are given fair treatment regardless of race, economic status, gender identity, sexual orientation, or ability status amongst other identities. While efforts have been ongoing to achieve justice, the movement for it is just beginning to gain recognition in various areas of society. Environmental racism is a term used to describe when a disproportionate amount of pollution emitting facilities are placed near a population with a large proportion of residents who are people of color. It can also occur when people of color do not receive the appropriate resources to deal with environmental hazards or when less media attention is directed towards people of color when they deal with pollution issues. One area of concern in this category can be seen with a particular issue in Detroit.

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Shared Understanding between Physicians and Nurses

Background
Communication between physicians and nurses is a critical component to the well-being and health of their patients. However, poor communication is still one of the main challenges that affects patient safety, at the cost of the patient’s health. Poor communication can lead to a lack of understanding of the patient’s needs, which can cause adverse effects that could have been avoided with good communication. Previous studies have shown that communication needs to be improved, but have not successfully improved communication. Thus, further action is needed so that physicians and nurses communicate in order to come to a shared understanding.

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Gene Editing for Combating Disease

The APP (amyloid precursor protein) is particularly relevant in the investigation of neurodegenerative diseases, notably Alzheimer’s, as a result of rare mutations in APP protein coding gene. Quantifying cell mRNA levels is crucial to the determination of cell genomic status: mRNA is transcribed from cell DNA, and ultimately translated to cell proteins. In this project, we will administer the CRISPR/Cas9 complex in neuroblastoma cells, and confirm the alteration of APP gene expression.

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The Effect of Prosthetic Leg Length on Low Back Muscle Activity and Pain during Walking and Sit-to-Stand

People with lower limb amputation have a greater incidence of low back pain than the general population, with some estimates as high as 65%. One potential cause of pain in this population is leg length asymmetry as it can lead to altered trunk-pelvis movement, and subsequently altered low-back loading. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of changes in prosthetic leg length on low back muscle activity and self-reported low-back pain.

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Wicked Solutions Domain

Data visualizations such as the John Hopkins COVID-19 Map, has become an impactful way of presenting updated health information to stakeholders such as policy makers and the general public. This pandemic dashboard has become a precedent for developing platforms that help provide useful information for issues with which our society is struggling. Using design thinking and participatory mapping, the WISDOM research team led by University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor Audrey Bennett aims to create an equitably accessible Wicked Solutions Domain for networked collaboration and knowledge exchange of existing data and research resources in relation to wicked problems such as food, poverty, and sustainability.

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Analyzing Readability of COVID-19 Biomedical Literature

Reading scientific literature such as preprints and papers is different from reading ordinary English novels. The average American reads at the 7th- to 8th-grade level, according to the Literacy Project [1]. The COVID-19 pandemic is unique in a way that not only scientists but also the general public actively seek for scientific information that would help to understand the new viral infection and fight its spread. The COVID-19 related literature has been read by the public, government officials, and people who had no prior biomedical education but it is questionable how much was understood. The goal of this project is to understand how readable the COVID-19 biomedical articles are and whether they could be easily understood by an average American.

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Scaffolded Practice for Programming

Many students, especially those without any prior programming experience, find introductory programming courses difficult and time consuming. However, students need lots of practice to learn programming. Typically they practice by writing code from scratch. While this is an authentic task, it can overwhelm beginners. We have been creating and testing interactive ebooks with a variety of practice types including Parsons problems. A Parsons problem provides all the correct code to solve a problem, but the code is broken into code blocks and mixed-up. The learner must place the blocks in the correct order. Our research has shown that most students find solving Parsons problems useful for learning, but some students would rather write code from scratch. We have added the ability to switch to an equivalent write code problem when asked to solve a Parsons problem. We are modifying all the Parsons problems in an interactive ebook for C++ to include the equivalent write code problem. We plan to test this new type of problem in Engineering 101 in fall 2021.

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Cultural Cybernetics: Merging Artisanal Tradition with Digital Fabrication

Colonialism may be in the past, but its legacies live on today, with populations still marginalized by income and still “primitivized” by the colonial view. New movements like AfroFuturism resist these stereotypes by combining technological sophistication with an anti-primitivist view of Black culture. In the book African Fractals, Dr. Eglash makes the case for scaling geometries–the nonlinear shapes found in nature–as a tradition in African design. Together with professor Audrey Bennett at UM’s Stamps School of Art and Design, and Olayami Dabls, the owner of Dabls’ MBAD African Bead Museum, they have developed a proposal to create an African Futurist greenhouse that will utilize the scaling geometry traditional to African homes, jewelry, and sculptures. Funded by Stamps and Poverty Solutions, this greenhouse will grow plants that furnish seeds for Dabls’s beadwork, food for local consumption, and more generally embody a decolonial approach that combines the circular economy of Indigenous traditions with the beauty and utility of culture-technology hybrids.

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