High throughput single cell transcriptomics is a powerful tool for unbiased marker-free discovery of the new cell types and activation states. This process involves reverse transcribing RNA using beads containing oligonucleotide bar codes to perform whole genome amplification such that a barcoded cDNA library is produced. This library can then...
The search for life beyond Earth is one of the big questions in the modern science community, and a primary motivation behind a range of NASA's ground-based and space-bourne missions. In the near future, the James Webb Space Telescope, LUVOIR, and HabEx will characterize the atmospheres of nearby Earth-like exoplanets....
Recent discoveries of black hole (BH) candidates in galactic and extragalactic globular clusters (GCs) have ignited interest in understanding how BHs dynamically evolve in a GC and the number of BHs (NBH) that may still be retained by today's GCs. Numerical models show that even if stellar-mass BHs are retained...
Investigating the drug response at the transcriptional level is powerful for understanding the mechanism of drug adverse effects, elucidating inter-individual drug response variability and developing personalized therapies. However, drug perturbation experiments are limited to immortal cell lines which do not reflect the true physiology and gene expression of the liver,...
Air pollution increases mortality risk up to 18 percent due to cardiovascular causes. Poor air quality occurs more when meteorological components prevent the dispersal of pollutants in the lower atmosphere. The atmospheric and hydrological patterns change as global warming alters the pattern of circulations seasonally. The purpose of this study...
The advent of next-generation sequencing has made it increasingly feasible to survey microbes in situ, including inside buildings where many people spend extended periods of time. Microbes in buildings, and specifically in dust, are linked to various health outcomes, and the amount of antimicrobial chemicals in dust is associated to...
The sexual network topology of individuals and their communities may affect the spread of infectious disease both within and across specific populations. To better understand this process, we collected ego-centric data on the personal sexual networks of 175 young men who have sex with men. Respondents were asked to nominate...
Approximately 1 in 3 deaths in the US is caused by cardiovascular diseases, among them atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis occurs through excessive cholesterol deposition (hyperlipidemia) along the inner layer of the artery called the intima, resulting in plaque formation that blocks arterial blood flow and could lead to heart attacks and strokes....
The High Energy Density Sciences group at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory studies materials in extreme conditions such as very high temperatures and pressures. We use shock waves produced by the Linac Coherent Light Source to compress polycrystalline diamond samples. Compressing these samples allows us to use x-ray diffraction to study...
A survey of adults (n = 706) found low levels of awareness of two social movements aimed at decreasing weight stigma: the Fat Acceptance Movement and Health at Every Size movement. For HAES, providing a brief story of an overweight person who endorses HAES improved perceptions of the movement.
Numerical simulations have shown that black holes (BHs) have significant influence on the evolution of globular clusters (GCs), and therefore shape their observational features. Recently, a BH-main sequence star (MS) binary system has been observed in the Milky Way GC NGC 3201. Our group uses Cluster Monte Carlo (CMC) code...
Objectives: Poor infant health is associated with lower wellbeing later in life. Food insecurity has been associated with higher rates of some morbidities in young children. However, this relationship has not been well studied in infants younger than six months or in Kenya. Thus, we sought to determine the relationship...
Skeletal sexual dimorphism presents itself in humans primarily through the anatomical shape of the cranium and pelvis. However, some physical anthropologists maintain that climate could have an effect on human sexual dimorphism. Despite ongoing research pertaining to climatic effects on soft tissue or size dimorphism, little to no research has...
Physiological linkage (i.e., the covariation of moment-to-moment physiology between individuals) is thought to play an important role in relationship functioning. The present study examined physiological linkage across interbeat interval (IBI) and skin conductance levels (SCL) in a sample of married spouses (N=106) during both a pleasant and a conflict conversation...
Expanding on research done on the mental health and happiness benefits associated with romantic relationships, this study investigates whether identity denial, the experience of being socially denied one’s chosen identity by having others refuse to acknowledge that identity, presents a challenge for bisexual people within committed romantic relationships. For straight,...
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by flashbacks of the traumatic event and high comorbidity with major depressive disorder (MDD). Prior stress is known to increase the likelihood of developing PTSD after experiencing a traumatic event. Currently, PTSD is diagnosed clinically, its biological etiology is not known...
Anxiety disorders are the most common group of mental illnesses in the United States and affect over 15% of the population. Prior work utilizing electroencephalogram (EEG) to investigate event-related potentials (ERPs) from the scalp has shown success in isolating certain neural correlates related to increased risk for developing anxiety disorders....
Given any polyhedron in R3, we can cut it open along its edges, flatten it out, and obtain a polygon in the plane R2. In this project, we explored the opposite process, an open question that was first posed about 70 years ago: given a polygon in R2, what is...
The bacterial CRISPR/Cas9 system shows promise as a genome-editing tool to treat human disease. It is integral to understand the binding and unbinding kinetics of Cas9 to its target DNA to study specificity of the Cas9 protein. Standard practices involve the use of negatively charged polymer Heparin to reduce unspecific...
Due to their ability to be engineered for specific cellular targeting, nanoparticles (NPs) have emerged as promising drug delivery vessels for immunotherapeutic and vaccination treatments. However, a major unsolved obstacle for cell-specific nanoparticle delivery is non-specific circulatory clearance by the mononuclear-phagocytic system(MPS). Comprised of various phagocytic cells, the MPS removes...