A Celebration of Research

An Exploratory Look at Assets and Crime on Milwaukee's Near West Side PARC
Elizabeth Killian, Katherine Rice

The Near West Side Partners is a collaborative effort between five anchor institutions including Marquette University.  Marquette's role within the PARC, Promoting Assets Reducing Crime, initiative includes survey and data analysis through Marquette's Center for Peacemaking and Democracy Lab.  This poster shows the methods and research practices of the PARC, as well as a brief overview of the Near West Side Partners.

Cooperative Business Model in the Near West Side of Milwaukee
Brendan Shine

This project examines Gandhi's economic tenets, cooperative business principles as the means to achieve his concept of Sarvodaya and proposes the creation/funding of a home care co-op in the Near West Side of Milwaukee.

Peace Works: Partnering to Promote Nonviolence in Milwaukee Schools
Gabriel Valez

Peace Works is a nonviolence education program that utilizes social-emotional learning strategies to provide elementary, middle and high school students with the skills and capabilities to resolve conflicts, demonstrate compassion and promote peace in their communities. Participation in Peace Works programming helps students experience increased personal well-being, reduces attitudes toward aggression, increases a student's ability to use non-violent strategies as well as assists in social success.

Rethinking University Relationships with Public Housing
Jennifer Byrne, Anna Weirick

On September 10, 2018, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded Marquette University and Near West Side Partners a $1.3 million Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI) grant to create a locally-driven, comprehensive strategy to transform the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee's College Court development and the surrounding neighborhood into an inclusive community of opportunity where people want to live, work, and play. This presentation will focus on the research that has gone into this project which includes the following areas: housing, people, and neighborhood.

A Role for the DREAM Complex in the Regulation of Germline Apoptosis
Frances Compere, Lisa Petrella

Organisms exist in environments that are subject to changes and fluctuations that may incur stress upon them; thus, they have means to cope with or adapt to stress and ensure their survival and propagation. One means of dealing with stress that organisms have is to induce programmed cell death through apoptosis in cells that have been damaged by the stressful condition. We are studying apoptosis in response to stresses in the C. elegans germline.The germline is the only tissue in the adult animal that undergoes apoptosis. LIN-35, the single worm homolog of the Retinoblastoma (pRb) tumor suppressor has been shown to be important for the promotion of several of the apoptotic pathways in the germline. However, LIN-35 does not appear to work at the same point of the apoptotic pathways as other members of the E2F complex, EFL-1 and DPL-1. Another complex that LIN-35 interacts with is the conserved MuvB core of the the DREAM complex which made up of synMuv B proteins. We have found that DREAM complex mutants, like lin-35 mutants, have reduced germline apoptosis in response to DNA damage. It is of note that in embryonic tissues, the DREAM complex and LIN-35 bind at the promoter of ced-9/Bcl2 which is the anti-apoptotic regulator of the core apoptotic machinery.  This could indicate that LIN-35 may be working with the DREAM complex to regulate germline apoptosis. We predict that DREAM complex mutants, like lin-35 mutants, will have increased levels of ced-9 expression but not that of ced-4 or ced-3 in the germline. We also predict that DREAM complex mutants will have an even more pronounced defect in germline apoptosis in an engulfment mutant background, like lin-35 mutants. Together these would indicate that the DREAM complex is a good candidate to be the complex with which LIN-35 is modulating germline apoptosis.

Compromised Mating Ability and Reduced Sperm Transfer Explain Reduced Fertility in C. elegans Males at High Temperature
Nicholas Sepulveda, Emily Nett, Lisa Petrella

Cuticle Morphology and Function in drd Mutants
Nate Fisher, Ed Blumenthal

The drop-dead (drd) gene is a gene of unknown function expressed in Drosophila melanogaster. After reaching adulthood, mutant flies lacking the gene die within two weeks and display a host of maladaptive and fatal phenotypes.  While the exact nature of the role the gene plays in fly development is unknown, prior research has shown a unique expression pattern in the epidermal cells of larvae. Because of this, it was hypothesized that drd is involved in the synthesis of the cuticle—based also on the fact that the gene is involved in the formation of other similar barrier structures.  The purpose of this project was to test for defects in cuticle function, measured by salt tolerance and survival in a wounding assay, and in cuticle appearance in drd mutant flies.

Elevational Differences in Climate are Associated With Changes in Density Dependence and Tree Species Diversity
Joseph LaManna, David Bell, Robert Pabst, David Shaw

Negative density dependence caused by host-pathogen interactions may explain differences in plant species diversity at landscape to global scales, but the mechanisms that affect changes in density dependence and species diversity remain unclear. We test the hypothesis that the strength of negative density dependence and plant species diversity both increase with temperature or precipitation along an elevational gradient. Higher temperatures were associated with stronger negative density dependence in young tree growth and survival. Higher temperatures were also associated with increased tree species diversity along the gradient. These results suggest that increases in temperature strengthen interactions between plant hosts and their pathogens, promoting higher species diversity in warmer environments.

Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance in Acinetobacter Baumannii
Chris Marshall

Identification and Functional Analysis of microRNAs in Male Gonads of C. Elegans
Lu Lu, Allison Abbott

microRNAs are short non-coding RNAs with a length of ~ 22 nucleotides that regulate gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Disruption of miRNA function is associated with a wide array of human diseases, including male factor infertility. While evidence suggests that miRNA function is needed for production of functional sperm, the specific regulatory roles of miRNAs in this process are largely unknown. To address this question in Caenorhabditis elegans, I used small RNA sequencing on isolated gonad tissues to identify microRNA profile, which revealed a differential expression pattern of microRNAs between hermaphrodite and male gonads. Specifically, 27 miRNAs were found to be lower and 25 miRNAs were found to be higher in the hermaphrodite gonad compared with the male gonad. Functional analysis is being carried out on existing microRNA deletion mutants or microRNA mutants built with CRISPR genome editing tool. Specifically, mating assays are being used to screen potential miRNAs for regulation of male fertility and fecundity. This study will provide important clues for our understanding of microRNA regulatory roles in sperm formation and function.

Intermittent Hypoxia Causes Cardiometabolic Dysfunction in Obese, ob/ob Mice
Sarah Framnes-DeBoer, Aaron Jones, Deanna Arble

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common sleep disorder characterized by repeated bouts of intermittent hypoxia (IH). Approximately, 40-70% of the obese population exhibit OSA and are at higher risk for developing hypertension, heart failure, and other cardiometabolic diseases. Leptin, a hormone increased with obesity, is also associated with cardiometabolic disease. It is unclear if it is leptin insensitivity or other aspects of obesity that make individuals more susceptible to cardiometabolic diseases when experiencing IH in the form of OSA. To determine the relative involvement of leptin and/or obesity in the cardiometabolic outcomes of IH, we exposed lean C57Bl/6J WT mice, leptin-deficient ob/ob mice, and weight-restricted ob/ob mice to 6 days of IH (a 30-second, 5% O2 desaturation event occurring every 6 minutes for 9 hours/day). We found that IH led to a negative energy balance in WT mice, resulting in both a decrease in food intake and weight loss. Interestingly, while leptin-deficient ob/ob mice also lost weight, these mice exhibited an increase in feeding with the IH exposure. These data suggest that leptin signaling during IH serves to reduce food intake. We further found that the obese, leptin-deficient ob/ob mice exhibited an IH-induced impairment in cardiac function as indicated by an increase in left ventricle internal diameter diastole and an increase in cardiac output. These cardiac impairments were not observed in either the WT or the weight-restricted ob/ob group. Taken together, we find that a 6-day exposure of IH is associated with a negative energy balance in mice and that both impaired leptin signaling and obesity are necessary for IH-induced cardiac impairments. Further research will focus on food intake and how that may mitigate cardiometabolic disease in OSA patients.

Investigating Serial Homology of the Adhesive Structures of Diplodactylid Lizards
Aaron Griffing, Thomas Sanger, Timothy Higham, Tony Gamble

One goal of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) is to understand the role of development in the origin of phenotypic novelty and convergent evolution. Geckos are an ideal system to study this topic as they are species-rich and exhibit a suite of diverse morphologies many of which have independently evolved multiple times within geckos. Classic examples of such morphologies are adhesive toepads, which have been gained and lost at least 12 and seven times, respectively, through gecko evolutionary history. Crested geckos (Correlophus ciliatus) not only exhibit impressive adhesive toepads, but also an adhesive pad located at the tip of their prehensile tails. Although C. ciliatus was presumed extinct before being rediscovered in 1994, this species is now abundant in the pet trade, providing the ideal opportunity to study the development of these remarkable structures. Due to the overall differences in adult morphology between C. ciliatus toepads and tailpads, we hypothesized that the adhesive tailpads of C. ciliatus are not serial homologs of toepads; therefore, we predicted that tailpads would exhibit different morphological and temporal developmental patterns to those of toepads. To test this hypothesis, generated embryonic series of C. ciliatus and Lepidodactylus lugubris, a non-adhesive-tailed gecko. We visualized tail and toepad development using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Early development of C. ciliatus tailpads is similar to that of toepads but rapidly diverges from this pattern through the formation of granular scales. Here, we discuss evidence for the serial homology and novel scale formation of adhesive tailpads and discuss development of adhesive structures in a phylogenetic context.

Microbial Community, Antibiotic Resistance Gene, and Pathogen Dynamics in River Bed Sediment Adjacent to Concentrated Livestock Farms
Rachelle Beattie, A. Bandla, S. Swarup, K. Hristova

Microorganisms present within freshwater benthic sediment contribute to a variety of ecosystem processes including primary production, decomposition, and nutrient cycling. Due to their functional importance, freshwater microorganisms are routinely used as biomarkers for the health of surface water ecosystems; thus, changes in microbial community composition and functional potential likely reflect anthropogenic contamination in surface waters. Using Next Generation Sequencing and multivariate statistical analyses, we measured the impact of manure contamination from concentrated dairy farms on the microbial communities of freshwater sediments. Results indicated that sediment microbial community composition and function were strongly impacted by manure fertilization with significant differences in community composition within the highly impacted watershed. Sediment microbial community composition was resilient to manure fertilization 5 months post application, but did not return to the original steady state.

Patterns and Mechanisms of Diversity Maintenance in Understory Layers of Old-growth Forests
Ethan Torres, Joseph LaManna

Over the summer, the authors of the poster and six other crew members established 321 1-meter square plots across several larger Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) plots in the H. J. Andrews Experimental Forest. These plots tagged and measured the abundance and height of every plant within the plot under 1 meter in height. With this data, we sought to analyze the mechanisms of biodiversity maintenance in these understory plants through several environmental variables - mainly local biotic interactions and climate effects. It was found that climate effects (mainly precipitation) is the variable most strongly correlated with understory abundance and species richness. This finding is of particular interest in that it varies from the known mechanisms of biodiversity maintenance found in larger trees of the same forests, as well as warns that changing climate patterns can have previously unknown effects on understory biodiversity.

Persistence of a Geographically-stable Hybrid Zone in Puerto Rican Dwarf Geckos
Brendan Pinto, James Titus-McQuillan, Juan Daza, Tony Gamble

Determining the mechanisms that create and maintain biodiversity is a central question in ecology and evolution. Speciation is the process that creates biodiversity. Speciation is mediated by incompatibilities that lead to reproductive isolation between divergent populations and these incompatibilities can be observed in hybrid zones. Gecko lizards are a speciose clade possessing an impressive diversity of behavioral and morphological traits. In geckos, however, our understanding of the speciation process is negligible. To address this gap, we used genetic sequence data (both mitochondrial and nuclear markers) to describe a putative hybrid zone between Sphaerodactylus nicholsi and Sphaerodactylus townsendi in Puerto Rico. We find strong support for the species-level status of each species and no evidence of movement, or unique climatic variables near the hybrid zone. We suggest that this narrow hybrid zone is geographically-stable and is maintained by a combination of dispersal and selection. Thus, this work has identified an extant model system within geckos that that can be used for future investigations detailing genetic mechanisms of reproductive isolation in an understudied vertebrate group.

Photoperiod Modulates Ventilatory Drive in the C57BI/6J Mouse
Aaron Jones, Nakia Chappelle, Deanna Arble

Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is commonly characterized by a reduction or cessation of breathing during sleep and significantly increases one’s risk for heart disease and mortality. Symptoms of OSA are exacerbated in the winter months, suggesting a role of seasonal photoperiod in disordered breathing. However, photoperiodic modulation of breathing is an unexplored topic open to novel therapeutic findings. Photoperiod plays a role in many physiological processes including alterations in leptin sensitivity. Given that our lab has previously shown leptin-mediated modulation of breathing in mice, we investigated the effect of photoperiod on leptin sensitivity and ventilatory drive in a mouse model. Male and female C57Bl/6J mice were housed in one of three photoperiods, long-day (20L:4D), short-day (4L:20D), or a standard 12L:12D day for 3 weeks prior to testing. Leptin sensitivity was assessed by reductions in body mass and food intake during 5 days of daily leptin treatment (i.p. 1¼g/g/day). Breathing and ventilatory drive were quantified using a whole-body plethysmograph. We found that mice housed in long-day photoperiods exhibited a greater reduction in body mass and food intake than those in 12L:12D or short-day photoperiods, indicative of increased leptin sensitivity. Ventilatory drive was also significantly reduced in mice housed on long-day photoperiods. Additionally, mice lacking the melanocortin-4 receptor, an important mediator of leptin signaling and body weight homeostasis, do not exhibit photoperiod-dependent changes in breathing. Taken together, these results suggest that a photoperiod-dependent increase in leptin sensitivity decreases ventilatory drive through a leptin-melanocortin pathway. Overall, these findings represent the first step in understanding the broader implications of light-mediated changes in breathing. Future studies will elucidate the underlying neuronal mechanisms and may prove useful for understanding and treating sleep-disordered breathing in humans.

Physiological Functional Traits May Explain Liana Performance During Seasonal Drought
Felipe Mello, Yuriani Cozzarelli, Maria Muriel Garcia-Leon, Christine Scoffoni, Stefan Schnitzer

Resource-based explanations for species abundance and distribution remain challenging in high diversity systems such as tropical forests. Trees and lianas, two important components of tropical forests, apparently compete strongly for resources. Lianas may compete particularly well with trees during seasonal drought, since recent studies show that lianas grow most in high-light, low rainfall conditions. However, few studies have examined whether differences in resource competition between trees and lianas can be quantified using different physiological functional traits. Here, we test the hypothesis that lianas have physiological functional traits that confer greater competitive ability than those of trees, and that differences between these traits are magnified during the dry season. We measured leaf hydraulic conductance, stomatal conductance and turgor loss point in six species of trees and six species of lianas growing in multiple plots in a common garden in Panama. All trees and lianas were planted at the same time and were allowed to grow for six years in full sun. We used the evaporative flux method (EFM) for maximum hydraulic conductance and stomatal conductance measurements, and osmometry to measure turgor loss point.

Leaf hydraulic conductance (Kleaf) in lianas was significantly higher during both dry and wet seasons compared to trees (Mean Kleaf dry season: Lianas=8.184 ± 2.14, Trees=3.384 ± 0.722; Wet season: Lianas=8.475 ± 1.815, Trees= 3.524 ± 0.923 mmol H20 m-2 s-1). Lianas had higher stomatal conductance (gs) than trees during both seasons with a decline in gs during the dry season (Mean gs dry season: Lianas=60.79 ± 9.502, Trees=41.906 ± 6.65; Wet season: Lianas= 82.945 ± 13.36, Trees=48.276 ± 7.615 mol H2O m-2 s-1). Seasonal differences indicate that plants adjust their leaf hydraulic physiology and stomatal conductance in the dry season due to water limitation. Leaf hydraulic conductance did not differ between lianas and trees within seasons. However, we found significant differences in stomatal conductance and turgor loss point between seasons for lianas. Therefore, we did find evidence that turgor loss point and stomata conductance may be driving the higher performance of lianas during the dry season compared to trees. The decrease in leaf turgor loss point and stomata conductance during the dry season compared to the wet season could indicate that leaf turgor could mediate stomata aperture and conductance.

Regulation of Oxidative Phosphorylation by the Mitochondrial Ribosome
Jessica Anderson, Rosemary Stuart

Synthetic Effects of H+, Na+, and Illuniation on Microtubule Dynamics in Light Responsive Chlamydomonas
Olivia Potter, Pinfen Yang

The versatile microtubule system plays crucial roles in cells. Some cellular processes harness its signature dynamic instability, whereas others rely on stabilized microtubules. Its various properties are controlled by numerous proteins. A recent study using fluorescent plus end binding EB1-NeonGreen (NG) as a reporter shows that microtubules in flagellated green alga, chlamydomonas, are highly sensitive to H+, Na+ and the illumination exciting NG. Light opens cation-permeant channelrhodopsins and modulates flagellar motility. To dissect individual effects, we investigated a-tubulin mutant, tub-2, which was refractory to H+- triggered rapid microtubule resorption, allowing revelations of the other changes. In tub-2, H+ had imperfect biphasic effects. Both low and high H+ decreased EB-NG plus end-binding comets, increased lattice binding and decelerated microtubule dynamics, albeit with distinct kinetics. In contrast, medium H+ drastically increased comets numbers and piggyback incidences, at the expense of comet sizes and lattice binding. Low Na+ had a similar effect as low H+. However, when present together, their influences became muted. Notably, NG-exciting illumination accentuate ion-elicited changes. These results demonstrate how acidification, salination and the activity of channels and transporters could jointly shape this crucial cytoskeletal system and thus diverse organisms.

The "Heart" of Green Algae
Pinfen Yang, Yi Liu, Brandon Wills, Xiaoyan Zhu

The Actin Cytoskeleton Network Plays a Role in Yeast Prion Transmission and Contributions to Prion Stability
Jacob Reilly, Anita Manogaran, Jane Dorweiler

The overarching project is for a new prion variant discovered by my PI and another researcher in the lab that will be getting published soon. My part of the project, and the part which I am presenting at both poster sessions, will be my contribution to the work of running the confirmatory protein assays, sucrose gradients followed by western blot analysis, to provide the final evidence for this new finding.

The Effect of intermittent Hypoxia on Body Weight Regulation in Diet Induced and Genetically Obese Mice
Kate Propsom, Sarah Frames-DeBoer, Deanna Arble

Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is characterized by periodic breathing cessation which results in blood oxygen desaturation. These drops in blood oxygen can be mirrored in animal models using an intermittent hypoxia (IH) protocol. As OSA affects over 50% of the overweight and obese populations, it is hypothesized that IH leads to further impairment of body weight regulation. To determine if insensitivity to leptin, which occurs with obesity, can exacerbate obesity in the context of IH, we utilized lean wild type, diet-induced obese (DIO) wild type, and leptin deficient ob/ob mice. All mice were exposed to 7 days of IH. Preliminary data demonstrate that IH leads to a negative energy balance in WT mice. IH does not alter the food intake of WT lean mice but reduces caloric intake in DIO mice, resulting in weight loss. Interestingly, ob/ob mice increase their food intake in response to IH. These results suggest that severe leptin insensitivity combined with IH may increase body weight and food intake homeostatic set points in mice. Clinically, these results help elucidate why an already overweight individual may be at a high risk for becoming obese after developing OSA.

The Effects of acute and Chronic Intermittent Hypoxia on Sympathetic TOne and Body Weight Regulation in Mice
Hannah Peterson

Numerous studies have described a relationship between obstructive sleep apnea, characterized by intermittent hypoxia (IH), and an increase in sympathetic activation. The relative timeframe of this increase remains unknown, along with the metabolic consequences of that intermittent oxygen restriction. We tested norepinephrine, glucose tolerance, and body weight to determine possible correlations with these variables and intermittent hypoxia.

Characterization of the Microsolvation of Aromatics
Damian Kokkin

Non-covalent interactions impact a variety of fields from molecular self-assembly and drug-substrate interactions, to supramolecular chemistry, biochemistry and crystal engineering. Applying a synergy of laser-based spectroscopic techniques, augmented with a complementary theoretical approach, we aim to characterize the microsolvation of various aromatics. By studying such model systems, we gain important insights into the structure, binding interactions and solvation effects.

Copper Catalyzed Reductive Deuteration of Alkynes
Albert Reyes, Lingzi LI, Samantha Sloane, Zoua Pa Vang, Joseph Clark

A strategy to install four deuterium atoms into an alkyne functionality via reduction using a homogenous catalyst is proposed. This method uses a unique silyl-deuterated source and a deuterated alcohol to obtain the desired product. Incorporating multiple deuterium atoms into a compound is beneficial in studying internal MS standards and pharmacokinetics.

Distinct Structural Domains Within the Lysine Specific Demethylase Enzyme Interact With Mononucleosomes
Danyun Zeng, Nick Reiter, Khadija Moore, Dulmi Senanayaka

Dynamic Nanomaterials: RIse of the Nanomachines
Ofer Kedem

We develop and explore the behavior of dynamic, functional nanomaterials. Our overarching goal is to develop autonomous nanoscale systems which can communicate, regulate reactions, propel themselves, and transport cargo. In this quest we are inspired by biological mechanisms, utilize techniques from varied fields of chemistry, and take a physical chemistry approach to create and characterize new active structures.

Electronic and CO Releasing Properties of Tricarbonyl Manganes(I) c-scorpionates
Billy Shone

Tricarbonyl Manganese complexes have shown applications in water splitting, CO2 reduction and as CO releasing molecules in anticancer research. We have synthesized a series of these Tricarbonyl Manganese complexes studying their electronic characteristics and their ability to release CO under various stimuli. 

Enantioselective Synthesis of (+)-Myrioneurinol
Sam Hintzsche, Mitchell Mills, Joseph Clark

My project is centered around an enantioselective Pd-catalyzed difunctionalization of cyclohexadienes for use in building unique heterocycles that can serve as natural product precursors. This difunctionalization reaction would allow for facile access to the core decahydroquinoline structure shared by an entire class of Myrioneuron alkaloid natural products, which is inaccessible with current synthetic methods. Several alkaloids from the Myrioneuron genus have shown antimalarial activity on Plasmodium falciparum, strong cytotoxicity against keratin-forming epidermal carcinoma cell lines, and significant inhibitory activity toward the hepatitis C virus. Only small quantities of these alkaloids can be isolated from nature, so I am working on pioneering an efficient synthesis of (+)-myrioneurinol, one member of the Myrioneuron alkaloid family which exhibits promising bioactivity.

Evaluation of Alpha-Hydroxycinnamic Acids as Pyruvate Caroboxylas Inhibitors
Bill Donaldson

Pyruvate carboxylase (PC) is an important anaplerotic enzyme.  Studies have linked PC activity to a number of diseases and infections including certain types of cancer, type 2 diabetes, and listeriosis that are sustained as a result of aberrant or essential PC expression in cells.  This study has led to the discovery of the first single-digit micromolar inhibitor of PC.  In addition, this compound does not inhibit human carbonic anhydrase II or matrix metalloprotein.

De Novo Catalyst Design Guided by Computational Chemistry: New Hybrid Catalysts for Carbon-Carbon Bond Formation
Chris Dockendorff, E. Greve, D.J. Porter

Paramodulins, a New Class of Anti-Thrombotic and Anti-Inflammatory Agents Acting at Protease-Activated Receptor 1 (PAR1)
Chris Dockendorff, M.D. Ghandi, E. Greve, J. DeRousse, K. Kentala, N. Diby, A.V. Snyder, A. Stephans, Y.H.T. Yeung, S. Subramaniam, E.K. Kurtenbach, E. DiMilo, A.L. Arnold, H. Weiler

Invention of Flourinated Opioids as Potentially Non-addictive Analgesics
Chris Dockendorff, R. Rosas, Jr., P.X. Huang, L.B. Roth

For decades, medicinal chemists have been searching for analgesics for acute and chronic pain that lack the addictive properties and dangerous side effects that have culminated in the opioid crisis, with tens of thousands dying each year from overdose. We disclose a modified medicinal approach expected to yield orally active painkillers with minimal addictive properties.

Isotope Effects: The Chemistry Behind the Mystery
Igor Gayday

Chemical reactions proceed with certain speed (reaction rate) that depends on variety of factors. In particular, these factors include isotopic composition (masses) of reacting molecules. A fairly simple and standard theoretical explanation of mass-dependence mechanism can be utilized to understand and predict changes in reaction rate caused by changes in isotopic composition of reactants in many cases. However, some experimentally measured results demonstrate striking inconsistency with the predictions of the standard theory, which indicates that a crucial aspect of molecular interaction is not taken into account. For the last 40 years, many different research groups were trying to pinpoint the reasons behind these inconsistencies, but no one was able to give a definitive answer so far. In this work we are presenting a possible explanation for this phenomenon.

Mechanistic Studies of Nonheme Iron Dioxygenase Models
Adam Fiedler, Anne Fischer, Praveen Kumar, Codrina Popescu

NMR Analysis of T-loop RNA Motifs that Perform Shape Recognition of the tRNA Elbow
John Aguirre, Ainur Abzhanova, Sheng Cai, Marco Tonelli, Nicholas Reiter

NMR and SHAPE-derived secondary structure of a conserved region within the HOTAIR long non-coding RNA
Ainur Abzhanova, Nick Reiter, Alex Hirschi

HOTAIR is a large, multi-exon spliced non-coding RNA that functions as a molecular scaffold that is required for silencing specific homeotic genes in embryonic stem cells and whose overexpression is associated with tumor metastasis and poor prognosis. An exon-biased biochemical analysis identified that there is a compact and stable fold. Also, biophysical methods are used to show the formation of discrete RNA structural modules. So, an exon-biased secondary structure determination is important for functional studies.

Research Projects in the Kincaid Lab of the Chemistry Department
James Kincaid, Yilin Liu, Remigio Usai, Yuanqi Jing, Tristan Barrington

Site-Selective Copper Catalyzed Reduction of Alkenes
Zoua Pa Vang, Mitchell Mills

The incorporation of deuterium into metabolically active sites of pharmaceuticals can enhance metabolic stability resulting in better safety, tolerability and efficacy while retaining original potency and selectivity. This was achieved with the first FDA approved deuterated drug, Deutetrabenazine, in 2017. However, a site-selective installation of one deuterium atom into a site remains challenging. A site-selective deuteration strategy is proposed via the reduction of an alkene functionality using a LnCuH catalyst and a deuterated alcohol.

Solar Energy Conversion Group at Marquette
Jier Huang

Huang research group in the Department of Chemistry at Marquette University seeks to gain fundamental insight into the photochemical and photocatalytic mechanism of hybrid materials for solar energy conversion, which integrates materials design and synthesis with advanced characterization using time resolved and in situ spectroscopic techniques.

Sulfur Allotropes: A Connection between the Past and the Future
Bikram Mandal

The diatomic molecule of sulfur, S2, is the smallest and simplest sulfur allotrope molecule that played an important role in the anoxic atmosphere of the ancient Earth. Formation of the S2 molecule by recombination of two sulfur atoms, S+S (bath gas) ) S_2, is the first step of the sulfur polymerization reactions followed by the formation of S3, S4, S6, and finally S8. In the anoxic atmosphere of Archean Earth these sulfur allotropes were deposited and preserved as surface sediments. Analysis of the stable isotopes in the Archean deposits indicates large and mysterious isotope effect that we are trying to explain.

Sustainable, Biocompatible and Smart Composite Materials: Green Synthesis and Applications
Chieu Tran, Mark Mitmoen, Tera Leonard

Development of novel methods to synthesize smart and biocompatible composite materials from naturally abundant and sustainable biopolymers including cellulose, wool, hair, chicken feathers, natural pollen grains.  Exploring the use of the composites in various applications including to purify drinking water, heal infected wounds, smart textiles and smart building materials.

 

All Pairs Routing Path Enumeration using Latin Multiplication and Julia
Haochen Sun, Debbie Perouli

Enumerating all routing paths among Autonomous Systems (ASes) at an Internet-scale is an intractable problem. The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the standard exterior gateway protocol through which ASes exchange reachability information. Building an efficient path enumeration tool for a given network is an essential step towards estimating routing properties such as the resiliency of the network to topology changes. In our work, we use the matrix Latin multiplication method to compute all possible paths among all pairs of nodes. We parallelize this computation through the standard domain decomposition for matrix multiplication and implement our solution in the Julia high performance programming language. Our preliminary results provide positive evidence for the applicability of the method.

Association Rule-based Feature Selection for Thoracolumbar Fracture in Crash Injury Data
Paramita Nitu

An initial study identifies an increasing trend in incidence rate of thoracolumbar fractures in frontal impact crashes as a function of vehicle model year from 1986 to 2008 (Pintar, 2012). Even though, spine fracture deteriorates the quality of life significantly, no in depth injury assessment has attained to understand the mechanism of thoracic or lumbar spine fractures (TL-fx) in motor vehicle crashes. In this project, we endeavor to achieve the feature space of TL-fx as a composite combination of vehicle diagram, accident environment, and demographic information of occupants. The curse of feature dimensionality of NASS-CDS data in comparison to relatively small number of subjects with TL-fx leads us to select features effectively, both data and knowledge driven. In this project, we perform association rule to obtain co-occurring injuries of thoracolumbar fracture. Despite having a small support for association rule with consequent as TL-fx (v. body), we generate top rules by lift measure to obtain TL-fx feature space.

Identifying Buildings with Ramp Entrances Using Convolutional Neural Networks with Visual Explanation
Jiawei Wu

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1992 stipulated that wheelchair access should be made available for buildings. However, the disabled may still encounter the trouble of accessing buildings without ramps. The previous work proposed a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model to detect ramps. The CNN comprised five convolutional layers which produced 95% accuracy after training with almost 8000 images of buildings with ramps and stairs. The author conjectured and discussed reasons why the model produced wrong results when it classified new images of building entrance. The extension in the current project is to visualize the process of how the model analyzes images, identifies features and does the classification. Knowledge of these features helps to modify and fine-tune the model for better prediction accuracy.

MARQUECare: A Model Palliative Care System for Everyone
Kazi Shafiul Alam, Bishnu D. Paudel, Roshani Gautam, Deepak Shrestha, Dipesh Dhital, Riddhiman Adib, Sheikh I. Ahamed, Richard R. Love

The majority of global deaths are characterized by misery and limited palliation and occur among citizens in low- and middle-income countries. The action place everywhere in the world, where the doing of palliative care happens however, is the patient-health care provider encounter. There are many challenges for home care because of rural locations, inconveniences of travel, expenses. To meet these challenges, we need better organizational mechanisms, facilitation for involvement of all and additional health care providers and better functioning and efficiency of activities. Information technology tools offer means for doing these activities effectively and inexpensively. Our goal is to develop a dynamic algorithm and artificial intelligence-facilitated palliative care symptom management system, and to create and bring more healthcare providers into effective palliative care. We have developed a patient-centered home palliative care system (NAPCare) with the Nepalese Association of Palliative Care.

miRDriver: A Tool to Infer Copy Number Derived miRNA-Gene Networks in Cancer
Banabithi Bose, Serdar Bozdag

Copy number aberration events such as amplifications and deletions in chromosomal regions are prevalent in cancer patients. Frequently aberrated copy number regions include regulators such as microRNAs (miRNAs), which regulate downstream target genes that involve in the important biological processes in tumorigenesis and proliferation. Many previous studies explored the miRNA-gene interaction networks but copy number-derived miRNA regulations are limited. Identifying copy number-derived miRNA-target gene regulatory interactions in cancer could shed some light on biological mechanisms in tumor initiation and progression. In the present study, we developed a computational pipeline, called miRDriver which is based on the hypothesis that copy number data from cancer patients can be utilized to discover driver miRNAs of cancer. miRDriver integrates copy number aberration, DNA methylation, gene and miRNA expression datasets to compute copy number-derived miRNA-gene interactions in cancer. We tested miRDriver on breast cancer and ovarian cancer data from the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. miRDriver discovered some of the known miRNAs, such as miR-125b, mir-320d, let-7g, and miR-21, which are known to be in copy number aberrated regions in breast cancer. We also discovered some potentially novel miRNA-gene interactions. Also, several miRNAs such as miR-127, miR-139 and let-7b were found to be associated with tumor survival and progression based on Cox proportional hazard model. We compared the enrichment of known miRNA-gene interactions computed by miRDriver with the enrichment of interactions computed by the state-of-the-art methods and miRDriver outperformed all the other methods.

Multi-omics Clustering in Identifying Subtypes of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML)
Xinming Wei

To explore the relationship between molecular features and subtypes of cancer, using the rMKL-LPP method to cluster patients suffered from AML, thus subtypes based on multi-omics were identified. And then compare the clustering similarity between TCGA and the results obtained.

Non-invasive Hemoglobin Measurement by Smartphone Video: Automating the Model and Designing a Validation Study
Md Hasanul Aziz, Md Kamrul Hasan, Richard R. Love, Sheikh Iqbal Ahamed

Hemoglobin-related blood disorders affect one-quarter of the world's peoples: 2 billion individuals. The conventional method for determination of blood hemoglobin levels involves venipuncture to obtain a blood sample and laboratory evaluation testing. This procedure is inconvenient and costly for most patients and is impractical when frequent or immediate results are needed. A point-of-care, patient-friendly, non-invasive, low-cost, and accurate hemoglobin measurement system would benefit patients worldwide.

Our group has developed a hardware and software setup using 10-second Smartphone videos of the index fingertip to measure blood hemoglobin levels non-invasively. We have used four different light sources with wavelengths in the near-infrared spectrum based on the absorption properties of the two primary components of blood- oxygenated hemoglobin and plasma. We found a strong linear correlation between our measured and laboratory-measured hemoglobin levels in 167 patients with a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of ~5%.

We have now adjusted and automated all our system software steps. Our analyses have suggested inexplicable inconsistencies in our results, which we attribute to a combination of laboratory errors and an unrepresentative study patient population with a non-normative distribution of hemoglobin levels. We also believe that we can increase our measurement accuracy by reducing "noise" in the signals we are using from the fingertip videos by specific data collection procedures.

We now propose a validation study of our system using data from a large population, including significant numbers of individuals with long-standing diabetes, sickle-cell hemoglobinopathy, low and high levels of hemoglobin to provide a full normal distribution of hemoglobin levels. If in this new study, we can validate or hopefully improve on our previous results, we will have a non-invasive hemoglobin measurement system that can benefit patients everywhere.

PhenoGeneRanker: Gene Prioritization Using Complete Multiplex Heterogeneous Networks
Cagatay Dursun, Naoki Shimoyama, Mary Shimoyama, Michael Schläppi, Serdar Bozdag

Uncovering genotype phenotype relationships is a fundamental challenge in genomics. Gene prioritization is an important step for this endeavor to make a short manageable list from a list of thousands of genes coming from high throughput studies. Network propagation methods are promising and state of the art methods for gene prioritization based on the premise that functionally related genes tend to be close to each other in the biological networks.

In this study, we present PhenoGeneRanker, an improved version of a recently developed network propagation method called Random Walk with Restart on Multiplex Heterogeneous Networks (RWR-MH). PhenoGeneRanker allows multi-layer gene and disease networks. It also calculates empirical p values of gene ranking using random stratified sampling of genes based on their connectivity degree in the network.

We ran PhenoGeneRanker using multi omics datasets of rice to effectively prioritize the cold tolerance related genes. We observed that top genes selected by PhenoGeneRanker were enriched in cold tolerance related Gene Ontology (GO) terms whereas bottom ranked genes were enriched in general GO terms only. We also observed that top ranked genes exhibited significant p values suggesting that their rankings were independent of their degree in the network.

Sharing Of Public Harassment Experiences On Social Media In Bangladesh
Fayika Farhat Nova, Pratyasha Saha, Md. Shafiur Shafi, Shion Guha

User Interactions With Algorithmic Crime Mapping
Katy Weathington

A poster based on a UI experiment with a crime analysis algorithm.

Veterans, PTSD and Social Media: Towards Identifying Trauma Text Categories using Grounded Theory
Joseph Coelho

Text classification using machine learning can be applied in various contexts such as in classifying research papers, identifying relevant news stories, and detecting fake reviews. Training an algorithm to perform such tasks generally requires a dataset with predefined labels. Valid labels for texts in a given domain can be predefined by domain experts. However, when it comes to free-form text from messaging applications and social networking sites it is difficult to predict what labels may be extracted from the text. Grounded theory provides a method by which concepts that emerge from data can be expressed as categories and properties. These categories and properties can then be arranged in a hierarchical class label structure that can be used to build a dataset for training models. This study focuses on text related to veterans with post traumatic stress disorder and identifies a hierarchical class label structure.

Analyzing the Relationship between Microfinance and Economic Growth Using Fixed-Effects Two-Stage Least Squares
Mychaela Paetow

This study investigates the impact of microfinance loans on economic growth. Using a sample of 20 countries over 2000-2017, I find a positive relationship between a country’s gross loan portfolio (GLP) and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. I use a fixed-effects estimation model to run the regression. Two-stage least squares is employed to address any potential endogeneity issues.

Public Vows: Fictions of Marriage in the English Enlightenment
Melissa Ganz

In eighteenth-century England, the institution of marriage became the subject of heated debates, as clerics, jurists, legislators, philosophers, and social observers began rethinking its contractual foundation. Public Vows argues that these debates shaped English fiction in crucial and previously unrecognized ways and that novels, in turn, played a central role in the debates. Like many legal and social thinkers of their day, novelists such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, and Amelia Opie imagine marriage as a public institution subject to regulation by church and state rather than a private agreement between two free individuals. Through recurring scenes of infidelity, fraud, and coercion as well as experiments with narrative form, these writers show the practical and ethical problems that result when couples attempt to establish and dissolve unions simply by exchanging consent. Even as novelists seek to shore up the legal regulation of marriage, however, they criticize the specific forms that these regulations take. In recovering novelists’ engagements with the nuptial controversies of the Enlightenment, Public Vows challenges longstanding accounts of domestic fiction as contributing to sharp divisions between public and private life and as supporting the traditional, patriarchal family. At the same time, the book counters received views of law and literature, highlighting fiction’s often simultaneous affirmations and critiques of legal authority.

Access Writing: Discerning the Accessibility of Writing at Marquette
WRITE Fellows (Ott Memorial Writing Center) in collaboration with the Office of Disability Services, Ali Leonhard, Katherine Hovland, Sunaina Randhawa, Jenn Fishman, Jack Bartelt, Jamie Elftman

Our project is anchored by English studies and made possible by the Writing Research-Integrated Tutor Enrichment or WRITE Fellows Program as well as the generous support of our research partners, the Office of Disability Services. There are 3 interlocking reasons we undertook Access Writing. To begin, we want to learn from students registered with ODS how accessible they feel writing is to them in their classes, on our campus, and in their lives. Next, we want to join and contribute to ongoing scholarly conversations about English, writing, and disabilities. Last, and perhaps most consequentially, we want to turn our research into action. Closest to home, we aim to improve the writing center's capacity to support students with disabilities, including both clients and tutors. We also hope our findings enable ODS to better represent the range of accommodations that might benefit student writers. Last, we plan to use our research to better advocate for students' access to writing in dialogue with instructors, administrators, and others at Marquette and beyond.

All Play and No Work: American Work Ideals and the Comic Plays of the Federal Theatre Project
Paul Gagliardi

I argue in All Play, No Work that some of the most politically radical texts produced by the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) were comic plays that subverted aspects of work during the Great Depression. To combat the effects of the Depression, the Roosevelt administration enacted many programs and initiatives that reinforced traditional social, philosophical, and cultural norms of work.

Reading up and Reception
Amy Blair

How does reading help people navigate their world? How do readers choose the books they choose, and what influences the ways they read them? How can we understand history through the reading habits of non-professional readers? My work in historical reception studies, both as an individual researcher and as the editor of an internationally-renowned journal, focuses on the ways we can understand lives through reading habits.

Tasting and Testing Books: Good Housekeeping, Popular Modernism, and the Modern Middlebrow Reader
Amy Blair

College Writing Writ Large
Jenn Fishman

My poster features my current monograph project, College Writing Writ Large: An Argument for Writing Education. Usually, the phrase "college writing" is synonymous with college-level writing instruction and those who design, deliver, and assess it (i.e., teachers, administrators, programs, curricula). I argue we should, instead, center college writing on college writers, and I draw on mixed methods longitudinal research I have conducted to establish a new gestalt for not only writing instruction but also writing education, broadly understood. 

Dating the "First American Novel": The Case of Mr. Penrose by William Williams
Sarah Wadsworth

This poster summarizes the findings resulting from primary research conducted on the manuscript of William Williams’s novel, Mr. Penrose: The Journal of Penrose, Seaman. To better understand the approximate dates and phases of the novel’s composition, I examined the paper, handwriting, and binding of this fictional castaway narrative using manuscript materials at Indiana University’s Lilly Library in combination with digitally enhanced high-resolution images. Although ambiguities remain, my research contributes to a more evidence-based dating of the text than had previously been available. I argue that analysis of watermarks, punctures, slight alterations in handwriting, and other physical features of the manuscript, in conjunction with narrative and biographical events, tends to solidify the texts status as the first American novel. This argument has significant implications for the way we understand U.S. literary history within the broader trajectories of transatlantic and hemispheric studies.

Expansion of the Western Frontier: A Lens Through Which to View Current Border Crisis
Maya Mocarski

Identifying and Categorizing Linguistic Discrimination in the Legal Field
Jessica Brown, Leah Flack

In my two-part, mixed method research, I am studying how language differences affect a person’s ability to move through the legal system. My poster focuses on the first half of my research, where I coded seven legal journals for race, gender, setting, and type of law to see if and how linguistic discrimination is talked about within the legal community.

James Joyce and Classical Modernism
Leah Flack

My interdisciplinary work studies how and why the most experimental, celebrated writers of the early twentieth century used the classical Greek and Roman traditions for both artistic and sociopolitical agendas. My first book, Modernism and Homer (Cambridge UP, 2016), opened a new conversation in classical reception studies, a field that held a major conference on this topic (at which I was an invited speaker), published an edited volume (to which I was an invited contributor), and launched a major series dedicated to studying the reciprocal relationship between modernist and classical literature. My next book, James Joyce and Classical Modernism, is one of the first monographs in this new series and will be published in February 2020. At the heart of my research is a simple question: why and how do we continue to read the classics, and why does literature endure as a central component of our contemporary world?

Language, Poetics, and Power in Nigerian Hip Hop and Afrobeats
Michael Gbogi

This research explores the interplay of literary and linguistic modes in the discursive fashioning of new African identities. In particular, the project examines how youth participating in Nigerian hip hop and Afrobeats index different axes of intersectional identities and in the process call attention to, contest, and redraw the social cartography of youth marginality, political oppression, urban poverty, interethnic tensions, post-imperialism, and gender roles and imbalance.

Novel Bodies: Disability and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature
Jason Farr

Socio-religious Challenges to the Secular-Religious Binary: Cultural Critique in the Twenty-First Century Muslim Literature of Nafisa Haji and Randa Jarrar
Ibtisam Abujad

My poster represents my scholarly article, "Socio-religious Challenges to the Secular-Religious Binary: Cultural Critique in the Twenty-First Century Muslim Literature of Nafisa Haji and Randa Jarra" forthcoming in the collection Hyphenations: Muslim Writers, Artists, and Performers in America, edited by Mahwash Shoaib. My paper examines what i call "Socio-religious Cultivation" in Muslim cultural productions. In my paper, I challenge both traditional theories of secularity and also examine contemporary analyses of culture and religion by Muslim theorists. I build upon and intervene in Muslim feminist scholar Miriam Cooke's theories of "Multiple Critique" about the culture-politics continuum. Ultimately, I analyze the contemporary Muslim fiction of Nafisa Haji and Randa Jarrar to argue that the cultivation of the socio-religious plays a central role in the examination of political and social relations of power, while also reimagining religion itself.

The "Curiosite" of John Shirley's Presentation of Chaucer's Complaint of Venus in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.20.
Elizaveta Strakhov

In this poster, I discuss the way in which a specific fifteenth-century manuscripts scribe represents a complicated historical event, fifty years later, on the pages of his manuscript.

The Poetics of Palliation
Brittany Pladek

Can literature heal? The Poetics of Palliation argues that our answers to this question have origins in the Romantic period. In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature cures by making sufferers whole again. But this model oversimplifies how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. Poetics documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley explored palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature's manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors' limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.

"Separate and Equal:" Colored Public Schools and School Reports in Post-Civil War Baltimore City
Lisa Lamson

In 1867, Baltimore City’s Board of School Commissioners incorporated the Baltimore Association for the Moral and Educational Improvement of Colored People’s freemen schools into the city’s public-school system, which created the Colored Public Schools (CPS). At the time of the CPS incorporation, the city and counties were also collated under the auspice of the state’s Board of Education, centralizing the administration of the varying schools to create an equal and separate system for both white and non-white students. Tracking the book and stationary purchases for both the city and the county of Baltimore, however, shows that equal was in rhetoric only and not in practice, justifying the lower amounts of spending per-student. Despite these lower costs, the CPS continued to expand in the city, providing educational access and attainment to the city’s children of color.

"The Colored Problem" - Milwaukee's Protestant Churches Respond to the Second Great Migration
Peter Borg

In 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. observed that "11 AM Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America." My research asks if and how this occurred in Milwaukee in the decades following WWII. Understanding why some churches fled, some folded, and some flourished as multi-racial congregations offers answers to today's churches for how they can bring people together in a time of deep division.

A Very Short Introduction to the History of Childhood
James Marten

My poster will highlight the salient points and a few of the illustrations from my recent book, A Very Short Introduction to the History of Childhood, published by Oxford University Press.  This synthesis ranges around the world and to the earliest moments of recorded history. It highlights several threads that connect the histories of children through the centuries: their roles in the economic well-being of their families, evolving ideas about education and faith, the effects of war and conflict on children and childhood, and efforts to promote modern childhoods--extended, protected, and free from economic responsibility.

Irish Partition and the Boundary of Identities
Timothy McMahon

Through images, maps, and text, my poster highlights my current book project. Funded by a Way-Klingler Research Fellowship, this project highlights the differences between political spokespersons and their followers that became evident when the island of Ireland was partitioned in 1921. At the heart of this work is the first sustained examination of the testimonies offered by 577 witnesses to the Irish Boundary Commission in 1924-1925.

On Sides: Reading Irish National Identities through Soccer, 1920-1998
Abigail Bernhardt

Plague and Sanctity in Medieval Tuscany
Lezlie Knox

Around 1307, a pious recluse died in the small town of Signa in rural Tuscany.  The historical record had little to say about her until the arrival of the Black Death in 1348 when a local woman was cured of plague following a vision of this Giovanna.  Pious townspeople stated claiming other miracles attributed to her intervention and soon founded a confraternity in her honor.  Between 1383-1396, an anonymous author collected these stories in a brief Legenda.  By the end of the fifteenth century, a chapel in the local parish church featured her sarcophagus and a series of frescoes.  Scholars have paid little attention to Giovanna given the scant sources and their late date, although she also may have been overlooked due to the essential ordinariness of her sanctity.  My larger research project assesses her cult in the context of lay piety in the Tuscan countryside and the role of popular saints outside the institutional concerns of religious orders and the papal court.  Here, I highlight what her hagiographical record reveals about the experience of plague and other illnesses in later medieval Italy. Giovanna’s miracle collection demonstrates both the persistence of this pandemic as well as the its normalization. 

Radical Relationships: The Civil War–Era Correspondence of Mathilde Franziska Anneke
Alison Efford

The poster introduces a book under contract with University of Georgia Press: This volume translates selections from the fascinating correspondence of Mathilde Franziska Anneke, a German-American revolutionary, abolitionist, feminist, writer, and educator who lived in Milwaukee in the Civil War era. Making Mathilde’s letters accessible to English-speaking historians, students, and members of the wider public for the first time fills a need for teaching and research resources that breathe life into the insights of recent scholarship on the US Civil War in global context. It also provides rich evidence for exploring passionate relationships between women in the nineteenth century.

Remembering Madre Rosa: A Multi-Year Undergraduate Research Project for Spanish Speakers
Laura Matthew, Colin Caley, Isabelle Soto, Marycruz Sanchez

Social Dynamics in the Dachau Concentration Camp
Michael Powell, Peter Staudenmaier

The research I conducted this summer was about the social dynamics between the groups of prisoners inside of the concentration camp known as Dachau from 1933 to 1945. The concentration camp is located just outside of Munich and with this grant I traveled to Munich, which is where is stayed for twenty days. My research this summer in the archive of Dachau was eye opening for many reasons. One of the most important reasons why my work in Germany this summer is because seeing the physical concentration camp allowed me to, more easily, establish a physical connection to the stories I have read. The social dynamics inside of Dachau rely on many different factors, some being solidarity, rivalry, pre-camp lives and the prejudices they brought to Dachau. Other factors that affected the way the prisoners interacted between each other were the constant changes from beyond the barbed wire. Beyond referring to outside changes such as military and political events that brought new prisoners of different cultures, countries, races, backgrounds, and professions into the demographics of Dachau.

Unearthing Easter in Laois: Provincializing the 1916 Easter Rising
Andrew Himmelberg

This project tells the story of a small group of provincial Irish nationalists who engaged in separatist activity on Easter Sunday 1916 in County Laois. The story of these men -- and their subsequent treatment in the Irish government's Military Service Pensions scheme -- provides valuable insight into the process of building historical narratives and how preconceived notions and contemporary biases impact which stories are heard in the larger narrative. By analyzing the pension award data of these men, conclusions about failures and trends built into the pensions scheme come to light, helping us better understand how the adolescent Irish state understood its revolutionary period.

Asturian features and the conflict between urban and regional identity in Asturias
Sonia Barnes

Asturian, the regional language of Asturias (Spain), and Spanish have been in contact since the 14th Century. Some linguistic features of Asturian are still being used in the Spanish of Asturian speakers. In this study I examine the role that the use of Asturian raised vowels has in the construction of urban identity in the city of Gijon. The results of quantitative and qualitative analyses show that participants rate speakers that use Asturian variants as significantly more rural than those that use the Spanish equivalents, and that speakers are aware that their linguistic variety is neither Spanish nor Asturian. Speakers from Gijon use Asturian features to construct a particular urban identity. While not all these features are equally associated with regional identity, raised vowels are often associated to Asturian speech and stigmatized as rural. However, for some speakers the use of raised vowels carries prestige linked regional identity. The tension between stigma and prestige governs the intra speaker variation observed in the urban varieties of the language, with speakers controlling the use of Asturian features in order to only show a degree of Asturianness that allows them to maintain their urban status.

Cuban Slavery from the Inside and Out
Julia Paulk

For a deeper understanding of the relationship between Cuba and the U.S. today, one must look back to the slow end of the Spanish colonial era and the early rise of the U.S. as a hemispheric power in the 1800s. Cuban slavery became a flashpoint of contention both within Cuban debates over independence and U.S. debates over its own peculiar institution and potential annexation of the neighboring island. This book in progress is a study of how writers from both Cuba and the U.S. understood Cuban slavery and slaves as economically essential but racially undesirable. Where North American writers saw an island that would inevitably require intervention, Cuban writers wrestled with racially diverse Cuban identities while also resisting Spanish colonial rule.

Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History
Michelle Medeiros

Gender, Science, and Authority in Women’s Travel Writing: Literary Perspectives on the Discourse of Natural History analyzes the interrelations among authority, gender and the scientific discipline of natural history in the works of transatlantic women travelers from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book sheds new light on our understanding of the literary perspectives of the discourse of natural history and how these viewpoints had a surprising impact in areas that went beyond scientific fields.

Indigenous Futurism in Bolivia 2006-20XX: Science Fiction, Technology, and Utopian Aesthetics
Tara Daly

Language and Identity-A case study of Chicago's Chinatown
Jen-Li Ko

Language usage and shift reflects the diversity and complexity of an ethnic community. This study examines the dynamics of language use, terms related to perception of self and others, and subjective understanding of race and ethnicity in Chicago’s Chinatown post-1965. Drawing from ten months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that ethnic identity is shaped and reshaped by not only the dynamics inside the local diasporic community, but also racial relations in a larger society. This case study sheds light on the making of the ethnic identity of Chinese Americans by examining the generational and cultural gap within the Chinese American community.

Saving Face: Speech Act Development in the Study Abroad Context
Conor McKeon, Todd Hernandez

Our research assesses the impact of pragmatic instruction designed to enhance the usage and understanding of apologies made by students who participate in a short-term study abroad program. The study was carried out by exposing students to pragmatic instruction regarding the appropriateness and usage of apologies in Spanish to provide greater contextual awareness of this difficult to acquire speech act. Our research assesses the pragmatic appropriateness of student apologies using oral discourse completion tasks (DCT) consisting of five vignettes that vary across three variables: relative social status of the interlocutor, relative social distance, and seriousness of the offense. The researchers developed an interactive animation tool, known as Computer Animated Production Task (CAPT) for pre-test and post-test data collection and assessment. Our purpose is to investigate whether study abroad students who are exposed to pragmatic instruction outperform those who do not receive an intervention.

The Prado Museum: Spanish Culture and Leisure in 3 Languages
Eugenia Afinoguenova

Since nineteenth-century travel writers often copied from each other, scholars wishing to extract reliable content from their stories are dealing with largely imprecise datasets, where the exact locations often have to be inferred and where the places that are traceable on a map have a fictional dimension, like the settings of a novel. Seeking to make it easier for scholars to separate information about each particular journey from extrapolation and fiction, The Spanish Travelers Project approaches travelogues as if they were hypertexts of the pre-digital age, with each mention of place or tourist attraction related, not just to their physical referents, but also to other texts, maps, and so on. Historical GIS [Geographic Information System], timestamped itineraries, gazetteer, and data format allowing to account for multilingual and imprecise locations and textual borrowings enable us to better tell fact from fiction. Mapping qualitative information, this work is developing the concept of capta as something taken, as opposed to data as something given, in Johanna Drucker’s coinage.

The Spanish Travelers Project (Artist Travels)
Timophey Korolev

The Artist Travels is an interactive website showcasing paintings of Spain, mapped onto historical maps and paired with real images of the locations painted. It's being developed as an offshoot of The Spanish Travelers Project for a collaboration with the Milwaukee Art Museum, and intended for display alongside an exhibit in 2020.

Functional Singular Spectrum Analysis
Jordan Trinka, H. Haghbin, S.M. Najibi, R. Mahmoudvand, M. Maadooliat

In this work, we present Functional Singular Spectrum Analysis (FSSA) which can be used to decompose functional time series (FTS) data. We showcase the algorithm by applying it to remote sensing data and how it does a better job at separating sources of variability than other methods. We also use other methods to confirm our results.

Pre-service Teachers' Conceptions of Mathematical Argumentation
Hyejin Park, Gavin Block, Marta Magiera

Argumentation is essential part of mathematical activity. Our research provides insights into pre-service teachers (PSTs) conceptions of mathematical argumentation in the context of elementary school mathematics. We analyzed 428 responses to written reflective journals shared by 52 PSTs preparing to teach elementary school mathematics. We identified how PSTs interpret mathematical argumentation in the context of elementary mathematics classrooms, what benefits of teaching mathematics with a focus on argumentation they see, how they think about teacher actions and strategies that support argumentation, and how they think about classroom expectations, mathematics content, and tasks that support engaging students in argumentation. 

"The People You Love Let You Down:" Learning Philosophy from Veronica Mars
James South

Juxtaposing two quotes from the series Veronica Mars, I was struck by their similarities and differences. I decided to use them to help me think about the complex neuroticism of skepticism and self-protection. Informed by Stanley Cavell's work on the origin of skepticism and Adam Phillip's work on the therapeutic effects of psychoanalysis, I identified a developmental perspective on skepticism that shows how Veronica is stuck in a cycle that mirrors a stage of skepticism. Using Phillips, I suggest at least one way out for Veronica.

Does It Bring You Joy?  How Do We Value Our Heritage?
Kevin Gibson

Bioimaging of Cancer
Sarah Erickson-Bhatt

Cancer is a uniquely mystifying disease. While breakthroughs in research have led to earlier detection and better treatment options, there is still much to understand about the nature of cancer formation, progression and especially metastasis. For example, cancer in the breast itself is not life-threating. It is only when tumors metastasize (i.e. spread to other organs in the body) that the cancer becomes lethal. This poster will summarize the research conducted to date in various aspects of bioimaging of cancer. Some topics include diffuse optical imaging for breast cancer detection, optical coherence tomography for intraoperative guidance during breast and thyroid cancer surgeries, and multiscale imaging (i.e. multiphoton microscopy and hyperpolarized magnetic resonance spectroscopy) for metabolic imaging of breast cancer metastasis. The poster will also introduce the proposed research lab starting in the Biophysics department at Marquette. The research will contribute to developing and improving imaging technologies in order to reveal new insights into the physical basis of cancer, monitor drug delivery and therapeutic agents in real-time, and potentially introduce new imaging methods to the clinic for cancer diagnostics and treatment monitoring in human patients. A better understanding of the physical basis of cancer formation, progression, and metastasis will help reduce the mortality and morbidity of cancer in patients.

Cosmic Ray Physics at Marquette University with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
Karen Andeen, Matthias Plum

An overview of cosmic ray research at Marquette in conjunction with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a world-class neutrino and cosmic ray telescope located at the geographic South Pole, will be presented, including recent results and student involvement.

Designing Instrumentation for Terrestrial Observations of the Cosmic Gravitational-Wave Background
Jax Sanders

The cosmological gravitational wave background (CGWB) is a high-value, high-investment target for future gravitational wave detectors. If detected, CGWB would provide a unique window into the first moments of the evolution of the universe and enable unique probes of the fundamental physical laws that apply at very high energy scales, inaccessible in laboratories. This letter attempts to quantify the prospects for a future measurement of the CGWB with terrestrial interferometric gravitational wave detectors, the limiting noise factors on such a measurement, and the necessary technological investment required. We identify a set of requirements for future facilities that would make this measurement possible.

Developing a New Snow Removal System for an Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescope at the South Pole
Amelia Ruffolo, Karen Andeen, Matthias Plum

Electron Paramagnetic Resonance at Marquette Physics
Brian Bennett, Balaraman Kalyanaraman, Richard C. Holz, Michael W. Lawlor, A. Andrew Pacheco, Chieu D. Tran

The poster introduces the Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) technique and summarizes Dr. Bennett's research in medical biophysics and molecular biophysics over the last four years at the Marquette Physics EPR Facility. The research includes: (i) EPR characterization of the role of oxidants in tumor tissue and cancer cells; (ii) EPR-detected oxidative damage in Parkinson's disease progression; (iii) EPR as a diagnostic method for mitochondrial and metabolic diseases; (iv) EPR detection and characterization of multiple states of nitrile hydratase, an enzyme with "green chemistry" applications; (v) EPR for trapping catalytic intermediates in a nitrogen-cycle enzymic reaction; and (vi) EPR monitoring of the binding and speciation of copper in films with antimicrobial activity. Collaborators include investigators at Marquette, UW-Milwaukee, and the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Estimating the Final Orbital Separation in Common Envelope Evolution Using Mass-Radius Profiles in AGB Stars
Michael Politano, Nicholas Lopez-Canelas

We seek to provide a better prescription for the final orbital separation in binary stars that exit the common envelope (CE) phase.  All close binary stars containing one or more compact objects (white dwarf, neutron star or black hole) must have gone through one or more phases of CE evolution.  Providing accurate formation rates and absolute numbers of these systems in our Galaxy depends upon providing realistic predictions of post-CE orbital separations.  So far, such predictions have overestimated the observed separations by an order of magnitude or greater.  We believe the resolution to these discrepancies lies in a better understanding of the interiors of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars.

Gender Balance of Human Images in Introductory Physics Textbooks
Katherine Finegan, Melissa Vigil

IceAct: An Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescope for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory
Matthias Plum, Karen Andeen

Very high energy cosmic rays particles constantly hit the Earth's atmosphere and produce large cascades of secondary particles that can be measured at the surface, so-called cosmic ray air shower. The origin and the mass composition of these cosmic rays are still unknown.

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a unique, large astroparticle detector located at the geographic South Pole.

The main IceCube detector instruments 1 km3 of the glacial ice between depths from 1.4 - 2.5 km with roughly 5000 digital optical modules. Additionally, the surface of the South Pole is instrumented with 162 IceTop cosmic ray air-shower detector tanks with a volume of 3 m3 clear ice. Both detectors combined are capable of measuring the energy spectrum and the mass composition of the primary cosmic rays.

IceAct is a proposed surface array of compact Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM) based small-size (50 cm) Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescopes to perform complementary measurements of cosmic ray. During January 2019, two IceAct telescope prototypes were installed in the center of the IceTop surface. Combining information from these two telescopes and IceCube and IceTop, it is possible to test the performance and the improvements in primary particle discrimination, detector calibration, and veto capabilities.

Identifying Hidden Supernovae in M83 with the VLA
Christopher Stockdale, Bradley Cole

We present results of our analysis of C and L band observations of the grand design spiral galaxy, M83 made with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). With recent optical (HST) and X-ray (Chandra) observations and utilizing the newly expanded bandwidth of the VLA, we are exploring the radio spectral properties of the historical radio point sources in M83 and have discovered more than 250 discrete radio sources. These observations allow us to probe the evolution of supernova remnants (SNRs) and to find previously undiscovered SNRs. These observations represent the fourth epoch of deep VLA observations of M83. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities.

Measuring the Excitonic Insulator Transition in Ta2NiSe5
Michael Mastalish

Modular Quantum Noise Modeling for Interferometer Topologies
Aaron Morial, Jax Sanders

Investigating a new way to model noise for future interferometers

Multispectral Image Analysis for Mapping Mineral Resources
Cosmas Kujjo

Digital processing of multi-spectral satellite images plays an important role in human interactions with the Earth, in matters related to energy, minerals, and water resources, as well as the natural hazards. The research utilizes remote sensing techniques in locating gold occurrences in the Red Sea Hills, Sudan.

Research in Support of Antihydrogen Physics
Tim Tharp

Dr. Tharp and undergraduate students have been researching material properties and developing new hardware for the ALPHA antimatter experiment located at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.  Plasma diagnostic stations developed at Marquette are currently in daily use on ALPHA to measure properties, such as temperature and density, of antimatter plasmas.  At Marquette, we are testing the extreme vacuum compatibility of 3D printed metals for potential future use in ALPHA.

Student Summer Immersion Experiences in Applied Physics
Holly Fortener, Brian Martinez, Kellen Philipp

Three Applied Physics students report on their summer internship and research experiences at Astronautics Corporation of America, Fermilab, and US Bank.

Political Science Research: Community-Engaged Research
Department of Political Science

Political Science Research: In the News
Department of Political Science

Political Science Research: Public Policy
Department of Political Science

Political Science Research: Public Scholarship
Department of Political Science

Boss Lady: A Correlational Study of Women's Career Aspirations and Self-esteem
Mary Tait, Maxine Ziegler, Renee Vogel, Monica Dreesen, Veronica Cortes-Castro, Mackenzie Kirkman, Maha Baalbaki, Debra Oswald

There has been a large body of research focusing on women's self-esteem, but less is known about how it relates to women's career aspirations. An online survey was sent out to 227 U.S. women to better understand these effects. A significantly positive correlation was found between women's career aspirations and self-esteem.

Emotion Regulation Affects Interracial Interacions After Exposure to Police Violence
Nakia S. Gordon, Sydney Timmer-Murillo, Keara Kangas

Intra-individual Variability of Event-related Potential Amplitude Suggests Decreased Neural Efficiency in Cognitively Intact Human Carriers of the Apolipoprotein-E4 Allele
Elizabeth Paitel, Sarah Evans, Kristy Nielson

Existing cognitive aging research highlights increases in intra-individual variability (IIV) of cognitive task performance in the course of healthy aging and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Neurological changes associated with AD begin decades before symptom onset, making biomarkers of early AD risk particularly important. A primary risk factor for AD is carrying the Apolipoprotein-E (APOE) 4 allele. IIV in cognitive performance also tends to be greater in intact APOE 4 carriers (4+) compared to non-carriers (4-), suggesting potential deficits in underlying neural networks. Yet, IIV with event-related potentials (ERPs) is lacking, despite the ability to provide direct insight into neural processing. Thus, we assessed IIV of ERP amplitudes in 4+ vs. 4-, demonstrating greater IIV in the 4+ group, particularly in frontal regions. Greater IIV was associated with poorer cognitive task performance, with this relationship driven by the 4+ group. Inheritance of the 4 allele is not in itself predictive of AD. Discrimination of those with risk who are most likely to progress to cognitive decline is crucial for prevention and intervention. Thus, we also assessed ERP IIV and cognitive performance within 4+ participants. 4+ participants with less IIV performed better on cognitive tasks than those with greater IIV. Thus, ERP IIV may discriminate 4+ participants with the highest risk of future cognitive decline, which would allow targeting of intervention to those with the greatest risk.

Is Heart Rate Variability a Biomarker of Risk for Alzheimer's Disease?
Tristan Gregg, Sarah Evans, Elizabeth Paitel, Kristy Nielson

Reductions in regional brain volume and cognitive performance are hallmarks of both cognitive aging and Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Heart rate variability (HRV), a measure of the fluctuation in the beat-to-beat timing of the heart, is an effective measure of the adaptability of the autonomic nervous system to physiological stressors and cognitive demand. Study of HRV as a correlate of cognitive aging is on the rise as it has been shown that HRV declines with advancing age and it has been linked to declining cognitive performance in older adults. What is less clear is whether HRV contributes to or can index the regional brain atrophy that is associated with cognitive performance in older adults. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the relationship between parahippocampal gyrus volume and working memory performance in cognitively intact older adults is moderated by HRV. A sample of 61 older adults were assessed using neuropsychological testing, MRI, and resting HRV. We found that HRV predicted parahippocampal brain volume and that parahippocampal volume interacted with HRV to predict working memory performance. These results support the idea that declining autonomic nervous system regulation contributes to neural and cognitive aging, and suggest that HRV can index risk for future cognitive decline.

Measuring Young Women's Experiences with Benevolent Sexism: Scale Structure and Wellbeing Correlates
Debra Oswald, Maha Baalbaki, Mackenzie S Kirkman

Neural Dysfunction and Alexithymia Interact to Contribute to Subjective Cognitive Complaints in Cognitively Intact Older Adults
Sarah Evans, Elizabeth Paitel, Kristy Nielson

Alexithymia is a construct characterized by difficulty identifying feelings, difficulty describing feelings, and externally oriented thinking. Alexithymia tends to increase with age and has recently been implicated in poorer executive functioning (EF), potentially contributing to memory impairment in elders. Neural dysfunction may be detectable prior to onset of cognitive decline by intra-individual variability (IIV) in event related potential (ERP) amplitude, with limited research suggesting greater ERP IIV may be an index of Alzheimer’s disease neuropathology. ERP IIV during an EF task will expand upon the aging literature by examining the influence of alexithymia and EF on subjective cognitive complaints (SCCs), a prodromal indicator of future cognitive decline. We hypothesize that the relationship between alexithymia and SCCs is moderated by EF via P300 amplitude IIV during a Stop-signal task.

Perceptions of God, Divine Control, and Divine Involvement
Simon Howard, Debra Oswald, Mackenzie Kirkman

Recent studies have explored whether certain conceptualizations of God are associated with various attitudes and beliefs. In the current study, we examined the relationship between gendered God concepts and the belief that God is involved in one’s life and religious-related rigid ideologies. Across two studies, one conducted with religious students at a Jesuit university and the other with a national sample, we found that individuals who believed God to be male were more likely to believe that God had more control and involvement in their life, had higher levels of religious fundamentalism and higher levels of RWA-Aggression (Study 1 and 2), RWA “Submission (Study 1 and 2), and RWA “Conventionalism (Study 2) than individuals with other gendered or nongendered conceptualizations of God. Implications of the broader impact that gendered God concepts have on social and political domains are explored. Last, limitations and future research directions are discussed.

Relationship between Emotion Dysregulation and Skin Conductance Response During Trauma and Neutral Imagery in Trauma Survivors
Jacqueline Fitzgerald, Hailey Begg, Claire Sheeran, Terri deRoon-Cassini, Christine L. Larson

Background: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common occurrence after a traumatic event. Emotion dysregulation is a cardinal feature of this disorder and may manifest as heightened arousal to trauma-specific cues. Skin conductance response (SCR) provides accurate measurement of arousal, and SCR correlates positively with symptoms of PTSD, yet no study to-date has tested the relationship between SCR/arousal response and symptoms of emotion dysregulation in this population. The present study tested SCR collected during trauma recall as a predictor of symptoms of emotion dysregulation in trauma-exposed individuals.

Methods: N=129 patients were admitted to the Emergency Room at a Level 1 Trauma Center and interviewed two weeks after their traumatic incident. During the interview, participants were prompted to discuss in detail their traumatic event while continuous measurement of SCR was recorded through the eSense system from electrodes placed on the fingertips. In another condition, participants described a non-affective neutral event (e.g., recent trip to the grocery store) also while SCR was collected (control condition). A value for SCR was calculating by averaging continuous SCR values during trauma recall vs. during the neutral event. Mean SCR (trauma, neutral) was subsequently correlated with symptoms of emotion dysregulation (Emotion Dysregulation Scale [EDS]).

Results: SCR during trauma recall (r(127)=0.264, p=0.017) and the neutral event (r(127)=0.232, p=0.035) were both positively related to severity of emotion dysregulation. Effects did not change controlling for gender or race.

Conclusion: Overall greater arousal during neutral and trauma recall was related to emotion dysregulation and suggests that persistent arousal “rather than specific heightened arousal during trauma recall“ may best qualify emotional dysregulation in this population.

Seen But Not Heard: Lifetime Sexist Experiences as Predictors of Self-silencing Among College Women
Zane Ballard, Mary Tait, Mackenzie Kirkman, Maha Baalbaki, Debra Oswald

Time's Up: Age Cohort Differences in the Experiences of Sexism in the Past Year
Ellie Lyne, Mary Tait, Zane Ballard, Mackenzie Kirkman, Maha Baalbaki, Debra Oswald

Previous research shows that women experience both hostile and benevolent sexism frequently. However, little research has indicated how women of different ages experience sexism. A study of 216 U.S. women ranging from ages 21 to 77 years old completed a survey on their experiences of hostile and benevolent sexism. Significant differences across age groups were discussed.

 

Exploring Targeted Postmortem Investigative Practices at the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery
Shannon Freire

The Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery (MCPFC) is an umbrella term used to describe the four cemeteries that were used by Milwaukee County, WI from 1878 through 1974 for the burial of the indigent, unclaimed, institutionalized, and anatomized. The primary focus of this research is the twice-excavated Cemetery II, in use between 1882 and 1925. Approximately one-quarter of Cemetery II interments excavated in 2013 did not meet expectations for standard, institutionalized pauper burials and have been associated with the local medical establishment, including the medical colleges, county hospital and pathology laboratory, and the coroner’s office. Current analyses suggest that a comparable pattern exists within the burials excavated in 1991-1992. Outstanding questions related to the practices that resulted in these two general categories of burials, here identified as Categories A and B, persist. This project utilized strontium isotope analysis to address whether specific immigrant groups were targeted for the postmortem investigative practices that frequently resulted in Category B burials. Permanent molars of 30 individuals from each category of burial were sampled for enamel apatite to determine whether there was a relationship between strontium isotope values and type of burial. This research demonstrates that there was no targeted selection of a specific immigrant population for dissection on the part of Milwaukee’s early medical colleges and institutions. Rather, the factors that led to an individual being interred in a Category B burial may have been more opportunity-based, such as the relative utility of a corpse and availability.

Socio-economic Impacts of the "Muslim Ban"
Louise Cainkar

My research studies the socio-economic impacts of the "Muslim ban" on Yemeni American families seeking reunification in the US during a time of war and humanitarian crisis. Anecdotal reports indicate that low income Yemenis are incurring massive debt and depleting remittance resources to obtain visa waivers that are denied 90% of the time. If this is the case, which I will further investigate, the "Muslim ban" is not only questionable immigration policy, it is also a transnational poverty producing policy.

Talking Trash: Public Health in 19th and 20th century Bronzeville (Site 11CK1235)
Jane Peterson, Noel Hincha

This poster represents Noel Hincha's undergraduate, senior thesis research.  Ms. Hincha integrated analysis archaeological collection and a variety of historical documents to expand our understanding of urban public health risks and challenges experienced by residents of Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. This work was recently presented at the Midwest Archaeology Conference annual meetings in Mankato, MN.

The Spatial Relationship Between Bus Stops and Crime
Lauren Haydin, Aleksandra Snowden

In this research project, Dr. Snowden and I searched for a relationship between bus stops and crime. Through work with the GIS ArcMap system, and various data processing software's, we were able to create a map of Milwaukee, and calculate the statistics that might relate bus stops and crime. We found that there was a statistically significant relationship between violent crimes and bus stops, and a slightly lesser significant relationship between nonviolent crimes and bus stops.

An Archē Not Anarchic Enough: A Spirited Critique of the Force
Matthew Mussoline, Kate Lawlor, John Lighthart

This poster presents the basic outline and argument for the book chapter "An Arche Not Anarchic Enough: A Spirited Critique of the Force." This chapter will be published in the forthcoming Theology and the Star Wars Universe. Father Ryan Duns, SJ and five undergraduate co co-authors--Brian Bottei ('19), Christopher Gregorio, ('19), Kate Lawlor ('21), Matthew Mussoline ('19) and John Lighthart ('22)--contributed to this project. We presented this project at the Marquette University Humanities Convention (MUHUCon) in April, 2019.

Are Roman Catholic Diocesan Priests Prepared to Minister to People Experiencing Mental Health Crises?
Sofia Driscoll

My research is about how confident Catholic, Diocesan priests feel ministering to people in crisis for mental health. It addresses the resources that priests currently have to help them navigate this situation, as well as the resources that they don't have but could use. It asks whether diocesan Catholic priests have the education and resources needed to minister to people in mental health crises, and seeks to find where their needs lie in relation to these ministerial situations.

Interfaith Engagement in Milwaukee
Irfan Omar, Caroline Redick

This project grew out of a graduate seminar in theology titled Christians and Muslims in Dialogue, offered at Marquette University in the spring of 2017. During the course of the semester, and based on participants interest, it was expanded into a community-wide project to document” even if in an abbreviated version” the practice of interfaith engagement and collaboration in the greater Milwaukee area. The research team includes a theology professor and five MU students - two undergraduates and three MA/PhD students. This project and the resulting publication (forthcoming) offer an example of student-faculty collaborative research as well as of community engagement. It highlights MU resources -- such as the Center for Peacemaking -- that actively support student research and extracurricular learning. It presents promising stories of cross religion interactions and collaborations in Milwaukee with some pertinent connections to Marquette as an institution and to its mission. The research project is both theoretical as well as praxis oriented. The research team members began their journey as students of literature on dialogue which became the basis for their narrative. As they interviewed local leaders and interfaith actors in the community, they were able to better appreciate the theoretical foundations though their encounter with real people engaged in dialogue. Thus, the project is dialogical both in method as well as in scope.

Limiting Conditions on Conservative and Liberal Practice in Ecclesiology
Joseph Mueller, S.J.

Their modernity places limiting conditions on the exercise of both liberal and conservative theological positions on the Church-world relationship. A preliminary comment on the nature of the liberal/conservative dichotomy will lead me into my attempt to define it as it applies to ecclesiology.  The modern view of history they both share will lead me to present some limiting conditions on both ecclesiologies, and I will illustrate those limits through the example of positions different theologians have taken on the ordination of women.  I will show finally that Pope Francis' call to exercise discernment can provide a way to avoid the limits on both sorts of ecclesiologies.

Marquette Lonergan Project
Robert Doran, S.J., Joseph Ogbonnaya

The Marquette Lonergan Project is devoted to preserving and implementing the work of Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan. The Institute is the latest development in the work of the Project. It was launched at Marquette in 2017, with five areas of specialization: Economics for Humane Globalization, Ecological Culture, Philosophy, Systematic Theology, and Critical-realist Hermeneutics. The Institute has already published one book with Marquette University Press: Everything Is Interconnected, the work of the Economics and Ecology groups.

The Marquette Irenaeus Project
Christopher Krall, Cathy Melesky Dante, Edward St. Aubin, Steven Molvarec

The Marquette Irenaeus Project (MIP) is an interdisciplinary research initiative aimed at cultivating prayer practices from the Christian tradition in the everyday lives of students, faculty, and staff on campus, with expansion in a second phase to the larger community (for example, parishes, prisons, homeless shelters, and veterans’ groups). MIP seeks to study the multidimensional effects of prayer on the human person. MIP’s team proposes that prayer practices promote fullness of life by bringing the person and community into relationship with the Divine. MIP will develop a plan to teach Christian prayer practices to focus groups, and then study the effects on the human person (neurological processes, psychological health, general measurements of wellbeing) and on personal experience of God. It is our contention that the deepest Christian traditions of prayer/contemplation have measurable/quantitative psychological and neurological effects as well as subjective/qualitative transformative experiences for the individual and the community. In recent studies of the effects of spiritual practices, we note that researchers tend to focus on Eastern mindfulness practices removed from their supportive, original religious contexts. We also note an exclusive focus on quantitative results. MIP's innovative contribution to the study of spiritual practice will be the bringing together of Western Christian prayer and the study of its effects using a mixed methodology to look at neuroscientific data together with the subjective experience of the person and community. MIP seeks to promote the formation of minds and hearts and the flourishing of the human person through this study. Our innovation is driven by an understanding that the fully-alive human person arises from the intentional and programmatic intersection of modern scientific insights, historical/theological wisdom, communal relationships, and cultivation of a relationship with God through prayer.

Wealth, Virtue, and Moral Luck: Christian Ethics in an Age of Inequality
Kate Ward

My research explores how wealth, defined as having more than we need, and poverty, defined as the need to struggle to survive, affect our progress in the moral life.

An Observational Study of the Temporal Effects of Eutrophication on Surrounding Physical and Chemical Water Quality Variables
Colin Barrington

Analyzing the Effects of Climate Change on Pacific Atmospheric River Behavior with MPAS
Joseph Miscimarra, Allison Michaelis, Zhenhai Zhang
Annual precipitation along the west coast of North America is largely influenced by Atmospheric River (AR) events, which have been demonstrated in prior research to comprise a larger portion of extreme precipitation events in this region with future climate projections. There has been growing interest in the future changes of these ARs due to their large impacts on the water supply and flooding control in this region. In this study, we utilized the Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) to simulate global weather patterns for selected years with higher resolution focused on the Northern Hemisphere. We then compared the ARs in the simulations with current climate conditions to those in the simulations with predicted future climate conditions, including adjusted sea-surface temperatures, CO2 concentrations, and sea ice fields, according to the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 emissions scenario. Comparing the future climate simulation to the current climate simulation, MPAS depicts more frequent AR conditions across most regions of the North Pacific and the west coast of North America in all seasons. The intensity of ARs, which is measured as the maximum integrated water vapor transport (IVT) of each AR, exhibits a significant increase under future climate conditions. Furthermore, there is a notable northward shift of the maximum frequency of ARs over the North Pacific, which may be related to the poleward shift of the North Pacific storm track. These results reflect the thermodynamic effects projected to accompany climate change and the related impacts on AR behaviors that are particularly relevant for volatile hydro-climate regions that are vulnerable to precipitation extremes, such as California.

Optimizing the yTRAP system as a Genetic Tool to Study Transthyretin Aggregation in Yeast
Abigail Kuborn, Anita Manogaran

Adenosine Activation of the Heart: Effects of Regular Exercise
Kalie Littlefield, Bob Fitts

Approaches to Shelley's Frankenstein: Representations of the Creature in Biographical & Legal Contexts
Katie Breck, Melissa Ganz

Where are Gun Dealers in the Conversation on Gun Violence?
Biluge Ntabala, Robert Smith

Back on the Porch: Stoicism and the Posthuman
Ryan Thom, Jenn Finn

Dynamics of Ferromagnetic Nano-Structures
Clare Urbanski, Andrew Kunz

This research examines the magnetic fields needed to switch the magnetization of ferromagnetic nanoislands varying in length, width, height, and magnetization state. Code is being developed to produce a topological diagram of the magnetic field surrounding said islands.