Author: orandall

Black history has been identified as important to psychosocial adjustment and education outcomes. In K‒12 and in higher education settings, Black history supports transformational educational experiences whereby African descent students can more readily negotiate race-based discrimination and develop counternarratives that challenge deficit ideas about their abilities as students and their value as people. Despite growing evidence to suggest the significance of Black history in contributing to African descent students’ academic outcomes and overall psychological well-being, there has been little scholarly attention given to identifying ways to quantitatively assess Black history among African descent youth. Quantitative self-report measures are among the most widely used non-cognitive assessments that support the measurement of individuals’ beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and emotions. Using a validated adult self-report measure of Black history consciousness as a foundation, the goal of the current study is to develop and initially validate a brief self-report measure assessing the importance and meaning of Black history for youth using a mixed-methods critical, participatory action approach to scale construction. This study will be grounded in transformative Black education and Black psychology frameworks to center the lived experiences of African descent youth and accurate histories within the African diaspora.

Funder: Spencer Foundation 

Amount: $74,985 

PI: Collette Chapman-Hilliard, Mary Frances Early College of Education 

In mammals, taste bud cells are post-mitotic, and they have a short lifespan and undergo continuous renewal, therefore, progenitors in the immediate surrounding tissue must be available to renew taste bud cells for homeostasis. Thorough information of taste bud progenitors and molecular regulation in the cell differentiation is essential to understanding taste disorders caused by taste bud progenitor deficiencies. Taste bud progenitor cells have been thought to reside in the basal layer of the stratified lingual epithelium and express Krt14, Krt5, Gli1, p63, Sox2 or Lgr5. Our recent findings indicate the existence of an underappreciated source of progenitors that express Sox10 (Sox10+) — cells under, but not within, the stratified tongue epithelium. These Sox10+ taste bud progenitors contribute to a significant proportion of taste bud cells including most of type-III taste cells that transduce sour and salt taste. Our further studies and early work using circumvallate papilla (CvP) transplantation provide compelling data to demonstrate that von Ebner’s minor salivary glands (vEGs) are the niche of these novel Sox10+ progenitors for taste buds. Questions remain regarding the exact locations, specific type(s), molecular signatures of Sox10+ taste bud progenitors in vEGs and regulatory roles of Sox10 transcription factor in cell differentiation. In mice, the single CvP in the midline of posterior tongue houses hundreds of taste buds with abundant vEGs underneath to form the CvP-vEG complex, which enables efficient analyses and will be our focus in this proposal. The goal of this application is to (Aim 1) define the spatial distribution and molecular signature of Sox10+ taste bud progenitors in vEGs, and (Aim 2) test whether Sox10 transcription factor regulates the differentiation of these progenitors to taste bud cells. We will take advantage of the unique strengths of conventional and modern tools (e.g., inducible transgenic mouse lines, proliferating and retaining cell labeling, spatial transcriptomic analysis, and CRISPR/Cas9 technology). In Aim 1, we will use adult Sox10-iCreERT2/tdTTmx mice to trace Sox10+ cell lineages, perform proliferating and retaining cell labeling and MERFISH (Multiplexed Error Robust Fluorescence in situ Hybridization) that combines the power of single-cell transcriptomics with spatial biology by directly visualizing and counting RNA transcripts of ~140 marker genes in tissue slices. In Aim 2, we will analyze phenotypes in Sox10 conditional knockout (cKO) — adult Sox10-iCreERT2/Sox10 fx mice, and Sox10- iCreERT2/ R26LSL-Cas9-EGFP mice with microinjection of AAV-Sox10 gRNA into CvP-vEG tongue region. The yielded data will allow us to pinpoint the Sox10+ taste bud progenitors in vEGs and to detect the marker gene expression in these progenitors and other cells on the tissue sections, and to collect solid data as to whether Sox10 is essential for the differentiation of Sox10+ taste bud progenitors in vEGs. The studies will enable us to better understand the features (spatial, cellular, molecular) and differentiation of these Sox10+ taste bud progenitors in vEGs and thus better understand the maintenance of taste bud homeostasis.

Funder: NIH 

Amount: $377,681 

PI: Hongxiang Liu, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Department of Animal and Dairy Science 

Cushing’s disease (CD) is a serious endocrine disorder characterized by an adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH)-secreting PitNET that subsequently stimulates the adrenal glands to overproduce cortisol. Chronic exposure to excess cortisol has wide ranging and detrimental effects on health, including increased stroke rates, diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety and death. Although CD is linked to a threefold increase in the risk of death, the advancement of current standard of care medical therapy is lacking. Current treatments exhibit low efficacy and tolerability for patients. The absence of preclinical models that replicate the complexity of the adenoma tissue has prevented us from developing effective therapies that are targeted to the tumor directly. The first-line treatment for CD is pituitary surgery. In the hands of an experienced surgeon, tumor recurrence occurs in as many as 30% to 50% of patients during the 10-year follow-up period. Despite multiple treatments, biochemical control is not achieved in approximately 50% of patients, suggesting that in routine clinical practice, initial and long-term disease remission is not achieved in a substantial number of CD patients. Hence, medical therapy is often considered in the following situations: when surgery is contraindicated or fails to achieve remission, or when recurrence occurs after apparent surgical remission. While stereotactic radiosurgery treats incompletely resected or recurrent PitNETs, the main drawbacks include the longer time to remission and the risk of hypopituitarism. There is an inverse relationship between disease duration and reversibility of complications associated with CD, thus emphasizing the importance of targeting the pituitary adenoma early. The primary barrier to developing new medical therapies is the lack of human relevant advanced in vitro tumor models.

Pituitary cell lines do not reproduce the multicellular complexity of PitNETs. In this instance, the overall objective is to develop PitNET organoids to advance our understanding of the pathogenesis and treatment of pituitary tumors in CD patients. The overall goal will be successfully achieved by collaborative efforts between the University of Arizona (UA) and Barrow Neurological Institute (BNI) that will leverage the expertise of professionals trained in complimentary fields including surgical treatments, pathology and cell biology of pituitary disease, organoid technology and high throughput data analysis including dug screening, molecular profiling, and transcriptomics. This led us to develop Specific Aims: 1) To use human PitNET derived organoids to define the molecular signatures of corticotroph tumor subtypes in CD, and 2) To use the pituitary tumor organoids as a preclinical model to accelerate targeted therapies for patients with CD. At the completion of the funding period, we will be positioned to implement patient-relevant organoids to accelerate the development of therapies that will effectively target ACTH-secreting pituitary adenomas in patients with CD.

Funder: National Institutes of Health 

Amount: $549,941 

PI: Yana Zavros, School of Medicine 

Despite the implementation of numerous successful harm reduction programs across the state, accessing harm reduction services remains a challenge for those living in rural communities. This lack of proximity to resources can directly impact the outcomes for those at risk of an opioid overdose. Our proposal seeks to utilize an untapped healthcare resource currently available in nearly every rural community in Georgia: our pharmacists. More than ninety percent of the US population live within 5 miles of a community pharmacy. With rural community pharmacists often being the only accessible healthcare professionals nearby, they also have the advantage of existing relationships and trust built within those communities. Despite being one of the most accessible and trusted healthcare resources, pharmacy has not yet been widely included in the harm reduction landscape. Enlisting these pharmacies to assist in increasing both access and education for harm reduction measures for those at risk of an opioid overdose can help to reduce the current death rate in these areas of our state.

Our project will seek to accomplish three goals:

1. Increase access to harm reduction services, with a focus on naloxone distribution, by utilizing an existing network of independent pharmacies.

2. Education of individuals falling into opioid overdose risk categories, or those close to those at risk.

3. Data capture assessing demographics, attitudes, and characteristics of those seeking harm reduction services.

Funder: Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities 

Amount: $1,182,902 

PI: Jordan Khail, College of Pharmacy 

Dysregulated expression of retrotransposons and other transposable elements (TEs) can lead to increases in TE copy number, DNA damage and instability, or aberrant regulation of host genes, which in turn can contribute to human disease. Conversely, TE activity is required for processes ranging from early mammalian development and cell senescence to horizontal transposon transfer (HTT) between species. The natural downregulation or absence of TE defense mechanisms such as RNA interference, DNA methylation, and repressive chromatin provides opportunities for TE expression and mobility. The fact that TEs do not always proliferate unchecked in such cases suggests new mechanisms of TE control remain to be discovered. The Saccharomyces cerevisiae/Ty paradigm is an attractive model for discovering new types of retrotransposon control. S. cerevisiae and its close relative S. paradoxus lack canonical TE control pathways but contain multiple active yet restrained retrotransposon families (Ty1-Ty5). We will expand on our discovery of a self-encoded form of copy number control (CNC) for the canonical Ty1 element (Ty1c) to determine if other Ty elements undergo forms of CNC, systematically determine whether Ty family interactions influence mobility, define the origin of Ty1c CNC, and understand the evolution and function of endogenized Ty sequences. In addition, we will develop new experimental models to study the mechanisms and consequences of HTT between species. Our work will combine rigorous experimental and computational approaches to provide insight into how novel mechanisms of retrotransposon regulation function and evolve to limit TE mobility and HTT.

Funder: NIH 

Amount: $1,488,092 

PI: David Garfinkel, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 

Federal student aid emphasizes income and under-acknowledges wealth. I (1) assess whether this under-acknowledgment reinforces Black-white inequality in student borrowing and debt, and (2) test whether more wealth-conscious aid would narrow the Black-white gap in student borrowing.

Student debt is very racially unequal, and the large Black-white gap especially merits attention. A likely contributing factor is wealth disparity and the structural racism undergirding it. The Black-white wealth gap greatly exceeds the income gap, and per Oliver and Shapiro’s Racialization of State Policy thesis, this gap is rooted in policy choices that have depressed Black wealth. Thus Black families seldom have surplus wealth, a large part of college financing.

I advance theory with the Racialization of Financial Aid Policy, a framework that locates financial aid as a site where ostensibly race-neutral policies perpetuate racial gaps in wealth and debt. I propose that one example is the focus on income over wealth in allocating Pell Grants.

Hence, better addressing wealth may narrow borrowing gaps by targeting a form of financial need that is under-met and disproportionately faced by Black students. I consider a supplemental Pell Grant based only on wealth, testing its potential to narrow the Black-white gap in student borrowing.

I use the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, the National Longitudinal Study of Youth-1997, new decomposition methods, and regression discontinuity methods.

Funder: Wiliam T. Grant Foundation

Amount: $50,000

PI: Christian Smith, Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education

We will evaluate the genetic changes of beef-related Salmonella isolates in the NCBI database, across time and geographic regions. The goal is to determine how quickly or slowly Salmonella populations change over time with respect to beef food safety and to identify patterns across time and geographic regions that could inform risks

1. Validation of a time period (“moving window”) over which to evaluate data for emergence of new outbreak Salmonella strains

2. Phylogeographic analysis of beef-related Salmonella outbreak case studies to identify factors contributing to disease emergence

3. Genomic analysis of historical and modern Salmonella isolates from top beef serovars to understand how pathogenicity evolves over time.

Funder: Meat & Poultry Research & Education

Amount: $122,630

PI: Nusrat “Nikki” Shariat, College of Veterinary Medicine

Prior to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, influenza viruses led to an estimated 140,000-170,000 hospitalizations and 12,000-52,000 annual deaths in the US. In response to the global spread of COVID-19, governments intermittently enacted strict non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), including school closures, stay-at-home orders, targeted business capacity restrictions or closures, and mask mandates, which in combination suppressed the 2020-2022 influenza seasons in both the Southern and Northern Hemispheres. However, the 2022-23 influenza season returned to the same levels of hospitalizations compared to the Pre-COVID seasons. In the future 2024-25 season, it remains uncertain the extent to which specific NPIs after the COVID-19 pandemic reduced influenza transmission in isolation, in combination, and across diverse socioeconomic and health subgroups.

The UT COVID-19 Modeling Consortium (UT-CMC) has extensive experience in modeling the detection, transmission, and control of influenza and has collaborated closely with local, state, and federal agencies to improve seasonal and pandemic influenza forecasting, surveillance, and intervention strategies. Our models have elucidated the complex interplay between influenza transmission, human behavior, viral evolution, and public health interventions. We have also developed practical decision-support tools for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Association of Public Health Labs (APHL), and Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) to accelerate the detection of emerging influenza outbreaks, improve the forecasting of ongoing epidemics, and ensure the fair and effective use of limited mitigation resources including ventilators, antiviral drugs, and vaccines. We propose to improve influenza forecasting projection models. We will provide technical guidance as the team uses the models to (1) produce short-term probabilistic influenza forecasts, and (2) broadly contribute to influenza forecasting and scenario modeling hub efforts across the CSTE and CDC Network. We will participate in regular on-line collaborative meetings, provide high level guidance on achieving the aims of the grant, and contribute to disseminating results through progress reports and publications.

Funder: Council of State & Territorial EPI

Amount: $300,000

PI: Spencer Fox, College of Public Health

It is hypothesized that Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the primary agent of human tuberculosis (TB) has been with the human population for more than 12,000 years. Although there are nearly 9 million new cases of TB each year, the vast majority of individuals who come into contact with this organism appear to clear it with no ill effects. The mechanisms employed during this ‘clearance’ process are generally unknown. In high-exposure TB epidemiologic settings, a small percentage of contacts go on to develop sputum culture-positive active disease with all symptomology, histopathology and immune responses that characterize TB; these individuals are assumed to be responsible for the subsequent TB transmission that occurs. A larger percentage of contacts become tuberculin skin test (TST)-positive but remain culture negative (latent disease); these individuals likely do not transmit to contacts while in the latent stage. Thus, it is assumed that a majority of TST-negative individuals have not been exposed to Mtb, or have cleared any bacilli to which they may have been exposed without inducing immunity. However, these TST-negative contacts rarely have their upper respiratory tracts (URT) cultured for Mtb.

Major human respiratory bacterial pathogens such as Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae utilize an URT carriage state in which the bacteria attach to the local epithelium, replicate, and transmit to other persons, but do not damage the host cells, cause disease in this location or induce more than a very mild local inflammation; ultimately, these commensal bacteria can clear or they can disseminate to sterile areas of the body including the lower lung and brain and cause disease. Infant humans are URT colonized at higher rates than adults with correspondingly higher rates of meningitis. Importantly, some vaccines can clear URT colonizing bacteria and thus prevent subsequent disseminated disease states or transmission to naïve contacts. Data from TB studies not originally designed to assess carriage have indirectly demonstrated that Mtb also possesses a URT carriage-like state in humans (and we have demonstrated it in natural transmission studies in ferrets), and if similar to the other respiratory pathogens, understanding this state is critical to ultimately more accurately diagnosing, controlling disease development and transmission and improving vaccine efficacy. We intend to perform a longer-term Mtb URT carriage analyses in asymptomatic adult humans in Kampala, Uganda exposed to active TB cases.

Investigators in the field consider Mtb carriage to either not exist, or not be relevant in the case of transmission and development of disease. Preliminary evidence indicates this is not the case. If accurate, this may be a significant missing component in our efforts towards developing a comprehensive control strategy for TB.

Funder: NEH

Amount: $335,193

PI: Frederick Quinn, College of Veterinary Medicine

Since the discoveries of archetypes of nearby, young moving groups (NYMGs) in the late 1990s, more than 10 NYMGs have been identified within #100pc, with #10,000 claimed members in total. Members of these NYMGs are the youngest (#200 Myr) available stars near Earth (#100 pc). Due to their youth and proximity, these stars serve as prime targets for a wide range of star/planet-related studies. For instance, NYMGs and their members are excellent laboratories for: (1) Direct imaging detection of exoplanets and their disk environments, (2) Studying the star formation history in the solar neighborhood, and (3) Understanding the time-dependent astrophysics of pre-main-sequence (pre-MS) and adolescent main sequence stars. Extensive information for the #10,000 claimed NYMG members exists in the literature, ranging from mere suggestions of potential kinematic members to detailed characterization of fully confirmed members. Non-experts often feel overwhelmed when attempting to utilize the potential of NYMGs due to the large volume of available data scattered across various research resources such as papers, online databases, and tools. A central archive dedicated to NYMGs would be an essential asset for the astronomy community, maximizing the scientific power of NYMGs. Such a database for NYMGs and stellar clusters, called MOCADB, has recently become available to the astronomy community. Using information available from the MOCADB complemented by our data collection for more specific data, we will demonstrate the potential of NYMGs by addressing three scientific questions: (1) the evolution of stellar flares during the first 200 Myr, (2) the origin of NYMGs and their dissipation to the field star population, and (3) the early evolution of energetic phenomena (coronae, chromospheres) around low-mass NYMG members.

Funder: NASA

Amount: $470,416

PI: Inseok Song, Franklin College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Physics and Astronomy