YO SOY RUMANO (I AM ROMANIAN): AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF MEMORY AND TRAUMA ON THE FORMATION OF THE SELF

I came to the United States from Romania with my parents when I was two years old. This moment of cultural, linguistic, and geographic separation occurred before I was able to consciously recall it, yet it constitutes a traumatic experience, in the Freudian and Lacanian sense, that defines my positionality and serves as a primary space in which I seek to develop who I am. However, regardless of how much I have developed my ability to communicate in English, it is not the language of my emotional affect. At the same time, profound expression in Romanian is not possible for me, as my ability to write in Romanian has weakened considerably since I only ever speak the language in my home. This leaves me, and other migrants like me, struggling to understand our place in our family’s migration stories—we are trying to claim our migrant identities without the proper language to understand our positions and process the corresponding trauma.

To solve this problem, I propose the writing of an autobiographical account and academic investigation in my third language, Spanish. Through this framework and creative exercise, I posit the weakening of my primary language as a mark of the trauma of youth migration and an open wound that I, as well as other migrants like me, carry every day, that can be resolved by exercising agency and learning/accessing a related third language as a process of working though or stitching up that open wound.

Because We Go: Poetry Exploring Memory and the Migrant Identity

I came to the United States from Romania with my parents when I was two years old. I struggle to remember this moment directly and I often find myself trying to bridge a personal gap between languages and cultures, between my memories and my parents’ stories, and within my own emotional affect. This chapbook project serves to probe my own narrative and analyze my own position in the world as a multilingual and multicultural individual, while aligning itself with a definition of memory that hinges on intergenerational storytelling, rather than lived experience alone. The poems vary in form and subject, and are unified by a sense of longing and an exploration of how an immigrant child understands their position—displaced from a home culture, and never fully planted in the adopted culture. This chapbook proposes that creative expression through poetry is a vital operation for young migrants seeking to better understand themselves, showing that memory and identity are not stagnant relics, but rather dynamic and ever-developing processes. This project is my story.

Approach Behavior to Species-Specific Sounds in Domestic Cats (Felis catus)

There have been studies to support that cats respond to cat-specific auditory stimuli. Researchers have found that cats listening to “cat music” respond with a shorter approach latency, more orientation, and more contact with the speaker than cats listening to regular classical music. Other studies have found that listening to “cat music” lowers stress-related behaviors of cats during a veterinary exam when compared to classical music and silence. In this study we focused on which elements within cat-specific music are most attractive to cats. These elements include an isolated purring track, an isolated suckling track, an isolated instrumental track, and the original track that combines these three elements. Subjects were thirty-two domestic cats (Felis catus) housed at The Scratching Post Cat Café in Lewisburg, PA. A speaker was placed in the center of the room, and one of the sounds was played for 10 minutes. We recorded all individual behaviors for one cat per trial, as well as distance from the speaker for all cats at one minute intervals. Three trials of each of the five conditions were conducted at night (8pm) over a span of five weeks. Cats approached the speaker significantly more in the isolated purring condition than in any other condition. Cats additionally approached the speaker more quickly in the isolated purr and suckle conditions. This suggests that cats’ interest in “cat music” may be best explained as an interest in species specific sounds such as purring and suckling.

An LP-based Characterizations Of Solvable Cases Of the Quadratic Assignment Problem

The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is perhaps the most widely studied nonlinear combinatorial optimization problem. It has many applications in various fields, yet has proven to be extremely difficult to solve. This difficulty has motivated researchers to identify special objective function structures that permit an optimal solution to be found in an efficient manner. Previous work has shown that certain such structures can be explained in terms of the continuous relaxation of a mixed 0-1 linear reformulation of the problem known as the level-1 reformulation-linearization-technique (RLT) form. Specifically, the objective function structures were shown to ensure that a binary optimal extreme point solution exists to the continuous relaxation. This paper extends that work by considering known solvable cases in which the objective function coefficients have special chess-board and graded structures, and similarly characterizing them in terms of the level-1 RLT form. As part of this characterization, we develop a new relaxed version of the level-1 RLT form, the structure of which can be readily exploited to study the special instances under consideration.

Characterizing Styrenic Triblock Copolymer with Static Light Scattering
Light scattering refers to the process in which a wavelength of light hits a particle and scatters in a pattern. This pattern can be interpreted to allow us to understand the characteristics of said particle. For my research, we used a known measurement technique called static light scattering (SLS) which measures the intensity of this scattering at multiple angles and multiple concentrations. This technique allows us to calculate constants such as the molecular weight, the A2 virial coefficient, and radius of gyration of the scattered particle. Using this information, the measured polymer characteristics are used to explore the relationship between structure and behavior of the polymer. The instrument used for these measurements is the BI-200SM Goniometer. The beginning part of the research project was to assemble, align, and calibrate this instrument for use. As soon as the instrument was prepared, we performed the SLS procedure on multiple polymers supplied by Kuraray America and Kraton Polymers. Using solutions of known concentrations, and by measuring the scattered intensity at multiple angles, we are able to organize the data into a Zimm plot. This Zimm plot is organized such that we are able to easily determine the important constants of the polymers by observing the trendlines of the data. Seventeen different styrenic triblock polymers were characterized using this instrument. A procedure for future measurements using the instrument was also developed. This instrument is currently being used in further research opportunities of dynamic light scattering (DLS) behavior of polymer gels.

Kalman Symposium 2022 – Michaela Bracken

Synthesis of Fluorinated Fatty Acids for Use in Iron Oxide Nanoparticle Formation

Iron oxide nanoparticles are useful in several applications including imaging as contrast agents for MRI’s, drug carrier delivery for target specific sites and other biological therapeutic agents. Basic iron carboxylates of fatty acids can be used as precursors to nanoparticles. These complexes are important to study so that applications of iron oxide nanoparticles can be improved and built upon. If they contain a fluorine atom, basic iron carboxylates can be studied using 19F NMR to examine the structure and aggregation of these nanoparticle precursors. To accomplish this goal, fatty acids with a fluorine marker must be synthesized, due to their commercial unavailability. Our approach focused on an SN2-like fluorination of hydroxy fatty acids using XtalFluor-E. Sodium-12-fluorostearate was synthesized as an initial target from 12-hydroxystearic acid. This molecule was easily prepared but fell short of success due to the marker being too far away from the iron aggregation site. The position of the marker in the ligand is important and determines how well the activity can be monitored by NMR when reacted with iron. A second ligand, 6-hydroxy heptadecanoic acid, is being created that uses bromovaleric acid as the starting material. This synthesis, which is currently in progress, will require additional steps but will put the fluorine marker closer to iron to give a better read of the aggregation activity at the iron center.

Measuring Concordance of Sulcogyral Patterns in Monozygotic and Dizygotic Twin Pairs

The brain’s surface is made up of sulci (grooves) and gyri (ridges) that together create the distinct folded (sulcogyral) appearance of the brain. Sulcogyral folding patterns have been identified in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) based on the continuity of the medial and lateral orbital sulci (MOS & LOS). Pattern types are named according to their frequency in the neurotypical population, with Type I present in ~50%, Type II in ~30%, Type III in ~15%, and Type IV in ~5%. It has been previously found that populations with schizophrenia have reduced frequency of Type I patterns, but the heritability of the OFC sulcogyral patterns is unknown.
The goal of this project was to explore whether OFC patterns are heritable. We examined whether there is increased concordance of patterns in 172 monozygotic (MZ) twins relative to 304 dizygotic (DZ) twins using structural magnetic resonance imaging data. We also characterized pattern subtypes to explore variance within OFC sulci that is not based on MOS and LOS continuity.
We find no difference in concordance rates between MZ and DZ twin pairs. Results from subtype analysis suggest that variability exists in other sulci that are not captured in overall OFC pattern characterization. This suggests subtyping may be important for future studies to further understand the relationships between pattern types and subtypes. Overall, these results suggest minimal genetic influence on OFC pattern types, indicating that OFC sulcogyral patterns may capture important variance that is not genetic in origin but is relevant to psychiatric disease risk.

INFLUENCE OF MATERNAL SEPARATION ON STRESS & ALCOHOL REWARD: CONTRIBUTIONS OF B-ENDORPHIN

Adverse childhood experiences affect over half of the population. and are associated with chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance misuse in adulthood. The opioid peptide β-endorphin regulates the stress response and has been implicated in the risk for excessive alcohol consumption. Clinical research has demonstrated that initial sensitivity to the rewarding effects of alcohol is associated with stress sensitivity and predicts the risk of developing an alcohol use disorder. Here, we explored the influence of β-endorphin on changes induced by maternal separation in open field activity, [as well as the initial rewarding effects of alcohol], using control C57BL/6J and β-endorphin deficient B6.129S2-Pomc tm1Low /J; KO mice. Maternal separation (MS) occurred for three hours each day from postnatal days (PND) 5-18. Maternal interactions did not differ between genotypes, but were influenced by the separation protocol. MS and control subjects were tested as adolescents (PND-26 to 32) or adults (PND-58 to 72). Anxiety was assessed using an open field assay, [followed by a single-exposure conditioned-place preference paradigm to measure alcohol reward].  The effects of maternal separation, early stress, on anxiety and alcohol reward are age and B-endorphin dependent.

Using Chaotic Interrogation and Attractor Deformation to Determine Damage Location and Extent

One promising approach for detecting damage in non-linear systems is to use chaotic interrogation: a system is excited by a chaotic signal and the resulting response is used to infer the damaged state. In this work, a new method based on boundary transformation vectors (BTVs) is explored as a way of simultaneously ascertaining both damage level and location.
The process works as follows: (1) The system is excited by a chaotic signal. (2) The system response is recorded at some location. (3) The peaks of the system response are sampled and combined to create a picture of the chaotic signal known as a Poincare section. (4) By comparing the boundaries of Poincare sections for different damage states using BTVs, the damage level and location can be inferred.
Three different systems were explored: a 5-body mass-spring-damper model, a simulated cantilever beam, and a physical cantilever beam. To excite these systems, a chaotic Brusselator signal was chosen. Displacements were used as output signals in the simulated systems; for the physical beam, acceleration was used.
Results from the simulated systems demonstrate that chaotic interrogation and BTV analysis can be used to ascertain system damage in stiffness or damping and, in some cases, location because Poincare boundary changes scale with the level of damage. For the physical beam, damage extent was discernible for particular combinations of damage and observer locations. However, indications of damage location were inconsistent.
Overall, these results demonstrate that the BTV method has promise and can be improved with further research.

Factors That Influence Successful Base Catalyzed Thiol-ene Hydrogel Synthesis

Ethoxylated trimethylolpropane tri-3-mercaptopropionate (ETTMP) and poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA)-based hydrogels are a promising candidate for injectable, localized drug delivery due to the potential for non-swelling behavior and controllable drug release properties. However, we find that existing literature synthesis methods suffer from slow gelation times or a lack of reproducible procedures. In this work, we present a repeatable synthesis procedure, along with a sensitivity analysis of the major variables that impact successful synthesis. Our methods allow the hydrogels to be reliably synthesized in a polymer concentration range of 15 to 90 wt.%, resulting in gelation times between 2 min and 1 h with equilibrium moduli between 3.5 and 190 kPa. Furthermore, base-catalyzed conjugate Michael curing led to 16.35 min and 1.67 min gelation times for buffer pH values of 6.5 and 8, respectively. Additionally, we show that ETTMP purification directly controls the concentration of mercaptopropionic acid (MPA) necessary to inhibit the Michael addition. Lastly, we find that a stoichiometric mixture of ETTMP and PEGDA has a freezing point range of -17.9 ºC to -27.2 ºC and can be stored at -20 ºC for 2 months without crosslinking, as opposed to 2 days at room temperature, making storage and shipment of mixtures possible.