Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

It is a fact of modern food processing that the majority of products contain one or multiple food additives. Yet, while these additives see great abundance of use, the average consumer has relatively little knowledge about them and, more often than not, a negative opinion of their inclusion. This piece explores the discrepancy between these two realities by delving into the origins, histories of use, health effects, and misconceptions that surround a number of modern food additives, exploring along the way the social changes and regulatory history that brought about the legal landscape of food safety in the United States. Ten author-developed recipes are included at the end to encourage not only a conceptual, but also a practical familiarity with these same food additives.

Speculative fiction and fantasy media have abundant power to portray alternative realities or imagined futures for minority groups. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from the late 1990s-early 2000s, and Wynonna Earp, from the late 2010s, are two fantasy television shows that produce this often-progressive, impactful representation, particularly for lesbians and bisexual people. Drawing on Queer and Monster Theories from Susan Stryker, Marilee Lindemann, Harry Benshoff, and Alexis Lothian, this thesis examines queer representation in these TV shows and how it contributes to the normalization of LGBTQ+ individuals whilst simultaneously honoring the shows’ queer fans. Normalizing non-cishetero genders and sexualities helps rewrite the narrative of LGBTQ+ people being considered “deviant” and threatening societal order; and holding true to queer roots of challenging social norms prevents the power of the queer community from being influenced by the pressures of compulsory heterosexuality.

This project aims to develop a new technology and technique that will aid in the relatively automated detection of respiratory-related changes that are exacerbated by air pollutants (e.g. lung function/respiratory changes due to air-pollution-induced asthma). This work involves understanding air transport in the human respiratory system (including the chemical and physiological impacts of air pollutants), advancing the state of the art in sensing, acoustic signal processing, and machine learning to enhance automation.

This paper outlines cumulative research on food deserts in relation to college students; namely, that there are communities classified as food deserts because significant numbers of the population lack access to grocery stores selling fresh produce or other goods normally called “healthy.” These areas are often also food swamps, or areas with intense access to sugar-dense, high-fat foods. Research as a whole suggests that three, among many, things might primarily drive food insecurity for individuals caught in these food deserts: lack of access to a personal vehicle, low income or prohibitively expensive healthy foods, and personal education or culture (Wright, 2016). College students both fit into the geographical food deserts and are individuals who tend to have a worrying level of food insecurity (Kim, 2018). It is costly to make adjustments to entire environments to rid communities of food desert qualities, and it is not always effective as ending food insecurity or malnutrition; instead, it can be much more effective to focus on individuals within communities and help push cultures into a better direction. This project demonstrates that ASU students are experiencing food dissatisfaction and are in a food desert worthy of attention and action, and that students are motivated to see a solution. The solution that the paper focuses on is a food delivery system of fresh produce and foods for students. 


Flavonoids are important biomolecules with a variety of pharmaceutical and agricultural applications. Currently, isolating these compounds is done by plant extraction, however this process is hindered by large land and energy requirements. Previous groups have aimed to overcome these challenges by engineering microbes to produce these important compounds, however this is largely bottlenecked by the lack of intercellular malonyl-CoA availability. To remedy this, the genes matB and matC have been identified as coding for malonyl-CoA synthase and a putative dicarboxylate carrier protein, respectively. Other works have successfully engineered two variants, Streptomyces coelicolor and Rhizobium trifolii, of these genes into Escherichia coli, however this has yet to be accomplished in Gram-positive Corynebacterium glutamicum. Additionally, other groups have neglected to attempt tuning these genes with respect to one another by inserting in front of different inducible promoters. This study has successfully assembled two plasmids containing the Streptomyces coelicolor and Rhizobium trifolii variants of both matB and matC. Preliminary fermentations and GCMS results confirmed that little to none naringenin was produced without the matB-matC module. Additionally, preliminary fermentations revealed that the DelAro1 and DelAro3 strains can be used to reduce metabolism of aromatics like naringenin.