Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
CONTEXT: Eating disorders are often portrayed as afflicting underweight women with a diagnosis of anorexia nervosa. Demographics of people outside this stereotype face health disparities in illness recognition and treatment. Passive exposure to information on eating disorders can reduce stereotypical beliefs among nursing students, which has the potential to improve patient care.
METHOD: Case studies, practice questions, vignettes, and care plans from eight psychiatric nursing textbooks were analyzed for portrayal of the three research variables.
DATA and RESULTS: Men were not significantly underrepresented in the exemplars. Transgender clients, clients of normal or overweight status, and clients with diagnoses other than anorexia nervosa were significantly underrepresented from eating disorder exemplars.
CONCLUSION: Textbooks should be adjusted to include more exemplars from underrepresented demographics of clients with eating disorders.
The purpose of this project is to analyze the current state of cancer nanomedicine and its challenges. Cancer is the second most deadly illness in the United States after heart disease. Nanomedicine, the use of materials between 1 and 100 nm to for the purpose of addressing healthcare-related problems, is particularly suited for treating it since nanoparticles have properties such as high surface area-to-volume ratios and favorable drug release profiles that make them more suitable for tasks such as consistent drug delivery to tumor tissue. The questions posed are: What are the current nanomedical treatments for cancer? What are the technical, social, and legal challenges related to nanomedical treatments and how can they be overcome? To answer the questions mentioned above, information from several scientific papers on nanomedical treatments for cancer as well as from social science journals was synthesized. Based on the findings, nanomedicine has a wide range of applications for cancer drug delivery, detection, and immunotherapy. The main technical challenge related to nanomedical treatments is navigating through biological barriers such as the mononuclear phagocyte system, the kidney, the blood-brain barrier, and the tumor microenvironment. Current approaches to meeting this challenge include altering the size, shape, and charge of nanoparticles for easier passage. The main social and legal challenge related to nanomedical treatments is the difficulty of regulating them due to factors such as the near impossibility of detecting nanowaste. Current approaches to meeting this challenge include the use of techniques such as scanning tunneling microscopy and atomic force microscopy to help distinguish nanowaste from the surroundings. More research will have to be done in these and other areas to enhance a major cancer-fighting tool.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous impact on people’s lives and it has reemphasized health inequities in the United States. Historically, minority communities have faced barriers to accessing health care and demonstrated hesitancies to getting vaccinated for various diseases. This has led to disparities in terms of how different diseases affect different communities. This same pattern has been seen regarding how COVID-19 has affected different ethnicities in the U.S. Statistics have shown vaccination disparities for COVID-19 among different ethnicities and organizations in the U.S. have employed different strategies to address this health inequity. This thesis analyzes the hesitancies and barriers to getting vaccinated for COVID-19, specifically among African Americans and Hispanics. Additionally, this thesis looks at the strategies that have been used to address the vaccination inequities that have affected these two ethnicities with a focus specifically on how mass vaccination sites and mobile health clinics try to address the vaccination disparity.