Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection

Humans use emotions to communicate social cues to our peers on a daily basis. Are we able to identify context from facial expressions and match them to specific scenarios? This experiment found that people can effectively distinguish negative and positive emotions from each other from a short description. However, further research is needed to find out whether humans can learn to perceive emotions only from contextual explanations.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of current advances and challenges in the field of bone tissue engineering. A systematic review of the literature was conducted to identify recent developments in biomaterials, scaffold design, cell sources, and growth factors for bone tissue engineering applications. Based on this review, an experimental proposal is presented for the development of porous composite biomaterials that may enhance bone regeneration, which consist of hybrid amyloid/spidroin fibers combined with a bioactive ceramic matrix. An iterative design process of modeling and simulation, production, and characterization of both the fibers and the composite material is proposed. A modeling and simulation approach is also presented for unidirectional fiber composite biomaterials using 2-point correlation functions, finite element simulations, and machine learning. This approach was demonstrated to enable the efficient and accurate prediction of the effective Young’s modulus of candidate composite biomaterials, which can inform the design of optimized materials for bone tissue engineering applications. The proposed experimental and simulation approaches have the potential to address current challenges and lead to the development of novel composite biomaterials that can augment the current technologies in the field of bone tissue engineering.

Globally, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. The disease and treatment cause many unfavorable symptoms such as fatigue, pain, and psychological stress. Research suggests that stress may negatively impact survival and recurrence outcomes of breast cancer patients. Cognitive-behavioral stress management (CBSM) programs have been found to improve these outcomes. In this thesis, I propose using virtual reality as a tool for CBSM to improve symptoms and outcomes for non-metastatic breast cancer patients.

Globally, breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. The disease and treatment cause many unfavorable symptoms such as fatigue, pain, and psychological stress. Research suggests that stress may negatively impact survival and recurrence outcomes of breast cancer patients. Cognitive-behavioral stress management (CBSM) programs have been found to improve these outcomes. In this thesis, I propose using virtual reality as a tool for CBSM to improve symptoms and outcomes for non-metastatic breast cancer patients.

This thesis’s goal was to design a theoretical research study based on a literature review on improving the aquaculture of European eels. Aquaculture is the farming of aquatic species such as fish. The European eel is a critically endangered catadromous fish species that faces a continuous decline in wild populations over the years due to pollution, climate change, industrial development, and overfishing. The replenishing of the fishery stock of European eels relies heavily on the wild population since there is no sustainable way of creating a generational captive population. The reason for this is that the lifecycle and environmental triggers of freshwater eels are relatively unknown due to their long lifespan, migratory lifestyle, metamorphoses, and sex differentiation timing. The primary focus of the design was to use different hormonal regiments and compared their effects on hatch rate, clutch size, survival rate, and lifespan of the juvenile eels. From this, it was concluded that the mother eel’s lipid storage impacts the quality of yolk sacs which in turn impacts the survival of leptocephali (eel larvae). The primary focus on eel population recovery should be habitat restoration and research on the leptocephalus stage since they both have the most evidence of success in eel population recovery.

As the pandemic hit back in 2019, an influx of pet adoptions occurred as more people were spending time home alone and saw the need for a companion. While SARS-CoV-2 is still circulating the globe, and mutating into different strains, people are continuing to work from home close to their animals. Evidence has shown that animals like dogs, cats, minks, and ferrets can contract the disease from their human counterparts, however, it is unclear if humans can contract the disease back from their animal companions [6]. While we have seen these Coronavirus outbreaks continually occur in the past several decades, we must be properly knowledgeable on the transmission capabilities of the virus to combat another wave of a SARS outbreak for future decades to come. Earlier coronavirus’ present in veterinary medicine has been noted to progress into more fatal and aggressive diseases when transmitted from one species to another [7], and therefore it is just as important that we understand the transmission possibilities of the virus in animals as we do ourselves. To determine if our pets can transmit the virus to us humans, a study is proposed where canines are purposefully inoculated with a selected SARS-Cov-2 virus and exposed to human volunteers to determine if the virus can spill back from canines to humans. To determine which virus strain will be utilized for the study, data regarding potential strain hosts will be collected from directly ill volunteers who also own canines prior to inoculation.