This 15-week long course is designed to introduce students, specifically in Arizona, to basic sustainability and conservation principles in the context of local reptile wildlife. Throughout the course, the students work on identifying the problem, creating visions for the desired future, and finally developing a strategy to help with reptile species survival in the valley. Research shows that animals in the classroom have led to improved academic success for students. Thus, through creating this course I was able to combine conservation and sustainability curriculum with real-life animals whose survival is directly being affected in the valley. My hope is that this course will help students identify a newfound passion and call to action to protect native wildlife. The more awareness and actionable knowledge which can be brought to students in Arizona about challenges to species survival the more likely we are to see a change in the future and a stronger sense of urgency for protecting wildlife. In order to accomplish these goals, the curriculum was developed to begin with basic concepts of species needs such as food and shelter and basic principles of sustainability. As the course progresses the students analyze current challenges reptile wildlife faces, like urban sprawl, and explore options to address these challenges. The course concludes with a pilot pitch where students present their solution projects to the school.

"No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth." These were the words of former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya who publicly expressed his regret in a 2017 interview over his role in co-creating Facebook. Palihapitiya shared that social media is ripping apart the social fabric of society and he also sounded the alarm regarding social media’s unavoidable global impact. He is only one of social media’s countless critics. The more disturbing issue resides in the empirical evidence supporting such notions. At least 95% of adolescents own a smartphone and spend an average time of two to four hours a day on social media. Moreover, 91% of 16-24-year-olds use social media, yet youth rate Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter as the worst social media platforms. However, the social, clinical, and neurodevelopment ramifications of using social media regularly are only beginning to emerge in research. Early research findings show that social media platforms trigger anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and other negative mental health effects. These negative mental health symptoms are commonly reported by individuals from of 18-25-years old, a unique period of human development known as emerging adulthood. Although emerging adulthood is characterized by identity exploration, unbounded optimism, and freedom from most responsibilities, it also serves as a high-risk period for the onset of most psychological disorders. Despite social media’s adverse impacts, it retains its utility as it facilitates identity exploration and virtual socialization for emerging adults. Investigating the “user-centered” design and neuroscience underlying social media platforms can help reveal, and potentially mitigate, the onset of negative mental health consequences among emerging adults. Effectively deconstructing the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (i.e., hereafter referred to as “The Big Three”) will require an extensive analysis into common features across platforms. A few examples of these design features include: like and reaction counters, perpetual news feeds, and omnipresent banners and notifications surrounding the user’s viewport. Such social media features are inherently designed to stimulate specific neurotransmitters and hormones such as dopamine, serotonin, and cortisol. Identifying such predacious social media features that unknowingly manipulate and highjack emerging adults’ brain chemistry will serve as a first step in mitigating the negative mental health effects of today’s social media platforms. A second concrete step will involve altering or eliminating said features by creating a social media platform that supports and even enhances mental well-being.

Over the course of 2020, individuals and organizations were thrown various unprecedented obstacles that necessitated flexibility, empathy, and understanding. Many organizations were forced to reevaluate their financial status, their purpose, and how they could provide for their employees. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that most companies had to introduce a ‘work from home’ policy, drastically decreasing the face-to-face contact that employees had with each other and leadership. The virus, coupled with the social and political unrest in the U.S. in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 presidential election, inspired many companies to reframe their organization and redefine their goals.<br/> The B2B (business-to-business) Marketing Agency, The Mx Group, is preparing for a change in leadership, with the current Chief Executive Officer and Founder stepping down, being replaced by the President of the company. The company plans to execute the transition in the spring of 2022, allowing them the rest of 2021 to plan for the change, catering to employees’ individual and the company’s collective needs. It was also prompted by factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic to reevaluate the values that it upholds as an organization, coinciding with the change in leadership. Leaders of the company are actively encouraging employees to engage with these values by recognizing when a colleague performs in alignment with a value.<br/> In reframing their organization, The Mx Group has a significant opportunity to uniquely position itself in the industry. Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal (2017) introduced four frames: human resources, symbolic, structural, and political, as a way to guide a transformative application of leadership and management in business. Analyzed from these perspectives, The Mx Group can utilize contemporary ideas to efficiently and effectively seize its opportunity of embedding new values and a change in leadership.

Human beings have long sought to conquer the unconquerable and to push the boundaries of human endurance. There are few such endeavors more challenging than venturing into the coldest and harshest environments on the planet. The challenges these adventurers face are nearly countless, but one that is often underestimated is the massive risk of dehydration in high mountains and the lack of sufficient technology to meet this important need. Astronauts and mountaineers of NASA's Johnson Space Center have created a technology that solves this problem: a freeze-resistant hydration system that helps stop water from freezing at sub-zero temperatures by using cutting-edge technology and materials science to insulate and heat enough water to prevent dehydration over the course of the day, so that adventurers no longer need to worry about their equipment stopping them. This patented technology is the basis of the founding of Aeropak, an advanced outdoor hydration brand developed by three ASU students (Kendall Robinson, Derek Stein, and Thomas Goers) in collaboration with W.P. Carey’s Founder’s Lab. The primary goal was to develop traction among winter sport enthusiasts to create a robust customer base and evaluate the potential for partnership with hydration solution companies as well as direct sales through online and brick-and-mortar retail avenues. To this end, the Aeropak team performed market research to determine the usefulness and need for the product through a survey sent out to a number of outdoor sporting clubs on Arizona State University’s campus. After determining an interest in a potential product, the team developed a marketing strategy and business model which was executed through Instagram as well as a standalone website, with the goal of garnering interest and traction for a future product. Future goals of the project will be to bring a product to market and expand Aeropak’s reach into a variety of winter sport subcommunities, as well as evaluate the potential for further expansion into large-scale retailers and collaboration with established companies.

The concept of Nature Made Candles was to “educate candle lovers on the importance of knowing what is in the candle. Everyone should know what they are inhaling...no matter how nice (or not) it smells. Earth needed a candle for enjoying scents and sights without hindering health, so we made one.” The objective evolved into educating the student population of Arizona State University (ASU) about what ingredients go into commercial candles, with a particular focus on the wax and scent, as well as giving students a free candle that emulated the holistic ingredients they were educated on. This project was designed to be a quality improvement and health promotion project with an emphasis on the ASU student population. The purpose of the project was to find a type of candle that was friendly to the lungs of all individuals who wanted candles in their household.

In this thesis paper, the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed. Chapter 1 discusses what inspired me to write this thesis and follows with a discussion of social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chapter 2 takes a step back and discusses biological effects of social isolation in general. Chapter 3 discusses the psychological effects of social isolation. Finally, this thesis concludes with a discussion of what can be done to help those experiencing social isolation during the pandemic.

My research aims to determine the effectiveness of meditation and sleep applications (apps) on the reduction of anxiety and stress in college students, with a focus on sedative piano music. Results showed a significant reduction of stress and anxiety levels in college students when listening to sedative piano music versus non-sedative piano music. Music along with other therapy modalities in meditation and sleep apps show promise in reducing students’ anxiety and stress and promoting their successes.

Though about 75 percent of American waste is recyclable, only 30 percent of it is actually recycled and less than ten percent of plastics disposed of in the United States in 2015 were recycled. A statistic like this demonstrates the immense need to increase recycling rates in order to move towards cultivating a circular economy and benefiting the environment. With Arizona State University’s (ASU) extensive population of on-campus students and faculty, our team was determined to create a solution that would increase recycling rates. After conducting initial market research, our team incentives or education. We conducted market research through student surveys to determine the level of knowledge of our target audience and barriers to entry for local recycling and composting resources. Further, we gained insight into the medium of recycling and sustainability programs they would be interested in participating in. Overall, the results of our surveys demonstrated that a majority of students were interested in participating in these programs, if they were not already involved, and most students on-campus already had access to these resources. Despite having access to these sustainable practices, we identified a knowledge gap between students and their information on how to properly execute sustainable practices such as composting and recycling. In order to address this audience, our team created Circulearning, an educational program that aims to bridge the gap of knowledge and address immediate concerns regarding circular economy topics. By engaging audiences through our quick, accessible educational modules and teaching them about circular practices, we aim to inspire everyone to implement these practices into their own lives. Though our team began the initiative with a focus on implementing these practices solely to ASU campus, we decided to expand our target audience to implement educational programs at all levels after discovering the interest and need for this resource in our community. Our team is extremely excited that our Circulearning educational modules have been shared with a broad audience including students at Mesa Skyline High School, ASU students, and additional connections outside of ASU. With Circulearning, we will educate and inspire people of all ages to live more sustainably and better the environment in which we live.

Glioblastoma (GB) is one of the deadliest cancers and the most common form of adult primary brain tumors. SGEF (ARHGEF26) has been previously shown to be overexpressed in GB tumors, play a role in cell invasion/migration, and increase temozolomide (TMZ) resistance.[3] It was hypothesized parental LN229 cell lines with SGEF knockdown (LN229-SGEFi) will show decreased metabolism in the MTS assay and decreased colony formation in a colony formation assay compared to parental LN229 cells after challenging the two cell lines with TMZ. For WB and co-immunoprecipitation (co-IP), parental LN229 cells with endogenous SGEF and BRCA were expected to interact and stain in the BRCA1:IP WB. LN229-SGEFi cells were expected to show very little SGEF precipitated due to shRNA targeted knockdown of SGEF. In conditions with mutations in the BRCA1 binding site (LN229-SGEFi + AdBRCAm/AdDM), SGEF expression was expected to decrease compared to parental LN229 or LN229-SGEFi cells reconstituted with WT SGEF (LN229-SGEFi + AdWT). LN229 infected with AdSGEF with a mutated nuclear localization signal (LN229-SGEFi + AdNLS12m) were expected to show BRCA and SGEF interaction since whole cell lysates were used for the co-IP. MTS data showed no significant differences in metabolism between the two cell lines at all three time points (3, 5, and 7 days). Western blot analysis was successful at imaging both SGEF and BRCA1 protein bands from whole cell lysate. The CFA showed no significant difference between cell lines after being challenged with 500uM TMZ. The co-IP immunoblot showed staining for BRCA1 and SGEF for all lysate samples, including unexpected lysates such as LN229-SGEFi, LN229-SGEFi + AdBRCAm, and LN229-SGEFi + AdDM. These results suggested either an indirect protein interaction between BRCA1 and SGEF, an additional BRCA binding site not included in the consensus, or possible detection of the translocated SGEF in knockdown cells lines since shRNA cannot enter the nucleus. Further optimization of CO-IP protocol, MTS assay, and CFA will be needed to characterize the SGEF/BRCA1 interaction and its role in cell survival.

In the current age of global climate crisis, corporations must confront the rising pressure to mitigate their environmental impacts. The goal of this research paper is to provide corporations with a resource to manage waste through the implementation of a circular economy and by increasing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Navigating this large and complex system required the use of various methodologies including: the investigation of the relationships between waste management systems and sustainable development across major companies; literature reviews of scholarly articles about CSR, circular economies, recycling, and releases of company reports on sustainable development and financials. Lastly, interviews and a survey were conducted to gain deeper insight into the problems that make circular economies so difficult to achieve at scale.