The purpose of this project was to garner a greater understanding of the form, function, and uses of school as well as community gardens. Worldwide, school and community gardens are used to promote health, nutrition, and some aspects of education. I wished to extend my knowledge of these gardens to greater lengths by building and incorporating a school garden in a community that was underderserving. Along the way I also sought to better my understanding of how to help communities through the knowledge and aid of experts and other community members. By doing this, I would hopefully both improve that community as well as understand the difficulties and problems that stand in the way of greater school garden incorporation.

The Founder’s lab is a year-long program that gives students an opportunity to participate in a unique, team-based, experiential Barrett honors thesis project to design and apply marketing and sales strategies, as well as business and financial models to start up and launch a new business. This Barrett honors thesis project focuses on increasing the accessibility of health and wellness programs for small businesses and their employees through a customizable and easily implemented third party program that encourages employee retention.

In 2020, all states and territories within the United States have at least 20% obesity rates among adults, with the state of Arizona specifically being between 30-35% of adults (CDC, 2021). Being overweight and having obesity are linked to increased risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, certain cancers, as well as other chronic conditions (NIH, 2018). The high percentage is partly due to the work environment in society, which has become increasingly sedentary with the rise of labor-saving technologies, like computers for example. As a result, sedentary jobs have increased 83% since 1950 (American Heart Association, 2018). Our proposed solution to this problem of people not getting enough exercise is Bet Fitness. Bet Fitness is a mobile app that utilizes social and financial incentives to motivate users to consistently exercise. The quintessence of Bet Fitness is to bet money on your health. You first create a group with your friends or people you want to compete with. You then put in a specified amount of money into the betting pool. Users then have to exercise for a specified amount of days for a certain period of time (let’s say for instance, three times a week for a month). Workouts can be verified only by the other members of the group, where you can either send photos in a group chat, link your fitbit/other health data, or simply have another person vouch that you worked out as proof. Anyone who fails to keep up with the bet, loses their money that they put in and it gets equally distributed to the other members of the party. According to our initial survey, this idea has generated much interest among college students.

Diabetes affects millions of people globally and can lead to other severe health complications when undiagnosed or not properly managed. The incidence of diabetes has rapidly increased over the past several years, however, not all individuals have access to affordable or convenient healthcare. We hypothesize that wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has the potential to assess community health status by analyzing biomarkers indicative of human health and disease, including diabetes. Used in tandem with current methods, monitoring indicators of diabetes in community wastewater could provide a comprehensive assessment tool for disease prevalence in large and small populations. Specifically, the proposed targeted biomarker evaluated in this study to indicate population-wide diabetes prevalence was 8-hydroxy-2’- deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG). This work combines a rigorous literature review and initial laboratory studies to explore the possibility of diabetes monitoring at the community level using WBE. Here, 24-hour composite wastewater samples were collected from within two wastewater sub-catchments of Greater Tempe, AZ. Overall goals of this study were to: i) Determine the feasibility to detect endogenous markers of diabetes in community wastewater; ii) Assess the potential impact of confounding factors, such as smoking, cancer, and atherosclerosis, through a literature analysis; and iii) Evaluate the socioeconomic status and demographics of the study population. Preliminary results of the experiments suggest this methodology to be feasible, as indicated by the observation of detectable signals of 8-OHdG in community wastewater collected from the sewer infrastructure; however, future work and continued experimentation will be required to address low signal intensity and assay precision and accuracy. Thus, the work presented here provides valuable proof-of-concept data, with detailed information on the method employed and identified opportunities to further determine the relationship between 8-OHdG concentrations in municipal wastewater and diabetes prevalence at the community level.

Diabetes affects millions of people globally and can lead to other severe health complications when undiagnosed or not properly managed. The incidence of diabetes has rapidly increased over the past several years, however, not all individuals have access to affordable or convenient healthcare. We hypothesize that wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) has the potential to assess community health status by analyzing biomarkers indicative of human health and disease, including diabetes. Used in tandem with current methods, monitoring indicators of diabetes in community wastewater could provide a comprehensive assessment tool for disease prevalence in large and small populations. Specifically, the proposed targeted biomarker evaluated in this study to indicate population-wide diabetes prevalence was 8-hydroxy-2’-deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG). This work combines a rigorous literature review and initial laboratory studies to explore the possibility of diabetes monitoring at the community level using WBE. Here, 24-hour composite wastewater samples were collected from within two wastewater sub-catchments of Greater Tempe, AZ. Overall goals of this study were to: i) Determine the feasibility to detect endogenous markers of diabetes in community wastewater; ii) Assess the potential impact of confounding factors, such as smoking, cancer, and atherosclerosis, through a literature analysis; and iii) Evaluate the socioeconomic status and demographics of the study population. Preliminary results of the experiments suggest this methodology to be feasible, as indicated by the observation of detectable signals of 8-OHdG in community wastewater collected from the sewer infrastructure; however, future work and continued experimentation will be required to address low signal intensity and assay precision and accuracy. Thus, the work presented here provides valuable proof-of-concept data, with detailed information on the method employed and identified opportunities to further determine the relationship between 8-OHdG concentrations in municipal wastewater and diabetes prevalence at the community level.