Language has a critical role as a social determinant of health and a source of healthcare disparities. Rhetorical devices are ubiquitous in medicine and are often used to persuade or inform care team members. Rhetorical devices help a healthcare team acknowledge and interpret narratives. For example, metaphors are frequently used as rhetorical devices by patients to describe cancer, including winning or losing a battle, surviving a fight, war, potentially implying that the patient feels helpless like a pawn fighting in a struggle directed by the physician, thus reducing patient autonomy and agency. However, this occidental approach is flawed because it excessively focuses on the individual's agency and marginalizes external factors, such as cultural beliefs and social support (Sontag, 1989). Although there is a large body of research about how the rhetoric of medicine affects patients in the United States, there is a lack of such research about how patient experiences' rhetoric can help increase the understanding of Latino populations' unique social determinants. This creative project aims to analyze the rhetorical differences in the description of disease amongst Latino and American communities, translating to creating an educational module for a Spanish for biomedical sciences class. The objective is to increase future healthcare professionals' ability to understand how the composition of descriptions and medical rhetoric in different mediums of humanities can serve as critical tools to analyze social determinants in Latino healthcare delivery.

CD47 is a cell surface receptor expressed on many cells in the body. It has many immune functions such as marking host cells as “self” and the activation of apoptosis through phagocytosis. Mac-1 is a major integrin on myeloid cells and has been implicated in several different macrophage immune functions. Previous studies from Dr. Ugarova’s lab demonstrated CD47 may form a complex with Mac-1 through the cis-interaction and could regulate Mac-1-dependent macrophage functions. To localize the binding site for Mac-1 in CD47, the extracellular domain of CD47 IgV was isolated as GST-fusion protein from E. coli cells. The recombinant fusion protein is being used in current studies with cell adhesion assays and immunoprecipitation to determine the complementary binding site in Mac-1.

Melanoma is one of the most severe forms of skin cancer and can be life-threatening due to metastasis if not caught early on in its development. Over the past decade, the U.S. Government added a Healthy People 2020 objective to reduce the melanoma skin cancer rate in the U.S. population. Now that the decade has come to a close, this research investigates possible large-scale risk factors that could lead to incidence of melanoma in the population using logistic regression and propensity score matching. Logistic regression results showed that Caucasians are 14.765 times more likely to get melanoma compared to non-Caucasians; however, after adjustment using propensity scoring, this value was adjusted to 11.605 times more likely for Caucasians than non-Caucasians. Cholesterol, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, and Hypertension predictors also showed significance in the initial logistic regression. By using the results found in this experiment, the door has been opened for further analysis of larger-scale predictors and gives public health programs the initial information needed to create successful skin safety advocacy plans.