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.

According to the CDC, obesity has increased from 30.5% to 42.4% over the past 18 years. Western diets (WDs) consist of large portions in high fats, high carbohydrates, excess sugar and high-glycemic foods that can cause metabolic complications and mitochondrial dysfunction. Diet-induced obesity can lead to changes in muscle metabolism and muscle fiber phenotypes, which in turn lead to metabolic complications. Muscle fiber phenotype is determined protein isoform-content of myosin heavy chain (MHC). Regular exercise alters mitochondrial content and fat oxidation and shifts MHC proportions under healthy circumstances. However, diet and exercise-driven fiber type shifts in diet-induced obesity are less understood. We designed our experiment to better understand the impact of diet and/ or exercise on fiber type content of gastrocnemius muscle in diet-induced obese mice. Exercise and genistein may be used as a treatment strategy to restore the MHC proportions in obese subjects to that of the lean subjects. We hypothesized that genistein and exercise would have the greatest MHC I change in muscle fiber phenotype of mouse gastrocnemius muscles. Further, we also hypothesized that a standard diet would reverse the expected increase in fast fiber phenotype (MHC IIb). Lastly, we also hypothesized that exercise would also reduce the abundance of MHC IIb. Gastrocnemius muscles were collected from mice, homogenized, run through gel electrophoresis and stained to give muscle fiber proportions. Paired sample t-tests were conducted for differences between the MHC isoforms compared to the lean (LN) and high-fat diet (HFD) control groups. The results showed that genistein and exercise significantly increased the abundance of MHC I muscle fibers (19%, p<0.05). Additionally, diet and exercise restored the muscle fiber phenotype to that of lean control. As expected, HFD obese mice exhibited elevated fast twitch fibers compared to only 3% slow twitch fibers. These findings show the potential for exercise and supplementation of genistein as a strategy to combat diet induced obesity. Future research should aim to understand the mechanisms that genistein acts on to make these changes, and aim to replicate these data in humans with obesity.

Cancers of the reproductive tissues make up a significant portion of the cancer burden and mortality experienced by humans. Humans experience several proximal causative carcinogens that explain a portion of cancer risk, but an evolutionary viewpoint can provide a unique lens into the ultimate causes of reproductive cancer vulnerabilities. A life history framework allows us to make predictions on cancer prevalence based on a species’ tempo of reproduction. Moreover, certain variations in the susceptibility and prevalence of cancer may emerge due to evolutionary trade-offs between reproduction and somatic maintenance. For example, such trade-offs could involve the demand for rapid proliferation of cells in reproductive tissues that arises with reproductive events. In this study, I compiled reproductive cancer prevalence for 158 mammalian species and modeled the predictive power of 13 life history traits on the patterns of cancer prevalence we observed, such as Peto’s Paradox or slow-fast life history strategies. We predicted that fast-life history strategists will exhibit higher neoplasia prevalence risk due to reproductive trade-offs. Furthering this analytical framework can aid in predicting cancer rates and stratifying cancer risk across the tree of life.

Quantum computing is an emerging and promising alternative to classical computing due to its ability to perform rapidly complex computations in a parallel manner. In this thesis, we aim to design an audio classification algorithm using a hybrid quantum-classical neural network. The thesis concentrated on healthcare applications and focused specifically on COVID-19 cough sound classification. All machine learning algorithms developed or implemented in this study were trained using features from Log Mel Spectrograms of healthy and COVID-19 coughing audio. Results are first presented from a study in which an ensemble of a VGG13, CRNN, GCNN, and GCRNN are utilized to classify audio using classical computing. Then, improved results attained using an optimized VGG13 neural network are presented. Finally, our quantum-classical hybrid neural network is designed and assessed in terms of accuracy and number of quantum layers and qubits. Comparisons are made to classical recurrent and convolutional neural networks.

The Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) is a protein on the surface of cells that is a large component of the adaptive immune response as it helps recognize foreign pathogenic material. We wonder if a set of primers designed for each HLA type could be used to amplify a wide spectrum of HLA to improve sequencing of HLA to improve HLA-typing access. We propose the use of an HLA allele panel to determine the pulldown capacity of the primers followed by MinION sequencing and also offer a multiplexing design for running 96 patients at once. Our results show that primers can capture Class I HLA alleles and typing was successful with an average alignment accuracy of 91.7%. In conclusion this method for HLA capture could be utilized for HLA-typing with material costs of under $3.00 per sample within 3 days.