University Honors

Within the Chinese American community, the art of embroidery is often valued as a way of forging one’s connections with Chinese history and culture. As a form of traditional textile craftsmanship, the knowledge of embroidery is often passed down through generations within a family. How does the act of creating a work of embroidery–which is, afterall, simply a piece of cloth–instigate the process of constructing one’s lineage and cultural identity? This project investigates the various aspects of embroidery–its technique, materiality, and design–in order to understand how the embroiderer’s choices in the process of embroidering dictates and shapes the meaning of the resulting work. The Chinese American embroiderer often chooses the type of stitch, material of the fabric, and the pattern to create an artwork with the specific intentions of portraying and constructing one’s own cultural identity. In this project, I demonstrated the power of embroidery and captured its cultural significance by creating my own work of embroidery. In doing so, this project demonstrated how it can be worthwhile to analyze the technical and material details of an embroidered cloth congruently as a way to understand this art medium’s power to preserve the embroiderer’s intergenerational memories and cultural identity.

Human pose estimation tools are designed to automatically detect facial and body key points and can be used to track humans in the environment. Typically, these are applied on adult data, and their application with young humans, such as infants, has not been adequately explored. These tools could be proven very useful in applications and research with infant populations that focus on movement assessment and diagnosis. The goal of this work was to examine the validity of a pose estimation tool, OpenPose, to track infant arm movement during reaching. A dataset involving videos from 36 infants (7 neurodivergent infants) who are less than 12 months old was used. The total number of reaching actions analyzed was 435. The wrist joint of each infant was manually tracked to obtain the 2D coordinates of its position throughout the reaching action. OpenPose was run in the same reaching segments to obtain the coordinates of the same keypoint. The ability of OpenPose to accurately track wrist joint motion was assessed through the direct comparison between the two methods. Certain parameters, such as different camera angles were also considered in the comparison. Bland-Altman and correlation analysis was performed in the coordinates obtained via the two methods and across the different camera angles. Our findings support a satisfactory performance of OpenPose to track infant reaching motion across the different angles, when compared to manual tracking. This work provides valuable insights into the use of OpenPose for motion tracking specifically in infants, an important yet under-represented population in this area of research.

Speaking up during doctor's appointments can be challenging for many people, especially for marginalized populations like the African American, Black, and Caribbean (ABC) population. However, it is a vital skill that could influence how patients make health decisions. According to a 2022 report by the California Healthcare Foundation, more than one in four Black Californians avoid care due to concerns of being treated unfairly.1 This leads to many Black patients refraining from asking questions, in fear that they will be judged or treated poorly. This highlights a significant issue, since patients' inability to advocate for themselves may result in poorer health outcomes and prolonged recovery time. Although there are websites that provide general tips on self-advocacy, an interactive resource is still lacking. To fill this gap, this project aims to put together a workbook that can assist Black patients in navigating patient-physician interactions. By incorporating principles from the book Smith's Patient-Centered Interviewing2, the workbook will contain worksheets that can guide patients to understand their healthcare values and better prepare for their healthcare visits. The completed workbook will be distributed to patients who participated in an experimental learning community as part of a study by the University of Riverside Program in Medical Education (PRIME)3 on self-advocacy in Black patients in the Inland Empire, California. With this resource, patients will feel more confident advocating for themselves by applying skills gained from the learning intervention in the clinical setting. The effectiveness will then be measured via participant satisfaction metrics conducted during 3- and 6-months follow-ups with patients in focus groups.

The present study examined the effect of social media parasocial contact on reducing stigmatization against individuals with mental disorders. 357 college students completed a survey measuring their experience of engaging in parasocial contact on social media and their response to a vignette character with bipolar disorder, including perceived dangerousness, relatability, and social distance. Regression analysis revealed that having more positive parasocial contact experiences decreased perceived dangerousness of the vignette character and increased relatability, decreasing social distance as a result. The finding highlights the effectiveness of parasocial contact in influencing people’s perceptions and suggests further research on psychological relationships social media platforms can create.

This project consists of using two types of single-cell datasets that are scanned from a developing mouse brain: Single-cell high-throughput chromatin conformation (scHi-C) and single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq). The goal of this project is to integrate the scHi-C data and scRNA-seq data by recreating the machine learning algorithm scGAD (single-cell Gene Associating Domain) from scratch and analyzing the accuracy of the recreated algorithm. We chose to recreate the scGAD algorithm from scratch in order to confirm that the research papers backing this algorithm are correct so that more research can be done into making new integration algorithms. I will explain step-by-step how we were able to accurately recreate the scGAD algorithm while also explaining the conceptual reasoning behind the decisions made at each step.

One thoroughly researched yet unexplained phenomenon is that women live longer than men on average. However, a 2023 study by Shawn Bauldry defined years lived free of serious physical or mental disability as “disability-free years.” While Bauldry’s research focused on comparisons between race and ethnic groups, his results also highlighted that women live longer than men despite experiencing more years with a disability. Curiously, Bauldry’s paper did not explore the potential factors explaining why women are more likely to develop a disability earlier in life than men. Therefore, this paper will conduct an integrative review on the factors contributing to this health disparity. By identifying and synthesizing current literature, this review aims to better understand how debilitating conditions are shaped by biological structures and gender inequities. Existing literature was collected on the biological and psychosocial factors of the three most common disabilities in women: low back pain, headaches, and depression. These three conditions were analyzed due to their prevalence in womens’ global health issues and their unexplored complex interplay of factors. The findings reveal a positive correlation between depression and stressful life events, such as emotional abuse and poverty. Additionally, biological factors such as fluctuating hormone levels during the menstrual cycle and pregnancy, increase the risk of chronic headaches, low back pain, and depression. Furthermore, medical professionals’ reliance on the biomedical approach rather than the biopsychosocial approach, creates a barrier for chronic pain intervention. Overall, these factors elucidate the psychosocial and biological complexities between disability-free years and gender. This paper concludes with solutions, such as intersectional health research and programs broadening the implementation of the biopsychosocial model in healthcare.

Thinking about, planning for, and completing tasks is a compulsory aspect of everyday life. A less apparent, and far less understood, aspect of our daily lives is the joint influences of thinking about future and present task demands. For instance, imagine you are performing a routine task like getting ready for school, then suddenly you recall your upcoming midterm. In a fluster, preoccupied by thoughts about the midterm, you leave home without brushing your teeth. In this case, realizing the upcoming task (your midterm) interfered with completing a task at hand (brushing your teeth). The present study tests whether knowledge about an upcoming task will interfere with performance on a preceding task. It addresses current and future task interference in terms of verbal fluency (or word generation). It suggests that joint task influences are mediated by pre-castination: the tendency to start subgoals as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra effort. Furthermore, this study seeks to expand pre-crastination to the verbal domain and offers a novel experimental design for verbal fluency. The implications of joint task interference cannot be overstated, given the busyness of the modern-day schedule.

This study investigates the effects of smoke exposure on the behavior and lung health of wild-caught Anna’s hummingbirds. Twelve birds were placed in individual insect cages with a syringe of 30 mL of nectar solution. Half the birds, the smoke group, were placed inside an environmental chamber and exposed to cold wood smoke of 1,419 µg/m3 concentration for 4 hours. The remaining six birds, the control group, were placed in a separate environmental chamber without smoke. At the end of the exposure, half of each group was euthanized immediately to study short-term effects on the lungs, including acute inflammation, immune cell infiltration, and carbon deposition. The other half were euthanized two weeks later to study long-term effects on the lungs, such as fibrosis and structural damage. A necropsy was performed on all the birds. Their lungs were processed for immunohistochemistry and analyzed after Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining. Observational results showed no differences in behavior between the two groups during the experiment. Statistical results (T-tests) showed no difference in food consumed by the smoke group versus the control group, but did show that the males ate more than the females. Additionally, neither group had significant data on weight loss nor gain after the experiment. Overall, this research aims to advance our understanding of avian respiratory physiology and behavior and enhance our understanding of the size and density of particulates that affect hummingbird lungs after wildfires.

Managed aquifer recharge (MAR) is a suite of methods used to replenish groundwater supply. Aquifer replenishment uses a range of water sources such as surface water, treated wastewater, and stormwater. In the critically overdrafted basins of Pajaro Valley, farm owners are using a unique MAR method, DSC-MAR, which allows for on-farm infiltration of untreated stormwater. Small infiltration basins (~4 acre) are installed on the farmland and surrounding stormwater is funneled into the basin. However, untreated stormwater in agriculturally-dense regions like Pajaro Valley can have high concentrations of pollutants including nitrates. To perform in situ remediation of stormwater nitrate, carbon-rich media such as almond shells and wood mulch have been added to the aquifer basins to induce denitrification, a naturally occurring soil microbial process that reduces nitrate to nitrogen gas, which is impacted by carbon availability and quality. However, the impacts of wet-dry cycling during seasonal rainfall events on carbon-rich amendments in MAR basins is not well understood. In this project, we used batch reactors to compare organic carbon release and degradation from carbon-rich amendments subjected to oxic, anoxic, or oscillating oxic-anoxic conditions. By assessing the influence of oxic-anoxic conditions on carbon amendment breakdown, we can determine which conditions promote dissolved organic carbon release and enhanced carbon media degradation. This would then allow for better insight into carbon amendment management at DSC-MAR sites for longer term in situ treatment of nitrate contamination in infiltrating waters.

Understanding the stability and evolution of personality disorders, particularly narcissism, remains a critical challenge in psychology [1]. Traditional longitudinal approaches often focus on linear changes and rank-order stability, potentially overlooking nuanced patterns and oscillatory behavior [1, 2]. In this study, we adopt a dynamical systems approach to model the temporal evolution of narcissistic traits and other personality dimensions, capturing both linear and cyclic dynamics that static models might miss. Using eigenvalue analysis and numerical integration techniques [3, 5], we examine how traits such as superiority and exploitative tendencies exhibit growth trends, while others, like exhibitionism, demonstrate oscillatory or decreasing behavior. Our results contrast with previous meta-analytic findings [1], which reported that most personality disorder criteria decrease over time, with some stability in antisocial and obsessive-compulsive traits. Additionally, Grijalva et al. [2] found a consistent decline in narcissistic traits across the lifespan, with agentic, antagonistic, and neurotic narcissism all demonstrating negative growth trajectories. Unlike these prior works, our analysis highlights the coexistence of increasing, de- creasing, and oscillatory dynamics within individual traits, reflecting a more complex temporal landscape. This novel perspective not only questions the assumption of linear decline [1, 2], but also provides a framework to understand how personality dynamics may adapt or fluctuate in response to social and cultural influences. Our findings suggest that integrating dynamical systems theory into per- sonality research could lead to more nuanced therapeutic strategies [6], where clinicians capitalize on oscillatory periods of trait relaxation to foster breakthroughs in therapeutic settings. Future studies with larger datasets and extended observation periods are essential to generalize these find- ings and further explore the interplay between trait evolution and sociocultural dynamics.