Stander Symposium Projects

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  Rhetorical Analysis of Rituals of Healing: Body, Mind, Spirit

  DJ Villhard, Abby Carter, Keelin Kelly

  Students in the CMM 357 Religious Rhetoric course were given the choice to choose a statue, building, space/place on campus that is marked as a religious text/artifact or propose a new object of visual rhetoric in order to analyze using the rhetorical theories from class. Thier analyses employ a variety of rhetorical theories and concepts discussed in class during the semester. Each group collaborated to answer the question: how does this artifact/text rhetorically communicate and construct religious identity at UD?

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  Rhetorical Analysis of the Marianist Community: Three O'clock Prayer Statue

  Tim Stewart, Brendan Miller, and Charlie Corrigan

  Students in the CMM 357 Religious Rhetoric course were given the choice to choose a statue, building, space/place on campus that is marked as a religious text/artifact or propose a new object of visual rhetoric in order to analyze using the rhetorical theories from class. Thier analyses employ a variety of rhetorical theories and concepts discussed in class during the semester. Each group collaborated to answer the question: how does this artifact/text rhetorically communicate and construct religious identity at UD?

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  Right-Sizing Solar Systems for Low-Income Housing

  Rishabh Sanjaykumar Shukla, Phillip Clayton

  Tools for estimating the solar systems for a building often err in oversizing out of caution in their results. This is fine for people who can afford the upfront cost and can wait for the eventual payback. But this makes it difficult for people with lower income to afford a solar system for their home, and lower income families are often the ones who could most use a relief from high energy bills.Our goal is to create an analysis tool that estimates the right size of solar system needed to fulfil the energy needs of a building with the lowest payback period and the least amount of energy going back into the grid.Using data for houses in the Dayton area with average, low, and high energy usage, we have analyzed what the payback period, amount of the load is met, and how much power is going back to the grid for various sizes of solar and battery capacities in a system. We then shifted these data sets +/-4 hours to analyze different scenarios of when energy consumption may line up with solar system production.The results of this analysis have given us a good idea of how certain combinations of solar and battery capacity in a system can work in buildings of different amounts of energy consumption. We will be able to build on this research in the future, to look at what solar systems will be needed if all the energy requirements of a building are converted to electricity. We will also record the actual energy usage of low income homes in the Dayton area to compare to this analysis.

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  Rising Interest Rates and Energy Price Trends in 2022

  Matthew Dahlke

  The macro environment in 2022 included a sustained effort by the US Federal Reserve to curb inflation through a major increase in the Federal Funds rate. In this study, I look at the growth rate trends in energy commodities (e.g. natural gas) and energy services (e.g. electricity) to see if their price trends are declining due to the Fed's policy of monetary tightening. I also compare the energy price growth rates to overall CPI growth rates to see if they trend together. I use year over year by month growth rates and rolling 3 month growth rates annualized to develop my trend analysis.

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  River Stewards 2023 Cohort Capstone Project

  Lyuba Benin, Victoria Jacobs, Sarah Yaroma, Kyle Torbic, Christopher Pirovano, Kerry Howard, Kelsey Saylor, Kathleen Dawson, Lauren Sapienza, Isabel Bartram, Elizabeth Vear, Emma Allington, Sean Zegarski, Grace Jackson, Natalie Yersavich

  The 2023 cohort of the University of Dayton River Stewards, the flagship program of the Rivers Institute, partnered with Dakota Center, a community partner located in West Dayton. The Rivers Institute, housed with other leadership development programs in the Fitz Center for Leadership in Community, uses a watershed model of community to promote service, learning, and leadership in Dayton and its neighboring communities. Capitalizing on an established relationship with the Dakota Center, the River Stewards began work towards revitalizing outdoor space at the Dakota Center, an under-utilized asset of the organization that could better serve both the afterschool and the senior programs there. The senior cohort organized volunteers from other cohorts in various garden days at the center and successfully wintered the garden, improved the raised beds, and prepared the garden for spring planting. In the off-season, the cohort developed a sustainability curriculum for the center’s afterschool program. These lesson plans drew upon the cohort’s interdisciplinary expertise, with a myriad of topics spanning from food sustainability to insect observation. As graduating seniors, the cohort intends for younger cohorts to continue nurturing this partnership; seniors compiled comprehensive lesson plans so future cohorts can continue the sustainability curriculum and garden days at the Dakota Center. The River Stewards hope that this project strengthens their partnership with the Dakota Center, that the curriculum enhances young people’s understanding and practice of sustainability, and that the garden days improve a space that inspires the joy of the outdoors in the greater Dayton community. The cohort thanks Mike Miller, Erin Wilson, Kristine Irby, Leslie King, and Kam Lee for their support and mentorship on this project.

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  Robotic Additive Manufacturing

  Ajith Kumar Veeraboina

  Additive manufacturing (AM) is a technology that produces a physical part directlyfrom its corresponding digital 3D model design. AM technology has been widely used in manyfields for rapid prototyping. Technological advancements in AM have shifted its purpose tomanufacturing. However, when compared to traditional manufacturing, AM is a slow process.So, the fabrication process speed must be improved by developing new mechanisms and slicingalgorithms and a model can be printed faster without sacrificing the surface quality and itsmechanical properties. Moreover, the 3D part fabrication time is dependent on the CAD model’scomplexity, such as overhanging structures. Most of the commercial 3D printers are based on agantry system, so printing such complex models requires support structures. So, it takes moretime and material to print both the support and the actual part. Therefore, developing multi-directional tool-path algorithms can minimize fabrication time. However, such algorithms canbe implemented only with a higher degree of freedom (DOF) mechanism, like industrial roboticarms. In this report, we have discussed about printing process architecture with a one six DOFmanipulator and testing a novel tool-path planning to improve mechanical properties with smoothsurface quality. Tensile tests are performed as per the ASTM D638-20 standards.

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  Role of M1BP, a transcriptional pausing factor in JNK-mediated cell death during eye development

  Hannah Darnell, Anuradha Chimata Venkatakrishnan

  During development, transcriptional regulation is a fundamental mechanism(s) to regulate differential gene expression. Recently, we have shown that M1BP, a transcriptional pausing factor and a functional homolog of ZKSCAN3, promotes cell survival in developing eyes by suppressing wingless (wg). We performed a forward genetic screen, to identify other targets of M1BP mediated transcriptional repression that may contribute to eye suppression phenotype. We identified members of Jun-amino-terminal-(NH2)-Kinase (JNK) signaling pathway as modifiers of the “no-eye” or “reduced-eye” phenotype of MIBPRNAi. We hypothesized that M1BP may promote cell survival in developing eyes by downregulating JNK signaling. Using the Gal4-UAS system, we modulated both JNK signaling components along with downregulation of M1BP function and assayed their role in cell survival during eye development. We found that downregulation of M1BP results in activation of JNK signaling which in turns activates both apoptosis as well as autophagy. Activation of JNK signaling enhances M1BPRNAi phenotype and downregulation of JNK signaling rescues the M1BPRNAi “no-eye” phenotype. Secondly, blocking cell death or autophagy alone genetically does not completely rescue M1BPRNAi phenotype of “no-eye”. Finally, downregulation of M1BP along with blocking both apoptosis and autophagy resulted in a significant rescue of the M1BPRNAi ”no-eye” phenotype. Here, we present the role and mechanism by which transcriptional pausing promote cell survival in developing eye.

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  Role of ZFP36L1 in suppressing human coronavirus replication

  Andrew Villasenor, Tooba Shafeeque Ahmed Momin, Malabika Bhowmik

  ZFP36L1 is a CCCH-type zinc figure protein (ZFP) where zinc ions coordinate the protein structure in a tetrahedral geometry by binding to cystine-cystine or cysteine-histidine amino acids. ZFP36L1’s unique structure enables it to interact with a wide variety of molecules including RNA; thus, it could modulate several cellular processes including virus replication. Several CCCH-type ZFPs have shown their antiviral efficacy against various DNA and RNA viruses. However, the role of ZFP36L1 in the human coronavirus is little explored. We used human coronavirus (HCoV)-OC43 to determine the role of ZFP36L1 on its replication. We overexpressed and knockdown ZFP36L1 in HCT-8 cells individually using lentivirus transduction. Wild type, ZFP36L1 overexpressed, and ZFP36L1 knockdown cells were each infected with HCoV-OC43, and the virus titer in each cell line was measured over 96 hours post-infection (p.i.). Our results show that HCoV-OC43 replication was significantly reduced with ZFP36L1 overexpression while ZFP36L1 knockdown significantly enhanced virus replication. ZFP36L1 knockdown HCT-8 cells started producing infectious virus at 48 hours p.i. which was an earlier timepoint as compared to wild-type and ZFP36L1 overexpressed cells. Wild-type and ZFP36L1 overexpressed HCT-8 cells started producing infectious virus at 72 hours p.i. Overall, the current study showed that overexpression of ZFP36L1 suppressed human coronavirus (OC43) production

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  Room Temperature for cost management and combating global warming. (Usage analysis)

  Srinivas Pranay Pulipati

  A room temperature sensor using Arduino Uno is a project that can be used in various real-life applications such as home automation, energy management, and industrial control systems. The project involves using an Arduino board and a temperature sensor to monitor the temperature in a room, and the data can be displayed on an LCD or sent to a computer for further analysis. This project can be used to control the heating and cooling systems in a house based on the temperature in each room, trigger alarms or shut down equipment in industrial control systems, and monitor temperature in controlled environments in scientific experiments. This can result in significant energy savings and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which are a major contributor to global warming.Its ability to monitor temperature in real-time and trigger actions based on temperature data make it a useful tool for controlling temperature-sensitive systems and ensuring safe and efficient operation.

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  Runoff to the Mangroves: Agricultural Runoff over Time in Volusia County, Florida

  Lauren Corrigan

  Mangrove habitats are coastal wetlands that make up less than 2% of marine environments. In the United States, mangrove habitats are located along the coast of Florida. These mangrove habitats are important because they protect the coast from erosion, are habitats to many organisms, and serve as a filter to rid carbon dioxide. It is important to monitor anthropogenic disturbances since mangroves play a crucial role in the ecosystem. This study will display geographic data of agricultural runoff over time. It will show total nitrogen and phosphorus inputted into the environment over about a ten year time frame in Volusia County, Florida. It will help show how agricultural runoff can cause possible transgenerational effects in organisms that live in these areas by showing areas of high runoff overtime.

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  Ruthenium-BODIPY Complexes as Potential Photodynamic Therapy Agents

  Jake Swavey, Darcy Setter, Frederick Willits

  Photodynamic therapy is a process by which light, a photosensitizer, and molecular oxygen are utilized to generate reactive oxygen species in a targeted microenvironment. The project presented will describe the synthesis of three new 4-difluoro-4-bora-3a,4a-diaza-s-indacene (BODIPY) dyes capable of strong absorption within the visible region of the spectrum. Incorporated within these dyes are conjugating Lewis Bases capable of coordinating to Ruthenium(II) complexes. There synthesis and characterization along with their ability to photo-react with plasmid DNA when irradiated with low energy light will be presented.

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  Saving Light

  Trevor Benning

  From the moment you walk in a room and turn on the light, how much energy is used? To solve this, an Arduino microcontroller will be used to automatically detect when a door is opened and track how much energy is being consumed from lighting the room. Utilizing Arduino and Node Red, the data that tracks the energy consumption will be sent to a virtualization platform where the data will be analyzed and displayed. This data will help limit the amount of wasted energy by only turning the light on when someone enters the room and turns the light off when they leave.

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  Scalable purification of High Purity Recombinant Lanthanide Ion Selective Protein from Methylorubrum extorquens and metal binding affinities

  Courtney Henthorn

  I will be discussing a novel purification method for isolating the lanthanide-sequestering protein, Lanmodulin, from an E.coli expression process, in addition to discussing comparative metal binding affinities of Lanmodulin to Europium(III) and Iron(III). This research topic is of major interest due to the unfulfilled demand for a national, sustainable supply of rare earth elements (REEs), for applications such as permanent magnets, energy storage devices, biomining, and metal waste valorization. My findings include a reproducible and scalable purification method for the isolation of His6-tagged LanM, its resulting activity compared to a LanM purified using a published method, and confirmation that heat treatment does not hinder the metal binding properties of LanM nor reduce the yield of the LanM.

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  Screen Printing Liquid Metal Ink for Wearable Technology Applications

  Elizabeth Shafer

  Liquid metal inks are printed onto a variety of substrates to create stretchable, flexible, wearable technology. Methods like blade coating and drop coating have been consistently effective to print liquid metal inks through masks onto flexible, stretchable substrates. These methods require a significant amount of time and manual labor to create each individual print. While effective, there is a need for a more efficient method to make this technology more accessible. We demonstrated that screen printing is an effective and efficient process to print liquid metal ink. It is simple, repeatable, and accessible. Anyone with the resources could learn how to print liquid metal ink. Screen printing also makes it possible to cleanly print smaller features than blade coating or drop coating. Intricate, precise masks can be designed and created.

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  Secondary “Success”-ion: Healing Post-Agricultural Soils Through Prairie Plantings

  Valerie Thurston

  Ecological restoration in landscapes heavily impacted by industrial agriculture is a pressing scientific concern that will require the development of techniques that facilitate the establishment of biodiverse habitats in post-agricultural fields. Ecological invasion is a significant concern in old-fields of the American Midwest and early establishment of problematic trees such as Pyrus calleryana may alter the course of secondary succession. Some evidence suggests that more biodiverse habitats may inhibit ecological invasion in some settings (i.e. the diversity-resilience hypothesis), but little is known about how prairie diversity may influence woody establishment in Midwestern old-fields. Working with our community partners at the Five Rivers Metroparks (Dayton, Ohio), we have established a fully replicated long-term restoration experiment on a 30-acre former agricultural field. The long-term management goal for this abandoned farmland is to establish a prairie community that transitions to mature oak forests. The experimental design includes four prairie seed mix treatments each replicated 5 times in 50 × 50 m plots and applied in spring of 2020: (1) high diversity with high legume content; (2) high diversity with low legume content; (3) low diversity with high legume content; (4) low diversity with low legume content. Each of the plots was then subdivided into four subplots and each of these received one of four soil amendment treatments: (i) leaf mulch; (ii) whole soil inoculation; (iii) whole soil + leaf mulch and (iv) control. Vegetation was assessed systematically using two transects to establish six 1m² quadrat within each subplot. Initial observations suggest that higher diversity seed mixes establish more diverse plant communities, and those diverse communities garner more niche space in the plant community. These results offer preliminary support for the diversity – resilience hypothesis given that a reduction in open space in the community should make it more difficult for invasive species to establish. Ongoing work seeks to discern the presence of exotic and invasive species throughout the restoration experiment and relate the abundance of invasive species to biodiversity of the established prairie community.

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  Seizure Identification and Prediction Using DeepLearning

  Abigayle Hahn

  Epilepsy is often characterized by uncontrolled electrical activity in the brain that manifests as seizures. Behavior has been used to identify seizure activity in humans for a long time and it is the most commonly used way to identify human patients with epilepsy. However, most of the behavioral scales that are used to identify seizures are observer biased and do not capture the dynamics of seizure activity. Importantly, we don’t have any reliable methods to predict the onset and severity of seizures. Recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence offer us new avenues to automate the identification of seizures from video datasets. We hypothesize that seizure activity in a preclinical mouse model of epilepsy can be reliably captured using a DeepLearning approach. Using a large dataset of clinically-relevant seizure activity in mice, we have annotated key anatomical features across different epileptic stages. We used the DeepLabCut toolbox to train a model to identify 28 key body components across our entire dataset. Our model is able to capture kinematic data in novel seizure videos with a high degree of accuracy. We plan to further refine the accuracy of our model using an active learning approach and by increasing the amount of training data. Using the kinematic data from our video data sets, we plan to identify and define seizure states from a purely data-driven standpoint. Our ultimate aim is to translate our approach to a clinical setting in order to prevent Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP).

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  Self-made IoT-powered Smart Blood Oxygen Monitor for Patients with Vital Medical Alerts

  Jinglei Zhan

  In this project, I will be discussing a novel concept of a patient blood oxygen monitoring system called "Self-made IoT-powered Smart Blood Oxygen Monitor for Patients with Vital Medical Alerts." This project caters to individuals whose blood oxygen levels require round-the-clock surveillance, such as COVID-19 patients or those reliant on a ventilator. The system consistently tracks the patient's blood oxygen levels and records them on the ubidots IoT platform. Additionally, it employs ubidots' alert and event features to send crucial medical alerts via voice calls, SMS, email, and Telegram messages to the hospital management and loved ones of the patient.

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  Semiotics and Religious Images: St. Joseph Statue

  Caroline Duarte, J. LaVonn Berry, Jennifer Reckers

  Students in the CMM 357 Religious Rhetoric course were given the choice to choose a statue, building, space/place on campus that is marked as a religious text/artifact or propose a new object of visual rhetoric in order to analyze using the rhetorical theories from class. Thier analyses employ a variety of rhetorical theories and concepts discussed in class during the semester. Each group collaborated to answer the question: how does this artifact/text rhetorically communicate and construct religious identity at UD?

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  Semiotics of the Nun Doll Collection

  Mary Sabatino, Christierra Williams, Anthony Martine

  Students in the CMM 357 Religious Rhetoric course were given the choice to choose a statue, building, space/place on campus that is marked as a religious text/artifact or propose a new object of visual rhetoric in order to analyze using the rhetorical theories from class. Thier analyses employ a variety of rhetorical theories and concepts discussed in class during the semester. Each group collaborated to answer the question: how does this artifact/text rhetorically communicate and construct religious identity at UD?

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  Sergei Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf" for woodwind quintet

  Andrea Garrison, Ashleigh Muir, Rachel Gleberman, Joseph Barnett

  This performance is a retelling of the age-old story of Peter and the Wolf using Prokofiev's musical score arranged for woodwind quintet.

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  Seroton-ing down the stress: serotonergic activity in response to predators in threespined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus)

  Michaela Rogers, Hayden Ott

  Animals constantly face stress in the environment due to rapid human-induced changes. A strong interest lies in the evolution of coping mechanisms that can help organisms deal with and respond to these stressors. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that is highly conserved across taxonomic groups and is upregulated in response to a broad range of stressors, including predator exposure. Serotonin upregulation can help organisms cope with the threat of a predator by decreasing fear and anxiety. Previous studies have shown an increase in serotonergic activity following acute predator exposures in mice, rats, and fish after only one exposure, but less is known about repeated stimulation of the serotonergic system. I chased stickleback for 15 seconds with a model trout predator every other day for 12 days. I used high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) to measure serotonin (5-HT) and its metabolite (5-HIAA) in whole brain tissue after the last day of exposure. We will use the 5-HIAA/5-HT turnover ratio to further assess the activity of the cells that integrate the synthesis, release, reuptake, and/or metabolism of serotonin. If predator exposure increases stress, then predator-exposed individuals will have higher levels of serotonergic activity. Individual differences in monoamine levels (e.g. serotonin) following stress exposure have been associated with individual differences in aggressiveness and risk-taking behaviors. Higher levels of serotonin in the brain following predator exposure provide implications on behavioral responses such as predator inspection and conspecific interactions following stressful events. These results can be linked to behavioral studies to explain variation in predator-exposed individuals.

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  Sexual Assault Cases and the Claim of Consent

  Nina Vaccaro, Lauren Sears

  In our research project we are interested in looking at the impact and implications of suspects claiming consent in sexual assault cases. The first question we are looking to answer is do different types of evidence, such as witness testimonies, DNA evidence, or other case facts on the victims and suspects, have an impact on the likelihood that the defendant will use a defense that the sexual assault was consensual. The second question we would like to analyze is how does claiming that the sexual assault was consensual impact the sentence imposed to the defendant. Previous research has been done on the effectiveness and weight of evidence collected by Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners as well as how consent is perceived in sexual assault cases. However, we would like to compare these aspects of sexual assault cases together to get a better understanding of the more comprehensive implications that consent has throughout the entire process of the case.

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  Sharing Library and Outdoor Space

  Annie Waters, Natalie Blue, Sarah Abed

  Students in the CMM 357 Religious Rhetoric course were given the choice to choose a statue, building, space/place on campus that is marked as a religious text/artifact or propose a new object of visual rhetoric in order to analyze using the rhetorical theories from class. Thier analyses employ a variety of rhetorical theories and concepts discussed in class during the semester. Each group collaborated to answer the question: how does this artifact/text rhetorically communicate and construct religious identity at UD?

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  Silly Goose! We Can Have Clean Energy, Too

  Nichole Dunham, Elizabeth Rhodes, Adelaide Starks, Alyssa Hack

  As the climate continues to change at catastrophic rates, research to mitigate environmentally-devastating effects have been globally conducted. Solar energy has become a widely understood renewable energy source, yet its implications on wildlife remain relatively unstudied. With concern from local communities and solar companies regarding implications of solar panel implementation on surrounding biodiversity, our research project aimed to investigate vertebrate activity in both undeveloped lawns (Sherwin Williams and Water Treatment) and an established lot (Daniel Curran Place Solar Prairie). We predicted a greater level of vertebrate activity and greater diversity at the solar prairie compared to the open lot facilities. To compare vertebrate activity across different habitats and understand solar panel effects on wildlife, we utilized the two empty grass lots and the solar prairie. Four transects were constructed at each of the three study sites (two additional added to the outside regions of the solar prairie) to collect scat data and document burrow observations. Both the scat and burrow type and location per transect were recorded. Camera traps were positioned throughout each site to capture supplemental photographic data of local vertebrates.We found more diversified scat at the solar prairie as well as burrows belonging to various burrowing vertebrates which implies that infrastructure can provide suitable habitat for vertebrate species. Based on this data, implementing solar prairies would provide a renewable energy source while simultaneously promoting vertebrate diversity in a human-dominated area.

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  Skeletal Muscle Reactive Hyperemia Is Dependent on the Deoxygenation Stimulus in Young Healthy Humans

  William Durbin

  Reactive hyperemia tests create mismatches in oxygen (O2 ) delivery and demand by occluding blood flow to skeletal muscle. We tested the hypothesis that skeletal muscle reactive hyperemia is dependent on the specific deoxygenation stimulus. We hypothesized that the magnitude of deoxygenation (Δ=nadir-baseline) would correlate with the magnitude of the reactive hyperemic response (Δ=peak-baseline), whereas the total deoxygenation would correlate with the total reactive hyperemic response. In six (3M:3F) young adults, we continuously measured forearm blood flow using doppler ultrasound on the brachial artery and muscle O2 saturation during three reactive hyperemia tests (1, 5, or 10 minutes in duration). The magnitude of deoxygenation was significantly (P < 0.05 via paired t-test) less during 1 min occlusion (-13±1.6%) compared to 5 min occlusion (-67±14%; P=0.0015) or 10 min occlusion (-74±10%; P=0.0004), but 5 min vs 10 min occlusion were not different (P=0.40). Similarly, the magnitude of the RH was greater in both the 10 min occlusion (329±102 ml/min; P=0.0004) and 5 min occlusion (295±123 ml/min; P=0.005) vs 1 min occlusion (131±69 ml/min; P < 0.0001), but not different from one another (P=0.11). However, total deoxygenation increased progressively from 1 min (-335±51 units), to 5 min (-10732±2209 units), to 10 min (-32357±5053 units; all P < 0.01) as did total reactive hyperemic response (1 min:1326±927 ml; 5 min:7865±4055 ml; 10 min:17447±9698 ml; P < 0.01). These results suggest the reactive hyperemia response is determined by the absolute magnitude of deoxygenation and total difference between O2 supply and demand. Prolonged deoxygenation in the 10 min occlusion led to a greater reactive hyperemia response, potentially mediated by increased muscle metabolite production and greater bioavailability of vasoactive products mediated by fully deoxygenated erythrocytes.