Stander Symposium Projects

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  The Yellow Banana Paradox: Surveys and Interviews exploring Chinese Adoptees’ Identities

  Ali Tomayko

  In 1979 China created the One Child Policy in fear of overpopulation. Due to this law, families with more than one child would be forced to give up their second child or their daughters for adoption. Couples outside of the U.S. who could not get pregnant or wanted to adopt, had an opportunity to adopt babies from China. As a result the Chinese adoptees’ identities would be influenced by the adoptive country’s culture. As a Chinese adoptee, my own experiences and identities were strongly influenced by living and being raised in a white culture in the United States. I was able to reconnect with my fellow Chinese friends who were affected by this policy. I begin with the history of Chinese adoption, and previous research on adoptees’ identities. This study was accomplished by conducting 20 surveys and nine interviews. The questions asked were on how race/ethnicity, culture, and life experiences had an influence on the participant’s identities. During surveys and interviews, many of the participants expressed excitement about having this opportunity to tell their truths about living and being raised in a White culture while looking Chinese. It is important for my participants to share their stories because it adds more and different perspectives on the effects adoption has on their identities. Even though the One Child Policy in China ceased in 2015; international, trans racial, and domestic adoption will still continue to happen. Understanding how adoptees’ identity form and are influenced through their race, ethnicity and culture is important for them to understand and accept who they are in society.

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  Traumatic Experiences among Community College Students

  Taylor Roberts

  The impacts of trauma have far-reaching consequences for students’ abilities to learn. While the K-12 educational world is starting to work to counteract the negative effects of trauma, the higher education world is not responding at the same pace. While some research has been done to examine college students’ exposure to potentially traumatic events (PTEs), this research has primarily been conducted on four-year university students, leaving community college students, a group often more likely to come from disadvantaged backgrounds, out of the conversation. This mixed methods study uses anonymous survey data to examine the effects of PTEs on students at one local community college in order to understand how background factors (e.g. age, race, gender, socioeconomic status, etc.) correlate to likelihood of exposure to PTEs.

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  Treatment of Stalking Cases in the Criminal Justice System

  Carissa M. Mitchell

  This is meant to understand the shared experiences of victims of stalking while going through the legal process. The results are intended to be shared with mayors, judges, and attorneys to inform ethical and compassionate treatment of victims of stalking.

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  Turning Dayton, Ohio, into a Human Rights City

  Alex M. Mueller

  This project forced me to view human rights standards, particularly the UN SDGs with a localized perspective. As the SDGs serve as a global blueprint that applies to every country, I commonly view them though an international lense. Conducting this research challenged me to view and then analyze them with a local perspective and see how they can be applied at the local level. In doing this, I gained a better understanding that for international human rights standards to be most fully normalized and advanced, they must be prioritized at every level of governance.

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  Understanding Chemolithotrophic Reduction Mechanisms from the Dark Marine Biosphere

  Anna Gwendolyn Blair

  As greenhouse gas emissions contribute to global warming and an increase in CO2 concentration in the earth’s atmosphere, the scientific community is under pressure not just to examine new technologies to reduce emissions, but also to consider the effect that increased CO2 concentration has on our terrestrial and marine ecosystems. In marine ecosystems, atmospheric CO2 dissolves and reacts with water to form carbonic acid. This diprotic acid then dissociates, contributing to a lowered pH of ocean water and affecting all levels of marine life. Fortunately, nature already has carbonate reduction mechanisms in place that can reduce the harmful effects of ocean acidification. Being able to identify individual bacteria in biological carbonate-fixing consortia can lead to adaptive systems engineered around biofilms. In this study, environmental samples taken from defined sites the dark marine biosphere (ocean depth of 2100-2300 meters) in the Gulf of Mexico will be grown in a number of selective medias with defined carbonate contents. Bacterial samples will then be analyzed using ion chromatography to measure carbonate consumption as a function of time. The data collected thus far suggests that by selectively pressuring environmental consortia from the dark marine biosphere toward the purpose of fixing carbon, mechanisms and pathways can be generated to control the level of CO2 in the marine environment.

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  Understanding Deep Neural Network Predictions for Medical Imaging Applications

  Redha Ali, Supun Samudika De Silva, Nathan Kremer Kueterman

  Computer-aided detection has been a research area attracting great interest in the past decade. Machine learning algorithms have been utilized extensively for this application as they provide a valuable second opinion to the doctors. Despite several machine learning models being available for medical imaging applications, not many have been implemented in the real-world due to the uninterpretable nature of the decisions made by the network. In this paper, we investigate the results provided by deep neural networks for the detection of malaria, diabetic retinopathy, brain tumor, and tuberculosis in different imaging modalities. We visualize the class activation mappings for all the applications in order to enhance the understanding of these networks. This type of visualization, along with the corresponding network performance metrics, would aid the data science experts in better understanding of their models as well as assisting doctors in their decision-making process.

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  UNet-based Deep Neural Network for 3D Lung Segmentation

  Dhaval Dilip Kadia

  The recent developments in the field of Medical Imaging, Deep Learning, is a crucial technology to accelerate medical tasks and perform them precisely and automatically. 3D lung segmentation has a significant role in removing the unnecessary volume of 3D CT scans and segments the actual volume of the lungs in three dimensions, to simplify the 3D CT scan for further tasks. Recently, the deep learning network such as U-Net and its variants provides excellent results for biomedical image segmentation. We propose a novel deep neural network architecture based on UNet, for the 3D lung segmentation task. The proposed model helps learn spatial dependencies in 3D and increases the propagation of volumetric information. We have investigated our network with different architectural modules, learning strategy, activation functions, optimizers, loss functions, and appropriate hyperparameters. Our proposed deep neural network is trained on the publicly available dataset - LUNA16 and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the VESSEL12 dataset and the testing set of LUNA16.

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  United Rehabilitation Services Walker

  Christina Louise Diersing

  The United Rehabilitation Services (URS) walker is a walker modified for a young girl who is blind and autistic. It reminds her to hold onto her walker with both hands by playing Disney music or vibrating in a pattern she likes when she has both hands on the walker. When she takes her hands off of the walker, the music and/or vibrations will stop.

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  Unlearning LGBTQ+ Implicit Biases on Campus

  Morgan Couture

  Just as prejudices are learned, they are also possible to “unlearn.” College is often the first opportunity students have to encounter LGBTQ+ themes and communities. Therefore, regardless of intentions, students are likely to act on biases they have formed prior to entering college. This can create a challenging environment for LGBTQ+ students to live and study in. Cognitive psychology research has identified successful strategies for reducing bias. This session proposes a customized digital learning module based on this research, aimed at helping UD students unlearn LGBTQ+ biases. This session will also be an opportunity to gain insight and feedback from stakeholders in preparation to implement this project on campus.

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  Unsupervised Real-Time Network Intrusion and Anomaly Detection by Memristor Based Autoencoder

  Md. Shahanur Alam

  Custom low power hardware systems for real-time network security and anomaly detection are in high demand, as these would allow for adequate protection in battery-powered network devices, such as edge devices and the internet of the things. This paper presents a memristor based system for real-time intrusion detection, as well as an anomaly detection based on autoencoders. Intrusion detection is performed by training only on a single autoencoder, and the overall detection accuracy of this system is 92.91%, with a malicious packet detection accuracy of 98.89%. The system described in this paper is also capable of using two autoencoders to perform anomaly detection using real-time online learning. Using this system, we show that the system flags anomalous data, but over time the system stops flagging a particular datatype if its presence is abundant. Utilizing memristors in these designs allows us to present extremely low power systems for intrusion and anomaly detection while sacrificing little accuracy.

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  Use of LU Factorization in Solving a Real-World Problem

  Zahra Hussain Al Muhaisin

  We applied the LU factorization to find the temperature distribution in a two dimensional flat rectangular metallic plate. The temperatures on the boundary are known and the interior temperature distribution will be determined. The problem will require solving a linear system: Ax = bThis system can also be solved by finding the inverse of A. However, we will show that for this problem, the LU factorization technique is more suitable.

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  Using a Genetic Mouse Model to Investigate the Role of Calcium Signaling in Mouse Behavior

  Aikaterini Britzolaki, Ben Klocke

  Ca2+ is a critical second messenger for a constellation of cellular processes, and neuronal Ca2+ signaling is no exception. Indeed, disruption of neuronal Ca2+ homeostasis has been implicated in a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders. Our lab has recently identified a potential new player in the neuronal Ca2+ toolkit that is expressed in the brain. Strikingly, mice that do not express this gene (KO) present a hyperactive phenotype as compared to their wild-type (WT) counterparts. However, the underlying neurobiological mechanisms by which this phenotype manifests itself are unknown. Thus, in the context of the current project, we employed high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and state-of-the-art electroencephalography (EEG) techniques to investigate the neurochemical systems and cortical rhythms that are affected by constitutive loss of this gene in mice. Indeed, our results show that KO mice exhibit neurochemical noradrenergic alterations in key brain regions associated with the pathophysiology of many neuropsychiatric disorders. Further, these mice show alterations in cortical rhythms during sleep. Overall, these data support a mechanistic role for this protein in regulating mouse behavior.

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  Using Infectious Disease Models to Study Gang Activity Through Computational Mathematics

  Allison Lenhardt, Hana Tinch

  Gang activity shows a similar pattern to infectious diseases which can be modelled using nonlinear differential equations. Using the model of infectious diseases, predictions can be made to relate gang interactions with the population and the recruitment of new gang members. By manipulating personal interaction, conviction, recidivism, and jail time, awareness of which combination of factors results in the least amount of gang activity can lead to preventative measures to see how to best minimize gang activity. We study this model using numerical solutions of systems of differential equations.

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  Using RNA-interference to Identify the Genetic Toolkit for a Fruit Fly Morphological Trait

  Jesse Taylor Hughes, Jenna Rose Rock

  Metazoan animal morphological traits result from the combined inputs of hundreds or more genes that comprise gene regulatory networks (GRNs). Each GRN utilizes various genes from the genetic toolkit of transcription factor and signaling pathway genes to control complex patterns of gene expression. However, for few traits, if any, has the full repertoire of toolkit genes been characterized for its GRN. Thus, how traits are built by regulated gene expression remains poorly understood. Here we are investigating the genetic toolkit that makes a male-specific pigmentation pattern for the fruit fly species Drosophila (D.) melanogaster. Using RNA-interference, we reduce the expression of ~588 transcription factor genes to find those necessary for the development of this trait by surveying for deviant pigmentation phenotypes. We uncovered 35 novel transcription factors involved in the development of male-limited pigmentation in D. melanogaster. Future work will focus on elucidating how each of these genes is expressed within the fruit fly abdomen as well as where each gene fits within the Drosophila pigmentation network.

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  Validation of Center of Mass Estimation in Humans

  Colin R. Theis

  Computational simulations of human movement require precise knowledge of the location of the body's center of mass (CoM). The CoM is a quantity that is impossible to directly measure experimentally. The location varies on a subject-to-subject basis and is essential for the generation of accurate simulations. OpenSim, a musculoskeletal modeling software, utilizes a built-in software function to estimate the CoM based off the geometry of the model. However, this estimation technique can be imprecise because the estimation is based solely off generic mass and geometry distributions. Since every individual is different with respect to body segment length and mass distributions, it is likely this estimation is inaccurate for all individuals. Therefore, using a new technique developed in UD’s DIMLab, we can estimate an individual's CoM more accurately than OpenSim. This estimation technique uses the statically equivalent serial chain model (SESC). The technique is based on a virtual chain, identified from a minimal amount of experimental kinematic data to be accurate. The system does not require knowledge of the total mass, or any of the individual segment mass or length properties. The SESC model is a function of the anatomical joint angles measured experimentally from the subject and terminates at the CoM. This project explores the feasibility of combining experimental CoM estimation methods with simulation based estimates of CoM. We aim to find a method to validate CoM estimates applied in simulations and improve simulation accuracy. We aim to integrate the SESC model into the OpenSim software package as the main mechanism for locating the CoM.

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  Vatican II War and Peace

  John W. Ruff

  Vatican II was the most recent ecumenical council that has been conducted within the Catholic Church. One of the most common said phrases in describing this council is that this council “updated church teachings to match the signs of our time”. Indeed, something did happen at Vatican II; many things did. A prevalent theme found within world culture around the time period of Vatican II was war. This makes sense particularly because Vatican II took place following world war II. The council did address this issue of war and peace, in one of their constitutions, Guadium et Spes. Within this presentation, I will address and analyze what Vatican II said in Guadium et Spes about war. Secondly, I will conduct an analysis on the progression of the Church’s teaching on war and peace throughout history while focusing on the Church’s peacemaking stance. Next, I will analyze the option/viewpoint of the possibility of the other argument, the argument for the legitimacy of war. Finally, I will compare and contrast the two points of views.

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  Visual Elements of an Effective Elementary Classroom

  Danielle Villhard

  Integrating interdisciplinary studies in Education and Visual Arts, this Visual Arts senior capstone project explores the visual experience in elementary schools, from the physical classroom setup to individual elements (posters, signage, etc.). With emphasis on color, subject matter, interactivity, and space, this project combines research on classroom setting and material design, patterns of effective teaching, best practices for elementary education, color theory, and color psychology. The project cumulated in a scale model of a classroom that implements elements of the research and offers one example of the research in practice.

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  Voting Rights in Dayton and Beyond: The Seminar in US History

  Adam James Boehnlein, Caelan Caelum Danbury, Seth Michael Dirkse DeWitt, Meghan E. Hahn, Kevin Walter McDougal, Caroline Anne Waldron, Adam Thomas West, Emilee Kay Zoog

  The papers on this panel focus on voting rights and "voice" as a vital piece of democratic ideas and practice. Based in original archival research, the HST485 Seminar cohort will discuss their findings about UD students and faculty and community members in the greater Miami Valley who responded to conditions that restricted democratic practices. These groups participated in women's suffrage and teen voting campaigns; they created inclusive institutions for justice, like the Urban League and American Federation of Teachers locals; and they supported those fighting for political autonomy and rights in Ireland and elsewhere.

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  Water Supply & Treatment Filter Air Binding Study

  Shadayah Kabre Lawrence

  The primary focus of my research is to understand what iscausing air bubbles, through air binding in the Water Supply and Treatments filtration system.Air binding is the clogging of a filter as a result of the presence of air released from water. Aircan prevent the passage of water during the filtration process causing a high loss of head and alower service time for the filter. It is hypothesized that the air binding issue is due to a low piperetention time as well as an excess amount of carbon dioxide. There are a few known causes ofair binding such as ozonation, Carbon Dioxide addition, hypochlorite, thermal warming etc.

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  Weaponization of the Socialist Label in Modern American Politics

  Matt Oliver Schubert

  This thesis studied the attitude of people in the United States toward the idea of socialism. The first section of my thesis examined how people define socialism, and whether there is any definition that is common among a large group of people. It also looked to see if this definition was different than their definition of democratic socialism. The next section addressed people’s support of a bill or political candidate identified as a socialist. The goal was to see if people would be willing to support a candidate or bill with socialist ideas, but shy away when they see the word “socialist.” The effects of this label were then examined across party lines to see if it had differentresults among Democrats and Republicans.

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  "Weekends Across Town" An analysis of current parental divorce resources and effectiveness

  Jimmy Edward Nagai

  Children that have experienced divorces in their lifestyle can sometimes have worse outcomes due to lack of communication between the parties, a vicious or damaging divorce, or lack of involvement with one or both adult parties in their lives. This literature review will examine some of the current practices in the field and evaluate their effectiveness with different strategies, including non-residential visitation periods, more positive divorce proceedings, or giving adequate attention towards the children in these turbulent times.

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  “When you’re done… you’re still part of our family:” An Exploration of Gendered Scripts and Relationships in Prison Reentry Programs

  Ruthey Schultz

  Historically, the U.S. prison population has been comprised of mostly men. As the number of offenders who are women rises, social services have been tasked with addressing the needs of returning citizens with an increasing focus on gender. Past research has largely focused on gender specific needs within the criminal justice system itself. This project explores perceptions of gender in reentry among social service workers, which will demonstrate how gender is conceptualized and reproduced within these services. I conducted 18 interviews with social service workers to ask about their perceptions on gender in reentry and how their organizations interact with gender. Social service workers often reported diverse gender needs in terms of external barriers such as trauma, community perceptions, social support, and parenting responsibilities. These findings reveal gender reproduction and interactions within the context of reentry and analyze how gender identity intersects with an “ex-offender” status.

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  Where You Are and What You Know: impact of Location and Education on Individual Engagement with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals

  Emily Sandstrom

  The United Nations created the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 to include 17 goals and 169 targets that foster ongoing environmental, social, and global economic development and aiming to accomplish each goal by 2030. There has been considerable enthusiasm in various sectors since the SDGs have been in place; however, there is still a significant amount of work to be done to engage experts and young scholars (the future experts) in the SDGs. According to Salvia, Filho, Brandli, & Griebeler, 2019, researchers at institutions of higher learning from around the globe found a relation between locality and research, though questions remain concerning the role vocation and locality play in determining one’s predilection for a given SDG. This project analyzes individual rankings of the SDGs by comparing responses from college students interested in environmental sciences and academic and field professionals engaged in environmental work or research.

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  White Castle

  Isabelle Blanchard, Joshua M. Huber, TJ Joseph Sosnowski

  Downtime reduction

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  Why Participating in a Professional Conference Should be Required

  Jordyn Mitchell

  Sport Management is a growing degree choice for up and coming professionals. In this industry, you gain experiences and are open to new opportunities by establishing a network of professionals to get you to the sport/business industry. It is not just, about what you know. It can come down to whom you know. The why, the how, insights in to the next steps will be discussed and the advantages of attending a professional conference. What is the benefit can do for you.