Hair cells are mechanosensory receptors in the inner ear used for hearing and balance. When hair cells are damaged or die, hearing is lost or impaired. Many studies have also shown that genetic mutations affecting mitochondrial function are another cause of hearing loss. However, it is unknown which cells in the auditory system are affected. In this study, we sought to determine whether or not these deafness-causing mutations impact hair cells. To do so, we took advantage of zebrafish as a model system and studied hair cells of the lateral line. To generate mutant fish, we used the Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)/Cas system, a genome editing tool that allows for gene-specific changes to be made to DNA. If these mutations do affect hair cells, we predict to see changes in mitochondrial and hair cell function. Characterizing these mutations in zebrafish will inform our understanding of the cellular mechanisms of hearing loss.

Historically, only clinicians and researchers have been involved with decisions about what research topics to pursue, and patients have been left out of the process. This creates a gap between clinical application of research and patients’ experience. By expanding the scope of how researchers and clinicians obtain patient data to include research topic priorities, we explore how to incorporate patient perspectives better. Although there are many studies that aim to analyze patient registries, there are limited studies that attempt to elucidate the degree of the participants’ interest, or willingness to get involved in providing input on research activities. Through a study funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), we developed a two-phase approach to prioritize topics for low back pain research. In phase one, we invited participants from a patient registry of older adults with back pain , and in phase two, invited participants using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online crowd-sourcing platform. Participants completed an initial screening survey comprised of the Roland Morris Disability Questionnaire, a standard tool to identify individuals experiencing back pain. Those scoring 7 or higher on the RMDQ were sent a research topic prioritization survey. 1966 people completed the screening survey, and 480 qualified, of which 353 completed the prioritization survey (completion rate: 74%). Using both recruitment strategies, we had a high response rate, and participants are diverse in terms of pain, gender, and age. Responses show participants’ effort to fully answer the survey and voice their opinion, including providing additional topics that had not been identified previously.This work highlights that recruiting from a patient registry or using MTurk are both effective tools to obtain patient input, and increases the flow of information from the public/patient to the researcher, and inevitably the clinician; we expect incorporating these methods will increase patient voice in research.

Hot flashes (HF) are acute vasomotor disturbances that cause facial flushing and sweating. They commonly occur in menopausal women as a result of a decreased production of estradiol from the aging ovary, which triggers an acute malfunction in the brain’s control of body temperature. However, the molecular and cellular mechanisms that generate HF are poorly understood. Recent studies suggest that super-activation of KNDy neurons in the hypothalamus, which occurs in response to either reduced levels of estradiol or artificial stimulation, can disrupt thermoregulatory centers in the brain. To test this, we are developing an optogenetic animal model for HF aimed at understanding their physiological origins and enabling preclinical testing of potential therapeutics. We have created a transgenic mouse that has a light-sensitive membrane channel (channelrhodopsin-2) inserted into KNDy neurons, which can be activated with a fiber optic probe inserted into the brain. Selective activation of KNDy neurons and the subsequent behavioral response of the animal along a thermal gradient allow us to explore the role of KNDy neurons in thermoregulation. We hypothesize that following activation of KNDy neurons, the thermoregulatory set-point for excess heat perception will be lowered, so the animal will move to a cooler place along the gradient. We have preliminary evidence to suggest that when activated with a different technology (Designer Receptor Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs) animals do, in fact move to cooler temperatures. Testing this hypothesis is our primary objective. We believe development of an animal model for hot flashes will aid our understanding of their neurobiological basis and foster development of better and safer therapeutic options for treatment.
 

Since the founding of the United States, education has been used as a means to create and maintain the idea of a citizen. Classrooms are therefore always social and political spaces. Often classrooms are spaces where people are socialized into dominant ways of thinking and understanding of the world which perpetuates existing structural inequalities and systemic violence. Mainstream understandings of poverty that hold individuals responsible for their own situation fails to recognize structural causes of poverty and its relationship with the reproduction of privilege. In order to push back, it is important to begin unlearning these dominant ways of thinking about poverty and privilege. The purpose of my research was to better understand how university classrooms can be spaces where previous beliefs and social norms about poverty and privilege are affirmed or altered. I examined what role the teacher’s instructional content, class activities, and approach to learning played in that process of possible transformation for students. Specifically, I examined how these pedagogies affect pre-existing ideas about poverty, privilege, and class relations in the U.S and how people understand their own class identities and shape their. My research had two main components: 1) participant observation in a University of Washington class where themes of poverty and privilege are related to course content, during Winter Quarter 2016; and 2) several focus groups with students enrolled in the class. Through my research I found that the instructor incorporated radical pedagogies through decentering his own authority, creating lots of space for discussion, and presenting ideas and questions that challenged dominant ways of understanding. Students expressed that these methods helped build a trusting yet rigorous space that allowed them to begin a process of unlearning previous assumptions. My research therefore has implications for educators working to create spaces of unlearning in their own classrooms.
 

Mass media can play dual role in the social life: reflect or affect political and social opinion. The current migration crisis in Europe is one of the cases when mass media can reflect the people's opinion and interpret the reaction of political officials, and in some cases can influence the possible changes in immigration policies of taking in refugees. This research analyzes mass media representations of migration from the Middle East to Europe between July, 2015 and February, 2016. This period spans the terrorist attack in Paris in November 13, 2015, which my research finds is an important turning-point in the discourses about migrants, with potential implications for changes in migration patterns in the wake of high profile terrorist violence. The research examines mass media representation of the current migrants in more depth and shows that the revising of immigration policies in many cases can reflect mass media representation of migrants and social discourses about immigration. Also, the study analyzes shifts in asylum admission numbers accepted by some European countries, mostly Germany, the United Kingdom, and France before and after the Paris attack. This research uses mixed methods including quantitative method to analyze existing statistical data which can provide main data about accepted asylum applications, and qualitative content analysis to study mass media editions and to analyze representation of immigrants in mass media at different periods of time.

This research examines how three Seattle-based global health organizations produce particular perceptions of mental health in the “developing world.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Health Alliance International, and The University of Washington Program on Global Mental Health all incorporate mental health into their work abroad in some capacity. Their programs and the way they publicize them are both methods of setting standards for the global health industry and of acquiring potential major donors. I use critical discourse theory, relational poverty theory, and critical development theory in examining these materials to determine which organizations produce what types of representations. I argue that certain representations serve to reinforce unequal power structures between those giving and receiving aid while other representations challenge these structures. Some programs and publicity for mental health interventions support the discourse of people living in the Global South as only being susceptible to mental illness after traumatic events. Other programs take a more holistic approach that acknowledges the daily burden of mental illness and challenges unequal power structures by encouraging collaboration between the organization and the communities receiving aid. Using content and discourse analysis in this research, I argue that specific key terms such as “mental health” are strategically placed in press releases and other publicly available materials to produce either a discourse of otherness or one of similarity. The types of discourses produced through these representations have real world implications as they either reinforce or challenge existing power structures.

 As millionaire art collector turned excavator Theodore M. Davis’s mistress, Emma B. Andrews documented significant archaeological excavations during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptian archaeology at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. Within her journals, Emma detailed annual voyages along the Nile for more than two decades, providing important contemporary insights into Egyptian society.  The goals of our Diary Project include the digitization and publication of diary content along with wide-ranging biographical and historical research. To date, student interns have transcribed all 19 volumes of the original diaries. This year we have focused on completing structural markup to prepare the texts for online publication.  Our historical research has been wide-ranging, bringing to light many contemporary images of family, friends, fellow travelers, archaeological sites and Nile travel. However, we have not yet discovered a clear photograph of Emma herself.  Although she was the daughter of a prominent Ohio family, and a nexus of archaeological and social activity in Egypt, her controversial affair with Theodore Davis may have caused her family to destroy documents and photographs after her death in 1922. Using digital tools and methodologies, our intention is to use the information we have gathered programmatically from the diaries as the basis for creating an artist’s sketch of Emma Andrews.  We have customized a generic Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) tagset to create a new ‘trait’ tag enabling us to document physical characteristics and automatically compile them in a database.  We will be incorporating similar details mined from related contemporary diaries and correspondence that reference Emma. We are completing a pictorial analysis of close family members along with further written descriptions we have identified to facilitate the recreation of our ‘invisible diarist’. Our proposal melds digital technology, traditional humanities research and an imaginative recreation of the past.

The federal government determines the poverty line in the United States by calculating untaxed income against the standardized cost of a calorically sufficient diet that is adjusted for inflation. The cost of living is much higher in cities; therefore, this methodology often fails to classify families living in urban areas as impoverished. The current methodology is unreasonable because it does not account for geographic variability in the cost of living for individual environments throughout the United States. There are other methods of measuring poverty, which attempt to acknowledge the shortcomings of an absolute poverty line, but these methods have shortcomings as well through the consistency of poverty measurement thresholds such as in the Supplemental Poverty Measurement. The European Union adopted a method of measuring poverty through a relational poverty line, which encourages the decrease of income inequality and also enables welfare policies to mark certain populations at risk for becoming impoverished. The goal of this project is to analyze and compare the use of the absolute and relative poverty measures in the United States to determine the differences in population size that would be eligible for government assistance. 

Many people say that voting is the duty of every American citizen. Despite this, voter turnout rates are endemically low; according to the US Census Bureau, turnout rates reached 60% in 2004, a time of peak political dissent and an unpopular war. Many political scientists and sociologists have sought to understand these falling turnout rates but have failed to incorporate intersectionality theory in their analyses. While racial background and socioeconomic standing are individually linked to a lack of political participation, a failure to examine how these demographic features affect one another results in a far less rich understanding of the non-voter. This study uses interview data to examine how people of various racial and class backgrounds make sense of their self-selection out of the political process. The results of this data will provide a more comprehensive understanding of the non-voting population and will offer guidance to organizations seeking to increase voter turnout rates.

This research is a qualitative case study of the class identity and life aspirations of private school alumni, as a way of examining class formation that happens through individualized learning and school choice of private school students. There is a large body of social science research on school choice that focuses on parents’ aspirations for their children and how this shapes the parents’ choice to send their children to private school. My research extends this body of work by focusing on (adult) alumni of private schools and two aspects of their experiences: 1) how they perceived their private school experience in order to explore class formation in spaces other than home neighborhoods; and 2) how this experience might have shaped the alumni’s own choices about schooling, employment, and co-curricular activities as young adults (e.g. as college students). We examined these issues through research with adult alumni of a private school in Seattle (University Child Development School). My research methods include semi-structured interviews with alumni and content analysis of public materials on the school’s website. The results of this project show that after elementary school, many of the alumni continue on to private high schools and colleges as well. This indicates that individuals begin to desire classed spaces from an early age and can even influence the spaces they inhabit later in life. These findings point to a larger issue of class segregation, stemming from the separation private school alumni have from those of a lower class.

Workplace discrimination is a factor affecting many Transgender individuals on a daily basis, which greatly affects how they are able to provide for themselves and their families. Unfortunately for Transgender employees there is little protection that they can call upon to help fight workplace discrimination. We posed the question: is there a lack of conversation in society around Transgender worker discrimination and how does that reflect in the policies that are created? With our research we demonstrate that due to the way the conversation around this issue is being discussed, laws are not being developed to protect the rights of Transgender Workers. We conducted a discourse analysis of The Washington Post and The New York Times to examine the state of public discourse around transgender workers over a five-year period. We then compare this dialogue with the self-reported experiences of transgender workers in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey completed in 2011. Our research shows that there is a correlation around how we discuss the issues and the lack in legal protection for this group. We argued that there is a clear disconnect between public discourse on this topic and the lived experiences of transgender workers as reported in the survey. Our findings correlate that we are not discussing the issues that are being faced by Transgender workers and with that lack of societal discourse public policies are not being developed to protect them.

The University District in Seattle is home to both a premier research university and an assortment of social services. This brings people of relative economic privilege along with the businesses that cater to them and people experiencing poverty and homelessness to same neighborhood. When commercial establishments and social service agencies closely share public space, their differing needs may come into conflict. The perception of homeless people as disruptive to capitalist goals in urban environments has resulted in changes to cities that prioritize the demands of businesses and often exclude, punish or generally make life more difficult for homeless people. At the same time, there are spaces, actors and alliances that refuse this exclusionary cityscape and present hopeful alternative negotiations of shared public space. My research looks at these alternatives to ask how public space is negotiated between business and social service providers to understand why and how exceptions to the exclusionary patterns of the contemporary city and the pathologizing discourse of homelessness emerge. Methods include semi-structured interviews with business and social service leaders in an alleyway in the University district as well as participant observation in the alley. Individual beliefs of the key stakeholders that consider structural causes of poverty and homelessness, long-term investment in the community, a vision for cross-class interaction and features of the built environment all contribute to this location’s more inclusive community. Theorizing from already existing alternatives to normative scripts about the city can help us imagine what possibilities exist for a cityscape that is more inclusive and caring of marginalized groups. My findings are of particular relevance to other communities in Seattle where privileged and impoverished populations closely share public space, such as the current negotiations surrounding the formalization of tent cities in Ballard and Interbay.

The acquisition and consumption of food is a daily struggle for homeless individuals and those experiencing high levels of poverty. I use the concept of foodscapes - spaces in which food is grown, acquired, consumed, and prepared - to study the complex political, ethical, and practical factors that shape and influence the geographies of survival that homeless individuals use on a daily basis in their search for food. My research looks primarily at geographies of survival - the daily practices of provision and protection necessary to survive - that homeless individuals utilize while living in city-sponsored encampments in Seattle, WA. These unique encampments are semi-permanent in that the city has allocated the land on which they rest to this purpose for one year with the option to extend for another year. They are also unique in that they are self-governed by residents living on site, operated by local non-profit organizations specializing in homeless services, and held to city health and safety standards. This project focuses on the geographies of survival and the foodscapes utilized by residents living in these unique encampments. Central to this project's contribution to the growing literature surrounding homelessness and food security is an emphasis on “lived experiences" and perspectives of residents living in the encampments. Of particular interest were changes in provision and consumption practices by individuals after arriving at the encampments and the underlying driving factors that brought about these changes. Data generated from a series of semi-structured interviews with residents was transcribed and thematically analyzed using a series of salient codes. Reoccuring themes of Security, Community, and Sustainability emerged during this process, each of which I use to discuss the implications that semi-permanent city-sponsored homeless encampments have on the provision and consumption of food within homeless populations. 

 In 1960, Graham Higman postulated that the number of conjugacy classes of the group of Unitriangular Matricies of size n over F_q is polynomial with respect to q. To better understand these groups, we explored the group of Unitriangular Matricies of size n over F_2. In particular, we sought to understand the relationship between such matricies and the set of simple graphs on n verticies. The relationship between these two sets defines a multiplication between the edge sets of simple graphs on n verticies. Hence, we awnser the following question: if G_X=([n],E_X) and G_Y=([n],E_Y) then what is G_XY=([n],E_XY)?

In creating the first interactive digital chronology of the history of a little-known painting once fêted as the work of Leonardo Da Vinci, we follow a tale of smuggling and intrigue as the piece moves from the hands of famed Italian art collectors, to Roman dignitaries, American connoisseurs and 'Robber Barons'. Our research has shed light on the fate of this work which had disappeared into apparent obscurity for almost a century.  The narrative has been developed using the open source online platform StoryMap JS, and seeks to visually guide the user through an exploration of the history and significance of this artwork, allowing users both a focused and customized experience.  The ‘Leonardo Project’ derives from work completed by interns on the Emma B. Andrews Diary Project.  The interns have been digitizing and researching the late 19th/early 20th century diaries of the mistress of millionaire art collector turned archaeological excavator Theodore Davis. The 5th volume details the acquisition of the “Portrait of a Girl” and its stealthy exit from Italy, across Europe, and eventually to Davis and Andrews’ home in Newport, R.I.  Intern work has focused on sourcing and analyzing related contemporary material including correspondence, images and other original documents, along with published scholarly articles, to create a detailed digital timeline narrative available to the public. We have uncovered the sometimes difficult interpersonal relationships that influenced the movement of the painting, the story behind its mistaken authentication, and how it has ended up hanging in the cozy hallway of a private home in the US. Our unique digital exhibit gives an unparalleled glimpse into the early twentieth century world of art, politics and acquisition.