When examining the average college campus, it becomes obvious that students feel rushed from one place to another as they try to participate in class, clubs, and extracurricular activities. One way that students can feel more comfortable and relaxed around campus is to introduce the aspect of gaming. Studies show that “Moderate videogame play has been found to contribute to emotional stability” (Jones, 2014). This demonstrates that the stress of college can be mitigated by introducing the ability to interact with video games. This same concept has been applied in the workplace, where studies have shown that “Gaming principles such as challenges, competition, rewards and personalization keep employees engaged and learning” (Clark, 2020). This means that if we manage to gamify the college experience, students will be more engaged which will increase and stabilize the retention rate of colleges which utilize this type of experience. Gaming allows students to connect with their peers in a casual environment while also allowing them to find resources around campus and find new places to eat and relax. We plan to gamify the college experience by introducing augmented reality in the form of an app. Augmented reality is “. . . a technology that combines virtual information with the real world” (Chen, 2019). College students will be able to utilize the resources and amenities available to them on campus while completing quests that help them within the application. This demonstrates the ability for video games to engage students using artificial tasks but real actions and experiences which help them feel more connected to campus. Our Founders Lab team has developed and tested an AR application that can be used to connect students with their campus and the resources available to them.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a great need for United States’ restaurants to “go green” due to consumers’ habits of frequently eating out. Unfortunately, COVID-19 has caused this initiative to lose traction. While the amount of customers ordering takeout has increased, there is less emphasis on sustainability.<br/>Plastic is known for its harmful effects on the environment and the extreme length of time it takes to decompose. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), almost 8 million tons of plastic end up in the oceans at an annual rate, threatening not only the safety of marine species but also human health. Modern food packaging materials have included a blend of synthetic ingredients, trickling into our daily lives and polluting the air, water, and land. Single-use plastic items slowly degrade into microplastics and can take up to hundreds of years to biodegrade.<br/>Due to COVID-19, restaurants have switched to takeout and delivery options to adapt to the new business environment and guidelines enforced by the Center of Disease Control (CDC) mandated guidelines. Some of these guidelines include: notices encouraging social distancing and mask-wearing, mandated masks for employees, and easy access to sanitary supplies. This cultural shift is motivating restaurants to search for a quick, cheap, and easy fix to adapt to the increased demand of take-out and delivery methods. This increases their plastic consumption of items such as plastic bags/paper bags, styrofoam containers, and beverage cups. Plastic is the most popular takeout material because of its price and durability as well as allowing for limited contamination and easy disposability.<br/>Almost all food products come in packaging and this, more often than not, is single-use. Food is the largest market out of all the packaging industry, maintaining roughly two-thirds of material going to food. The US Environmental Protection Agency reports that almost half of all municipal solid waste is made up of food and food packaging materials. In 2014, over 162 million tons of packaging material waste was generated in the states. This typically contains toxic inks and dyes that leach into groundwater and soil. When degrading, pieces of plastic absorb toxins like PCBs and pesticides, and then each piece will, in turn, release toxic chemicals like Bisphenol-A. Even before being thrown away, it causes negative effects for the environment. The creation of packaging materials uses many resources such as petroleum and chemicals and then releases toxic byproducts. Such byproducts include sludge containing contaminants, greenhouse gases, and heavy metal and particulate matter emissions. Unlike many other industries, plastic manufacturing has actually increased production. Demand has increased and especially in the food industry to keep things sanitary. This increase in production is reflective of the increase in waste. <br/>Although restaurants have implemented their own sustainable initiatives to combat their carbon footprint, the pandemic has unfortunately forced restaurants to digress. For example, Just Salad, a fast-food restaurant chain, incentivized customers with discounted meals to use reusable bowls which saved over 75,000 pounds of plastic per year. However, when the pandemic hit, the company halted the program to pivot towards takeout and delivery. This effect is apparent on an international scale. Singapore was in lock-down for eight weeks and during that time, 1,470 tons of takeout and food delivery plastic waste was thrown out. In addition, the Hong Kong environmental group Greeners Action surveyed 2,000 people in April and the results showed that people are ordering out twice as much as last year, doubling the use of plastic.<br/>However, is this surge of plastic usage necessary in the food industry or are there methods that can be used to reduce the amount of waste production? The COVID-19 pandemic caused a fracture in the food system’s supply chain, involving food, factory, and farm. This thesis will strive to tackle such topics by analyzing the supply chains of the food industry and identify areas for sustainable opportunities. These recommendations will help to identify areas for green improvement.

For the Love of the Game is a 15-minute documentary highlighting what the culture of soccer is like in Spain. Filmed completely in Valencia, Spain, this short film shows the actual atmosphere of everyday soccer. People of all ages and backgrounds give depth into what it's like to grow up in Spain with and fall in love with the game.

Much of Nepal lacks access to clean drinking water, and many water sources are contaminated with arsenic at concentrations above both World Health Organization and local Nepalese guidelines. While many water treatment technologies exist, it is necessary to identify those that are easily implementable in developing areas. One simple treatment that has gained popularity is biochar—a porous, carbon-based substance produced through pyrolysis of biomass in an oxygen-free environment. Arizona State University’s Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) has partnered with communities in Nepal in an attempt to increase biochar production in the area, as it has several valuable applications including water treatment. Biochar’s arsenic adsorption capability will be investigated in this project with the goal of using the biochar that Nepalese communities produce to remove water contaminants. It has been found in scientific literature that biochar is effective in removing heavy metal contaminants from water with the addition of iron through surface activation. Thus, the specific goal of this research was to compare the arsenic adsorption disparity between raw biochar and iron-impregnated biochar. It was hypothesized that after numerous bed volumes pass through a water treatment column, iron from the source water will accumulate on the surface of raw biochar, mimicking the intentionally iron-impregnated biochar and further increasing contaminant uptake. It is thus an additional goal of this project to compare biochar loaded with iron through an iron-spiked water column and biochar impregnated with iron through surface oxidation. For this investigation, the biochar was crushed and sieved to a size between 90 and 100 micrometers. Two samples were prepared: raw biochar and oxidized biochar. The oxidized biochar was impregnated with iron through surface oxidation with potassium permanganate and iron loading. Then, X-ray fluorescence was used to compare the composition of the oxidized biochar with its raw counterpart, indicating approximately 0.5% iron in the raw and 1% iron in the oxidized biochar. The biochar samples were then added to batches of arsenic-spiked water at iron to arsenic concentration ratios of 20 mg/L:1 mg/L and 50 mg/L:1 mg/L to determine adsorption efficiency. Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) analysis indicated an 86% removal of arsenic using a 50:1 ratio of iron to arsenic (1.25 g biochar required in 40 mL solution), and 75% removal with a 20:1 ratio (0.5 g biochar required in 40 mL solution). Additional samples were then inserted into a column process apparatus for further adsorption analysis. Again, ICP-MS analysis was performed and the results showed that while both raw and treated biochars were capable of adsorbing arsenic, they were exhausted after less than 70 bed volumes (234 mL), with raw biochar lasting 60 bed volumes (201 mL) and oxidized about 70 bed volumes (234 mL). Further research should be conducted to investigate more affordable and less laboratory-intensive processes to prepare biochar for water treatment.

The purpose of this research is to exploit the neglect of specific populations and diseases in Latin America through an epidemiological literature review. As a small part of a larger publication, the foci of this research was the infectious disease, helminthiasis. Using manually indexed abstracts from the National Library of Medicine database in PubMed, 4,594 papers were synthesized and then processed for further review. Of those papers, 29 provided information about helminths in indigenous populations. These papers were reviewed and used in prevalence data extraction and variable analysis. The main conclusion was to reveal the fact that from an entire health database less than 30 papers provided information about the persistence of helminths in indigenous communities of Latin America. Not only that but the few papers that could be analyzed had consistently high prevalence ratios.

The use of discourse markers (DMs) is present in speech to both structure and organize the discourse (Fung & Carter, 2007). However, despite the different studies about the use of DMs, less attention has been paid to specific Spanish DMs such as pues, ‘so, well’ luego, ‘then, therefore’ and entonces ‘so, then’ about their reduction. The focus of this study is on the phonetic variation of these DMs from a corpus of speakers of Mexican Spanish from Salinas, California (Brown & Alba, 2017). This paper analyzed dependent and independent variables to show their influence on the reduction of DMs. Also, chunking phenomena and special reduction were part of the study as they can reflect patterns of change in the language.

Oscillatory perturbations with varying amplitudes and frequencies have been found to significantly affect human standing balance. However, previous studies have only applied perturbation in either the anterior-posterior (AP) or the medio-lateral (ML) directions. Little is currently known about the impacts of 2D oscillatory perturbations on postural stability, which are more commonly seen in daily life (i.e., while traveling on trains, ships, etc.). This study investigated the effects of applying 2D perturbations vs 1D perturbations on standing stability, and how increasing the frequency and amplitude of perturbation impacts postural stability. A dual-axis robotic platform was utilized to simulate various oscillatory perturbations and evaluate standing postural stability. Fifteen young healthy subjects were recruited to perform quiet stance on the platform. Impacts of perturbation direction (i.e., 1D versus 2D), amplitude, and frequency on postural stability were investigated by analyzing different stability measures, specifically AP/ML/2D Center-of-Pressure (COP) path length, AP/ML/2D Time-to-Boundary (TtB), and sway area. Standing postural stability was compromised more by 2D perturbations than 1D perturbations, evidenced by a significant increase in COP path length and sway area and decrease in TtB. Further, the stability decreased as 2D perturbation amplitude and frequency increased. A significant increase in COP path length and decrease in TtB were consistently observed as the 2D perturbation amplitude and frequency increased. However, sway area showed a considerable increase only with increasing perturbation amplitude but not with increasing frequency.

A growing body of research suggests a link between adverse childhood experiences and negative health outcomes. However, less is known about where racial discrimination ranks compared to other adverse childhood experiences, such as maltreatment. To address this issue, I conducted two systematic reviews of meta-analyses to compare the magnitudes of the links between racial discrimination and depressive symptoms and childhood maltreatment and depressive symptoms. My aim was to establish if racial discrimination should be considered an adverse childhood experience. My results demonstrated that the link between racial discrimination and depressive symptoms (r = 0.27) is comparable to the links between 4 different manifestations of maltreatment and depressive symptoms (physical abuse: r = 0.257, emotional abuse: r = 0.301, neglect: r = 0.381, sexual abuse: r = 0.408). I discuss the implications of these findings and propose future research directions.

The use of enzyme-catalyst interfaces is underexplored in the field of biocatalysis, particularly in studies on enabling novel reactivity of enzymes. For this thesis, the HaloTag® protein tagging platform was proposed as a bioconjugation method for a pinacol coupling reaction using lipases, as a model for novel reactivities proceeding via ketyl radical intermediates and hydrogen-bonding-facilitated redox attenuation. After an initial lipase screening of 9 lipases, one lipase (Candida rugosa) was found to perform the pinacol coupling of p-anisaldehyde under standard conditions (fluorescein and 530nm light, 3% yield). Based on a retrosynthetic analysis for the photocatalyst-incorporated HaloTag® linker, the intermediates haloamine 1 and aldehyde 6 were synthesized. Further experiments are underway or planned to complete linker synthesis and conduct pinacol coupling experiments with a bioconjugated system. This project underscores the promising biocatalytic promiscuity of lipases for performing reactions proceeding through ketyl radical intermediates, as well as the underdeveloped potential of incorporating bioengineering principles like bioconjugation into biocatalysis to overcome kinetic barriers to electron transfer and optimize biocatalytic reactions.