Nature journaling in school gardens is a unique way to engage students in the natural world, providing time to notice, wonder, and observe through writing and drawing while engaging in environmental and sustainability learning. With the number of school gardens increasing in the United States, educators can benefit from understanding what students experience while participating in garden-based learning activities so they can adapt their teaching to fit the educational needs of their participants. School garden studies typically focus on measuring academic and health outcomes and nature journaling studies typically focus on educator experiences with one classroom. We facilitated a nature journaling study with four elementary classrooms in a public, Title I school in the desert southwest to explore student experiences while nature journaling in their school garden. Our findings show that nature journaling provides opportunities for students to engage in sustainability literacy by helping them to develop a sense of place in their school garden, inspire environmental stewardship, and practice systems thinking right outside their classrooms.

The widespread environmental degradation characterizing the Anthropocene is a call to address a deteriorating human-nature relationship. For much of history, humans have been deeply connected with and in respect of nature both physically and psychologically, and this bond can be renewed. Doing so is especially important for future generations, as modern youth have less opportunities to experience the natural world and more opportunities to experience the virtual world. A lack of nature connectedness in our youth has clear implications for sustainability and underscores the need for interventions aimed at reconnecting youth with nature. Primary and secondary education is a particularly valuable leverage point for such interventions, and nature-based school landscapes may be a valuable tool in strengthening the human-nature relationship and reconnecting youth with nature. While studies have indirectly linked garden-based learning and connection with nature in youth, research has not yet directly explored the relationship between the two.

My research explores 12th grade students attending Desert Marigold School in South Phoenix. Desert Marigold practices Waldorf educational philosophy with the school’s garden as a primary teaching tool and recreational space. I used arts-based methods to give students an opportunity to visually communicate their perspectives of the school’s landscape through photography and artistic renderings. Students then verbally described and discussed their media in a series of group interviews. Data were then coded and analyzed for themes of connection with nature expressed in the literature. The results illustrate that students connect with nature in a variety ways through the school’s landscape, demonstrating potential for enhanced sustainability outcomes in education.

Polymer drug delivery system offers a key to a glaring issue in modern administration routes of drugs and biologics. Poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) can be used to encapsulate drugs and biologics and deliver them into the patient, which allows high local concentration (compared to current treatment methods), protection of the cargo from the bodily environment, and reduction in systemic side effects. This experiment used a single emulsion technique to encapsulate L-tyrosine in PLGA microparticles and UV spectrophotometry to analyze the drug release over a period of one week. The release assay found that for the tested samples, the released amount is distinct initially, but is about the same after 4 days, and they generally follow the same normalized percent released pattern. The experiment could continue with testing more samples, test the same samples for a longer duration, and look into higher w/w concentrations such as 20% or 50%.

I spent the first half of my project researching Mexican cuisine, as well as the history of traditional recipes and how various ingredients became incorporated into the food of the Southwest region. The second half of my project was focused on creating a video to document my family's recipe for making tamales. I analyzed the recipe and its larger cultural and social implications which I presented with a PowerPoint.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a widespread health issue that affects approximately 1.7 million lives per year. The effects of TBI go past the incident of primary injury, as chronic damage can follow for years and cause irreversible neurodegeneration. A potential strategy for repair that has been studied is cell transplantation, as neural stem cells improve neurological function. While promising, neural stem cell transplantation presents challenges due to a relatively low survival rate post-implantation and issues with determining the optimal method of transplantation. Shear-thinning hydrogels are a type of hydrogel whose linkages break when under shear stress, exhibiting viscous flow, but reform and recover upon relaxation. Such properties allow them to be easily injected for minimally invasive delivery, while also shielding encapsulated cells from high shear forces, which would normally degrade the function and viability of such cells. As such, it is salient to research whether shear-thinning hydrogels are feasible candidates in neural cell transplantation applications for neuroregenerative medicine. In this honors thesis, shear-thinning hydrogels were formed through guest-host interactions of adamantane modified HA (guest ad-HA) and beta-cyclodextrin modified HA (host CD-HA). The purpose of the study was to characterize the injection force profile of different weight percentages of the HA shear-thinning hydrogel. The break force and average glide force were also compared between the differing weight percentages. By understanding the force exerted on the hydrogel when being injected, we could characterize how neural cells may respond to encapsulation and injection within HA shear-thinning hydrogels. We identified that 5% weight HA hydrogel required greater injection force than 4% weight HA hydrogel to be fully delivered. Such contexts are valuable, as this implies that higher weight percentage gels impart higher shear forces on encapsulated cells than lower weight gels. Further study is required to optimize our injection force system’s sensitivity and to investigate if cell encapsulation increases the force required for injection.

There are many challenges in designing neuroprostheses and one of them is to maintain proper axon selectivity in all situations. This project is based on an electrode that is implanted into a fascicle in a peripheral nerve and used to provide tactile sensory feedback of a prosthetic arm. This fascicle can undergo mechanical deformation during every day motion. This work aims to characterize the effect of fascicle deformation on axon selectivity and recruitment when electrically stimulated using hybrid modeling. The main framework consists of combining finite element modeling (FEM) and simulation environment NEURON. A suite of programs was developed to first populate a fascicle with axons followed by deforming the fascicle and rearranging axons accordingly. A model of the fascicle with an implanted electrode is simulated to find the electrical potential profile through FEM. The potential profile is then used to compare which axons are activated in the two conformations of the fascicle using NERUON.