The purpose of the study was to identify the effect of a single bout of moderately intense aerobic exercise on measures of executive function in young adults with ADHD. Thirty-two young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 years old were randomly assigned to either an acute exercise group or a control group. The exercise protocol was designed to address the methodological shortcomings in the exercise and executive function literature, and involved cycling on a stationary bike at moderate intensity for 30 minutes. Participants completed executive function tasks related to set shifting, working memory, and inhibition prior to and immediately following the treatment session. Results of the study reveal that acute exercise facilitated performance on the Stroop Color-Word task when compared to sedentary controls. However, unlike previous research on healthy adults, no improvements on the other measures of executive function were observed. These findings suggest that young adults with ADHD may specifically benefit from acute exercise on aspects of executive function related to the Stroop Color-Word measure. In conclusion, further research on this topic should continue to investigate this population, as well as consider the relationship between acute exercise and additional neuropsychological measures of inhibition, set shifting, and working memory in order to better determine the effects on each construct.

Low-velocity impact damage in IM7/977-3 carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites was investigated using 3D computed tomography (CT). 32-ply IM7/977-3 symmetric cross-ply composites were impacted at different impact energy levels and with different impactors (DELRIN® resin flat-ended cylindrical and tool steel hemispherical strikers) using an Instron 8200 Dynatup drop-weight impact machine. The impact energies were chosen to produce slightly visible damage, characterized by short cracks on the impacted surface and little delamination on the non-impacted surface (29.27 J), and barely visible damage, characterized by indentation on the impacted surface but no visible delamination on the back surface of the specimens (20.77 J). Internal damage was assessed using the Zeiss METROTOM 1500 industrial CT scanning system, and CT images were reconstructed using VGStudio MAX and the MyVGL 2.2 viewer. To determine the extent of the damage zone, impacted 152.4 mm square composite plates were initially scanned. As the relatively large specimen size did not allow for evaluation of internal cracks and isolation of delamination at ply interfaces, smaller specimens that enclosed the damaged region (45 mm square plates) were cut out and imaged. The CT scan results showed that volume of the impact damage zone had a generally positive correlation with impact energy, maximum load, and maximum deflection, but that the relationship was generally weak. Absence of a definite correlation between damage volume and impact energy was unexpected, as the difference in the impact energy was up to 30%.

Over the last two decades, the use of empowerment approaches to help reduce health-related vulnerabilities and violence among female sex workers has increasingly informed global health efforts directed at HIV/STD prevention. The empowerment approach to sex worker health rejects both abolitionist and narrowly conceived clinical approaches in favor of strategies that promote commercial sex as valid work, strengthen sex workers’ agency, reinforce female sexual autonomy, and support rights-based framing. A significant outcome of the empowerment approach to integrating health, social, and legal strategies has been the creation of numerous sex worker associations and NGOs, which advocate for collective mobilization and community-based HIV/STD prevention programs among sex workers. Despite numerous studies examining the efficacy of community empowerment approaches to sex worker health and the creation of civil society organizations to implement such approaches, there has been little theorization about how participation in sex worker NGO-based programming and activism shapes the personal, embodied experiences and subjectivities of sex workers. Similarly, questions of how sex worker associations and NGOs are shaped by the experiences, realities, feelings, and personal opinions of sex workers have received limited attention. Given the morally charged and highly stigmatized environments in which sex workers typically operate, studying how and which sex workers come into contact with these NGOs helps to illuminate how community and kinship relations, and individual and collective aspirations, shape sex work activism and contribute to the making (and unmaking) of related associations and NGOs. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with female sex workers and sex work activists, this work combines medical anthropological and feminist perspectives to interpret sex worker associations and NGOs as “local moral worlds” that highlight how subjectivities, body, moral experience, kinship, care, and women’s agency relate. From the subjective experiences of older female sex worker/activist informants, I argue that sex worker associations and NGOs are best comprehended not simply as the outcomes of global health efforts to curb the spread of HIV and other STDs, but also as complex social arenas that need to be reconsidered in light of existing relationships between and among sex workers and their families and the state. This argument is informed by my yearlong engagement with Women’s Solidarity House (WSH), a pseudonym for an organized association of active and retired female sex workers in the red-light district of San José, which recently received NGO status from the Costa Rican state. One important dimension of WSH that requires careful consideration is the fact that most of the women who participate in its development and programming are over the age of 40, with an average age of about 52. This fact makes WSH an interesting and important case study, since it caters most especially to female sex workers who are generally outside of the purview of most sex worker empowerment and health-related prevention programs, which are designed and implemented by public health researchers and development specialists. While theories of gender, stigma, and social inequality have increasingly informed medical anthropological efforts to understand how structural factors shape the personal, embodied experiences of sex workers and the distribution of HIV/STDs, there has been very little effort to understand how aging and ageism factor into the making and unmaking of sex worker embodiment and subjectivity and older women sex workers’ risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases and infections. Given that sex work is a profession or income-generating strategy that adult women in various stages of their lives perform, the lack of research and theorization about these aspects of female sex workers’ lives, I suggest, has prevented a broader research and programmatic response both to common risks such as HIV/STDs and violence, and to work-related health problems and occupational conditions that older sex workers may consider more important in their day-to-day lives. My research shows that a “structural approach” to sex work, which highlights the underlying social, historical, political, and economic forces that encourage and foster the economic exploitation, stigmatization, and negative health outcomes of women (and men) who sell sex, would benefit from adding a feminist anthropological perspective on aging. In this view, aging is a critical social structural inequality that society uses to devalue women’s status and which women often experience as stigmatizing and/or shameful. In Costa Rica, where recent reporting has suggested an increase in the number of older women in the local sex industry, studying women’s experiences of and responses to growing old in the sex trade reveals not only the long-term impacts of neoliberal reform polices, but also how gendered discourses about aging, increasing familial caregiving responsibilities, and growing inequality and economic pressure, together, conspire to limit older women sex workers’ employment opportunities and put them at greater risk of violence, discrimination, psychological distress, sexual assault, substance abuse, poverty, and HIV/STDs.

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Where does your food come from? This is a simple question that many people ask but don't truly want to have to answer to. We have some idea of the concept of farming that is cobbled together from images taken from the media and advertisements. The vision of a small pastoral farm where animals roam around in outdoor pens or live in stately wooden barns is the idea that comes to mind when we think of farming. This concept could not be further from the actual truth. This difference between your perception and the reality is due to a widespread effort to block images of modern farming practices from public view. Those orchestrating this deception are so powerful that they have pushed censorship laws onto nineteen different states in the United States. These laws are collectively called the Ag Gag. This series of photographs was created to shed light on modern farming practices and to bring awareness to the overreach of agricultural corporations in dictating laws limiting individual free speech. In this work you see images of what modern large scale animal farming actually looks like. You will also see what impacts this has on the environment and learn about the benefits and problems with this type of farming. In the end the most important question I want you to ask yourself is: Is this where I want my food coming from?

The amount of information and the speed at which it is changing is fascinating and overwhelming. The capacity of our computer systems to process this information far exceeds the limits of our brains, making the systems of processing and organizing seem foreign and abstract. The anxiety caused by this information overload compels me to try and make sense of these systems by slowing things down, by recreating digital actions and artifacts by hand. At times my need to archive this digital world is genuine and results in sincere attempts to create physical records of the software and programs we use. But this cloud full of information, data, systems, and images is so elusive and mysterious that the frustration of creating a genuine archive encourages me to pull from software and systems at will, mashing them up in ways that are both generative and degrading. These then result in quasi-scientific, semi-fictitious images and installations that investigate possible histories and cultures that this invisible world might hold.

I love you and I will always try my best.

Tradition begins with innovation. The rich and complicated history of Printmaking is shaped by invention and discovery. I see this advancement for the sole purpose to distribute knowledge and ideas to every person regardless of prosperity and status. At its core intention is the need to make art and knowledge accessible. The procedural research I have been exploring along side my artist research was designed to do just as invention in printmaking has done before. I have applied my knowledge and availability of modern technology with traditional ways print artists create. These new processes are geared to make photomechanical practices in lithography and intaglio cheaper and more accessible to artists and students with limited resources. I have also included a statement about the artwork that has been able to be developed because of this research to provide context for my artistic practice.

It is a well-known phenomenon that stress can lead to hippocampal damage and a subsequent decline in anterograde memory. We are now learning that stress may also damage the prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in important cognitive abilities such as judgment and decision making. Notably, several of the brain regions vulnerable to increased levels of stress (i.e., hippocampus and prefrontal cortex), are also known to undergo disproportionate decline during normal aging. To date, surprisingly very little research has examined the effects of stress on the prefrontal cortex and decision-making preferences in the elderly. In order to address these gaps in the literature, the aim of the current study was to investigate how stress impacts the prefrontal cortex and decision-making preferences in a healthy older adult sample. The first aim was to investigate the impact of acute stress on decision making in older adults. It was hypothesized that typical age-related changes in decision making would be amplified in older adults when subjected to an acute stressor, the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST). Decision-making preferences were measured by tasks that assess decision making under risk (via the Cups Task), decision making under ambiguity (via the Ellsberg Task), and temporal discounting (via the Intertemporal Choice Task). In partial support of this prediction, stress induced by the TSST affected decision making under risk and temporal discounting in older adults. After the TSST, older adults older adults displayed decreased risk-seeking when presented with a gain. Moreover, after the TSST, older adults displayed increased temporal discounting. That is, they had a decreased preference for later but larger gains (vs. smaller but sooner gains) and an increased preference for later but larger losses (vs. smaller but sooner losses). Moreover, changes in decision making varied depending on whether or not participants showed a physiological response, as measured by cortisol, to the TSST. The second aim was to investigate the relationship between chronic stress and decision making in older adults. It was hypothesized that typical age-related changes in decision making would be amplified in older adults that evidenced higher levels of chronic stress. Chronic stress was measured by: 1) chronic stress self-report questionnaires; 2) a semi-structured chronic stress clinical interview; 3) 24-hour urinary free cortisol; and 4) diurnal salivary cortisol. Decision-making preferences were measured by tasks assessing decision making under risk (via the Cups Task), decision making under ambiguity (via the Ellsberg Task), and temporal discounting (via the Intertemporal Choice Task). Overall, I did not find strong support for the prediction that decision making and chronic stress are related. The third aim was to investigate the relationship between chronic stress and the integrity of the prefrontal cortex in older adults. It was hypothesized that older adults who evidenced more chronic stress would have decreased volumes of the prefrontal cortex, as measured by structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Chronic stress was measured by: 1) chronic stress self-report questionnaires; 2) a semi-structured chronic stress clinical interview; 3) 24-hour urinary free cortisol and 4) diurnal salivary cortisol. As predicted, perceived stress was negatively correlated with prefrontal cortex (PFC) volumes. Contrary to what was predicted, increased urinary free cortisol, diurnal salivary cortisol and positive life stressors (LES-Positive) were positively correlated with PFC volumes. Together these experiments provide some evidence to support the hypothesis that stress, both acute and chronic, impacts the prefrontal cortex and decision making among healthy older adults.

Spin-lattice relaxation in the rotating frame (T1ρ) is a relaxation parameter measured in nuclear magnetic resonance studies. This parameter has been found to be sensitive to chemical exchange processes occurring in diseased tissue associated with abnormal metabolism when measured in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Metabolic changes in tissue affected by abnormal metabolism can be quantified with good spatial and temporal resolution using T1ρ, better than a similar method of assessment known as CEST and current methods such as spectroscopic (1H- and 31P-MRS) and nuclear medicine (PET) methods used in clinical settings. Though T1ρ has these advantages, there is no consensus as to which metabolic changes T1ρ is most sensitive. The metabolic changes may be pH related, or due to changes in concentration of metabolites like glucose and glycogen. This work is tries to identify which metabolite evokes the greatest change in T1ρ by studying the response of three spin relaxation measures (T1ρ, T2 and T1) at different temperatures. It was found that T1ρ is more sensitive to pH changes than glucose and lysine at 3T. Also at body temperature, the pH results showed an exponential decay trend for T1ρ signifying the limited range of sensitivity in the pH range of 6.9 to 7.5. The T2 results can be used to explain this trend.