Category: Honors College

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is characterized by the development of tau tangles within neurons, resulting in impairments in cognition and memory. As increased levels of oxidative stress are seen early in the disease and could activate various pathways that result in further AD development, a measure of oxidative stress, superoxide dismutase (SOD), was chosen as the enzyme of interest. In order to counteract these impairments, four-month-old transgenic (Tg, 4510 hTau) and wildtype (Wt) mice were treated with either plasma or saline. Mice were injected with plasma drawn from young, healthy mice over the course of seven treatments. Saline injections acted as a control. To determine if these treatments were effective in reversing AD side effects in the transgenic mice, we performed western blot analysis (n = 4 for each group) to compare concentrations of SOD. Western blot analyses were run with an Oxidative Stress cocktail. Data was analyzed through a two-way ANOVA and analysis of the western blots identified that there were, surprisingly, not significant differences between concentrations of SOD within the brains of Tg mice treated with plasma and the brains of Tg mice treated with saline, as the AD mice did not appear to have existing significantly high measures of oxidative stress. However, plasma injections of the Wt mice showed a significant trend of reduction of SOD when compared to the Wt mice that received saline injections. While plasma injections into Tg mice did not appear to decrease measures of oxidative stress, plasma injections of Wt mice may indicate the potential to use plasma injections to reduce AD pathways and mitigate AD impairments.

Hello, my name is Alison Perlberg, and under the direction of Dr. Flinn of the psychology department, this is my presentation on the So to start, what is Alzheimer’s disease? Alzheimer’s disease, shortened to AD, is a neurdegenerative disease that is characterized by a decline in cognitive and behavioral abilities, such as memory and learning. One of the hallmark AD pathologies that occur in the brain are tau tangles. Inside neurons, tau tangles are small fiber clumps that are made of a protein called tau and form when tau proteins abnormally clump together, creating neurofibrillary tangles. When these tangles form in the neuron, the neuron is blocked from receiving nutrients and sending out signals, and eventually dies. Possible explanations for why these tangles form is if there is an increased concentration of vasopressin, a hormone, or oxidative stress in the brain. One of the best methods for monitoring and researching these pathologies are through genetically modified mouse models. These transgenic mice carry a human gene for AD, which allows us to study AD in action in a model that is more ethical, safer, and easier to test than it would be in humans. Our method for attempting to decrease the concentrations of vasopressin and oxidative stress in the mice was through administered injections of plasma collected from young mice. Hernandez et al. found that when aged AD mice were given transfusions of plasma from young mice, the plasma appeared to have properties that decreased the development of the tau tangles. However, they were unable to rescue any cognitive or behavioral impairments. The study done by Hernandez et al. served as the basis for this current study, and is built off the same principles. Once our mice had undergone seven rounds of injections and had finished their behavioral trials, I was then able to go through and analyze the concentration of measures of oxidative stress and vasopressin in their brains through western blot analysis. So what are SOD and vasopressin? Superoxide dismutase, or SOD, is a measure of oxidative stress, and was the measure of focus for oxidative stress in this study. In a transgenic mouse model study done in 2019, the researchers found that increased levels of oxidative stress activated a chemical pathway in the brain that resulted in the development of more tau, and thusly more tau tangles. Vasopressin is a hormone that occurs naturally in the pituitary gland in the brain and, in mice, is important for nesting abilities. Nesting is an innate behavior found in mice, but AD mice often have impaired nesting abilities. Craven et al. actually found that mice that had higher concentrations of vasopressin tended to build poorer nests than mice with normal levels of vasopressin. Because of this, there likely is a correlation with AD and high levels of vasopressin. In order to run the western blot analysis, the brain samples from the mice were emulsified into a liquid, and the mixed with phosphate buffered saline (PBS), LDS sample buffer, and a reducing agent. These mixtures were then pipetted into a gel to undergo electrophoresis. Following completion of the electrophoresis, while invisible at this point to the naked eye, the proteins from the sample had traveled down the gel and were dispersed by weight. In order to visualize these weights, the gel image was transferred to a blotting paper through the iBlot machine. The paper was then incubated overnight with the primary antibody, an oxidative stress defense cocktail, and the secondary antibody, goat anti-rabbit IgG. After the incubation period, the blot Evaluation of young mouse plasma transfusion efficacy in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s Disease through Western Blot analysis paper was imaged through an imagining machine, visualizing the protein concentrations for data analysis. At the start of the study, the anticipated outcome was that the AD mice who received plasma injections would show decreased concentrations of SOD and vasopressin in the brain compared to AD mice who were injected with just saline. However, I wasn’t able to run enough vasopressin westerns to have analyzable data, and I wasn’t able to obtain a new bottle of vasopressin antibodies in time. Once the antibodies are delivered, I will look into different methods for looking at vasopressin, as western blot may not be the most effective approach for this hormone. In the oxidative stress study, there did not appear to be any significant difference between the experimental and control groups. In order for data to be significant, its p-value must be less than 0.05 when run through statistical analysis. The results from the oxidative stress demonstrated a p-value of 0.524. This value is larger than 0.05, and is therefore deemed insignificant. This large of a p-value indicates that the experimental and control groups were too similar and had very little difference between them, meaning the plasma was not effective at lowering SOD concentrations in AD mice. A possible explanation for why this data is so insignificant is that the plasma was injected into the mice too late in life for it to be effective. Interestingly enough, with a p-value of 0.098, I did get significantly trending results when the wildtype mice were injected with plasma. Wildtype mice that received the plasma injections actually had lower concentrations of SOD than their saline counterparts. Because of these results, I’ll actually be re-running these tests on a separate cohort of mice who are much younger at two-months-old, as four-month-old mice may be too advanced for the plasma to be effective. I’d like to thank Dr. Flinn for her mentorship, Rachel Barkey and Karin Pedemonte for their support and guidance, , to the Krasnow institute for providing the equipment, chemicals, and space needed to conduct this research, and to OSCAR for funding this study. Thank you!

Abstract: After discovering a gender gap, favoring women, within the OSCAR department at George Mason University, a research team was drafted to understand the causes, implications, and concentrations of the gap. Through analysis of university data by college, major, and gender, and through the same categories within the OSCAR offices’ own programs, studies of where the gender gap were most prevalent were to be conducted. Literature suggested the possibilities of mentors, faculty attitudes towards research, grade point averages, and societal differences between genders as possible causes of the gap. Within the 10 weeks given to this project, it is too soon to say which, if any, of these causes were at play within George Mason, however, our work with the data helped distinguish where and who the difference affected.

Hi! My name is Reagan Emmerling. That’s me up there in the corner. The first thing to know about me, is that I love dogs; and that I love to journal. Which is why I choose this mode of presentation. I am not, however, a very good artist. So please forgive any artistic shortcomings that you may see in this video. I’m an integrative studies major, with a concentration in women and gender studies, and this is my summer research project on… The boy crisis What I mean when I say ‘the boy crisis’, is that for the first time in history, there are more girls involved in research than boys. This is absolutely fantastic, for such a long time women were completely excluded from education, and now, they can, and are, flocking to it. However, the goals of the OSCAR office, are for their research programs to look like the university; which is about 50/50. So, to create a representative program, we needed to understand where and why there are more women. The first thing that I needed to do was that I needed to be FERPA trained. I was handling classified university information, so I needed to be sure that I was able to handle it responsibly. Second, I needed to do a ton of background research. We had our research guide our questions; which were, do other colleges have this trend? What factors could have contributed? What areas were these trends elevated? We then turned that into an annotated bibliography. From here, we made a hypothesis that made sense based on our previous research. We considered a few hypothesis, but the one we most seriously considered was mentors. It’s been discovered that the more a mentor looks like you physically, the more likely you are to do research. We didn’t really have time to look into some of our others, which were GPA, or other factors. Then, we took broad university data and compared it to the OSCAR data. We compared the college of arts, college of science, the humanities, and engineering. As you can see, the school of engineering is a huge red flag. In the broad university data, you can see there are drastically more men than women. When you look at who is researching, the rates are about the same. Next, we looked at where and what gender our mentors were. That was pretty much all that we had time for in our 10 weeks. But, over the summer, I learned so much. I learned things like, how to manage and understand data, the innerworkings of research, valuable reading work, database searching, and statistical work, and most surprisingly useful of all, lots of experience with excel. So, take it from me, please consider a research project into your future plans. There is so much to gain. Thank you for watching.

The ability to navigate and construct social structures, such as, work, community, and society, can be fulfilled by a leader. Leaders improve functionality and address individual’s values and concerns (Dugan, 2016). The aim of this research is to determine if Ethical Leadership influence corporate social responsibility when developing intercultural competence in the workplace. The leader should consider other people‚Äôs values and experiences more often as they facilitate enriching interpersonal conversation (Collard, 2007), which can be described as Ethical Leadership. Ethical Leadership involves uplifting and supporting diverse workers, I believe it is important to learn about the effective ways to communicate; a result of interpersonal communicative efforts to build rapport and develop trusting relationships (Presbitero & Teng-Challeja, 2019). How does ethical leadership interact with the development of intercultural communication? In what ways is Ethical Leadership associated with Corporate Social Responsibility when developing Intercultural Communication in the workplace?

In many situations, a single person is not acting alone. They are a factor among other moving parts in a complex multi level environment all throughout the world. Often a leader is explicitly or implicitly selected to aid in a group’s achievement and security. The ability to navigate and construct social structure such as work, community and society, can be fulfilled by a leader.  My name is Aliscia Warren and this summer I researched a leaders knowledge, skills and attitudes to cultivate intercultural competence in the workplace.  We are immersed in a working community with a wide variety of social identities backgrounds, and to interdependent on one another to collectively achieve organizational goals. Ethical Leadership involves uplifting and supporting diverse workers. It is important to learn about the active voice to communicate so that it results in intercultural interpersonal communication efforts that builds great report and develop trusting relationships.  This project is also significant because researchers estimated that people spend 1/3 of their life at work. So it’s important this is in a welcoming environment. How does Ethical Leadership interact with the development of intercultural competence and in what ways is Ethical Leadership associated with corporate social responsibilities when developing intercultural competence in a workplace, I decided to to conduct a literature review to examine these three constructs. And when thinking of factors for ethical leadership, there is a lot that may come to mind.  The primary behaviors of an ethical leadership style includes conducting interpersonal relationships, evaluating personal actions, communicating effectively and conducting ethical decisions, in contrast to ethical leadership, displaying behaviors of avoidance not initiating relationships, providing no guidance and a lack of support is considered passive leadership.  intercultural competence can also be described as the ability to change perspectives, beliefs, behaviors and knowledge to include various cultures similarities and differences. A leadership a leader should know how to adapt to multiple cultures in a world is constantly changing and constantly going and changing. It’s a cultural competence is continuous, and it should continue to develop as the relationship itself develops.  Corporate Social Responsibility is the key to influencing employee behaviors. A leaders perception of Corporate Social Responsibility can influence the subordinates trust, increase organizational citizenship behavior, and enhance and identify employees contributions to the organization. A study in China found that ethical leadership has a positive association with corporate social responsibility and the personal social responsibility. Leaders not only serve as a role model in a workplace but have great influence on the organization’s perceived Social Responsibility and Ethics.  Examining corporate social responsibility at an organization reinforces the importance of ethical conduct by stating it is it is the responsibility of the organization and all of the individuals.  For my research, I will be conducting a research proposal and then to collect data on this topic, it would be through conceptual questionnaires. For example, I would use the intercultural development inventory also known as the IDI to measure the construct of intercultural competence and conclusion.  I believe that ethical leadership, corporate social responsibility and intercultural competence is very important when conducting a workplace environment.  Leaders hold a significant role in the workplace, as they are the key authority personnel for information interpretation and organization reinforces workplace behavior. This is demonstrated when subordinates look to the leader for appropriate workplace practices to identify organizational goals and values.  Thank you all for taking the time to watch my video and please leave any questions that you may have