All Abstracts

 The thrust of migration from the British-colonized Caribbean to America can be dated to the early twentieth century but accelerated from 1964 with the removal of country quotas. Jamaicans represent the largest number of British Caribbean migrants to the United States and possess the most distinct and persistent cultural identity. This researc...

This study examines the response of the Jonathan administration to the 2014 kidnapping of 276 girls in Chibok, Nigeria. This study was designed to show the relationship between gender policy, security, and state-based patriarchy and has a time frame of between April 2014 and May 2015. This study analyzes the Jonathan Administration’s national age...

Black music is a term that describes music that is produced or inspired by Black people. Black music, such as blues, jazz, soul, and rhythm & blues, explores Black pain. Black women singer-songwriters have shared trauma and presented their experiences of Black womanhood by presenting and politicizing it through their music, but they also benefi...

Television is often used to promote dominant ideologies and to define social and cultural norms and expectations. Reality television has been has been singled out by scholars and critics because its supposedly “real” content is in fact intentionally structured and presented to emphasize ideologies related to social norms and cultural stereotype...

The US has been the world leader in incarceration rates for more than four decades and continues to populate prisons with more inmates each year. As sentencing laws have become harsher and more extensive, the prison population has reached unprecedented heights with no foresight of future decline. The rise in incarceration is accompanied with rising...

Black women are often underrepresented and marginalized in the workplace. Black women often deal with the double edged sword of both their race and gender, which can impact their work and their ability to move up the corporate ladder. There are currently no black women CEOs among the Fortune 500 companies, while there are four black men and thirty ...

Recently, Community Mental Health initiatives have been brought to the forefront due to China’s government health policies lagging on the professionalism, normalization, and effectiveness of mental health programs. The purpose of this study is to examine the current state of China’s Mental Health Reform with a focus on its impact on younger gen...

I will contextualize my thesis collection within the literature on psycholigical responses to color, specifically the impact of color on mood. Psychological responses should not be confused with emotional responses or color symbolism. Color, along with sound and light, can be used in art as a vehicle to explore the relationship between cause and ef...

Maternal mortality is a widely-used indicator of the political, social, economic and cultural landscape of a country. This project investigates the effects of selected macroeconomic drivers of maternal mortality in the time periods 2000-2001 and 2013-2014. Ordinary least squares regression is used to analyze country-level, cross-sectional data avai...

Eritreans are the third largest refugee group arriving to Europe by boat. The glaring difference in life chances, rights and privileges among Eritrean political elites and the rest of the population has triggered a ravenous desire for young Eritreans to seek better opportunities and rights in exile. This study examines the structures of domination ...

Midwifery and birthing practices are topics that have been thoroughly discussed in the history of medicine. Less known is the story of the Southern Black midwife. Their role is often marginalized, even ignored, in the literature. Through the analysis of primary accounts of midwives and those who supported and objected to their purpose, this researc...

Using an intellectual property and human rights frame, this paper explores the global performance of the haka, a traditional and complex dance of the Māori people of New Zealand. My questions are: Does the use of haka by non-Māori constitute appropriation of the Māori culture, and if so, how? Is cultural appropriation a human rights violation? H...

It is common to find differential rates of methylation among various cancers. Previous studies suggest that exposure to organochlorines, a major component of pesticides, leads to differential methylation, and thus ultimately plays a role in the development of cancers. Previous analysis has shown that males with high levels of organochlorines in the...

Biofilm formation (BF), the aggregation of bacteria encased in an extracellular matrix, is an emerging scientific and health concern in many environments including hospitals, infrastructures, and industrial production sites. Pathogenic Neisseria species, N. meningitidis and N. gonorrhoeae, form biofilms. However, it is unknown whether commensal Nei...

There is a significant gap in social scientific knowledge about suicide amongst black women. Existing research on this topic is limited and relegated to rigid frameworks of thought based on assumptions of pathology and trauma. This project seeks to interpret the phenomenological implications of suicidal conduct as a response to being socially kille...

Black women have been voting at rates above 85% in presidential elections since 1972 which begs the question: what have they seen that others have not? Building on applied standpoint epistemology theory, Black women’s acceptance of a presidential candidate is examined as a leading indicator of the polarization of presidential approval. Polarizati...

Random matrix theory is a major branch of contemporary mathematics. With origins in nuclear physics and statistics, random matrices have numerous applications in areas as diverse as real-time signal processing, civil engineering, combinatorics and number theory. The notion of rigid motion in Euclidean geometry is captured by orthogonal matrices. Th...

According to a 2017 Atlanta Journal Consitution article, "The Atlanta area is the 9th largest statistical area in the country. The region grew by 1.6% from 2015-2016..." This project examines the impact of that growth on the environment. The results of the a previous project showed that urbanization of the Metropolitian Atlanta area has led to defo...

Informed by conflict theory, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, Peggy McIntosh’s theory of White Privilege, W.E.B. DuBois' notion of double-conciousness and William Cross’ model of racial identity development, this qualitative and quantitative research project seeks to investigate how boarding schools in the American South inf...

Neisseria gonorrhoeae, a pathogenic sexually-transmitted bacterium, is becoming untreatable due to increased antibiotic resistance (AR). Related commensal Neisseria bacteria are non-pathogenic and are often found in the human oral and nasopharynx, but they are rarely studied. We seek (1) to characterize the intrinsic antibiotic resistance (AR) prof...

This project explores the differences between education systems in China and the  United States, including each system's advantages and disadvantages. The materials used to carry out this study include news articles and websites. By focusing on students' daily lives, I will show how and why there are faults and strengths in both countries' edu...

This project examines the impact of the gender diversity on corporate boards on business performance for US S&P 500 firms. Corporate performance is measured by market capitalization, earnings per share, revenue and total return. Gender diversity is defined as the total number of women on a firm’s executive board, the percentage of women on th...

Given the importance of entrepreneurship and innovation (E&I) for economic growth, the question of what stimulates them is imperative. Recent research has focused on business training programs as a main driving force. However, these programs have been shown to have mixed effectiveness. Therefore, it is necessary to explore other potential drivers. ...

Graph theory is the study of connections. There are many applications of graph theory to other fields. In this project, we analyze different properties of graphs that imply the existence of certain sets of cycles in graphs. In particular, we investigate pairs of subgraphs that must be forbidden to imply that a graph contains a doubly chorded cycle ...

In 1981, the first case of AIDS was reported in the United States. Since then, over 700,000 cases of AIDS, and over 1.1 million cases of HIV been reported. Compared to other races/ethnicities, Blacks/African Americans account for a higher proportion of new HIV diagnoses, of those living with HIV, and those who have received an AIDS diagnosis. Moreo...

Most angiosperms have nuclear endosperm, which consist of an initial syncytial phase and a cellularization phase. Before endosperm is fully cellularized, the embryo growth rate is relatively slow. Our work indicates that the expression of an Invertase inhibitor (InvINH1) during the syncytial phase correlates with the slow embryo growth rate. Since ...

Mobile technology can be utilized both to encourage and to distract students from educational pursuits. This project examines cell-phone based learning methods in undergraduate chemistry classrooms. It is hypothesized that the use of cell phone applications and services stimulates learning in chemistry. Information from previous studies has been co...

Patrice Brown, a curvy paraprofessional and rising Internet celebrity known as #TeacherBae, emerged in September 2016. She was both praised and chastised for her figure and her form fitting work attire. Pop culture articles about #TeacherBae opened a larger conversation about Black women’s bodies and oversexualization. My goal is to extend the di...

As a civil rights activist, Ruby Hurley showcased her progressive thinking while with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). We call her progressive thought "radical" because women, especially black women during the forties and fifties, were encouraged to govern themselves according to societal standards that made t...

Within this research, Computational Commutative Algebra was used to solve a common Graph Theory problem known as three colorability. A special kind of generator for the ideals of a polynomial ring in n-variables R[x1, x2, ... , xn] were studied. These generators are called Gröbner bases, which are suitable for solving many computational problems r...

Beauty and Reason is a collection of seven mixed-media sculptures in the form of a uterus. I use the form of the uterus because of the theme of my work is women.Each uterus has its own theme and thought-provoking imagery about the decisions we make in our daily lives to achieve our desires. The work reflects on personal and societal ideas...

Within the “Talented Tenth,” Du Bois explores the means through which issues of racism, classism, and other systems/institutions of power can be effectively addressed. Du Bois argues that it is through the cultivation and sustainment of those deemed as the top ten percent most capable and gifted individuals within the black community that the N...

On nearly every surface and inside almost every organism, there are millions of tiny microbes that are invisible to the naked eye. Some of these microbes, known as symbionts, live in symbiosis or within other organisms. These tiny microbes include bacteria, fungi, and viruses. Honeybees (Apis mellifera), like most insects, host symbionts in their g...

Spectroscopy is used to investigate how matter, such as atoms and molecules, interacts with light. Spectroscopy is also one of the most effective ways to study the behavior and structure of molecules. Conventional spectroscopy is able to gather information for most simple molecules. However, some molecules are difficult to analyze using conventiona...

HIV is a public health problem in the United States which disproportionately impacts racial minorities. Current studies highlight the social determinants of health (SES, media, social stigma, etc.) on the spread of HIV. This study investigated media, HIV-related stigma, and perceived risk of HIV contraction as social determinants of health. African...

In the Dominican Republic, there are remnants of oppression and atrocious discrimination which have detrimentally halted the attainment of equality for Afro-Latina women. This research explores the pattern of systemic femicide and gender violence which pre-date the 21st century as they have been perpetuated by the historic prevalence of racism attr...

This research compares the Mit’a system, a communal pre-colonial migration, the exploitative colonial migration, and today’s criminalized coerced migration. I compare characteristics such as source of compulsion, ownership of labor and resources, and legality. Under the Inca Empire, conquered people forcibly labored in the Mit’a to benefit th...

Sports documentaries offer an opportunity to see just how much race matters in America. In the past thirty years, there has been a significant rise in the production of sports documentaries as athletes have become world-wide celebrities. Within a number of these documentaries a specific narrative has arisen of the African American sports star as he...

Blood-feeding is a trait that has evolved multiple times within flies (Diptera). The goal of this study is to compare gene expression between two blood-feeding flies, the blow-fly Protocalliphora sailia and mosquitos to identify conserved genes related to blood-feeding. This is interesting because these two flies have independently evolved the bloo...

Factors pertaining to a child’s home environment, such as income, can impact learning outcomes. One outcome that has been found to be affected by a child’s family income is reading ability. Previous literature suggests that children's ability to read in primary school is linked to cognitive development and their academic trajectory, making it i...