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 disti...

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 ana...

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 politic...

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 ideologi...

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. Th...

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 com...

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 Healt...

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 vehicl...

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 t...

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....

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 sup...

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 ...

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 tha...

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 biof...

Through the course of this research, we utilized the geometric mean to discover how it differs from the arithmetic mean. The geometric mean is found by taking the n-th root of the product of n numbers. The geometric mean can be used to determine growth rates, portfolio returns, and stock indices. ...

When sexual assaults occur, individuals who learn of the event may develop victim-blaming attitudes in which they attribute more guilt to the survivor than the perpetrator (Kelley, 1967). Previous research shows that complex factors like race, attitudes about rape, and endorsement of sexual stereoty...

Misinformation, or information initially accepted as fact until later corrected or retracted, can persist in memory and influence subsequent inferences and judgments. This phenomenon of continued reliance on false information is known as the continued influence effect (CIE). Previous research has in...

According to the Center of Disease Control, there were over 1,500,00 cases of chlamydia reported in the United States in 2016. Is this figure in line with the recent past or does it represent a rise on the incidence chlamydia? This project's aim is to look at the trend of chlamydia rates within the ...

Home interiors often allude to who inhabits them. Black home interiors include visual references as to the worldly understanding of its inhabitants. The walls are adorned with pictures and objects that seemingly constitute a black aesthetic and represent the materiality of black interiority. Focusin...

The field of cellular reprogramming has the potential open avenues for disease modeling and personalized medicine. Many protocols have been developed to differentiate embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells into neurons, but a simple and efficient method for creating matured neurons i...

The purpose of this study is to explore creative education (focusing on art education) and its impact on children’s development. There is a documented need for quality art education, as art has been used as a means to engage students in the learning process. As young children require hands-on acti...

In our culture, black women are not seen as important entities to help preserve and protect the African American culture, but are seen and treated as sexualized objects. Negative stereotypes govern the black woman. Strong public disinterest in uplifting black women has detached them from their true ...

This study seeks to explore the politics of Afro-Cuban identity after the triumph of the 1959 Cuban revolution. I answer three main questions: What role, if any, have the tools of nation-state building played on how Cubans identify themselves? Does a distinction between racial identity and national ...

Kidney transplantation is a surgical procedure using a donor kidney to treat an individual with end stage renal disease (ESRD). Common causes of ESRD are diabetes and high blood pressure. Approximately 29 million people in America have diabetes, causing a high demand for kidney transplants. Over 100...

Increasing gentrification and homelessness have coincided with neighborhoods, communities, cities, and states undergoing transformation and reconstruction. A negative outcome of gentrification is cultural displacement experienced when a group is forced out of the neighborhood due to changes in prope...

Biologically relevant odors, including those related to predators, produce unconditioned fear and anxiety-like behaviors, such as risk assessment, avoidance and freezing as well as conditioned place avoidance. In addition to predator odors, social stress can promote anxiety-like behaviors. When a ma...

Research demonstrates that Black women are the strongest supporters of black female candidates. However, despite strong electoral support for candidates, few gains have been made in electoral success, as compared to other minority groups. What is missing in the literature is how this support impacts...

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 suic...

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...

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 Euclide...

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...

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 investig...

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 characte...

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 the...

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�...

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...

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 i...

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, an...

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 c...

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 chemis...

The performing arts often fail to reflect the technologically advanced society we live in. Scientists and engineers rarely collaborate with the performing arts. In an attempt to encourage this collaboration, we have created wearable technology, programmed in concordance with the music and choreograp...

Economic prosperity, a better quality of life, and a hopeful future are key aspects that migrant individuals seek when coming to the United States. These migrants often send money back to their native countries in hopes of improving the lives of their families. Research has shown that migrant remitt...

Spring of 2011 brought the ban of the burqa (face covering-veil) in public spaces in France. The French government stressed that the law was implemented for security purposes, to help combat terrorism and promote homogenous attire for people in France. Others interpreted the ban as an attack against...

Ruby Hurley's moral agency in the NAACP consisted of advocacy for civil rights, increasing the orgainzation's membership, public speaking on race issues, and investigating racial incidents. As a Black woman serving as the Southeastern Regional Director for the NAACP from 1951 until 1978, Ruby Hurley...

For decades HIV and AIDS have remained a public health problem for the United States and many other countries. While great progress has been made in preventing and treating HIV, there is still much to do. Considering that the HIV virus can lead to Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) if not tr...

As of 2015, there are 29 independent nations where French is an official language, also known as francophone countries. Francophone countries are in five of the seven continents including Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania. Out of the 29 francophone countries, only 3 of them are in the top 10...

Prostate cancer (PCa) is one of the most frequently diagnosed malignancies among men worldwide and the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States. In many cases, PCa develops slowly, but it can be more aggressive and metastasize to other parts of the body. Our recent studies ...

Most political research is concerned with Presidential elections. However, congressional elections are more relevant to the interests of citizens. Research about congressional elections in specific districts such as majority-minority districts is scarce. Examining voting in majority-minority distric...

In “Blogging while Black,” Catherine Knight Steele invites us to consider blogs as “sites where black women interrogate the intersectionality of race and gender from a black feminist perspective” (2). Because my project is rooted in English-language literature, I analyze the role of a blog ...

For the first time in history, the aggregate student loan debt in the United States has surpassed the total credit card debt. Furthermore, the amount of federal tax dollars allocated towards funding postsecondary education has remained the same over the last thirty years. Research has shown that the...

Media is a socializing institution which produces and reproduces culture by circulating images. Unfortunately, many images that respresent Black Women are "controlling images" (Collins 200:85). Examples of controlling images of Black Women are the Mammie, Jezebel, and the welfare queen. These monoli...

The Brazilian film This Love that Consumes Us, directed by Allan Ribeiro (2012), portrays an Afro-Brazilian dance company and its struggle for sustainable artistic creation. The group is striving to secure the house where they live and rehearse in Rio de Janeiro. In my presentation, I analyze how th...

Multiple myeloma (MM) currently accounts for less than 1% of total cancer occurrence worldwide. Despite decades of research and design of therapeutics, clinical responses to molecular-targeted drugs tend to vary and are often unsuccessful. This hematological malignancy originates in the plasma cells...

Research has found that voter identification requirements do not significantly impact voting. These studies have focused on short-term rather than long-term impact. Past analysis has failed to test if voter identification laws implemented in the 1960s continue to impact voter participation among min...

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 ...

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 them...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 mellif...

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 mo...

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 con...

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 per...

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 pe...

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 ha...

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 t...

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 deve...

The works of Fabiola Jean-Louis, a contemporary artist and photographer, reflect a style that is historical, haunting, magical, and mysterious. Focusing on her “Madame Leroy,” this presentation highlights Jean-Louis’s recourse to history and fashion as vehicles for interpretation of the treatm...

Pathogenic Neisseria, N. meningitidis and N. gonorrhoeae that respectively cause meningitis and gonorrhea, form biofilms in vivo, and while in these structures, display increased resistance to antibiotics, compromising treatment. Biofilm formations (BF) are aggregates of microorganisms encased in an...

Previous research indicates that executive functioning, the ability to manipulate information through the use of focused attention, is an important predictor of math achievement. Some studies report that the direct effects of executive functioning seem especially strong for mathematics. The present ...

In the United States, household debt is often examined in relation to household spending, with minimal consideration for how other factors contribute to the likelihood of individuals incurring debt over their lifetime. Through an OLS regression analysis of cross-sectional data from the Panel Study o...

Tetrahydrobenzoxepines are seven-membered heterocyclic rings that are found in a variety of natural products and biologically active substances such as Forbaglin, a potent anticancer agent derivative. This project targets the synthesis of tetrahydrobenzoxepines from donor acceptor nitrocyclopropanes...

Neisseria meningitidis, an agent of bacterial meningitis, is carried by 70% of the healthy population, where it forms biofilms in the human oral and nasopharynx. A biofilm is an aggregate of surface-associated bacteria enclosed in an extracellular polymeric substance matrix, often associated with in...

In 1202, Fibonacci, an Italian mathematician, created a mathematical sequence to model the reproduction of rabbits. Fibonacci used his sequence to explore patterns found in multiple areas outside of mathematics such as: nature, art, and architecture. Additionally, the Fibonacci sequence can be found...

Music plays a vital role in the way a film is perceived and accepted by its audience. In this study, film, music and melody are approached from a musical, psychological, and emotional point of view. This project seeks to understand the psyche and emotions of a listener/viewer. I will analyze the mel...

This project is inspired by a poem by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. His work, “Borges y Yo” was written in prose and focuses on the conflict of identity between Borges the individual and Borges the author. Critics such as Roland Barthes, who wrote “The Death of an Author”, believe ...

Maternal adaptation to physiological shifts during pregnancy is essential for both successful pregnancy, parturition and newborn health. The physiological changes that occur during pregnancy could be detected at the transcriptional level. However, little research has been conducted on gene regulatio...

African-American respectability politics are founded in ideals of whiteness, yet they are reinforced within the homes, social spaces, and institutions of the black community. HBCUs have long served as hubs of black intellectualism and racial uplift, but have not escaped the consequences of conformit...

Black Lesbian Fiction emerged as a literary genre out of the cultural work of Black feminists of the 1970’s and 1980’s. The genre’s formal beginning was marked in 1974 by the publication of the novel, Loving Her. Despite its cultural significance, Black Lesbian Fiction and the writers who work...

While the importance of herbivorous fishes in supporting the health of coral reefs has been established globally, the role of herbivorous invertebrates has only been evaluated in the Caribbean, where urchins were found to have compensated for a long history of overfishing when a catastrophic decline...