Seventh Annual Three Minute Thesis Competition

[Speaker: Moza Coote] Have you ever felt discouraged and defeated? Well, that's exactly how I felt at the end of my first week as a new teacher. On my first day, I walked in excited and ready. Or so I thought. But at the end of that week, I was discouraged, defeated ready to call it quits. But a mentor made all the difference for me. The support she provided turned my discouragement into possibility and my defeat into victory. Sadly, not every new teacher has a positive mentoring experience like mine. So many new teachers mentoring is the main and often the only support they receive as novice educators to promote retention in the profession. So it's critical we get mentoring right. New black women teachers are the most likely to report that the mentoring they received was ineffective. My research focuses on listening to and learning from the experiences of new black women teachers to understand where our current mentoring systems have failed them. And in what ways we can strengthen mentoring to make it more impactful. Black teacher turnover is 60 percent greater than that of other teachers in cities across the country. The decline in the number of black teachers is particularly disturbing. For example, in a 10-year period in New York City, the number of black teachers decreased by 15 percent. 39 in Chicago and 62 percent in New Orleans. What I'm learning from listening to the stories of black women is that they need the kind of mentoring that not only supports the instructional practice, but that helps them navigate the social-emotional realities of being a teacher. And helps them feel a sense of belonging at their school community. If we say we care about equity and justice and retaining a diverse teacher workforce, we cannot sit by and let an entire population of teachers just fritter away. I know the picture I've just painted of the current reality sounds really discouraging and defeating. But by implementing the kind of mentoring that truly matters, we give new black women teachers access to the victorious outcome both they and their students deserve. Thank you.

[Applause]

[Speaker: Min Ma] When you take a pill for your headache sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and sometimes it causes side effects and damage to liver or stomach. Why does the drug go to the right place? When solving a problem like this, spatial information or the location of drug and disease is important. For example, to play baseball you meet your friends at the baseball field. You and them being in the same location as the prerequisites for the activity to happen. Similarly the drug and the disease need to be at the same location for the cure. And to get to the diseased spot, the drug needs to travel a long way and it better grab a map. A map of all the proteins in your body. It's just like when you are driving to a city you've never been to. Can you get there without your Google or Apple map? I know I can't because I even needed a map to find our library. Without spatial information the location of drug and proteins in your body. It is impossible to study diseases and treatments. Surprisingly, people have not studied these important questions with the aspect of spatial information. Why? Because a technique that can map the locations of all the proteins is lacking. Here my teammates and I have developed a revolutionary method that can make a map for every protein and organ with detailed regional information. For the first time, we have reviewed the location maps of thousands of proteins and whole mouse breed. With these maps. We can locate the important activities of proteins and the drug enters the body. We can locate the area where it received enough drug and where is still waiting for its rescuers. Think about how wonderful this is. For all the time in the past, drugs strive to find their way in the dark but they could not hit the disease and could not avoid harming your healthy body parts. Now, with my research we can design better drugs and navigate them to the right place and really treat the disease. With Google maps We can get everywhere we want. And with our protein maps we can design better drugs, treat diseases and save people. Thank you.

[Applause]

[Speaker: Md. Arafat Ali] What if I tell you everyone, literally everyone in this room and the people who are watching virtually contains a toxic cancer-causing chemical in body? Scary, right? But that's the truth. That chemical is known as PFAS, the full form is per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance. It is a synthetic chemical that has a unique property to repel both oil and water. And for this reason starting from non-stick pan to personal care products, everything that we use in our life, most of those things has PFAS in it. For example, I see many of you have brought coffee with you. Those one-time coffee cups are made of PFAS. How many of you had sandwiches for lunch today? Probably 10-15 people in this whole room? Those sandwich wrapper probably had PFAS in it. And for this reason PFAS entered into our food system. It has been found in drinking water. Even in breast milk. Do we really want to let it go like this? The answer is no. So we have to find out a treatment technology that completely removes PFAS from water. Here comes my research. My research focuses on this. But here is a fact. PFAS as a chemical is a very strong and hard to break. That is why it is called forever chemical. Adsorption seems to be a solution for this. Which is removing the PFAS from water using a solid filter material. But you see this is kind of extracting the PFAS, not destroying it. The PFAS is remaining same as it is. It is kind of like taking trash from one basket to another. Here comes our innovation. In our lab we develop different material. Recently we have developed a nano size material that has shown very promising results in terms of PFAS removal. Within 20 minutes of treatment time, we have seen more than 95 percent PFAS can be removed from water and most importantly we have seen the partial degradation of PFAS. Yes, we have been achieved to break it down. And with some modification, I believe and we all believe that we will be able to completely break down these PFAS into smaller and smaller fragments that won't be harmful for human health anymore. PFAS is a forever chemical but we want to say, let's defeat this forever chemical for once and for all. Thank you.

[Applause]

[Speaker: Fae Hajhosseini] Do you think you know the secret of Jennifer Lopez's romantic success? Or of Olivia White's routine Beauty? You might think you know because the media makes such secrets daily available to billions of us. And we in turn are supposed to feel special for having access to our favorite celebrities. But do we really have access to their secrets? So what would it mean not to reveal the secret and keep it secretive? This is what my project is about. To pursue a comparative analysis on the secret in Iranian medieval philosophy and western philosophy. This is important for two main reasons. First, it shows these two systems of thoughts are not necessarily compatible with each other as we often believe. Secondly, it indicates there was a time in Iranian history when philosophers priced the plurality of meaning, ambiguity and tolerance. If we think of the secret as a meaning that evolves rather than a fixed truth, then we become more tolerant for other people's ideas. But unfortunately these contributions of those Iranian philosophers have been forgotten over the years because of many reasons. But chiefly due to political constraints, it is not surprising that these philosophers were not accepted either. During their own times, many have been sent to exile, punished or even executed because their contemporary. Political and religious authority rejected their idea of the dynamic secrets of the text and specifically of the religious texts. In the west also many philosophers have speculated on this concept. I focus on drug darita who considers literature as being similar to the secret, and secret as being literature. This does not mean that literature doesn't offer any meaning. But its meaning is not fully there yet. The literary work always keeps secret to tell us in future. And this is my point. The secrets will never be revealed completely in the present. But why does it matter? Why should we keep everyone in perpetual suspense? Because the idea of an unrevealed secret can show us, can create, can help us create a more democratic, pluralistic and tolerant world. The Iranian sage Sohrevardi once told us "read the scripture in a way that it's a secret written only for you." I believe if leadership in Iran today chose to reflect on this statement, they would be led to think about the prospects of democracy. So let's think about the secrets again. But not only the secret of Jennifer Lopez, but the secret as a dynamic concept central for democracy. Thank you.

[Applause]

[Speaker: Mruganka Parasnis] You may be surprised to know that nearly half a million children under the age of six have been affected by the release of lead from corroded pipes and paints across 2 billion homes in the U.S. An insignificant amount of only 10 milligrams of lead can cause brain damage and eventually lead to death. What's most surprising is that each and every year for the past two decades, nearly 16 billion dollars have been spent on releasing this lead from water and soil sources. Well, that's a lot of money, but still this problem is persistent. To solve this problem, we need to develop more effective economical and environment-friendly new materials. My research focuses on one such material which is called mycelium: the root part of fungus. Now let's talk about the fungus. We all know about the fungus that we have in our cuisine. It is the oldest and youngest. The largest and the smallest. The healer of many years, silently cleaning  the Earth since the origins of life. Believe it or not, but there is a huge world of this fungus which is found right beneath the soil like a network, just like you have in your brain or the computer network and it forms a world wide web. It is called mycelium. This mycelium contains many proteins and enzymes which are responsible for pollutant removal. Even if this mycelium is an excellent filter it is not practical to use it in our water filters or to grow it in the Buffalo soil. Hence, I prepare a biomaterial out of this live mycelium which is more resilient and an alternative to plastic filters. My study also explores on increasing how much amount of lead is getting absorbed through advanced materials along with this mycelium and we create a normal membrane. My study has already shown 99 percent lead removal, and we do it in just 30 minutes. I would like to be a part of this   community to solve this pressing environmental problem to make the soil and water safer to you, your children, and generations to come. I hope my research will benefit the disadvantaged communities and the environment at large. Thank you for listening.

[Applause]

[Speaker: Leo Marecki] So magnetic resonance imaging or MRI is a very useful imaging tool. The reason for this is the fact that it can identify many, many different tissues. However, MRI lacks the ability of telling you what's going on in those tissues. So that's where positron emission tomography, or PET scanning comes into play. However, pet scanning doesn't have the ability to identify tissues. So because of that my research focuses on ADD pet to any MRI. So my research focuses specifically on pre-clinical or animal studies, not necessarily like the dogs you see up here but, um, but more or less mice, which you hear about all the time being, you know, used in different pre-clinical studies and everything. So the reason for, so my research focuses on being able to take different PET scans of different dimensions and different sizes and being able to retrofit them with other MRI systems. The advantage to this is the fact that by being able to retrofit any PET scanner, when researchers are developing different technology for the PET scanners, it  can be integrated directly with the MRI without needing some commercial system that needs to be utilized. Now the reason for this focus is the fact that animal scanners in particular have one of the highest resolutions and are some of the best reconstructions. So because of that my focus is focusing on those animals pet scanners. Now the reason why animal studies are very very important is the fact that when you're trying to develop a new type of drug or therapy method there's this concept known as effective dose. So essentially like when you're taking something like, uh, like Tylenol you know there's that instruction of "take it X many hours" and everything. The reason for that is because there's a value known as the effective dose, and as we all know with many other different drugs that we hear about there's also things like overdose. So my research focuses also on being able to quantify the PET, uh, the PET images so that way you can determine what is the effective dose and what is an overdose. Now it when it comes to this type of research this has a this has a very big application when you're trying to develop new things like vaccines, so you know, we all went through COVID and everything, so because of that my research focuses on improving specifically the animal studies because animal studies as we know is the stepping stone to human studies and so by so by improving the res the quality that we can get of animal studies, pharmaceutical companies as well as other researchers like here at UB will be able to get uh will be able to improve the scans that they are able to acquire, get more quantifiable information and we'll be able to bring new drugs and therapy methods to the public so that way things like COVID won't ever happen again. Thank you.

[Applause]

[Speaker: Clayton Brady] We all strive for balance in our lives. But I'll bet one form of balance you haven't thought about is the acid base, or pH, balance that's happening inside your body. And fortunately, you don't have to think about it. Our body has complex mechanisms that work together to keep pH in balance. If pH balance is like maintaining a comfortable temperature in your house, then the pH that I am studying is how our body keeps that pH in balance. I'm guessing most of us set our thermostat somewhere around 70 degrees, and by doing so, no matter what temperature changes happen on the outside, the inside stays almost constant at that 70 degree set point. The same principle applies to our blood pH. Despite variations in how much we eat, drink, or exercise, all of which can affect pH, it stays exquisitely close to its set point of 7.4. So, with this analogy to temperature in mind what I have been searching for is the thermostat for pH. Now, during an acidosis, which is defined as anything that decreases pH, our brain senses this change and triggers an increase in breathing in order to blow off the extra acid in the form of carbon dioxide. At the same time, our kidney responds by increasing acid excretion in our urine. So if a decrease in pH is like a decrease in temperature, then these responses, by our brain with its control of breathing and our kidney with control of acid excretion, are just like your furnace and fireplace working together to keep your house warm. But. How do these organs sense that there was a decrease in pH in the first place? Well, we discovered that in the brain, a single molecule called NBCE1 acts just like a thermostat for pH. At the molecular level, NBCE1 transports base across the membranes of our cells. And because this transport increases during acidosis, this acts as a signal to our brain that our pH is decreasing. To understand the impact of this, we genetically modified mice so that they are missing NBCE1, and we tested their response to acidosis. And we found that the expected increase in breathing never happened. Just imagine your furnace with a broken thermostat unable to respond to a fallen temperature. Even more surprising, because these mice don't blow off carbon dioxide like they're supposed to, this caused the kidney to overreact and excrete more acid than it was supposed to given the severity of acidosis: a response that can actually cause damage to the kidney. To take our temperature analogy to the extreme, this would be like starting a bonfire in your living room just because your furnace broke. Since acidosis and kidney disease are often intertwined, it's my hope that these results will lead to better and more targeted therapies for kidney disease patients in the future. Overall, this research indicates that NBCE1, with its base transporting activity, is an essential mechanism of pH sensing. Which makes pH balance, really, all about that base. Thank you.

[Applause]