Browsing by Subject "COVID-19"
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Item A different world [than where you come from] : examining the experiences of Black undergraduate students at predominately White institutions amid the dual pandemics(2023-04-18) Webster, Travette Ann; Garces, Liliana M.; Brownson, Chris; Pierce Burnette, Colette; Reddick, Richard JIn 2020, society as we knew it changed drastically. A global health crisis that highlighted negative disproportionalities for people of color was exacerbated by a front-row seat to our generation's racial awakening. COVID-19 along with the public murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others became known as the "dual pandemics" (Jones, 2021). Prior research identifies a relationship between racial discrimination at predominately White institutions (Feagin, 1992; Grier-Reed et al., 2021; Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Hurtado, 1992; E. Morales, 2021; Swim et al., 2003) and adverse psychological effects on Black (K. F. Anderson, 2013; Carter & Forsyth, 2010; Nadal et al., 2014). However, an extensive analysis of recent literature reveals that research has yet to consider how the current COVID-19 and racial justice pandemics (Madrigal & Blevins, 2021; J. Miller, 2020) affect Black undergraduate students. To this end, this research study explored the experiences and coping strategies of Black undergraduate students in the aftermath of the dual pandemics. The study used Racial Battle Fatigue (W. A. Smith et al., 2007) and coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) as conceptual frameworks, and employed qualitative methods – interviews and a written reflection – to examine seven Black undergraduate students enrolled at predominately White institutions. Analysis of the data reveals that the dual pandemics caused severe disorientation and isolation in Black college students. These students are not sheltered by their campus walls. Compounded by an anti-Black institutional climate is the awareness of everyday racism felt by simply being Black in America. As a result, participants described significant levels of anxiety, fatigue, and hypervigilance characterized by intense fear over the past three years. In response to race-based trauma, participants employed various effective coping strategies including cultural identity and collective activism, hope, talking with friends or family, and imitating modeled behavior. Avoidance was noted as an ineffective coping strategy. As a result of the pandemics, Black students showed an increase in problem-focused coping driven by a strong sense of responsibility and high cultural identity. Findings will raise awareness and guide university administrators, Black student organization advisors, faculty, and mental health personnel to taking a proactive role in helping students to mitigate the detrimental effects of race-based trauma at the college level.Item A statistical analysis of COVID-19 for the Houston Area(2020-05-07) Baum, Jack Edward; Bickel, J. EricTo support planning by a major academic medical center in Houston, we provide a decision tool. A Texas COVID-19 pandemic forecast model is developed and scaled down to the greater Houston area to project the number of new cases, disease prevalence, and hospitalizations. Given the daily expected disease prevalence in the greater Houston area and a hypothetical number of daily regular patient visits, a probabilistic model informs decision-makers of the likelihood that x or more COVID-19 cases enter a facility. The COVID-19 projections are immediately needed to guide daily admittance decisions during the course of the outbreak.Item A tale of two realities: gendered workspace at home during the pandemic in Taipei(2023-12) Tsai, Chyi-Rong; Williams, Christine L., 1959-; Glass, JenniferRemote work has been viewed as facilitating work-family balance and promoting gender equality. While work-family scholars provide evidence to show that women still carry more responsibility at home compared to their husbands, this study adds to the debate from the spatial aspect of remote work by asking whether there is a gendered pattern of space allocation and use when couples work from home together. This study examines how heterosexual couples in Taiwan use space when both are working from home. I interviewed 29 people in 19 households how they arranged working space at home, and how these spatial arrangements influenced their working experiences and career development. I found that space is gendered: men tend to work in a preferable space at home compared to their partners. However, a preferable space is not always an independent physical space, such as a room. Interviews reveal that women are more interrupted regardless of the physical setting of the space. Their experiences reveal that women’s family roles, such as mother, daughter, and wife, are prioritized at home, resulting in constant interruptions. On the contrary, men’s roles as a worker are protected when they worked from home. Gender transcends and transforms the physical space to reproduce gender inequality at work for people who work from home, suggesting the need to reconsider treating remote work as a pro-work-family policy.Item Alex Tabarrok: COVID-19 Interview(2020-06-18) Tabarrok, AlexItem Alone Together(The Texas Scientist, 2021) Robards-Forbes, EstherItem Amanda Veasy Interview(2022-02-18) Institute for Diversity & Civic Life; Department of Religious StudiesThis interview is with Amanda Veasy, co-founder of One Love Longview, a nonprofit resource center for unsheltered, uninsured, and underserved populations. Amanda talks about the rapid rise of her organization as a response to community needs for accessible mental and physical health care. She describes the changes in her religious experiences over time, including being spurred to leave the church over her unwillingness to condemn the LGBTQ+ community. Amanda also talks about her methods of helping effectively by putting the individual’s desires and consent first and about the strength of her value of southern hospitality.Item Amesh Adalja: COVID-19 Interview(2020-09-09) Adalja, AmeshItem An Untold Story of Hardship: How COVID-19 Has Uniquely Impacted American Foster Parents(2021-05) Das, RahulCOVID-19 has drastically impacted our world from a health, economic, and psychological perspective. However, certain segments of the American population have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and historically neglected. One of these groups if foster parents. In this thesis, I aim to unearth the unique challenges the COVID-19 pandemic has created for American foster parents . My ultimate intentions of this paper are to raise awareness, particularly within The University of Texas at Austin community, for the need to support American foster parents in times of crisis and to spur said awareness into tangible action. I begin the paper by providing an overview of the American foster care system to establish baseline knowledge and context for the rest of the thesis. I then describe my interview-driven research methodology and employ the insights from my primary and secondary research to describe nine pre-pandemic problems for foster parents that were exacerbated by COVID-19 and six novel challenges that were created by COVID-19. Finally, I conclude the thesis with recommendations based off insights learned from my research and discuss key life lessons I took away from this thesis-writing and research process.Item Answering the Call(The Texas Scientist, 2021) The Texas ScientistItem ASIS&T Webinar and Discussion: The Role of Information During a Global Health Crisis - Association for Information Science and Technology(ASIS&T, 2020) Xie, Bo; Mercer, Tim; Fleischmann, Kenneth R.; Zhang, Yan; Yoder, Linda H.; Stephens, Keri K.; Mackert, Michael; Lee, Min KyungItem Aurelia Pratt Interview(2020-10-29) Institute for Diversity & Civic LifeThis interview is with Aurelia Pratt, a Chicana woman, and lead pastor to a progressive Baptist Church based in Austin, Texas. The vision of Pratt’s church focuses on decolonizing faith, justice, inclusion, and liberation. Aurelia speaks to the challenges of navigating life as a pastor during the global pandemic and how her personal experiences with racial tension and microaggressions as a brown woman of color have shaped who she is today.Item Big civic energy : social connectedness during the COVID-19 pandemic in Austin, TX(2023-05-04) Weatherford, Krista Michelle; Bixler, R. Patrick (Richard Patrick)The COVID-19 pandemic has revolutionized the way society views many things. Is civic engagement one of them? In the beginning of the pandemic, many individuals were active in their immediate neighborhood, leading many to believe that long-term social change was inevitable. However, the pandemic was a mixed bag in terms of the engagement it inspired. Benefits to the community in response included broader mutual aid, volunteering, mask-making, and food delivery to the elderly. Whereas negative civic impacts included anti-Asian racism, toilet paper hoarding, mass gatherings and antimasking despite restrictions. Ultimately, it is impossible to assess whether the event was wholly good or bad in terms of civic engagement. However, this report examines whether the following forms of civic engagement (referred to as social connectedness) increased in Austin during the pandemic: volunteering, donating, group association, and favors for neighbors. The report also uncovers any spatial disparities between how different populations responded to the pandemic. Academic literature analyzes how neighborhoods can differ in resident formation of social capital, and individual motivations to become civically engaged. Beyond that, a significant amount of literature discusses community formation and mutual aid in response to disruptive events such as natural disasters. This report utilizes mixed methods through a quantitative analysis using the Austin Area Sustainability Indicators, as well as a qualitative approach of interviewing community members and non-profit leadersItem Billie Watts & Kerry Kirtley Interview(2020-09-25) Institute for Diversity and Civic LifeThis interview is with Billie Watts and Kerry Kirtley, co-pastors of the Touchstone Community Church. Billie and Kirtley share their passion for creating an inclusive, justice-seeking community outside of their previous ties to certain denomination’s discriminatory practices. Billie and Kerry discuss both past challenges of leaving behind a community that was not accepting of their children and the current challenges of COVID-19 era co-pastor duties.Item Biochemical mechanisms for selectivity governing RNA and DNA replication(2021-04-07) Dangerfield, Tyler Lane; Johnson, Kenneth A (Kenneth Allen); Ellington, Andrew; Vasquez, Karen; Zhang, YanEnzymes that catalyze DNA and RNA replication are biologically important and provide examples to understand enzyme specificity as the correct substrate and alternate substrates are well known. The DNA polymerase from bacteriophage T7 has been a model system for understanding high-fidelity DNA replication, yet outstanding questions remain about the controversial nucleotide induced conformational change. I developed methods to directly measure the conformational change by site specifically incorporating a fluorescent unnatural amino acid into the enzyme at a position that gives a fluorescence signal upon nucleotide binding. In addition, I developed high throughput methods to analyze kinetic samples by capillary electrophoresis to assist in the kinetic analysis of DNA replication. Kinetic studies show that the conformational change is the primary determinant of specificity at the polymerase active site. I also characterized the enzyme’s 3’--5’ proofreading exonuclease activity and showed that the enzyme has multiple opportunities to correct mistakes during replication. I also used molecular dynamics simulation methods to propose a structure of the proofreading exonuclease editing complex. While finishing studies on the T7 DNA polymerase, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic devastated the world. I used techniques developed in my previous studies to characterize the RNA dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) from SARS-CoV-2, a prime target for antiviral drugs to stop replication of the virus. I developed methods to express the tag free complex in E. coli and subsequent purification to give highly active enzyme, which for the first time met standards for physiologically relevant activity. I characterized the pre-steady state kinetics of UTP and ATP incorporation and found that the enzyme catalyzes nucleotide incorporation at a fast rate, sufficient to replicate the 30 kb viral genome in less than 2 minutes. The ATP analog Remdesivir triphosphate, the only FDA approved treatment for COVID-19, was then studied to calculate the discrimination relative to ATP. We found that Remdesivir is incorporated more efficiently than ATP and acts as a delayed chain terminator, although this termination can be partially overcome by incubation with high nucleotide concentrations. Cryo-EM was used to determine the structure of the Remdesivir stalled RdRp complex and we found that the translocation step was inhibited after incorporation of 3 Remdesivirs due to a steric block between Remdesivir and the enzyme.Item Business Experts Weigh In on Coronavirus(2020-03-17) Simon, Jeremy M.Item Call for transparency of COVID-19 models(Science, 2020-05-01) Barton, Michael; Alberti, Marina; Ames, Daniel; Atkinson, Jo-An; Bales, Jerad; Burke, Edmund; Chen, MinItem Campus Scenes(The Texas Scientist, 2021) The Texas ScientistItem A Case for Holding On(2021) Khan, RoshanItem Challenging the land use planning status quo in the Austin metro area(2023-04-19) Smith, Kayla Michele; Wegmann, JakeThis report explores potential urban land use planning implications of changes both accelerated and brought forth by the COVID-19 pandemic that began in March of 2020. Analysis of current trends is first grounded by a literature review that examines the origins of urban systems and considers methodologies for conducting and evaluating land use planning and implementation efforts. The three notable trends studied are: increased remote and hybrid working arrangements, housing supply shortages and affordability challenges, and acknowledgement of disparate urban experiences based on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Discussion of the disruptive potential of these trends aims to move the land use planning field beyond its reactive status quo toward consideration of how cities and metro areas can strategically position themselves to adapt and thrive in the face of changing futures. A case study of the Austin Metro Area examines specific manifestations of these trends and proposes challenges to the current land use planning approach in the region and its principal city. Planning and regulation of land use must be more flexible in the face of uncertainty, more cognizant of historical planning interventions and the disparate impacts of exclusionary policies, and more responsive to changing patterns of socioeconomic geographic distribution related to affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity for both households and the region. Additionally, future land use planning must center the needs of diverse types of people and their use patterns rather than seeking to achieve “ideal” urban forms derived from often outdated and worker-focused assumptions about how people interact with the built environment. To support this approach, planners require better means of collecting and monitoring real-time data about population characteristics, economic activity, mobility, and the real estate market, particularly in a quickly evolving urban system like the Austin Metro AreaItem A changing narrative: The impact of COVID-19 on the roles of healthcare chaplaincy and advance care planning(2021-05-10) Rajagopal, Shilpa; Kwak, JungAdvance care planning (ACP) is a set of processes designed to help individuals express and document their preferences for future care and treatment interventions in accordance with their unique personal values. Prior research has identified healthcare chaplains as well-suited, yet potentially underutilized, facilitators of ACP given their expertise in spiritual care and healing. While ACP plays an important role in mapping patients’ long-term care plans, the physical and emotional strains of the COVID-19 pandemic have disrupted traditional avenues of ACP. As a result, this study analyzed 236 frontline accounts from board-certified healthcare chaplains to identify the ways in which COVID-19 has affected ACP across different clinical settings. Content analysis revealed two major themes: 1) COVID-19 has limited the scope of ACP and completion of advance directives, leading to 2) the emergence of legal, organizational, and technological adaptations in response to these challenges to continue supporting end-of-life care decision-making. Given the severity and progression of COVID-19, such findings suggest that there is heightened urgency for ACP, especially among patients and families who are unprepared or unfamiliar with navigating such conversations. This is further reinforced by the fact that ACP should ideally occur prior to a patient becoming critically ill, necessitating that healthcare professionals approach ACP education from a more proactive stance. Additionally, there may be future opportunities to incorporate the changes in ACP facilitation to foster greater interprofessional collaboration and accessibility through virtual platforms.