Office of Undergraduate Research hosts Fall Symposium of Student Scholars

Jennifer Monyhan’s proposal investigates the effectiveness of a targeted, 30-second stretching session incorporated into each shift change huddle, for employees beginning their shift as well as employees ending their shift, on reports of lower back pain.

“In my previous career I worked for UPS, and I was out in operations where all the truck drivers are,” Monyhan said. “Every morning, we’d have our little huddle like the nurses do and we would do a quick stretching exercise — every single morning for 30, 45 seconds to get them ready to move those packages.”

“So, I figured we have a captive audience in the huddle with the nurses and the care partners, so why don’t we incorporate a quick stretch?”

To ensure accurate results, Monyhan will focus on care partners and nurses who report lower back pain and will provide a pre-determined list of targeted exercises to be performed on an identified medsurg/telemetry unit during each shift huddle.

Afterward, Monyhan will interview participants and ask them to rate their back pain on a 10-point pain scale, then compare those results to the answers provided at the beginning of the study.

Anodically coloring electrochromes (ACE) provide a solution to this problem because they are colorless in the neutral state, and upon oxidation are colored.

“Anodically coloring electrochromes are ones that start off colorless, and when you apply the potential, they become colorful,” Julia A. Mauro said. “So, like a smart window, that’s what the remote is: You press the button and it applies the potential and the molecules in the glass change its color and it darkens.”

This research project used 1,4-dihydropyrrolo[3,2-b]pyrroles (DHPP) because they are synthetically simple and highly tailorable, thus, highly applicable to organic electronic applications.

“All of this together basically shows that there should be more investigation into pyrrolo pyrroles as anodically coloring electrochromes, and specifically energy-saving anodically coloring electrochromes,” Mauro said.

Past research found an increase in male eating disorders in the recent years, and this project wanted to see if there were implications in male athletes.

Caitlin Callahan and Abby Doster used a dataset from the National Library of Medicine that collected information from athletes 18 years old and above, measuring restraint, eating concern, weight concern and shape concern.

“We initially thought, ‘OK, the stereotype is females and eating disorders. Those two pair together all the time,’ Doster said. “Especially in lean sports like ballerinas, they are pressured to lose weight, but it was so surprising at first when we did the t-test, we found that males were significantly higher in the eating disorder global score.”

Their research found that male athletes scored significantly higher that female athletes in all subcategories of the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q). They also found that when looking at the interaction of gender and sport type, male athletes in non-lean sports scored higher in shape concern and eating concern.