Dean's Seminar Series

The central goal of cancer biology is to understand how the acquired genetic changes become responsible for deregulated cell growth and differentiation at molecular level. Cancer is not one disease but a family of diseases that makes early detection extremely difficult. Rapid development in high-throughput molecular techniques has resulted in the accumulation of vast amounts of cancer transcriptome data. By applying computational methods to these data sets, it is possible to paint a molecular picture of a particular cancer subtype. In this talk, I will give an overview of my research in understanding cancer heterogeneity.

• Shembarger, R. R., Romito, L. M., and Nair, T. M., Are there gastric cancer biomarkers in salivary transcriptome? Submitted (2019)
• Nair, T. M. Kilbride, E., and Dang, J., Delineating features associated with non-small cell lung cancer. ISMB Conference, Basel, Switzerland (2019).
• Nair, T. M., Understanding heterogeneity in pregnancy-associated breast cancer Bioinformatics and Biomedicine IEEE International Conference, Washington, DC,USA, 1192-1196 (2015)
• Nair, T. M., Analysis of isoform expression from splicing array using multiple comparisons Methods Mol Biol 802, 113-121(2012)

Academia and the public media have emphasized the link between STEM majors and innovation as well as the need for STEM graduates in the U.S. economy. Given the proclivity of international students to major in STEM fields, immigration policy may be used to attract and retain high-skilled STEM workers in the United States. We examine the impacts of a 2008 policy extending the Optional Practical Training (OPT) period for STEM graduates. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates, we find that, relative to other foreign-born U.S. college graduates, the foreign-born who first came on student visas were 18 percent more likely to have their degrees in STEM fields if they enrolled in their major after the OPT policy change. While part of this increase is likely due to the rather mechanical drop in return migration among STEM graduates following the OPT change, the policy also appears to have induced some international students, who may have otherwise chosen a different field, to major in STEM.

I will discuss my journey from nursing practice at the bedside which informed my research and that led to the construction of a middle range theory of development of trust between the hospitalized patient and the nurse.

Developing interpersonal trust between the nurse and the patient in the hospital setting is fundamental to nursing care. I have conducted three separate grounded theory studies [classic] on the development of trust in the nurse-patient relationship with hospitalized patients using three distinct patient populations in the Midwestern United States. These populations were a) English-speaking Mexican American adult patients, b) Spanish-speaking (monolingual or limited English proficient) Mexican American adult patients, and c) African American and European American patients. The three models from these research studies were then synthesized into an empirically-based middle range theory of how interpersonal trust develops between the hospitalized patient and the nurse.

The process of how I developed the theory is presented as well as the resulting theory and participant quotes to support categories. The key factor in developing trust is the nurse entering the relationship focused on and available to the patient as a person. When the patient develops trust, the patient feels comfortable with the nurse and is more willing to ask questions, allow the nurse to help, confide in the nurse, and try something new. If the encounter with the nurse is negative, trust does not develop and the patient may feel like a bother, avoid the nurse and not ask for help, and feel more vulnerable. Two assumptions of the theory are a) the nurse is in control of trust development and b) trust is bound by the nursing shift and is cyclical in the hospital setting.

Nurses caring for hospitalized patients can apply the theory in their practice to identify areas to assist them in developing trust with patients. It is imperative that the nurse develop trust since the patient deciding to confide in the nurse or allow the nurse’s help affects patient safety and quality of care. Future research may be testing the fit of the theory with other populations and the development of an instrument to test the middle range theory.

Participants were undergraduate students from IUSB. Participants answered the Perceived Stress Scale, Major Commitment Inventory (a modified version of the Career Commitment Inventory), and a demographic questionnaire. A total of 99 participants were included in the final analyses. The average age of students was 24.39 (SD = 7.45). Most participants were in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (45.1%), followed by Health Sciences (19.6%), School of Arts (10.8%), Business and Economics (8.8%), and Social Work (6.9%). Nearly 30% of participants were juniors (29.5%), followed by seniors (26.5%), sophomore's (21.6%), and first years (14.7%). A small percentage (5.9%) indicated "other" in terms of year in school. The average stress score was 29.42 (SD = 8.05), which is slightly higher than other estimates of stress levels in university students. The participants' stress scores ranged from 5-46, indicating there is much variability in students' perceived stress.The average score on the Major Commitment Inventory was 49.94 (SD = 7.29), and scores ranged from 25-60. There was a significant, negative relationship between stress and commitment to their college major (r = -.31, p = .002). 

The year of Israel's founding as a state (1948), America's most famous and pugnacious Jewish socialist and writer, Mike Gold, left a one-act play buried in his desk. Rather than celebrating the new Jewish homeland, the play contained a dialogue between ghosts of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and a Jewish socialist writer in New York. The ghosts accuse the writer that he saw Nazism coming and that he did too little, too late, misled by his faith in American liberal democracy. And on the eve of the founding of the first Jewish state, Palestine is mentioned only once, as but another false dream:  where the Nazis would tell the Ghetto residents they are going on their way to Auschwitz.  The play concludes with the wistful desire that Jews return to Eastern Europe and rebuild their lives -- not in Israel, but in the diaspora. 

That Gold left this play in his desk says a great deal about how such articulations have been silenced for the last several decades, lingering as a literal ghosts haunting the Jewish left. This talk examines Jewish left-wing anti-imperialist thought as expressed by Jewish authors and intellectuals from the mid-twentieth century to the present. My research suggests that the supposed consensus around the need for a nation-state in Palestine was at best short-lived, and Jewish writers and thinkers—such as Mike Gold and Robert Gessner in the 1930s and 1940s and Irena Klepfisz and Grace Paley in the 1960s and 1970s—articulated many complex and even contradictory visions of transnational, anti-imperialist, and globally connected Jewish life in critical dialogue with Zionism

In 1903 W.E.B. DuBois wrote that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” One hundred and seventeen years later, the problem of the color line remains one of the most divisive and contested issues of the twenty-first century. This paper argues that underlying the problem of the color line is an unwillingness to teach the role that race played in the nation’s formation and its ongoing development. Rather than acknowledging the central function of the ideology of white supremacy, we adhere to a national narrative of American exceptionalism and a linear trajectory of triumphant progress. This paper suggests that we must move from an uncritical self-affirmation about American history and engage in critical self-reflection that makes an unflinching examination of how race has been a central organizer of social relations and national policy. While doing so is not sufficient for addressing the nation’s shortcomings, it is a necessary if we are to have a more open, honest, and productive conversation about where we are and how we got here. Even more so, unless and until we acknowledge, own, and repair the wreckage of our racial heritage, the most fundamental ideals about what it means to be an American will forever remain beyond our grasp.

Abstract coming soon.