Objectives/Goals: The overall goal of this project is to determine bacterial transcriptional signatures from clinical sputum and assess their potential to monitor treatment response and predict the outcome of drug therapy in patients with tuberculosis (TB). Methods/Study Population: We are developing a novel transcript capture sequencing (TC-Seq) approach to sequence the mRNA of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) and analyze transcriptomes from clinical samples containing minimal amounts of bacterial RNA. This protocol generates single-stranded biotinylated probes from Mtb DNA. Probes are hybridized to and allow enrichment of Mtb-specific mRNA within next-generation RNA sequencing libraries. We will apply TC-Seq to sputum samples collected throughout an 18-month Phase II clinical trial investigating response to TB treatment to compare the transcriptome of Mtb between patients whose treatment results in cure or relapse. Results/Anticipated Results: We have refined a technique to generate biotinylated probes starting from DNA of lab grown Mtb. This protocol achieves robust and unbiased sampling of the Mtb transcriptome from mixed samples containing both human and Mtb RNA. Preliminary sequencing of clinical sputum collected pretreatment has generated 1–4 million Mtb-specific reads, a sequencing depth that allows examination of the entire bacterial transcriptome. We will measure differential gene expression before and during treatment as well as between cure and relapse cases. These results will allow us to characterize bacterial response to treatment and identify bacterial markers that correlate with relapse. Discussion/Significance of Impact: Understanding Mtb activity during treatment will offer new ways to assess the efficacy of different treatment regimens. Crucially, identifying clear bacterial markers that demarcate a cure or relapse outcome will have a significant impact on determining patient eligibility for shorter drug therapy.

Objectives/Goals: The NIH Common Fund launched Community Partnerships to Advance Science for Society (ComPASS) to study ways to reduce health disparities by addressing underlying structural factors within communities. ComPASS was designed for community organizations to lead research that addresses community needs. Methods/Study Population: ComPASS awarded five health equity research hubs (Hubs) to provide specialized technical support to ComPASS research projects led by community organizations. Expertise provided by the Hubs to the community-led projects will focus on specific facets of community health, including nutrition access, health care access, and built environment. The Hubs support community-led piloting and testing of structural interventions within community settings by providing subject matter expertise in areas including structural and multilevel intervention study design and methods, implementation science, and community engagement. Results/Anticipated Results: The Hubs will provide expertise and support to the community-led research projects around one or more social determinants of health domains: health care access and quality, education access and quality, economic stability, social and community context, and neighborhood and built environment. The Hubs will help identify strategies for measuring health outcomes and assessing the effects of structural and contextual factors on intervention outcomes. We anticipate the ComPASS program will lead to a better understanding of how structural interventions that leverage multi-sectoral partnerships can advance health equity. Discussion/Significance of Impact: Through community-led research, ComPASS projects are implementing structural interventions to address social determinants and advance health equity. The technical scientific support rooted in health equity provided by the Hubs is essential to the success of these research projects.

Objectives/Goals: Lack of comparative data limits research operations quality improvement (QI). The Northwest Participant and Clinical Interactions (NW PCI) Network, a group of 17 unaffiliated university and health system-based research centers, built an operations dashboard to track efficiency and enable multisite QI projects. Methods/Study Population: A Data Governance Working Group was assembled to establish shared data governance, draft nondisclosure (NDA), and data transfer and use agreements (DTUA) suitable across organizations and standardize research operations metric definitions. Sites in the NW PCI Network were recruited to participate in a pilot program to assess data sharing and governance infrastructure, data collection, upload procedures, and data visualization tools. The NW PCI Coordinating Center developed an analytical data dashboard of research operations metrics and conducted semi-structured interviews with participating sites to understand barriers and facilitators of program success. Results/Anticipated Results: Four sites (2 health systems, 2 universities) were recruited for the pilot and reviewed and executed NDAs and DTUAs. Three of the sites have submitted data for a total of 1,405 studies. Of the 24 requested data operations metrics (e.g., study startup, recruitment, implementation, and basic study information), 71% of the metrics were submitted by all three sites (n = 17), 25% were submitted by at least one site (n = 6), and 4% were not submitted by any site (n = 1). Interviews with sites after data submission found areas for improvements (clarification of data definitions, efficiency of data upload process) and positive effects for sites (e.g., process improved insight into own data operations). Discussion/Significance of Impact: Unaffiliated research centers created data governance procedures to enable sharing of operations data. Pilot sites successfully loaded most but not all operations data to the dashboard. Interviews identified process limitations and opportunities for improvement to inform expansion to all NW PCI sites.

Objectives/Goals: Arterial stiffness is a determinant of vascular health. Older Black females exhibit greater arterial stiffness than White females. Exercise minimizes negative health effects of prolonged exposure to adverse social determinants of health (SDoH). Here, we will assess the role of exercise on race differences in arterial stiffness and SDoH in females. Methods/Study Population: We will recruit 96 postmenopausal females (48 Black, 48 White) from the Birmingham, AL area. Graded exercise tests will be used to define training status (“trained”: VO2max ≥60th percentile, “untrained”: ≤35th percentile). We will assess arterial stiffness via pulse wave velocity (SphygmoCor XCEL). SDoH will include income, education, neighborhood deprivation, racial discrimination, food insecurity, and healthcare access, all measured via corresponding surveys. We will then perform a two-way analysis of variance (race × training status) to assess the differences in arterial stiffness between groups. Through linear regression, we will evaluate the statistical relations between arterial stiffness and race, training status, and SDoH. Results/Anticipated Results: Our central hypothesis is that Black females will have greater arterial stiffness, by way of greater exposure to adverse SDoH, than White females, but that habitual aerobic exercise will attenuate this race difference. Ultimately, we aim to inform future clinical trials related to understanding female-specific cardiovascular disease progression. Discussion/Significance of Impact: Black females face significant exposure to adverse SDoH and have the highest rates of cardiovascular disease in the United States. However, females are still widely underrepresented in relevant research. This will be the first study to examine the roles of aerobic exercise, race, and SDoH in cardiovascular disease risk among females.

Objectives/Goals: Research participation by adolescents and young adults (AYAs) is critical for advancing therapeutic interventions applicable across the life course. Identifying effective strategies to recruit and retain AYAs is challenging. This poster elucidates the process and outcomes of working with an AYA Health Research Board and surveying AYAs. Methods/Study Population: The AYA Health Research Board established in 2022 as part of an AYA Program within the UC Davis (UCD) Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC). The Board is composed of youth advisers, ages 13–39, from across CA. In 2023, the Program supplemented insights from the board with a national online survey of AYAs using the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform. Two separate instruments were administered, one on recruitment and another on retention, each with over 400 responses. The UCD AYA Board was then engaged to provide crucial insights contextualizing the survey findings, ensuring their relevance and applicability to the AYA population. Results/Anticipated Results: Overall, survey results indicate that AYAs are aware of health studies and clinical trials. Responses affirm that incentives are the biggest driver of AYA participation, while side effects were identified as the biggest reason to drop out of a study. Overall, youth appear more interested in participating in online studies versus those that require in-person appearances. Text messages, regular updates, and sharing of study results were identified as strategies to maintain participant engagement. Additional results will be available through a one-page factsheet for researchers to use as they think about retention and recruitment of AYAs. Discussion/Significance of Impact: Survey results will be made available to health researchers to help move the needle on recruitment and retention efforts of AYAs. This mixed-methods case study serves as an example of the impact AYAs can have on shaping research and validating survey findings.

Objectives/Goals: Digital recruitment can improve participant engagement in medical research, but its potential to introduce demographic and socioeconomic biases is unclear. This study investigates pathways participants took during a digital recruitment workflow in neurology, examining potential associations with socioeconomic and demographic factors. Methods/Study Population: As part of an ongoing study aiming to remotely capture speech from patients with neurologic disease, most participants seen in neurology on our campus are invited to complete a self-administered speech examination. We exported participant data from Epic (semi-automated identification and invitation), Qualtrics (eligibility screening), the participant tracking database (consent), and the recording platform (completion) for March to July 2024. Data visualization was performed using a Sankey diagram. Socioeconomic status was assessed using the housing-based socioeconomic status (HOUSES) index and area deprivation index (ADI) national rank. Kruskal–Wallis and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests were used to compare the median age, socioeconomic indices, and time taken to reach different steps of the study. Results/Anticipated Results: Of the 5846 invited participants, 57% were from urban areas, 23% from rural areas, and 20% from urban clusters. Most did not read/respond (2739) or declined (1749) the initial invitation via Epic. Of the 1358 interested participants, 415 completed the study. Participants from urban areas completed enrollment steps faster than those from rural areas and urban clusters, though the variance was large (42.6 ± 41.4 days vs. 50.6 ± 42.2 days and 50 ± 43.9 days, respectively; p  =  0.030). Female participants took longer to complete enrollment than males (48.7 ± 44 days vs. 40.5 ± 38.8 days; p  =  0.026). Participants who successfully finished the study had significantly lower ADI national ranks compared to other common pathways (40.6 ± 19; p  =  0.0021). No associations were found with the HOUSES indices. Discussion/Significance of Impact: Our findings support differences in participant engagement, with urban participants and males more likely to complete enrollment steps. Those who finished the study were less disadvantaged suggesting potential bias in digital recruitment. These findings can inform strategies to improve digital recruitment in neurology research.

Objectives/Goals: Originally presented at TS24, we would like to discuss follow-up outcomes and preliminary findings“Building Empowerment Through Fitness” – objectives were designed to address the “whole women” in underserved segments of the population in impoverished and/or underprivileged communities with fewer opportunities and promote economic mobility. Methods/Study Population: A qualitative study design to understand unique cultural context and challenges faced by women residing in the Birmingham Housing Authority, regarding physical activity engagement, including sedentarism. The needs assessment approach examined barriers, support systems, and social networks. Semi-structured, pre, mid, and post program focus groups explored challenges and opportunities for health, such as diet and exercise, and are being analyzed by hand with a thematic analysis. The project framework used movement, home repair tools with a life-building/life repair curriculum to influence self-efficacy and program engagement. The study enrollment included 51 women over two cohorts in a 12-week project. Results/Anticipated Results: Preliminary are results showed the women did face heightened health risks due to sedentary lifestyles, educational gaps, and socioenvironmental barriers. We incorporated tool skills, healthy lifestyles, and social/emotional focus group to explore social/emotional perceptions, concerns, and needs. Although our results were on target, there were some unexpected outcomes related to family dynamics, literacy, housing stability, and peer support. Discussion/Significance of Impact: Women are more likely to be sedentary and have poor health. BeFit served as a solution to addressing problems related to economic mobility barriers, poor health, sedentariness, and low self-esteem/self-efficacy. Additionally, exercise/movement programs can be a powerful tool to address disparities and help prioritize health.

Objectives/Goals: To present findings from a focus group study that evaluate clinical research professionals’ (CRPs) team science learning preferences. The study aims to better understand CRPs’ experiential perceptions of team science skills, training gaps, team cohesion, conflict, and contributions for their preferred team science training. Methods/Study Population: This study targeted CRPs across various roles in Academic Health Centers via focus groups. The focus groups will assess current skills, identify training gaps, and share experiences on team cohesion, team conflict, team contribution, and their thoughts and perceptions about clinical research professional team science training. The focus groups will be held via Zoom in the Autumn of 2024 with volunteer participants from an initial survey that was conducted earlier in 2024. We will report on combined data from multiple 90-minute focus groups, with approximately 6 participants per session. Results/Anticipated Results: The focus group facilitator’s guide includes questions informed by the CRP team science learning needs assessment results and other questions on team issues that would benefit from focused training. Focus group methods and demographic characteristics of the participants by role and experience level will also be presented. Qualitative analyses of recorded focus-group discussions will present key themes by demographic groups, and as a whole, these data will contribute to the development of CRP team science educational programs and toolkits. Discussion/Significance of Impact: CRPs are vital members of clinical translational science teams. Overlooking CRP team science training can negatively affect the efficiency and effectiveness of the clinical translational science enterprise. CRP team science skills will foster a more collaborative and productive research environment.

‘Living well’ is an important concept across national dementia strategies. Qualitative research has contributed to understanding of living well for people with dementia. Longitudinal qualitative approaches, though fewer, can explore potential changes in accounts of living well, psychological coping and adapting to dementia, and if/how people with dementia maintain continuity in their lives. This longitudinal qualitative study aims to gauge what is important for ‘living well’ with mild-to-moderate dementia and whether this changes over time in a group of older people with mild-to-moderate dementia living at home. Semi-structured, qualitative interviews with 20 people with dementia from the IDEAL cohort study were conducted in 2017 and again one year later then thematically analysed. The overarching narrative was largely that of continuity and adaptation, with incremental not disruptive change. Continuing participation and meaningful occupation were important to maintaining living well over time; individuals pursued new as well as previous interests. As a key psychological coping strategy to support continuity in their lives, individuals emphasised their capabilities to maintain activities in spite of dementia, compartmentalising areas that had become more challenging. Maintaining social networks and accommodating changes in social relationships were also central to living well, including managing the psychological impacts of changes in spousal relationships. People in the earlier stages of dementia emphasise continuity and their capabilities, reporting change over time only in certain aspects of their lives. However, small, incremental changes in their social relationships and opportunities for meaningful occupation may still afford key areas for supporting capability to ‘live well’.

This article seeks to cast a critical eye on musical modernism through the experiences of its percussionist practitioners. It charts the origins and accepted truisms of percussion ontology as it is understood through the modernist sensibility, and demonstrates how certain modernist assumptions have been inherited by many contemporary practitioners. Some of these individuals’ resulting expressions of grief, anger, and sadness in the wake of modernism's waning are presented, and a reparative reading of modernist percussion that seeks to make the repertory inhabitable and sustaining is instead offered. This practice is illustrated through a feminist and performer-led analysis of Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kontakte (1958–60), for piano, percussion, and tape. It is ultimately argued that performer knowledge and affective attachment is essential to understanding modernism's history and aesthetics, as well as its place in the contemporary moment.

The Cox duration model serves as the basis for more complex duration models like competing risks, repeated events, and multistate models. These models make a number of assumptions, many of which can be assessed empirically, sometimes for substantive ends. We use Monte Carlo simulations to show the order in which practitioners assess these assumptions can impact the model’s final specification, and ultimately, can produce misleading inferences. We focus on three assumptions regarding model specification decisions: proportional hazards (PH), stratified baseline hazards, and stratum-specific covariate effects. Our results suggest checking the PH assumption before checking for stratum-specific covariate effects tends to produce the correct final specification most frequently. We reexamine a recent study of the timing of GATT/WTO applications to illustrate our points.

We construct a Divisia money measure for U.K. households and private non-financial corporations and a corresponding dual user cost index employing a consistent methodology from 1977 up to the present. Our joint construction of both the Divisia quantity index and the Divisia price dual facilitates an investigation of structural vector autoregresssion models (SVARs) over a long sample period of the type of non-recursive identifications explored by Belongia and Ireland (2016, 2018), as well as the block triangular specification advanced by Keating et al. (2019). An examination of the U.K. economy reveals that structures that consider a short-term interest rate to be the monetary policy indicator generate unremitting price puzzles. In contrast, we find sensible economic responses in various specifications that treat our Divisia measure as the indicator variable.

Host–parasite adaptation is crucial for evolutionary success of a parasite. The nematode Angiostrongylus cantonensis has a heterogenic life cycle involving molluscs as intermediate hosts and rats as definitive hosts. Several mollusc species are susceptible hosts of A. cantonensis, allowing the development of first-stage larvae (L1) into third-stage larvae (L3). Changes in the metabolism of infected molluscs have been demonstrated, disturbing regular routes and inducing host defence mechanisms. This study aimed to identify changes in the proteomic content of Phyllocaulis spp. mucus during A. cantonensis infection. Proteins were extracted from the mucus samples of infected and non-infected slugs and identified using liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry. We found 26 up-regulated and 15 down-regulated proteins in infected slugs compared to non-infected slugs. Protein profiles are promising markers of parasite infection, and a better understanding of proteomic profiles during infection may help inform in vivo studies and promote new tools for the non-invasive identification of infected hosts.

Founded a century ago upon the initiative of three European men, each with links to colonial administration or mission, the International African Institute subsequently developed in directions that could hardly have been predicted. Most of those directly involved in the first two decades were from Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, including a growing number of academics. In addition to promoting creative writing in Africa and a common orthography for African languages, the Institute secured private American funding for a big research programme involving social anthropological fieldwork. After 1945, with decolonization on the horizon, the focus was on systematically producing ethnographic and linguistic handbooks. From the 1960s onwards the Institute endeavoured to shake off its remaining links to colonialism and – to a modest degree – to africanize itself. Its successes lay in organizing a series of International African Seminars, held at newly emerging African universities, and in continuing to produce the journal Africa, as well as several series of monographs.

When the world’s leading human rights advocates violate international norms, how does this affect support for those norms around the world? Rather than diffusing norm breaking across borders, I argue that authoritarian states’ propaganda about liberal states’ violations may increase the salience of human rights norms in places where those norms are normally censored. Focusing on American racial discrimination, I find that the Chinese Communist Party publicizes American human rights violations on to its citizens for strategic political reasons. Through two survey experiments I show that while exposure to news about American discrimination does provide substantial propaganda benefits to the regime, it also makes Chinese respondents more supportive of minority rights and more critical of their own country’s respect for those rights. The study shows how prominent violations of international norms may be an underappreciated means of strengthening global public support for those norms.