James Quinn, Ph.D. - US grants

A scanning electron microscope will be acquired to resolve external microstructure of dinoflagellates, parasites, mollusks, lobsters, and animal parts. The instrument will be used principally in descriptive studies to resolve conservative morphological features and delineate variation within and among species for the purposes of taxonomic identification, classification, parasite host specificity and interactions, distribution patterns and ecological relationships, aging of larval fishes, and characterization of sensory structures.

Dr. Botsford and collaborators will model and analyze the dynamic effects of spatially and temporally varying physical oceanographic conditions on spatially distributed, meroplanktonic marine populations with age or size structure and density- dependent recruitment. They will examine the effects of both: (1) large scale physical forcing on transport and survival between sub-populations during the planktonic larval stage, and (2) small scale physical forcing on life history rates in local sub-populations. Population behavior will be characterized in terms of persistence, stability, sensitivity to environmental variability, and spatial synchrony. These investigators will use their models and the results of their analyses to project changes in these populations due to projected changes in global climate. As specific examples for which to make these projections, they will focus on the Dungeness crab (Cancer magister) and the feeding interaction between sea urchins (Strongylocentrotus spp.) and macroalgae (Nereocystis leutkeana, Macrocystis pyrifera) in the California Current System. For these systems they will model larval transport based on idealized flows and small scale benthic flows computed from wave energy. Potential future changes in the physical environment will include changes in the level of upwelling and the frequency and magnitude of ENSO events.

Command-and-control regulation by single-function federal and state agencies has many limitations. In response, community-based environmental planning involving direct negotiations among governmental and private parties has become an increasingly popular strategy for resolving local environmental conflicts. This project seeks to ascertain: 1) whether consensus-based negotiations are more successful than conventional methods in designing and implementing specific management projects. 2) the relative ability of three theoretical frameworks-Elinor Ostrom's Institutional Analysis and Development Framework, the Advocacy Coalition Framework of Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith, and Robert Putnam's Social Capital Framework-in explaining the ability of watershed negotiations to reach and implement legally-binding agreements. The data base will involve personal interviews and surveys of participants in 60 watershed negotiations in California.

DESCRIPTION (Taken from the applicants abstract): Next to the common cold, traumatic wounds are the most common reasons people seek medical care in the United States. An estimated 3.9 billion dollars of charges are incurred yearly to treat simple lacerations alone. Most of our knowledge and recommendations regarding the treatment of wounds is based on old dogma related to basic science research that has little clinical relevance. There is a lack of clinical outcomes research to determine the most efficient method to treat traumatic wounds. The purpose of the proposed application is to develop the candidate into an independent career clinical-outcomes researcher through formal training and practical experience. The training goal of the candidate will be to complete a Masters of Clinical Research (MCR) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The MCR requires 36 quarter-hours of didactic courses tailored to the candidates needs and publication of an original scientific paper in lieu of a Masters thesis. It involves strong preceptor relationships with faculty mentors. The practical-experience goal will be achieved by completing two scientific projects during the course of the award. Early in the course of the award, the candidate will develop and implement a clinical research unit (CRU) in emergency medicine at UCSF. Through implementing this program to screen, recruit and enroll patients a randomized trial to determine the best way to treat simple hand lacerations will be completed. In this trial conservative management (non-suture closure) will be compared to traditional suture management. The primary outcome will be three month cosmesis and wound healing, with secondary outcomes of pain, time and patient satisfaction also being assessed. In the later years of the award, as the candidate completes his MCR and fully develops his local CRU, he will become a multi-center clinical-trials investigator. This will be accomplished by using his formal training and with the help of his mentor, Dr Cummings, the Director of the University of Califomia Coordinating Center (UCCC). The UCCC is specifically designed to help run multi center clinical trials. With the use of the UCCC resources a trials network utilizing common databases and data collection techniques will be used to undertake a multi-center clinical trial on the use of prophylactic antibiotics for the management of dog bites. In this study amoxicillin/clavulanic acid will be compared to placebo. The primary outcome of the study will be infection. Other outcomes studied will be wound-healing patient satisfaction and cost.

Interdisciplinary (99)
Chemistry, physics, and education faculty are engaged in designing, developing, and pilot testing a physical science course that is designed to enhance the scientific awareness of nonscience majors. This is being done in a three cycle iterative process where each cycle ends with assessment leading to subsequent improvements. Currently the university required curriculum for non-science majors does not provide direct experiences with the methods and processes of science. This developing course is providing an undergraduate science experience that is inquiry-based and content-relevant to students' personal experiences. This is being accomplished by including materials that are contextually familiar and potentially interesting to Michigan students. Students taking the new course are learning the scientific approach to problem solving -- a process that requires basing opinions on facts and observable evidence. Use of peer learning groups in active-learning classroom activities and computer laboratory study are part of the course design. We expect this pedagogical design will prove effective in improving critical thinking and communication skills. The course is also teaching methods for locating information on scientific topics and for understanding and interpreting scientific data. The course is constructed around three modules -- the science of everyday life, science of the microscopic world, and the earth and beyond. These choices are making extensive use of modules developed by two NSF Chemistry Initiatives known as Modular Chemistry and ChemLinks. Each module area is being developed with some flexibility. Eventually there will be a minimum of two alternative module implementations developed in each module area to provide flexibility of choice for the many faculty who are (or soon will be) teaching it. This project is also adapting materials from the textbook "Physical Science" by J. Faughn, R. Chang, and J. Turk (Fort Worth, Texas: Saunders College Publishing, 1995), from "Workshop Science: Exploring Nature Through Active Learning," by S. Franklin, D. Jackson, and P. Laws, AAPT Spring Meeting, Lincoln, NE (1998), the Integrated Science Program at Cal State - Chico (R. Lederer, "A Problem Solving, Simulation, and Teamwork Approach to Teaching Integrated Science, being developed under a 1997 NSF grant), and the general education program at UCLA (www.college.ucla.edu/ge/). A systematic effort will be made to identify and recruit future secondary science teachers from students entering the university, particularly those who enter with an undecided career. Project products will include modified ChemLinks/ ModularChem modules, assessment tools to measuring levels of scientific awareness, and a workshop for training faculty and teaching assistants in the teaching and assessment methodologies used in this course.

The University of California at Davis has been awarded a grant to design and develop a web enabled database combining an extensive amount of butterfly occurrence data collected over 30 years with local environmental data for an area of northern California. Representations to XML and EML (Ecological Metadata Language) will be available from the Darwin Core based schema which will also be DiGIR enabled. This will make the data broadly useable and easily integrated across the internet with other data from various fields.

This medium ITR project will develop a framework to facilitate science
research and education on the semantic web, and will implement and
evaluate prototype tools and applications for use in the biocomplexity
and biodiversity domains. These capabilities include the ability to
collaborate and convey meaning through the automatic and
semi-automatic semantic annotation of web documents; to improve
information retrieval using background knowledge and inference; and to
extract and fuse information from multiple, heterogeneous sources in
response to a query. A testbed for prototyping these capabilities will
be the web portal of the National Biological Information
Infrastructure (http://www.nbii.org/). The framework will include
specifications for ontologies, protocols, agents, and tools for
authoring, automated ingest, and annotation. These tools will leverage
collaboratively constructed ontologies to bring diverse communities
together and enable community construction of scientific
knowledge. Additional domain-independent, general purpose ontologies
will be developed to enable metadata about the contents and structure
of databases and other knowledge repositories to be expressed in
emerging knowledge markup languages such as RDF and OWL. This will
enable agents to both access and index the hidden web, and will also
support the data mining of diverse and distributed databases.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In 2003 there were 114 million emergency department visits, of which 5.7 percent involved the treatment of acute open wounds. In general there is a lack of clinical outcomes research to determine the most efficient method to treat these wounds. Current treatment of acute wounds is guided by old dogma, some of which may not be appropriate. Evidence is based on animal trials and on old clinical research lacking sufficient methods or in fact non-existent and perpetuated by opinion. A classic example is the treatment of hand lacerations and the rate of wound infections from dog bites, both studied in the candidate's K-23 award. Old literature suggests the baseline infection rates for dog bites is about 15 percent overall and perhaps as high as 30 percent for hand wounds leading to many advocating for prophylactic antibiotics. Current work suggests that the current rate of infection is probably 5 percent making the rationale to treat all wounds invalid. The candidate has also challenged dogma demonstrating that simple hand lacerations heal regardless of whether they are treated with sutures or conservatively. The majority of acute wounds are simple and uncomplicated that only occasionally may develop complications such as infection and dehiscence. There are tremendous variations in wound care practices among physicians. This includes wound cleansing (what solution and how much irrigation?), wound closure (primary vs. secondary and modality), and the use of prophylactic antibiotics. Determining which wounds are at risk for complications based on outcomes research will guide treatment and follow-up decisions and ultimately allow for the most cost-effective care. The candidate has expertise in the area of wound care and has completed extra graduate training in clinical research. Having successfully completed his K-23 award the candidate has prepared himself for a career as an independent clinical scientist .The purpose of the proposed application is to allow the candidate to utilize his research skills in clinical decision rule development and his passion for wound care research to develop clinical decision guidelines to predict wounds at risk for complications after ED treatment. The specific aim of this application is to utilize the wound care network established in the candidate's K-23 to collect a large prospective cohort of lacerations and acute dog bite wounds to develop a decision rule to predict wound healing complications. Using his real-time notification and tracking system to identify eligible patients, he will have physicians prospectively complete a standardized web based data collection form. He will then determine wound outcomes (infection and dehiscence) within 30 days to determine the rates of acute wound complications. Using his skills in clinical prediction rule development specifically utilizing recursive partitioning techniques he will derive highly sensitive and specific clinical prediction rules for predicting complications of acute lacerations and dog bite wounds. If the candidate can successfully derive the rules in this R-21 they will be subsequently validated and implemented to improve the efficiency of acute wound care. [unreadable] [unreadable] This application will study the second most common reason why people seek medical care in the country, the treatment of acute traumatic lacerations and bites. The potential impact of this study is enormous as the study results will guide efficient and cost effective management decisions on controversial issues such as which patients would benefit from prophylactic antibiotics. This will be accomplished by studying a large group of patients presenting to emergency departments with acute lacerations and dog bites to determine the current incidence of wound complications, primarily infection. Numerous variables will then be analyzed to determine a group of risk factors for developing these complications. Knowing which patients are at risk for complications will help guide treatment and management decisions. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Stroke, seizures, meningitis, anoxic brain injury, traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury and intracerebral hemorrhage are common neurological emergencies that cause significant morbidity and mortality and result in substantial human suffering and enormous health care costs. Neurological emergencies can be surgical or non-surgical and clinical trials in this area requires a cooperative and coordinated network of emergency physicians, neurologists, neurosurgeons and neurointensivists who can coordinate the pre-hospital, emergency department and inhospital environments to ensure clinical trials for neurological emergencies can be effectively implemented. This proposal, in response to RFA-NS-06-009 for the network hub sites which is a companion to RFA-NS-06-002 for the NETT coordinating center, will describe how we will function as a hub in this network to work in collaboration with the coordinating center. The proposal focuses on how we will utilize the unique skills, relationships and experiences we have as an interdisciplinary team of pre- hospital, emergency and in-hospital providers to recruit, enroll, treat and follow-up patients for proposed clinical trials for patients with neurological emergencies in the pre-hospital environment and at academic and community hospitals within our hub. The first aim of our hub will be to coordinate 2 EMS agencies and seven academic and community hospitals in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, of which three also provide trauma services to Santa Cruz and San Benito counties. These hospitals and county EMS agencies accounted for over 300,000 ED visits, 6,000 trauma activations and 100,000 EMS responses. All hospitals in our hub have demonstrated a commitment to neurological emergencies by instituting protocols and services to be accredited or in the process of being accredited as JACHO stroke centers. The second aim will be to utilize the expertise of the investigators from Stanford University in emergency medicine and neurological research to extend their clinical research infrastructure and experience to all sites within the hub. The third aim will be to describe how the hub will work with the coordinating center to implement clinical trial infrastructure at these sites. This will be done by partnering with the EMS providers, using innovative systems to identify potential patients, using 24/7 on call support to ensure accurate implementation of protocols and with novel technology strategies to follow-up and retain patients entered into network trials.