Research

Groundbreaking work and published results in peer reviewed journals across disciplines.

Title

Topic

  • ‘Design Rules for Optimization of Photophysical and Kinetic Properties of Azoarene Photoswitches’

    “Azoarenes are an important class of molecular photoswitches that often undergo E → Z isomerization with ultraviolet light and have short Z-isomer lifetimes. Azobenzene has been a widely studied photoswitch for decades but can be poorly suited for photopharmacological applications due to its UV-light absorption and short-lived Z-isomer half-life (t1/2). … We calculated the E-isomer absorption (λmax) and Z-isomer t1/2 for a set of 26 hemi-azothiophenes. We compared their properties to thiophene-based photoswitches that have been studied previously.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry.

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  • ‘Reanalysis of mtDNA mutations of human primordial germ cells (PGCs) reveals NUMT contamination … selection in PGCs may be positive’

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    “The resilience of the mitochondrial genome (mtDNA) to a high mutational pressure depends, in part, on negative purifying selection in the germline. A paradigm in the field has been that such selection, at least in part, takes place in primordial germ cells (PGCs). Specifically, Floros et al. (Nature Cell Biology 20: 144-51) reported an increase in the synonymity of mtDNA mutations (a sign of purifying selection) between early-stage and late-stage PGCs. We re-analyzed Floros’ et al. data and determined that their mutational dataset was significantly contaminated with single nucleotide variants.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Mitochondrion.

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  • ‘Renova Toilet Paper: Avant-Garde Marketing in a Commoditized Category’

    “Renova, a Portuguese toilet paper manufacturer, is battling to survive in a stagnant, commoditised market dominated by international giants and private labels. To grow and remain independent, CEO Paulo Pereira da Silva is considering three options: 1) private label manufacturing, 2) new functional innovations and 3) launching a black toilet paper. What should he do? And how should the chosen strategy be implemented? In exploring the challenges facing small players in stagnant commodised categories, … this case provides detailed information on consumer behaviour, competition and the company.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Case Centre.

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  • ‘Allosteric Site Variants Affect GTP Hydrolysis on Ras’

    “RAS GTPases are proto‐oncoproteins that regulate cell growth, proliferation and differentiation in response to extracellular signals. The signaling functions of RAS, and other small GTPases, are dependent on their ability to cycle between GDP‐bound and GTP‐bound states. … GTP hydrolysis catalyzed by HRAS can be regulated by an allosteric site located between helices 3, 4 and loop 7. Here we explore the relationship between intrinsic GTP hydrolysis on HRAS and the position of helix 3 and loop 7 through manipulation of the allosteric site, showing that the two sites are functionally connected.” Find the paper and authors list at Protein…

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  • ‘Addressing Climate Change With Behavioral Science: A Global Intervention Tournament in 63 Countries’

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    “Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics and differed across outcomes. … These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Science Advances.

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  • ‘Characterizing collective physical distancing in the U.S. during the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic’

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    “The COVID-19 pandemic offers an unprecedented natural experiment providing insights into the emergence of collective behavioral changes. … Here, we characterize collective physical distancing … in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the pre-vaccine era by analyzing de-identified, privacy-preserving location data for a panel of over 5.5 million anonymized, opted-in U.S. devices. We define five indicators of users’ mobility and proximity to investigate how the emerging collective behavior deviates from typical pre-pandemic patterns during the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Find the paper and full list of authors at PLOS Digital Health.

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  • ‘Neural Network Field Theories: Non-Gaussianity, Actions and Locality’

    “Both the path integral measure in field theory (FT) and ensembles of neural networks (NN) describe distributions over functions. When the central limit theorem can be applied in the infinite-width (infinite-N) limit, the ensemble of networks corresponds to a free FT. … Given the connected correlators of a FT, one can systematically reconstruct the action order-by-order in the expansion parameter, using a new Feynman diagram prescription whose vertices are the connected correlators.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Machine Learning: Science and Technology.

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  • ‘An Evolution of Hashtags: A Comparative Analysis of Hashtag Usage Following the Deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd’

    “Recent instances of racial injustice and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement have spurred conversations about police reform across the United States. Exposure to police aggression through the second-hand accounts of family members, friends, and the media is known to shape individuals’ perceptions of law enforcement. However, it remains unclear whether social media platforms can also facilitate vicarious exposure to racialized police violence. The current study addresses this gap by focusing on patterns of hashtag usage in a sample of over 350,000 tweets related to law enforcement.” Find the paper and list of authors at Race and Justice.

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  • ‘From Alert Child to Sleepy Adolescent: Age Trends in Chronotype, Social Jetlag and Sleep Problems in Youth With Autism’

    “Developmental changes in sleep in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are understudied. In non-ASD youth, adolescents exhibit a ‘night owl chronotype’ … and social jetlag (i.e., shifts in sleep timing across school nights and weekends), with corresponding sleep problems. The purpose of this study is to evaluate age trends in chronotype, social jetlag and sleep problems in high-risk youth with ASD. … Older age was associated with later chronotype, more social jetlag, fewer sleep anxiety/co-sleeping problems, fewer night waking and parasomnia problems and more daytime alertness problems.” Find the paper and authors list at the Journal of Autism and…

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  • ‘Evaluating Protein Cross-Linking as a Therapeutic Strategy to Stabilize SOD1 Variants in a Mouse Model of Familial ALS’

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    “Mutations in the gene encoding Cu-Zn superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) cause a subset of familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (fALS) cases. A shared effect of these mutations is that SOD1, which is normally a stable dimer, dissociates into toxic monomers that seed toxic aggregates. Considerable research effort has been devoted to developing compounds that stabilize the dimer of fALS SOD1 variants, but unfortunately, this has not yet resulted in a treatment. We hypothesized that cyclic thiosulfinate cross-linkers, which selectively target a rare, 2 cysteine-containing motif, can stabilize fALS-causing SOD1 variants in vivo.” Find the paper and list of authors at PLOS Biology.

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  • ‘Exploring the Indian Political YouTube Landscape: A Multimodal Multi-Task Approach’

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    “Social media profoundly influences all facets of our lives, including politics. Political parties, politicians, and media outlets have strategically cultivated their social media presence to engage with the public. However, with the advent of freely available Internet services in India, there has been a rising proliferation in the community of independent content creators on YouTube, with many getting millions of views per video. In this study, we present a novel multimodal dataset of videos, taken from 20 independent and influential content creators. … By introducing this novel dataset, we aim to stimulate further investigation within the domains of opinion dissemination…

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  • ‘Deploying and Evaluating LLMs to Program Service Mobile Robots’

    “Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have spurred interest in using them for generating robot programs from natural language, with promising initial results. We investigate the use of LLMs to generate programs for service mobile robots leveraging mobility, perception, and human interaction skills, and where accurate sequencing and ordering of actions is crucial for success. We contribute CodeBotler, an open-source robot-agnostic tool to program service mobile robots from natural language, and RoboEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ capabilities of generating programs to complete service robot tasks.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • ‘Adaptive thresholding increases sensitivity to detect … rate of skin conductance responses to psychologically arousing stimuli’

    “Psychophysiologists recording electrodermal activity (EDA) often derive measures of slow, tonic activity—skin conductance level (SCL)—and faster, more punctate changes—skin conductance responses (SCRs). … We developed a fixed plus adaptive (FA) thresholding method that adjusts identification of SCRs based on an individual’s SC at the onset of the SCR to increase statistical power and include data from more participants. We assess the utility of applying FA thresholding across two independent samples and explore age and race-related associations with EDA outcomes.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

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  • ‘Fossil Fuel Interests in Puerto Rico: Perceptions of Incumbent Power and Discourses of Delay’

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    “This study explores perceptions of fossil fuel interests and the role narratives of fossil fuel obstruction play in slowing down the renewable energy transition in Puerto Rico. We analyzed interviews conducted with 56 ‘energy actors’ engaged in Puerto Rico’s energy system. … Our interviews revealed that a wide range of energy actors perceived obstruction by fossil fuel interests as shaping Puerto Rico’s energy transition and used discourses of delay to describe Puerto Rico’s energy transition, but also employed narratives that countered this obstruction and resisted fossil fuel interests.” Find the paper and list of authors in Energy Research and Social…

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  • ‘Interpretation Issues With “Genomic Vulnerability” Arise From Conceptual Issues in Local Adaptation and Maladaptation’

    “As climate change causes the environment to shift away from the local optimum that populations have adapted to, fitness declines are predicted to occur. Recently, methods known as genomic offsets (GOs) have become a popular tool to predict population responses to climate change from landscape genomic data. Populations with a high GO have been interpreted to have a high ‘genomic vulnerability’ to climate change. … This study uses hypothetical and empirical data to explore situations in which different types of fitness offsets may or may not be correlated with each other or with a GO.”

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  • ‘A Network-Based Normalized Impact Measure Reveals Successful Periods of Scientific Discovery Across Disciplines’

    “The impact of a scientific publication is often measured by the number of citations it receives from the scientific community. However, citation count is susceptible to well-documented variations in citation practices across time and discipline, limiting our ability to compare different scientific achievements. Previous efforts to account for citation variations often rely on a priori discipline labels of papers, assuming that all papers in a discipline are identical in their subject matter. Here, we propose a network-based methodology to quantify the impact of an article by comparing it with locally comparable research.” Find the paper and authors list at PNAS.

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  • ‘Inhalable Bottlebrush Polymer Bioconjugates as Vectors for Efficient Pulmonary Delivery of Oligonucleotides’

    “Antisense oligonucleotides hold therapeutic promise for various lung disorders, but their efficacy is limited by suboptimal delivery. To address this challenge, we explored the use of inhaled bottlebrush polymer–DNA conjugates, named pacDNA, as a delivery strategy. Inhaled pacDNA exhibits superior mucus penetration, achieving a uniform and sustained lung distribution in mice.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ACS Nano.

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  • ‘Unveiling the Degradation of Pt/NbOx/C Catalysts in PEMFCs via In Situ X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy’

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    “Among the class of the catalyst that is composed of metal nanoparticles supported on metal oxides (MMO), the Pt/NbOx/C system has shown promising oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) activities as a cathode of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs). Herein, we have studied a series of Pt/NbOx/C catalysts prepared via physical vapor deposition and unraveled the nature of the metal and metal oxide interaction (MMOI) by characterizing this system under reactive conditions. … We demonstrate that Pt preferably interacts with O but not Nb in the Pt/NbOx/C system.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Journal of The Electrochemical Society.

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  • ‘The Expressive Function of Public Policy: Renewable Energy Mandates Signal Social Norms’

    “Addressing collective action problems requires individuals to engage in coordinated and cooperative behaviours. Existing research suggests that individuals’ propensity to work together depends in part on their belief that others support the cause in question. People form their expectations about prevalent beliefs and behaviours from many sources. To date, most of the literature has focussed on how social norm perceptions are inferred from peers or summary statistics. We explore an understudied source of norm information: the passage of policies by democratically elected institutions.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

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  • ‘Local Adaptation in Trait-Mediated Trophic Cascades’

    “Predator-induced changes in prey foraging can influence community dynamics by increasing the abundance of basal resources via a trait-mediated trophic cascade. The strength of these cascades may be altered by eco-evolutionary relationships between predators and prey, but the role of basal resources has received limited attention. We hypothesized that trait-mediated trophic cascade strength may be shaped by selection from trophic levels above and below prey. … We suggest that adaptation to basal resource availability may shape geographical variation in the strength of trait-mediated trophic cascades.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

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  • ‘Does More Advice Help? The Effects of Second Opinions in AI-Assisted Decision Making’

    “AI assistance in decision-making has become popular, yet people’s inappropriate reliance on AI often leads to unsatisfactory human-AI collaboration performance. In this paper, through three pre-registered, randomized human subject experiments, we explore whether and how the provision of {second opinions} may affect decision-makers’ behavior and performance in AI-assisted decision-making. We find that if both the AI model’s decision recommendation and a second opinion are always presented together, decision-makers reduce their over-reliance on AI while increase their under-reliance on AI.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • ‘Native Capillary Electrophoresis–Mass Spectrometry of Near 1 MDa Non-Covalent GroEL/GroES/Substrate Protein Complexes’

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    “Protein complexes are essential for proteins’ folding and biological function. Currently, native analysis of large multimeric protein complexes remains challenging. Structural biology techniques are time-consuming and often cannot monitor the proteins’ dynamics in solution. Here, a capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (CE–MS) method is reported to characterize, under near-physiological conditions, the conformational rearrangements of ∽1 MDa GroEL upon complexation with binding partners involved in a protein folding cycle.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Advanced Science.

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  • ‘Emotion Regulation Convoys: Individual and Age Differences in the Hierarchical Configuration of Emotion Regulation Behaviors in Everyday Life’

    “A key limitation of studying emotion regulation behavior is that there is currently no way to describe individual differences in use across a range of tactics, which could lead to investigations of intraindividual changes over time or interindividual differences as a function of personality, age, culture, or psychopathology diagnosis. We, therefore, introduce emotion regulation convoys. This research tool provides a snapshot of the hierarchy of emotion regulation tactics an individual favors across everyday life situations and how effective they are at regulating moods.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Research Gate.

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  • ‘Linear Extension and Calcification Rates in a Cold-Water, Crustose Coralline Alga are Modulated by Temperature, Light and Salinity’

    “Long-lived crustose coralline algae are important ecosystem engineers and environmental archives in regions where observations of climate variability are sparse. … Here, we present the results of the first, to-our-knowledge, controlled laboratory experiment isolating the effects of light, temperature, and salinity on calcification rates of C. compactum. Algal calcification rates were modulated by a combination of light exposure, salinity, and temperature, where temperature and salinity were positively correlated, and light level was negatively correlated with calcification rate.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Limnology and Oceanography.

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  • ‘Covalent Inhibition of Pro-Apoptotic BAX’

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    “BCL-2-associated X protein (BAX) is a promising therapeutic target for activating or restraining apoptosis in diseases of pathologic cell survival or cell death, respectively. In response to cellular stress, BAX transforms from a quiescent cytosolic monomer into a toxic oligomer. … In this study, we performed a disulfide tethering screen to discover C126-reactive molecules that modulate BAX activity. We identified covalent BAX inhibitor 1 (CBI1) as a compound that selectively derivatizes BAX at C126 and inhibits BAX activation by triggering ligands or point mutagenesis.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Nature Chemical Biology.

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  • Vision paper: ‘Towards Mobility Data Science’

    “Mobility data captures the locations of moving objects such as humans, animals and cars. With the availability of GPS-equipped mobile devices and other inexpensive location-tracking technologies, mobility data is collected ubiquitously. In recent years, the use of mobility data has demonstrated significant impact in various domains including traffic management, urban planning and health sciences. In this paper, we present the emerging domain of mobility data science. Towards a unified approach to mobility data science, we envision a pipeline having the following components: mobility data collection, cleaning, analysis, management and privacy.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • ‘Distributed Cognition Approach to Understanding Compensatory Calendaring Cognitive Systems of Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment’

    “While consumer digital calendars are widely used for appointment reminders, they do not fulfill all of the compensatory functions that are supported by calendars designed for cognitive rehabilitation therapies. … We employed a Distributed Cognition framework to elucidate how older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and their care partners manage calendaring details when supported by a traditional rehabilitation calendar. … We used a Distributed Cognition framing to articulate information flows and breakdowns in participants’ calendaring systems.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence proceedings.

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  • ‘An Efficient OFDM-Based Monostatic Radar Design for Multitarget Detection’

    “In this paper, we propose a monostatic radar design for multitarget detection based on orthogonal-frequency division multiplexing, where the monostatic radar is co-located with the transmit antenna. The monostatic antenna has the perfect knowledge of the transmitted signal and listens to echoes coming from the reflection of fixed or moving targets. We estimate the target parameters, i.e., range and velocity, using a two-dimensional periodogram. By this setup we improve the periodogram estimation performance under the condition of low signal-to-noise ratio using Zadoff-Chu precoding and the discrete Fourier transform channel estimation.” Find the paper and authors list at IEEE Access.

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  • ‘DREiMac: Dimensionality Reduction With Eilenberg-MacLane Coordinates’

    “DREiMac is a library for topological data coordinatization, visualization, and dimensionality reduction. Currently, DREiMac is able to find topology-preserving representations of point clouds taking values in the circle, in higher dimensional tori, in the real and complex projective spaces, and in lens spaces. In a few words, DREiMac takes as input a point cloud together with a topological feature of the point cloud (in the form of a persistent cohomology class), and returns a map from the point cloud to a well-understood topological space.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the Journal of Open Source Software.

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  • Noveck provides guidance on using artificial intelligence in government

    Noting how governments around the world have been slow to adopt ChatGPT in their processes, Beth Noveck, professor and director of the Burnes Center for Social Change at Northeastern University, provides guidance and examples for how large language models can be leveraged by public-serving professionals. “The journey from skepticism to the beginnings of strategic implementation,” she writes, “reflects a growing recognition of the transformative potential of AI for public good.”

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