Despite being the third leading cause of death after cancer and heart attack, stroke research and treatment did not progress until the mid-1990s. Stroke was long considered a brain disorder with no viable treatment, and its victims were left permanently disabled or dead. A drug known as tPA (tissue plasminogen activator) was widely used for myocardial infarction and had been in the process of extensive testing to treat stroke. My research question is, why did it take so long for tPA to be taken seriously as a drug for stroke? When I was born in 1998, prominent doctors, neurologists, and emergency physicians debated if stroke was an acute emergency. The practical contribution of my project is to broaden the knowledge of stroke and tPA to the general public. I hope that with my research, there is a better understanding of what stroke is and that time is the most critical factor in treatment. I lost both of my maternal grandparents to stroke in 2020, and their chances of leaving the hospital without permanent disability would have been 1 in 3 with tPA. I conducted a literature review of Justin Zivin M.D, Ph.D., and John Galbraith Simmons’ book, tPA for Stroke: The Story of a Controversial Drug. Additionally, I gathered and synthesized footage from my advisor, Professor Glenn Gebhard, who is filming a documentary on tPA and stroke research. I learned that stroke and neurology have changed drastically within the last 30 years.

As of the year 2022, about 40 percent of income-eligible immigrant children were uninsured due to their immigration status. Despite immigrant populations growing higher than ever, immigrants and those of immigrant backgrounds often encounter difficulty in accessing effective healthcare due to misinformation and immigration status. The purpose of this literature review is to explore the impact of Medicaid/CHIP and its effectiveness in serving immigrant children and the children of immigrants given the unique barriers this population faces to equitable healthcare. Through this inquiry, I detail Medicaid’s role in healthcare injustice and future directions for improved healthcare policy serving the immigrant population. I analyzed eight journal articles from PubMed and Web of Science databases to examine reasons for disparities. The terms used across database search engines included the terms “Medicaid”, “CHIP”, and “immigrant children,” limited to articles published from 2009 to 2023. Using systematic review, I expect to find that immigrant parents are unaware of the benefits their child has from Medicaid due to poor communication from service providers. My research will help identify Medicaid gaps and opportunities, which can help inform policy revisions that will expand healthcare insurance coverage for immigrant children.

In the course of biological science, there has been a shift away from qualitative values to quantitative values about an individual's health. This objectification of the individual is upheld by insurance companies, which reduce the value of human life to cost of treatment. As witnessed today, contemporary/modern medicine is engaged in crisis care and not preventive care that would afford an individual to flourish in our complex environment. Furthermore, by objectifying the human body, subjective metrics such as pain are devalued, which compromises patient centered care models. In this presentation, I will interrogate the complex issue of reducing care to a system of quantitative numbers by examining a group of individuals existing in what I consider an in-between precarious space of insurance coverage. I will look at this problem through the lens of nutrition, as nutritional health starts from care models for the individual. To understand the binary of the object and subject, I will examine medical ethics texts from the seventeenth century to the early twenty-first century. Some examples include Donna Haraway’s “The Modest Witness" and Georges Canguilhem’s “The Normal and the Pathological”. Using these texts will provide a perspective to understand how we can integrate patients' voices in their own care.

Obesity in the U.S. is a devastating public health crisis affecting millions of adults and children. Understanding how the household shapes the child’s dietary behaviors that lead to the development of obesity is essential to provide adequate nutrition interventions. Being overweight to obese is a contributing factor in developing chronic diseases such as type II diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. In addition, this disease leads to stress, low self-esteem, and depression, which can and will profoundly affect a child’s mental health. This paper performs a scientific review of existing studies on economic, social, and psychological factors contributing to childhood obesity by assessing several factors that contribute to obesity, such as (1) food literacy, (2) parental factors, (3) the scarcity of healthy food options, and (4) behavioral and biological functions that affect children that seek to develop basic cooking skills and food literacy in children and parents to mitigate the problems of obesity. Keywords: “cooking skills,” obesity,” “parents,” “childhood obesity,” “Stress,” “African Americans,” “Peer effect,” “parental influence.”