NSF

Overall: Dysphagia (swallowing disorders) causes 150,000 annual hospitalizations, increases pneumonia incidence, and adds 220,000 additional days to hospital admissions each year. Dysphagia risk is currently assessed via screening, and a failed screen then leads to the diagnostic gold-standard, the videofluoroscopic (VF) test. However, many patients who aspirate pass initial screens because they aspirate silently.

Conservatives and liberals in America often demonize the other side, judging each other's values to be inferior and immoral. Rather than seeking understanding of others, people often shut out, talk over, or even spew hatred at people who do not share their own perspectives. This "empathy gap" reflects a tendency for empathy to break down in situations where people are in conflict or feel different from each other. This research tests ways to reduce this empathy gap by focusing on how people understand their own empathy.

People can recognize objects and concepts at different semantic levels, such as knowing that a pet is an animal, a dog, a German shepherd, and “Fido”. These levels can be remembered or forgotten differently. When people first learn a concept, the brain encodes the relevant information at each of these levels into memory. Each time a memory is retrieved, its underlying neural patterns are reactivated, including its multiple semantic levels. Yet, the neural representation of these levels of memories and reactivations are poorly understood.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this i-Corps project would be the ability to bring to market a heart-targeted radioisotope for use during stress testing. This is a field that has not seen any new imaging agents come to market in ~25 years. Current stress tests rely on a particular formulation of Technetium, a radioisotope, to image the heart at rest and at peak stress. This current clinical standard, Technetium Sestamibi, goes to multiple organs other than the heart leading to poor image quality due to high signal to noise ratio as well as increasing radiation exposure.