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Although graduate academic institutions implement diverse annual review processes, their overall intent is focused on ensuring continuous improvement of program quality (National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment, 2020). Through program review processes, university leaders (e.g., department chairs, program leads) analyze student performance and department procedures to inform future actions and policies. This mixed-methods case study examined an online campus's program review structure. Specifically, a description of how administrative faculty (i.e., department chairs and associate department chairs) reported their program's strengths, challenges, and future directions and the collaborative scholarly interactions that resulted from these sessions are discussed. Findings from all study participants revealed that administrative faculty perceived program review processes as beneficial and provided a unique opportunity for collaboration across diverse university programs.

Abstract Background There is currently a wide therapeutic arsenal for migraine patients, without a single first-line preventive drug and we choose the different available alternatives taking into account comorbidities, national guidelines, previous treatments and personal experiences. Our objective was to evaluate the differences in the use of migraine treatments between neurologists from different countries. Methods This is a multi-centre observational study carried out by neurologists from specialized headache units in seven countries, retrospective with consecutive inclusion of all patients presenting with a migraine diagnosis, over a period of three months. Results A total of 734 patients were recruited but only 600 were considered in the analysis in order to homogenize the patient cohorts from countries: 200 Spain (ES), 100 Italy (IT), 85 Russia (RUS), 80 Germany (DE), 60 Portugal (PT), 45 Poland (PL) and 30 Australia (AU). 85.4 % of patients were women with a mean age of 42.6 ± 11.8 years. Considering previous and current preventive treatment, the order of use was: antidepressants (69.3 %), antiepileptic drugs (54.7 %), beta-blockers and antihypertensive drugs (49.7 %), OnabotulinumtoxinA (44.0 %) and others (36.2 %). Statistically significant differences were found between all pharmacological classes: antidepressants were commonly used in all countries, with the exception of Poland (AU: 76.7 %, IT: 71.0 %, DE: 60.0 %, PL: 31.1 %, PT: 71.7 %, RUS: 70.6 %, ES: 78.5 %; p

Following the worldwide shift, partially or fully, to virtual education during the COVID-19 pandemic, online education has received renewed attention. Bal et al. (2020) noted the issues faced by higher degree students during that period in which they struggled with time management, access to resources, and balancing work and personal life. Over 61% of doctoral students writing their dissertations reported increased hardship during the transition, but not necessarily due to online education (Donohue et al., 2021). The most prominent struggles involved data collection during times of lockdown (Donohue et al., 2021), but many students also struggled with a shift to online mentorship with their chairs and committee members (Niño & Martinez, 2022). Given the changes and struggles, Atkinson et al. (2022) pondered the professional and societal value of earning a PhD, arguably due to some concerns that the partially or fully online process of doctoral education could not support students' academic outcomes and success. Therefore, perhaps the forced shift to virtual education methods elucidated a need to better understand the online doctoral education process (Mullen, 2021). Given that several online higher educational institutions developed models for providing online doctoral education prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, they may present an opportunity to understand the long-term online doctoral education experience during times of greater normalcy. Exploring how online higher education institutions support students who are writing dissertations should provide insight into best practices of supporting online students during their dissertation processes.

Abstract Digital twins represent a key technology for precision health. Medical digital twins consist of computational models that represent the health state of individual patients over time, enabling optimal therapeutics and forecasting patient prognosis. Many health conditions involve the immune system, so it is crucial to include its key features when designing medical digital twins. The immune response is complex and varies across diseases and patients, and its modelling requires the collective expertise of the clinical, immunology, and computational modelling communities. This review outlines the initial progress on immune digital twins and the various initiatives to facilitate communication between interdisciplinary communities. We also outline the crucial aspects of an immune digital twin design and the prerequisites for its implementation in the clinic. We propose some initial use cases that could serve as “proof of concept” regarding the utility of immune digital technology, focusing on diseases with a very different immune response across spatial and temporal scales (minutes, days, months, years). Lastly, we discuss the use of digital twins in drug discovery and point out emerging challenges that the scientific community needs to collectively overcome to make immune digital twins a reality.

Objetivo. Describir la metodología de la búsqueda intencionada y reclasificación de muertes maternas (BIRMM), que permite identificar y corregir la clasificación errónea y el subregistro de defunciones maternas. Métodos. Se utiliza la metodología BIRMM, desarrollada inicialmente en México en el 2003 y difundida en otros países de América Latina a partir del 2012. La BIRMM consta de cuatro componentes clave: i) reclasificación de muertes maternas confirmadas; ii) identificación e investigación de casos sospechosos de muerte materna; iii) confronta con otras fuentes de información; y iv) publicación de resultados y análisis estadístico de la mortalidad materna. Resultados. La aplicación de la BIRMM permite identificar y analizar las muertes maternas en comités de mortalidad materna, lo que ha facilitado la implementación de planes de respuesta efectivos, contribuyendo a una reducción sostenida de la mortalidad materna en los países. Conclusiones. La metodología BIRMM es una herramienta efectiva para corregir el subregistro y la mala clasificación de muertes maternas, lo que permite una mejor vigilancia y respuesta a este problema. Su adopción y ejecución rutinaria son esenciales para mejorar la calidad de la información sobre mortalidad materna y reducir las muertes maternas en la Región de las Américas. La sostenibilidad de esta metodología depende del compromiso institucional y la voluntad política en los países.

The authors explored the influence of family background and students' perceived socioeconomic status with minoritized students' acculturation and transition experiences during their first-year, first-time enrollment at a predominantly White institution in the southeastern United States. Narrative interviews and "a priori" codes from the Model of Hispanic Identity Development (MHID, Torres, 2003) were implemented to construct case studies of first-year Latina students. Although Latina students' positive and negative acculturation experiences aligned with the MHID, each participant had a unique profile and distinctly different transition experience. The authors discuss expansion of the MHID, engagement and retention implications of early extracurricular involvement, belongingness uncertainty, and student advisement for minoritized first-year students at predominantly White higher education institutions.

This study describes the process of co-developing an operational climate forecast service for the viticulture sector. Weather and climate conditions affect grapevine development in cultivars: anticipating the atmospheric variables in the coming weeks and months is thus relevant for effectively managing vineyards, as impacts will be felt in wine production, biodiversity, and a wide range of related aspects. The operational service was co-developed with two types of users: impact modellers, who are the intermediary users incorporating climate forecast outputs in phenological and disease models, and end-users from the wine sector with vineyards in various European locations. For the operational service, sub-seasonal and seasonal climate forecasts were tailored considering their needs. The initial steps of the co-production process identified relevant decisions for which the service was essential and co-defined effective ways to deliver the climate information. Afterwards the climate forecasts outputs were integrated with impact model data. Substantial efforts were directed at the harmonisation of climate services information with the decision-making system of end-users. Because end-users need to navigate, comprehend, and select from various alternative options amidst uncertainty, significant emphasis has been placed on crafting the visual representation of the climate service, incorporating interactive elements, and cognitive considerations, thereby enhancing the overall user experience. Practical implications: Weather and climate conditions affect the development of cultivars: phenological stages, disease risk, or wine quality. This study presents the co-production process for deploying a climate service for vineyard management. The service consists of the near-real-time operational provision of sub-seasonal and seasonal climate forecasts. This service aims to help vineyard managers make decisions by anticipating the climate conditions up to three months in advance for a set of essential climate variables. The service includes the requirements of a set of intermediary users, which are disease risk and phenology researchers who feed their impact models with the provided climate forecasts. To our knowledge, it is the first time that sub-seasonal and seasonal climate forecasts have been integrated into an operational service for vineyard management.The service was developed during the VitiGEOSS project, the primary outcome of which is the VitiGEOSS platform: a single entry-point solution for wine producers aiming to boost vineyard sustainability. Three pilot plots are used for the service development: the Douro region in Portugal, the Catalonia region in Spain, and the Campania region in Italy. The co-production is seen as an iterative, interactive and collaborative process that brings together a plurality of knowledge sources to mutually define problems and develop usable products to address these problems. The process can be divided into three phases: initial co-exploration, co-design and co-development.The co-exploration phase consisted of conducting a benchmark analysis, identifying available services to viticulture and highlighting the gap that the newly developed solution could fill in. In the co-design phase, more intense engagement methods were implemented to communicate the capabilities of climate forecasts and design the product’s visualisation. Finally, the co-evaluation consisted of an ad hoc and ongoing process during the recurring meetings and a final workshop conducted with direct and potential users to obtain feedback on using the platform and potential further developments.As a result, the operational post-processing workflow of the sub-seasonal and seasonal state-of-the-art model outputs was adapted to include users’ requirements. The workflow includes the downscaling of model outputs to increase their spatial resolution, the storage of sub-seasonal climate forecasts at daily frequencies to feed phenological impact models, the provision of past climate simulations to train the impact models, the bias-adjust of climate forecasts to reduce systematic model errors, the assessment of the climate forecasts to aware users on their quality and the deployment of a server to allow access to impact modellers.The variables provided are mean, minimum and maximum temperature, accumulated precipitation and solar radiation. The final co-designed product consists of a graphic of bars. The user can select the location and variable, and the forecasts for the next four weeks or the next three months are displayed for the sub-seasonal and seasonal climate forecasts, respectively. For each week or month, three bars show the tercile probabilities of above-normal, normal or below-normal conditions for the time of the year. The limits of the tercile categories are also displayed, which helps to understand the averaged values of the variable in the selected region and the time of the year calculated with information from the past. The probabilities of extremes, i.e. exceeding (non-exceeding) the percentile 90th (10th), are displayed as extra bars for each week and month in case the prediction is skilful and they are greater than 40%.Last but not least, the results of the skill assessment are shown. This skill assessment consists of calculating a metric for each location, initialisation date and forecast time. When this metric, known as skill score, is positive (negative), the climate model forecast is better (worse) than the climatology (the climatology is a naive forecast which considers all categories equiprobable by definition). If the skill is negative, which means there is no proof of the added value of using the numerical model prediction, the bars are blurred, and the user can still be informed of the tercile category limits.The service has been provided for almost two consecutive years. During this period, we have confirmed the value of some key recommendations from literature when co-producing a climate service. Especially relevant is the need to invest time and resources to conduct a good co-production process by repeating the iterative process. We also tested the idea of providing information in the format of seasonal climate forecast outlooks to end-users before the service was operational. In this way, the climate service process would be ‘slowed down’, by which the use of climate data is incorporated more slowly and allows for place-based knowledge from the resource managers to be included too.One of the most challenging questions is the communication of the probabilistic forecasts product and their quality. The probabilistic nature of climate forecasts is sometimes understood by novice users as the incapacity to provide a deterministic forecast. Similarly, negative skill leads users to interpret the forecast fails. Overall, the perception of the service quality can be low. To avoid this perception, the co-producing process is essential to engage with users and redefine the service if possible.In this work, we have tried different ways to overcome low-quality perception. The users requested access to the climate forecasts for their vineyard plots. For that reason, the downscaling technique was applied to increase the spatial resolution, and the bar plots were designed to show the forecast for a specific location. However, to improve the perception of the forecast quality, the forecast can be contextualised by providing the forecast in the format of a map of the surrounding areas.Despite all these limitations, end-users reported on the extreme importance of climate information. Furthermore, end-users can benefit from getting the climate services integrated with the impact models to take maximum advantage of all services and make timely decisions, but also receiving this information in a clear, parsimonious and direct format that is intuitive and can be easily incorporated into the decision-making processes is key for the sustainability of their farm fields.After the operational provision of the climate forecast service, some implications of our findings have been detected: ● Combined downscaling and contextualisation. Downscaling techniques help to provide more accurate information at the location scale. Nevertheless, the spatial visualization over large regions may help to contextualize the climate forecasts, and that is also beneficial for end-user interpretation of the climate-related information. ● Skill. Efforts to provide more skilful climate forecasts are required, as well as alternative information to be used in situations where skill is lacking (e.g.: past climate information). The skill assessment is crucial to inform users about forecast reliability and accuracy. It enhances user understanding and trust in the service by generating realistic expectations. ● Operationalisation. Reducing the time for data processing or increasing the computational resources will allow the provision of climate forecasts that are closer to the date of production. Users will benefit from earlier access to the information than the current time-lapse. ● Co-production. The co-production process ensures the service is designed based on user needs and feedback which is more likely to be adopted and effectively utilized by users. This process never ends, so, it needs to be applied if future developments or requests are included in the current service. ● Support for sustainability. End-users benefit from the integration of the climate forecast along with phenological and disease risk services. Further explorations to include more climate variables in the service and in the impact models will be beneficial for end-users. For instance, the probabilities of extreme events help vineyard managers prepare for potential adverse conditions, while, safeguarding vineyards against weather impacts through proactive measures. ● Capacity building. By training users about the nature of climate forecasts, they can enhance the preparedness and resilience response to varying climate conditions. New information and products could be co-explored to co-evaluate their utility and usefulness.

Globally, plastic pollution has become a major concern environmentally due to its affinity to degrade for generations. The Philippines is known to be the 3rd ranking contributor to plastic pollution in the world as around 2.7 Mt of plastics are generated yearly. A large portion of these non-biodegradable plastics enter the oceans which negatively impacts marine life and even the livelihood of vulnerable coastal communities. From this perspective, biodegradable plastics have been introduced to remedy the problem, and polylactic acid (PLA) has been known to be both biobased and biodegradable, with good mechanical qualities, biocompatibility, low toxicity, and high compostability. PLA is produced by using lactic acid as the main raw material in the process which involves 3 stages: pre-polymerization, lactide formation, and ring-opening polymerization (ROP). This study seeks to design, simulate, and establish a polylactic acid production plant in the Philippines and evaluate its economic feasibility. Using Aspen Plus v11 as a plant design simulation software, the final product has a desirable weight-average molecular weight of 261,364.22 g/mol in the form of pellets for further use. From the results of the feasibility study of this plant design, the simulation can produce about 30,000 t of PLA which will be exported to China, South Korea, Italy, and Belgium. Financial calculations for this pilot plant proposal have been proven to provide a high return of investment at 28.15 % with a short payback period of 5 y.

Zinc oxychloride cement (ZOC) is considered a promising quick-drying material for fabricating photoactive coatings composed of three components: zinc oxide (ZnO), zinc chloride (ZnCl2), and water. However, its massive application has not been implemented due to the lack of research about its stability and mechanical performance. Thus, this article aims to provide insights about the self-cleaning photoactivity of ZOC coatings incorporated with titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles to boost the photocatalytic performance. Two stoichiometries of ZnO:ZnCl:H2O (112 and 415) were studied to investigate the influence of the molar ratio of the components on the physical and chemical properties. According to these results, no significant differences were observed in the physical and chemical properties between the two stoichiometries studied; however, the mechanical properties were affected. The coatings crystallized as simonkolleite Zn5(OH)8Cl2·H2O with a laminar hexagonal morphology, show high surface area, and absorbs light in the UVA region. The self-cleaning activity was evaluated using four model pollutants: Rhodamine B, Methylene blue, Orange G, and Carbon under accelerated weathering conditions. All the ZOC coatings were photoactive to decompose the pollutants from their surface. The addition of TiO2 nanoparticles into the coatings did not significantly enhance the self-cleaning efficiency, but it improves the mechanical performance of the coatings. These results could be associated with the fact that TiO2 works as filler for voids in the coatings without affecting its settings. The stability of the coatings was confirmed after the exposure to accelerated weathering at high humidity conditions, which places them as an attractive, low-cost, and easy to apply self-cleaning material.

La evaluación de la marcha en cinta caminadora puede resultar relevante para la toma de decisiones clínicas. No obstante, factores demográficos como la edad y el IMC pueden alterar la interpretación de los resultados. Nuestro objetivo fue obtener variables espacio- temporales, energéticas y costo de transporte durante la velocidad autoseleccionada en cinta caminadora para una muestra representativa de adultos uruguayos (n=28) y evaluar si diferentes rangos de edades e IMC pueden ser factores a tener en cuenta en pruebas clínicas donde se consideren dichas variables. Participaron 17 hombres y 11 mujeres (39,3 ± 14,8 años, 75,9 ± 12,5 kg, 1,74 ± 0,09 m, IMC 25,2 ± 4,06). Se realizó una reconstrucción 3D del movimiento en forma sincronizada con el consumo energético. Se obtuvieron valores de referencia y luego de agrupar los participantes según su IMC y rango de edad se compararon los datos mediante test de t (p≤0.05). Los resultados revelaron discrepancias significativas en las medidas espacio-temporales y energéticas de los adultos uruguayos al caminar en cinta con respecto a la literatura. La marcha difiere entre adultos jóvenes y de mediana edad en su velocidad autoseleccionada (p=0,03), longitud de zancada (p=0,01), trabajo mecánico externo (

The Zika virus, known for its potential to induce neurological conditions such as microcephaly when transmitted vertically from infected mothers to infants, has sparked widespread concerns globally. Motivated by this, we propose an optimal control problem for the prevention of vertical Zika transmission. The novelty of this study lies in its consideration of time-dependent control functions, namely, insecticide spraying and personal protective measures taken to safeguard pregnant women from infected mosquitoes. New results provide a way to minimize the number of infected pregnant women through the implementation of control strategies while simultaneously reducing both the associated costs of control measures and the mosquito population, resulting in a decline in microcephaly cases.