Boston School Research Articles

Kim Q. Do: Antioxidants specifically targeted at mitochondria: A novel therapeutic approach to schizophrenia

Kim Q. Do was appointed senior lecturer at the University of Lausanne (CH) in 2000. Over the years, she became an associate professor of translational psychiatry in 2011 and attained the position of full professor in 2017. In 1999, she established the Unit for Research in Schizophrenia at the Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience within the Department of Psychiatry at Lausanne University Hospital. She served as the head of this unit from 1999 until 2022. Additionally, she was the Center for Psychiatric Neuroscience director from 2013 to 2019. She holds visiting professor positions at Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King's College London, UK, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Professor Do graciously consented to participate in the Genomic Press interview, offering insights into her unique personal and professional journeys.

Assessing the Impact of a Hospice and Palliative Medicine Mentored Clinical Shadowing Experience for First-Year Medical and Dental Students: A Pilot Study.

Background: All physicians encounter patients with serious illness. Medical students recognize the value of hospice and palliative medicine (HPM) and desire more knowledge and skills in this area. However, both pre-clinical and clinical HPM content are underrepresented within medical school curricula. Objectives: To conduct a pilot study examining the impact of a novel required HPM clinical experience on pre-clinical medical and dental students' learning through mixed methods evaluation of student responses. Design: Students completed a two-part electronic survey following a half-day HPM mentored clinical shadowing experience (HPM-MCSE) which included an introductory session, a faculty-mentored shadowing experience and a debriefing session. Setting/subjects: 163 first-year students at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, USA in 2022. Measurements: The survey collected demographic information and student responses to both closed-ended (Likert-scale) and open-ended prompts. Data were analyzed quantitatively using descriptive statistics and qualitatively using constant comparative methodology. Results: 127 medical and dental students responded (78% response rate). Qualitative analysis yielded three overarching themes: acquisition of knowledge about operational dimensions of HPM, acquisition of knowledge about psychosocial dimensions of HPM, and personal impact including an awareness of discordance between expectations and lived experience of HPM practice. Of the 109 students who completed the entire survey, 67% indicated that this experience increased their interest in palliative care and 98% reported an increase in their understanding of how palliative care enhances patient care. Conclusions: Early clinical exposure to HPM for first year students stimulates multi-dimensional learning about HPM and evokes personal reflection about serious illness care.

Interscholastic Policy Debate Promotes Critical Thinking and College-Going: Evidence From Boston Public Schools

Few interventions reduce inequality in reading achievement, let alone higher-order thinking skills, among adolescents. We study policy debate—an extracurricular activity focused on improving middle and high schoolers’ critical thinking, argumentation, and policy analysis skills—in Boston schools serving large concentrations of economically disadvantaged students of color. Student fixed effects estimates show debate had positive impacts on English Language Arts (ELA) test scores of 0.13 SD, equivalent to 68% of a full year of average ninth-grade learning. Gains were concentrated on analytical more than rote subskills. We find no harm to math, attendance, or disciplinary records, and evidence of positive effects on high school graduation and postsecondary enrollment. Impacts were largest among students who were lowest achieving prior to joining debate.

Measuring Indoor Air Quality Does Not Prevent COVID-19.

Boston Public Schools (BPS) closed for in-person learning in March 2020 due to COVID-19 and didn't fully reopen until the 2021-2022 school year. Due to the age of schools and absent ventilation systems, coupled with decades of disinvestment in the infrastructure, BPS entered the pandemic with serious challenges impacting the health of students and staff. These challenges were magnified by an infectious airborne virus. Instead of using this opportunity to improve ventilation systems, BPS opted to invest in an air quality monitoring system. This system only confirmed what was already known-there is poor ventilation in most school buildings. It did not lead to correction of new or long-standing problems. This failure has harmed the BPS community, which includes primarily low-income Black and Brown families. This article describes Boston's school system, its track record of inadequate attention to infrastructure, and explores pitfalls of focusing on evaluation instead of correction.

Editorial introductions.

Current Opinion in Gastroenterology was launched in 1985. It is one of a successful series of review journals whose unique format is designed to provide a systematic and critical assessment of the literature as presented in the many primary journals. The field of gastroenterology is divided into 12 sections that are reviewed once a year. Each section is assigned a Section Editor, a leading authority in the area, who identifies the most important topics at that time. Here we are pleased to introduce the Section Editors for this issue. SECTION EDITORS Matthew A. CiorbaMatthew A. CiorbaDr Matthew Ciorba is a gastroenterologist and biomedical researcher dedicated to advancing care in the Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD) and Colon Cancer. His clinical expertise is in caring for patients with Crohn's and ulcerative colitis and preventing colon cancer. He is Director of the IBD Center at Washington University, USA, and leads one of the largest clinical teams in the USA dedicated to providing comprehensive and cutting-edge clinical care to more than 8000 patients affected by IBD. His basic-translational research program is dedicated to defining pathways and mechanisms of intestinal inflammation and the transition to colon cancer. His lab has developed methods to study intestinal organoids and tumoroids to facilitate studies of the epithelial response to inflammation, injury and repair. His lab investigations have spawned four ground-breaking Bench-to-Bedside clinical trials addressing unmet patient needs in colitis, enteritis and rectal cancer using probiotics, novel immunotherapies and manipulating bile acids. In addition to his own lab, Dr Ciorba is also Director of IBD Research at Washington University and use this platform to foster collaborative discovery between the world-class scientific investigators and the robust IBD clinical program. Finally, he is deeply committed to training the next generation of medical investigators who will advance discovery and treatment of digestive diseases. Supporting this mission, he serves as Associate Director of the GI Fellowship's T32 Research Training grant and serves on several training grant review committees for several organizations including the CCF, AGA and NIH. Stuart J. SpechlerStuart J. SpechlerStuart Jon Spechler, MD is Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology and Co-Director of the Center for Esophageal Diseases at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas, as well as the Co-Director of the Center for Esophageal Research at the Baylor Scott and White Research Institute. Prior to joining Baylor University Medical Center in January 2017, Dr Spechler was the Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology for the VA North Texas Healthcare System, Professor of Medicine, and holder of the Berta M. and Cecil O. Patterson Chair in Gastroenterology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and he had been the Director of the Center for Swallowing Disorders at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Dr Spechler's research has focused primarily on disorders of the esophagus, especially GERD and its complications, and eosinophilic esophagitis. He has chaired three VA Cooperative Studies on medical and surgical treatments for gastroesophageal reflux disease. He described the condition known as “short-segment Barrett's esophagus” in 1994. Dr. Spechler has published more than 300 scientific reports, editorials, review articles, and book chapters on esophageal disorders. He is best known for his work in the areas of GERD, Barrett's esophagus, and eosinophilic esophagitis. Dr Spechler has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals including Gastroenterology, Gut, Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Digestive Diseases and Sciences and Diseases of the Esophagus, and he has served as Chair of the Gastroenterology Teaching Project and the Esophago-Gastro-Duodenal Section of the American Gastroenterological Association.

Global leadership in paediatric and congenital cardiac care: education and empowerment to improve outcomes in low- and middle-income countries - an interview with Krishna Kumar, MD, DM FAHA.

Dr Krishna Kumar is the focus of our sixth in a series of interviews in Cardiology in the Young entitled, "Global Leadership in Paediatric and Congenital Cardiac Care." Dr Kumar was born in Raurkela, India. He attended medical school at Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi, graduating in 1984. Dr Kumar then went on to complete internal medicine, emergency medicine, and adult cardiology training at All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1988, 1989, and 1990, respectively. He then pursued paediatric cardiology training at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, USA. Dr Kumar began his clinical position as a paediatric cardiologist at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi, Kerala, India.During his impressive career, Dr Kumar has made significant contributions to educational advancement, research and innovation, public health advocacy, and clinical care. Dr Kumar is credited for distinguishing paediatric cardiology as a distinct subspecialty in India. He was a founding member of the Pediatric Cardiology Society of India and the original editor of the society's academic journal. Recognising the deficit of paediatric cardiology-trained physicians in low- and middle-income countries, Dr Kumar helped establish formal structured training programmes for paediatric cardiology in India. More recently, he established the Children's HeartLink Fellowships in paediatric cardiac sciences at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences in Kochi and Institut Jantung Negara in Malaysia. Through educational programmes, Dr Kumar has taught countless caregivers and paediatricians, in India and neighbouring countries, the early identification and management of children with CHD. Dr Kumar has established a premier paediatric heart programme at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences. As department Chief, he emphasises the importance of teamwork, advocacy, and continuous quality improvement. He has developed numerous low-cost strategies for the management of CHD. He has established large community-based studies on rheumatic heart disease and CHD in South India. Dr Kumar's focus on advocacy and policy change in India has made a substantial impact on early identification and treatment of CHD in the subcontinent. He has made a global impact on the care of paediatric cardiology patients through his educational programmes, research and innovation, large-scale research registries, and advocacy for public health policy changes. He is an incredibly humble and generous leader, and his patients and community are the source of his unending motivation.

Editorial introductions.

Editorial introductions.

Fatima Cody Stanford: changing the narrative on obesity

Fatima Cody Stanford is an obesity medicine physician and scientist who uses her public platform to change the conversation surrounding obesity. She challenges conventional framings of obesity, such as flawed notions of individual moral failing or that it is only about physical activity and consumption of food, and instead calls for obesity to be recognised as the complex, relapsing-remitting multifactorial disease that it is. As Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, MA, USA, Stanford takes an integrated approach to obesity that combines clinical care, research, health policy, health disparities, and public health approaches. As Stanford comments, ”I have to convince people that obesity actually is a disease. Yes, I must tailor to each individual patient. But from a population perspective, change the narrative about this very visible disease. As obesity is a disease you wear.”

“We're all in this fight together”: African American and Latinx Parent-Activists in Boston Schools

Abstract This essay examines the parallel African American and Latinx educational movements in the decades prior to mandated school desegregation or the “busing crisis” of 1974. It focuses on working-class mother-activists who employed various organizing strategies in the pursuit of educational justice in the Jim Crow North.

The Boston Freedom Schools as Places of Possibility for Reciprocal Integrated Education

AbstractIn 1963 and 1964, organizers in Boston held Freedom Stay-Outs—one-day school boycotts—to protest the neglect of predominantly Black schools from the Boston School Committee, the governing body of the Boston Public Schools. Boycotting students attended Freedom Schools, where they learned about Black history and discussed issues facing Black youth. This article examines the 1964 Stay-Out and Freedom Schools as spaces where Black educators, organizers, parents, and students developed and enacted a vision of integrated education distinct from the dominant models of integration proposed in Boston and across the nation post-Brown v. Board (1954). The 1964 Freedom Schools modeled reciprocal integration, a vision for integrated education that promotes bidirectional physical and cultural movement, rather than the dominant model of integration that moved Black children into white schools to be taught white history and culture. Reciprocal integration was developed through Black parents’ and students’ educational testimony, the Stay-Out organizers’ own educational analysis, and the practical necessity of interracial organizing.

A complex puzzle realized: US achieves one-millionth organ transplant: Decades of visionary scientists, skilled surgeons, and courageous patients have made this miraculous milestone a reality

A complex puzzle realized: US achieves one-millionth organ transplant: Decades of visionary scientists, skilled surgeons, and courageous patients have made this miraculous milestone a reality

Editorial introductions.

Editorial introductions.

Moral metaphysics as philosophy of culture in Tu Weiming’s Boston Сonfucianism

New Confucianism is a philosophical movement which seeks to combine Confucian tradition with Western philosophical thoughts. The idea appeared to some extent due to ideological motives. For instance, New Confucian Mou Zongsan formulated the concept of moral metaphysics, which was supposed to compete with Kantian transcendentalism. Moral metaphysics is further developed by Mou Zongsan’s follower Tu Weiming, who belongs to Boston school of New Confucianism. His moral metaphysics is essentially different from that of Mou Zongsan. It is based on the notion of “self-enlightenment” (cheng). It presents an idea that in some cases interpretation can serve as a research method and be more precise than analysis. The focus of investigation is not the way how something first emerged and developed, but how it was examined and interpreted afterwards. In other words, the key to understanding is the “second birth” of things which happens during the interpretation. But to interpret correctly, we should possess the full knowledge of “ourselves”. However, “oneself ” also turns out to be not a separate body subject to analysis, but an aggregation of interpretations offered by others. The drawn conclusion is that everything exists only when it has an opportunity to interpret oneself during interaction. And in this sense “self-enlightenment”, according to Tu Weiming, is a “certain form of metaphysics”. This article, however, suggests narrowing this conclusion to cultural existence. Unlike Mou Zongsan, Tu Weiming does not intend to prove that the Chinese philosophical thinking is better than the Western one. We can view his moral metaphysics as a certain type of philosophy of culture. It does not offer a precise analytical approach, but it does present a certain pattern of thought, which deals with embracing the form of one’s cultural existence.

Calls from Boston Schools for Police Psychiatric Emergency Response: A Study of 911 Call Record Data from 2014 to 2018.

This study examines patterns and trends in 911 calls from Boston public school addresses related to mental health and physical assaults/fights generated from 2014 to 2018. We analyzed 12,113 Boston Police Department (BPD) 911 call records from 102 Boston Public School addresses during the 2014-2018 school years. In addition, we separately analyzed calls coded by BPDas Emotionally Disturbed Person ("EDP"), indicating a psychiatric crisis was the primary reason for the call, as well as calls coded as "Fight," "Assault," or "Assault and battery." Call frequency ranged from 0 to 277 per school each year. Although the annual average number of calls increased each school year over the 4-year period, this was primarily due to an increase in hang-ups and abandoned calls. Overall, 7.4% calls were coded as EDP and 6.5% were coded as assault/fight. Call volume was highest in the middle of the school day, with a median time of 12pm. EDP calls were significantly earlier in the day than non-EDP calls, and the percentage of calls labeled as EDP decreased in frequency each day over the course of the week. There were more overall 911 calls, on average, per day in late spring than in other seasons. The frequency with which schools call upon police as emergency service providers for psychiatric crises indicates a need for additional school-based resources. Such resources may be most effective if they are allocated mid-day, responsive to changing student needs over the course of the week, and increased in spring.

Gallstones: The thing in itself.

Content available: Audio Recording.

Race, Politics, and Nation in Albion W. Tourgée's American Historical Novels Series: The Example of Hot Plowshares

Race, Politics, and Nation in Albion W. Tourgée's American Historical Novels Series: The Example of <i>Hot Plowshares</i>

The Involution of the Storm Corner: Sean Bonney’s Occult

This essay constructs an understanding of Sean Bonney’s occult poetics, especially in his prose-poem ‘Second Letter on Harmony’, through its mediation of past traditions of ‘occult poetry’—specifically, Stephen Jonas and the Boston school—with the philosophy of history of Ernst Bloch in Heritage of our Times and Bertolt Brecht’s uses of alienation, particularly the notion of ‘gesture’. Bonney’s methods of apprehending a multifaceted reality, composed of darkness, antipodes, contraries and hiddenness, as much as clarity, self-sameness, light and truth, are related to although different from the occult’s methods of transformation which make the hidden ‘visible’. I argue that Bonney estranges already estranged and fetishised knowledges and facts in their contradictoriness, as a mode of turning knowledge ‘inside out’, whose results are channelled towards anti-fascist struggle and revolutionary praxis. Bonney’s occult poetics seeks to re-appropriate zones of fascist cultural hegemony, such as the occult, making these ripe for revolutionary rediscovery. This very practice sets out a materialist means of communicating with the dead.

Modeling energy and exposure benefits through integrated ventilation upgrades and rooftop gardens in a high school in Boston, MA

BACKGROUND AND AIM Many U.S. schools have poor indoor ventilation, impacting air quality (IAQ), which is associated with adverse learning outcomes for children (e.g. reduced cognition, academic performance). However, increased ventilation results in increased energy consumption, which conflicts with goals to lower utility bills and carbon emissions. Addressing these challenges requires innovative and sustainable solutions. We propose a novel approach to simultaneously implement indoor ventilation upgrades and rooftop gardens, and model the impacts on energy use, financial costs, and carbon cycling in a Boston, MA high school. METHODS We measured CO2 concentrations continuously for a week in 13 classrooms and at exhaust rooftop vents during a two-month period in Spring 2019. We calculated baseline school-level average ventilation rates and estimated the energy needed to increase indoor ventilation to reduce CO2 to recommended indoor values (i.e. &amp;#x3c;1000 ppm). We then compared to yearly modeled energy savings and carbon emissions reductions occurring through plant carbon capture at a rooftop garden. RESULTS The baseline median classroom CO2 concentration was 840 ppm and exceeded 1000 ppm 33% of the school day. The estimated ventilation rate during occupancy was 4 L/s/person, below the recommended 7 L/s/person. Increasing ventilation to recommended levels would increase yearly total energy, cost, and carbon emissions (1-4%). A rooftop garden would provide net decreases of energy (12%), cost (13%), and carbon emissions (23-46%) with the higher end of this range attributed to plant growth enhancement. CONCLUSIONS Our analyses demonstrated the potential for integrated interventions in school buildings that can improve IAQ while capturing carbon through rooftop gardens. We found that CO2 levels of concern persist in schools, but could be vented to rooftops to reduce exposures and benefit plant growth. Future studies should evaluate alternative rooftop garden configurations that yield maximal energy and carbon reduction benefits. KEYWORDS Schools, CO2, energy, rooftops

Emergent anticoagulation reversal and BP control are key for ICH

Emergent anticoagulation reversal and BP control are key for ICH

The Statistical, Scientific, and Sensory Proof of Teddy Ballgame’s Mammoth Shot

The Statistical, Scientific, and Sensory Proof of Teddy Ballgame’s Mammoth Shot Larry Ruttman (bio) For a large segment of the Red Sox Nation, the horrendous 1883 explosion of Krakatoa in Indonesia, which killed over thirty-five thousand people, pales by comparison to the storm stirred up and still continuing about Ted Williams’s mammoth home run struck in 1946 at Fenway Park in Boston. The main reason seems to be that no one looking at the lonely red seat high in the right-field bleachers marking where the ball landed can believe a baseball can be hit that far, including Ian Kinsler, but we’ll get to that. I was fifteen in 1946, an avid Red Sox and Splendid Splinter fan, and lucky to be seated in the center-field bleachers on June 9 with a sideways view of Ted’s man-made volcano. I guess you had to be there. In the seventy-five years since then, all those people and personages whom I have told about the event have cast a dubious eye on me and my story, including such notables as Theo Epstein and the aforementioned Ian Kinsler. That is, until I became acquainted lately with Chaim Bloom, the present chief baseball officer of the Red Sox, who read my account of the home run (about which you will read) in my 2018 short memoir, “My Eighty-Two Year Love Affair with Fenway Park: From Teddy Ballgame to Mookie Betts.” Chaim wrote to me, “I must admit I was a skeptic myself, but I believe you.” Hey, I believe in this guy whose Yale University– and Tampa Bay Rays– enhanced smarts will lead the Boston Red Sox to nirvana yet again. I am supposing Chaim was persuaded by the wealth of facts I recited in the subsequent long quote from the memoir. One would have to be more Machiavellian than Machiavelli to make this stuff up. Here is my account. I’ll supply even more facts from my own memories of the event. God forbid that I should be labeled “More Machiavellian than Machiavelli”: In 1946 the Boston Red Sox won the American League pennant in a romp. It might be said that Ted Williams’s career rose to an apogee and [End Page 17] descended to its perigee that summer. Perhaps the apogee was on June 9, 1946, by which time the Sox were all alone in first place and Ted led the league in every major batting category. Accompanied again by my good friend then and now, Yale Altman, rifle armed all-city third baseman for English High School in Boston, I attended a doubleheader between the Sox and the Detroit Tigers. In the first game, Ted hit a soaring home run off the screen at the back of the Red Sox bullpen off ace Detroit curve-ball specialist Tommy Bridges. But the best was yet to come in the nightcap on this beautiful June day when the west wind was briskly blowing from home plate out to right field. Ted stepped in against Detroit’s fine right hander (and later a respected manager) Freddy Hutchinson. I can see and hear it all clearly in my mind’s eye and ear. The pitch was thrown hard and to the inside. Ted’s quick bat flashed through the strike zone striking the ball so hard that a sharp crack was heard all over Fenway Park. Indeed, the ball rose high and fast describing a relatively flat arc in the sky, more like a gargantuan line drive than a big fly. The ball sailed and sailed, landing very high in the sixty or so row right field bleachers. From my position in the center field section of the bleachers I saw the ball come down and quickly bounce up to the very last rows of the bleachers, close to six hundred feet away from home plate and thirty-five or more feet off the ground. As reported in the newspapers the next day, what actually happened is that the ball went through a man’s straw hat in the 42nd row, bouncing off his head to the position I just described. That man was 502 feet...