Peer Mentors Forging a Path in Changing Times

This complete evidence-based practice paper examines the experience of two peer mentors, known as Student Engagement Liaisons (SEL), as they worked to cultivate community and sense of belonging for first year engineering students. Over the past two years, the educational pendulum has swung wildly as students have gone from in-person to online learning and back again. Many students continue to navigate a changing landscape as they straddle between the two worlds of in-person and remote learning with some classes continuing to meet online and others being fully in person. These abrupt transitions have left many students struggling to develop meaningful connections with their peers, faculty, and their educational programs, all of which have negative ramifications on their academic progress and sense of belonging. This investigation uses a critical constructivist theoretical approach to explore how two SELs, who were tasked with enhancing student engagement and building social networks for first year engineering students, modified support mechanisms in response to the changing teaching and learning modalities. Of particular interest is how the SEL program has evolved during this tumultuous time, the mentors' experiences exploring and developing new ways of connecting students, and the impact of the experience on the mentors themselves. The results indicate a shift in focus solely driven by the mentors, along with a willingness to reframe activities, events, and support measures to meet the dynamic needs of the students. Their ability to listen, pivot, and adapt to changing needs of students indicates a commitment to creating inclusive and accessible social environments through community centered solutions. We recognize that these new ways might be innovative because of the circumstances, but they can also continue to be integrated as ways to support and engage students, particularly because they were created by students. The SELs used the COVID-19 pivots as an opportunity to reinvent what it means to mentor their peers and, with that, have explored and experimented with new ways of creating community. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2022.

Environmental and Pharmacokinetic Aspects of Zeolite/Pharmaceuticals Systems—Two Facets of Adsorption Ability

Zeolites belong to aluminosilicate microporous solids, with strong and diverse catalytic activity, which makes them applicable in almost every kind of industrial process, particularly thanks to their eco-friendly profile. Another crucial characteristic of zeolites is their tremendous adsorption capability. Therefore, it is self-evident that the widespread use of zeolites is in environmental protection, based primarily on the adsorption capacity of substances potentially harmful to the environment, such as pharmaceuticals, pesticides, or other industry pollutants. On the other hand, zeolites are also recognized as drug delivery systems (DDS) carriers for numerous pharmacologically active agents. The enhanced bioactive ability of DDS zeolite as a drug carrying nanoplatform is confirmed, making this system more specific and efficient, compared to the drug itself. These two applications of zeolite, in fact, illustrate the importance of (ir)reversibility of the adsorption process. This review gives deep insight into the balance and dynamics that are established during that process, i.e., the interaction between zeolites and pharmaceuticals, helping scientists to expand their knowledge necessarily for a more effective application of the adsorption phenomenon of zeolites.

Control of COVID-19 transmission dynamics, a game theoretical approach

We analyze a mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission control, which includes the interactions among different groups of the population: vaccinated, susceptible, exposed, infectious, super-spreaders, hospitalized and fatality, based on a system of ordinary differential equations, which describes compartment model of a disease and its treatment. The aim of the model is to predict the development disease under different types of treatment during some fixed time period. We develop a game theoretic approach and a dual dynamic programming method to formulate optimal conditions of the treatment for an administration of a vaccine. Next, we calculate numerically an optimal treatment. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Inverse optimal control for positive impulsive systems toward personalized therapeutic regimens

Infectious diseases are latent threats to humankind. Control theoretical approaches can help practitioners to advance the scheduling of drugs. For the case of infectious diseases, it is not possible to keep continuous flow of drug administration over all time-steps, thus the action of the control input has to be restricted at some of the kth instants. This paper presents the adaptation of inverse optimal control to positive impulsive systems in discrete-time to schedule therapies. The properties of positive systems are used to simplify the control design. Thus, the problem of scheduling therapies in infectious diseases is illustrated with influenza and COVID-19. Numerical results show the applicability of the control algorithms. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Experimental and theoretical approaches on structural, spectroscopic (FT-IR and UV-Vis), nonlinear optical, and molecular docking analyses for Zn (II) and Cu (II) complexes of 6-chloropyridine-2-carboxylic acid

Novel transition metal-based complexes that may be of value as biological agents and/or nonlinear optical materials, Zn (II) and Cu (II) transition metal complexes of 6-chloropyridine-2-carboxylic acid (LH), were successfully synthesized. The chemical structure of each complex was characterized using X-ray diffraction (XRD) method and FT-IR spectroscopy. XRD and FT-IR demonstrated that L ligand coordinate to central metal ions through the donor N and O atoms. By coordinating two H2O ligand to Zn (II) ion, a distorted octahedral complex geometry was constructed for 1. As for 2, a distorted trigonal bipyramidal coordination geometry was obtained by a H2O ligand coordination to Cu (II) ion. Theoretical studies using B3LYP/6-311++G(d,p)-LanL2DZ were performed to further validate the proposed structures. The molecular docking of 1 to SARS-CoV-2 main protease (PDB: 6LU7) gives a binding energy of −5.24 kcal/mol and inhibition constant of 144.6 μM, demonstrating that 1 is a more promising candidate to biologically active complexes than 2. The first-order hyperpolarizability (β) parameter for 1 and 2 was calculated as 0.88 × 10−30 and 10.40 × 10−30 esu, respectively. These β values also demonstrated that 2 exhibits more effective NLO character than 1 due to the electronic configuration and coordination geometry. © 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.