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Lending a helping hand in Eritrea is no easy task.
The small northeast African country’s political situation, coupled with poverty, make humanitarian trips difficult at best and dangerous at worst. But Nursing Professor Brenda Hanson-Smith is determined to improve women’s healthcare in the region.
She first got involved in 2006, when the not-for-profit One Tribe Foundation sent a team of advanced practice nursing educators to Eritrea to assess nursing education and healthcare needs related to women’s health.
“There was a great need for instruction on teaching methods, curriculum development and evaluation,” Hanson-Smith says. While there, she was also able to assess perinatal needs outside the hospital setting. “In Eritrea only about one in four women deliver in a hospital. The others deliver in their homes.”
During the visit, Hanson-Smith met with hospital and nursing staff as well as the National Union of Eritrean Women, which works to improve the health and social status of women, to determine teaching needs for a future visit.
“Hemorrhage and infection are killers, and there was a need for lay workers and registered nurses alike to have updated instruction,” she says. “Likewise, current newborn and infant assessment and resuscitation skills were lacking.”
Hanson-Smith returned last spring, again with a full agenda, including teaching fetal monitoring, newborn assessment and resuscitation to the nursing staff and lay healthcare workers from the outlying villages, and speaking on reproductive cancers of the breast, cervix and uterus.
In addition, Hanson-Smith sent along vitally needed hospital equipment including fetal monitors, fetoscopes, cord clamps and assorted surgical instruments. Unfortunately, the fetoscopes and surgical instruments were stolen en route.
Undaunted by the setback, she focused on delivering lifesaving lessons that couldn’t be taken away. “Breast self-exam is not a common practice and access to mammograms is non-existent,” says Hanson-Smith. “Teaching women breast self-exams is tremendously important because it directly impacts the quality of their health.”
And Hanson-Smith’s dedication didn’t go unnoticed. During a hospital welcome the OB/GYN chief of staff declared that Hanson- Smith “is one of us. She is our sister.”
“It was truly an unexpected honor,” says Hanson-Smith. “Sister is a name given to the highest-ranking nurse, a most learned person. What I have given them is so small in comparison to what they have given me.”
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Not many people know Art Professor Catherine Turrill as somewhat of a detective, combing through documents to learn the vital statistics and trace the actions of her subject. Only in Turrill’s case, the subject happens to be a female artist who lived more than 400 years ago. Turrill’s research resulted in two entries in Plautilla Nelli: The Painter Nun of Renaissance Florence, a collection of essays edited by Jonathan K. Nelson.
A contemporary of Michelangelo, Nelli lived and worked in the Dominican convent of Santa Caterina da Siena in Florence. It was common practice for convents to support themselves by creating items from weaving, spinning or lace-making. But Nelli took things in a new direction. “She brought painting into the convent,” Turrill says.
Turrill’s fascination with Nelli was prompted in the 1990s by an art history student who wanted to know more about female artists in the Italian Renaissance. When Turrill and the student started gathering names they found that Nelli’s turned up frequently. “Almost nothing had been written about her in English at that point. I had this whole field of research to myself,” Turrill says.
After joining Sacramento State in 1995, Turrill spent several summers in Florence, unearthing even more information about Nelli. Surprisingly, this art research involved very little art. “It was very rare that I looked at a painting,” Turrill says. “I was usually looking at documents, in Italian, from the 16th century.”
Because Renaissance artists did not sign all of their works, matching an unsigned painting with an artist can be a problem. Only three of Nelli’s documented paintings are known today.
That includes a 22-foot-wide painting of the Last Supper she did for the convent’s dining room, and which now hangs in the refectory of the Dominican friars at Santa Maria Novella in Florence. But Nelli was famous in her own time and her works were purchased by many patrons. So it’s believed other paintings may be unrecognized or are hanging in private collections, Turrill says.
In comparing Nelli’s works to other wellknown, male artists of the Renaissance, Turrill says hers don’t quite match up to their standards. But she adds that Nelli didn’t have the same advantages as the men, who, as young teenagers, were apprenticed to artists and learned their craft over several years.
Nelli entered the convent around age 14 and is said to have taught herself without the benefit of a mentor. “She had a natural ability and did the best with what she had,” Turrill says.
Her best was good enough to ensure that her name and talent are still recognized almost five centuries later.
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You would expect to see Bunsen burners in a chemistry lab, but microwave ovens?
Professor Cynthia Kellen-Yuen and her students use ordinary, kitchen model ovens to cook up molecules that could be used to fight a variety of diseases, including cancer and HIV.
“We use microwave ovens for the same reason you use a microwave oven,” she says. “The reactions are very fast.”
The ovens are used to heat two organic molecules until they collapse and become one larger, cyclic molecule which she hopes will be biologically active, affecting the metabolic activity of the cells. The “combined” molecules, called pyrroles and triazoles, have the potential to become useful pharmaceutical drugs.
“The pyrroles we are making are very simple versions of complicated molecules that can be found in marine animals like mollusks and sea sponges,” Kellen-Yuen says. “Although the natural molecules have shown great promise as anti-cancer or anti-HIV drugs, the animals produce their pyrroles in small amounts, so they’re not really useful, pharmaceutically speaking.”
The shapes of the molecules produced in the microwave ovens are a little different than the natural ones, and Kellen-Yuen says she’s not positive her molecules are as biologically active as the natural compounds. “But, there are similarities to the natural product which means they have potential. We need to produce them in decent quantities and in sufficient variety to test and see if they have any activity on their own.”
For experiments that create molecules which could help battle fatal illnesses, you might expect specialized equipment, but the ovens in Kellen-Yuen’s lab are store-bought models like those found in most homes. “You can buy a standard microwave oven for about $50-60,” she says. “But if you were to buy labgrade oven it would be close to $20,000-30,000.”
Using an off-the-shelf model does have its drawbacks, the biggest being they are not tuned to do precision heating.
“I bet when you turn your microwave on and select 30 percent power, you think you’re getting 30 percent power,” Kellen-Yuen says. “What you are really getting is full power for 30 percent of the time. That leads to all kinds of interesting outcomes when we put our experiments into the microwave.”
So Kellen-Yuen uses tricks such as artificially forcing the power down by putting a container of ice in the back of the oven. “Ice is wonderful at absorbing microwave energy, and best of all, the byproduct is only water.”
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