university of alabama at birmingham thesis

Are you seeking one-on-one college counseling and/or essay support? Limited spots are now available. Click here to learn more.

University of Alabama at Birmingham

Dave Bergman

Dave has over a decade of professional experience that includes work as a teacher, high school administrator, college professor, and independent educational consultant. He is a co-author of the books The Enlightened College Applicant (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and Colleges Worth Your Money (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).

• 2-Year Colleges
• Application Strategies
• Best Colleges by Major
• Best Colleges by State
• Big Picture
• Career & Personality Assessment
• College Essay
• College Search/Knowledge
• College Success
• Costs & Financial Aid
• Data Visualizations
• Dental School Admissions
• Extracurricular Activities
• Graduate School Admissions
• High School Success
• High Schools
• Homeschool Resources
• Law School Admissions
• Medical School Admissions
• Navigating the Admissions Process
• Online Learning
• Outdoor Adventure
• Private High School Spotlight
• Research Programs
• Summer Program Spotlight
• Summer Programs
• Teacher Tools
• Test Prep Provider Spotlight

“Innovative and invaluable…use this book as your college lifeline.”

— Lynn O'Shaughnessy

Nationally Recognized College Expert

Biomaterials Science

Matrix stiffness influences response to chemo and targeted therapy in brain metastatic breast cancer cells †.

* Corresponding authors

a Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487, USA E-mail: [email protected] Fax: +(205) 348-7558 Tel: +(205) 348-6564

b Department of Pathology, O'Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35233, USA

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy accounting for 12.5% of all newly diagnosed cancer cases across the globe. Breast cancer cells are known to metastasize to distant organs ( i.e. , brain), wherein they can exhibit a dormant phenotype for extended time periods. These dormant cancer cells exhibit reduced proliferation and therapeutic resistance. However, the mechanisms by which dormant cancer cells exhibit resistance to therapy, in the context of brain metastatic breast cancer (BMBC), is not well understood. Herein, we utilized hyaluronic acid (HA) hydrogels with varying stiffnesses to study drug responsiveness in dormant vs. proliferative BMBC cells. It was found that cells cultured on soft HA hydrogels (∼0.4 kPa) that showed a non-proliferative (dormant) phenotype exhibited resistance to Paclitaxel or Lapatinib. In contrast, cells cultured on stiff HA hydrogels (∼4.5 kPa) that showed a proliferative phenotype exhibited responsiveness to Paclitaxel or Lapatinib. Moreover, dormancy-associated resistance was found to be due to upregulation of the serum/glucocorticoid regulated kinase 1 (SGK1) gene which was mediated, in part, by the p38 signaling pathway. Accordingly, SGK1 inhibition resulted in a dormant-to-proliferative switch and response to therapy. Overall, our study demonstrates that matrix stiffness influences dormancy-associated therapy response mediated, in part, via the p38/SGK1 axis.

Supplementary files

• Supplementary information PDF (1107K)

Article information

Download citation, permissions.

Matrix stiffness influences response to chemo and targeted therapy in brain metastatic breast cancer cells

V. Yakati, L. A. Shevde and S. S. Rao, Biomater. Sci. , 2024, Advance Article , DOI: 10.1039/D4BM00342J

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page .

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page .

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content .

Social activity

Search articles by author.

This article has not yet been cited.

Advertisements

VOTE IN OUR POLL: What is the most important issue in Alabama?

UAB launches new degree program focused on AI in medicine

by Kyra Purvis

Birmingham, AL (WBMA) — The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)is launching a new degree program focused on combining artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with the medical field.

The Master of Science degree in artificial intelligence in medicine is the first degree of its kind in the Southeast region. It was just recently approved by the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees.

Students entering into the program do not have to have a medical background. They instead will mainly be made up of engineers, computer scientists or technicians looking to work in partnership with medical experts.

The goal is to use the AI technology to improve the accuracy and efficiency of medical practices. Experts say it can assist with improving hospital operations, diagnoses, and drug discovery

It can also be used for tracking public and population health. Dr. Rubin Pillay, the executive director for the UAB Institute for Biomedical Innovation, says the technology could have major benefits during a health crisis.

“One of the reasons that we failed so miserably during COVID is because we just didn’t have the where with all to predict the onset and predict the trajectories, said Dr. Pillay, "AI could be used as a surveillance tool.”

These positions are in high demand right nationally and internationally. That demand is expected to grow as AI becomes more familiar in the medical setting.

"The reality is we just don’t have enough people with the expertise to actually bring this to fruition," said Dr. Pillay.

• SEE ALSO: Expert weighs in on patient impact of hospital acquisitions
• SEE ALSO: Senator Tommy Tuberville discusses gun violence, IVF, and government spending

The implications of AI in different fields comes with concerns of safety and security. Dr. Pillay says those features are built into any AI program.

“The aspect of responsible AI, ethical AI, privacy and security. Ensuring that AI does not worsen current disparities. These are just important foundational principles that we build into it,” said Dr. Pillay.

UAB will be rolling out other AI focused degree programs in the future. Dr. Pillay says AI in nursing and health services should be implemented within the college by next year. These programs are expected to be very competitive and bring students from across the world.

The first cohort of students for the new masters program will begin in Spring of next year. Admissions are expected to open up by July 2024.

Alabama State sheds light on heavy on-campus police presence

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (WSFA) - Alabama State University is releasing a statement regarding an incident in which multiple law enforcement officers responded to campus Wednesday afternoon.

According to an ASU spokesperson, a large number of law enforcement officers responded to the campus as a precaution after a fight broke out at an event at the Acadome. The function involved an off-campus group that rented out the facility for its graduation ceremony, the university said.

Officials are stressing that there were no gunshots fired, however, and there are no reports of injuries.

Not reading this story on the WSFA News App? Get news alerts FASTER and FREE in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store !

Copyright 2024 WSFA. All rights reserved.

Contractor dies at state prison construction site in Elmore County

Man out on bond for attempted murder arrested again

Baby unaccounted for after mother dies in house fire; 2 detained

Montgomery Fire/Rescue extinguishes early morning business fire

Latest news.

Morning Smile: Marbury All-stars headed to USSSA Rec World Series

Town of Pike Road celebrates the season with annual SummerFest

Teen wanted after man shot, killed in Eufaula

Town of Pike Road holding annual 'SummerFest' Thursday night

These Researchers Study the Legacy of the Segregation Academies They Grew Up Around

Three young academics in alabama are examining these mostly white private schools through the lenses of economics, education and history to better understand the persistent division of schools in the south..

• Twitter Twitter
• Facebook Facebook
• https://www.propublica.org/article/alabama-researchers-segregation-academies-school-vouchers Link Copied! Link Copy

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches , a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

One young researcher from Alabama is unearthing the origin stories of schools known as “segregation academies” to understand how that history fosters racial divisions today.

Another is measuring how much these private schools — which opened across the Deep South to facilitate white flight after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling — continue to drain public school enrollment.

And a third is examining how these academies, operating in a “landscape marred by historical racial tensions,” receive public money through Alabama’s voucher-style private school tuition grants.

All three researchers are white women raised in Alabama, close in age, who grew up near these academies. The women — one recently received a doctorate and the other two are working on theirs — approach their research from the varied disciplines of economics, education and history. Their inquiries are probing the very schools some of their family and friends attended.

In an ongoing series this year, ProPublica is examining the continued effects of hundreds of segregation academies still operating in the South . One of the three researchers played a key role in our initial story. Her experiences, both personally and academically, provided essential context to understanding how one segregation academy in rural Alabama has kept an entire community separated by race.

The research conducted by all three women is especially important now. It comes at a time when Southern legislatures are creating and expanding school-voucher-style programs that will pour hundreds of millions of public dollars into the coffers of private schools, including segregation academies, over the coming years.

Segregation Academies and Voucher Programs

Annah Rogers was working on her undergraduate degree at Auburn University in 2013 when Republican lawmakers suddenly rushed to pass the Alabama Accountability Act. The legislation created a voucher-style system to pay private school tuition for low-income students. As Rogers followed the debates, she wondered just how accessible private schools are to families with few resources, especially in rural areas. She knew that some of those communities don’t have private schools — and where they do exist, they’re often segregation academies.

Rogers hails from Eutaw, Alabama, a town of 3,000 people located in the Black Belt, a stretch of counties whose dark, rich soil once fueled large cotton plantations. Her parents sent her 45 minutes away to a private Catholic school. (Catholic schools generally aren’t considered segregation academies because most dioceses integrated willingly.) Rogers’ father attended a now-defunct local segregation academy, and her mother went to one in another county.

While working on her doctorate in political science at the University of Alabama, she devoted her 2022 dissertation to examining the state’s voucher-style program and its effects on private schools , including segregation academies. She had expected segregation academies to balk at participating in the program given that more than 60% of students who use it are Black. Yet she found that many do. In fact, they take part at a slightly higher rate — 8% more often — than other private schools.

That discovery prompted more questions: Are the tuition grants enabling Black students to attend segregation academies, making the schools more diverse? Or are the academies merely siphoning off the white students who use the grants?

“The biggest problem is that we don’t know,” said Rogers, who’s now an assistant professor at the University of West Alabama’s education college. She hit a huge hurdle when the state refused to break down by school the demographics of students who use the publicly funded program to pay private school tuition.

Despite that roadblock, she continues to probe these questions while working on related studies, including one that demonstrates how school segregation patterns have continued and even worsened across Alabama’s Black Belt over the last three decades.

Her research will become more critical in the coming years, as more students, including students from wealthier families, will be receiving state money to attend private schools. In March, Alabama lawmakers created a universal voucher-style program to fund private school tuition. It will be open to all children, regardless of household income, starting in 2027.

Segregation Academies and Public School Enrollment

Danielle Graves grew up in Mobile on the Gulf Coast, where she attended a mostly white private Episcopal school. Although it opened long enough before the Brown v. Board ruling that academics don’t label it a segregation academy, its enrollment still grew substantially during desegregation.

Graves left the South to pursue her master’s and doctorate in economics at Boston University, where she is a fourth-year Ph.D. student. While in the Northeast, she realized that private schools there tend to be much older than in the South. The private school tradition didn’t really catch on in the South until white people thought Black students might arrive at their children’s public schools.

Graves also realized how few people outside of the South knew about segregation academies. Economics literature rarely mentioned them at all.

“I felt like it was this missing piece,” she said.

A lot of economic research on school desegregation and white flight focuses on cities rather than on rural areas “where segregation academies really play a big role,” Graves said. She jumped into that largely empty research lane.

Graves tackles questions like: How have segregation academies affected the average public school enrollment? Are there differences between rural and urban areas?

She taught a class on the economics and history of school segregation at Harvard University this spring and has spent the last two years researching and presenting her work on the impact that segregation academies have on local public schools.

For the dissertation she is finishing, Graves found that on average, when segregation academies opened in Alabama and Louisiana, they caused white enrollment in neighboring public schools to drop by about a third — and the white population did not return over the 15 years that followed.

Now she is measuring the effects of segregation academies on local public school funding, the students who attended them and the communities where they operate.

Segregation Academies and History

Unlike the other two researchers, Amberly Sheffield went to her local public schools, which were predominantly Black. As she watched other white families pay to send their children to segregation academies, she wondered: why?

Sheffield grew up in Grove Hill, a town of 2,000 people, where her father briefly attended a local segregation academy. After earning her undergraduate degree, she landed a job teaching history at a segregation academy in neighboring Wilcox County. ProPublica’s first story in its series on these academies focused on Wilcox County and the lasting effect that school segregation has had on community members — including, for a time, Sheffield. 

Almost all of her students at Wilcox Academy were white. The entire faculty was white. Yet Wilcox County is 70% Black .

Like most segregation academies, Wilcox Academy doesn’t advertise itself as such. Some of these schools include their founding years on their websites or entrance signs — as Wilcox Academy does — but mention nothing about the fact that they opened to avoid desegregation.

Sheffield wanted to shed light on the context of the schools’ openings. In her 2022 master's thesis at Auburn University , she chronicled Wilcox County’s history of sharecropping, violence against civil rights advocates, and resistance to school integration.

She also documented the many fundraisers white people held to pay for the segregation academies they rushed to open before many Black students arrived at the white public schools. Families forming one academy held a skit night, barbeque, fish fry, bingo party, pet show and pancake supper. The money raised paid for school equipment and salaries “but equally important, it created a new community for its founders, sponsors, and families,” she wrote.

The schools also joined a new group that provided their accreditation and organized sports events. “These academies allowed whites to gain complete control over their children’s education — they no longer had to answer to any form of government but their own,” Sheffield wrote.

Today, she is continuing her research as a doctoral student in history at the University of Mississippi.

“History is very important in understanding how we’ve gotten to where we are today, especially when you look at public schools in rural communities in Alabama,” Sheffield said. Many of these schools are mostly Black, underfunded and struggling. “I want people to understand how it got that way, and the answer usually is segregation academies.”

Help ProPublica Report on Education

ProPublica is building a network of educators, students, parents and other experts to help guide our reporting about education. Take a few minutes to join our source network and share what you know.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

Greg Abbott’s School Voucher Crusade Is Three Decades in the Making

Greg Abbott has campaigned against members of his own party who do not support voucher programs. This fall, he may finally get the votes needed to pass a bill.

by Jeremy Schwartz , June 21, 5 a.m. CDT

How Illinois’ Hands-Off Approach to Homeschooling Leaves Children at Risk

At 9 years old, L.J. started missing school. His parents said they would homeschool him. It took two years — during which he was beaten and denied food — for anyone to notice he wasn’t learning.

by Molly Parker and Beth Hundsdorfer , Capitol News Illinois , June 5, 8 a.m. EDT

Local Reporting Network

New York Education Department Hindered an Abuse Investigation at Boarding School for Autistic Youth

A state judge ruled that the agency must cooperate in a disability rights investigation into Shrub Oak International School. A ProPublica investigation found that would-be whistleblowers could not get state authorities to intervene at the school.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen , May 31, 6 a.m. EDT

How an Alabama Town Staved Off School Resegregation

In the 1970s, Black students organized protests and a boycott that cost local white businesses money. Today, many families who could afford private school still choose Thomasville’s public schools.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes , May 29, 5 a.m. EDT

How Residents in a Rural Alabama County Are Confronting the Lasting Harm of Segregation Academies

In Wilcox County, Alabama, many people say they want to bridge racial divides created by their segregated schools. But they must face a long and painful history.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes , photography by Sarahbeth Maney , May 24, 6 a.m. EDT

“I Refuse to Be Told What to Do”: Facebook Posts Show a Conservative School Board Member Rejecting Extremism

When reporter Jeremy Schwartz first learned of a local Texas activist who ran for school board on a far-right education platform, she seemed to embody the extremist movement he’d covered since 2021. Then her Facebook posts took a surprising turn.

by Jeremy Schwartz , May 22, 5 a.m. CDT

In a Push for Green Energy, One Federal Agency Made Tribes an Offer They Had to Refuse

The Yakama Nation wanted to consult on the development of a project on sacred land. But when the tribal nation refused to disclose confidential information, the agency moved forward without tribal input.

by B. “Toastie” Oaster , High Country News , June 26, 5 a.m. EDT

Multiple Trump Witnesses Have Received Significant Financial Benefits From His Businesses, Campaign

Witnesses in the various criminal cases against the former president have gotten pay raises, new jobs and more. If any benefits were intended to influence testimony, that could be a crime.

by Robert Faturechi , Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski , June 3, 6 a.m. EDT

How 3M Execs Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe

Decades ago, Kris Hansen showed 3M that its PFAS chemicals were in people’s bodies. Her bosses halted her work.

by Sharon Lerner , photography by Haruka Sakaguchi , special to ProPublica , May 20, 6 a.m. EDT

How Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class Into a Tax-Free Piggy Bank

Roth IRAs were intended to help average working Americans save, but IRS records show Thiel and other ultrawealthy investors have used them to amass vast untaxed fortunes.

by Justin Elliott , Patricia Callahan and James Bandler , June 24, 2021, 5 a.m. EDT

The Delusion of “Advanced” Plastic Recycling

The plastics industry has heralded a type of chemical recycling it claims could replace new shopping bags and candy wrappers with old ones — but not much is being recycled at all, and this method won’t curb the crisis.

by Lisa Song , illustrations by Max Guther , special to ProPublica , June 20, 5 a.m. EDT

Republish This Story for Free

Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Thank you for your interest in republishing this story. You are free to republish it so long as you do the following:

• You have to credit ProPublica and any co-reporting partners . In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication(s).” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by ProPublica.” You must link the word “ProPublica” to the original URL of the story.
• If you’re republishing online, you must link to the URL of this story on propublica.org, include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up language and link, and use our PixelPing tag .
• If you use canonical metadata, please use the ProPublica URL. For more information about canonical metadata, refer to this Google SEO link .
• You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
• You cannot republish our photographs or illustrations without specific permission. Please contact [email protected] .
• It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories. You can’t state or imply that donations to your organization support ProPublica’s work.
• You can’t sell our material separately or syndicate it. This includes publishing or syndicating our work on platforms or apps such as Apple News, Google News, etc.
• You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. (To inquire about syndication or licensing opportunities, contact [email protected] .)
• You can’t use our work to populate a website designed to improve rankings on search engines or solely to gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
• We do not generally permit translation of our stories into another language.
• Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you.
• If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. We have official accounts for ProPublica on Twitter , Facebook and Instagram .