Akshay Agrawal – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Fri, 25 Sep 2015 08:00:51 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://stanforddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cropped-DailyIcon-CardinalRed.png?w=32 Akshay Agrawal – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Stanford researchers determine cause of arsenic spikes in groundwater https://stanforddaily.com/2015/09/25/stanford-researchers-determine-cause-of-arsenic-spikes-in-groundwater/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/09/25/stanford-researchers-determine-cause-of-arsenic-spikes-in-groundwater/#respond Fri, 25 Sep 2015 08:00:51 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1103819 A collaboration between Stanford scientists and the Orange County Water District diagnosed the cause of transient spikes in trace arsenic levels seen in a Southern Californian groundwater basin — the introduction of highly purified water.

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A collaboration between Stanford scientists and the Orange County Water District (OCWD) recently diagnosed the cause of transient spikes in trace arsenic levels seen in a Southern Californian groundwater basin — the introduction of highly purified water. The study was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, and OCWD has modified post-treatment operations in light of its findings.

Arsenic levels in OCWD’s aquifers occasionally exceeded the drinking limit of 10 micrograms per liter. OCWD Director of Health and Regulatory Affairs Jason Dadakis reported that public water supplies were at no time affected by the spikes, which were transient in nature.

The fact that highly purified water can instigate the release of naturally occurring subterranean contaminants was previously unknown. The study’s findings are particularly relevant for drought-stricken California, where groundwater basins have emerged as attractive alternatives to evaporation-vulnerable surface reservoirs.

OCWD built and operationalized its groundwater replenishment system in 2008. The world’s largest treatment system for potable reuse, it recharges a subterranean basin with local surface water, imported water and thoroughly treated recycled water. Water is piped into surface ponds, from which it percolates and infiltrates the basin below.

A network of wells provides over 1,400 sampling points and enables OCWD to conduct over 350,000 analyses per year, and it was with this monitoring infrastructure that OCWD observed arsenic traces. The spikes, which were first seen in 2009, were difficult to reason about — blending of different water types and their aggregate flow through the basin, for example, complicated analyses. And so, three years later, OCWD enlisted the help of Stanford’s earth system science professor Scott Fendorf.

“It was very difficult to understand exactly what was going on all the time in this uncontrolled field [setting],” Dadakis said. “That led us to contact Stanford… to do work in [Fendorf’s] laboratory where we could control some of these factors.”

Fendorf’s laboratory received samples of sediment from underneath Anaheim’s Miraloma Basin. The scientists packed the sediment — which itself had naturally occurring arsenic — into small vials, flowing differing water samples through them and measuring the extent to which arsenic bled into the water. They found that OCWD’s recycled water was particularly effective in coaxing arsenic to unbind from sediment, precisely because it was poor in calcium and magnesium cations.

“What we discovered is that, essentially, their water is too pure,” said Sarah Fakhreddine, co-author of the study and a third-year graduate student advised by Fendorf. “Some of the arsenic is bound on the clay particles in the aquifer, and it’s bound by calcium and magnesium…. As you introduce high purity water that has [low concentrations of] ions, you start to lose the calcium and magnesium in the system and you release the arsenic.”

Dadakis said that OCWD has responded to these findings by increasing the amount of calcium added to the recycled water post-treatment. Preliminary results do not show any negative consequences of doing so, though it is too early to tell whether the attempted solution will be effective.

This work was not the first collaboration between Stanford and OCWD (Stanford began consulting for OCWD as early as the late 1970s), nor will it be the last. Fendorf and company have already taken up a second project: OCWD is evaluating the feasibility of injecting water directly into the groundwater basin, and the Stanford scientists have come on board to study the geochemistry of that particular system.

 

Contact Akshay Agrawal at akshayka ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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ASSU survey measures student opinions of mental health services https://stanforddaily.com/2015/04/15/assu-survey-measures-student-opinions-of-mental-health-services/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/04/15/assu-survey-measures-student-opinions-of-mental-health-services/#respond Thu, 16 Apr 2015 06:11:22 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1099165 The ASSU Mental Health team has completed a wide-ranging survey that measures students’ perceptions of and experiences with campus mental health services. Emergent threads from the responses include a lack of familiarity with the constellation of services available for students and a demonstrated interest in the quality and type of care provided. According to the Mental Health team co-directors Nikita Desai ’15 and Anne Evered, ’15, the survey played an integral role in opening up an ongoing, productive dialogue between University administrators and the ASSU on the topic of mental health.

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The ASSU Mental Health team has released their survey results about mental health and CAPS (VICTOR XU/The Stanford Daily).
The ASSU Mental Health team has released their survey results about mental health and CAPS (VICTOR XU/The Stanford Daily).

The ASSU Mental Health team has completed a wide-ranging survey that measures students’ perceptions of and experiences with campus mental health services. Emergent threads from the responses include a lack of familiarity with the constellation of services available for students and a demonstrated interest in the quality and type of care provided. According to the Mental Health team co-directors Nikita Desai ’15 and Anne Evered ’15, the survey played an integral role in opening up an ongoing, productive dialogue between University administrators and the ASSU on the topic of mental health.

Evered traced the impetus of the survey back to spring of 2014 — after conversing with CAPS Director Ron Albucher and Vaden Health Care Director Ira Friedman, the team realized that they needed hard data to support the anecdotal murmurings they had heard about mental health on campus.

“We needed to convince people who aren’t going to listen if you just tell them a sad story,” said Jennifer Hill, Ph.D. candidate in sociology and lead designer of the survey. “We jointly realized that we [had to] get some numbers behind this.”

Distributed via email and open from November 2014 to February 2015, the survey amassed 1,687 voluntary respondents. Fifty-four percent of respondents were graduate students while the remaining 46 percent were undergraduates, roughly representative of the University’s distribution of students. Making up 62 percent of the respondents, significantly more females than males participated in the survey. Hill commented that over-representation of women in voluntary surveys is somewhat typical.

 

A lack of awareness

Many respondents expressed a lack of awareness about the mental health and well-being services available on campus, confirming a trend that the Mental Health team had picked up on from conversations with other students. The extent to which students were unfamiliar with the resources on campus, however, did surprise the team.

Nineteen percent of those surveyed indicated that they were “not at all knowledgeable” about “Stanford’s approach to mental health and wellness,” while a quarter said that, if they suspected a friend or roommate was suffering from a mental health issue, they would not or probably not know how to act or where to seek help. Across all services, graduate students were significantly less aware of resources than undergraduates were. Only 49 percent of respondents were aware that Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) offers a 24/7 on-call service for urgent and emergent cases, and 13 percent had never heard of CAPS at all.

In order to help students better navigate mental health and wellbeing services, Desai and Evered are developing a flowchart that visualizes avenues for care.

“In our research, we spent months looking at the different resources and trying to figure out the system,” Evered said. “Even after that, it was sort of unclear how the different pieces interacted.”

 

Experiences and perceptions

The survey dedicated a third of its questions to soliciting students’ experiences with and opinions about CAPS. Approximately one-third of those surveyed had used CAPS at some point in their Stanford careers; for context, about 15 percent of the student population was served by CAPS in the 2014-15 academic year. These patient respondents reported generally positive opinions about their counselors, though a quarter of them were unsatisfied with their experiences with CAPS as a whole.

Graduate students were significantly more approving of their experiences with CAPS than undergraduates. No statistically significant dependencies between experiences with CAPS and race, gender or prior exposure to psychiatric care were found.

A large majority of patients wished for a mechanism through which they could provide feedback to CAPS — a sign that, when coupled with the high response rate, convinced the Mental Health team that students want a voice in their mental health system. Indeed, Evered was pleasantly surprised by the time and care that students seemed to put into the survey.

“We had an outpouring of free-response answers to the survey with very detailed accounts of what should be improved in CAPS and clear concerns,” Evered said.

Although the triage process was the subject of much discussion in February’s town hall on CAPS, 70 percent of students who used CAPS found triages (initial assessments and categorizations of the urgency of mental health problems) to be helpful and comfortable.

Forty-one percent of respondents said that they would be unlikely or somewhat unlikely to visit CAPS, should they need help in the future. Large numbers of students cited doubts about the severity of particular health issues, mental health stigmas, uncertainty about the intake process and health insurance costs as deterrents to visiting CAPS.

Albucher has previously stated that CAPS was underfunded and understaffed, and that the organization was hampered from an unusual amount of turnover during this academic year. CAPS has received additional funding and hopes to hire five new counselors by Sept. 1, 2015.

Experiences with other counseling services on campus, though limited, were overwhelmingly positive.

 

Towards a working relationship

According to Desai and Evered, the contribution of the survey was two-fold: Not only did it provide them with a more audible pulse on student relationships with mental health and wellbeing services, it also helped cement a working relationship between the Mental Health team and University administration.

Toward the end of winter quarter, Hill and members of the ASSU Executive Cabinet, including Desai and Evered, presented a preliminary report on the survey, compiled from the responses of about 900 respondents, to Albucher and Friedman. Both Desai and Evered described the survey and that presentation as pivotal in their relationship with CAPS and Vaden.

Collaboration between these entities led to the creation of a number of joint initiatives, including PHE-led tours of CAPS, beginning fall quarter of 2016, and in-residence CAPS counseling, to pilot later this quarter in select residences.

With elections on the horizon, Desai and Evered plan to speak extensively with the elected ASSU slate and hope to help them maintain the relationships they forged.

One of the things [that] wasn’t clear when we first came into office was just how much time establishing a trusting relationship with your counterparts can take,” Evered said. “That’s been one of our major goals — to lay a very solid groundwork of collaboration with CAPS and with the administration.”

Contact Akshay Agrawal at akshayka ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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CAPS receives funding to hire additional counselors https://stanforddaily.com/2015/04/03/caps-receives-funding-to-hire-additional-counselors/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/04/03/caps-receives-funding-to-hire-additional-counselors/#respond Fri, 03 Apr 2015 07:07:02 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1098219 Student Affairs has approved additional funds for Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), effective Sept. 1, 2015. The funds, requested by CAPS earlier this quarter, will enable the organization to hire three more full-time counselors.

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Student Affairs has approved additional funds for Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), effective Sept. 1, 2015. The funds, which CAPS requested earlier this quarter, will enable the organization to hire three more full-time counselors.

In total, CAPS plans to increase its counseling staff by five for the 2015-2016 academic year. CAPS is currently in the process of hiring two full-time counselors experienced in working with Native American and African American populations. According to the job posting, these counselors will provide mental health services “with a specific focus on… the African American or Native American student community.”

During last month’s town hall meeting centered on CAPS, multiple students expressed frustration with the wait times encountered when scheduling appointments, with some citing waits of up to three weeks.

CAPS Director Ron Albucher attributed this academic year’s longer wait times to a particularly tumultuous staffing situation, and he hopes that a larger and more stable staff will help drive wait times down to an average of one to two weeks.

“It was extremely abnormal. We’ve never had this many staff either leave for retirement, take another position, go out on medical leave or take [maternity] leave… either sequentially or all together,” Albucher said. “This entire year we’ve been attempting to catch up with staffing, and we’ve always been behind.”

While CAPS provides a 24/7 hotline to service urgent cases, Albucher acknowledged that some students with medically non-urgent cases may find one- to two-week wait times too long. Budget constraints, however, prevent CAPS from realistically striving for wait times below one week.

Albucher also emphasized that, although CAPS does not enforce an institutional limit on the number of counseling sessions available to students, the organization is primarily a short-term care facility. In order to help students navigate care options outside CAPS, Albucher hopes to find at least one of the three future counselors to be well-versed in matters of insurance and referrals.

Vice Provost for Student Affairs Greg Boardman declined to comment on the specifics of CAPS’ budget.

“The University does not provide information about internal unit budget decisions, which are confidential business matters,” Boardman and Albucher wrote in a joint statement to The Daily.

Visit wellness.stanford.edu for a comprehensive catalog of Stanford’s health services. Students with urgent and emergent matters can reach an on-call CAPS clinician by calling (650) 723-3785 at any time; callers will be connected to a clinician within 20 minutes. For life threatening issues that require immediate attention, call 911 and/or visit the nearest emergency room.

Contact Akshay Agrawal at akshayka@stanford.edu.

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Students discuss concerns, experiences at CAPS town hall https://stanforddaily.com/2015/02/26/students-discuss-concerns-experiences-at-caps-town-hall/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/02/26/students-discuss-concerns-experiences-at-caps-town-hall/#comments Thu, 26 Feb 2015 09:27:49 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1096590 On Wednesday night, dozens of students participated in a town hall meeting with Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) director Ron Albucher. Students expressed frustration with delays encountered when making appointments with CAPS counselors over the phone. CAPS advertises a 24/7 number that students can dial for urgent matters, though students said that they had mixed experiences […]

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The ASSU hosted a town hall Wednesday night for students to talk about their experiences with CAPS (VERONICA CRUZ/The Stanford Daily)
The ASSU hosted a town hall Wednesday night for students to talk about their experiences with CAPS. (VERONICA CRUZ/The Stanford Daily)

On Wednesday night, dozens of students participated in a town hall meeting with Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) director Ron Albucher.

Students expressed frustration with delays encountered when making appointments with CAPS counselors over the phone.

CAPS advertises a 24/7 number that students can dial for urgent matters, though students said that they had mixed experiences with the on-call service.

Multiple students took issue with the triage process: Prior to physically meeting counselors, students are scheduled for a brief phone consultation. The triage is designed to aid counselors in understanding the students’ concerns and conditions; however, some students found the questions impersonal and harrowing.

Some students did provide positive testimonials of their experiences with CAPS, including those who managed to navigate the triage successfully. One student thanked Albucher and CAPS personally, stating that CAPS “saved her.”

Others’ experiences were not as positive; multiple expressed frustrated with being passed between counselors, and with being assigned to counselors who were in training.

John-Lancaster Finley ‘16 recounted an experience he had with CAPS his freshman year. During a particularly difficult quarter in which Finley lost eight family members, his RF insisted that he visit CAPS. He went through the triage process but felt uncomfortable sharing the particulars of the depression he struggled with.

“I felt like they were trying to solicit some things from me that I didn’t necessarily want to share on the phone … So I just [said] … that I have ‘adjustment issues’, and that was the label they put on my file, ‘adjustment issues,’” Finley said. “When my counselor [was] finally available … We started talking about everything that was happening to me. I was entirely depressed … [but] it felt like the CAPS counselor didn’t understand [that].”

Albucher spent the majority of the discussion listening to student accounts. He did spend some time detailing the staffing structure of CAPS — during regular hours, three to four employees take calls, while two to three people take calls during after hours.

In an interview after the Town Hall, Albucher confirmed that CAPS is understaffed and underfunded and has requested a budget increase. CAPS is currently attempting to hire staff that increases the diversity of their counselors, and hopes to scale that hiring if the funding is approved.

“Hearing the individual stories that people bring, to me, is heartbreaking. People work up the courage to come and then they have a negative experience, and that’s just awful,” Albucher said.

Contact Akshay Agrawal at akshayka ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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Burglaries target Stanford Research Park, surrounding area https://stanforddaily.com/2015/02/05/burglaries-target-stanford-research-park-surrounding-area-2/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/02/05/burglaries-target-stanford-research-park-surrounding-area-2/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2015 07:26:14 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1095126 According to a press release from the City of Palo Alto, Palo Alto Police apprehended a man in the process of burglarizing a construction site in Stanford Research Park on Jan. 11. Eleven burglaries struck the site over the course of the past two months, incurring losses of at least $11,000 in stolen copper and […]

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According to a press release from the City of Palo Alto, Palo Alto Police apprehended a man in the process of burglarizing a construction site in Stanford Research Park on Jan. 11. Eleven burglaries struck the site over the course of the past two months, incurring losses of at least $11,000 in stolen copper and tools.

Palo Alto Online reports that the University plans to add surveillance equipment and an additional security guard to deter future robbers. None of the burglars were armed.

The construction site, on which the University is building 180 units of faculty housing, spans the 1400-1600 blocks of California Avenue. Though met with protests—local residents expressed concern about increased traffic and pedestrian hazards—the housing project was unanimously approved by the Palo Alto City Council in June 2014 and is slated for completion in 2018.

A mile away from the construction at Stanford Research Park, two robbers, at least one of them armed, stole three video game consoles from Fry’s Electronics on Jan. 28. One of the two suspects was arrested on Feb. 4. The other remains at large.

 

Contact Akshay Agrawal at akshayka ‘at’ stanford.edu.

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