Avni Prasad – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com Breaking news from the Farm since 1892 Wed, 23 Sep 2015 06:59:37 +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 Avni Prasad – The Stanford Daily https://stanforddaily.com 32 32 204779320 Residential Fellows talk life on campus https://stanforddaily.com/2015/09/22/residential-fellows-talk-life-on-campus/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/09/22/residential-fellows-talk-life-on-campus/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2015 06:59:37 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1103648 Residential fellows (RFs) often take on a larger, more unique responsibility than other faculty members. As they set aside their professor cap at their last lecture of the day, they can enjoy their 10-minute walk back home free from responsibility. However, once they enter their house, their RF hat is waiting for them.

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(AVNI PRASAD/The Stanford Daily)
Matthew Snipp, RF in Murray House, has grown accustomed to the Murray House RF Space. (AVNI PRASAD/The Stanford Daily)

Residential fellows (RFs) often take on a larger, more unique responsibility than other faculty members. As they set aside their professor cap at their last lecture of the day, they can enjoy their 10-minute walk back home free from responsibility. However, once they enter their house, their RF hat is waiting for them.

Matthew Snipp, Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Humanities and Sciences in the department of sociology and resident fellow of Murray House, has grown fond of his small apartment surrounded by around 60 students. Originally, the hallways seemed to carry a quietness, and according to Snipp, he liked it best that way.

In the summer of 2014, when a group of international students moved in, Murray House was exposed to something different – noise.

In the middle of one night last summer, Snipp was woken up by his nine-year-old daughter. She was concerned about the sounds coming from their backyard. Snipp staggered around, came out to his backyard and looked up to the sight of three international students lounging in his garden with beers in their hands.

Although Snipp admitted that these situations are not extremely common, dealing with these issues come along with the job of being an RF. While college dorms are a temporary living place for students, they are permanent homes for residential fellows for years at a time. Snipp himself recently finished his second year as an RF.

“I thought [living on campus] would be a good experience for my kids and allow them to be exposed to students and life on a college campus,” Snipp said.

Living on campus entails a different atmosphere, he explained. For Snipp, it comes with many perks: a 10-minute commute to work, a covered housing cost and a chance to get close to Stanford students.

“Murray’s house is a very low-key, chill house,” Snipp said. “Since it is very small, everybody kind of knows each other, and you get used to seeing the same faces every day.”

However, the jobs of RFs can also be challenging with after-hours meetings and additional time commitments.

Ari Kelman, Jim Joseph Chair in education and Jewish studies, and his wife, Eva Kelman, are RFs in Junipero. They chose to live in a “wilder” type of dorm – a freshman dorm.

“Unlike most other friends who don’t have [the responsibilities of an RF], I come back from work, and I may have meetings with staff and residents,” Kelman wrote in an email to The Daily.

Many professors are drawn towards the RF lifestyle by the opportunity to engage with Stanford students beyond the classroom.

“[Teaching solely upperclassmen] would have taken me out of the thing that defines campus life, which is undergraduate [freshmen] students,” Kelman said. “And so I thought a good way to stay involved was by being a residential fellow.”

Geoffrey Baker and his wife, Patti Honlon-Baker, are also residential fellows for a freshman dorm. They have lived in Larkin since 2007.

“Being an RF is never dull,” Baker wrote in an email to The Daily. “There are always interesting questions to consider and pose. There are always multiple ways of understanding and solving problems. There’s always more positive shared experiences to co-develop with student staff who take their responsibilities very much to heart.”

Dorms vary across campus, and so does the RF experience. In particular, the all-freshman dorms can be quite different from the upperclassman ones.

Baker called the life of an RF “beautifully complex” and explained that the all-freshman house presents the challenge and excitement of “start[ing] everything over, from scratch, each year.”

Stephen Stedman ’79, M.A. ’85, Ph.D. ’88 and his wife, Corinne Thomas, have shared two different RF experiences. While they are currently RFs for the upperclass Crothers Hall, they preceded the Baker family as the Larkin RFs from 1997-2003. Stedman and Thomas left the dorm life for six years before returning to Crothers.

Frankly, we missed all of the student connections that we had made in Larkin,” Stedman told The Daily in an email.

In Larkin, Stedman and Thomas would get a roster of all the freshmen who were staying in that house each summer. They were expected to know each student’s name before they even arrived. But as Stedman and Thomas graduated to an upperclassman house with 380 students, the emphasis on the RF-to-student relationship decreased.

“In an upperclassman house, your residents are more independent,” Stedman said. “Fewer seek you out. It’s harder to know your residents. The trade-off, though, is that students have a more refined sense of where they are going or what they are seeking intellectually.

“The frosh RF experience is terrific, but if you do it right, it’s also much more all-encompassing,” he added. “If you love students, then it is incredibly rewarding, but also a real commitment.”

For Stedman, becoming an RF was an easy decision. When he attended Stanford, the RAs in his freshman dorm were very influential in his undergraduate experience, he explained. Stedman believed that being an RF would be be a good way of “paying back a debt to Residential Education.”

“As soon as I had accepted Stanford’s job offer in 1997, I called the Office of Residential Education and asked whether they still had RFs in the dorms,” Stedman said. “They said yes, and then I asked whether you can have dogs if you are an RF, and they said yes. Then I had to convince my wife that we should live with 100 18-year-olds.”

The sense of reward is shared among many RFs. Although the extra time commitment can be tiring, they have the opportunity to work with student residents and staff who, according to Baker, “become part of our family and long-term friends.”

 

Contact Avni Prasad at avniprasad ‘at’ gmail.com.

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Stanford professor creates largest database of autism bioinformatics https://stanforddaily.com/2015/09/21/stanford-professor-creates-largest-database-of-autism-bioinformatics/ https://stanforddaily.com/2015/09/21/stanford-professor-creates-largest-database-of-autism-bioinformatics/#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2015 06:52:35 +0000 https://stanforddaily.com/?p=1103558 Dennis Wall, associate professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is leading the “largest-ever collaborative, open-access repository of bioinformatic data on autism.” According to Wall, his goal is to figure out what causes autism and find ways to develop therapy techniques for the condition.

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Dennis Wall, associate professor of pediatrics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is leading the “largest-ever collaborative, open-access repository of bioinformatic data on autism.” According to Wall, his goal is to figure out what causes autism and to find ways to develop therapy techniques for the condition.

The project is funded by a $9 million grant from the Hartwell Foundation. The goal of the database is to tackle the genetic component of autism. The online database will include visible observations of autism like social behavior and language as development as well as non-visible aspects such as data on genomes and genes.

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that today one out of 68 people are born autistic in the United States – 30 percent higher than previous estimations in 2012. In addition, this increasingly prevalent condition still holds a high level of perplexity.

Wall explained that autism is multigenic, or controlled by multiple genes; however, genetics is not the only factor that leads to autism. In fact, researchers have estimated that only about 50 percent of autism behaviors are controlled by genes. Wall’s work focuses on studying the 50 percent of autism cases that people cannot yet explain.

“A large foundation of what is at the root of autism is likely to lie in the genomes,” Wall said. “Once we figure that out, we can parse out more complex aspects of autism that include environment.”

Michael Snyder, Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine, is also collaborating with Wall on the database. According to Snyder, uncovering the complexities of autism is “going to take a lot more than [looking at] genetics.”

Wall believes a significant variable in the unknown 50 percent that causes autism is related to environment. Environmental factors include elements such as exposure to pesticides, the age of an individual’s parents and the flora in the area where a person is living. Since these factors are harder to observe and connect with autism, most autism research studies genomes, Wall said. However, with over three million DNA base pairs in a whole genome sequence, the search for biomarkers indicating autism is not an easy task.

“We have had a difficult time discovering biomarkers, therapeutic intervention, over the last decades,” Wall said. “One of the reasons for this is the lack of numbers of data on a large number of individuals.”

Wall’s project has already shown success in detecting autism from young ages. Currently, the clinical intake process can only be marked by professionals. However, the amount of kids at risk of autism far exceeds the number of professionals who can diagnose autism.

“What you wind up with, just as a blatant math, is long, long waiting rooms,” Wall said. “Kids are waiting to get an assessment for a diagnosis.”

Currently, the average age for getting a diagnosis is four and a half, but by that time children have lost opportunities for therapeutic interventions that are more effective at a younger age. Wall and his team, however, have created a quicker and more effective way of detecting autism.

“Using machine learning and artificial development, we discovered an algorithm that can detect the presence and risk of autism in minutes using a mobile device and a short home video recorded by the parents of the child,” Wall said.

Through the home video, they look for play behaviors, eye contact, level vocabulary development and interactions with toys. From these observations, they are able to instantaneously detect autism – in under five minutes. Wall hopes to reduce the current standard of diagnosis from four and a half to two years old. The earlier autism is caught, the easier it is to treat, he explained.

Snyder acknowledged that addressing a complex issue like autism requires a level of creativity, an ability to observe autism in a unique way. He was impressed with the originality of Wall’s home videos.

“Autism is a complex disorder,” Snyder said. “No [single] person is going to solve it. We are coming at this problem from a different angle. Ultimately, we are trying to make sense of all the data, trying to turn the data into knowledge.”

Wall admits that it is unlikely to develop diagnosis markers and have clear targets for therapeutic interventions in the next three years. However, he is hopeful that this database can translate into learning of not only autism, but also other diseases.

“This database can be leveraged to understand the causes of other diseases,” Wall said. “Because human diseases are highly innervated, we can leverage the commonality in autism with a number of overlapping diseases.”

 

Contact Avni Prasad at avniprasad ‘at’ gmail.com.

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