Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, pre-health individuals around the world encountered a range of challenges. Research and internship opportunities were cancelled, clinical experience was unreachable, and prerequisites became more demanding in a remote setting. I myself was working in a research lab in Switzerland when the pandemic was declared, resulting in my career-altering internship to be cut short six months. My life-long friend, Alejandra, had the same experience and reached out to me with an extraordinary idea to unite and empower pre-health individuals on a national level. With my skills in event planning combined with her vision, we built the National Pre-Health Conference (NPHC): a 3-day virtual event for pre-health individuals to explore medical careers and learn how to pursue their professional goals, particularly during these uncertain times. We held our inaugural conference with the theme A Future in Medicine in 2020 with over 1000 attendees from around the country. In 2021, we held our second-annual conference with the theme Unity in Healthcare with over 1000 attendees as well. In addition to planning the second-annual NPHC, I employed pre-event and post-event surveys to assess the confidence level of attendees before and after the conference in healthcare experience, research experience, standardized testing, community service, academics, essay writing, and completing graduate/professionals school applications. We found that NPHC improved the confidence level of attendees in all categories. Overall, understanding how NPHC benefits pre-health students will help our team improve for future conferences.

For most women, pregnancy is the period in which they will have more interaction with the healthcare field than any other period in their lives. The quality and accessibility of obstetric care varies greatly throughout the United States, and health disparities in this field have the largest impact on African American women. Black mothers in the U.S. are three to four times more likely than white mothers to die as a result of pregnancy related complications. The increased risk of maternal morbidity and mortality seen in the African American population is largely due to preventable causes. This thesis project includes three case studies which analyze the most prevalent and preventable sources of health disparity affecting Black mothers: preeclampsia, hemorrhage, and cesarean section. Possible solutions to each of these disparities are explored on an individual, institutional, and societal scale.

The United States and China have entered a geopolitical competition for power and influence unseen since the Cold War. By examining the nature of this contest through the lens of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and Graham Allison's Thucydides' Trap theory, it is possible to analyze the nature of this relationship, and make predictions as to where it may lead.

People have known about mass biodiversity loss and the human actions that drive it for decades now, and yet we have largely failed levels to change our behavior to protect the environment. What’s failing to motivate people to change? Some conservation psychologists have partially blamed the negative way we communicate about environmental issues for paralyzing audiences into doing nothing because they feel helpless to change such a big problem. Instead, many psychologists have called for using positive emotions in communication to motivate an audience, but there’s still little research showing whether that’s a more effective approach or not. To study whether positive or negative emotions are really more motivational for inspiring change, I looked at how different emotions were used in the discourse about an emerging conservation technology called de-extinction as a case study. De-extinction claims to be both a tool for fighting biodiversity loss and for inspiring more positive and inspiring narratives in conservation. In this thesis, I examine those claims by exploring five emotions that the discourse around de-extinction elicits: fear, guilt, grief, awe and hope. I examined the motivating power of those emotions and what kind of actions de-extinction discourse motivates or fails to motivate through the way it uses those emotions. I found that de-extinction discourse erases negative emotions and boosts positive ones as many conservation psychologists recommend. However, de-extinction discourse accomplishes this in misleading ways: it minimizes the sense of importance of ongoing extinctions by framing extinction as a reversible phenomenon, and it overstates the ability of technology alone to combat the extinction crisis without requiring societal change. As a result, de-extinction discourse could risk making the public less motivated to take personal action to forward conservation goals. I conclude that positivity or negativity should not be the central concerns for motivating action, but rather efficacy and honesty.

There is a higher incidence of asthma, worse outcomes, and a higher burden of disease in Black Americans compared to white Americans. This thesis aims to understand asthma disparities in the Black population by analyzing a variety of social determinants of health and genetic factors that may contribute to these racial health disparities. Based on the evidence collected, a variety of interventions are discussed that explore potential solutions to address the critical issue.

This thesis project consists of 2 key components, a marketing brand book for the ASU Division I ice hockey team and an in-depth narrative of both the team’s history and why each decision was made for the brand book itself. The brand book consists of four main sections: team history, visual guidelines, social media, and public relations. The team history tells the story of how the program formed and grew into the NCAA Division I team they are today. The history then goes into detail discussing the coach, Greg Powers, and his ASU hockey journey as well as how he developed the club program and has coached/recruited the team to success. This section also highlights ASU’s first national breakout player, Joey Daccord, who became the first player from ASU to play a game in the NHL. Other than the team history, each section contains multiple goals for the marketing team to achieve as well as rules and guidelines to assist them with achieving these goals. All of ASU’s current brand rules and guidelines are included within the visual guidelines section of the brand book, allowing for all Sun Devil hockey marketing efforts to properly resemble and embody Arizona State University as a whole. The Public Relations section covers how to positively get the team in the news through service and community events and embody ASU’s commitment to service. The Public Relations section also covers how ASU hockey is to respond in a PR crisis and the importance of gathering all the information and then publicly addressing the situation. The social media section of the brand book lists all goals, target audience, and methods of achieving the goals for each current platform ASU hockey has (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram) and the frequency of posting required.