COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 3 chromosomes. If the DNA damage gets repaired, the cell will emit fluorescence or luminescence, providing a readout of how efficiently the cells repaired the DNA damage. Laverty’s research program has two complementary goals. First, his team investigates the fundamental molecular mechanisms of DNA repair, particularly focusing on how cells handle doublestrand breaks, the most dangerous type of DNA damage, and a process called translesion synthesis, which allows cells to tolerate unrepaired damage and restart DNA replication. The second thrust has direct clinical implications, understanding how cancer cells develop resistance to treatment. Many cancers initially respond to chemotherapy or radiation but eventually become resistant. Laverty suspects that cancer cells activate error-prone repair pathways that generate mutations, essentially accelerating their own evolution to develop drug resistance. By understanding exactly how cancer cells resist treatment and designing functional assays that can detect this resistance in real time, his work could help move cancer therapy from a blunt instrument to a precision tool. SOCIOLOGY MINING DIGITAL DISCOURSE As mental health awareness reaches unprecedented levels, sociologist Amy Johnson is using computational methods to examine how Americans conceptualize psychological well-being. Her forthcoming book analyzes four decades of mental health conversation and challenges a fundamental assumption that increased dialogue reduces stigma. Working at the intersection of cultural sociology and data science, Johnson has analyzed millions of texts, from newspaper archives spanning 1980-2020 to five years of daily posts from Reddit’s r/mentalhealth forum. “Language is our window into culture, especially language that’s preserved historically,” says Johnson, assistant professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. “Reading it, looking at it, analyzing it tells us how culture and cultural ideas change.” Johnson began with a straightforward question: What do ordinary people, not mental health professionals, think about mental health? While surveys exist, Johnson sought something deeper. “To really get at culture, I had to go to text data,” she says She started with news media, pulling articles from six major publications through the publications database ProQuest. Her search parameters were deliberately broad, capturing articles mentioning mental health and illness or tagged as related. The dataset provided insight into dominant cultural narratives. But newspaper coverage left a critical question unanswered: How do individuals apply these macro-level concepts to their own experiences? This question led Johnson to Reddit, which offered authentic discussions of personal mental health experiences. “Reddit has a wealth of forums or subreddits about mental health,” Johnson says. “People go online and describe their emotions, their past treatment, stating how they feel and how they’re making sense of it.” The platform’s anonymity proves crucial. Users discuss stigmatizing experiences without worrying about “saving face or preserving their reputation,” Johnson says For her newspaper analysis, Johnson employed topic modeling, a computational method that identifies themes within large text datasets. She also used word embeddings, a technique capturing connotations and semantic relationships. Johnson’s central finding challenges conventional wisdom about destigmatization. “Just because we’re talking about mental health so much more now does not mean that we have destigmatized it. We’re not in any sort of moment of acceptance of mental health and illness,” she says. Instead, increased mental health literacy may provide more sophisticated language for creating social divisions. “The fact that we talk more about mental health has equipped more people to also use the language of mental illness to create divisions. To say, well, this person is different. This person is not like me. This person should be kept away from me, or they’re dangerous,” Johnson adds. PAMELA MCTURK / SCIENCE SOURCE, MARIA GONCALVES / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO A circular loop, or plasmid, of DNA molecules in which an individual gene has been modified.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==