Surviving as an underrepresented minority scientist in a majority environment.

I believe the evidence will show that the science we conduct and discoveries we make are influenced by our cultural experience, whether they be positive, negative, or neutral. I grew up as a person of color in the United States of America, faced with challenges that many had as members of an underrepresented minority group. I write here about some of the lessons I have learned that have allowed me to survive as an underrepresented minority -scientist in a majority environment.

Inventing "French Feminism:" A Critical History

French Feminism has little to do with feminism in France. While in the U.S. this now canonical body of work designates almost exclusively the work of three theorists—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—in France, these same thinkers are actually associated with the rejection of feminism. If some scholars have on this basis passionately denounced French Feminism as an American invention, there exists to date no comprehensive analysis of that invention or of its effects. Why did theorists who were at best marginal to feminist thought and political practice in France galvanize feminist scholars working in the United States? Why does French Feminism provoke such an intense affective response in France to this date? Drawing on the fields of feminist and queer studies, literary studies, and history, “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” offers a transnational account of the emergence and impact of one of U.S. academic feminism’s most influential bodies of work. The first half of the dissertation argues that, although French Feminism has now been dismissed for being biologically essentialist and falsely universal, feminists working in the U.S. academy of the 1980s, particularly feminist literary critics and postcolonial feminist critics, deployed the work of Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva to displace what they perceived as U.S. feminist literary criticism’s essentialist reliance on the biological sex of the author and to challenge U.S. academic feminism’s inattention to racial differences between women. French Feminism thus found traction among feminist scholars to the extent that it was perceived as addressing some of U.S. feminism’s most pressing political issues. The second half of the dissertation traces French feminist scholars’ vehement rejection of French Feminism to an affectively charged split in the French women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and shows that this split has resulted in an entrenched opposition between sexual difference and materialist feminism, an opposition that continues to structure French feminist debates to this day. “Inventing ‘French Feminism:’ A Critical History” ends by arguing that in so far as the U.S. invention of French Feminism has contributed to the emergence of U.S. queer theory, it has also impeded its uptake in France. Taken as a whole, this dissertation thus implicitly argues that the transnational circulation of ideas is simultaneously generative and disabling.

HIV/AIDS-related institutional mistrust among multiethnic men who have sex with men: effects on HIV testing and risk behaviors.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate relationships between institutional mistrust (systematic discrimination, organizational suspicion, and conspiracy beliefs), HIV risk behaviors, and HIV testing in a multiethnic sample of men who have sex with men (MSM), and to test whether perceived susceptibility to HIV mediates these relationships for White and ethnic minority MSM. METHOD: Participants were 394 MSM residing in Central Arizona (M age = 37 years). Three dimensions of mistrust were examined, including organizational suspicion, conspiracy beliefs, and systematic discrimination. Assessments of sexual risk behavior, HIV testing, and perceived susceptibility to HIV were made at study entry (T1) and again 6 months later (T2). RESULTS: There were no main effects of institutional mistrust dimensions or ethnic minority status on T2 risk behavior, but the interaction of systematic discrimination and conspiracy beliefs with minority status was significant such that higher levels of systematic discrimination and more conspiracy beliefs were associated with increased risk only among ethnic minority MSM. Higher levels of systematic discrimination were significantly related to lower likelihood for HIV testing, and the interaction of organizational suspicion with minority status was significant such that greater levels of organizational suspicion were related to less likelihood of having been tested for HIV among ethnic minority MSM. Perceived susceptibility did not mediate these relationships. CONCLUSION: Findings suggest that it is important to look further into the differential effects of institutional mistrust across marginalized groups, including sexual and ethnic minorities. Aspects of mistrust should be addressed in HIV prevention and counseling efforts.

Facilitators and barriers to hypertension self-management in urban African Americans: perspectives of patients and family members.

INTRODUCTION: We aimed to inform the design of behavioral interventions by identifying patients' and their family members' perceived facilitators and barriers to hypertension self-management. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted focus groups of African American patients with hypertension and their family members to elicit their views about factors influencing patients' hypertension self-management. We recruited African American patients with hypertension (n = 18) and their family members (n = 12) from an urban, community-based clinical practice in Baltimore, Maryland. We conducted four separate 90-minute focus groups among patients with controlled (one group) and uncontrolled (one group) hypertension, as well as their family members (two groups). Trained moderators used open-ended questions to assess participants' perceptions regarding patient, family, clinic, and community-level factors influencing patients' effective hypertension self-management. RESULTS: Patient participants identified several facilitators (including family members' support and positive relationships with doctors) and barriers (including competing health priorities, lack of knowledge about hypertension, and poor access to community resources) that influence their hypertension self-management. Family members also identified several facilitators (including their participation in patients' doctor's visits and discussions with patients' doctors outside of visits) and barriers (including their own limited health knowledge and patients' lack of motivation to sustain hypertension self-management behaviors) that affect their efforts to support patients' hypertension self-management. CONCLUSION: African American patients with hypertension and their family members reported numerous patient, family, clinic, and community-level facilitators and barriers to patients' hypertension self-management. Patients' and their family members' views may help guide efforts to tailor behavioral interventions designed to improve hypertension self-management behaviors and hypertension control in minority populations.

Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012

"Facts and Fictions: Feminist Literary Criticism and Cultural Critique, 1968-2012" is a critical history of the unfolding of feminist literary study in the US academy. It contributes to current scholarly efforts to revisit the 1970s by reconsidering often-repeated narratives about the critical naivety of feminist literary criticism in its initial articulation. As the story now goes, many of the most prominent feminist thinkers of the period engaged in unsophisticated literary analysis by conflating lived social reality with textual representation when they read works of literature as documentary evidence of real life. As a result, the work of these "bad critics," particularly Kate Millett and Andrea Dworkin, has not been fully accounted for in literary critical terms.

This dissertation returns to Dworkin and Millett's work to argue for a different history of feminist literary criticism. Rather than dismiss their work for its conflation of fact and fiction, I pay attention to the complexity at the heart of it, yielding a new perspective on the history and persistence of the struggle to use literary texts for feminist political ends. Dworkin and Millett established the centrality of reality and representation to the feminist canon debates of "the long 1970s," the sex wars of the 1980s, and the more recent feminist turn to memoir. I read these productive periods in feminist literary criticism from 1968 to 2012 through their varied commitment to literary works.

Chapter One begins with Millett, who de-aestheticized male-authored texts to treat patriarchal literature in relation to culture and ideology. Her mode of literary interpretation was so far afield from the established methods of New Criticism that she was not understood as a literary critic. She was repudiated in the feminist literary criticism that followed her and sought sympathetic methods for reading women's writing. In that decade, the subject of Chapter Two, feminist literary critics began to judge texts on the basis of their ability to accurately depict the reality of women's experiences.

Their vision of the relationship between life and fiction shaped arguments about pornography during the sex wars of the 1980s, the subject of Chapter Three. In this context, Dworkin was feminism's "bad critic." I focus on the literary critical elements of Dworkin's theories of pornographic representation and align her with Millett as a miscategorized literary critic. In the decades following the sex wars, many of the key feminist literary critics of the founding generation (including Dworkin, Jane Gallop, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Millett) wrote memoirs that recounted, largely in experiential terms, the history this dissertation examines. Chapter Four considers the story these memoirists told about the rise and fall of feminist literary criticism. I close with an epilogue on the place of literature in a feminist critical enterprise that has shifted toward privileging theory.

Sociocultural and socioeconomic influences on type 2 diabetes risk in overweight/obese African-American and Latino-American children and adolescents.

PURPOSE: It is unclear whether sociocultural and socioeconomic factors are directly linked to type 2 diabetes risk in overweight/obese ethnic minority children and adolescents. This study examines the relationships between sociocultural orientation, household social position, and type 2 diabetes risk in overweight/obese African-American (n = 43) and Latino-American (n = 113) children and adolescents. METHODS: Sociocultural orientation was assessed using the Acculturation, Habits, and Interests Multicultural Scale for Adolescents (AHIMSA) questionnaire. Household social position was calculated using the Hollingshead Two-Factor Index of Social Position. Insulin sensitivity (SI), acute insulin response (AIRG) and disposition index (DI) were derived from a frequently sampled intravenous glucose tolerance test (FSIGT). The relationships between AHIMSA subscales (i.e., integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization), household social position and FSIGT parameters were assessed using multiple linear regression. RESULTS: For African-Americans, integration (integrating their family's culture with those of mainstream white-American culture) was positively associated with AIRG (β = 0.27 ± 0.09, r = 0.48, P < 0.01) and DI (β = 0.28 ± 0.09, r = 0.55, P < 0.01). For Latino-Americans, household social position was inversely associated with AIRG (β = -0.010 ± 0.004, r = -0.19, P = 0.02) and DI (β = -20.44 ± 7.50, r = -0.27, P < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: Sociocultural orientation and household social position play distinct and opposing roles in shaping type 2 diabetes risk in African-American and Latino-American children and adolescents.

Delay activity of saccade-related neurons in the caudal dentate nucleus of the macaque cerebellum.

The caudal dentate nucleus (DN) in lateral cerebellum is connected with two visual/oculomotor areas of the cerebrum: the frontal eye field and lateral intraparietal cortex. Many neurons in frontal eye field and lateral intraparietal cortex produce "delay activity" between stimulus and response that correlates with processes such as motor planning. Our hypothesis was that caudal DN neurons would have prominent delay activity as well. From lesion studies, we predicted that this activity would be related to self-timing, i.e., the triggering of saccades based on the internal monitoring of time. We recorded from neurons in the caudal DN of monkeys (Macaca mulatta) that made delayed saccades with or without a self-timing requirement. Most (84%) of the caudal DN neurons had delay activity. These neurons conveyed at least three types of information. First, their activity was often correlated, trial by trial, with saccade initiation. Correlations were found more frequently in a task that required self-timing of saccades (53% of neurons) than in a task that did not (27% of neurons). Second, the delay activity was often tuned for saccade direction (in 65% of neurons). This tuning emerged continuously during a trial. Third, the time course of delay activity associated with self-timed saccades differed significantly from that associated with visually guided saccades (in 71% of neurons). A minority of neurons had sensory-related activity. None had presaccadic bursts, in contrast to DN neurons recorded more rostrally. We conclude that caudal DN neurons convey saccade-related delay activity that may contribute to the motor preparation of when and where to move.

Biogeographic analysis of the woody plants of the Southern Appalachians: Implications for the origins of a regional flora.

PREMISE OF THE STUDY: We investigated the origins of 252 Southern Appalachian woody species representing 158 clades to analyze larger patterns of biogeographic connectivity around the northern hemisphere. We tested biogeographic hypotheses regarding the timing of species disjunctions to eastern Asia and among areas of North America. METHODS: We delimited species into biogeographically informative clades, compiled sister-area data, and generated graphic representations of area connections across clades. We calculated taxon diversity within clades and plotted divergence times. KEY RESULTS: Of the total taxon diversity, 45% were distributed among 25 North American endemic clades. Sister taxa within eastern North America and eastern Asia were proportionally equal in frequency, accounting for over 50% of the sister-area connections. At increasing phylogenetic depth, connections to the Old World dominated. Divergence times for 65 clades with intercontinental disjunctions were continuous, whereas 11 intracontinental disjunctions to western North America and nine to eastern Mexico were temporally congruent. CONCLUSIONS: Over one third of the clades have likely undergone speciation within the region of eastern North America. The biogeographic pattern for the region is asymmetric, consisting of mostly mixed-aged, low-diversity clades connecting to the Old World, and a minority of New World clades. Divergence time data suggest that climate change in the Late Miocene to Early Pliocene generated disjunct patterns within North America. Continuous splitting times during the last 45 million years support the hypothesis that widespread distributions formed repeatedly during favorable periods, with serial cooling trends producing pseudocongruent area disjunctions between eastern North America and eastern Asia.

Patient-provider communication, self-reported medication adherence, and race in a postmyocardial infarction population.

OBJECTIVES: Our objectives were to: 1) describe patient-reported communication with their provider and explore differences in perceptions of racially diverse adherent versus nonadherent patients; and 2) examine whether the association between unanswered questions and patient-reported medication nonadherence varied as a function of patients' race. METHODS: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of baseline in-person survey data from a trial designed to improve postmyocardial infarction management of cardiovascular disease risk factors. RESULTS: Overall, 298 patients (74%) reported never leaving their doctor's office with unanswered questions. Among those who were adherent and nonadherent with their medications, 183 (79%) and 115 (67%) patients, respectively, never left their doctor's office with unanswered questions. In multivariable logistic regression, although the simple effects of the interaction term were different for patients of nonminority race (odds ratio [OR]: 2.16; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.19-3.92) and those of minority race (OR: 1.19; 95% CI: 0.54-2.66), the overall interaction effect was not statistically significant (P=0.24). CONCLUSION: The quality of patient-provider communication is critical for cardiovascular disease medication adherence. In this study, however, having unanswered questions did not impact medication adherence differently as a function of patients' race. Nevertheless, there were racial differences in medication adherence that may need to be addressed to ensure optimal adherence and health outcomes. Effort should be made to provide training opportunities for both patients and their providers to ensure strong communication skills and to address potential differences in medication adherence in patients of diverse backgrounds.

Postnatally-transmitted HIV-1 Envelope variants have similar neutralization-sensitivity and function to that of nontransmitted breast milk variants.

BACKGROUND: Breastfeeding is a leading cause of infant HIV-1 infection in the developing world, yet only a minority of infants exposed to HIV-1 via breastfeeding become infected. As a genetic bottleneck severely restricts the number of postnatally-transmitted variants, genetic or phenotypic properties of the virus Envelope (Env) could be important for the establishment of infant infection. We examined the efficiency of virologic functions required for initiation of infection in the gastrointestinal tract and the neutralization sensitivity of HIV-1 Env variants isolated from milk of three postnatally-transmitting mothers (n = 13 viruses), five clinically-matched nontransmitting mothers (n = 16 viruses), and seven postnatally-infected infants (n = 7 postnatally-transmitted/founder (T/F) viruses). RESULTS: There was no difference in the efficiency of epithelial cell interactions between Env virus variants from the breast milk of transmitting and nontransmitting mothers. Moreover, there was similar efficiency of DC-mediated trans-infection, CCR5-usage, target cell fusion, and infectivity between HIV-1 Env-pseudoviruses from nontransmitting mothers and postnatal T/F viruses. Milk Env-pseudoviruses were generally sensitive to neutralization by autologous maternal plasma and resistant to breast milk neutralization. Infant T/F Env-pseudoviruses were equally sensitive to neutralization by broadly-neutralizing monoclonal and polyclonal antibodies as compared to nontransmitted breast milk Env variants. CONCLUSION: Postnatally-T/F Env variants do not appear to possess a superior ability to interact with and cross a mucosal barrier or an exceptional resistance to neutralization that define their capability to initiate infection across the infant gastrointestinal tract in the setting of preexisting maternal antibodies.

Quantitative genetics of CTCF binding reveal local sequence effects and different modes of X-chromosome association.

Associating genetic variation with quantitative measures of gene regulation offers a way to bridge the gap between genotype and complex phenotypes. In order to identify quantitative trait loci (QTLs) that influence the binding of a transcription factor in humans, we measured binding of the multifunctional transcription and chromatin factor CTCF in 51 HapMap cell lines. We identified thousands of QTLs in which genotype differences were associated with differences in CTCF binding strength, hundreds of them confirmed by directly observable allele-specific binding bias. The majority of QTLs were either within 1 kb of the CTCF binding motif, or in linkage disequilibrium with a variant within 1 kb of the motif. On the X chromosome we observed three classes of binding sites: a minority class bound only to the active copy of the X chromosome, the majority class bound to both the active and inactive X, and a small set of female-specific CTCF sites associated with two non-coding RNA genes. In sum, our data reveal extensive genetic effects on CTCF binding, both direct and indirect, and identify a diversity of patterns of CTCF binding on the X chromosome.