University of Maryland, College Park

“My heart is at peace because I know that I am protected:” understanding the factors that facilitate adolescent girls and young women’s uptake of long-acting injectable PrEP in Zambia

Adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) in EASTERN AND SOUTHERN Africa face a disproportionate risk of HIV acquisition. While effective, uptake of daily oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV prevention among this population has remained inadequate. Hypothetical preference...

Excess glutamine rewires endothelial cell metabolism

Abstract Introduction Glutamine, the most abundant amino acid in the body, is a key metabolic substrate for endothelial cells. Glutamine supplementation protects against cardiovascular disease in animal models and in humans; however, glutamine in vitro has inconsistent effects on...

Leveraging the private sector for health system development in sub-Saharan Africa

Development assistance has historically supported major gains in health and health-system development in sub-Saharan Africa, but recent reductions in development assistance have intensified financing and service-delivery pressures across the region. As governments seek more durab...

AutoEDA: Enabling EDA Flow Automation through Microservice-Based LLM Agents

Electronic Design Automation (EDA) remains heavily reliant on tool command language (Tcl) scripting to drive complex RTL-to-GDSII flows. This scripting-based paradigm is labor-intensive, error-prone, and difficult to scale across large design projects. Recent advances in large la...

Resolving circumarctic zero-curtain phenomena with AI-integrated earth observations

<title>Abstract</title> Across the circumarctic, permafrost landscapes store approximately 1700 billion metric tons of organic carbon - nearly twice atmospheric levels - yet reservoir stability depends on the zero-curtain, a subsurface thermal plateau that emerges when latent hea...

Airborne eddy covariance measurements of ocean-air VOC fluxes: Distinguishing signal from noise

Abstract. Ocean-atmosphere exchange plays an important but uncertain role for many volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Airborne eddy covariance (EC) enables direct flux quantification over large areas, but VOC applications have largely been performed over land. Here we combine the...

Mechanical and durability properties of concrete mixed and cured in hypersaline water

Abstract This study investigates the influence of hypersaline water on the compressive strength, bleeding, and water absorption of concrete, comparing freshwater and saltwater curing environments. Mixes were prepared using 0%, 10%, 15%, 20%, and 30% saltwater by weight of mixing...

Investigación etnográfica de los espacios globales: Interrogantes metodológicos Para el estudio de poblaciones virtuales

Al igual que otros Estados-nación, la población de los Estados Unidos está compuesta por personas que viven tanto dentro como fuera de sus fronteras geográficas. El estudio de ciudadanos estadounidenses residentes en el extranjero presenta interesantes desafíos metodológicos: por...

Efficient quantum implementation of dynamical mean field theory for correlated materials

The accurate theoretical description of materials with strongly correlated electrons is a formidable challenge in condensed matter physics and computational chemistry. Dynamical Mean Field Theory (DMFT) is a successful approach that predicts behaviors of such systems by incorpora...

Programmable Property-Based Testing

Property-based testing (PBT) is a popular technique for establishing confidence in software, where users write properties---i.e. executable specifications--that can be checked many times in a loop by a testing framework. In modern PBT frameworks, properties are usually written in...

Testing electron–photon exchange–correlation functional performance for many-electron systems under weak and strong light–matter coupling

We present results for a photon-free exchange–correlation functional within the local density approximation (pxcLDA) for quantum electrodynamics density functional theory (QEDFT), which efficiently describes the electron density of many-electron systems across weak to strong ligh...

Fathers, Mothers, Sons, and Daughters: Parent–Child Relationships and the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce

ABSTRACT Objective This study examines whether and how post‐divorce mother–son, mother–daughter, father–son, and father–daughter relationships buffer or amplify the intergenerational transmission of divorce (ITD). Background Children who experience parental divorce are more likel...

Association Between Changes in Perceived Neighborhood and Cognitive Performance Within Healthy Aging in Neighborhoods of Diversity Across the Life Span (HANDLS) Black Adults

Perceived neighborhood characteristics are related to cognitive performance. However, limited studies have examined how changes in neighborhood characteristics relate to cognitive performance, particularly among Black adults who are likely to experience changes in their residenti...

Direct avirulence effector-receptor interaction confers wheat immunity against insects

Wheat immunity against the global pest Hessian fly operates on a gene-for-gene basis, yet molecular mechanisms underlying resistance-avirulence interactions have remained elusive for over five decades due to the absence of any cloned insect-resistance gene. Here, we cloned the H1...

Failures to maintain CpG-methylation of CoRSIVs in bovine sperm are associated with low sire conception

CoRSIVs are genomic regions with CpG-methylation patterns that differ between individuals, yet are consistent between tissues, within the same individual; therefore, their methylation can be profiled in bodily fluids that are easily obtained, like blood and semen. Bearing in mind...

Short Report: Divergent Sleep–Wake Regularity in U.S. Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Bedtime vs Wake-up Regularity

Sleep–wake regularity is an emerging dimension of sleep health, yet its association with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remains understudied in nationally representative samples, particularly across distinct components of sleep timing. Using parent-reported data from 11,462 U.S....

Room-temperature multiferroicity in all–van der Waals heterostructures

Multiferroics host simultaneous and coupled ferroic orders, allowing disparate external stimuli to induce abrupt transformations in their structures and properties. Creating multiferroicity in two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) platforms would add the elements of strong qua...

Community-Led Operationalization of a Champion Implementation Strategy for Anal Cancer Prevention in Nigeria

Abstract Context-specific adaptation of implementation strategies is an important component of promoting evidence-based intervention use. But guidance on systematic approaches is limited. Here we described our mixed method approach to adapting (Study 1) and monitoring (Study 2) a...

Significance of Size‐Dependent Hygroscopicity Parameterization for Aerosol‐Cloud Interactions

Abstract Aerosol‐cloud interactions (aerosol indirect effects) are the most significant source of uncertainties in the effective radiative forcing (ERF) due to aerosols which can act as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). Uncertainties in the indirect effect can result from systemat...

How illegal wildlife trade adheres to and defies conventional market behavior

Illegal wildlife markets comprise a complex global economy generating criminal profits while harming biodiversity and livelihoods. The negative externalities from biodiversity loss, ecosystem destabilization, and zoonotic disease risk may be orders of magnitude larger than the mu...