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With higher and faster growing wages [1], STEM-related employment has been key to building thriving communities. In the deindustrialized Midwest, however, cities often have poverty rates double the national average, lower educational attainment, and the ‘brain drain’ problem [2]. These issues create barriers to developing and retaining a regional STEM workforce and competing in the knowledge economy. Thus, STEM engagement is not just a national imperative, but critical to revitalizing these Midwestern cities. The University of Notre Dame developed and piloted a program to address the challenges of STEM engagement/retention in the disciplines and place retention. The program leveraged high impact practices such as immersive place-based education (internships), academic community engagement, and STEM-based experiential problem-based learning, while interns engaged in asset-based community development in the South Bend-Elkhart, Indiana region [3-14]. The pilot program was distilled into a model through evidence-based refinement – the Community- Engaged Educational Ecosystem Model (C-EEEM, pronounced ‘seam’), and contributes to our understanding of building learning environments that meet those challenges [4-6, 15-18]. 

This study investigates the relationship between urban walkability and human stress across three distinct sites, utilizing data collected from wearable sensors. The objective is to assess how urban design and environmental factors influence human stress while walking. Participants were equipped with wearable sensors to monitor physiological indicators of stress (e.g., heart rate variability, etc.) as they walked through different urban environments. Data was collected in realtime to capture fluctuations in stress levels and provide insights into how specific urban design features impact pedestrian well-being. To facilitate data collection and analysis, walking areas were divided into blocks, and urban design features were grouped into six categories such as imageability, enclosure, human scale, transparency, complexity, and safety. Each city has different features, depending on the issues that were considered most pressing for that city. To supplement sensor stress data, the study also utilized surveys to gather participants’ perceptions of safety, comfort, and environmental quality. Using regression analysis, researchers identified the urban design categories that have a significant impact on stress scores and their frequency. Machine learning models were built to predict stress scores based on the urban design aspects and air quality data as input features. Results showed that increased stress is correlated with poorly designed walkways, while lower stress was linked to well-maintained paths and green spaces. Transparency and enclosure were identified as significant contributors to pedestrian stress. The findings from one of the three cities add another dimension to the understanding of walkability and stress, highlighting that there are factors beyond basic infrastructure, such as noise levels and tree canopy can play a significant role in influencing pedestrian well-being. Findings from this research can facilitate targeted infrastructure planning and investment, better mobility, and ultimately improve the quality of life in urban areas. Future research should consider a wider range of environmental and social factors and how different factors interact over time to influence stress levels. 

Abstract Social transmission of fear occurs in a subset of individuals, where an Observer displays a fear response to a previously neutral stimulus after witnessing or interacting with a conspecific Demonstrator during memory retrieval. The conditions under which fear can be acquired socially in rats have received attention in recent years, and suggest that social factors modulate social transmission of information. We previously found that one such factor, social rank, impacts fear conditioning by proxy in male rats. Here, we aimed to investigate whether social roles as determined by nape contacts in females, might also have an influence on social transmission of fear. In-line with previous findings in males, we found that social interactions in the home cage can provide insight into the social relationship between female rats and that these relationships predict the degree of fear acquired by-proxy. These results suggest that play behavior affects the social transfer/transmission of information in female rats. 

With the ongoing transition to the knowledge-based, mobile economy, cities in the United States recognize the importance of a STEM-literate workforce. In the depopulated, legacy industrial areas in the Midwest, cities fight to attract and retain an educated workforce – particularly workers with STEM skills. STEM-related jobs, which generally have higher wages and growth are important to stabilizing and rebuilding their communities in the Digital Age. Yet, these areas also tend to have higher percentages of those underrepresented in STEM, including low socio-economic status (LSES) and underrepresented minorities (URM). Engagement and retention in STEM disciplines is of national importance, but for these regions it is critical to competing in the knowledge economy and revitalizing these cities. The Center for Civic Innovation at the University of Notre Dame (UND) piloted a program leveraging what we know about STEM engagement, project-based learning (PBL), academic community engagement, and asset-based community development with federal support (NSF IUSE Exploration and Design Tier for Engaged Student Learning & Institution and Community Transformation). Through examination and refinement, researchers developed the Community-Engaged Educational Ecosystem Model (C-EEEM, pronounced ‘seam’). The C-EEEM pilot contributed to our understanding of how to build learning environments that support 1) improvements in student motivation and retention in STEM; 2) changes in place attachment for participants; and 3) community impacts from project implementation. Through support of an NSF IUSE Development and Implementation Tier grant, the C-EEEM is now in its second year for replication in two cities, Youngstown, Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky 

Abstract Environment is a determining factor that can facilitate or hinder social interactions. A precursor to meaningfully engaging with conspecifics is being exposed to opportunistic encounters with others. Increasing the number of individuals in a given space (thus increasing density) would, statistically speaking, increase the likelihood of accidental encounters. This might have consequences on the formation of social networks—an idea that has not reliably been explored. If true, we would expect that increasing density would lead to an increase in the number and the duration of ‘clusters’ of animals. Here, we examined whether varying the number of rats in an open field environment differentially affected their movement dynamics or their propensity to aggregate into clusters and, if so, whether such effects are dependent solely on statistical factors due to increases in density, the potential for actively-sought social interactions, or both. We found that the number of rats in an environment impacts ambulation speed, distance traveled, cluster formation and approaches, and that number and duration of clusters are highly dependent on the propensity for the rats to engage in social interactions. 

Abstract Learning can occur via direct experience or through observation of another individual (i.e., social learning). While research focused on understanding the neural mechanisms of direct learning is prevalent, less work has examined the brain circuitry mediating the acquisition and recall of socially acquired information. Here, we aimed to further elucidate the mechanisms underlying recall of socially acquired information by having male and female rats sequentially recall a socially transmitted food preference (STFP) and a fear association via fear conditioning by-proxy (FCbP). Brain tissue was processed for mRNA expression of the immediate early gene (IEG) Arc , which expresses in the nucleus following transcription before migrating to the cytoplasm over the next 25 min. Given this timeframe, we could identify whether Arc transcription was triggered by STFP recall, FCbP recall, or both. Contrary to past research, we found no differences in any Arc expression measures across a number of prefrontal regions and the ventral CA3 of the hippocampus between controls, demonstrators, and observers. We theorize that these results may indicate that relatively little Arc- dependent neural restructuring is taking place in the prefrontal cortices and ventral CA3 following recall of recently socially acquired information or directly acquired fear associations in these areas.