Participation, Power, and Place: Roots of the Community Health Center Movement

Morissa Sobelson, American Studies & Community Health (Class of 2009)

Research Advisors: Professors Edith Balbach and Kevin Irwin

The Tufts-Delta Health Center, established in the Mississippi Delta in 1965, was the forerunner of a movement that changed the way we think about health and health care. It furthered national awareness of the failure of traditional health systems to reach marginalized populations, and showed the effectiveness of bridging public health and clinical interventions at a grassroots level. It demonstrated why race, class, and power are important determinants of health, and why community is a critical locus for health care delivery and social change. Rather than pathologize poor people, it highlighted their assets, strengths, and ways of knowing, and prioritized their active involvement. The project not only managed to initiate an empowerment-based and comprehensive approach to health care, but it did so in the context of some of the most entrenched race, class, and status segregation in the country. Through analysis of the stories and archives of health and civil rights pioneers, this thesis analyzes the participatory approach they took to promoting health and community empowerment at one of the nation’s first health centers in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. I use an empowerment domains framework in order to understand the application of this participatory model, sources and impacts of opposition to the center, and the ways in which these dynamics can inform contemporary health equity and reform efforts. 

7. Bio-Medical Engineering: This abstract frames the complexity of the bio-medical research with a purpose and significance that any reader can understand.

Light Scattering Spectroscopic Characterization of Healthy and Cancerous White Blood Cells

Austin Hsiao, Mechanical Engineering (Class of 2009)

Leukemia is uncontrolled proliferation of immature white blood cells. The conventional method of diagnosis requires invasive and medically extensive biopsies and blood samplings of great discomfort to the patients. Since leukemia is the most prevalent type of cancer in children, where blood drawing is particularly painful and difficult, a non-invasive screening modality could improve significantly the detection and monitoring of these patients. For this reason, we performed an initial set of studies to assess the potential of light scattering spectroscopy to determine whether unique light scattering signatures can differentiate leukemic from healthy white blood cells. We acquired angle-dependent and wavelength-dependent light scattering maps of the samples in the backscattering geometry. Specifically, we acquired polarized light scattering maps from isolated cell populations along the parallel and perpendicular polarizations and computed the differential light scattering maps, representing mostly singly backscattered light. From these LSS maps, the wavelength-dependence of the biological samples, characterized by a power law exponent value, was used to quantitatively differentiate between the healthy lymphocytes, granulocytes and the leukemia cells. Therefore, these initial findings provide the basis for detection of leukemia in in vivo flow cytometry and demonstrate the potential of a non-invasive leukemia screening test.

8. History: Because this study is a narrative of an historical event, the abstract focuses on the historical context. The second to last sentence summarizes the author’s analysis. This abstract also provides a good example of when it’s acceptable to use a quotation.