University of Maryland Graduate School to Launch Degree in Vulnerability and Violence Reduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown violence that has simmered below the surface into the foreground: race-based violence, domestic violence, political violence, and beyond. The pandemic has also underscored the lack of trust between individuals, communities, and citizens and governments. The spike in vulnerability created by this global disaster requires new solutions that can only be created through a global, interprofessional, and systemic approach.

To meet this challenge, the University of Maryland Graduate School is partnering with the Centre for Trust, Peace & Social Relations at Coventry University in the United Kingdom to offer a master’s degree and certificate in Vulnerability and Violence Reduction that will launch in Fall 2021.

Violence and vulnerability are seldom researched or taught from a multidisciplinary and comparative lens, which is critical to developing solutions. Students in this innovative international degree program will have the opportunity to explore critical approaches to the understanding of vulnerability and risk within communities challenged by violence.

The international faculty will bring the best ideas from around the globe to address the problem of violence in multiple communities and, more importantly, to address the vulnerability that leads to violence. The degree builds on the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) commitment to community-engaged and asset-based approaches to address the overlapping epidemics of poverty, racism, and violence.

The innovative program includes UMB faculty from the University of Maryland School of Law, University of Maryland School of Nursing, and the University of Maryland Graduate School, many of whom are nationally recognized experts in public health, community engagement, conflict resolution, and global health.

The MS degree is a 30-credit program that is primarily online and designed to be completed in two years. It involves a combination of a launch seminar which includes online lectures, interactive case studies, a research-based capstone project, and a culminating in-person workshop. The seminar is designed to create strong links between the student cohorts and give them the opportunity to share research and develop implementation plans. The core courses trace the nature of violence, the link between vulnerability and violence, violence prevention, and sustaining nonviolence. Students can also enroll in the 12-credit certificate program in Vulnerability and Violence Reduction. The program is fully online and will allow them to earn a certificate by taking three of the four core courses.

The application deadline for the degree is July 1, 2021. The program’s webpage and application portal are available at https://graduate.umaryland.edu/Violencereduction/.

— Source: University of Maryland, Baltimore

Partnership Addresses Workers’ Mental Health Issues

Now more than ever, it’s important to create a workplace culture where everyone is encouraged to pay attention to their own—and others’—emotional well-being. Give An Hour and WILL Interactive have responded to this moment by creating an engaging interactive experience that offers practical day-to-day guidance for maintaining emotional well-being.

The award-winning Emotional Life Skills @ Work follows employees as they deal with the realities of remote work. Created with WILL’s evidence-based interactive behavior modification system, users learn to make the choices that will keep them positive and productive in the workplace, along with tools that provide emotional literacy needed to maintain a healthy balanced life. Combining Give An Hour’s mental health expertise and their copyrighted Emotional Wellbeing Tools, as well as WILL's immersive and experiential Choose Your Own Journey training methodology, Emotional Life Skills @ Work will positively improve employee well-being.

“WILL is honored to partner with Give an Hour to address these societal, organizational, and personal issues faced by our nation’s workforce,” says Sharon Sloane, CEO of WILL Interactive.

“Give An Hour is excited to make this much-needed resource available in partnership with WILL Interactive,” says Randy Phelps, PhD, CEO of Give An Hour. “This new program will help employees better manage the stress and burnout exacerbated by COVID-19 and will help lead to a more engaged and productive workforce.”

— Source: WILL Interactive

Rice University Students Develop Glove-Based Sensor for Those With Trichotillomania

People who compulsively pull their hair—an affliction known as trichotillomania—could find relief with a device created by Rice University students.

Seniors at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering are developing a glove-based sensor that tracks hand motion and flexing, combined with a smartphone app that tracks behavior over time. The glove incorporates a flex and other sensors along with a gyroscope to sense when a hair-pull has happened. The glove sends data to the app, which keeps track of “no-pull” streaks.

“The reward for every week you don’t pull your hair could be monetary or something as simple as a congratulations on the app,” says Linda Liu of Rice University.

The team was among dozens demonstrating their capstone projects, required of graduating seniors in engineering, at the school’s Engineering Design Showcase.

Members of the trichotillomania team, which calls itself TRICH or Treat, are bioengineering majors Liu, Saideep Narendrula, Jack Wilson, and Thomas Zhang, and electrical engineering majors Zach Alvear, Joshua Bae, Anirudh Kuchibhatla, and Fredy Martinez. Their advisers are Rice’s Sabia Abidi, a lecturer in bioengineering, and Gary Woods, a professor in the practice of electrical and computer engineering, and Eric Storch, PhD, a professor and vice chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine.

Trichotillomania is a mental disorder often considered among the obsessive compulsive and related disorders. Those with the disorder often remove hair to a noticeable, and even painful, degree.

“One of our challenges is that we need to get treatment even more effective,” Storch says. “We want to increase the awareness people have when they’re pulling their hair out in a more effective manner.

“The products out there now are great, but they fire without sensitivity or specificity,” he says. “You reach up and it goes off, so you learn pretty quickly to ignore it.”

The students would normally work at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen but gathered mostly online during the pandemic. Online resources also helped them get a sense of the real-world issues and how they could be addressed through browsing a Reddit feed dedicated to trichotillomania. “We saw that something just as easy as applause or awareness of your successes are things we can incorporate into the gamification side,” Liu says.

“Our Baylor sponsor had a system in mind that would use gamification as a model, providing rewards for users to condition them not to pull their hair,” she adds.

With that knowledge, the team shifted its focus to technology that would provide accurate detection. Liu also notes motion-tracking wristbands currently marketed as devices for trichotillomania patients return “a lot of false-positives.”

The team’s rough prototype is a regular work glove with sensors that run up the fingers and feed data to a microcontroller that communicates wirelessly to a phone app. “The glove allows us to have electrical tape, wires, and everything attached to it and still function and feel comfortable,” Narendrula says.

“The sensors look at the flexing of fingers you’re going to use for pinching movements as well as your hand movements,” he says. “We know not only when you’re pulling your hair but also when you’re about to pull your hair. Having this information easily accessible to a patient is really where our device shines.”

They hope teams that pick up the project in future years will make the glove sleek—and fashionable.

“It's not the prettiest design right now, since we’re still in the prototyping phase,” Liu says.

“We really want to focus on showing real results through identification of the motions,” Narendrula adds. “But one of our suggestions for moving forward is to have a nice, well-designed glove with maybe an ounce of fashion. That’s outside our expertise, but with our current design, everything can be hidden inside the glove.”

— Source: Rice University