Understanding Children's Mental Health

Mahjazee Ruiz, Verrazzano Class of 2025, completed major in Psychology and minor in Dance

For my capstone, I wanted to focus on an area that really aligned with my passions and interests, something I felt very strongly about. I've always been motivated to work with children and adolescents in my future career, and I have also always been a big advocate for mental health awareness in our society and communities. Focusing on the minimal attention that children's mental health receives would be very suited and important research for me.

My expectations for this capstone experience were pretty high, as I had never written or done this much research on my own, and that reality was a little daunting and overwhelming when I realized how big the project actually was. I think the hardest part for me was structuring all my information in the most relevant order and in a way that cohesively flowed, because there was so much information I had gathered.

At times, when working with my mentor, I found it hard to take out things I had written or edit and change them, because I believed every piece of information was important. Some things made more sense than others when developing the idea and structure for my research, so I had to make sure I was purposeful with the information I included to keep the goal of my research clear.

Finding the specific sub-topics I would include about children's mental health research was also quite challenging since many areas of children’s mental health didn't necessarily have that much research done on them, especially in terms of early diagnosis and interventions.

Not having a sufficient amount of research made the process take longer than I wanted and was a little frustrating. But the easiest thing for me about this entire project was writing it. It came so naturally to me to talk about something I would genuinely advocate for. When you speak from your heart, the words flow effortlessly, and that was one of the things that I most enjoyed from this research.

As someone who has struggled with mental health since a young age, this capstone hit close to home. I could relate to the need for identifying mental health needs in children, because when I was a kid having someone there and different outlets of expression helped me through a lot of difficult times.

As a child, it’s challenging to understand your emotions, especially if they are due to some sort of mental challenge. The environment that you come from can be evident in the way a child copes with their emotions and feelings. It was important for me to highlight the basis that there is not being enough care for specific groups, with emphasis on underdeveloped and marginalized communities.

One thing we fight for in this world is equality on all fronts. But how often is the need for children’s mental health advertised? Upon the completion of my capstone, I’ve noticed I have become much more aware of what society should do to navigate a healthier and more emotionally stable world for our children. Awareness and knowledge are where the growth begins, to help and nurture the minds of children for happier and more stable lives.

Visiting Freshkills Park

Matthew Dodge, Verrazzano Class of 2025, completed major in Biology (7-12) and minor in ASL

Last spring, I visited the infamous Freshkills Park, 2,200-acre wetlands that once housed the former Fresh Kills Landfill. For 46 years, Fresh Kills Landfill was the largest operating landfill in the world, processing about 29,000 short tons of garbage per day. In 1996, Staten Island’s Borough President Guy Molinari filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging the Fresh Kills Landfill violated the Clean Air Act of 1970 due to the daily emission of 5 tons of methane gas from the decomposing garbage. The landfill was finally closed in March of 2001, and was briefly reopened as a sorting area after the 9/11 attacks. Rescue workers sifted through approximately 1.6 million tons of World Trade Center rubble.

After closing, the garbage was covered by an impermeable landfill cap, sealing the garbage underground forever. This seal stops water from entering the waste, and stops methane gas from entering the atmosphere uncontrolled. Today, the park is suited to become the largest New York City park, about three times larger than Central Park. It is currently the largest grasslands environment in the region. The ecosystem has since started healing, and has become a hub for Ecology research and bird watching. The park will also have a memorial where the 9/11 search and rescue efforts took place, honoring the lives lost. This beautiful park serves as a reminder for how important environmental conservation is, and what we can do to promote ecological diversity in our environment.

Understanding Prosody in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Kayla Poggi, Verrazzano Class of 2025, completed major in English Linguistics and minor in ASL

Throughout the completion of my capstone project, I learned things that will be beneficial to my future career as a Speech Language Pathologist, and learned more about Autism Spectrum.
For example, understanding prosody, which refers to the rhythm, pitch, volume, and intonation of speech, and plays an essential role in how we convey meaning, emotion, and intent in communication. In autism, prosody can be affected in various ways, which may lead to differences in how speech sounds to others. Many individuals with autism experience differences in prosody, such as monotone speech, which is a lack of variation in pitch, atypical speech rhythm, or inappropriate stress on words. These differences can sometimes make it harder for others to interpret their emotional state, intentions, or level of engagement.
This research taught me how social communication can have its challenges for someone with autism. The differences in prosody in individuals with autism may contribute to challenges in social communication. For instance, their speech might not align with social expectations of tone, such as speaking too loudly or softly, which can affect social interactions and lead to misunderstandings.
Prosody in autism could be due to difficulties in both producing and perceiving prosodic cues. Research could focus on whether individuals with autism struggle more with prosodic production (e.g., monotone speech) or perception (e.g., difficulty recognizing emotional tones in speech).
In addition to learning about prosody and how it impacts individuals with autism, I also learned a great deal about writing an in-depth research paper. I learned about writing structure, paying attention to details and making sure what I am writing aligns with my evidence. I learned how to do research on certain databases, handling citations, and how best to utilize my sources.
If I continued research on this topic, I think it could be further developed by observing people with autism in a social setting and focusing on expressive and receptive language.

The Effect of Spinal Electrical Cord Stimulation for Neurogenic Bladder

Karina Toska, Verrazzano Class of 2025, completed major in Biology and minor in Spanish

My research was motivated by an interest in anatomy and a curiosity of understanding the body systems and how they affect each other. My objective explored urinary incontinence due to spinal cord injury. Urinary incontinence is the leakage of urine from the bladder due to an individual losing control over the muscles in the bladder due to weakness. The urinary system and central nervous system are involved because the damage to nerves in the spinal cord create a miscommunication with the bladder which ultimately leads to patients urinating involuntarily, when their bladder isn’t full.

Methods such as electrical muscle stimulation are used, where shocks are applied from patches placed on top of or under the skin. Studies found that the electrical muscle stimulation had a positive impact, where events of involuntary urination decreased by 64%.

I was anticipating my capstone being difficult, because many studies had to be conducted and reviewed. It was challenging to read through multiple articles and create one cohesive paper based on many different data sets. Learning about and writing about the anatomy of the human body was easy since I had already learned that, and reading through articles gave me a refresher.

I think research on this topic could be further expanded to test if electrical muscle stimulation is able to provide more function to other limitations in the body, such as paralysis. Individuals who have gone through many unfortunate events that left them with paralyzed body parts might feel like they have lost hope, that they’ll never be able to move as they did before. Now, with new technological advancements, they will be able to regain function.

 After this research experience, I have been very appreciative of the physicians and physical therapists that work to help patients live happier lives and allow them to get therapy to gain more control over their bodies, therefore allowing them to have more control over their lives. I’ve been working as an EMT and many of the older patients I have had to transport have urinary incontinence, and many are bed-ridden, with diapers or tubes to catch their urine into a jug.

I was surprised yet elated with the results; in the beginning I had no idea if shocks delivered to the spinal cord would actually have a noticeable effect on a patient being able to hold in their urine, but in a relatively short time, I found that it was possible.

Capricorn AI: An Automated Deep Learning Approach for Histopathological Tissue Classification

Moshe Newman, Verrazzano Class of 2025, completed major in Molecular & Cellular Biology

I identified my research topic at the intersection of oncology, bioinformatics, and artificial intelligence, motivated by my longstanding passion for cancer research and precision medicine. My goal was to contribute toward improving the diagnostic accuracy and efficiency of cancer detection, ultimately aiming to benefit patient outcomes. The idea of utilizing advanced technology like deep learning to tackle histopathological classification inspired me, especially since the method holds potential for significant clinical impact.

Early on, I had expected the capstone to be straightforward training and testing of deep learning models. Instead, it turned out to be far more complicated and involved frequent troubleshooting and optimization. The capstone required heavy preprocessing, model architecture exploration, and close attention to model outputs. The complexity of converting results into clinical understanding was deeper than anticipated but ultimately more rewarding.

Among the greatest challenges was handling dataset imbalances and hyperparameter tuning of the neural network to avoid overfitting, and it took a lot of experimenting and statistical exploration. In contrast, understanding the theoretical background of deep learning was relatively easier to me given my background in bioinformatics as well as programming. What was most surprising to me was the complexity involved in adequately visualizing and representing the model output predictions, which necessitated creativity and more statistical expertise than expected.

To further expand this work, I plan to incorporate patient metadata and clinical history to enhance the predictive capability of Capricorn AI, effectively making it a more detailed diagnostic and prognostic tool. Exploring real-time imaging and adaptive training techniques could significantly improve clinical utility and specificity of the model. Lastly, conducting larger validation studies with more varied datasets will be necessary to facilitate generalizability.

Through this experience, I am developed a greater appreciation of the challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary research. It reinforced my passion for bioinformatics and oncology and expanded my expertise in machine learning, particularly the importance of meticulous data handling, model verification, and successive experimentation. Professionally, it established my analytical skills, research endurance, and ability to present sophisticated scientific outcomes succinctly and persuasively to different audiences.