Search

Developing mission-centered students, faculty, and staff leaders is a common goal among Catholic higher educational institutions. This article shares how Barry University's Dominican heritage informs its strategies for leadership development. A review of the last decade at Barry illuminated four essential elements that serve to institutionalize mission engagement: (1) the development of mission-driven leaders, (2) an institutional discernment process, (3) the strategic prioritization of mission education, and (4) the creation of affirming organizational structures. Increased collaboration between campus leaders and the university's founding congregation, the Dominican Sisters of Adrian, Michigan, helped define the role of mission education as a strategic priority. Today, models for leadership formation, highly informed by a Dominican charism for higher education, manifest in the fabric of institutional structures and campus programming.

The authors report a validation study of the Teen Court Peer Influence Scale (TCPIS), a newly developed scale, to examine its factor structure, reliability, and evidence of validity. Methods: The scale was disseminated to 202 participants in six teen courts in the state of Florida, and the authors conducted exploratory factor analyses. Content validity was established conceptually and evidence of concurrent validity, convergent construct validity, and discriminant construct validity were established statistically. Results: Factor analyses suggest that positive peer influence is operationalized by three constructs: positive cognitions/expectations, positive identity development, and modeling/imitation. The TCPIS has good internal consistency with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.90. Conclusions: The TCPIS shows preliminary evidence of sound psychometric properties and may be used to inform teen court policy and practice. (Contains 2 tables.)

Exposure to oxygen-rich environments can lead to oxidative damage, increased body iron stores, and changes in status of some vitamins, including folate. Assessing the type of oxidative damage in these environments and determining its relationships with changes in folate status are important for defining nutrient requirements and designing countermeasures to mitigate these effects. Responses of humans to oxidative stressors were examined in participants undergoing a saturation dive in an environment with increased partial pressure of oxygen, a NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations mission. Six participants completed a 13-d saturation dive in a habitat 19 m below the ocean surface near Key Largo, FL. Fasting blood samples were collected before, twice during, and twice after the dive and analyzed for biochemical markers of iron status, oxidative damage, and vitamin status. Body iron stores and ferritin increased during the dive (P<0.001), with a concomitant decrease in RBC folate (P<0.001) and superoxide dismutase activity (P<0.001). Folate status was correlated with serum ferritin (Pearson r =20.34, P<0.05). Peripheral blood mononuclear cell poly(ADP-ribose) increased during the dive and the increase was significant by the end of the dive (P<0.001); γ-H2AX did not change during the mission. Together, the data provide evidence that when body iron stores were elevated in a hyperoxic environment, a DNA damage repair response occurred in peripheral blood mononuclear cells, but double-stranded DNA damage did not. In addition, folate status decreases quickly in this environment, and this study provides evidence that folate requirements may be greater when body iron stores and DNA damage repair responses are elevated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]