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Abstract Introduction The African Center for Integrated Laboratory Training (ACILT) in Johannesburg, South Africa offered a laboratory biosafety program to improve laboratory biosafety practices in 22 President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) supported countries. This manuscript evaluates the transference of newly gained knowledge and skills to the participants’ place of employment for HIV and TB diagnostic laboratory programs. It also serves as a follow-on to a previously published manuscript that measured training effectiveness for all courses offered at ACILT. Methods ACILT offered 20 Laboratory Biosafety and Infrastructure courses (2008–2014), also referred as biosafety course/course comprising of 14 core laboratory safety elements to 402 participants from 22 countries. In 2015, participants received 22 e-questions divided into four categories: (1) Safety Policies, (2) Management’s Engagement, (3) Safety Programs and (4) Assessments of Safety Practices to determine retrospectively the training effectiveness of biosafety practices in their place of employment 6 months before and after attending their course. We used Kirkpatrick model to assess the transference of knowledge, skills and obstructive factors. Results 20% (81/402) of the participants completed the e-questionnaire. The overall percentage of positive responses indicating implementation of new safety practices increased from 50% to 84%. Improvement occurred in all four categories after attending the course, with the greatest increases in Safety Policies (67–94%) and Safety Programs (43–91%). Creating a safety committee, allocating resources, and establishing a facility safety policy were important drivers for implementing and maintaining laboratory safety practices. In addition, accredited laboratories and countries with national safety regulations or policies had a higher percentage of improvements. The most reported challenges were inadequate funding and lack of management enforcement. Conclusions PEPFAR and other partners’ investments in training institutions, such as ACILT, were effective in building sustainable country ownership to strengthen biosafety practices and were leveraged to combat zoonotic diseases and COVID-19. Although support continues at the national/regional level, a standardized, coordinated and continent-wide sustainable approach to offer a biosafety program-like ACILT is missing. Continuous offerings of biosafety programs similar to ACILT could contribute to sustainable strengthening of laboratory biosafety, QMS and pandemic preparedness.

Sustained positive BOLD (blood oxygen level-dependent) activity is employed extensively in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies as evidence for task or stimulus-specific neural responses. However, the presence of sustained negative BOLD activity (i.e., sustained responses that are lower than the fixation baseline) has remained more difficult to interpret. Some studies suggest that it results from local "blood stealing" wherein blood is diverted to neurally active regions without a concomitant change of neural activity in the negative BOLD regions. However, other evidence suggests that negative BOLD is a result of local neural suppression. In both cases, regions of negative BOLD response are usually interpreted as carrying relatively little, if any, stimulus-specific information (hence the predominant reliance on positive BOLD activity in fMRI). Here we show that the negative BOLD response resulting from visual stimulation can carry high information content that is stimulus-specific. Using a general linear model (GLM), we contrasted standard flickering stimuli to a fixation baseline and found regions of the visual cortex that displayed a sustained negative BOLD response, consistent with several previous studies. Within these negative BOLD regions, we compared patterns of fMRI activity generated by flickering Gabors that were systematically shifted in position. As the Gabors were shifted further from each other, the correlation in the spatial pattern of activity across a population of voxels (such as the population of V1 voxels that displayed a negative BOLD response) decreased significantly. Despite the fact that the BOLD signal was significantly negative (lower than fixation baseline), these regions were able to discriminate objects separated by less than 0.5 deg (at approximately 10 deg eccentricity). The results suggest that meaningful, stimulus-specific processing occurs even in regions that display a strong negative BOLD response.

In November 2005, the faculty of Macalester College voted to institute a graduation requirement in Quantitative Thinking (QT) that is truly interdisciplinary. It currently draws on courses from thirteen departments including Anthropology, Economics, Geography, Political Science, Theater, Mathematics, Environmental Science, and Geology. This article describes the process that led to the creation of this program. It explains how we were able to get broad buy-in at the beginning and the long process of trial and error—informed by formative assessment—that was needed to refine the initial vision and shape it into a viable program that would be accepted by most of our faculty. The article concludes with a description of the program as it now exists, a discussion of our ongoing assessment of the program and its effectiveness, and a discussion of the lessons we learned in the process.