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Background. The concept of occupational justice was derived from a social justice perspective in response to a renewed commitment by the occupational therapy profession to address the occupational needs of individuals, groups and communities who experience social injustice. Accordingly, it is acknowledged that education with regard to occupational justice has the deliberate intention of preparing graduates, who would be change agents as critical practitioners. Nonetheless, while occupational therapy education programmes may seek to instil broader professional values, theory covered in the curriculum may not always assure congruent practice.Objective. To explore how occupational therapy graduates’ conceptualisations of occupational justice, as instilled by the occupational therapy curriculum of the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, manifested in their practice while undergoing community service.Methods. Seven occupational therapy graduates were selected to participate in the study through purposive sampling. A descriptive case study of their practice was generated through qualitative methods. Semi-structured interviews, document review and participant observation were used as data collection methods, analysed through a process of inductive thematic analysis.Results. The findings revealed that while the participants conceptualised occupational justice as broader social change through occupational enablement, they encountered several constraints related to structural and systemic power issues in their practice contexts.Conclusion. The study supports the utilisation of transformative learning and inter-professional education in developing critical competencies such as agency and political proficiency to assist graduates in dealing with the complexities of practice during community service.

Background: This paper begins with the premise that ethics and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) overlap in engineering. Yet, the topics of ethics and DEI often inhabit different scholarly spaces in engineering education, thus creating a divide between these topics in engineering education research, teaching, and practice. Purpose: We investigate the research question, "How are ethics and DEI explicitly connected in peer-reviewed literature in engineering education and closely related fields?" Design: We used systematic review procedures to synthesize intersections between ethics and DEI in engineering education scholarly literature. We extracted literature from engineering and engineering education databases and used thematic analysis to identify ethics/DEI connections. Results: We identified three primary themes (each with three sub-themes): (1) lenses that serve to connect ethics and DEI (social, justice-oriented, professional), (2) roots that inform how ethics and DEI connect in engineering (individual demographics, disciplinary cultures, institutional cultures); and (3) engagement strategies for promoting ethics and DEI connections in engineering (affinity toward ethics/DEI content, understanding diverse stakeholders, working in diverse teams). Conclusions: There is a critical mass of engineering education scholars explicitly exploring connections between ethics and DEI in engineering. Based on this review, potential benefits of integrating ethics and DEI in engineering include cultivating a socially just world and shifting engineering culture to be more inclusive and equitable, thus accounting for the needs and values of students and faculty from diverse backgrounds.

Engineers contribute to large-scale socio-technical challenges, and human-centered design offers a design thinking approach that helps engineers develop a thorough understanding of the socio-technical effects of their design work. Thus, effective strategies for assessing and teaching human-centered design are needed. This study aimed to identify course characteristics that influence how students experience human-centered design in an introductory systems engineering design course. First, we categorized open-ended written reflections to understand the degree to which students experienced human-centered design. Second, we performed a thematic analysis to characterize salient course experiences for two groups of students: (1) students who experienced human-centered design in a technology-centered (i.e., "non"-human-centered) way and (2) students who used user input to guide their design thinking and thus experienced design in a human-centered way. Finally, we identify commonalities in course experiences across these two groups of students. Our analysis suggested that most students did not prioritize human-centered design approaches during the course. Most students strived for technical perfectionism, centered CAD competencies, fixated on novel design, and prioritized design decision-making tools. However, students who demonstrated human-centered design approaches integrated user research into their design process, valued communication, and expressed feeling a tension between user information and course requirements. While students may complete the same design course, their design experiences will vary. We provide a heuristic that we encourage instructors to utilize to identify students' ways of experiencing design. Moreover, we encourage instructors to extend study findings to help non-human-centered designers bridge the divide between social and technical knowledge.

Background. Interprofessional education (IPE) can be seen as the vehicle to address the health and social problems of society through collaborativeapproaches. Since IPE should be facilitated by educators who are skilled in this area, faculty development initiatives should be based on the principles of IPE and collaborative practice (IPECP).Objective. To explore academics’ knowledge and experiences of IPECP.Methods. The study used an exploratory descriptive design and the appreciative inquiry framework underpinned data gathering and analysis. The data were collected using workshops, and the participants of the workshops shared their knowledge and experiences of IPECP, which were audio-recorded and analysed using thematic analysis. Ethical clearance was obtained from the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa.Results. The analysis revealed three themes: knowledge of IPE; experiences of IPECP; and enablers of IPECP aligned to the dream and discovery phasesof appreciative inquiry. The findings revealed that academics were knowledgeable about the concept of IPE and that their experiences with IPECPranged from clinical supervision to research. Regarding enablers of IPECP, they provided important input, which could facilitate IPECP in a university faculty. These included competencies for IPECP, professional development and a common practice framework.Conclusion. The academics who attended the faculty development workshops were knowledgeable about the concepts of IPECP. They concluded that for IPE to be effective, a common practice framework should be adopted in the faculty to inform specific teaching and learning strategies and outcomes.

Civic-mindedness is a central aim of higher education, but strategies for assessing civic-mindedness in engineering education are limited. Thus, engineering educators must build on strategies employed across higher education while ensuring these strategies are transferable to the engineering context. This study furthers efforts to validate the Civic-Minded Graduate Scale within engineering by using mixed methods to pursue multiple forms of validity evidence. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected from first-year engineering students and then integrated to evaluate how well the Civic-Minded Graduate Scale represented first-year engineering students' civic-mindedness. Findings from this study align with extant engineering education research, particularly in the domains of ethics, humanitarian engineering, and professional skills development. This article concludes with implications for teaching and assessing civic-mindedness within and outside of engineering education.

PRINCIPLES: Statin therapy reduces cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. However, a substantial residual cardiovascular risk can be observed in patients receiving this therapy due to persisting lipid abnormalities as well as to the lack of a systematic global risk-reduction strategy. The objective of the study was to assess the prevalence of dyslipidemia in a cohort of patients living in Switzerland and receiving statin therapy. METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted by 61 primary care physicians, cardiologists, endocrinologists and internists in Switzerland. Patients were consecutive outpatients ≥45 years-old, on statin therapy for at least 3 months with available lipid values. A clinical examination and a recording of the latest lipid values on statin therapy were performed in all patients. RESULTS: A total of 473 patients (age 66.3 ± 9.41 years; 61.9% male) were included in the final analysis. Under statin therapy, 40% of the analysed patients had a normal lipid profile, 32.6% presented increased low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) (3.35 ± 0.88 mmol/L), 28.8% low high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C) (0.95 ± 0.18 mmol/L) and 31.1% elevated triglycerides (2.69 ± 1.04 mmol/L). It is of note that the included population was characterised by a high prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors (86.5% patients had 10-year cardiovascular risk >20%). Nevertheless, the lipid lowering therapy was modified in only 15.4% of the patients. CONCLUSION: Persistent dyslipidemia is a reality in statin-treated patients and may contribute to their residual cardiovascular risk. Therefore, comprehensive lipid management should be preferred to aggressive LDL-C lowering alone. Moreover, strategies to assess and modify the global cardiovascular risk of patients should be taken into account as an important component of primary and secondary prevention.

Abstract Amazonia encompasses extensive forests in areas that are periodically inundated by overflowing rivers. The inundation depth and duration vary according to the slope of the terrain and distance to major water bodies. This creates a flooding gradient from the lowest lying seasonally flooded forest up into the unflooded forest, which directly affects the biota. However, the effect of this gradient on soil organisms remains elusive. Here, we use DNA metabarcoding to estimate prokaryote and eukaryote diversity from soil and litter samples along the flooding gradient in central‐western Amazonia using 16S and 18S gene sequences, respectively. We characterize the below‐ground diversity and community composition based on amplicon sequence variants (ASVs). We examine relationships between the soil biota and the flooding gradient, soil properties, and above‐ground woody plant diversity. The flooding gradient does not explain below‐ground biodiversity, nor is below‐ground diversity explained by the above‐ground woody plant diversity. We uncover several taxonomic groups—such as Patescibacteria—not previously reported from Amazonian seasonally flooded forests. The flooding gradient and woody plant diversity partly explain the community composition of soil bacteria. Although the effects of the flooding gradient, soil properties, and above‐ground woody plant diversity are difficult to quantify, our results indicate that flood stress may influence below‐ground bacterial community composition.

Accurate measurements of terrain elevation are crucial for many ecological applications. In this study, we sought to assess new global three-dimensional Earth observation data acquired by the spaceborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) missions Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) and Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI). For this, we examined the “ATLAS/ICESat-2 L3A Land and Vegetation Height”, version 5 (20 × 14 m and 100 × 14 m segments) and the “GEDI Level 2A Footprint Elevation and Height Metrics”, version 2 (25 m circle). We conducted our analysis across four land cover classes (bare soil, herbaceous, forest, savanna), and six forest types (temperate broad-leaved, temperate needle-leaved, temperate mixed, tropical upland, tropical floodplain, and tropical secondary forest). For assessment of terrain elevation estimates from spaceborne LiDAR data we used high resolution airborne data. Our results indicate that both LiDAR missions provide accurate terrain elevation estimates across different land cover classes and forest types with mean error less than 1 m, except in tropical forests. However, using a GEDI algorithm with a lower signal end threshold (e.g., algorithm 5) can improve the accuracy of terrain elevation estimates for tropical upland forests. Specific environmental parameters (terrain slope, canopy height and canopy cover) and sensor parameters (GEDI degrade flags, terrain estimation algorithm; ICESat-2 number of terrain photons, terrain uncertainty) can be applied to improve the accuracy of ICESat-2 and GEDI-based terrain estimates. Although the goodness-of-fit statistics from the two spaceborne LiDARs are not directly comparable since they possess different footprint sizes (100 × 14 m segment or 20 × 14 m segment vs. 25 m circle), we observed similar trends on the impact of terrain slope, canopy cover and canopy height for both sensors. Terrain slope strongly impacts the accuracy of both ICESat-2 and GEDI terrain elevation estimates for both forested and non-forested areas. In the case of GEDI the impact of slope is, however, partly caused by horizontal geolocation error. Moreover, dense canopies (i.e., canopy cover higher than 90%) affect the accuracy of spaceborne LiDAR terrain estimates, while canopy height does not, when considering samples over flat terrains. Our analysis of the accuracy and precision of current versions of spaceborne LiDAR products for different vegetation types and environmental conditions provides insights on parameter selection and estimated uncertainty to inform users of these key global datasets.

Abstract Bacteriophages, or phages, are viruses that specifically infect bacteria and coopt the cellular machinery to create more phage proteins, eventually resulting in the release of new phage particles. Phages are heavily utilized in bioengineering for applications ranging from tissue engineering scaffolds to immune signal delivery. Of specific interest to vaccines and immunotherapies, phages have demonstrated an ability to activate both the innate and adaptive immune systems. The genome of these viral particles can be harnessed for DNA vaccination, or the surface proteins can be exploited for antigen display. More specifically, genes that encode an antigen of interest can be spliced into the phage genome, allowing antigenic proteins or peptides to be displayed by fusion to phage capsid proteins. Phages therefore present antigens to immune cells in a highly ordered and repetitive manner. This review discusses the use of phage with adjuvanting activity as antigen delivery vehicles for vaccination against infectious disease and cancer.