Their award-winning , named Paper of the Year by the American Journal of Physiology, sheds light on the heightened risk of kidney complications in cancer patients undergoing treatment. The study revealed that cancer itself may harm the kidneys, but that damage and scarring is intensified when patients take cisplatin, a commonly used chemotherapy drug.��

“Everything in your body is connected, from your internal systems to the medications we take,” said Andrew Orwick, lead author and recent doctoral graduate in pharmacology and toxicology.

Orwick’s doctoral research in the laboratory of researchers Leah Siskind and in collaboration with Levi Beverly, both from the and , examined the interplay of cisplatin and lung cancer, which is highly prevalent in Kentucky.

“By better understanding what those interactions are and how they happen,” he said, “we can take them into consideration and improve outcomes for the patient.”

Ultimately, that could lead to new diagnostics, more effective drugs and treatment plans that better consider the patient’s overall health and avoid or limit kidney damage.

Chronic damage to the kidneys can nausea, vomiting, fatigue, high blood pressure and even death, without transplant or dialysis. Because symptoms progress slowly, patients may not notice the condition until its advanced stages. Even so, current testing methods are difficult and invasive.

The UofL researchers think their work could help clinicians better predict not only which patients will react negatively to cisplatin and other chemotherapy drugs, but also identify potential kidney problems early. The goal is to better understand the underlying mechanisms and biomarkers, so clinicians can make more informed decisions.

“Obviously, addressing the cancer is first and foremost, but if we can do that while also preserving the patient’s overall health and feeling of health, that’s optimal,” said Siskind, a professor and senior author on the study. “The great news is that the fact that we’re even having this conversation means we’re making progress in solving cancer — we’re considering not only life, but the quality of that life.”

Siskind said the paper represents a paradigm shift in how researchers think about and treat both cancer and kidney disease. As it stands, no treatment for this form of kidney disease has made it past a phase 2 clinical trial or been approved for use in patients. This research could also help inform better drugs and experiments to fill that need.��

That innovative thinking and broad impact is likely part of why this work was selected as Paper of the Year, said Jon Klein, interim executive vice president for .

“Being selected for this honor is a massive accomplishment and underpins the immense value of the research being done by this team and across UofL,” Klein said. “This is work that truly can save and improve lives.”��

A new study from the University of Louisville shows the nicotine in certain types of e-cigarettes may be more harmful than others, increasing risk for irregular heartbeat, or heart arrhythmias.

A popular claim is that nicotine in e-cigarettes is relatively harmless, whereas additives and combustion products largely account for the harms of traditional cigarettes. The UofL research, which tested the effects of e-cigarettes with various types and doses of nicotine in animal models, showed that the nicotine form contained in pod-based e-cigarettes — nicotine salts — led to heart arrhythmias, particularly at higher doses.

In the study, published in , researchers compared heart rate and heart rate variability in mice exposed to vape aerosols containing different types of nicotine. The aerosols contained either freebase nicotine, used in older types of e-cigarettes; nicotine salts, used in Juul and other pod-based e-cigarettes; or racemic freebase nicotine, simulating the recently popularized synthetic nicotine; and their effects were compared to nicotine-free e-cigarette aerosols or air. In addition, the research team delivered increasing concentrations of the nicotine over time, from 1% to 2.5%, to 5%.

The nicotine salts induced cardiac arrhythmias more potently than freebase nicotine, and the cardiac arrhythmias increased with the higher concentrations of nicotine.

“This suggests the nicotine is harmful to the heart and counters popular claims that the nicotine itself is harmless,” said Alex Carll, assistant professor in UofL’s Department of Physiology and researcher with , who led the study. “Our findings provide new evidence that nicotine type and concentration modify the adverse cardiovascular effects of e-cigarette aerosols, which may have important regulatory implications.”

The study also revealed that the higher levels of nicotine salts increased sympathetic nervous system activity, also known as the fight-or-flight response, by stimulating the same receptor that is inhibited by beta blockers, heart medications which are prescribed to treat cardiac arrhythmias. In the autonomic nervous system, sympathetic dominance increases the fight-or-flight response in bodily functions, including heart rate.

“The nicotine in e-cigarettes causes irregular heartbeats (arrhythmias) in a dose-dependent manner by stimulating the very receptor that many heart medications are designed to inhibit,” Carll said.��

The findings conclude that inhalation of e-cig aerosols from nicotine-salt-containing e-liquids could increase cardiovascular risks by inducing sympathetic dominance and cardiac arrhythmias.

This work is part of a growing body of research on the potential toxicity and health impacts of e-cigarettes reported by the American Heart Association Tobacco Regulation and Addiction Center, for which UofL serves as the flagship institute. The team’s previous research found that exposure to e-cigarette aerosols containing certain flavors or solvent vehicles caused ventricular arrhythmias and other conduction irregularities in the heart, even without nicotine, leading Carll to speculate that the arrhythmias may not be the result of the nicotine alone, but also by the flavors and solvents included in the e-cigarettes.

The researchers concluded that, if these results are confirmed in humans, regulating nicotine salts through minimum pH standards or limits on acid additives in e-liquids may mitigate the public health risks of vaping.

Even without regulatory changes, however, the research suggests that users may reduce potential harm by opting for e-cigarettes with freebase nicotine instead of nicotine salts or using e-cigarettes with a lower nicotine content.

University of Louisville researchers recently have shown that beta-glucan, a natural carbohydrate, can generate enhanced immune responses to cancer in the pancreas and may lead to improved efficacy of immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer.

Jun Yan, chief of the Division of Immunotherapy in the Department of Surgery at UofL, said one of challenges for pancreatic cancer is that natural immune cells are unable to enter the pancreas to combat the growth of tumors, creating an immune desert.

“These tumors lack quality effector immune cells that can kill them,” Yan said. “In addition, pancreatic cancer has a unique tumor microenvironment that prevents the influx of anti-tumor immune cells.”

In new research published this month in , Anne Geller, an MD/PhD student, and a research team at UofL led by Yan demonstrate that a type of beta-glucan derived from yeast can alter the environment within the pancreas to promote anti-cancer immune cell migration to the site of the cancer. Beta-glucan, a naturally occurring carbohydrate found in plants, bacteria and fungi, is known to induce trained immunity, stimulating an immune response to a specific stimulus, such as pancreatic tumor cells.

Trained immunity is a new concept in the field of immunology and is the idea that innate immune cells possess a form of “memory,” which typically only has been considered to be a feature of adaptive immune cells such as T-cells. Using animal models, Yan and his team found that when they injected particulate beta-glucan into the peritoneal area, it accumulated in the pancreas and promoted anti-cancer immune cell migration to the area. These immune cells were found to have a trained immunity phenotype and effectively inhibited pancreatic cancer growth.

“This research demonstrates that a natural compound can stimulate trained immunity in pancreas,” Yan said.

The researchers also found that beta-glucan-stimulated trained immunity can enhance PD-1 antibody therapy in pancreatic cancer. Anti-PD-1 immunotherapy has been approved to treat many types of cancer including melanoma and lung cancer. However, this therapy has failed in treating pancreatic cancer. This research could be a breakthrough in successfully applying immunotherapy to pancreatic cancer.

“This research has a great potential for clinical translation as it elucidates a strategy for delivering therapeutics directly to the pancreas, identifies a mechanism of enhancing anti-tumor immune responses against pancreatic tumors and provides insight into ways of unleashing the awesome power of immunotherapies against PDAC,” Geller said. “This could be a breakthrough in treating the deadly cancer that has evaded so many other forms of treatment.”

Yan, director of the Immuno-Oncology Program at and study coauthor, and surgical oncologist Robert C.G. Martin II are conducting a clinical trial using beta-glucan in pancreatc cancer patients as a proof-of-concept study.

“This publication demonstrates that a simple yeast-derived beta-glucan supplement has the potential to enhance a patient’s immune system and then respond more effectively to therapies in pancreatic cancer.��The concept that patients’ immune systems can be ‘trained’ to see their pancreatic cancer as abnormal or foreign could be a crucial step in enhancing a patient’s overall survival and thus quality of life,” said Martin, professor and director of the UofL Division of Surgical Oncology and a co-author on the study.

According to the , more than 60,000 adults are expected to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the U.S. in 2022 and nearly 50,000 patients will die from the disease. Alex Trebek, long-time host of the game show “Jeopardy!” shared his pancreatic cancer diagnosis and treatment journey beginning in 2019. Trebek died in 2020, just over 18 months after announcing his diagnosis.

“UofL is committed to solving big, global challenges through research,” said Kevin Gardner, UofL’s executive vice president for research and innovation. “This work, leveraging the power of the immune system to better treat pancreatic cancer, could have a big impact in helping people live lives that are not just longer, but healthier and more resilient.”

Imagine reliving your entire life in the space of seconds. Like a flash of lightning, you are outside of your body, watching memorable moments you lived through. This process, known as ‘life recall,’ can be similar to what it’s like to have a near-death experience. What happens inside your brain during these experiences and after death are questions that have puzzled neuroscientists for centuries. However, the new study suggests that your brain may remain active and coordinated during and even after the transition to death and be programmed to orchestrate the whole ordeal.

When an 87-year-old patient developed epilepsy, Zemmar and his colleagues used continuous electroencephalography (EEG) to detect the seizures and treat the patient. During these recordings, the patient had a heart attack and died. This unexpected event allowed the scientists to record the activity of a dying human brain for the first time ever.

Findings ‘challenge our understanding of when exactly life ends’

“We measured 900 seconds of brain activity around the time of death and set a specific focus to investigate what happened in the 30 seconds before and after the heart stopped beating,” said Zemmar, assistant professor of neurological surgery at UofL, who organized the study. “Just before and after the heart stopped working, we saw changes in a specific band of neural oscillations, so-called gamma oscillations, but also in others such as delta, theta, alpha and beta oscillations.”��

Brain oscillations (more commonly known as ‘brain waves’) are patterns of rhythmic brain activity normally present in living human brains. The different types of oscillations, including gamma, are involved in high-cognitive functions such as concentrating, dreaming, meditation, memory retrieval, information processing and conscious perception, just like those associated with memory flashbacks.

“Through generating oscillations involved in memory retrieval, the brain may be playing a last recall of important life events just before we die, similar to the ones reported in near-death experiences,” Zemmar said. “These findings challenge our understanding of when exactly life ends and generate important subsequent questions, such as those related to the timing of organ donation.”

A source of hope

While this study is the first of its kind to measure live brain activity during the process of dying in humans, similar changes in gamma oscillations have been previously observed in rats kept in controlled environments. This means it is possible that, during death, the brain organizes and executes a biological response that could be conserved across species.

These measurements are, however, based on a single case and stem from the brain of a patient who had suffered injury, seizures and swelling, which complicate the interpretation of the data. Nonetheless, Zemmar plans to investigate more cases and sees these results as a source of hope.

“As a neurosurgeon, I deal with loss at times. It is indescribably difficult to deliver the news of death to distraught family members,” he said. “Something we may learn from this research is that although our loved ones have their eyes closed and are ready to leave us to rest, their brains may be replaying some of the nicest moments they experienced in their lives.”

By Maryam Clark, science writer for .

“By inducing proliferation in cardiac heart muscle cells, we hope to be able to treat this deadly disease.” Mohamed said. “In this study, we have demonstrated preliminary efficacy of the transient gene therapy we call 4F in the treatment of ischemic heart failure.”��

The most common form of heart disease, ischemic heart disease affects about 18.2 million adults in the United States and caused 360,900 deaths in 2019. Also called coronary heart disease, it is characterized by reduced blood and oxygen flow to the heart due to narrowed arteries, usually caused by a buildup of plaque. When the blood flow to the heart muscle is completely blocked, the patient experiences a heart attack and millions of heart muscle cells die.

Since heart muscle cells do not reproduce readily and limited medical options exist to repair heart muscle, a heart attack often leads to progressive heart failure.

The therapy developed by Mohamed’s team involves a combination of four cell-cycle regulator genes, cyclin-dependent kinase 1 (CDK1), CDK4, cyclin B1, and cyclin D1, known collectively as 4F, or four factors. Using 4F, the UofL-led team was able to stimulate the proliferation of heart muscle cells in the lab, leading to improved heart function in animal models for up to four months.

In addition, the proliferation was limited to onecycle, avoiding adverse effects resulting from uncontrolled proliferation, thereby increasing clinical feasibility of the process.

Mohamed was part of a team that first identified the potential of the of heart muscle cells in 2018. In this most recent work, he and his team further refined the process to use these genes, bringing the technology to treat ischemic heart disease closer to testing in humans. was published Jan. 21 in the journal Circulation.

In October, Mohamed and Bradford Hill, professor in the Division of Environmental Medicine, led a team that showing that two common food supplements, Nicotinamide (Vitamin B3) and N-acetyl glucosamine (GlcNAc), are essential for heart cell division and improve cardiomyocyte proliferation when included as part of treatment with 4F.

“This discovery will facilitate new avenues to use metabolites which are naturally in our food to regenerate the diseased heart and treat heart failure,” Mohamed said.

The study utilized a����developed at UofL by Mohamed that keeps slices of human hearts alive for a longer period of time for research. The system mimics the environment of a living organ through continuous electrical stimulation and oxygenation, maintaining viability and functionality of the heart segments for six days, allowing more extensive testing. The����for use by researchers outside UofL.

All of the company’s participate in UofL Trager Institute’s network training hub, for example. Our School of Nursing houses a state-of-the-art simulation lab, upgraded just last year thanks to Trilogy’s $250,000 commitment.

And it just so happens that Trilogy’s founder, Randall J. Bufford, is one of our most prominent alums. In 2016, he was named the alumni award winner for the College of Business and just last month earned our inaugural Alumni Ambassador Award. The 1981 graduate was a part of UofL’s 1980 national championship men’s basketball team. He has since been recognized for his leadership in his profession and community, as Trilogy employs over 10,000 people and is considered to be one of the best senior housing companies in the world.

It’s no wonder, then, that Trilogy would tap into UofL’s expertise to transform its organization to emphasize diversity, equity and inclusion. The company’s DEI plan was developed earlier this year with the help of UofL researchers from the College of ����ֱ�� and Human Development, Geneva Stark, Jeffrey Sun, Heather Turner.

UofL’s researchers worked alongside Todd Schmiedeler, Trilogy’s chief engagement and innovation officer, and Priscila Mattingly, Trilogy’s chief human resources and inclusion officer. The team worked for a year collecting and spoke to every level of employee to capture the company’s strengths and improve both employee and resident outcomes.

“Trilogy Health Services has an impressive leadership team and has been dubbed one of the nation’s best workplaces for aging services. They care about their employees who are truly integrated as community members of the organization. They sought to expand their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, and building off our existing relationship (which is based on trust and genuine interest in each other’s success), we also engaged with them on rethinking their practices, policies and priorities to ensure that diversity, equity and inclusion actively and visibly became a critical component of their organizational culture and values,” Sun said.

“In fact, they revised their whole Environmental, Social & Governance structure so diversity, equity, and inclusion were not simply words or temporal concerns, but a lived experience where employees felt a sense of belonging and are hopefully having rich and valuable encounters across the company, even with their vendors and partners. It’s likely no organization has reached these aspirations, but Trilogy Health Services is trying, and we are honored to be partners with such a caring and focused company,” he added.

Together, the UofL and Trilogy team identified four key areas to advance Trilogy’s DEI efforts: Accountability, recruitment, retention and development, and culture.

Accountability: The DEI plan tasks Trilogy’s leaders to develop unit-specific and measurable annual diversity goals. The goals are also to be monitored quarterly, so leaders can assess progress and readjust if necessary. Leaders are also tasked with holding regular campus town halls to ensure all employees have a voice in enacting these changes.

Further, Trilogy is conducting an audit of its suppliers to ensure their values are consistent with Trilogy’s, and the organization will revise supplier contracts to include this consideration.

Recruitment: Trilogy will analyze job postings for content and placement to identify language or phrasing that may deter applicants. The company is also strengthening partnerships with organizations – such as universities and nonprofits – to help facilitate a recruitment pipeline. Finally, the company plans to establish a business resource group for networking – all with an objective of increasing the diversity of its applicant pools.

Retention and development: Trilogy is creating individualized employee growth plans to provide employees with steps for advancement into leadership roles. The plans are paired with advancement and mentorship programs that include training, resources and mentoring.

Culture: Trilogy aims to break down siloes by creating employee resource groups (ERGs) to focus on connecting people with similar interests across campuses and creating a stronger sense of belonging with the company.

This plan has been published in and will be presented next week at the 2021 annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher ����ֱ��. This isn’t likely the last of the UofL/Trilogy partnership, however.

“In the College of ����ֱ�� and Human Development, our commitment is to our community, and since 2019, we have been working with Trilogy to build and enhance its workforce through innovative learning designs such as apprenticeships and workforce diversity,” Sun said. “Under the leadership of (CEHD) Dean Amy Lingo, we plan to continue expanding our private/public partnerships to learn from each other and increase community engagement.”

Natalie Hewlett, CEHD’s coordinator for development and communications, contributed to this story.

The symposium serves to offer valuable opportunities to research scholars in need of gaining essential presentation skills and experience, meet scholarship requirements for faculty ranking and promotion, build peer networks and gain feedback from research scientists in a wide range of disciplines.

“The University of Louisville is a true research powerhouse,” said Kevin Gardner, UofL’s executive vice president for research and innovation. “This event is an opportunity to showcase the breadth of that work, create career pathways for students and raise awareness of the important role research plays in our day-to-day lives.”

More than 126 judges with various fields of expertise devoted their time during the four days of poster sessions.

R!L’s symposium also featured seminars, presentations and lectures on a variety of subjects, including nursing research, research security and foreign influence, environmental health sciences, core facilities, anti-racism research and more. Highlights included presentations by research scholars who received funding by the Jewish Heritage Foundation for Excellence, the Center for Integrative Environmental Health Sciences’ series of presentations, the Kentucky Science Center’s seminar for seventh to 12th grade students with a focus in biomedical sciences and, most notably, a media event/announcement of a $5.5 million grant from Kosair Charities to fund the Pediatric NeuroRecovery program and an additional $900,000 to other children’s health programs at UofL ().

R!L’s keynote speaker Mary Jo Turk, professor of microbiology and immunology with Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine and co-director of the Immunology and Cancer Immunotherapy Program, Norris-Cotton Cancer Center, presented the lecture, “Lymph node resident memory T responses to metastatic melanoma.” Other keynote speakers included Derrick L. Franklin, acting chief of investigative operations, U.S. Department of HHS/OIG; Heather Hardin, assistant professor of nursing with Case Western Reserve University’s Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing; and Michael L. Blakey, National Endowment for the Humanities professor of anthropology, Africana studies and American studies and director of the Institute for Historical Biology, College of William & Mary.

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The pilot, recommended in a report from the University of Louisville’s�� Commonwealth Institute of Kentucky (CIK), housed in the School of Public Health and Information Sciences, would initially be limited to critical incident 911 calls from LMPD’s Fourth Division. It involves establishing:

• A Behavioral Health Hub, with health crisis interventionists integrated in the MetroSafe 911 call center. Call takers would direct certain Critical Incident calls to an interventionist, who would help further triage the crisis to determine whether it could be de-escalated over the phone, if the person in crisis would benefit from a mobile response, or if the scenario called for an LMPD response due to safety concerns. Their mission would be “to assist persons in crisis and first responders by providing empathy, connection, de-escalation and linkage to the right-sized care,” the report says.
• A mobile response unit consisting of trained crisis interventionists to “rapidly respond, effectively screen and assist persons in crisis in accessing the appropriate level of care.”
• A 24-hour “community respite center,” a fully staffed safe place where individuals can stay for up to 24 hours when connected by the mobile response team. There, qualified mental health and substance use professionals will provide evaluations and connect individuals to needed services and resources, beyond what the mobile response team can provide onsite.

The research team recommended the pilot be centered in LMPD’s Fourth Division because of its high number of what Metro terms Crisis Intervention Team-related events; an average of 11.63 events of this type occur each day.

“Our team has been grateful for the opportunity to partner with the community to build a better way of addressing a public health crisis,” said Susan Buchino, who co-directed the research. “Our research has allowed us to examine what other communities have done, while being intentional about listening to the unique needs of our own community. The one thing emphasized by other cities is that it is best to start small, learn from the community what’s working and what needs to change, and then refine the process before scaling it.” Buchino is assistant professor in UofL’s School of Public Health and Information Sciences and assistant director of the CIK.

Now that the report has been shared, Fischer said, UofL, Seven Counties Services and other partners will begin to work to implement the plan, with UofL’s stated goal of beginning the pilot in December 2021.

In announcing a nearly $5 million investment in deflection and diversion programs as part of the FY22 budget, Fischer noted that “some situations are best served by a social service response, particularly when dealing with people living with homelessness, mental health challenges or substance use.”

“By quadrupling our investment in violence prevention and capacity-building programs, including in deflection and diversion, we are acting on our shared goal of creating a safe city with fewer arrests and less incarceration for non-violent offenses,” Fischer said. “I appreciate the hard work of the university team to move us closer to that goal.”

Louisville Metro Government contracted with CIK to draft the report and implement the pilot, as part of a plan for reimagining public safety with an emphasis on the whole-of-government and whole-of-city approach, Fischer said.

In its Alternative Responder Model report recommending and outlining the pilot model, the UofL team acknowledged the national debate around public safety, and cites “a pattern in which law enforcement has become a default response in crisis calls, even when the crisis may be a civil issue or one best resolved by health care or social services.

“Even the officers themselves – in Louisville and elsewhere – admit they are asked to do too much, often without the best tools for serving the person in crisis, especially when it is a behavioral health need,” the report says.

The report is the result of seven months of study by CIK and a multidisciplinary team consisting of the Kentucky Department of Behavioral Health, Development and Intellectual Disabilities; Spalding’s School of Social Work; Seven Counties Services (SCS); and community members, charged with assessing the feasibility and development an alternative response model that appropriately meets the need of Louisville’s residents.

“As the region’s leading provider of mental health services, Seven Counties Services is well positioned for this community partnership to help our neighbors in crisis who need mental health treatment or other social services as opposed to a police response,” said Abby Drane, president and CEO of Seven Counties Services/Bellewood & Brooklawn. “We are hopeful that this deflection program will best serve our neighbors and aid in the effort to modernize public safety for the Louisville Metro area.��This plan will provide a more streamlined path to critical services for those with a mental health or addiction crisis.”

Their work included a review of police deflection activities in other U.S. communities; a series of interviews and focus groups with community members, behavioral health providers, and Metro Government leaders, as well as observations of Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) responses to 911 calls that could potentially be deflected and activities in the MetroSafe 911 Call Center, and an extensive review of MetroSafe 911 data.

The team also engaged with a Community Advisory/Accountability Board, which has met routinely since April to provide oversight and recommendations to the team’s research and planning – an effort to enhance community ownership and sustainability for the new program.

The report stresses that continual evaluation of the program is key, and that expansion beyond the pilot phase should occur “in phases that allow researchers to evaluate implementation and outcome and identify areas of improvement and success.”

Katina Kulow, assistant professor of marketing in the UofL College of Business, and co-authors reveal in “,” that when consumers give luck human characteristics, it can provide a sense of security and shared risk when it comes to financial decisions.

“This sense of shared risk can make those individuals more likely to pursue higher-risk financial behavior, such as purchasing lottery tickets with worse odds or investment opportunities with a low chance of return,” Kulow said. “Such decisions could have significant negative consequences for consumers’ financial and psychological welfare.”

In four experiments, Kulow and co-authors Thomas Kramer and Kara Bentley used a series of online surveys to assess individuals’ risk perceptions and decisions involving financial risk, such as a lottery or startup investments.

The authors found that when consumers attributed human qualities to luck, they more often preferred higher-risk alternatives when making financial decisions. On the other hand, when the situation involved risk of social capital (goodwill, trust and influence), participants responded as though they perceived they had more control over outcomes and felt less in need of the security provided by an anthropomorphized entity.

These results may be useful when considering public policy decisions, such as whether marketers may be required to qualify references to anthropomorphized luck, particularly when consumers may be vulnerable to taking undue financial risks, such as in gambling establishments. A sign in a casino that reads “Lady Luck is on Your Side,” for example, could lead gamblers to engage in higher-risk behaviors than a sign reading “Luck is on Your Side” or “Good Luck.” Or, limiting the use of “lady luck” on lottery scratch-off tickets could prevent devastating financial losses among lower socioeconomic status consumers.

In “Protecting the flock or policing the sheep?” Ben Fisher, assistant professor of criminal justice, studied 73 school resource officers across two school districts; one made up of primarily white students and one made up primarily of students of color.

“What we found is that the way SROs talked about the most salient threats to their schools are really different across the two districts,” Fisher said.

“At the whiter and wealthier district, it was a lot more about preventing external threats from coming into the school,” Fisher added. “In the more diverse, urban district, it was more about the students themselves as threats.”

Fisher’s findings elaborate on the ways SROs from each district perceive students. For example, in the primarily white districts, many issues are attributed to typical youth behavior such as drugs, alcohol and violence. However, those same issues in the more diverse district were attributed to the community environment bringing those issues into the classroom.

Fisher also refers to SROs as an extension of police within a community, which may often influence biases within a school or region.

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