College of Health and Human Services

Eric Post, a professor in the School of Exercise and Nutritional Sciences, is studying the preparedness and challenges of athletic trainers at the NCAA Division I, II, and III levels as colleges and universities resume sport participation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

School of Nursing professors Amanda Choflet and Judy Dye are collaborating with Sharp HealthCare to better understand the effect of COVID-19 on the stress, coping and anxiety levels of nurses. They conducted an anonymous survey and analyzde the relationships between the pandemic and mental health outcomes in nurses. By comparing outcomes across specialties, they will identify high-risk groups and work with the health system to prepare community-level interventions. Preliminary results found that a large portion of the surveyed nurses are at risk for clinically significant levels of anxiety and depression, and have also experienced some type of housing disruption. Choflet hopes the research can later be used to help inform best practices.

Surabhi Bhutani, a professor in the School of Exercise and Nutritional Sciences, is examining the relationship between loss of smell and taste and COVID-19. In partnership with colleagues, she has developed an international questionnaire to assess perception in smell, taste and chemesthesis before and during COVID-19. Preliminary findings indicate that in 4,039 participants diagnosed with COVID-19, smell, taste and chemesthesis was significantly reduced.

In another analysis of 15,000 questionnaire participants, Bhutani and colleagues found that smell loss during illness is the best predictor of COVID-19 status, This study resulted in the development of a COVID-19 rating tool that may be used to screen for recent smell loss.

Bhutani is also considering the effect of home confinement during COVID-19 on weight gain. Researchers have found people ate more food and became more sedentary during quarantine. Factors like boredom, cravings and high sleepiness led people to eat unhealthy and be sedentary, while greater self-control, positive mood and low sleepiness led to better health behaviors. The research team is collecting a second wave of data from the same people to understand whether body weight and related health behaviors changed during quarantine.

Public health researchers Hala Madanat, Susan Kiene, and Eyal Oren are leading a $5 million National Health Institute-funded project to increase uptake of testing in underserved communities. In San Diego, Latinx residents are three times more likely than white residents to become infected with the disease, and they account for 61% of local hospitalizations, according to county figures. The research team is working to curb these disparities and improve outcomes for underserved communities. The effort, dubbed “Communities Fighting COVID!,” aims to test 42,000 people in 14 months.

Eyal Oren, a professor in the School of Public Health, is working with clinical partners in San Diego to collect information on COVID-19 cases in order to understand who is more likely to test positive for COVID-19 depending on characteristics like age, gender, ethnicity or occupation. His $15,000 project is funded by San Diego County Health and Human Services. 

Lianne A. Urada, a professor in the School of Social Work, and a team of graduate students are conducting a "COVID-19 Mental Health and Wellness Survey" that will examine how the pandemic is affecting social workers, students and faculty self-care practices and ability to teach. Findings may inform social work education, policy and practices.

JoAnn Silkes, a professor in the School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, is working to establish a reliable way of administering language tests remotely to patients with stroke-induced language disorders. The project was motivated by COVID-19 stay-at-home orders and quarantine, when in-person assessments were replaced with video assessments.

School of Public Health faculty Guadalupe X. Ayala and Kristen J. Wells are leading a project to encourage participation in efforts aimed at minimizing and preventing the spread of COVID-19 in vulnerable communities. They will create a multi-channel communication campaign to promote COVID-19 testing, vaccine trial enrollment and vaccine uptake and identify hard-to-reach patients in San Diego and Imperial Counties. Their $200,000 project is funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.
 

COVID-19 is a novel virus that demands effective nurse decision-making under unique circumstances.

^{Nursing professor Christine Nibbelink}

School of Nursing professors Christine W. Nibbelink and Willa Fields are exploring factors that influence acute care nurse decision-making when caring for patients with COVID-19, such as patient deterioration assessments. The research team is surveying acute care nurses virtually. Their qualitative research will explore previously unknown factors that guide nurse decision-making during a pandemic.

Thirteen million people in the U.S. may have latent tuberculosis. For these individuals, contracting COVID-19 could activate the bacterium and lead to a more severe form of the disease. Faramarz Valafar, a professor in the School of Public Health, is conducting a multi-cohort study to investigate the synergy between TB, COVID-19 and AIDS, and their rates of transmission. 

School of Public Health researchers Richard M. Gersberg and Goran Bozinovic are studying COVID-19 shed into San Diego wastewater. Their $4,000 project is funded by a local water district. Such testing has not occurred in San Diego, but in other areas studies have demonstrated a correlation between concentrations of SARS-CoV-2  wastewater and COVID-19 clinical case reports. The researchers are analyzing historical wastewater samples from the San Diego region and correlating results with clinical case data provided by San Diego County Health and Human Services for evidence of past and future SARS-CoV-2 circulation.

There has been limited research investigating adolescent mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic or previous pandemics. Nursing professor Young-Shin Lee is studying how adolescents are experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on daily life, including anxiety, depression and academic performance. She is surveying middle and high school students in Southern California.

SDSU’s School of Public Health is partnering with the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Agency to advance the county’s COVID-19 contact tracing program in underserved communities. The $3 million project, led by public health professors Hala Madanat and Corinne McDaniels-Davidson, allows SDSU faculty to train and recruit community health workers to support the county’s disease control activities and to identify individuals believed to have come into contact with those diagnosed with COVID-19.

Public health professor Susan Kiene is evaluating the effectiveness the contact tracing program; provide
feedback on implementation effectiveness and community-identified barriers; and help inform refinements to continued program implementation.

 

As COVID-19 causes health care practitioners to move appointments online, School of Nursing professor Philip Greiner is working to improve the quality of telehealth access in Imperial County. In partnership with primary care partner Clinicas de Salud del Pueblo, he is overseeing development of best practices for telehealth, training workers and funding necessary equipment. His work is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for $90,625 as a part of the CARES Act passed by congress in response to the pandemic. 

SDSU has partnered with the San Diego County Health and Human Services Agency to train more than 300 nursing students to administer the COVID-19 vaccine. SDSU School of Nursing director Philip Greiner says many are already helping at vaccination sites across the county.

School of Public Health professors Kristen J. Wells and Susan Kiene are involved in a California-wide, academic-community partnership to identify community-engaged approaches for addressing COVID-19 prevention, treatment, clinical trial enrollment and vaccination in high-risk communities. The partnership compromises 11 academic institutions and their community partners to implement and coordinate locally-informed strategies statewide for education, research and policy. The alliance will share best practices, findings and develop system-wide culturally-competent, linguistically-relevant, and socially-considerate solutions in the form of policy changes, new infrastructure and standardized processes. SDSU’s share of the project, titled “Share, Trust, Organize, Partner: The COVID-19 California Alliance (STOP COVID-19 CA), is $320,000.

The SDSU site-specific project involves community health worker intervention for COVID-19 prevention and trial engagement, which will be implemented during the “teachable moment” of COVID-19 test results return.

College of Sciences

Biology professor David Lipson is collaborating with San Diego biotechnology company Menon Biosensors and University of California, San Diego researchers to develop a new COVID-19 test using a combination of molecular biology and nuclear magnetic resonance technology. They aim to create a high throughput testing system that circumvents the need for standard real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing.

College of Sciences psychology professor Jean Twenge and Florida State University colleague Thomas E. Joiner compared levels of mental distress experienced by U.S. adults during the pandemic to pre-pandemic distress levels. Their study, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, found that during the pandemic adults were eight times more likely to experience mental distress compared to adults in 2018. Twenge is also working on a study of mental health and time use among adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Chemistry professor Erica Forsberg is studying blood serum samples from Sharp HealthCare. She will perform untargeted metabolomics, looking for novel metabolites and biomarkers associated with COVID-19. She wants to understand unique biological mechanisms in COVID-19 positive patients.

 

 

Chemistry professor Byron Purse and his lab are launching a new project that uses fluorescent probes to search for inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2 replication. His lab is applying its expertise on fluorescent modifications of DNA and RNA to create methods for studying the replicative processes of coronaviruses. Other molecules that inhibit viral replication form the basis of possible drug leads, and fluorescence-based methods are very valuable for identifying these inhibitors quickly and efficiently.

Psychology researcher Keith Horvath is studying how substance use and HIV may impact COVID-19 infections. He is researching how these factors interact with SARS-CoV-2 and how they impact pathogen levels by dysregulating the gut-immune system. His work is funded by a $100,000 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He is wokring with colleagues Adam Carrico (University of Miami) and Sabina Hirshfield (SUNY, Downstate Health Sciences University).

Psychology professors Gregory Talavera and Linda Gallo are studying the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic upon the health and well-being of Latinx residents of the South Bay region of San Diego. The research team is surveying some 2,200 participants on the psychosocial and socio-economic impact of the pandemic, as well as COVID-19 health status, testing, hospital admissions and recovery.  

The duo is also participating in a study of 50,000 people from diverse communities nationwide to explore COVID-19 risk factors, predictors of disease severity, and its long-term impacts.This will help scientists understand why some people become so gravely ill they need to be hospitalized while others have a milder form of the disease.

Virology researchers Forest Rohwer and Naveen Vaidya are collecting and analyzing environmental samples for COVID-19. The research team is developing mathematical and computational models to predict COVID-19 risk and trends in different parts of San Diego. The project informs public agencies about how the virus spreads and determines if there are environmental reservoirs where the virus thrives. Their work is funded by a $200,000 Rapid Response Grant from the National Science Foundation.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can remain viable in aerosols for more than three hours. Virologist John Mokili is conducting a surveillance of the virus in the air of certain classrooms, labs and dormitories at SDSU, including rooms recently occupied by people who tested positive for COVID-19.

College of Education

Charlene Holkenbrink-Monk, a doctoral student in the College of Education, is surveying students at a San Diego charter K-12 school to collect and analyze their perceptions of how the school responded to the pandemic. She aims to ensure students and teachers are supported through a new and unprecedented teaching and learning experience.

College of Engineering

Several SDSU engineering professors and their students created low-cost assisted breathing devices as a part of a U.S. Department of Defense Hack-a-Vent Challenge in March. Mechanical engineer Kevin Wood and his lab created a prototype that can be assembled with readily available parts to help hospitals in case of a surge in very ill patients needing ventilator assistance. 

Civil, construction & environmental engineering professors Natalie Mladenov and Matthew Verybyla, along with public health professor Kari Sant, are measuring SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater and evaluating its persistence in water. The researchers use spiking and degradation experiments, combined with sample collection from waterways with known wastewater contamination, to better understand the persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater and surface water. The $16,700 project is funded by the California State University COAST program and San Diego River Conservancy. 

Engineering professor Kee S. Moon and a diverse group of researchers are working on an SDSU Big Ideas project to create a lung digital health platform. COVID-19 has led to a permanent shift toward virtual health care and other innovations that reduce human-to-human contact, and Moon’s project will provide the ability to easily collect and understand the lung health information of people and quickly and remotely connect health care systems to health care providers, including overwhelmed hospitals. The benefits of continuous health monitoring – even when a person shows no signs of illness – offers a significant paradigm shift in future health care. 

Moon has also helped to develop a wearable sensor the size of a Band-Aid, that can detect early, remote detection of lung function abnormalities. The wearable device contains medical-grades sensors, collecting more than 4,000 data points per second. Placed on a person’s chest, it monitors heart and lung health, looking for problems in real-time. The device can detect abnormalities in the lungs before a person shows COVID-19 symptoms, alerting doctors before there’s a true emergency and hopefully preventing hospitalizations.
 

College of Arts and Letters

A team led by anthropologist EJ Sobo and public health researcher Noe Crespo is part of a national coalition working toward an equitable and effective COVID-19 vaccination rollout among historically underserved Black, Indigenous, and Latinx populations. The CommuniVax initiative promotes COVID-19 vaccines among groups that have endured disproportionate health and economic impacts from the pandemic. SDSU's team will focus on the South County region, conducting interviews with the Latinx population for thoughts on how vaccine roll-out programs should be designed and assisting communities with capacity building in support of future public health resilience.

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The Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age developed a comprehensive resource database to help monitor and visualize outbreak patterns in San Diego County using big data, GIS and social media. The Research HUB offers six areas of collected data, including vulnerability maps, San Diego ZIP code maps, timelines that track major policies and events for 16 major cities, and SMART dashboards that use social media and keywords to monitor real-time information. The “Vulnerability Map” visualizes and maps diabetes-related emergency department discharge information by age and location in San Diego County.

 

Geography professor and Center for Information Convergence and Strategy co-director André Skupin amassed and analyzed data to create a public resource on coronavirus diseases.. Before COVID-19 resulted in a shutdown of much of the country, Skupin began sifting through thousands of documents related to coronaviruses, going back more than fifty years. He analyzed the data by focusing on bibliometric content from subject headings and keywords, and compiled it to swiftly develop a publicly accessible knowledge map and dashboard. Since launching in March 2020, this unique resource has received industry accolades and global attention, with active users in 60 countries.

 

"It's really exciting to work on a project that matters." _{HDMA cartographer} 

_{Jessica Embury, a senior.}

 

^{Real-time Research}

An interdisciplinary team of SDSU researchers affiliated with the Center for Human Dynamics in the Mobile Age is collaborating with an international group of collaborators led by Gabriela Fernandez to collect and track information about social behaviors, travel and public health policies during the pandemic. SDSU researchers built the “Track IT COVID-19 Screening Tool@SDSU,” a large-scale survey seeking input from respondents from all over the world to help track the spread of the disease and provide a clearer picture of how people across the world experience the pandemic. The group wants to help educate public health organizations, decision makers and the general public as these groups address policies related to symptoms, social distancing, policy measures and social behaviors related to COVID-19.

Researchers from SDSU’s Youth Environment Society and Space (YESS) program created a clickable resource map for children and families living in La Mesa and Spring Valley.  The map enables a spatial search for resources such as emergency childcare, shelters and food banks; as well as more mundane but important resources such as public transit, parks and schools. Geography professor Stuart Aitken and graduate students Jasmine Arpagian, Michelle Dubreuil and Empress Holiday developed the resource based on UNICEF’s emergency response strategies under the Child Friendly City initiative. (Map -- https://arcg.is/1vWb11)

Sociology professor Joseph Gibbons, public health researcher Eyal Oren and SUNY Albany professor Tse-Chuan Yang are investigating how factors like race and social capital correlate with social distancing. They are using data collected from Google Maps to determine how visits to work, stores and recreational sites have changed since the start of the pandemic. The research team uses a spatial analytical method called Geographically Weighted Regression to see how social capital — the sum benefit of social connections — and racial and ethnic composition vary across locations, and how that affects social distancing across the country. 

So far researchers have found the benefits of social capital are highly stratified: in some cases it is related to more distancing while in others it is related to less distancing.  In short, some communities are more unified in resisting COVID-19 than others.

 

 

In a recent study, economist Shoshana Grossbard found U.S. states and European countries where the pandemic started later have experienced fewer deaths from the virus than other countries. They also show that in part this advantage of starting late may relate to learning from the success of various social distancing measures, including lockdowns and school closures. Advantages may also originate from medical advances in the treatment of COVID-19 since the virus first spread. The study, "Later onset, fewer deaths from COVID," published in the medical journal Pathogens and Global Health and was co-authored by University of Turin researcher Ainoa Aparicio Fenoll.

Political science professor Cheryl O'Brien co-authored a paper in the journal ‘Politics & Gender,’ arguing that the COVID-19 pandemic exposes a multidimensional continuum of violence that comprises authoritarian, exclusionary practices, and hierarchical relations that undermine democracy and the everyday security of nondominant groups.

Economist Joseph Sabia co-authored a study that explored the impact of President Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign kickoff rally on physical distancing and COVID-19 related outcomes. Researchers used anonymized smartphone data to track likely rally goers to their home counties, and did not detect spikes in COVID-19 cases in areas that drew larger numbers of rally attendees. 

 

College of Professional Studies & Fine Arts

Colter Ray, a professor in the School of Communication, is examining loneliness trends during the COVID-19 pandemic and studying whether certain groups of people are more likely to experience loneliness. Using a series of online questionnaires distributed during the early months of the pandemic, this study inspects how people's experiences of loneliness during the pandemic change over time. Early results show that people are not reporting increases in loneliness over time; however, certain life situations are more likely to be associated with increased feelings of loneliness during the pandemic. For example, those who live alone and are not in a romantic relationship report the highest levels of loneliness. Ray's research has also shown that as people report greater levels of loneliness, the amount of compassion felt towards those affected by COVID-19 decreases.

School of Communication professor Lourdes Martinez and School of Public Health researcher Eyal Oren published a study in the American Journal of Public Health in October 2020 that analyzed tweets during San Diego's Hepatitis A outbreak in 2016 and 2017. Researchers say lessons learned from the outbreak about misinformation during a health crises can be applied to COVID-19 and possibly stem the current tide of misinformation and reverse direction with proactive engagement on social media. 

Barbara Mueller, a professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies, is examining consumer responses toward COVID-19 corporate social responsibility advertisements. Investigators are comparing consumer responses from Germany and the U.S, across four different generations, including Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X and Boomer. 

Lourdes Martinez, a professor in the School of Communication, is studying information acquisition, beliefs, attitudes, experiences of symptoms and behaviors of adults who disclose a COVID-19 diagnosis on social media. Findings can help inform the design of future COVID-19 interventions. 

Shawn Flanigan and Megan Welsh, professors in the School of Public Affairs, are surveying unsheltered homeless to understand how people are coping and surviving during shelter-in-place orders, which have disrupted access to needed services and resources.. Their project is funded by a $16,050 grant from the California Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program. 

 

Fowler College of Business 

Vivian Huangfu, a professor of management information systems, is exploring factors that influence the number of confirmed cases for COVID-19. She is collecting and analyzing data on weather information, COVID-19 related tweets and case numbers.

Xialu Liu, a professor of management information systems, is using statistical methods to analyze how government actions impact the spread of COVID 19.  

Professors Martina Musteen and Ami Doshi are working on an SDSU Big Idea Initiative that addresses food insecurity -- a global problem exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. To encourage environmentally regenerative and socially equitable food production, distribution and consumption, the researchers are looking at alternative collaboration and business models that are inclusive and have the capacity to bring about fundamental change. Faculty will study food ecosystems and best practices across related industry domains, with the hope of brokering new ideas and setting in motion a lasting, sustainability-based policy agenda to curb food insecurity.