Stress and diabetes coexist in a vicious cycle. Different types of stress lead to diabetes, while diabetes itself is a major life stressor. This was the focus of the Chicago Biomedical Consortium’s 19th annual symposium, “Stress and Human Health: Diabetes,” in November 2022. There, researchers primarily from the Chicago area met to explore how different sources of stress – from the cells to the community – impact diabetes outcomes. Presenters discussed the consequences of stress arising from mutant proteins, obesity, sleep disturbances, environmental pollutants, COVID-19, and racial and socioeconomic disparities. This symposium showcased the latest diabetes research and highlighted promising new treatment approaches for mitigating stress in diabetes.

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Preterm birth is the most common birth complication in the United States. To date, there are no effective public health strategies to reduce the burden of prematurity. Using geospatial information system (GIS) mapping, we identified the most salient risk factors of preterm birth across US counties targetable for future interventions. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Risk factors of preterm birth were identified from the perinatal health nonprofit organization, March of Dimes, and included factors such as obesity, smoking, insurance coverage and poverty. US 2013 county-level data on sociodemographic characteristics, behavioral risk factors and preterm birth were extracted and combined from the American Census, Center for Disease Control, and US Health Resources and Services Administration. Spatial autocorrelation and multivariate spatial regression were used to determine the risk factors most strongly associated with preterm birth. These models were adjusted for race, given well-documented race disparities for preterm birth. As a case-study comparison, we mapped risk factors in the two states with the highest and lowest proportion of preterm births in 2013. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: In our preliminary analysis, obesity was the factor most strongly associated with preterm birth (ß = 7.32, SE: 1.13, p<0.001) at the US county-level. Surprisingly, smoking was not found to be significantly associated with preterm birth. In 2013, Vermont had the lowest prevalence of preterm birth at 7.6% and Mississippi had the highest prevalence of preterm birth at 13.1%. Health insurance coverage and obesity were the two risk factors that differed between Vermont and Mississippi. The median proportion of uninsured individuals in Mississippi counties was four times higher than that of Vermont counties (26.3% vs 10.9%, p<0.01). Similarly, the median obesity prevalence in Mississippi counties was significantly higher than the median obesity prevalence in Vermont counties (38.8% vs. 25.2%). DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Public health efforts aimed at reducing obesity and increasing health insurance coverage may have the greatest impact at addressing the US burden of preterm birth. Further, geospatial mapping is a powerful analytic tool to identify regions in the US where preterm birth interventions would be most beneficial.

We present BV photometry and the results of a search for stellar variability in the Galactic globular cluster M 69. The resulting color–magnitude diagram shows significant contamination by field stars. In our variability search we found 62 variable stars, 54 of which were new discoveries.

As British Ambassador to Libya between 2002 and 2006 the author has been directly involved in many of the major changes and developments that have taken place between Libya and Britain in recent years. This paper, which was originally presented as a lecture to the Society for Libyan Studies in London on 8 February 2007, describes these recent developments and the role they have played in repairing relations between Libya and Britain and with the wider international community.

RR Lyrae stars (RRL) are a favourite standard candle for globular clusters and other old stellar populations, yet recent absolute magnitude calibrations, MV(RR), span more than 0.2 mag. Precise distance estimates for nearby globular clusters will eventually be available through satellite-based trigonometric parallaxes (Layden, these proceedings), thus providing a resolution to this old problem.

Here, we present a progress report on our high quality time-series photometry of RRL in the nearby globular cluster NGC 3201 - the first obtained for this cluster with a CCD. The resulting light curves provide accurate intensity-mean apparent magnitudes and reddening estimates, which will in turn be used to calibrate MV(RR) once a satellite-based parallax for NGC 3201 is available.

We describe two projects currently underway to provide an improved calibration of RR Lyrae luminosities.

We describe a photometric survey for variable stars in twelve metal-rich globular clusters, and provide results for the first two clusters.

We present results of EUVE spectrophotometry of the EUV luminous polar, QS Tel (RE1938-461), together with contemporaneous optical photometry and spectroscopy. In marked contrast to the ROSAT survey observations, the EUVE light curve shows two flux maxima per orbital cycle, implying that both magnetic poles were active. A deep, narrow dip is observed during one of the two flux maxima, exhibiting a complex morphology which includes pronounced flickering behaviour. Although this feature is probably caused by stream occultation of the emission region, the apparent lack of spectral hardening at this time disfavours photoelectric absorption by cold gas as the dominant source of opacity. Whilst the overall EUVE spectrum can be characterized by a low temperature (~15eV) blackbody, implying a large soft/hard component flux ratio (~50), tentative evidence of an absorption edge from NeVI at 85A and lines due to NeVIII and NeVII at 98Å and 116Å respectively indicate that more sophisticated models must be employed. Quasi-simultaneous optical photometry shows a substantial change in the light curve over an interval of just 3 days and little evidence of correlated behaviour with the EUV flux. We consider the implications of these results on the accretion geometry and the structure of the accretion flow.

Zinn & Lee (1994, in prep.) have shown that the halo globular clusters with Rgc < 6 kpc are dominated by clusters with relatively blue horizontal branches for their metal abundance, which they interpret as a sign of their old relative ages. Of these “Old Halo” clusters having −1.7 < [Fe/H] < −0.8 dex, they find a net rotation about the galactic center of Vrot = 59 ± 22 km s−1, and a line-of-sight velocity dispersion of σlos = 62 ± 10 km s−1.