SCIENCE

“People don’t understand the power behind storytelling, especially when it’s coming from the person whose story it is,” Valecha said. Valecha also said the program will give students valuable skills such as editing, video recording and voiceover.

To Valecha, the Terrier Creator Program will help set BU apart from other universities in the area and the nation.

“I believe that [the Terrier Creator Program] is just going to help students a lot as well because some people, they might be very shy, or they might think that they don’t have the skills to ever be in front of the camera,” Valecha said.

Sargent professor uses iron deficiency study in new ways

BY MARA MELLITS Associate Science Editor

In the United States, around ten million Americans are iron deficient, and around five million have iron deficiency anemia, according to the National Library of Medicine. In India, however, the number is much larger — 50% of adolescent girls are anemic.

Hagere Yilma, a clinical assistant professor at Boston University’s Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, said social norms in India contribute to iron deficiency.

“There is this common cultural and gender norms practice where women are eating last in their families,” Yilma said. “What’s left over is not usually the most nutritious or the most iron rich.”

Yilma said iron deficiency anemia is characterized by a low oxygen-carrying capacity for blood cells or, in simple terms, that a person is not getting enough iron in their diet, which could cause them to feel weak and fatigued.

The RANI project, short for Reduction in Anemia through Normative Innovation, was wrapped in 2021 and designed to lower that number of anemic women in India. Yilma said she worked on the RANI project with a team at The George Washington University.

“What we were seeing was there were gender and social norms as well as other sorts of psychological and environmental factors that are determining whether or not somebody’s doing this very easy behavior of taking a pill or eating enough iron-rich foods,” Yilma said.

Yilma said the iron supplement pill is something she’d call a “really cool medical innovation” because it lessened the impacts of food insecurity.

“Trying to eradicate poverty is a big task, but you could take these supplements when you can’t afford or have access to iron-rich foods,” Yilma said.

Despite a global promotion by the World Health Organization, Yilma said many people are not taking iron supplements, including pregnant women who are “very much at risk for anemia.”

Yilma said one of the many reasons why iron deficiency is so high in many parts of India is because many women are vegetarian, which limits the amount of iron they’re taking in.

In part due to these cultural norms that make women’s daily lives “characterized by so much work from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep,” Yilma said many women don’t even know they’re iron deficient.

To create change, the RANI project had to develop a “multicomponent intervention” in the form of monthly community meetings.

Women learned about what causes anemia, and at the end of each session, women volunteered to get their hemoglobin tested to check their anemia levels. The levels were then color coded.

“You could see, just by looking at the colors, how much anemia was in your community,” Yilma said.

And, she said, the project was a success — including among women of marginalized caste groups.

“That’s really hard to do and that doesn’t always happen because these marginalized caste groups don’t usually have the same access to healthcare or social support because of prejudice and discrimination in our social and structural systems,” Yilma said.

Even though discriminating against caste is illegal, she said it still occurs.

“Some people are born into higher caste groups where they might have a little bit more privilege in society, maybe people revere them a little bit more,” Yilma said. “And some

OintTag, a small circular sticker that goes on your phone case, makes it possible to share a link with a person without them opening their phone or typing out a link to a certain website or app. All it takes is one tap. An OintTag can be individualized and set up on the Oint website to personalize the link that is sent to other phones.

The OintTag uses a technology called Near Field Communication, the same mechanism as Apple Pay and Google Pay, which allows the chip inside the sticker to share information, but Mayer said “the way you use the tag is my software.”

With the product already developed, Mayer now works with a team of advisors at the BUild Lab to further the growth of OintTag. From the Innovation Pathway at the lab, Mayer has received about $2000 of funding and other benefits.

“On that pathway, you can get money for each stage that you’re at, and then you also get mentor

Mayer said through the program he will live at Boston University over the summer and take part in a 10-week intensive program.

“I think I’m at the stage where I could really start taking it seriously,” Mayer said.

Mayer started working on the OintTag during his senior year of high school and brought them to Boston University where he sold them to his new friends. Through his connections at BU, Mayer has been able to pitch OintTag to companies for investment and to events to sell his product in bulk.

“It’s just really surprising the rooms that I’ve been in just because of the BUild Lab,” Mayer said.

Diya Gandhi, a sophomore in the College of General Studies, lives in the same dorm as Mayer. Gandhi said she remembers when she met Mayer.

“He was just showing me his OintTag and he was like, ‘Tap this, watch what happens,’ Gandhi said. “I was like, ‘Oh, no way! You should start selling those.’” people are born into lower caste groups where they’re marginalized.”

Now at BU, Yilma, joined by undergraduate students, continues to analyze the project in two different ways.

Maisie Bradley, a senior in SAR, is working independently and with Yilma to understand the psychological and social factors that are impacting whether or not women decide to take the iron folic acid supplements.

“It’s really kind of fun and really academically interesting to try to figure out what are the real-life causes for the things that we’re seeing in the data,” Bradley said.

Yi-Hsi Huang, a sophomore in SAR, is also working with Yilma. Huang analyzes data, focusing on the Risk Perception Attitude framework.

The RPA framework has two components. The risk perception component measures a person’s awareness of their own health risks, while the efficacy component measures how much an individual perceives the prevention measures as effective.

“In our case, that would be on whether the individual believes that taking iron supplements would be an accessible and effective solution,” Huang said. This means that Huang compares iron supplement intake before and after the intervention to see whether or not there is a correlation.

“For a lot of parts of the world, we take it for granted that, as long as you’re eating enough iron, it’s not something you have to worry about,” Yilma said. “But in many parts of the world, people are faced with food insecurity. So getting enough iron is harder to do than you would think.”

Gandhi said she recommended Mayer change the price for the OintTag from $5 to $10 “because people will pay more.”

“Honestly, he’s like one of the reasons I switched my major,” said Gandhi, who now plans on transferring from CGS to CAS to study computer science. She said watching Mayer pursue his passion “shows [her] to try things and it’s inspirational.”

Mayer was able to show his friends the potential for OintTag at the BUild Lab’s Pitch & Pizza event where he won first place and crowd favorite for his one-