Proyectos

El proyecto consiste en realizar talleres de apreciación y creación cinematográficos dirigidos a profesoras y profesores de enseñanza general básica a cargo de las asignaturas de artes visuales, música, lenguaje e Historia y a especialistas del área de música y artes de la escuela de cultura y difusión artística. Esto con el propósito de aplicar lo aprendido en el aula con profesorado y estudiantes de cursos de 6° a 8° básico de las escuelas beneficiadas. Los talleres se relacionan con objetivos de aprendizaje de cada una de las asignaturas participantes, de modo de conectar los conocimientos y experimentación cinematográfica con los aprendizajes escolares esperados, facilitando así su aplicación. Los talleres se realizarán una vez por semana en dependencias de la Escuela de Cultura y Difusión Artística, tendrán una duración de tres horas. Se destinarán 4 meses para la capacitación teórico práctica y tres meses para acompañar la puesta en práctica de la unidad planificada en los cursos de los distintos establecimientos y posteriormente evaluar los resultados y realizar una muestra de los trabajos realizados.

El presente proyecto, tiene como objetivo general analizar las características discursivo-literarias, artísticas, editoriales y simbólico-culturales que exhibe la configuración de los imaginarios de identidad en la literatura para las infancias y adolescencias que versiona relatos de tradición oral de los pueblos originarios de Chile en las últimas dos décadas. Los objetivos específicos contemplan identificar autores, obras, géneros y formatos de este tipo de obras; describir las características discursivo-literarias, artísticas y editoriales de estos relatos, e interpretar problematizadoramente sentidos sobre la configuración de imaginarios de identidades.

Hypotheses: 1) There is a significant relationship between a) dimensions of reading motivation, b) strategies to teach reading, and c) reading performance of adolescent students. 2) Teachers whom foster reading motivation have a repertoire of teaching strategies directly associated with it. In sum, the general objective of this proposal is to analyze the relationship between reading competence, intrinsic motivation, and self-efficacy perception, and to analyze the characteristics of the didactic strategies that can promote the motivation associated with reading.

Hypotheses: 1) There is a significant relationship between a) dimensions of reading motivation, b) strategies to teach reading, and c) reading performance of adolescent students. 2) Teachers whom foster reading motivation have a repertoire of teaching strategies directly associated with it. In sum, the general objective of this proposal is to analyze the relationship between reading competence, intrinsic motivation, and self-efficacy perception, and to analyze the characteristics of the didactic strategies that can promote the motivation associated with reading.

En América Latina y el Caribe, las inequidades de género persisten en, y a través de, la educación, modelando las trayectorias de vida de niñas/os, jóvenes, mujeres y hombres de manera desigual, e impactando en el desarrollo sostenible de la región. En Chile, si bien se ha avanzado en la reducción de brechas de género en años de escolaridad, existe una fuerte segregación de género entre áreas del conocimiento en la educación superior y entre ocupaciones. Esta segregación horizontal, que genera brechas en oportunidades sociales y condiciones laborales entre hombres y mujeres, tiene sus raíces en procesos de socialización tempranos, y los sistemas educativos son fundamentales en su desarrollo y reproducción a lo largo de la vida. Sustentado en una perspectiva de género y un enfoque del curso de la vida, el presente proyecto busca desarrollar una agenda de investigación interdisciplinaria sobre segregación horizontal temprana en Chile, así como sobre sus antecedentes, moderadores y consecuencias. Para esto, se estudiarán los patrones generizados de elección de cursos electivos de enseñanza media científico-humanista, identificando diferencias entre y dentro de áreas del conocimiento, con foco en: 1) su estabilidad durante el período 2011-2022; 2) su consistencia entre establecimientos, de diversa dependencia administrativa, ubicación geográfica y composición (socio-económica, académica y de género); 3) el rol de otros significativos (padres y apoderados, docentes y pares) en estas elecciones; 4) los principales moderadores a nivel de estudiante, aula/docente y establecimiento escolar; y 5) su influencia en las transiciones a la educación superior. Lo anterior, en el contexto de un sistema escolar altamente privatizado y socio-económicamente segregado; de la desigual implementación de una reforma curricular, a partir del año 2020, destinada a ampliar y estandarizar la variedad de cursos electivos disponibles entre escuelas; y de los efectos diferenciados de la crisis sanitaria por COVID-19 en la provisión de educación, que han ampliado las brechas socioeconómicas y geográficas en resultados educativos, debido al extenso período de cierre de las escuelas y al diferencial acceso y experiencias de educación remota. Se analizará en qué medida estas características y cambios estructurales del sistema educativo interactúan con las diferencias de género en las preferencias y elecciones de los estudiantes. Mediante análisis de datos secundarios (bases de datos administrativas y de evaluaciones estandarizadas de cobertura censal); la aplicación de cuestionarios, en dos ocasiones de medición, a estudiantes de enseñanza media; y la integración de técnicas de análisis estadístico avanzadas (que incluyen análisis de datos longitudinales, modelos multinivel, análisis de clases latentes y análisis de redes sociales), el proyecto generará evidencia para comprender los mecanismos sociales a través de los cuales el género afecta las trayectorias educativas. Así, se espera contribuir al diseño de políticas públicas orientadas a reducir las brechas de género en oportunidades de aprendizaje y en las trayectorias educativas y laborales. Los resultados esperados del proyecto son: 1) publicar artículos en revistas de corriente principal, 2) diseminar resultados en circuitos nacionales e internacionales, 3) fortalecer la capacidad de investigación educacional con perspectiva de género, incorporando investigadoras jóvenes y formando a estudiantes y asistentes de investigación, 4) promover una perspectiva interdisciplinaria y un enfoque del curso de la vida para el estudio del rol del género en educación, 5) establecer una red de colaboración con investigadores internacionales, e 6) identificar relaciones causales, políticas relevantes y buenas prácticas que puedan ser transferidas. El proyecto constituye un aporte novedoso al estudio del rol del género en las trayectorias educativas en Chile. El equipo de investigadoras tiene vasta experiencia en investigación y en la aplicación de métodos cuantitativos avanzados para responder a preguntas sustantivas sobre equidad y efectividad en educación. Nuestra colaboración previa, así como nuestra formación disciplinar complementaria, darán sinergia y viabilidad al presente proyecto.

It is proposed to assess the feasibility of using ultrasound as a nonintrusive, in-situ, probe of plastic behavior in high-entropy alloys (HEAs). More specifically, whether it is possible to use ultrasound to reliably characterize the plasticity deformation mechanism---slip, TWIP, TRIP---of Fe80-xCo10Cr10Mnx. To this end, the speed of sound will be measured, continuously, as a function of applied stress in uniaxial tensile tests. In previous work, proposers have shown that the speed of sound as a function of stress provides a reliable tool to measure dislocation density in aluminum, copper, and stainless steel. In the latter case, it has also been shown to reliably discriminate between slip and twinning as a deformation mechanism. It is now proposed to study the possibility of extending this capability not only to new materials, HEAs, but also to a new mechanism, phase transformation. We will start with the materials whose plastic deformation is slip-dominated, since we have robust experience in this case. We shall then move to the TWIP material, where our more recent experience will be brought to bear, to end up with the unexplored, from the point of view of ultrasound, TRIP material. Samples for tensile loading will be prepared. They will be tested using a universal testing machine and ultrasound measurements of longitudinal wave velocity will be carried out in-situ. A decrease in the wave velocity as a function of applied stress will indicate a proliferation of dislocations; the dislocation density will be determined as a function of stress as will the parameters of Taylor's rule. An increase in wave velocity as a function of stress will indicate a decrease in average grain size. Modeling will be applied to determine whether this is due to twinning or phase transformation. These results will also be validated with post-mortem XRD, TEM, and metallography measurements, as well as ex-situ acoustic measurements. The success of the proposed research would have short-term and long-term benefits: In the short term it would provide a non-intrusive tool---ultrasound---to assist in the search for HEAs with pre-determined properties, as needed for specific applications. In the long-term, it would pave the way for the development of a practical, non-intrusive, tool for the evaluation of HEA pieces in service.

The impacts of biodiversity loss on the quality of life (QoL) are at the forefront of major national and international agreements; nevertheless, the understanding of these connections is complex and unclear. Our project will address this critical issue, focusing on how rural communities develop and organize themselves to enhance the satisfaction of their QoL under new socio-ecological conditions, in interaction with other social, political and economic trends at local scales. Biodiversity loss will determine changes in the provisioning of nature’s contributions to people, which, in turn, affects multiple dimensions of QoL. However, the existing empirical foundation has been shaped by research with mainly an economic point of view, which has a limited and partial concept of QoL. On the contrary, people have diverse perspectives regarding their QoL and how it can be satisfied by biodiversity; beyond the domain of wealth and income are issues such as health, justice, freedom, and equality, which have not yet been assessed. Changes in nature’s contributions due to biodiversity loss may directly affect the subjective or psychological aspects of QoL. In turn, enhanced biodiversity conservation may improve some aspects of QoL, such as household wealth, by generating income via tourism-related activities or agricultural production, or respiratory health by exposing individuals to beneficial or protective environmental conditions. Respiratory health has received growing attention because respiratory diseases constitute a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, while the scientific literature on causative relationships and mechanisms is almost nonexistent. The scarce existing evidence shows that biodiversity loss could trigger upper respiratory tract infections, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Furthermore, the scant evidence has a strong bias toward urban spaces, while very few studies have investigated a gradient of environmental exposure in rural communities. Within this framework, our overarching goal is to determine the consequences of biodiversity loss on the QoL of rural communities. While biodiversity loss will be proxied by changes in native vegetation, QoL will be addressed as a multidimensional concept and measured through subjective (i.e. life satisfaction) and objective indicators (i.e. respiratory health). For this, we will complement inductive and deductive approaches to (i) characterize the changes in native vegetation, (i) assess the changes in the order of satisfaction of the dimensions of QoL and the set of nature’s contributions associated with biodiversity loss, and (ii) estimate the changes in life satisfaction and respiratory health in relation to changes in native vegetation among rural people. Fieldwork will be carried out in the district of Alhué, in the Metropolitan Region, a territory with one of the lowest QoLs in Chile that has been seriously impacted by biodiversity changes and anthropic activities. The methodology will rely on qualitative, such as focus groups and semi-structured interviews, and quantitative methods, including satellite image analysis, structured questionnaires, and analysis of medical records from the local public health center. This project will be led by an interdisciplinary team from environmental, social, and medical sciences. This research will become a reference for other scientific disciplines that try to connect the complex linkages between QoL and biodiversity management. Also, outcomes will advance the frontiers of scientific knowledge and provide key insights into public policy making processes.

One goal is to enhance the methods being currently developed by Espı́ndola (Physics), Krause (Physiology), and Xavier (Biomedical Engineering) for reconstructing capillary networks with ultrasound. The super-resolution is needed for early detection diseases such as cognitive decline, cancer, or liver fibrosis. They perfuse lipid-encapsulated microbubbles as contrast agents and then localize the bubbles in the ultrasound images with the singular value filter. However, that method leaves a non-negligible percentage of bubbles undetected. Here we propose to complement the singular value filter for the detection and tracking of microbubbles with the sophisticated and mathematically sound Mumford-Shah method for image contour detection, which stems from the conceptually-insightful and numerically-robust perspective of the minimization of energies. In the reconstruction of the capillary network from ultrasound, it is impossible to directly distinguish the microbubbles, or even the blood vessels, in each frame separately, due to the attentuation and degradation in this imaging technique. It is essential to take into account the dynamic nature of the problem, distinguishing the slowly-varying signals emitted by the tissue from those emitted by the microbubbles, which flow rapidly, behave nonlinearly, and have a much shorter coherence length. We therefore propose to regard the collection of two-dimensional frames as a single three-dimensional image, where a moving bubble becomes a tubular neighbourhood of a filament, which the Mumford-Shah model is expected to recover. From these filaments, bubbles can be detected and tracked, and the vertical inclinations of theses filaments will yield the microbubbles velocities. From the velocity profiles it is possible to estimate the shear wall stresses (their ‘tangential elastic rigidities’) of the blood vessels, and anomalies in these stresses are commonly good indicators of the presence of specific diseases. A fortunate encounter between mathematics and mechanics led to the observation that the problem of finding the path that the propagation of a crack will follow inside a structure upon loading could be solved with the mathematical theory (the analysis of free-discontinuity problems) developed for the apparently unrelated image segmentation Mumford-Shah model. The variational fracture theory initiated by Francfort and Marigo is by now (20 years after) very well established. The second goal of this proposal is to further develop the ongoing collaboration between Song (Pharmaceutics), Siegel (Pharmaceutics), Sánchez (Numerical analysis), Calderer (Applied mathematics), and the PI on the study of the debonding of polymer gels from rigid substrates (relevant in the design of the synthetic polymers coating the metallic parts of pacemakers and other medical prostheses) from this variational fracture theory perspective. The third main goal is to apply the mathematical analysis of free-discontinuity problems to the modelling of the evolution of the cavity in the block caving technique in underground rock mining. This has been pursued by Ortega, Lecaros, and coworkers from the side of applied mathematics in academia, in collaboration with Gaete from the Geomechanics Research Department at El Teniente, research group to which Gutiérrez and the PI have joined in the last months. We propose to study the seismic activity induced by the fracture of the rock mass due to gravity, following the works in the last decade within the variational fracture theory that incorporate the inertia effects. The final aim is to optimize the injection of water jets for the aminoration of the seismic events near the operation sites. The three research lines are applications of the phase-field regularization by Ambrosio and Tortorelli of the Mumford-Shah free-discontinuity model, a different variant being required in each of the three contexts. The first stage of the implementation is of mathematical modelling and high-level numerical simulation abilities, in which the intuition and first-hand knowledge from the members of the research team that are experts in vascular function, ultrasound imaging, polymer chemistry, and mining geomechanics is translated into particular mathematical concepts and concrete computational methods. This is followed by a stage of calibration and validation, where the full interplay with experiments is required. The product of a robust and validated computational method will constitute then an advancement in the capabilities, available resources, and understanding in each of the applied disciplines.

Our interest in this project is to obtain two-dimensional models for a three-dimensional thin structures involving situations: • Magnetoelastic plates which are heterogeneous and whose heterogeneity occur at a small scale which depends of the thickness of the plate. Depending on energy scaling and the ratio between these two small parameters, different theories can be obtained. • Poroelastic shell containing a viscous fluid. • Quasistatic evolution problems for linearly elastoplastic shell with hardening.

Materia investigada: Biomedicina, enfermedades cardiovasculares, regulación transcripcional.