VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Deciding to Play: Exploring Why Adolescent Athletes Under-report Sport-related Concussions using a Mixed Methods Approach
Keywords: Adolescents
Concussion
Decision-Making
Injury
Reporting
Sports

Sport participation offers several benefits for adolescent athletes but is not without limitations, including risk of injury. Sport-related concussions (SRC) leave adolescents vulnerable to significant health, physical, social, and educational disruptions. Current recommendations emphasize SRC education and removal from play upon suspicion of concussion. However, many adolescents under-report SRC symptoms, but the scope of under-reporting for this population is not well understood, nor are the underlying motivations for (under)reporting. It is necessary to interrogate the relationship between SRC knowledge and reporting and invite athletes to share their decision-making processes. In consideration of developmental, educational, psychosocial and sport cultural findings, the objective of the current research was to understand why adolescents under-report sport-related concussions. Using a mixed methods approach, two studies were developed. The purpose of Study 1 was to assess the current literature on SRC under-reporting in adolescent athletes 13-18 years old through a systematic review. In total, 26 articles were included in the review. All studies found evidence for athletes failing to disclose concussion symptoms; both male and female athletes were found to under-report, with limited evidence suggesting male athletes under-report SRC more frequently. Prior concussion knowledge does not appear to predict sustained improvements in under-reporting behaviours, highlighting the complexity of under-reporting decision-making. The purpose of Study 2 was to understand how athletes’ attitudes, experiences and beliefs regarding concussions influence their under-reporting decisions and behaviours. This research employed a constructivist grounded theory approach. Participants included 17 elite athletes, 16-18 years old, from a variety of sports. A substantive theoretical model demonstrates personal, social, cultural, and biophysical processes that contribute to under-reporting decisions. The model identifies multiple interconnected processes that contribute to ‘high-risk’ situations of under-reporting. Findings implicate the collective responsibility of under-reporting and the use of risk profiles as a novel approach to understand and consequently improve under-reporting behaviours. Overall, this research synthesizes evidence on adolescent under-reporting, challenges the reliance on concussion education as the primary tool for improving behaviours, and provides a theoretical foundation for how to support adolescent athlete decision-making for improved reporting outcomes.
A Six-Case Comparative Study to Identify Systems Thinking in Government-designed Public Health Strategies
Keywords: Complex Adaptive Systems
Governance
Public Health
Public Policy
Strategy Design
Systems Thinking

Governments around the world are grappling with increasingly complex and hard to solve public health problems, such as the rise in chronic diseases and increasing health inequity. Complexity is a significant challenge for policy makers who design large-scale interventions for several reasons: the interconnected dynamics of a system might lead policy design to overlook potential synergies, the heterogeneity of factors and the nonlinearity of processes in a system make causal links difficult to determine, and prediction is difficult because multiple forces shape the future behaviour of the system. Traditional theoretical frameworks, such as the biomedical or behavioural health models, are based on a reductionist paradigm that holds that all phenomena can be understood by reducing them to their smallest components and studying their interactions. This reductionist stance is inadequate for dealing with increasing complexity in public health. In this dissertation, I explore the use of systems thinking as a theoretical framework for understanding complex public health issues and designing government-led public health strategies. A systems thinking framework considers how dynamic feedback, unpredictability, and interconnected elements impact the overall structures and patterns in a system. I use a multiple case study analysis to investigate the extent to which systems thinking concepts and social determinants of health approaches are present in the design processes of three federal and three provincial strategies in Canada. Each case applies an original analytical framework to policy documents and interviews with senior strategy design leaders (n=18). Through comparative analysis, I find that that although no cases formally applied systems thinking to strategy design, the concepts are present to a significant, moderate, or limited extent. The analysis also presents a set of contextual factors in the policy environment that help or hinder the use of systems thinking. Contextual factors include the evidence-base of the strategy topic and theory of change, the policy environment and policy levers available, the specifics of the strategy design process and operational resources, and the leadership, culture, and skills of the workforce. This study contributes to the calls for evidence of applied systems thinking in public health policy and systems research.
Sensitivity of Hostile Hemodynamics to Intracranial Aneurysm Geometry
Keywords: aneurysm
cfd
fluids
geometry
imaging

An intracranial aneurysm (IA) is an abnormal outpouching of an artery in the brain and is thought to be present in about 1 in 30 adults. Rupture of an IA is a devastating event leading to death or disability in most cases. To supplement clinical treatment decisions, researchers have turned to hemodynamics, which are thought to contribute to the growth and rupture of IAs. Simulations using medical-image-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) yield patient-specific risk parameters, but these parameters are often highly uncertain due to modelling limitations, limiting their clinical utility. Recent CFD studies have shown IA rupture to be associated with wall shear stress (WSS) and jet impingement, but these studies may be overlooking turbulent-like flow instabilities. This thesis investigates the nature of these flow instabilities and risk parameters in the context of uncertainty due to geometry. To characterize these instabilities, this thesis highlights the novel use of spectrograms as an interpretable summary of the flow field (Chapter 2) and demonstrates their variation in a cohort of 50 IAs (Chapter 3). Based on these spectrograms, I developed a novel marker to quantify harmonic flow features and demonstrated that this marker was a better predictor of rupture than popular WSS-based metrics in our cohort of 50 high-fidelity IA simulations (Chapter 4). Overestimation of the IA neck is a widespread issue among IA CFD researchers, which could selectively promote or inhibit the development of flow instabilities. To overcome this issue, I devel- oped a novel technique for improving IA segmentation from 3D imaging (Chapter 5) and showed that hemodynamic parameters including flow instabilities can be sensitive to these common segmentation errors, potentially muddling efforts toward rupture prediction (Chapter 6). Hemodynamic parameters are ultimately only useful if they are robust to modelling error and provide useful diagnostic information that is not more-easily extracted from geometry alone. Lever- aging a recent deep neural network for unsupervised 3D shape interpolation, I created plausible interpolations between patient-derived geometries and demonstrated the hemodynamic sensitivity to these broad changes in geometry (Chapter 7). This research exposes limitations inherent to reduced risk indices and could help researchers identify better risk markers.
Using the Nanoparticle Protein Corona to Build Nanomaterials
Keywords: Genome-wide screen
Nanoparticles
Protein corona
Protein nanomaterials
Receptors

Nanoparticles are used to carry medical agents to diseased sites for treatment and diagnosis. When nanoparticles are administered in biological environments, hundreds of proteins rapidly adsorb onto their surface and form a protein layer known as the protein corona. These adsorbed proteins cover up the original surface of the nanoparticle and form a new interface that interacts with cell and tissues. Strategies to use targeting or blocking molecules on the nanoparticle to circumvent or abolish protein corona formation have been unsuccessful. The protein corona forms regardless of the material composition, surface chemistry, size and shape. Consequently, it is necessary to understand how the protein corona directs interactions with cells and tissues to design effective nanoparticles. In this thesis, I developed methods to understand and use the protein corona as a nanomaterial for delivery. In aim 1, I developed a workflow combining mass spectrometry, genome-wide screens and bioinformatic analysis to identify interactions between specific proteins in the protein corona and receptors on the cell surface. This approach allows us to systematically discover the molecular interactions formed between the protein corona and cells. Given that the protein corona dictates biological fate rather than the underlyingnanoparticle, I turned the protein corona into a standalone nanomaterial in aim 2. This eliminated the need for the underlying nanoparticle which is often foreign to the body. Altogether, this thesis provides researchers with the foundational tools needed to understand the biological behavior of the protein corona and to use it as a nanomaterial for effective and predictable delivery. This thesis has broad implications because it presents a paradigm shift away from preventing the protein corona and towards exploiting it for delivery.
A Discriminating Memory: Learning and Chemosensation in C. elegans
Keywords: arrestin
c. elegans
discrimination
kamin blocking
learning
olfaction

Animals receive information about the external world through their senses, which feed this information into the nervous system where it’s processed, stored, and subsequently influences behaviour. In this work, I describe both how the first steps of chemosensory processing occur in the sensory neurons of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, and how the information provided by this chemosensory input, in conjunction with previous sensory information and the internal satiety state of the animal, act to modulate subsequent behaviour. In the first part of this work, I provide an analysis of the phenomenon of Kamin Blocking in C. elegans, in which past learning about sensory cues can modulate the ability of subsequent cues to form memories, and offer a molecular analysis of Kamin Blocking in the worm which challenges a common interpretation of it in mammals. In the second part of this work, I focus on the very initial steps occurring during chemosensation in C. elegans chemosensory neurons, and find that discrimination between different olfactory stimuli which are sensed within the same neuron relies on β-arrestin mediated desensitization of ligand-bound receptors. I provide a model for how desensitization acts to enable intraneuronal olfactory discrimination in the paradigm being tested, offering a resolution to a longstanding question in the field, and test several predictions of this model. In sum, the research presented in this work describes both the earliest mechanisms of chemosensory biology in the worm, and examines how chemosensation acts to create memories and modulate subsequent behaviour. By exploiting the simplicity and genetic tractability of C. elegans, the research described here deepens our understanding of the mechanisms underlying (and linking) the most fundamental aspects of sensation and learning in animals.
Women’s Prisons and the Politics of Punishment in Nazi and Postwar Germany
Keywords: Cold War
Germany
Holocaust
Nazi
Prisons
Women

This dissertation is a new line of inquiry in the history of gender, crime, and punishment in modern Germany and during the Holocaust, illuminating the degree to which conventional prisons confined and often terrorized women during and after the Third Reich. Prisons in twentieth-century Germany are largely overlooked, while studies of concentration camps and Soviet forced labor camps have understandably drawn the attention of historians, but their history provides an important and rich template for critical understandings of carceral systems and their enduring power in the modern age. This project has two main objectives: first, to analyze how conceptions of gender shaped the lives of women prisoners and informed the administration of penal institutions, and second, to shed light on the position of prisons in relation to the Holocaust and to better understand the role of prisons in nascent postwar East and West German societies. The ways in which the “outside world” had concrete effects on the “inside world” of prisons are explored throughout this research, with the following interest groups at the core of the narrative: people in prison, staff in prison, families of people in prison, political actors, and broader society. The primary characteristics of the female prisoner population changed with the political, social, and economic climates of the times, as did the methods of punishment and rehabilitation, but the overarching function of prisons as sites of state power was constant. This study reveals that the criminalization of women’s sexuality and class did not falter even as the criminalization of women and their intersections with race, religion, and politics fluctuated enormously from one German administration to another. Underpinning twentieth-century German women’s prisons was a paradox of invisibility and visibility. Although women were not deemed important enough to warrant substantial sex and gender-specific treatment, they were dangerous enough to confine. Women were also the legal system’s afterthought, except for when the government sought to control their sexuality and exploit their labor. Despite the repressive conditions to which women prisoners were subjected, many found ways to resist the isolating and demoralizing effects of incarceration.
New Methods for the Site-selective O-H and C-H Functionalization of Sugars
Keywords: Carbohydrate
Isomerization
Oxidation
Photoredox
Sulfamoylation
Sulfation

Carbohydrates are among the most abundant biomolecules in nature and serve as the metabolic precursors to nearly all other biomolecules. The immense structural diversity found among carbohydrates has resulted in an equally diverse profile of biological functions, including roles in energy storage, structural support, and cell-cell communication. Recognizing the myriad of vital roles carbohydrates serve in animals, development of carbohydrate-based drugs has been pursued intensely and has resulted in the prolific use of drugs like empagliflozin, enoxaparin and molnupiravir. The function of most natural carbohydrates is unknown and glycobiological research on them is limited by their availability. To facilitate this research, new synthetic methods able to generate the sophisticated functionalization patterns found in these molecules must be developed. Direct methods for the site-selective installation of functional groups onto carbohydrates are desired as they avoid the process inefficiencies caused by use of protecting groups. In this thesis, new catalytic methods for the site-selective O-H functionalization of carbohydrates will be covered. Chapter 1 will cover the borinic-acid catalyzed sulfation of carbohydrates and Chapter 2 will cover the boronic-acid catalyzed sulfamoylation of carbohydrates. Photoredox catalysis has resulted in the revitalization of radical chemistry by enabling access to open-shell intermediates under mild conditions. In conjunction with hydrogen atom transfer catalysis, activation of C-H bonds in complex molecules is possible. Given the prominence of hydrogen atom transfer processes in carbohydrate biosynthesis, photoredox-mediated hydrogen atom transfer catalysis can be used as a tool to activate the C-H bonds within sugars. Novel site-selective methods for the C-H functionalization of sugars will also be covered in this thesis as well. Chapter 3 will cover C-H alkylations and Chapter 4 will cover redox isomerizations. Finally, Chapter 5 will cover the site-selective oxidations of carbohydrates, a longstanding goal of our research program.
Contextualized Rehabilitation Technologies: An Exploration into Anger Dyscontrol after Traumatic Brain Injury
Keywords: Affective Computing
Co-design
Emotion
Pervasive Computing
Rehabilitation
Traumatic Brain Injury

Emergent pervasive computing technologies offer new opportunities to extend the rehabilitation paradigm beyond the hospital setting and into the context of everyday life – an opportunity area we frame as contextualized rehabilitation technologies. The development of such technologies is an interplay of clinical expertise, human-centered design, and technology readiness. Navigating this landscape, however, is fraught with challenges as one needs to balance rehabilitation opportunities against the practicalities of technology design. Pushed too far to one side, and one can either far-exceed the capabilities of emerging technologies, or miss an opportunity to capitalize on technology readiness. This thesis seeks to explore the design space of contextualized rehabilitation technologies, particularly with the focus on outpatient cognitive rehabilitation for individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). In Part 1 of the thesis, we broadly explore the design space between outpatient cognitive rehabilitation and pervasive computing, by developing a new co-design process that enables wide ideation of possible design ideas and considerations. In Part 2 of the thesis, we conceptualize an outcome idea from Part 1 as an exploratory case-study of a contextualized rehabilitation technology. Specifically, we examine the potential of photoplethysmography (PPG), a physiological wristband sensor, to be used to estimate emotion for the self-management of anger after TBI.
The Impacts of Rohingya Refugee Humanitarian Aid Policies on Local Bangladeshi Communities
Keywords: Bangladesh
Gender
Humanitarian Aid
Migration
Refugee Studies
Rohingya

Long-term refugee camps are a significant outcome of the record 82.4 million displaced people globally, with 85 percent of refugees in camps in the Global South. Refugee camps in the Global South are growing ever larger as countries in the Global North close their borders to refugees. Refugee camps are well studied in the field of forced migration, but most research focuses on the lives of refugees. What is missing in this field is research on the social-environmental impacts of long-term refugee aid policies on non-refugee populations living in and around the camps: local people who are affected by refugee aid policies but are virtually invisible to aid agencies. There is a gap in the examination of the hardening of borders between camp and local communities, between the categories of refugee and citizen, between who is eligible for aid, and how this denies the deep entanglements of social, economic, and ecological life across these borders while deepening the most adverse impacts. Much of the blame for these impacts fall on the shoulders of refugees themselves, fueling anti-refugee xenophobia. This production of vulnerability through aid policies and practices is understudied and impacts of aid policies on local communities garner little attention from aid agencies or donor states. I argue that aid policies intended for refugees (re)produce gendered vulnerability of local, non-refugee “host” communities living in and around refugee camps and in this way, increases anti-refugee xenophobia. I explore the Rohingya refugee “mega camp” in Bangladesh and how aid policies shaping this camp affect local social and environmental dynamics. This dissertation explores three scenarios where aid policies affect Bangladeshi households. The first chapter explores how the lives of forest-dwelling Bangladeshi families forcibly surrounded by the camp have changed; the second chapter looks at how aid policies (re)produce gendered vulnerability to climactic events; and the third chapter examines how fractured jurisdiction between aid agencies and the Bangladeshi government affects aid practices and fuels anti-Rohingya xenophobia. Investigating the impacts of refugee aid on non-refugees is one way to diversify forced migration and vulnerability research, adding new insight to the production of anti-refugee xenophobia.
German Economists and the Intersection of Science and Politics: A History of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, 1872-1972
Keywords: Economic Institutions
Kathedersozialismus
Liberalism
Neoliberalism
Political Economy
Verein für Sozialpolitik

This dissertation examines the intersection of politics and scholarly activism in Germany through the prism of one organization, the Verein für Sozialpolitik. The history of the Verein highlights the deep connections between the state, science, and politics from the founding of the Kaiserreich to the establishment of the Bundesrepublik. Created in a moment of intense debate over the social question, particularly within German liberalism, the Verein pursued two aims at the same time: to educate middle-class opinion on the plight of workers in an age of rapid industrialization, and to influence government policy through detailed investigations of socio-economic phenomena. The Verein’s key contribution in its early years was propelling the notion of Sozialpolitik onto the national stage. However, the Verein increasingly evolved into a society of professional economists, although the tensions between science and politics remained. The Verein served as a space where the major issues related to Germany’s social, political, and economic development took place among middle-class elites, particularly academics. Throughout its existence, the Verein played a crucial role in defining the boundaries between liberalism, conservatism, and socialism in German intellectual life. But its early emphasis on the social question gradually grave way to increasing focus on economic problems, particularly as Sozialpolitik came to be viewed as a politically divisive force. The history of the Verein expresses the evolving nature of economic liberalism in German economic thought, particularly by showcasing the transformation of liberal conservatism from the Kaiserreich to the West German Bundesrepublik. Based on research in archives in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and the United Kingdom, this dissertation traces the origins of the liberal democratic consensus among German economists that became firmly established after 1945. It details the fate of the Verein’s left wing and explains why left-leaning economics failed to take hold in the economic mainstream in Germany. By taking a longer view of the history of social and economic thought in Germany and by also focusing on the most important and consequential association for economists in German-speaking Europe, it highlights the continuities and discontinuities that defined German liberalism between 1872 and 1972.