VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Protein Requirements and Amino Acid Metabolism following Endurance Exercise
Keywords: Dietary Protein
Endurance
Protein Breakdown
Protein Synthesis
Recovery
Sexual Dimorphism

Sex and diet [e.g. amino acid (AA) ingestion] can impact whole-body protein turnover following intense endurance exercise, ultimately influencing protein recommendations to enhance performance. This thesis examined sex-based differences in protein requirements and the impact of protein intake on plasma AA concentrations and markers of myofibrillar protein breakdown [3-methylhistidine (3MH)] in endurance athletes. Study one utilized a modified indicator amino acid oxidation (IAAO) 3-point curve to assess protein requirements in male and female endurance athletes. Following 2-d of controlled diet and training, participants completed an IAAO trial following a 20km outdoor run from home on three occasions testing variable protein intakes (0.2, 1.2 or 2.0g⋅kg−1⋅d-1). Oral[1-13C]Phenylalanine was used to generate a biphasic linear regression of 13CO2 excretion (F13CO2) and phenylalanine oxidation (PheOx; the reciprocal of whole-body protein synthesis) with the mean breakpoint per group serving as the estimated average requirement (EAR). Results indicated a PheOx EAR of ~1.60g·kg-1·d-1 and safe intake of ~1.85g·kg-1·d-1 with no difference (P=0.94) between sexes. The EAR and safe intake were not different from those previously determined using traditional lab-based IAAO in males, suggesting the modified 3-point IAAO is effective at determining AA requirements, and recommendations are similar whether the run is performed on an automated treadmill or in the real-world environment. Study 2 was a subset of previous research in which urine and blood samples of endurance trained males were examined to determine the effect of three different protein intakes (0.94, 1.20 or 1.83g·kg-1·d-1) following a controlled running protocol on plasma AA and plasma and urinary 3MH. Plasma results demonstrated significantly greater essential AA and branched chain AA as well as reduced 3MH with 1.83 compared to 0.94 or 1.2g⋅kg-1⋅d-1. This may indicate less myofibrillar protein breakdown is required to maintain plasma AA with an intake of 1.83g⋅kg-1⋅d-1. In conclusion, future research should consider the time-efficient modified 3-point IAAO and the home-based protocol we have developed to examine protein requirements in other populations. A protein intake of 1.85g⋅kg-1⋅d-1 maximizes whole-body protein synthesis and may reduce myofibrillar catabolism. On this basis, we recommend that endurance athletes consume towards the upper end of current consensus statement protein recommendations (1.2-2.0g⋅kg-1⋅d-1) regardless of sex.
Macrophage Migration Inhibitory Factor as a Critical Disease Driver and Novel Therapeutic Target in Spondyloarthritis
Keywords: Ankylosing spondylitis
CD74
Macrophage migration inhibitory factor
New bone formation
spondyloarthritis
type 3 immunity

Spondyloarthritis (SpA) is a rheumatic disease characterized by inflammation and new bone formation (NBF). Although current treatments including anti-tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and anti-interleukin-17 (IL-17)-targeted therapies are available, up to 40% of SpA patients do not adequately respond to any treatment modalities. Therefore, better understandings of the disease pathogenesis and discoveries of novel therapeutic targets are warranted in SpA. Our group previously found that the concentration and expression of macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF), a proinflammatory mediator, in serum and target tissues are increased in SpA patients compared to healthy volunteers or osteoarthritis patients (disease controls). However, the specific roles of MIF in the pathogenesis of SpA remain elusive. Chapter 1 describes the overview of current understandings of the pathogenesis of SpA, extensively covering contributions of genetic and environmental factors, immune activation leading to inflammation, and NBF associated with SpA. Chapter 2 describes the specific roles of MIF in the immunopathology of SpA. The data shown here incorporates experimental results obtained from a well-established SpA mouse model (curdlan-SKG mice) and SpA patient samples. I identified that among major immune cell lineages, neutrophils are the primary cells producing and secreting high amounts of MIF in both the mouse model and SpA patients. Pre-clinical testing shows that both MIF- and neutrophils-targeted therapies are effective in decreasing inflammation and NBF in SpA. Mechanistically, MIF boosts type 3 immunity by enhancing the acquisition of a T-helper 17 cell (Th17) phenotype in both mouse and human regulatory T cells. The data shown in this chapter was published in Science Translational Medicine. Chapter 3 outlines the potential role of MIF on the development of NBF in SpA. During endochondral ossification, a common process of NBF in SpA, MIF increases the expression of chondrogenesis and cartilage extracellular matrices markers by activating STAT3 and mitochondrial energy potentials. Chapter 4 proposes future directions for MIF-related research and therapies. My findings expand the current understanding of the pathogenesis of SpA and demonstrate the potential of MIF-targeted therapies to attenuate the development of inflammation and NBF in SpA. Future clinical trials testing the efficacy and safety of MIF-targeted therapies are warranted.
Seeking a Right to the City in Toronto: Youth, Pedagogy, Pandemic, and Performance
Keywords: Drama Education
Pedagogy
Performing Arts
Qualitative methodology
Urban
Youth

This drama-based ethnographic research study asks how youth in Toronto, Canada, negotiate a right to the city in these times of pandemic and climate crisis. It also examines the affordances of using drama-based methodologies to study Toronto youth’s right to the city. It engages with three online drama classrooms in the Toronto District School Board: one middle school (12-14 years old) and two high schools (14-18 years old). In these drama classrooms, auto-topography (Heddon, 2007) is mobilized as a methodological and pedagogical tool to engage the city as an oeuvre (Lefebvre, 1996) that integrates both physical and virtual space. Amin’s (2012) ‘urban feelings,’ Ahmed’s (2004/2014) ‘cultural politics of emotion’ and Massumi’s (2015) ‘politics of affect’ conceptually guide this study. ‘Diffracted reflexivity’ (Serra Undurraga, 2021) is adopted as an analytical approach that attends to the sensory and embodied qualities of the data, and the broader forces of power, history and identity in which they are entangled. The findings align with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1985) concept of ‘the minor’ in that the youth’s auto-topographical performances contest majoritarian narratives of belonging, exclusion, nature, culture, and participation in Toronto in these times. Auto-topography gestures to how emotional flows of shame, disgust, fear, nostalgia, longing and joy serve to ‘deterritorialize’ and ‘reterritorialize’ youth in the context of gentrification (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Auto-topography confronts the capitalist and anthropocentric city, enlivening the enchanted materialism (Bennett, 2001) and ‘ecological anthropomorphism’ (Woynarksi, 2015) of parks, libraries, valleys, animals, and streets. Further, ‘participation’ – as foundational to the formation of the urban citizen – is problematized amid the changing stakes of ‘trust’ and ‘risk’ during the COVID pandemic. Hospitality and intimacy emerge as concepts for advancing a right to the city that integrates the public and private spheres. The dissertation closes with a consideration of a ‘theatre of little changes’ (Balfour, 2009) for the conceiving of a right to the city via a politics of co-flourishing.
Investigating Human Neutrophil Phenotypes that Associate with Neisseria gonorrhoeae
Keywords: CEACAM
infection
Neisseria gonorrhoeae
neutrophil
pathogen
phenotypes

The human-specific pathogen Neisseria gonorrhoeae (Ngo) causes the sexually transmitted disease gonorrhea, an oppressive public health burden due both the recent emergence of multidrug-resistant ‘superbug’ strains and the ability of untreated infections to cause inflammation-induced scarring of the maternal reproductive tract and blindness in children born from infected mothers. The hallmark of gonococcal infection is a massive influx of neutrophils that do not seem to clear the infection. Primary human and murine neutrophil-based studies demonstrate that opsonin-independent binding and engulfment of Ngo is driven by bacterial Opa protein adhesins binding to CD66 glycoproteins expressed on the neutrophil surface. A growing awareness that multiple neutrophil phenotypes exist prompted us to hypothesize that these neutrophil populations may differentially respond to Ngo. If true, then we must revisit the potential roles for neutrophils in gonococcal immunity and the immunopathogenesis of infection. The specific objective of this work is to develop a model to study the interaction between Ngo and different neutrophil subsets, to define and characterize the subpopulations of neutrophils that respond to Ngo infection, and to understand the specific response of each neutrophil phenotype to this infection. My studies to date reveal substantial differences in the phenotypes of neutrophils recovered by standard purification methods (such as Ficoll-isolation and MACSpress negative isolation beads) and whole-blood neutrophils, and my results have been compiled in a manuscript. Using a whole blood infection model, I performed a high-throughput flow cytometry-based analysis of 355 different cluster of differentiation (CD) antigens to reveal those expressed by Ngo-infected neutrophils. After identifying the most frequent CD antigens present, I generated customized HTS plates with our top 20 hits to identify antigens expressed on neutrophils that bound Ngo. I found that expression of CD11b, CD63, CD66c, CD256, CD277 and CD288 identify neutrophil phenotypes that are more likely to bind Ngo. My ongoing research aims to further understand how these different populations contribute to immunity versus immunopathogenesis against this devastating pathogen.
The Positional Logic of Technological Innovation in the Canadian Bioenergy Sector
Keywords: Clean Energy
Climate Change
Comparative Political Economy
Varieties of Capitalism

For almost fifty years, OECD governments have sought to increase the rate of technological innovation in the energy sector to resolve price-supply risks, improve economic performance, and address environmental concerns. Policy and innovation effort has been concentrated within the transportation, electricity, and industrial sectors; fewer resources have been allocated to support the innovation of alternative energy technologies applicable to non-industrial buildings. Small European nations and many subnational jurisdictions are important exceptions to this general tendency. This dissertation presents an integrative theoretical approach to understanding these patterns that begins explanation with the power-distributional effects of material reality and then considers the power-distributional effects of institutions that do not logically derive from material reality. The explanation is improved through attention to temporal processes (path dependence and positive feedback). Areas of the political economy that are prone to oligopoly and vertical/horizontal integration (that are ”centralized”) and that involve complex technologies are more likely to receive resource allocations owing to greater institutional development (organizations and rules). The development of institutions in areas of the political economy that are less centralized and associated with less complex technologies functions to expand the scope of policy and innovation effort. The approach is tested using the example of clean technology innovation in the Canadian bioenergy field. In Chapter 2, federal policy and sectoral developments since the 1970s demonstrate that the transport sector – a highly centralized area of the economy involving the innovation of complex technologies – has been the principal emphasis of policy and innovation effort. The lack of federal policy effort in the non-industrial heating sector is attributed to its decentralized and low-tech nature. In Chapter 3, a comparison of the development of recent non-industrial heating policies in the bioenergy fields of Ontario and Quebec provides evidence supporting the proposition that institutionally complex jurisdictions function to increase resource allocations in decentralized, low-tech areas of the economy. Chapter 4 presents a method of technical and policy model parameterization that is designed to mitigate overconfidence, a plausible mechanism of positive feedback. The final chapter summarizes the findings and discusses implications for clean energy transitions and comparative political economy scholarship.
Three Essays in Public Economics
Keywords: Political economy
Presidential elections
Public economics
Tax policy

This thesis collects three papers on topics in public economics. In the first two chapters, I consider the relationships between political and economic effects at the US state-level. Chapters 2 and 3 both have ramifications for contemporary policy debates, and highlight features of tax and intellectual property systems which have been understudied. The first chapter examines the relationship between economic growth and the outcomes of US presidential elections. Contemporary US politics has been marked by substantial increases in political polarization and a decline in swing voting, which we might expect would reduce the effect of economic growth on election outcomes. Using a Bartik-type instrument and state-level and individual-level data, I find that the effect of state economic growth on incumbent vote share is smaller when state-level polarization or individual partisanship is stronger. I also show that swing voting and economic voting are closely linked. The second chapter studies how tax systems reflect different social preferences about taxing income groups. I apply the inverse-optimum income tax method to quantify these preferences by calculating the implied weights for every US state. To capture major features of state taxation, I extend the theory underlying the inverse-optimum method to include sales taxes, property taxes, and state income taxes. Using IRS data, I calculate effective tax rates for each state, and find the weights for both single and joint filers across incomes in every US state. I find that the weights vary substantially across states, and do not decrease monotonically as might be expected from most theories of social welfare. The third chapter examines the effect of a different public policy: Canada's protection of a specialized form of intellectual property, industrial designs (IDs). Estimating the effect of holding IDs with nearest-neighbour matching, I find a 19% total treatment effect in revenue for Canadian firms holding IDs. To determine the marginal effect of each additional ID held, a regression with fixed effects finds that a 1% increase in the stock of IDs increases revenue by 0.14%. This shows the importance of design protection in Canada's IP policy.
Signal Processing and Instrument Characterizationon a Large-N Radio Interferometer
Keywords: CHIME
cosmology
cygnus loop
dark energy
radio interferometer

The CHIME radio interferometer telescope was designed with the purpose of studying dark energy during an era of accelerated expansion. It will conduct a survey of large scale structure to sample the matter density field in HI emission and measure the time evolution of the dark energy equation of state, w. CHIME is a large-N telescope and features the largest GPU correlator in radio astronomy. Here I present my contributions to the CHIME project, which took place during my graduate career, between 2015-2022. The GPU array cluster is supported by an enterprise scale software backend that I helped design to be portable and extensible by an object-oriented code infrastructure. The CHIME backend, kotekan, is built for multi-tiered task allocation across the GPU cluster that includes support tasks such as RFI excision, in addition to several operational modes including beamforming. Extensions to the architecture are designed for new science objectives and compliment the cosmology functionality to include new capabilities for FRB surveys and pulsar timing. The GPU management infrastructure I wrote and beamforming code I optimized are described here and directly impacted these objectives. Calibration of the system is performed by precisely measuring the response of the instrument. This is accomplished by either setting configurations in advance of observation cycles or by manipulating the correlated visibilities offline. Statistical analysis of the data using conventional methods such as principal component analysis are applied to test the quality of the data by estimating the redundancy of baselines that are averaged to improve signal-to-noise. The work toward optimal calibration is an evolving process for greater fundamental understanding of the system. The achieved performance of the existing calibration of the telescope can be evaluated through application in a scientific study. The study presented here is of the Cygnus Loop and a spatial spectral index variation mapping across the surface of the feature. The study incorporated every calibration developed by the collaboration and addressed every systematic present in the system. The calibrator 3C286 was selected to calibrate the spectral flux density and several beam models were applied to calibrate the spectral response.
Development of Vapor-phase Deposited Perovskite for Light-emitting Diodes
Keywords: Light-emitting Diode
Passivation
Perovskite
Self-assembly
Thin films
Vapor-Deposited

Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are steadily becoming the new standard for luminescent display devices because of their energy efficiency and relatively low cost, and the purity of the light they emit. Perovskite materials have attracted tremendous research interests in recent years for LEDs and photovoltaic applications due to their simple synthesis and record-breaking performances. To this day, most perovskite research focuses on solution-based syntheses. There is a limited number of reports on fabricating perovskite LEDs by vapor-phase deposition (VPD), a process in vacuum that lowers the risk of contaminants and offers much better control over the thickness of films. This method can also be easily scaled up for commercial production and is currently used for publicly available LEDs/OLEDs. The class of perovskite at the center of this research is the caesium lead halide family (CsPbX3), which were found to have high colour purity, an intrinsically high photoluminescence yield and a better stability, making them strong candidates for light-emitting applications. The goal of this project is to gain a proper understanding of the material and optical behaviour of these perovskites fabricated through VPD. The underlayer (hole transport layer in the LED structure) onto which the perovskite is grown is found to have a significant impact on the film’s uniformity and can limit the reaction between the perovskite precursors CsBr and PbBr2. Hole transport layers with higher glass transition temperatures (Tg) are found to be critical to facilitate growth of crystalline perovskites, improving the colour purity. Passivation studies show that CsPbBr3 films, when coated with a thin LiBr overlayer, demonstrate an extraordinary mass transport at room temperature with self-assembly into well-defined islands. LiBr also passivates nonradiative defects and significantly boosts the luminescence performance of CsPbBr3 as single films and in LED devices. This thin film self-assembly phenomenon is also observed with CsPbCl3 and CsPbI3 compounds with varying nanostructures. The unique role of LiBr in facilitating perovskite thin film recrystallization due to increased moisture attraction is demonstrated through Density Functional Theory simulations.
The Lived Experience of Street-involved and Homeless Youth who have Eating Struggles while Living in Situations of Food Insecurity
Keywords: Body Image
Critical Feminism
Eating Disorders
Food Insecurity
Homeless Youth
Homelessness

Eating struggles continue to be predominantly conceptualized as a white, middle-to-upper class, cis-gender, female youth disorder, evident by physical emaciation. This is despite the rise of literature evidencing the existence of eating struggles among individuals of diverse backgrounds including those living in situations of poverty, food insecurity and homelessness. Street-involved and homeless youth (SIHY) often endure extreme forms of food insecurity that significantly impact their relationship with food and their body. Yet, SIHY are significantly underrepresented within the existing eating disorder and food insecurity literature. This thesis aimed to address this gap by exploring the lived experiences of SIHY who have eating struggles while living in situations of food insecurity; and to explore how SIHY perceive social services in relation to their eating struggles. A Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenological approach was used to investigate how SIHY with eating struggles interpret and negotiate with their experiences of food insecurity and other oppressive living conditions. This study was conducted at a local SIHY resource centre in Ontario and included 11 participants. The participants were asked to partake in three interview sessions and one body map arts-based activity. The findings of this thesis (1) dismantles misconceptions surrounding SIHY who have eating struggles; (2) expands our understanding of trauma, revealing the multifaceted and interlocking forms of systemic (e.g., food insecurity) and relational traumas (e.g., intimate partner violence) that underlie SIHY’s eating struggles; (3) reveals the deeper purpose of eating struggles as an embodied negotiation and response; and (4) builds knowledge from SIHY’s recommendations for social service provision including conceptualizing healing as not only an inner process but one of which requires change and healing of our world.
Dying to Stay Alive in Residency and Beyond: A Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Burnout’
Keywords: burnout
discourse analysis
hidden curriculum
medical education
residency
wellness

In 1974, Dr. Herbert Freudenberger ‘coined’ the term ‘burnout’. With the creation of the Maslach Burnout Inventory in 1984, ‘burnout’ went from a term used in pop psychology to a highly studied phenomenon of academic interest in the helping professions, including medicine. Exponential growth in the study of ‘burnout’, culminated in its adoption into the International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-11 in 2022. Yet, despite awareness of this issue, and the many efforts aimed at addressing ‘burnout’ in physicians, the rates of ‘burnout’ continue to rise. Why does ‘burnout’ persist in medicine despite efforts to ameliorate it? In this thesis, a Foucauldian discourse analysis was used to investigate this question, specifically examining the socializing period of post-graduate medical education (PGME). The purpose of this thesis was to identify different discourses that legitimate or function to mobilize the use of the word ‘burnout’ in PGME. The archive from which the discourses were constructed included 10 review articles, over 500 academic articles, numerous policy documents, autobiographies, videos, documentaries, materials from conferences and discussions in forums including Reddit. This thesis identified three discourses of ‘burnout’: illness, occupational stress and existentialism. Each discourse was associated with statements of truth, signs and signifiers, roles that individuals play within the discourse and different institutions that gained visibility as a result of differing discourses. Finally, the analysis of these discourses revealed socio-historical dimensions of their occurrence, including undefined medicalization, neo-liberal capitalism and existentialism.