VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Exploring the role of blood pressure self-monitoring in the management of women with hypertensive pregnancies
Keywords: blood pressure
self-monitoring
hypertensive disorders of pregnancy

This thesis aimed to examine the role of blood pressure self-monitoring (SMBP) for the management of hypertension in pregnancy. Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) affect around one in ten pregnancies. They contribute to considerable maternal and fetal morbidity and mortality. Currently, pregnant women with hypertension have more frequent clinic surveillance to monitor for any deterioration in blood pressure and emerging pre-eclampsia or fetal complications. This places a considerable burden on both the woman and the health service and deterioration may occur between visits. An SMBP intervention for use in pregnancy hypertension was developed and tested using a mixed methods approach comprising a randomised controlled feasibility study and parallel qualitative studies.
The pilot randomised controlled trial compared SMBP with usual care (2:1) recruiting pregnant women from four UK maternity centres. 86 women with chronic hypertension (55 SMBP, 31 control) and 72 with gestational hypertension (49 SMBP, 23 control) were randomised and outcome data and analysis were completed for 154 (97%). There were high recruitment (71%), adherence (SMBP 5.5 days per week) and persistence rates (SMBP for >80% of enrolment time). There were similar quality of life scores between randomised groups and greater preference shown by participating women for BP self-monitoring versus usual clinic monitoring. There were no overall group differences in BP control.
Parallel qualitative studies explored the experiences and perceptions of pregnant women and their clinicians using the self-monitoring intervention. These included observations of 38 clinics and semi-structured interviews with 24 women and 8 clinicians. Women with hypertension were highly motivated to use BP self-monitoring. This enthusiasm was in the context of valued continuity of care from expert clinicians. Despite women’s and clinicians’ joint goal for a healthy mother and baby, there wasn’t always consensus regarding how best to achieve this. For example women and clinicians gave difference precedence to home and clinic BP readings with important implications for antihypertensive medication adherence which could ultimately affect maternal BP control.
These findings together suggest that SMBP is a feasible and acceptable intervention to trial on a larger scale for the management of hypertension in pregnancy. However, because women and their clinicians could ascribe different meanings to the home and clinic BP readings this in turn influenced subsequent perspectives around treatment. Clinicians could better support shared decision making with enhanced awareness of and discussion around women’s experiences of home monitoring and treatment concerns. Further research is needed to understand the relationship between home blood pressure readings and clinical outcomes to inform these discussions.
Harnessing the graft-versus-leukaemia effect in acute myeloid leukaemia
Keywords: Cancer antigens
T cell therapy
Allogeneic stem cell transplantation
Acute myeloid leukaemia

Allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-SCT) is the best established cellular immunotherapy and is a common treatment for acute myeloid leukaemia (AML). Allo-SCT relies on donor T cells identifying AML cells as foreign and eradicating them, which is known as graft-versus-leukaemia (GvL). Donor T cells recognise AML through interactions between their T cell receptor (TCR) and peptide antigens bound by human leukocyte antigen (HLA) on the surface of AML cells. Despite being administered for over 50 years, our understanding of the AML antigens that elicit a donor T cell response after allo-SCT is very limited.
Identification of antigens that mediate GvL may directly lead to improvements in selection of allo-SCT donors for treating AML patients. A donor whose cells can produce a specific alloimmune response against the recipient’s AML cells would reduce relapse. Furthermore, antigens represent potential targets for immunotherapy.
This study establishes a novel workflow to identify and characterise GvL antigens and the donor-derived T cells that respond to them. GvL antigens are likely to result from germline DNA variants that are present in a patient but absent in their allo-SCT donor. Exome and RNA sequencing were used to identify mismatched DNA variants between patient and donor that are expressed in AML. Candidate GvL antigens were identified using: (1) in silico HLA-binding prediction, and (2) mass spectrometry of peptides eluted from HLA on AML cells.
Predicted GvL peptide antigens were functionally screened, which led to the identification of 24 validated antigens from 9 patients. Of the antigen-specific T cell responses characterised, 86% stimulate CD4+ donor T cells. For a GvL antigen derived from the PADI4 gene, responses are HLA-DP restricted and donor T cells are CD4+ with a cytotoxic T helper 1 phenotype.
As a proof of concept, a T cell therapy was developed targeting the PADI4 antigen. Antigen-specific TCR sequences were identified and inserted into human T cells. These were then used to assess T cell-mediated killing of AML cells in vitro and in vivo, and also to investigate the mechanism of PADI4 antigen presentation by HLA.
All Jihad is local
Keywords: Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
insurgency
insurgent recruitment
terrorism
foreign fighting
civil wars
terrorist recruitment

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) recruited an estimated 40,000 foreign fighters from over 100 countries from 2013 until approximately the end of 2015. This was one of the largest foreign fighter mobilizations to a single insurgent group fighting in a single civil war in the past 120 years. Based on the size and scale of this mobilization, it would seem as though ISIS foreign recruits came from every corner of the globe. Yet the vast majority of ISIS foreign fighters came from a small number of places around the world. This dissertation focuses on these places, which I call recruitment hubs, because they were sites of disproportionate recruitment. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), for example, 75 percent of ISIS foreign fighters were recruited from regions that constituted 11 percent of MENA’s total population.
Why were ISIS foreign fighters concentrated in these hubs and not others? How did these recruitment hubs form and function? And why were people recruited to become foreign fighters, as opposed to joining an armed rebellion or participating in protests in their own country? This dissertation argues that ISIS foreign fighter recruitment hubs were crucial to the group’s success attracting foreign fighters; not only because large numbers of fighters joined ISIS from hubs, but also because hubs affected the types of fighters who joined ISIS. This dissertation finds that there are some identifiable patterns in where hubs form, how they form, and why recruitment is so effective there. But it is much more difficult to predict whether recruitment hubs form for foreign fighting or other outcomes, like domestic insurgency. That is because the foreign fighting occurs in part due to highly contingent events – breaks in patterns of past relationships, the emergence of conflicts in foreign lands, and choices made by several individuals at critical junctures where potential alternatives existed.
'Life is made of courage and coffee' an ethnography of speciality coffee in São Paulo, Brazil
Keywords: São Paulo
consumption
production
specialty coffee
Brazil

This thesis explores the ways in which specialty coffee is consumed in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee-producing nation and a rising consumer power. A central aim of this thesis is to address how the consumption of a globalised and modern good such as specialty coffee is experienced in a culture and context that has historically been exploited for the production of that very good, and that now finds itself unevenly positioned in the global consumer market. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with specialty coffee enthusiasts and professionals in the city of São Paulo, this thesis explores how a network of individuals that I call the ‘apaixonados’—those passionate about coffee—engage individual aspirations and passions to navigate the boundaries and frictions between their local coffee consumer culture and what is discursively constructed as a ‘global coffee community.’
To explore how global consumer inequalities are manifest in Brazil, I begin by introducing the emic idea of ‘tipo exportação,’ a classificatory and experiential notion used to describe goods that are produced domestically but perceived to be of exportation (i.e., high) quality, and are typically destined for foreign consumption. Through my engagement with how tipo exportação is lived, I show how echoes of Brazil’s colonial past inform contemporary structural constraints that stifle apaixonados’ access both to foreign specialty and Brazil’s own best coffee. I examine the ways in which apaixonados work within, through, and against these trade structures to obtain the coffees they desire, and show how the consumption of specialty coffee is used to mark specific forms of cosmopolitan aspiration and local prestige. The practical adaptations my participants make to key concepts in this ‘global coffee community’—namely, authenticity and origin—in response to trade regulations that prohibit the importation of green (raw) coffee into Brazil reveal possibilities for the incorporation of more forms and spaces of labour into the wider ethical consumption discourse by taking account of the ‘view from the South.’ By adding a hybrid producer–consumer perspective to prevailing models of coffee consumption experiences—which have historically been centred in coffee-importing nations and drawn much of their meaning from coffee’s travel from its agricultural origin and subsequent exoticism—this research contributes to anthropological debates on the politics and economics of food and consumption cultures in a globalising but unequal world.
The right of access to educational materials and copyright: international and domestic law
Keywords: UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies
access to knowledge
intellectual property law
treaty interpretation
fragmentation
regime interaction
international trade law
copyright exceptions and limitations
constitutional law
Indian constitutional law
systemic integration
Bill of Rights
three-step test
comparative constitutional law
fundamental rights
ESCRs
fair practice
right to equality
copyright and human rights
international human rights law
right to education
intellectual property and human rights
copyright
South African constitutional law
unfair discrimination
relationship between international and domestic law
public international law
World Trade Organisation

International rules regulating copyright pose obstacles to accessing educational materials, particularly impacting persons living in poverty, persons living with disabilities and other marginalised groups. This Thesis argues that access to educational materials is a human right under the right to education and imposes obligations upon states. State obligations under human rights law thus appear to conflict with international copyright obligations for common parties. In demonstrating that states can reconcile these competing obligations harmoniously, the Thesis advances a rights-based response to the problem of access for those neglected by the market.
This Thesis is divided into two Parts. Part I locates access to educational materials as a human right and gives content to states parties’ obligations. It identifies and analyses educational ‘exceptions’ to copyright in the relevant copyright treaties. It argues that these ‘exceptions’ coincide with states parties’ human rights obligations to facilitate access. States parties can thus concurrently fulfil both sets of obligations to respond to the problem of access for the most marginalised. However, after analysing the relative institutional design of the international trade system and human rights treaty bodies, Part I concludes that trade-based obligations are likely to be prioritised over human rights obligations. This prioritisation negatively impacts access to educational materials in countries that cannot afford to pay for free access for all.
Part II investigates the manner in which two countries in the global South have sought to reconcile these obligations. South Africa’s draft copyright legislation seeks to do this but the President has declined to assent to it due to concerns emanating from the international trade system and related actors. This illustrates the conclusions at the end of Part I. In contrast, a recent Indian court decision demonstrates the possibility of adopting a harmonious interpretation that facilitates equitable access for the most marginalised. The Thesis thus emphasises the crucial role of domestic constitutional actors in harmonising competing international obligations.
New catalytic routes to sulfonyl fluorides
Keywords: Palladium
SuFEx
Fluoride
Sulfonyl
Sulfonylation
Catalysis

In this thesis, new methodologies towards the synthesis of sulfonyl fluorides through various approaches are documented. These approaches include the development of novel bi- or multifunctional sulfonyl fluoride reagents, and their derivatisations into structurally diverse sulfonyl fluorides and sulfonyl-containing compounds. During the study, the serendipitous formation of a symmetrical dialkenyl sulfone from the corresponding triflate led to further investigation on the cross-electrophilic sulfonylative cross-coupling.
Measurement of the W boson mass with the LHCb experiment
Keywords: Standard Model
Precision Electroweak tests
CERN
Particle Physics
LHCb

Precision measurements of electroweak parameters permit fundamental consistency tests of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. The resulting constraints on physics beyond the Standard Model are primarily limited by the precision of direct measurements of the mass of the W boson (mW). Over the past thirty years, many experiments have performed measurements of mW , but an improvement in its precision is still needed. This thesis presents the first measurement of mW by the LHCb experiment at the facilities of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. This measurement is based on data collected by LHCb during the year 2016 at centre-of-mass-energy √s = 13 TeV. A simultaneous fit is performed on the q/pT distribution of a sample of W → μν decays and the φ∗ distribution of a sample of Z → μμ decays. The value of mW is determined to be
mW = 80354 ± 23stat ± 10exp ± 17theory ± 9PDF MeV,
based on an arithmetic average of results with three different Parton Distribution Function sets. This is considered a pathfinder measurement aimed at starting discussions with the theory and experimental community to reduce the still large systematic uncertainties on mW . The new methodologies and strategies adopted for this work lay the foundation of what will be the legacy measurement with the full dataset collected between 2015 and 2018. While this thesis describes the full measurement, greater detail will be given to the treatment of two of the most important sources of systematic uncertainty on the theoretical and experimental side, namely the Parton Distribution Functions and the measurement of the muon momenta. New methods, published in peer-reviewed journals, and ad hoc strategies have been developed to reduce their associated systematic uncertainties. Some of these studies have been applied to the proof-of-principle measurement described in this thesis. The others will be extremely important in the attempt of reducing the total uncertainty in future measurements of mW .
The role of small GTPases in regulating sleep in Drosophila melanogaster
Keywords: dFB neurons
Rac1
Drosophila Melanogaster
Sleep
Sleep regulation
Homeostat
small GTPases
Cv-c
Rho1

Sleep is highly conserved across the animal kingdom, yet why and how we sleep remains largely unknown. Uncovering the molecular pathway underlying homeostatic sleep regulation is integral to understanding the origin and function of sleep, as well as for the development of spatiotemporally precise medication to treat sleep disorders.
In the model organism, Drosophila melanogaster, neurons that project to the dorsal fan shaped body (dFB neurons) form a critical part of the sleep homeostat. By switching between their electrically-silent (OFF) state and electrically-active (ON) state, dFB neurons respond to increasing sleep pressure by inducing sleep. Previous work identified that mutating crossveinless-c (cv-c), a gene encoding a Rho-GTPase activating protein (Rho GAP), locks dFB neurons in the OFF state and results in an insomniac phenotype. Since GAPs are essential for the hydrolysis of small GTPases from their active (GTP-bound) to their inactive (GDP-bound) state, this thesis aimed to uncover the role of small GTPases in sleep regulation. A combination of genetic interaction, behaviour and imaging experiments were used.
The work presented here demonstrates that active Rho1 is upregulated in dFB neurons of cv-c mutants, and that manipulating Rho1 in dFB neurons of cv-c mutants rescues the insomniac phenotype. In addition, knocking down Rho1 in cv-c mutants restores dFB neuron excitability. This suggests that Rho1 is an important part of the molecular pathway underlying sleep regulation. However, the nature of how Rho1 regulates dFB membrane excitability, and to what extent its interacting partner Rac1 is involved, remains unclear. The findings of this thesis suggest a vexingly complex role of small GTPases in regulating sleep and highlights the importance of finely-tuned regulation of these signalling proteins.
The impact of path dependent degradation on the lifetime of Lithium-Ion batteries
Keywords: Lithium-Ion
Lifetime
Battery
Power Fade
Degradation
Capacity Fade
Experiment
Energy Storage

To ensure lithium-ion batteries are reliable in terms of lifetime and performance, a detailed understanding of their ageing behaviour is essential. Models that predict battery lifetime require knowledge of the causes of degradation and operating conditions that accelerate it. Batteries experience two ageing modes: calendar ageing at rest and cyclic ageing during the passage of current. Existing empirical ageing models treat these as independent, but degradation may be sensitive to their order and periodicity – a phenomenon known as “path dependence”. This empirical study investigates whether interactions between ageing modes can impact the rate of degradation. Eight groups of graphite/NCA 18650 lithium-ion cells were exposed to load profiles consisting of the same ratio of calendar and cyclic ageing applied in various orders. The profiles incorporate different C-rates, cycling methods and calendar ageing conditions, to gain insight into the conditions that encourage path dependent ageing. The data collected indicates that under certain conditions cells exposed to the same amount of calendar/cyclic ageing, but in different orders, can lead to a difference in degradation trends. The divergence in degradation rates is more pronounced when constant current cycling at higher C-rates and is limited when constant voltage steps are incorporated during cycling. Comparing the rate of degradation experienced by cells exposed to combined load profiles versus the degradation predicted using the cumulative empirical model indicates that the cumulative model underestimates the cell lifetime. These findings suggest that including the possible coupling between calendar and cyclic ageing modes can improve the accuracy of lifetime predictions.
High intensity focussed ultrasound treatment planning for renal tumour ablation
Keywords: HIFU tumour ablation
treatment planning
cancer therapeutics
high intensity focussed ultrasound

The use of High Intensity Focussed Ultrasound for the thermal ablation of renal tumours provides a completely non-invasive method for treatment, which is advantageous for patients who are not eligible for surgery due to co-morbidity issues. However, clinical trials have shown variable results with challenges to the delivery of the ultrasound beam related to the intervening tissue layers. The use of patient-speciﬁc models is investigated as a means to provide a treatment planning step to aid clinicians in the choice of the transducer’s position and ultrasound power for the treatment.
CT scans from patients treated in a clinical trial were segmented into bone, muscle and fat. Then patient-speciﬁc acoustic simulations were undertaken using the time domain acoustic solver software k-Wave. Patient-to-patient anatomical variability yielded differences of up to 154 W in the acoustic powers required for successful renal tumour ablation.
To ﬁnd an optimal placement for the transducer, back-propagation acoustic simulations were undertaken. A virtual source was placed within the tumour with the receiver surface representing the potential transducer locations. The complex pressure received over the transducer surface was used to predict the optimal placement.
The present thesis also considers the sensitivity of the model to speed of sound variations. There was a signiﬁcant impact on the focal pressure due to the relative change in speed of sound between fat and muscle. For the patient model tested there was a > 20% change in maximum pressure for variations of 4% and 7% in the speed of sound of muscle and fat respectively.
In conclusion, patient-speciﬁc acoustic modelling was successfully used to evidence the patient to patient variability in power requirements for renal tumour ablation as well as the signiﬁcance of transducer placement for the individual patient. This in turn explains the signiﬁcant variability in ablation outcomes achieved in clinical studies to date, and emphasizes the need for careful patient-speciﬁc treatment planning if renal ablation is to be adopted clinically.