VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Sexually Dimorphic Immunity in Insects

Mammals (including humans), birds, fish, and insects, have all demonstrated female biased immunity; relative to males, females typically show lower incidences of infection, lower pathogen loads and initiate stronger immune responses. Using a variety of insect systems I investigate what factors may be responsible for sex differences in immunity. In the sex-role reversed katydid

Advisor: Gwynne, Darryl
Baker, Robert
On the Problem of Nature in Rousseau's Thought

The problem of nature is arguably the central problem in Rousseau’s thought. It may be posed in the form of the question, “Whether and how nature remains a standard for human social life?”. Two influential, and opposing, schools of thought have emerged in response to this question. These are the naturalist and the historicist interpretations, which answer the question in the affirmative and in the negative respectively. Each school proceeds on its own terms, laying stress on different parts of Rousseau’s corpus to advance its view. As a result, scholars across the interpretive divide talk past one another, leaving the nature-history debate in Rousseau’s thought mired in an impasse. This dissertation injects a new impetus into the debate by putting forward a naturalist interpretation based entirely on historicist premises. It therefore offers a considered response to, and a sympathetic refutation of the historicist interpretation, while revising at the same time the contours of existing naturalist interpretations in fundamental ways. With a focus on the Discourse on Inequality and Emile, the dissertation treats in succession the themes or problems of history, nature, and society in Rousseau’s thought. It also calls upon the natural man living in the state of nature and the natural man living in the state of society from the Rousseauian cast of characters to illustrate how nature continues to serve as a standard for human social life.

Keywords: Emile
History
Nature
Rousseau
Second Discourse
Society
Advisor: Orwin, Clifford
Comparative Identification and Characterization of Myosin Heavy Chain Isoforms in Avian Skeletal Muscle

Organisms require muscles capable of meeting the functional demands of locomotion. Many of the contractile properties of muscle are tightly correlated to the expression of specific myosin heavy chain (MHC) isoforms. While the identification and characteristics of mammalian MHC isoforms have been well documented, comparatively little is known about avian MHC expression. The diversity of locomotor styles and life histories observed in birds suggests that the locomotor muscles of these species must operate over a wide range of contractile conditions that may be achieved, in part, by the differential expression of MHC isoforms. Specifically, it was hypothesized that, due to their very rapid wingbeat frequencies, the MHC expression of hummingbird flight muscle would differ from that of larger-bodied species to enable rapid muscle shortening. Further, the unique contractile requirements associated with different locomotor and life history strategies across avian species would lead to varying MHC isoform expression both intra- and interspecifically. The aim of this thesis was to explore the MHC expression in avian skeletal muscle across species, muscle groups, and life history stages. While MHC expression appeared to vary across muscle groups tasked with performing different locomotor activities, the MHC expressed by the flight muscle initially appeared relatively conserved across species. However, analysis of pectoral MHC isoform(s) in a larger array of species revealed greater diversity, including the presence of several characteristically distinct avian isoforms. Analysis of characteristics that may influence MHC expression revealed that the migratory predisposition of a species corresponded with MHC expression in small-bodied passerine species. Examining the pectoral MHC expression of one migratory passerine species, the white-crowned sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys), across three life stages demonstrated that MHC expression of the flight muscle altered with the migratory status of the species. Thus, the avian MHC family of proteins appears to much more diverse than previously anticipated, with expression associated, in part, with meeting the mechanical demands associated with migration in some species. Continued research into the MHC expression and gene families of avian species will further our understanding of the evolutionary and functional implications of this observed diversity.

Keywords: bird
flight muscle
MHC
muscle
myosin
Advisor: Welch, Jr., Kenneth C
Protein Interactions Regulate KCC2-mediated Chloride Homeostasis

KCC2 is the primary Cl- cotransporter which maintains a low [Cl-]i required for inhibitory neurotransmission. Despite intense investigation into the mechanisms governing KCC2 regulation, the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this thesis I have presented three novel pieces of evidence providing further insight into KCC2 regulation. First, KCC2 membrane expression, and therefore function, require the expression of the KAR-type subunit GluK2. Second, KCC2 membrane recycling can be increased in the presence of GluK2 or by PKC-mediated phosphorylation. Protein interaction with GluK2 and PKC-mediated phosphorylation synergistically increase KCC2 expression and function, demonstrating how this protein can be regulated by functional cross-talk of multiple protein modifications. Finally, KCC2 is dephosphorylated by a calcineurin-dependent mechanism in response to ionic shift plasticity induction. Elucidating the mechanisms which regulate KCC2 function are highly coveted as KCC2 down-regulation is commonly observed in neuropathophysiological conditions such as epilepsy and neuropathic pain. Taken together, my results present novel findings regarding the mechanisms which regulate KCC2 function and surface expression and critically regulate neuronal Cl- homeostasis.

Keywords: chloride
GABA
GluK2
kainate receptor
KCC2
neuron
Advisor: Woodin, Melanie A
Mobilizing Light and Shadow: Popular Nationalism, Political Culture, and the Early German Cinema, 1895-1918

This dissertation explores representations of the German nation as projected onto German cinema screens in the years between the invention of film in 1895 and the end of the Kaiserreich in 1918. This was a period of intense growth for the German film industry. From a novelty feature in travelling exhibitions at the end of the nineteenth century, film was a part of the everyday lives of millions of Germans by the First World War. Unified only in 1871, Germany was a young state and attempts to define, popularize, and harness its national image formed a central and contested aspect of German political culture. This dissertation argues that the conflicting cinematic representations of the German nation in this period should be understood within the larger context of Wilhelmine political history and that invocations of the nation were instrumental in the development of the German cinema. Kaiser Wilhelm II, political pressure groups on the radical right, foreign and domestic film producers, and, ultimately, military and civilian authorities of the German state all promoted cinematic visions of the nation that were overlapping, complementary, and conflicting. Kaiser Wilhelm II was Germany’s first film celebrity and personified onscreen a nation of monarchists and military might, yet his media-constructed political authority was overshadowed by his film stardom. Around 1900, imperialist political associations such as the Navy League and the Colonial Society began to use film to construct an image of the nation as an assertive power, transforming their political agendas into cinematic attractions. In the decade preceding the First World War, critics and reformers became increasingly concerned with the effects of film on the German audience. Part of the response to this criticism—and to Germany’s weak position in the international film market place—was the production of films depicting the heroes and events of the national past. Following the outbreak of war in 1914, cinema connected audiences to the war experience and promoted an image of the nation at war. Between 1916 and the end of the war, the state-driven consolidation of the industry and a wave of propaganda films aimed at the domestic audience brought together the nation as it was conceived by the state with the nation as projected in the cinema.

Advisor: Jenkins, Jennifer
Quantifying Nature: Epistemology for Climate Science

Quantifying Nature: Epistemology for Climate Science is motivated by a central question: how should our methods of quantification influence the way we understand the products of climate science? I advance three theses. First, I argue that, contra popular belief, simulation’s supposed lack of empiricality—its inability to make causal contact with its target—does not prohibit it from producing novel empirical evidence. I argue that data must be connected to their target, informative, and accompanied by a justified quantification of uncertainty in order to serve as novel empirical evidence. I compare computer simulation practices to measurement practices, and demonstrate that if measurement meets these three criteria then, in certain situations, simulations can as well. Thus, either both practices produce novel empirical evidence, or neither do. Second, I argue that measurements in experimental atmospheric chemistry involve producing model-based explanations of data. This is surprising because it was previously thought that concerns regarding explanation were relatively independent from the concerns of data production (Bogen and Woodward 1988; Woodward 2011). As I show, we can expect that incorporating explanation into measurement practice will have implications for the fragility of the results. Lastly, I argue that the practice of quantifying the influence of anthropogenic factors on extreme weather, using model-based probabilistic event attribution, is not reliable enough for many of the purposes that motivate this practice. I examine the aims for undertaking probabilistic event attribution, including, for example, supporting climate adaptation, producing policy tools, and increasing public awareness. I conclude that only in limited cases is probabilistic event attribution via simulation likely to meet these aims. Overall, my dissertation shows how epistemic concerns that guide the development of quantification methods also shape the understanding and use of scientific products in climate science.

Keywords: climate
computer simulation
extreme weather
measurement
Advisor: Morrison, Margaret
Counter-cartographies: Literary Wayfinding in Transnational Cities

My project examines how minority literary texts from Singapore, Vancouver, and Toronto intervene in capitalist and cartographical configurations of urban space. Reading contemporary literary texts as detours in the overlapping postcolonial realities of Canada and Singapore, I demonstrate how these novels, films, poems, and short fictions resist the abstraction of these capitalist spaces, restoring sociality and human complexity. My study draws from the spatial theories of cultural geographers like Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, and David Harvey, and anthropologist Timothy Ingold. Using an interdisciplinary methodology, I use the spatial tactics of wayfinding, confabulation, and indeterminacy as modes of reading literary texts. These tactics challenge cartographical understandings of urban spaces, opening them up to the prospects of unforeseen pasts, lived presents, and unpredictable futures. My readings of these texts contribute to a spatial politics that enriches our current understanding of the relationship between literature and space, the imagined and the real, the fictional and the material. My work on contemporary Vancouver and Singapore examines representations of the cities in urban planning documents, material sites, and popular media. Both urban sites began as cartographic fictions, dreamed into existence by planners and land speculators. They continue to be spectacularly mapped, planned, and commodified in the late capitalist period. My work places these cultural texts in dialogue with recent literary urbanisms from both cities including works by Madeleine Thien, Wayde Compton, Sachiko Murakami, Tan Shzr Ee, Tan Pin Pin and Alfian Sa’at. My project then turns to three transnational novels by Lydia Kwa, Larissa Lai, and Dionne Brand that produce a complex urban politics that goes between and beyond Singapore and Canada. These transnational counter-cartographies resist celebratory accounts of neoliberal globalization while addressing the realities of migration and diaspora through the various genres of historical fiction, immigrant narrative, and dystopian fiction.

Keywords: Canadian literature
postcolonial studies
Southeast Asian literature
spatial theory
transnational cities
urban literature
Advisor: Quayson, Ato
An Evaluation of a Universal Funding Program for Insulin Pumps for Children and Teens with Type 1 Diabetes

Pediatric insulin pump therapy has been broadly adopted despite equivocal evidence about long-term comparative effectiveness. This thesis aimed to elucidate the dynamics underlying observed patterns of pump use and outcomes in the context of a universal funding program for pediatric insulin pump therapy in Ontario, Canada. First we conducted interviews with physicians to understand why pumps have been broadly adopted. We found that physicians recognized that pumps fell short of expectations often because of lack of family or school support. Yet, pumps were valued in a number of ways. Second, we developed a survey and described the distribution of patients and resources amongst all 35 centres in the Ontario Pediatric Diabetes Network. We found differences in availability of diabetes team members and 24 hour support. Finally we performed two population-based cohort studies of youth with type 1 diabetes (

Keywords: Adolescent
Child
Child
preschool
Diabetes Mellitus
type 1
Health Services Research
Insulin Infusion Systems
Advisor: Guttmann, Astrid
Miller, Fiona A
Some Causes and Consequences of Non-random Animal Movement

Throughout the animal kingdom, individuals have been found to move non-randomly in response to the environment and differ in movement strategies from other individuals in the population. Chapter 2 uses a two-patch consumer-resource model to investigate how phenotypic variation in movement can evolve when the consumers are able to sense the patches and move adaptively to the more resource abundant patch. Considering the case when dispersers are inferior competitors compared to less dispersive phenotypes, variation in dispersal behaviours can evolve and persist when dispersal is cost-free, fast, and adaptive. In the other case, when dispersers are superior competitors compared to less dispersive phenotypes, variation in dispersal behaviours can evolve and persist when dispersal is more costly, slow, and random. Chapter 3 and 4 are case studies of non-random movement in two fish species. Chapter 3 examines lake trout (Salvelinus namaycush) telemetry data to determine the daily movement patterns of the fish and infer how smaller morphs are able to persist in the presence of larger, cannibalistic morphs. In the summertime---when the water temperatures force the small and large lake trout morphs into the same parts of the lake---the small morphs avoid the large morphs by using shallower waters in the day, but when the larger cannibals have poorer vision at night, both morphs overlap in the same part of the lake. This daily routine movement of the small lake trout morphs away from the larger cannibals is probably critical in maintaining the size variation within the population. Chapter 4 examines some factors that influence dispersal in guppies (Poecilia reticulata) and predicts the long-term consequences of dispersal on population dynamics in natural stepping-stone metapopulations. Guppy dispersal between pools can depend on intrinsic factors, like physiology and sex, and extrinsic factors, like the type of stream environment, season, and the conditions in the pools. The individual dispersal events can influence population dynamics: without dispersal, guppy pool populations within most metapopulations are predicted to be sinks in the wet season and at equilibrium in the dry season; therefore, dispersal may play a role in the persistence of these guppy populations.

Advisor: Rodd, Helen F
Shuter, Brian J
Carbon Pricing in Canadian Provinces: from Early Experiments to Adoption (1995-2014)

This dissertation studies the emergence of carbon pricing mechanisms at the sub-federal level in Canada to answer two questions. First, why have some Canadian provinces adopted carbon pricing instruments, either a cap-and-trade or a carbon tax, while others have not? And, second, of the provinces that have adopted carbon pricing, how can we explain differences in the design of their carbon pricing instruments? In order to answer these questions, the dissertation has investigated the process of adoption of climate change policy in Canada’s ten provinces through four distinct stages: 1) the diffusion of the ideas supporting carbon pricing, 2) climate policy capacity building, 3) the public debate following the proposition of carbon pricing by the governing party, and 4) the design of the carbon pricing instrument. After reviewing the climate policy-making processes in the provinces, the dissertation’s answer to the first question is that carbon pricing instruments have been adopted in provinces in which the government has shown early on an acceptance of both the scientific paradigm of anthropogenic climate change and the policy paradigm of liberal environmentalism—the latter promoting market-based climate policy. These provinces are also the ones in which the premier has shown a personal commitment to the issue of climate change, which has contributed to focusing resources on the issue and to building climate policy capacity ahead of other provinces. Among provinces that have adopted carbon-pricing, climate policy is framed as providing important economic benefits through the creation of carbon markets and fostering investments in the renewable energy industry and other green technologies. The answer to the second question is that provinces, although to varying degrees, have designed carbon pricing instruments in order to take into consideration the particularities of their economic context and the policy preferences of their main industrial emitters. While some provinces, such as Quebec in imposing a cap-and-trade system, have been willing to go well beyond what their industries have been ready to accept, at least initially, others have adopted carbon pricing instruments designed to match closely the policy preferences of their most important GHG emitting industry.

Keywords: Canada
carbon pricing
climate change
climate policy
energy
environmental policy
Advisor: Skogstad, Grace
Sexual Conflict and the Evolution of Reproductive Traits

Sexual conflict occurs when the fitness interests of males and females differ. There is some support for inter- and intralocus sexual conflict, but we still lack a full understanding of the impact of these processes. In this thesis, I use several different approaches to study the role of interlocus sexual conflict on the evolution of reproductive traits. In three chapters, I examine variation in and evolutionary processes underlying the rapid, divergent evolution of genitalia. In Chapter 2, I explore interpopulation variation of genitalia in a water strider, Gerris incognitus. I found higher rates of evolution of genital than non-genital traits and greater complexity of intromittent than non-intromittent genital traits. However, I did not detect a signature of sexual selection on genital evolution. In Chapters 3 and 4, I examine two characteristics of genitalia in Trinidadian guppies, Poecilia reticulata. First, I test whether the genital claws function to transfer sperm to unreceptive females. I found that clawed males transferred up to threefold more sperm than declawed males to unreceptive females, but similar quantities to receptive females. Second, I test whether longer genitalia impede male reproductive behaviours at higher current flows. I did not detect a cost for genital elongation, but males did alter their mating strategies in response to current flow. Finally, I was interested in whether mating system can affect the level of parent-offspring conflict and, thus, placental evolution. In Chapter 5, as a first step, I examine natural variation in the morphology of the maternal follicle and embryonic pericardial sac in eight closely related species of Poeciliopsis that span the range in maternal nutrient provisioning during development. I found that species that provide substantial provisioning had (a) maternal follicles that were more hypertrophied and folded, and (b) embryonic pericardial sacs that were more extensively covered with epithelial microvilli and richly vascularized than species with no or moderate provisioning. Taken together, this thesis provides evidence that sexual conflict can play a role in the evolution of reproductive traits, but it is important to consider that role in the context of other evolutionary and ecological processes.

Keywords: Genitalia
Guppies
Placentae
Poeciliopsis
Water striders
Advisor: Rowe, Locke
Rodd, F Helen
Regulation of neuronal Cl- homeostasis and GABAergic inhibition by components of excitatory neurotransmission

KCC2 is the neuron-specific member of the K+-Cl- cotransporter family of proteins, which maintains a low intracellular Cl− essential for fast inhibitory synaptic transmission in the mature central nervous system (CNS). KCC2 is essential for survival, as KCC2 knock-out mice die at birth due to respiratory failure. Moreover several neurological disorders including neuropathic pain, epileptic seizures and autism spectrum disorders exhibit impaired synaptic inhibition due to decreased KCC2 expression and function. Despite the critical importance of this protein in maintaining fast synaptic inhibition, KCC2 was discovered to be abundantly expressed at the vicinity of excitatory synapses in 2001. Since this discovery, no study has systematically analyzed how components of synaptic excitation regulate KCC2 function and fast synaptic inhibition in the CNS The principal novel discoveries from my thesis research are: (i) native-KCC2 exists in a multiprotein complex with key members of excitatory synapse namely, the kainate-type ionotropic glutamate receptor (iGluR) subunit GluK2, and its auxiliary subunit Neto2; (ii) these components of excitatory synapse could serve as auxiliary subunits of KCC2 – a concept which was previously non-existent for transporters in general, and in particularly for KCC2; (iii) Neto2 and GluK2 regulates several aspects of KCC2 cellular regulation including total and surface abundance, oligomerization and transporter efficacy in vitro and in vivo; (iv) finally, loss of Neto2 or GluK2 result in impaired KCC2 transporter function in hippocampal neurons. Hence, my discovery represent a novel regulation of KCC2 function and fast synaptic inhibition by components of excitatory transmission, significantly advancing our growing understanding of the tight interplay between excitation and inhibition.

Keywords: Excitation-inhibition balance
Hyperexcitability
Epilepsy
Neuropathic pain
Neurodevelopmental disorders
GABA
Glutamate
Hippocampus
CNS
Glutamate receptors
Auxiliary subunits
iGluR
Kainate receptors
Multi-protein complex
Neuronal chloride homeostasis
Cation chloride cotransporters
SLC12A5
KCC2
Neto2
GluK2
Advisor: Woodin, Melanie A