VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Examining the Leadership Role of the Dean of Business in Ontario Colleges:Using Narrative Inquiry to Reflect Leadership Identity Journeys of Selected Deans in this Role

My research study leadership journeys of selected incumbents in the role of dean of business in the Ontario College System. Using the methodology of narrative inquiry, I wanted to understand how their journeys led them to the role of dean, how they experienced the role, their perceptions of their own leader self-identity, how they approached their learning and growth while in the role, and to what extent they engaged in reflective practice. Participants engaged in two interview sessions with me, responding through dialogue to a guiding set of interview questions. A significant feature of the experience of business deans is that many of them had well-established career roles in business settings and joined the Ontario College System mid-career, most often directly assuming the role of dean. One of the contributions that I am seeking to make through my work is to integrate the stories of their personal career journeys with their leadership identity development and to understand how the Leadership Capability Framework for the Ontario College System captures or misses the requirements for the role of dean of business. Several common themes emerged: (a) they found the program development aspects of their role challenging as they tried to learn the college context that seemed at times esoteric, (b) they perceived their roles and contributions as impactful on their own institutions, (c) they expressed interest in career advancement roles in system but were unsuccessful in securing them, (d) the Leadership Capability Framework was viewed as describing generic not contextual leadership requirements, and (e) their reflective practice was very informal. These findings present implications for the Ontario College System as it seeks to attract, retain, and develop leaders in this role, and for the leadership learning that is required to support leadership development and growth.

Keywords: competency frameworks
educational administration
leadership
learning
Ontario college system
reflection
Advisor: Joshee, Reva
Extending Current Models of a Phosphoinositide Code of Cilia by Examining the Effect of Phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate Reduction

Cellular organelles called cilia sense diverse physical and chemical stimuli and transmit them to the cell, facilitating sensory modalities such as light, sound and smell. In humans, cilium dysfunction causes genetic disorders known as ciliopathies whose clinical phenotypes include polycystic kidney disease, congenital heart disease and retinal degeneration. A subset of ciliopathies is associated with mutations in INPP5E, which encodes a phosphatase for the membrane lipid phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bisphosphate (PIP2), preventing its intraciliary build up. This observation has lead to a model where high intraciliary PIP2 perturbs intraciliary transport in mammals and Drosophila melanogaster. Using Drosophila as a model, we investigated whether reducing PIP2 affects cilium formation and function. We found that reduction of PIP2 in the Drosophila male germline by ectopic expression of the PIP2 phosphatase SigD and mutation of the type I phosphatidylinositol phosphate kinase (PIPKI) Skittles (Sktl) affected maturation of cilium transition zones (TZs) and induced their hyperelongation. TZ hyperelongation was concomitant with defects in TZ detachment from basal bodies at the onset of axoneme elongation and loss of connections between cilia and the plasma membrane. The onr allele of the Drosophila Exo84, which encodes a component of the exocyst complex, exhibited loss of cilium-plasma membrane contacts but not TZ hyperelongation, decoupling the two phenotypes. In ciliated chordotonal neurons, sktl knockdown following ciliogenesis induced sensory defects in adults. In cells with sktl knocked down, No mechanical potential B (NompB), the homolog of intraflagellar transport protein IFT88, accumulated at the tips of chordotonal cilia, indicating a defect in its retrieval. Similar to previous studies, we observed an enrichment of PIP2 at the base of chordotonal cilia, but we also found that it was present within the ciliary dilation in these cells, indicating that cilia and PIP2 are not spatially mutually exclusive. Chordotonal neuron clones that are mutant for sktl form truncated cilia, indicating that sktl is required for ciliogenesis in these cells as well. Our results indicate that PIP2 is important for cilium formation and function, and that PIPKIs might act as regulators of cilia and as genetic modifiers of ciliopathies associated with TZ dysfunction.

Advisor: Brill, Julie A
The Functional and Clinical Consequences of TP53 Mutations in Cancer

The discovery of genetic variants linked to cancer have provided useful biomarkers for diagnostics, prognostics, and therapeutic targets. Mutations in the TP53 gene that encodes the p53 tumor suppressor protein are the most abundant genetic variants in human cancers, yet their clinical utility has not been fully explored. Normally, the p53 protein plays a crucial role as a barrier to cancer. Hundreds of different sporadic and germline (Li-Fraumeni syndrome) pathogenic p53 mutants have been identified; some with loss of function or partial function, and others gaining oncogenic activity. Currently, there is no clinical distinction between different p53 mutants as a biomarker despite evidence of substantial functional disparity. A greater understanding of the functional diversity between different variants will be necessary to improve the clinical utility of TP53 mutations. The central theme of this thesis was to characterize the cellular functions of different p53 mutants and translate this knowledge to the clinic as informative biomarkers. Specifically, the thesis focuses on how the oligomerization and residual transcriptional activity of p53 mutants can impact oncologic outcomes. First, I describe the preliminary study that compared the cellular activities of oligomeric p53 variants, reporting that p53 cellular activities are modulated by its oligomeric state. Second, in a follow-up study, I outline the clinical consequences of each clinically-relevant germline TP53 mutation in the oligomerization domain. A strong genotype-phenotype relationship was observed where the ability of mutant p53 to oligomerize prognosticated more favourable clinical outcomes. Lastly, I describe a functionally integrated meta-analysis that stratified cancer patients with TP53 mutations according to their mutant-specific level of residual transcriptional activity. A male-specific linkage between increased residual activity and prolonged survival was uncovered in glioma and gastric adenocarcinoma patients. This association was recapitulated in the lifetime cancer survival of Li-Fraumeni syndrome, where brain and gastric tumors are more common among men. Together, this thesis demonstrates that a wide spectrum of functionality exists between different p53 mutants that should be considered in clinical decision-making.

Keywords: Bioinformatics
Cancer
Protein Oligomerization
TP53
Transcription Factor
Tumor Suppressor
Advisor: Gariepy, Jean
Molecular and Functional Heterogeneity of Cancer Associated Fibroblasts in High Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer

Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) have been shown to play a role in promotion of cancer cell proliferation and invasion, and mediation of chemotherapy resistance in several cancer types. The work described in this thesis explores the role of CAFs in high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) and their heterogeneity at the intra-tumoral and inter-tumoral levels. I demonstrate that CAFs derived from primary tumors by outgrowth in culture mediate cancer cell invasion and chemotherapy resistance. Following a high-throughput flow cytometry screen of a large panel of cell surface-specific antibodies, I have identified CD49e to be uniquely expressed on the surface of CAFs in HGSOC. I further validated and characterized CD49e+ fibroblasts through transcriptional profiling and discovered that patients stratify into two groups based on their CAF gene expression profiles. One group of patients has predominantly CD49e+Fibroblast Activation Protein (FAP)-Hi CAFs in the stroma, while the other group of patients has predominantly CD49e+FAP-Lo CAFs. The molecular signature of CD49e+FAP-Hi CAFs resembles the classical CAF phenotype in its expression of alpha-smooth muscle actin (αSMA), collagens, and growth factors. However, the CD49e+FAP-Lo subset is distinct and possesses a novel preadipocyte-like signature. The CD49e+FAP-Lo phenotype has remained largely unnoticed as it is generally outcompeted in vitro by CD49e+FAP-Hi cells when grown under classical CAF culture conditions. Subsequently, I functionally characterized the properties of each of these subsets in the context of cancer using in vitro and in vivo assays. I showed that FAP-Hi CAFs better promote cancer invasion, growth, metastasis, and chemoresistance than their FAP-Lo counterparts. Moreover, I identified transcription factor TCF21 as a candidate master regulator of the functional disparities between FAP-Hi and FAP-Lo fibroblasts. Through RNA-Seq profiling, I generated a gene signature that is unique to each subtype of CAFs. I applied the gene signature to the existing Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database and showed that infiltrating fibroblasts heavily contribute to the molecular classification of HGSOC patients and their survival outcomes. Finally, I demonstrated that FAP-Hi and FAP-Lo stromal phenotypes are present in pancreatic, bladder, and esophageal carcinomas.

Keywords: Cancer Associated Fibroblasts
CD49e
FAP
Ovarian Cancer
Advisor: Ailles, Laurie
Storytelling of Indigenous and Racialized Women in the Academy in Toronto: Implication for Building Counternarrative Learning Spaces

Indigenous and racialized women utilize storytelling as a counter-hegemonic practice; a form of resistance in the academy. This research is centered within a graduate program in Social Science and Humanities, where a high volume of intellectual exchange involves sharing personal, cultural and collective experience. For Indigenous and racialized women, however, personal storytelling renders us vulnerable, especially when the stories become subject matter for research conducted within the dominant culture. However, telling our stories is profound because it helps us develop a sense of self-determination and supports cultural recovery. This project braids anti-colonial, anti-racist, and feminist theoretical frameworks. It depends on concepts developed by Indigenous elders, activists and scholars: Indigeneity, Resistance and Responsibility/Reciprocity. These discursive lenses enable me to situate my arguments about the narrative consumption of Indigenous and racialized female students in the Eurocentric academic setting. Primary data was obtained from face to face interviews as well as a group sharing circle. Two of the participants identified as Indigenous women, seven identified as racialized women, two as queer and all as cis-female. Seven of the participants were graduate students at universities in Toronto, and two of them had already graduated at the time of my interviews in 2014. There are three main findings. First, the act of narration itself enabled us to reclaim our holistic self and resist ongoing historical oppression. Second, the consumption of stories belonging to Indigenous and racialized women by white academics are not isolated experiences. Third, there is a need for mentorship essential to student success. Finding a peer support network among cohort members plays an important role in mitigating daily challenges, however, participants strongly emphasized the importance of institutional support and mentorship from faculty to center the notion of reciprocity. Finally, recommendations focus on the resource development available to Indigenous and racialized women to enhance our experience in the graduate program.

Keywords: Counternarrative
Indigenous
Mentorship
Racialized
Storytelling
Women
Advisor: Wane, Njoki
Exploiting Data Characteristics in The Design of Accelerators for Deep Learning

The recent “Cambrian explosion” of Deep Learning (DL) algorithms in concert with the end of Moore’s Law and Dennard Scaling has spurred interest in the design of custom hardware accelerators for DL algorithms. While DL has progressed quickly thanks in part to the abundance of efficient parallel computation provided by General Purpose Graphics Processing Units, newer DL algorithms demand even higher levels of compute density and efficiency. Furthermore, applications of DL in the mobile and embedded domains demand the energy efficiency of special purpose hardware. DL algorithms are dominated by large matrix-vector product computations, making them ideal targets for wide Single Instruction Multiple Data architectures. For the most part, efficiently mapping the structure of these computations to hardware is straightforward. Building on such designs, this thesis examines the data characteristics of these computations and proposes hardware modifications to exploit them for performance and energy efficiency. Specifically, this thesis examines the sparsity and precision requirements of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, which comprise multiple layers of matrix-vector product computations. We propose a profiling method to find per layer reduced precision configurations while maintaining high classification accuracy. Following this, we propose three accelerator designs that build on top of the state-of-the-art DaDianNao accelerator. 1) Proteus exploits the reduced precision profiles by adding a light weight memory compression layer, saving energy in memory access and communication, and enabling larger networks in a fixed memory budget. 2) Cnvlutin exploits the presence of zero, and near zero, values in the inter-layer data by applying sparse compression to the data stream while maintain efficient utilization of the wide memory and compute structure of the SIMD accelerator. 3) Stripes exploits the reduced precision profiles for performance by processing data bit-serially, compensating for serial latency by exploiting the abundant parallelism in the convolution operation. All three designs exploit approximation, in terms of reduced precision and computation skipping to improve energy efficiency and/or performance while maintaining high classification accuracy. By approximating more aggressively, these designs can also dynamically trade-off accuracy for further improvements in performance and energy.

Keywords: Accelerators
ASIC
Bit-Serial
Deep Learning
Reduced Precision
Sparsity
Advisor: Moshovos, Andreas
Regional Complementarity and Place-making in the Northern Region of the Tapajós National Forest Reservation, Lower Amazon, Brazil

From the tenth to the eighteenth centuries in the late pre-colonial period, Indigenous communities associated with the Santarém ceramic style lived in settlements of various sizes in the present day cities of Santarém and Belterra in the western region of the state of Pará, Brazil. This region is characterized by a rich and varied archaeological landscape consisting of inland ponds, anthropogenic forests, trail networks, and Amazonian Dark Earths (a very fertile and stable anthropogenic soil). In this dissertation, I combine historical ecology perspectives with theories of landscape, place and space in order to improve understanding of previous occupations and environmental transformations in the Santarém-Belterra region. More specifically, I present the results of an archaeological survey conducted in 2014 in the northern region of the Tapajós National Forest Reservation, 66 km south of the junction of the Tapajós and Amazon rivers. Altogether, I mapped thirteen archaeological sites, recorded the location of four Amazon Dark Earth deposits and two findspots. The majority of the ceramics recovered from my survey belong to the Santarém archaeological culture, however, ceramics associated with the Konduri and Pocó style, the Incised and Punctate tradition, and the Formative period were also recovered during the survey. In addition, my survey identified pre-contact Amazon Dark Earth soils and an extensive trail network that connected the plateau to the riverine environments of the reserve. The application of ArcGIS spatial analyst toolbox modelled how the settlements in peripheral areas were integrated and connected in terms of pathways and river networks with the Porto site, the heartland of the Santarém tradition at the junction of the Amazon and Tapajós rivers. My study indicates that the social and economic organization of the inhabitants in the northern region of the Flona-Tapajós was based on strategic resource and ecological complementary that integrated diverse environments. Permanent, year-round communities settled in different landscape likely maintained communication, sponsored joint ritual events, and engaged in the exchange of resources. In the end, the dissertation demonstrates that the Amazon was systematically reshaped by the social production of space.

Keywords: Amazonian archaeology
GIS
Landscape archaeology
Lower Tapajós
Regional complementarity
Santarém archaeological culture
Advisor: Swenson, Edward
A Representational Account of Memory and Perception Across the Lifespan

The representational hierarchical model suggests that regions of the medial temporal lobes (MTL) differ in terms of the representational content they support (i.e., the perirhinal cortex represents objects, while the hippocampus represents scenes). The model posits that these representations are useful for all cognitive functions – be it memory or perception – and predicts that stimulus-specific processing deficits will emerge based on the neuroanatomical locus of dysfunction. Thus, the goal of the present dissertation was to examine (1) stimulus-specific processing deficits in older adults at-risk for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and in healthy older adults, and (2) whether manipulations that impact memory also impact perception in young adults. In Chapter 2, we hypothesized that cognitive status related to MCI would result in object-specific memory decline, based on past work demonstrating that MCI pathology originates in the perirhinal cortex. We assessed recognition of objects and scenes in older adults and correlated recognition performance to cognitive assessment scores. As predicted, we found that object recognition showed a stronger relationship to cognitive status than did scene recognition. In Chapter 3, we hypothesized that healthy older adults would show scene-specific associative memory deficits based on putative hippocampal dysfunction. We examined associative memory for object-and-scene pairs and found that older adults were not able to use scene contexts as effectively as young adults to recall associated objects. In Chapter 4, we examined whether context reinstatement would affect both object memory and object perception, as predicted by the representational hierarchical model. We found that when object memory was tested within the same scene as study, object recognition was boosted. Critically, we also found that subsequent object perception was improved, even in the absence of a scene. The results of these experiments support representational accounts of memory by demonstrating stimulus-specific decline resulting from putative neural dysfunction. Moreover, they add novel support to the idea that stimulus representations are impacted in similar ways across different cognitive domains. Thus, I show that examining cognition by appealing to representational content instead of cognitive taxonomy is a powerful way to elucidate a broad range of novel empirical phenomena.

Keywords: Aging
Medial Temporal Lobes
Memory
Objects
Scenes
Advisor: Barense, Morgan D
Lee, Andy CH
Quantitative Imaging Using Computed Tomography for Evaluation of Chronic Lung Allograft Dysfunction

Lung transplantation is a destination treatment for end-stage lung disease. However, chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD) reduces long term graft survival. Pulmonary function tests (PFTs) have been used to diagnose CLAD and its subtypes, bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS) and restrictive allograft syndrome (RAS). However, PFTs are based on global estimates of lung function and do not reflect changes in regional lung function; therefore these tests are more problematic for single-lung transplant patients and patients who have heterogeneous disease severity between the two lungs. Computed tomography (CT) has been used to assist in the diagnosis of CLAD and its subtypes. RAS is an aggressive disease process characterized by parenchymal fibrosis, decreased overall lung volume, and increased average density on CT imaging, whereas BOS demonstrates mosaic attenuation, air trapping, bronchial dilatation, increased overall lung volume and decreased average lung density. We propose that quantitative analysis of lung CT images may provide useful imaging biomarkers to better phenotype patients with CLAD, in order to improve management and predict survival. We developed tools to categorize and identify the prognosis of post lung transplant patients using biomechanical modeling and lung density histograms using CT images. We tested these newly developed tools retrospectively on a well described cohort of lung transplant patients from a single center and compared the derived parameters with graft survival. Overall, the use of new quantitative tools showed promising results to categorize patients and also evaluate graft survival.

Advisor: Paul, Narinder
Martinu, Tereza