VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
In Their Own Words: Using Siblings’ Meanings about Daily Family Interaction to Understand the Influence of a Child with a Developmental Disability on the Sibling Experience

This study examined daily experiences of stress and coping among adolescent siblings of children with developmental disabilities. Early studies of this population have assumed that living with a disabled sibling is inherently stressful due to changes in the availability and allocation of familial resources. While recent work suggests that only a minority of nondisabled youth experience considerable stress related to family interactions involving a disabled sibling, few studies offer an understanding of how nondisabled siblings make meaning of their experiences and their attempts to cope with them. As such, we have a poor understanding of why some nondisabled siblings struggle while others do not. To address this gap in the literature, I drew on models of stress and coping to conduct a qualitative exploration of the cognitive appraisals used by nondisabled siblings during stressful family interactions. I conducted in-depth individual interviews with 11 nondisabled siblings (aged 10 to 17 years old) to elicit their descriptions of daily family interactions. The interviews were composed of audio-recorded dinner conversations and emotion maps as well as open-ended questions to elicit candid and detailed accounts of family life./nAnalyses of participants’ appraisal processes addressed the following questions: which aspects of daily family interactions they experienced as stressful and why they were appraised as stressful, how the participants attempted to manage these stressful interactions and why they chose particular coping behaviors and resources, and how their coordination of these appraisals were associated with their subsequent distress. The findings present three important clinical and research implications, including the importance of considering nondisabled siblings’ appraisals of stressful family interactions in clinical practice and research, the need to expand nondisabled siblings’ coping behaviors and resources for managing daily family-related stress, and the role of parents in nondisabled siblings’ experiences of stress.

Advisor: Holloway, Susan
Fast MCMC algorithms, Stability and DeepTune

Drawing samples from a known distribution is a core computational challenge common to many disciplines, with applications in statistics, probability, operations research, and other areas involving stochastic models. In statistics, sampling methods are useful for both estimation and inference, including problems such as estimating expectations of desired quantities, computing probabilities of rare events, gauging volumes of particular sets, exploring posterior distributions and obtaining credible intervals etc./nFacing massive high dimensional data, both computational efficiency and good statistical guarantees are more and more important in modern statistical and machine learning applications. In this thesis, centered around sampling algorithms, we consider the fundamental questions on their computational and statistical guarantees: How to design a fast sampling algorithm and how long should it be run? What are the statistical learning guarantee of these algorithms? Are there any trade-offs between computation and learning?/nTo answer these questions, first we start with establishing non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for popular MCMC sampling algorithms in Bayesian literature: Metropolized Random Walk, Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. To address a number of technical challenges arise enroute, we develop results based on the conductance profile in order to prove quantitative convergence guarantees general continuous state space Markov chains. Second, to confront a large class of constrained sampling problems, we introduce two new algorithms, Vaidya and John walks, to sample from polytope-constrained distributions with convergence guarantees. Third, we prove fundamental trade-off results between statistical learning performance and convergence rate of any iterative learning algorithm, including sample algorithms. The trade-off results allow us to show that a too stable algorithm can not converge too fast, and vice-versa. Finally, to help neuroscientists analyze their massive amount of brain data, we develop DeepTune, a stability-driven visualization and interpretation framework via optimization and sampling for the neural-network-based models of neurons in visual cortex.

Advisor: Yu, Bin
Hormone Receptor Activity and Chronic Disease Risk in Migrant Populations

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including type 2 diabetes (T2D) and breast cancer, account for a vast majority of deaths worldwide. The incidence rates of these morbidities vary widely among different ethnic groups with racial minorities disproportionately affected by these chronic pathologies. Known risk factors among those afflicted with T2D and breast cancer include genetic markers, diet, obesity, and other lifestyle factors. However, these risk factors cannot fully explain the observed incidence rates across different ethnic populations. For migrant populations whose environment is often altered throughout their lifetime, environmental factors play a significant role in the development of chronic diseases. For this reason, approaches that are aimed at identifying non-genetic factors are necessary. This dissertation makes use of an exposome approach known as the receptorome. This methodology was used to investigate differences in hormone receptor activity and their association to breast cancer and T2D in migrant populations. The introduction in Chapter 1 provides an overview of the exposome approach highlighting the role of steroid hormones and environmental mimics in the development of two chronic diseases that disproportionately affect migrant populations. Chapter 2 investigates the association between estrogenic activity and nativity, genetic ancestry, and lifestyle factors among Mexican women. Chapter 3 is an extension of the previous chapter, providing further evidence that ancestry and other breast cancer risk factors may be associated with mechanisms linked through the endocrine system. This study demonstrates the importance of endogenous and exogenous estrogens among different racial/ethnic groups and their potential role in breast cancer incidence rates. Chapter 4 examines hormone receptor activity and the association to T2D and persistent organic pollutants in South Indian Asians and European Whites living in London. Lastly, Chapter 5 summarizes all findings and elucidates a secondary technique, known as metabolomics, to aid in the identification of novel environmental risk factors affecting the incidence rates of NCDs in migrant groups.

Advisor: Smith, Martyn T
The Potential of Place: Leveraging Children’s Local Knowledge and Participatory GIS Mapping to Conceptualize Ecological Systems in Elementary Science Instruction

Students bring a wealth of resources to science learning contexts, including knowledge of their everyday worlds. Yet within traditional approaches to K-12 science instruction, students typically are not given opportunities to draw upon this knowledge. In this dissertation, I examine the potential of place-based science curriculum and a digital mapping tool to support students’ conceptually rich science learning by leveraging their local knowledge./nThrough design-based research, I developed an 18-lesson sequence and then analyzed 27 fifth graders’ participation within it to examine the potential of place-based science inquiry. Key features of the lesson sequence included (a) students’ use of a participatory geographic information system (GIS) mapping tool, Local Ground, to support investigating an ecological system - life underfoot on their schoolyard, and (b) students’ engagement in disciplinary practices of soil ecologists (e.g., observation at field sites, isolating and measuring variables, aggregating and visualizing data, and generating evidence-based arguments) to further support their understanding of both science knowledge-building practices and ecological systems./nAnalyses of student dyads’ GIS map use in whole class presentations revealed that the map often afforded students opportunities to integrate their everyday knowledge with data collection experiences in sensemaking. Specifically, the map supported students as they drew upon data generated at different sites and different moments in time as they conjectured and contested arguments about relations between variables like soil moisture, earthworm counts, and shade, digging deep into student-generated data and reasoning about complex ecological relationships and processes./nLongitudinal analyses of two focal dyads over the 18 lessons revealed that student’s desires, their emergent affect-laden goals, shaped how they engaged in science disciplinary practices. Students’ desires sometimes led them deeper into reasoning about ecological systems and closer into alignment with ecologists’ sampling and representational practices, and sometimes led them further away. In contrasting the two pairs’ experiences within the same curriculum, this analysis offers insights into how science practices may become needed in formal science contexts./nThis dissertation examines the potential of new forms and contexts to support conceptually rich science learning opportunities. This research contributes to the fields’ understanding of how we might engage students in science disciplinary practices, in ways that productively build on children’s extensive experiences, affect-laden goals, and varied perspectives

Advisor: Saxe, Geoffrey B
Law's Audiences

This dissertation explores the concept of audience in contemporary theories of legal interpretation, examining the varied roles that nonjudicial legal actors play in interpreting, constructing, and applying statutes and the Constitution. So defined, legal audiences include both those who are actively engaged with, as well as those who are passively affected by, legal rules, in addition to those outside the formal legal system but who nevertheless assert claims about legal meaning. Orienting legal interpretation around nonjudicial legal audiences provides an important contrast to predominant approaches in American public law legal theory, which tend to situate acts of legal interpretation as practices primarily for judges. Prominent debates in both constitutional and statutory interpretation are often most concerned with providing accounts about the proper role of unelected and politically unaccountable judges when interpreting democratically promulgated constitutional and statutory texts. Instead, this dissertation focuses on how the content of the law is also developed as a collaborative endeavor between judges as authors about rules for legal interpretation, and the relevant legal audiences who bring the law to life, through their implementations, applications, and interpretations. In particular, the dissertation analyzes the distinctive conversational, confrontational, and cooperative dynamics that develop between courts and other legal audiences involved in making claims about the meaning of law.

Advisor: Song, Sarah
Kutz, Chris
A Given Image: Monsters, Men, and Beasts on Olympia’s Votive Bronze

In his Periegesis (5.21), Pausanias writes about touring the sanctuary of Olympia. Describing the Altis’ monuments and dedications, he lingers on their appearance, inscriptions, and dedicators. Millennia later, Olympia and its votive gifts continue to draw interest and provoke curiosity. Contemporary scholarship has examined Olympia and other sanctuaries as spaces conceptually distinct from the polis and therefore important loci for elite competition and interaction—particularly in the Archaic period, during the early development of the Greek city-state. Within this framework, scholars have explored the social politics and visual programs of sanctuary architecture and monumental votive gifts; they have paid relatively little attention, however, to other votives of the Archaic period./nThe present study focuses on these “standard” dedications—the types of objects that were dedicated repeatedly—and considers their role in the visual culture of the sanctuary. It addresses three distinct sets of votive gifts, all bronzes dedicated at Olympia during the 8th-5th centuries BCE. First, it discusses protome cauldrons, similar in form to the traditional sanctuary cooking implement, but heavily elaborated with attachments representing the heads and necks of mythological creatures. It then explores miniature tripods and figurines, the earliest and most numerous of the Altis’s dedications. Finally, it addresses shields, looted from enemies and set up as victory monuments around the ancient stadium. Although similar votive gifts are found at other sanctuaries, as a group these votives embody traits specific to Olympia: no other sanctuary received either such an extraordinary quantity of bronze, nor nearly as many martial dedications./nIn its analysis, this study draws on a variety of disciplines, including cultural anthropology, art history, and psychology, with a view towards reaching a contextually embedded understanding of the dedications and their visual programs. It highlights points of contact between these very different types of gifts, including geographical allusions and what has been called “defunctionalization.” It explores the many ways in which the votives’ composition and iconography influenced and commented upon the sanctuary space, and how they themselves interacted with and impacted their viewers.

Advisor: Shelton, Kim
Controlling the Dynamics of Nanoscopic Matter with Electromagnetic Fields

The electromagnetic force is one of the four basic interactions discovered in nature and it plays an essential role in determining the internal properties of most matter seen in daily life. In this dissertation, we present the endeavor on exploiting electromagnetic fields to actively control the dynamics of various nanoscopic matter, including atomic ion rings, monolayer semiconductors, and nanomechanical membranes. The achieved controls open up unique opportunities to study fundamental many-body quantum physics and to facilitate information and energy transfer processes at the nanoscale./nThis dissertation consists of three sets of experiments. 1. We design and fabricate a surface-electrode Paul trap and confine up to fifteen 40Ca+ ions into a microscopic ring using radio-frequency electric fields. The achieved unprecedented circular symmetry enables the first observation of localization-delocalization transitions of ion rings at millikelvin temperatures. 2. We propose and demonstrate a scheme to couple electron valley degree-of-freedom with macroscopic mechanical motion using a magnetic field gradient perpendicular to suspended monolayer semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (for example MoS2). Direct transduction of valley excitation into mechanical states is realized for the first time. 3. We perform the first experiment to probe and manipulate the phonon energy transfer driven by quantum fluctuations of electromagnetic fields (the Casimir effect). With a delicate approach to place two nanomechanical membranes parallel and close to each other, we realize the first strong Casimir phonon coupling condition and thus observe the thermal energy exchange across vacuum between individual phonon modes.

Advisor: Zhang, Xiang
Randomization Tests under the Potential Outcomes Framework

The Fisher randomization test (FRT) is appropriate for any test statistic, under a sharp null hypothesis that can recover all missing potential outcomes. However, it is often of interest to test a weak null hypothesis that the treatment does not affect the units on average. To use the FRT for a weak null hypothesis, we must address two issues. First, we need to impute the missing potential outcomes although the weak null hypothesis cannot determine all of them. Second, we need to choose a proper test statistic. For a general weak null hypothesis, we propose an approach to imputing missing potential outcomes under a compatible sharp null hypothesis. With this imputation scheme, we advocate a studentized statistic. The resulting FRT has multiple desirable features. First, it is model-free. Second, it is finite-sample exact under the sharp null hypothesis that we use to impute the potential outcomes. Third, it conservatively controls large-sample type I errors under the weak null hypothesis of interest. Therefore, our FRT is agnostic to treatment effect heterogeneity. We establish a unified theory for general factorial experiments. We also extend it to stratified and clustered experiments.

Advisor: Ding, Peng
Electron-Scale Processes in the Solar Wind and Magnetosphere

Plasma, one of the four fundamental states of matter, prevails the universe and accounts for 90\% of the known masses. Interaction between the solar wind, a space plasma with solar origin, and the terrestrial magnetic field shapes the space climate that is crucial for our modern society that heavily dependent on electricity, electronics and satellites. Waves ubiquitously grow, propagate, interact with other waves and plasmas, and eventually damps away in plasmas, significantly altering plasma dynamics and energy transport. Measurements of both plasma particles and electromagnetic fields allow probing wave-plasma interactions of interest./nPart one of the thesis presents a few new results relating to the electron heat flux in the solar wind. Electron heat flux is a poorly understood quantity in weakly collisional or collisionless astrophysical and space plasmas, but it is crucial to modeling large scale systems such as galaxy clusters and stellar winds. We present a statistical study of the electron heat flux in the solar wind and confirm that it is bounded from above by power laws of electron beta. We consider various collisionless processes that potentially reduce the heat flux. In particular, the whistler heat flux instability (WHFI) has long been considered to constrain heat flux in the high beta regime. We show for the first time local generation of whistler waves in the solar wind using high-cadence simultaneous particles and wave measurements onboard ARTEMIS spacecraft. We present the statistical properties of the whistler waves in the solar wind at 1 AU, with evidence supporting WHFIs generating the observed whistler waves. However, we argue that the wave amplitude is too small to effectively reduce the electron heat flux. Accompanied by the electron heat flux is measurable electron bulk drifts with respect to the solar wind protons, which significantly modify Landau resonance of kinetic Alfv\'en waves (KAWs). We consider the effects of potential KAW instabilities in the context of electron heat flux inhibition./nPart two of the thesis considers a type of electrostatic structure known as the electron phase space hole (EPSH). It is formed in the non-linear stage of plasma streaming instabilities and remains highly stable for long duration. We address for the first time 3D configuration of EPSHs by analyzing multi-spacecraft (using NASA MMS) passing of the same EPSH. The length scale perpendicular to the background magnetic field is directly measured with significant implications to electron motions inside EPSHs. In addition, statistical study of such multi-spacecraft observation reveals strong correlation among parameters of fast EPSHs.

Advisor: Bale, Stuart D
Nontrivial tori in spaces of symplectic embeddings

This dissertation is comprised of two papers studying the topology of certain spaces of symplectic embeddings./nThe first paper shows how given two 4-dimensional ellipsoids whose symplectic sizes satisfy a specified inequality, a certain loop of symplectic embeddings between the two ellipsoids is noncontractible. The statement about symplectic ellipsoids is a particular case of a more general result which claims that given two convex toric domains whose first and second ECH capacities satisfy a specified inequality, one can prove that a certain loop of symplectic embeddings between the two convex toric domains is noncontractible./nThe second paper proves how given two 2n-dimensional symplectic ellipsoids whose symplectic sizes satisfy certain inequalities, a certain map from the n-torus to the space of symplectic embeddings from one ellipsoid to the other induces an injective map at the level of homology with mod 2 coefficients.

Advisor: Hutchings, Michael
Engineering MS2 Capsid Assembly Using Systematic Fitness Landscapes

Self-assembling proteins are emerging as compelling solutions in both drug delivery and vaccine development. Typically, a self-assembling protein, such as a virus-like particle, is repurposed as a drug delivery vehicle by decorating a native, well-characterized viral capsid through chemical or genetic modification. While this was successful in several applications, it does not allow the physical properties of the particle itself to be adjusted in a rational manner. Indeed, there are many instances in which native capsid properties—such as stability, size, binding, chemical reactivity, among others—are non-ideal for the application at hand./nHerein, we developed and employed a new technique to study the mutability of self-assembling virus-like particles. This technique allows facile generation of highly targeted libraries, as well as simultaneous evaluation of many variants in a single pool. Furthermore, this technique is compatible with many different direct functional selections, such as heat, acid, or chemical challenges, enabling granular insight into how mutations affect chemical and physical properties. We evaluated how single amino acid mutations affect self-assembly of a model virus-like particle (Chapter 2). We then applied this technique to study the two-amino acid mutability of a small and flexible loop (Chapter 3). We also studied how N-terminal extensions alter the stability and chemical reactivity of the virus-like particle (Chapter 4). Finally, we sought to understand how mutations can affect the quaternary geometry of a self-assembling particle (Chapter 5). In sum, by allowing the simultaneous evaluation of many variants in a single pool, this work has generated the most systematic data available regarding the effects of individual amino acid substitutions on the resulting properties of virus-like particles.

Advisor: Francis, Matthew B
Tullman-Ercek, Danielle