VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Functional Hybrid Biomaterials based on Peptide-Polymer Conjugates for Nanomedicine

The focus of this dissertation is the design, synthesis and characterization of hybrid functional biomaterials based on peptide-polymer conjugates for nanomedicine. Generating synthetic materials with properties comparable to or superior than those found in nature has been a "holy grail" for the materials community. Man-made materials are still rather simplistic when compared to the chemical and structural complexity of a cell. Peptide-polymer conjugates have the potential to combine the advantages of the biological and synthetic worlds- that is they can combine the precise chemical structure and diverse functionality of biomolecules with the stability and processibility of synthetic polymers. As a new family of soft matter, they may lead to materials with novel properties that have yet to be realized with either of the components alone./nIn order for peptide-polymer conjugates to reach their full potential as useful materials, the structure and function of the peptide should be maintained upon polymer conjugation. The success in achieving desirable, functional assemblies relies on fundamentally understanding the interactions between each building block and delicately balancing and manipulating these interactions to achieve targeted assemblies without interfering with designed structures and functionalities. Such fundamental studies of peptide-polymer interactions were investigated as the nature of the polymer (hydrophilic vs. hydrophobic) and the site of its conjugation (end-conjugation vs. side-conjugation) were varied./nThe fundamental knowledge gained was then applied to the design of amphiphiles that self-assemble to form stable functional micelles. The micelles exhibited exceptional monodispersity and long-term stability, which is atypical of self-assembled systems. Thus such micelles based on amphiphilic peptide-polymer conjugates may meet many current demands in nanomedicine, in particular for drug delivery of hydrophobic anti-cancer therapeutics./nLastly, biological evaluations were performed to investigate the potential of micelles as drug delivery vehicles. In vitro cell studies demonstrated that the micelles can be used as a delivery vehicle to tailor the cellular uptake, time release, and intracellular trafficking of drugs. In vivo biodistribution and pharmacokinetic experiments showed long blood circulation. This work demonstrates that peptide-polymer conjugates can be used as building blocks to generate hierarchical functional nanostructures with a wide range of applications, only one of which is drug delivery.

Advisor: Xu, Ting
Fourteen Convicted, Three Million Condemned: The Slansky Affair and the Reconstitution of Jewish Identities After the Holocaust

In this study, I examine how Jews in the United States, Western Europe, and Israel reacted to the Slansky Affair, the Doctors' Plot, and the general wave of overt Soviet antisemitism which took shape in late 1952 until Stalin's death in early March 1953. I explore how the Holocaust, the creation of a Jewish state, and the Cold War affected Jewish conceptions of antisemitism as well as the nature and character of Jewish collective action on both the global and the domestic stage. After investigating the ways in which Jews understood and reacted to the trial culturally, religiously, organizationally, nationally, and politically, I assert that in the early 1950s, Jews were in a process of redefinition. The role of Israel in diasporic Jewish affairs, the relationship between Jews and the Left, the position of Jews in the Cold War, and the nature and character of Jewish central leadership figured prominently in the lives of individual Jews and Jewish communities in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. This is not an investigation of the Slansky Trial itself. Rather, through examining how Jews understood and made sense of the Trial, I construct a narrative of Jewish identity politics in the early 1950s.

Advisor: Connelly, John
The Evolving Braid: An Ethnography of Technology Change in Uganda

If there's one thing one can expect from information technology deployments in developing countries-it's the unexpected. From 2007-2010, I combined my skills as a software developer with ethnographic methods to observe the use of information technology in a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Southwest Uganda. This NGO subsidizes health facilities by paying for sexually transmitted infection treatment on the basis of claims submitted after the patient consultation, targeting treatment of 99,000 clients between 2006-2011. The program addresses a real need - in the program area, a household survey found that while 39% of the population reported STI symptoms, only 1/3 sought care. However,/nmanagement of this program is information intensive. As part of my studies, I implemented and tested Claim Mobile, a smartphone-based data collection application intended to reduce claims processing delays and improve health facility engagement. I successfully tested Claim Mobile in Summer 2008, processing 35 claims for two health facilities, and then discontinued its deployment six months later, when I decided that integration and scale-up of the technology would be problematic for the changing context the NGO. New priorities and new program management practices revealed `invisible constraints' that a redesign of Claim Mobile would not accommodate./nThis dissertation addresses the ways in which I as a researcher, an NGO, and their beneficiary health service providers deal with and understand social and technological change. I discuss how the NGO program staff 'braided' communications together to address their communications needs, the ways in which choices in design can affect stakeholder relationships, and reflect on the reasons for Claim Mobile's 'failure'. I find that 1) designs must account for all stakeholders, not just users, 2) ICTs are used in co-evolving and co -dependent, braided ways, 3) affordances and constraints change over time, as well as in relation to the different user contexts, and as a result 4) designs are subject to changing context.

Advisor: Chuang, John
Saxenian, AnnaLee
Spatial Ecology of the Giant Kangaroo Rat (Dipodomys ingens): A Test of Species Distribution Models as Ecological Revealers

Monitoring a species' distribution and abundance is a critical component in both applied and theoretical ecology. Wildlife managers demand effective and efficient methods for monitoring species of concern. Theoretical ecologists, as well, need accurate estimates of species' distributions and abundance, and measures of the quality of habitat that determines these parameters. Recent advances in species distribution models have suggested an inexpensive and robust way forward for estimating habitat suitability, but these models have rarely addressed species distributions at ecologically relevant spatial or temporal scales. Further, few studies have examined the relationship between habitat suitability, as estimated from species distribution models, and habitat quality, a better predictor of long-term population persistence. In this study, I (1) test current methods for monitoring giant kangaroo rat population extent and abundance; (2) create novel species distribution models that incorporate primary productivity as an ecological predictor for giant kangaroo rat distribution; and (3) test whether these models are actually related to independent measures of habitat quality. Aerial surveys are shown to be a reliable estimator for giant kangaroo rat population extent. Burrow counts may be a reliable index of long-term population size, but are inadequate to detecting short-term changes in size or growth. Distribution models that incorporate ecologically relevant variables on annual time scales are shown to better predict giant kangaroo rat distribution than static models that assume the species is at equilibrium. Finally, species distribution models perform well at measuring long-term giant kangaroo rat abundance, and temporally explicit models predict short-term abundance, but species distribution models are generally incapable of adequately distinguishing between high and low quality habitat as measured by survival or body condition.

Advisor: Brashares, Justin S
Cash Flow and Discount Rate news estimation: which method to choose?

This paper documents that the VAR method for estimating the Discount Rate and Cash Flow News components of stock returns at the firm level produces results that are highly sensitive to research design choices. To alleviate these concerns, an alternative method of the news estimation is proposed. This method is based on Campbell and Shiller's (1988) return decomposition, but directly computes the Cash Flow News as the sum of the revisions in analysts' forecasts without relying on the VAR system as a modeling mechanism for market expectations (RAF method). Moreover, this method does not require estimation of the implied cost of capital as proposed by Chen and Zhao (2010). Empirical results provide evidence that the RAF method outperforms both VAR and Chen and Zhao's (2010) methods. Monte-Carlo simulations suggest that the RAF method more accurately captures Cash Flow and Discount Rate news.

Advisor: Dechow, Patricia M
Sloan, Richard G
The Role of Prior Knowledge and Problem Contexts in Students' Explanations of Complex System

The purpose of this dissertation is to study students' competencies in generating scientific explanations within the domain of complex systems, an interdisciplinary area in which students tend to have difficulties. While considering students' developing explanations of how complex systems work, I investigate the role of prior knowledge and how students' explanations systematically vary across seven problem contexts (e.g. the movement of sand dunes, the formation of traffic jams, and diffusion in water)./nUsing the Knowledge in Pieces epistemological perspective, I build a mini-theory of how students construct explanations about the behavior of complex systems. The mini-theory shows how advanced, "decentralized" explanations evolve from a variety of prior knowledge resources, which depend on specific features of the problem./nA general emphasis on students' competences is exhibited through three strands of analysis: (1) a focus on moment-to-moment shifts in individuals' explanations in the direction of a normative understanding; (2) a comparison of explanations across the seven problem contexts in order to highlight variation in kinds of prior knowledge that are used; and (3) a concentration on the diversity within explanations that can be all considered examples of emergent thinking. First, I document cases of students' shifting explanations as they become less prototypically centralized (a more naïve causality) and then become more prototypically decentralized over short time periods. The analysis illustrates the lines of continuity between these two ways of understanding and how change can occur during the process of students generating a progression of increasingly sophisticated transitional explanations. Second, I find a variety of students' understandings across the problem contexts, expressing both variation in their prior knowledge and how the nature of a specific domain influences reasoning. Certain problem contexts are easier or harder for students, depending on the kinds of prior knowledge resources activated. For example, in the sand dune problem context, where students are able to access a wide range of intuitive resources that are applicable at multiple levels, coming to explain decentralized causality is relatively straight forward. Third, I find that for these students' emergent thinking is not a unified entity. It is diverse in its nature and varies across problem contexts and across the kinds of prior knowledge that students evoke./nThis dissertation illustrates the importance of students' prior knowledge resources in their understanding and developing explanations for how complex systems work. Combined, these results suggest that the fundamental diversity in explanations needs to be respected. Instruction should emphasize the generative process of explaining based on students' prior knowledge rather than any a priori taxonomy of forms of explanations to be learned.

Advisor: diSessa, Andrea A
Cantatas of the Wild: Memoir, Mysticism, and Modern Feminist Poetry

In this dissertation, the introduction defines the erotic-mystical mode, using the poetry and prose of the five feminist writers that I argue constitute a core poetic movement. Based on their shared understandings of the centrality of this disruptive new paradigm--with important influences from English Romanticism--these poets create both lyric and prose works that position them as major leaders in feminist thought in the seventies. Collapsing conventional binaries, their works offer examples of how to live, on the deepest level, as life-affirming beings, regardless of gender, race, class, or sexuality, on a damaged, yet still vibrant, planet. They never deny difference, embracing all that is living, yet still grounded in faith in possibilities of collective communication. No one style best expresses the erotic mystical mode; yet it occupies a place, in the seventies, I argue, linked with memoir-poems, paving the way for the contemporary surge of women's memoirs./nThe first chapter concerns itself with selectively surveying the erotic mystical mode transnationally and across periods, while dipping into recent American examples, creating a kind of ground for the sustained individual author readings of H.D.'s Sea Garden, chapter three, and the poetry of Adrienne Rich, 1951-1984, chapters five and seven. The second chapter tells the stories of how this dissertation is constructed and why this particular methodology. It defines and justifies its hybrid methodology, attaching it to a history of genre-crossing writing by feminist critics. In order to do so, I draw from the fairly recent formation of an innovative, hybrid literary criticism by a vigorous diaspora of scholars, consisting of both second wave and contemporary feminist critics./nA number of feminist literary critics have written about these four poets in the past three decades. The feminist critical attention, of course, has gone largely to the poet, most famous and most lauded by the literary establishment, Adrienne Rich, whose first published book of verse predates the publications of the other three by at least fifteen years. In chapter one, I discuss a number of critics relevant to this dissertation, figures such as Francine DuPlessis, Susan Friedman, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Wendy Martin, and Jan Montefiore./nTheir works inspired me to juxtapose creative memoir writing, comprising chapters four and six, with the more traditional chapters of literary criticism, chapters three and five. This personal memoir sprang up in response to years of immersion in the life-altering poetry this dissertation explores and celebrates.

Advisor: O'Brien, Geoffrey G.
Narratives of Contamination: Representations of Race, Gender, and Disease in Nineteenth Century Cuban Fiction

This dissertation correlates the evolution of biomedical discourse and prose fiction in nineteenth century Havana, Cuba. Both, I argue, function as narratives that shape collective consciousness in that era. Beginning with the cholera epidemic of 1833, medical language increasingly insinuates itself into the constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Cholera gives rise to medical fictions that invade or "contaminate" many domains of Cuban life. In effect, the disease blurred the distinctions between the concepts of contagion, race, and sin; the physical and the moral were thereby collapsed into one category. The city--understood to be a biological extension of the individual--was threatened by barbaric racial "outsiders." Their intrusive presence corrupted the entire Cuban social body. In the end, the cholera epidemic led to a symbolic, if not a physical, cleansing of the colonial city./nThe early Cuban novel functions as a laboratory or taller in which theories of purity and disease develop and mature. The individual subject, a microcosm of the larger Cuban social body, becomes the locus of the desire to see and to know enigmatic disease. As the "clinical eye" of the medicalized viewer searches the body for signs of contagion, it defines the hygienic Cuban subject against its impure, racialized Other. However, the novel itself is an agent of contagion, since writing, as Derrida's pharmakon, exacerbates the problem it meant to solve. I argue that the Cuban novel not only unmasked the fiction of stable identities; it also anticipated fin-de-siècle European narratives of degeneration and decline.

Advisor: Ramos, Julio
Iarocci, Michael
Studies in Optics and Optoelectronics

This thesis will detail four projects aimed at understanding and applying the principles of optics and optoelectronics./nIn Chapter 1, we describe phase-sensitive sum-frequency vibrational spectroscopy (PS-SFVS), a nonlinear optical technique that can probe the molecular structure of the top few monolayers of a liquid-vapor interface. We use this technique to investigate the air-water interface, using a number of water samples with different dissolved salts. The information is used to draw inferences about the surface propensity of these salt ions—information that can shed light on both atmospheric chemistry and water solvation theory. We also give a detailed description of the experimental methodology for PS-SFVS, its rationale, and the issues that can arise./nPS-SFVS measurements, such as those described in Chapter 1, can be fruitfully used by comparing them with the signal predicted by molecular simulation. However, the relationship between a molecular configuration and its nonlinear optical signal is not thoroughly understood in the theoretical chemistry community. In particular, the procedures used in the literature to predict an PS-SFVS signal within a molecular simulation have been ambiguous, depending on arbitrary parameters. In Chapter 2, we review PS-SFVS theory at a fundamental level, then map it to modern simulation methods, thereby explaining the ambiguities as consequences of improper truncation of a multipole expansion. A molecular-dynamics simulation of the water-air interface is used as an example, illustrating the consequences of different simulation methods and suggesting which ones should be most accurate./nChapter 3 explores a different aspect of nonlinear optics: The compression and characterization of ultrafast pulses of light. These pulses have been explored for a variety of scientific and technological applications. Ideally, an optical pulse can be reduced in duration up to the limit imposed by its spectral bandwidth via the uncertainty principle. However, the presence of "nonlinear chirp" (different frequencies arriving at different times in a nonlinear fashion), which is especially common in mode-locked fiber lasers, can be a major factor preventing the shortening of a pulse. We describe a new technology, a type of patterned glass phase plate, that promises to reduce nonlinear chirp in a convenient, adjustable, inexpensive, and high-throughput manner. After showing simulations, we describe how we made the plate, and then how we used frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) to watch the plate change the duration and shape of a pulse from a fiber laser./nFinally, Chapter 4 discusses a new architecture for solar cells that uses the field effect, rather than the traditional p-n junction, to separate charge. This could be advantageous for semiconductor materials that are difficult to dope to both p- and n-type, such as oxides, sulfides, and nanoparticles. We discuss the underlying physics and rule-of-thumb design principles, along with both finite element simulations and experimental verifications.

Advisor: Wang, Feng
Inverse Limit Reflection and the Structure of $L(V_{lambda+1})$

We explore the technique of inverse limits, a tool first introduced by Laver in the context of rank-into-rank embeddings. We extend reflection results of Laver using inverse limits up to and including embeddings of the form $L(V_{lambda+1}) to L(V_{lambda+1})$. Isolating this technique as `inverse limit reflection,' we use it to prove structural results of $L(V_{lambda+1})$ very similar to properties of $L(R)$ under $AD^{L(R)}$. We then define a representation, first introduced by Woodin, for subsets of $V_{lambda+1}$, and prove basic closure properties of this representation. Employing the technique of inverse limit reflection we then prove an important property called the Tower Condition and analyze certain measures generated from fixed points of embeddings to broaden the extent of these representations in $L(V_{lambda+1})$.

Advisor: Woodin, W. Hugh
Engineering Optical Antenna for Efficient Local Field Enhancement

Optical antennas have been widely used for variety of applications such as sensitive photodetection, efficient light emission, high-resolution imaging, heat-assisted magnetic recording, and surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) because they can capture and focus propagating electromagnetic energy into sub-diffraction-limited areas and vice versa. However, widespread application of optical antennas has been limited due to lack of appropriate methods for uniform and large area fabrication of antennas, as well as difficulty in achieving an efficient design with small mode volume (gap spacing < 10nm)./nIn this dissertation, we theoretically derived the local field enhancement of the optical antenna and found that optimized radiation and small gap spacing are required for maximum field enhancement of the antenna. To address these parameters, we experimentally demonstrated three different designs of optical antennas./nFirst, we report on applying a dipole antenna on a ground plane for radiation engineering. The dipole antenna design can achieve the optimum radiation condition by tuning the spacer thickness between the antenna array and the ground plane; however, reducing the gap spacing below 10 nm is challenging if using typical nanofabrication techniques such as e-beam lithography and focused ion beam milling./nSecondly, we report on using a patch antenna on ground plane for the uniform sub-5 nm gap spacing. The patch antenna design can be easily implemented with extremely small gaps; however, the poor radiation efficiency of the patch antenna with a nanometer-scale gap degrades the performance of the antenna./nFinally, we present a novel optical antenna design--the arch-dipole antenna--which has optimal radiation efficiency and small gap spacing (5 nm) fabricated by CMOS-compatible deep-UV spacer lithography. This antenna design achieves a strong SERS signal with an enhancement factor exceeding 108 compared to the arch-dipole antenna array; this is two orders of magnitude stronger than that obtained from the standard dipole antenna array fabricated by e-beam lithography. Because the antenna gap spacing--a critical dimension of the antenna--can be defined by deep-UV lithography, efficient optical antenna arrays with sub-10 nm gap can be mass-produced using current CMOS technology.

Advisor: Wu, Ming C
Nonzero degree maps between three dimensional manifolds

The main result of this dissertation shows that every orientable closed 3-manifold admits a nonzero degree map onto at most finitely many homeomorphically distinct non-geometric prime 3-manifolds. Furthermore, for any integer d > 0, every orientable closed 3-manifold admits a map of degree d onto only finitely many homeomorphically distinct 3-manifolds. This answers a question of Yongwu Rong. The finiteness of JSJ piece of the targets under nonzero degree maps was known earlier by the results of Soma and Boileau–Rubinstein–Wang, and a new proof is provided is this dissertation. We also prove analogous results for dominations rela-tive to boundary. As an application, we describe the degree set of dominations onto integral homology 3-spheres.

Advisor: Agol, Ian