VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Infectious diseases of poverty research data management: opportunities and challenges to capacity strengthening in Africa

Data Management (DM) is a critical, yet often neglected step of research studies, essential to guarantee the integrity of data and validity of conclusions derived from it. To enable meaningful data use (and re-use), investigators and their institutes must therefore be equipped with appropriate DM capacity. Little empirical research so far has explored DM practices in clinical research or the barriers and enablers of their implementation, especially in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs). Using a mixed-methods design, this thesis addresses this important and timely gap.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of schistosomiasis treatment efficacy studies first demonstrates the pitfalls of aggregated data for re-use, and uncovers varied data management and analysis practices within this research community. The case of schistosomiasis (a neglected, under-researched tropical disease) is contrasted with that of malaria. Through its well-established data-sharing platform, the World- Wide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN) enables an in-depth exploration of datasets and accompanying study documentation from 108 antimalarial trials performed in Africa. This exploratory analysis shows that DM capacity development needs particularly concern comprehensive annotation and transparent handling of study datasets.
Two qualitative case studies in Dakar, Senegal and Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo complement this systematic description of DM across Africa. Through indepth interviews and observations of local practices, I examine clinical research staff's knowledge, attitudes, experiences and perceptions of DM, as well as the constraints within which they operate DM systems (DMS). Findings confirm that robust DMS depend on adequate financing and strong infrastructure, but also on an overall enabling environment where the importance of DM is recognised.
Results from this work highlight priority areas for clinical research DM capacity strengthening in LMICs, emphasising the necessity to raise awareness of DM's complexity and to establish DM as a valued professional role.

Keywords: Malaria
Neglected Tropical Diseases
Schistosomiasis
Data management
Low and Middle Income Countries
Capacity development
Capacity building
Data sharing
Advisor: Lang, T
Guérin, P
Marsh, V
Olliaro, P
Methodologies for evaluating exposure and response of stone masonry to wind-driven rain

Wind-driven rain (WDR) is a main moisture source and weathering factor for monumental and vernacular stone masonry in the UK. To conserve and manage these structures, especially as weather events are predicted to become more intense during the 21st century, methodologies are needed that: (a) characterise environmental WDR exposure, and (b) non-destructively monitor the response of moisture regimes within stone masonry.
This thesis aims to address exposure and response between WDR and stone masonry, integrating characterisation and methodological development with an emphasis on data handling and visualisation. Semi-empirical approaches are employed to characterise current and future WDR exposure in the UK to evaluate existing standards and metrics. The use of non-destructive electromagnetic techniques for moisture measurement is explored for comparative advantages when applied for stone masonry.
Extreme value analysis (EVA) is used to evaluate severe WDR exposure in the UK at eight sites. While reinforcing established trends (e.g. prevailing wind directions) this research highlighted the impact of wall orientation on the volume of water and consistency within WDR spells and their quantity and duration. The EVA demonstrated that current standards (ISO 15927-3 and BS 8104) underestimate extreme exposure. A combination of UKCP09 Weather Generator output with probabilistic processes demonstrated that existing contrasts between sites will be magnified by predicted climatic changes and become more seasonally polarised, providing an impetus to improve current standards by incorporating extreme value analysis and temporal metrics.
A novel, cost- and time-effective method of laboratory gravimetric calibration using 'isolated diffusion' was validated, which produced calibrations of radar and microwave techniques for three UK building stones that matched modelled behaviour. The combined use of microwave and radar techniques in field studies on two stone masonry constructions characterised localised moisture regimes within stone masonry systems (stone units and mortar joints), demonstrating that technique selection is optimised with consideration for material properties and the investigation objective. Innovative data handling and visualisation strategies demonstrated their utility for these scenarios of stone masonry composed of different materials.
By developing methodologies for semi-empirical evaluation and non-destructive techniques, as well as characterising environmental and hygric properties/behaviour of stones and stone masonry, this thesis has contributed to both progress in scientific research and practical aspects of heritage conservation in the context of a changing 21st century climate.

Advisor: Viles, H
The experiences of parents who have a child with an intellectual disability

Parenting a child with an intellectual disability is associated with high levels of challenges and increased parental stress. Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is a qualitative research methodology that has been increasingly used to explore the experiences of parents of children with intellectual disabilities.
The first paper is a systematic review which identifies the range of IPA research exploring the experiences of parents who have a child with an intellectual disability and evaluates the quality of papers. Twenty studies were identified, findings of which were critiqued and synthesised. The review found that parents of a child with an intellectual disability experience a range of difficult emotions and practical difficulties, and that the level of parent coping is related to external support. Studies showed strengths in most areas of methodological rigour pertinent to the quality of IPA. Areas for improvement included reflexivity, ethical considerations, justification of research design, and use of an inclusion and exclusion criteria in participant sampling. Future research should be conducted across a wider number of countries and cultures and with an increased focus on the experiences of fathers and older parents.
The second paper presents an IPA study that explored the lived experiences of parents who had a child with an intellectual disability transitioning to adulthood. Transition to adulthood is an important life stage for young people and may be particularly challenging for people with intellectual disabilities. Ten parents were interviewed. The interviews were analysed and revealed three superordinate themes. These captured parents’ experiences of difficulties and uncertainty related to their role, their child’s independence, navigating services for their child, and accessing support for themselves. Increased collaboration and consistency from statutory services is required in addition to providing emotional support to parents and facilitating parent support networks.

Advisor: Hewitt, O
The genomics, evolution, and spread of Shigella species in Asia

The bacterial genus Shigella remains a significant cause of diarrhoea in young children, particularly in tropical and developing countries. Effective clinical management and public health policy implementation require an in-depth understanding of the pathogen’s evolution and epidemiology. This thesis set out to utilize genomic and phylogenetic analyses to investigate Shigella’s life history in several settings. Firstly, I focused on S. sonnei exhibiting escalating resistance to fluoroquinolones, which are the recommended treatment for shigellosis. I showed that extant geographically dispersed fluoroquinolone resistant S. sonnei emerged as a single clone in South Asia around 2007. This clone then spread internationally, creating sustained transmissions in Southeast Asia and Europe. Secondly, examination of a vast historical Shigella sequencing dataset from Southeast Asia showed that contemporary regional Shigella populations are progenies of relatively recent introductions, mostly during the 1980s-1990s. Intraspecific clonal replacement, occurring in both S. sonnei and major S. flexneri serotypes, was frequent and linked with resistance to contemporaneously used antimicrobials. The secondary aim of this thesis was to explore the alternations of the gut microbiota in response to infectious diarrhoea in children. I found that the diarrhoeal faecal microbiome could either generally resemble or greatly diverge from that of a healthy state. Escherichia and oral bacterial commensals were found to be consistently enriched in the diarrhoeal faecal microbiome. These studies demonstrate the versatility of applying sequencing to studying diarrhoea in endemic regions, enhancing our current understanding of this public health problem.

Keywords: Shigella genomics
Diarrheal microbiome
Shigella evolution
Shigella epidemiology
Asia
Shigella
Advisor: Baker, S
Thomson, N
Rabaa, M
Social anxiety in children and young people: imagery and attention

Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is one of the most prevalent mental health disorders in children and young people, and can have a negative effect on multiple areas of the child’s life, for example, education, and peer relationships. Adult cognitive models of SAD outline the mechanisms involved in the maintenance of the disorder. Two core components of this model are negative self-images, and attentional focus. Although these mechanisms have been widely explored in the adult literature, far less is known about them among children and young people.
The first paper presents a systematic review investigating the association between imagery and social anxiety in children and young people. The review found that to date, there is some evidence to support the association between imagery and social anxiety in children and young people. However, many of the effects of negative imagery were found not to be specific to those with high social anxiety.
The second paper presents an empirical study exploring the association between the balance of internal and external focus of attention and anxiety under social stress conditions in pre-adolescent children. A community sample of children completed self-report questionnaires assessing focus of attention and social anxiety. Children scoring high and low in social anxiety also completed an attention task assessing focus of attention. The findings of the questionnaires revealed a significant cross sectional association between increased internal, relative to external, focus of attention and high social anxiety. However, the results of the attentional task provided no evidence that heightened anxiety led to increased internal, relative to external, focus of attention for high vs. low socially anxious children. These findings are discussed in terms of implications for clinical practice and future research, together with the limitations of the study.

Advisor: Creswell, C
Halldorsson, B
Small-scale cyber security: mapping security requirements for IT users at home and in small organisations

Despite a long-standing assumption that developments in personal and cloud computing models would change the way we approach security, small-scale IT users (SSITUs) remain underserviced by existent cyber security models. This dissertation discusses survey results relating to the technology employed by SSITUs and their engagement with cyber security.
We determine that: SSITUs are focusing on easy-to-implement technical measures, leading to a disconnect between the security implemented and any risks identified; few SSITUs face more than basic threats or employ more than basic security measures; available resources, knowledge, prioritisation of business processes, reduced system control and a lack of threat intelligence all combine to limit the ability to make cyber security decisions; and assessing risk in SSITUs will not lead to sufficient investment to mitigate risks for risk-holding stakeholders in the supply chain.
We also found that: the system architectures employed by SSITUs are significantly different to those employed by large corporate or government entities; the architecture of a small organisation’s digital footprint has far more impact on their overall security than would be the case for a large organisation; and SSITUs do not hold sufficient influence within the supply chain to manage cyber security in their interactions with service providers.
We show that improving small-scale cyber security architectures is not simply about developing new technology — there is a need to consider technology use in context of interactions within a broader ecosystem of a supply chain, users with multiple roles and conflicts of interest, as well as the increased importance of SSITUs’ digital footprints on their security.
In order to improve the cyber security posture of the smallest organisations, security providers need a better understanding of their requirements and the role of larger stakeholders within the supply chain. They also need a business case for investing in products for this marketplace. To this end we have developed a framework of global requirements and constraints for small-scale cyber security, which should have the potential to assist in the development of products adapted for this user group.
For contrast we have provided a requirements framework developed from the perspective of the risk-holding stakeholders in the supply chain, to illustrate the differing expectations of the best-resourced stakeholders in their interactions with SSITUs. This highlights the difficulties posed by incumbent best practices, where many security measures are beyond the grasp of SSITUs and the risks some stakeholders expect to be reduced far exceed the means of the smaller organisations.
We conclude that, with a better understanding of the context within which SSITUs operate, combined with a suitable expectation of how much risk can be transferred to them within the supply chain, it is possible to improve small-scale cyber security.

Keywords: Cyber Security
Advisor: Simpson, A
The compatibility of the standard of judicial review in EU competition law with article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights

This thesis brings two different, but interrelated worlds together. It assesses whether the standard of review applied in competition law cases by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is sufficient to comply with the right to a fair trial of Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Within the framework of EU competition law, the EU judicature is called to review antitrust and merger decisions adopted by the European Commission. Since those decisions adversely affect the business and property rights of economic entities, it is essential that an effective judicial control is subsequently carried out by an independent and impartial tribunal. On this account, Article 6(1) of the ECHR imposes certain minimum requirements that the EU courts must fulfil despite the fact that the Convention does not form part of EU law.
My first goal is to decipher the foregoing requirements by perusing the relevant case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), to wit the institution entrusted to interpret and apply the Convention authoritatively. My second goal is to define the standard of judicial review applied in EU competition law by scrutinizing the relevant case law of the CJEU. My third and most important goal is to determine in a substantiated manner whether the conditions set by the ECtHR are satisfied by the CJEU.

Advisor: Enchelmaier, S
How do master planners think? A sociomaterial inquiry

This thesis is an inquiry into master planning culture in everyday practice. It asks how master planners collectively make sense of and achieve complex tasks, or more to the point, how do planners think? Attending to how planners think rather than what they think about, shifts the discussion away from urban matters and design decisions, towards the study of cultures of practice. Drawing from a distributed cognition approach, the study is concerned with the sociomaterial basis of thought, wherein people, materials, their spatial environments and temporal perceptions are entangled in an emerging cultural system.
Over the course of eight months of participant observation and 38 ethnographic interviews, the study followed the making of three planning artefacts – a model, drawing and report – to consider their performative roles in sociomaterial arrangements and perceptions of time and space. In the making of boundary objects, the teams of planners internalize the boundaries of the task enacting contingent relationships with others and enfolding agential properties of uncertainties into coordinated practices. The findings show that planners do not try to avoid uncertainty but think through modes of adapting and attending to it, generating temporary contexts of confidence.
On the basis of these findings and the method of inquiry, I outline three contributions this thesis makes to planning practice literature: it proposes a method of addressing the internal coordination of teams of planners and their cognitive complexities, rarely addressed in the literature; it focuses on an observable unit of study, which enables the analysis of the uncertain, ambiguous and absent dimensions entangled in planning thought; and lastly, it renders the concept of a planning culture amenable to reflexive conceptions of everyday practice. This approach provides insights into the multiple ways in which master planners conceive of and enact the ecology of planning in which they are embedded.

Advisor: Rayner, S
Holographic approaches to strongly-interacting systems

In this thesis, we investigate some applications of the gauge/string duality to strongly-coupled quantum field theories. After a brief review of the duality and the main entries of the holographic dictionary, we explore the asymptotic nature of the gradient expansion for Bjorken flow using the fluid/gravity correspondence. We link the divergence of the series to the presence of non-perturbative quasi-normal modes and construct the hydrodynamic attractor, using Borel-Padé summation techniques. We find that different initial conditions hydrodynamise, at large values of the pressure anisotropy, before the plasma has had time to reach thermal equilibrium. We then explore the transport properties of zero sound modes in a family of holographic strange metals. We find sound modes with speed given by the conformal value and attenuation constant given by hydrodynamic form at arbitrarily low temperatures, even outside of the usual hydrodynamic regime. The sound attenuation constant as a function of temperature qualitatively resembles that of a Landau Fermi liquid zero sound, including a maximum between the collisionless and the hydrodynamic regimes. In order to get insight into these low temperature sound modes, we introduce a new quantity called ''entanglement density", which we study holographically for a range of systems and relevant deformations. We conclude that its asymptotic nature is linked to the area theorem of entanglement, and that it can be used to classify states of quantum matter according to their long-range entanglement and the violation of the area theorem.

Keywords: Holographic RG Flows
AdS/CMT
Long-range Entanglement
Resurgence and Resummation
Hydrodynamic Attractor
Landau Fermi Liquid
Holographic Zero Sound
Advisor: O'Bannon, A
Starinets, A
Separation and abstraction in property transfers: a comparative study of English and Chinese law

This thesis is a non-traditional comparative study of a traditional topic, to see to what extent the non-unified rules in English law and vague rules in Chinese law can be fitted into the conceptual framework of separation and abstraction which originates in German law. It therefore comprises two main questions: first, how title/ownership is conveyed inter vivos consensually and second, whether the validity of conveyance is infected by a nullified or rescinded underlying basis. As for the existence of separation (between the underlying obligation and conveyance), answers for both jurisdictions are generally in the affirmative. It is further argued that though the underlying contract and the conveyance may factually coincide, a separate intent to convey can nevertheless be found as a method of conveyance conceptually independent from the contract. As for the existence of abstraction, answers for both jurisdictions are also generally in the affirmative, though in English law it appears to be but is in reality not subject to an exception in the context of sale of goods involving fraudulent misrepresentation, while in Chinese law such proposition can only be inferred from clues in other legislative provisions rather than direct authorities. A special feature of English law which must not be neglected is that though the transfer system may be notionally abstract at common law, the consequence of a valid conveyance involving a flawed underlying basis might be a right beyond in personam under a constructive trust. This makes the English system effectively causal in equity, though a coherent rationale is not easy to find regardless of the trust being an immediate response or one triggered by rescission. Although trusts are recognised in China, the role of constructive trust as a device for reversing unjust enrichment is alien to Chinese law, with substantial barriers from a systematic perspective for Chinese law to take lessons from English law. When it comes to debates over justifications between abstraction and causality, pro-causality justifications such as swollen assets, involuntary assumption of risk, causality plus bona fide acquisition, and property of sentimental value cannot stand up to scrutiny. It is suggested that the theory of detecting opportunity could serve as a positive argument for abstraction

Keywords: separation
abstraction
rescission
property transfer
causality
Advisor: Swadling, W