VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Minimum data sets in women’s health: Opportunities and challenges explored within the context of developing a core outcome set for pre-eclampsia

Future pre-eclampsia research should ultimately improve patient care. For this to be possible, randomised trials must select, collect, and report outcomes that genuinely reflect the perspectives of key stakeholders, including healthcare professionals, researchers, and women with pre-eclampsia.
The objective of this study was to develop a core outcome set for pre-eclampsia, along with standardised definitions, to ensure outcomes and outcome measures are consistently selected, collected, and reported across future primary research, secondary research, and clinical practice guidelines.
A long list of 116 potential core outcomes was developed by undertaking a systematic review of 79 published pre-eclampsia trials and thematic analysis of 30 in-depth interviews of women with lived experience of pre-eclampsia.
The long list of potential core outcomes was entered into a modified Delphi method. Four hundred and thirty-two participants, including 281 healthcare professionals, 41 researchers, and 110 patients, representing 31 high-income countries and 25 low- and middle-income countries participated in a three-round Delphi survey. One hundred and fifty-nine participants (37%) withdrew. Forty-seven consensus outcomes were identified and entered into a modified nominal group technique. Eleven healthcare professionals, two researchers, and three women with lived experience of pre-eclampsia prioritised 14 maternal, four fetal, and four neonatal core outcomes.
A long list of 86 potential definitions were identified by reviewing four formal definition development initiatives, eight international and national guidelines, 11 Cochrane systematic reviews, and 79 pre-eclampsia trials. During a consensus development conference involving ten healthcare professionals and three researchers, consensus definitions were successfully developed for all core outcomes.
Embedding the core outcome set within future pre-eclampsia research could make a profound contribution to advancing the usefulness of research to inform clinical practice, enhance patient care, and improve maternal and offspring outcomes.

Keywords: routinely collected data
randomised controlled trials
minimum data sets
qualitative methods
consensus development study
clinical practice guidelines
systematic review
observational studies
Advisor: McManus, R
Ziebland, S
Functional diversity of vascular macrophages in atherosclerosis

Atherosclerosis is a multifactorial chronic inflammatory disease of the artery. Diverse macrophage subsets in the atherosclerotic artery contribute to the pathogenesis of the disease. The dendritic cell immunoreceptor (DCIR) 1 is a C-type lectin receptor that inhibits immune responses in myeloid cells. DCIR1 plays both protective and detrimental roles in autoimmune diseases and pathogen-induced infections, respectively. However, to date, the role of DCIR1 in macrophage biology and atherosclerosis remains unknown.
In this thesis, I identified six macrophage subsets by single cell technologies in the murine atherosclerotic aorta. These consist of three “resident” and three “recruited” subsets, which include two novel subpopulations (CD209b+ resident and CCR2+ recruited macrophages). DCIR1 is preferentially expressed by resident vascular macrophages and maintains the balance between resident and recruited macrophage subsets. A novel mouse strain LysMCre Dcir1-DTRflox enables ablation of vascular resident macrophages, together with the majority of tissue macrophages. DCIR1-mediated macrophage ablation opens the niche to Ly6C+ monocytes which can re-acquire DCIR1. This indicates that DCIR1 expression defines tissue resident macrophages.
A comparative study using apolipoprotein E (ApoE)-/- and ApoE-/- Dcir1-/- mice showed that DCIR1 protects against atherosclerosis by maintaining the resident vascular macrophage niche in the aorta. The loss of DCIR1 alters the myeloid cell dynamics in the atherosclerotic aorta, promoting the recruitment of monocytes and macrophages and exacerbating disease evolution.
In conclusion, DCIR1 is a potent regulator of myeloid homeostasis which acts to sustain the resident macrophage niche in the majority of organs. In atherosclerosis, DCIR1 alleviates the disease progression by sustaining the survival of two vascular resident macrophage subsets and limiting monocyte influx to the artery.

Keywords: Macrophages
Atherosclerosis
Advisor: Monaco, C
Words for ‘to speak’ in Old English poetry and the uses poets make of them

This project is the first holistic survey of the major verbs of speech in Old English Poetry. In particular, the thesis examines those numerous verbs of speech which have seemed to modern scholars and readers to be nearly synonymous; a supposition probably due to the loss of the connotative distinctions between these words which would have been evident to contemporary speakers of Anglo-Saxon. Underlying the written project there are several large Excel databases in which data used for analysis are gathered. Although these form the factual basis for the written project, the thesis does not require the reader to have access to the databases.
The introduction discusses the significance of speech as a field, before examining the complex problems and theories which underpin semantic field studies. The literature review is used to examine the practical application of these theories, and the scope of the project and methodology are also explained therein. Chapter One looks at the maþelian, mælan, mæþlan group of verbs, including examining the problem of disentangling their etymologies, and discussing possible post-conquest usage. Chapter Two explores the ( )secgan group of verbs, uncovering evidence of connotations which were hitherto unknown. The Conclusion discusses the (-)cweðan and (-)sprecan groups, which show little evidence of connotational differences, and, in addition to this discussion, provides an overview of the connotations of the verbs of speech in Old English. A selective examination of the Old Norse cognate verbs of speech in the poems of the Codex Regius, focussed particularly on segja, forms a forward-looking Epilogue.

Advisor: Griffith, M
O’Donoghue, H
Representation and the nation in the portraiture of Elizabeth I

This thesis examines the representative functions of Elizabeth I's visual portraits, challenging the popular account that the queen's image was developed systematically as an icon of abstract ideas beyond her Crown; most notably the English nation. The argument suggests individual images must be properly contextualised if their representative function is to be understood fully, in particular highlighting the importance of Dutch influences upon English national representation. The discussion shows that portraits' disparate political, religious, material, circumstantial, and iconographic contexts can render them representationally dissimilar despite any aesthetic parallels that may exist between them.
Where certain of Elizabeth's painted portraits have dominated 'iconic' and 'national' readings of her visual representation, chapter I shows that the queen's painted images exhibited little symbolic homogeneity beyond representing the monarch and Crown and were never a conduit for national expression. The rare instances of Elizabeth being rendered as a personification of England occur only in printed and medallic portraiture composed outside England (considered in chapters II and III, respectively). National representation would have required a far greater level of abstraction than normally seen in Elizabeth's image and was not a common feature of the queen's portraits in any media.
Throughout this thesis, portraits are analysed in relation to their unique context, rather than to one another. The discussion considers selected images in individual case studies to minimise the chances of applying potentially anachronistic interpretive models to and between them. Dividing these case studies into typological chapters in turn highlights how images' symbolic functions are affected by the media in which it is realised.
The discussion concludes that Elizabeth's portraits were composed individually to represent the queen in manners specific to each image's context. Whilst abstract ideas other than the Crown are sometimes represented in Elizabeth's portraits, those characterisations are by no means regular. The nation is one of these ideas.

Advisor: Gajda, A
Parkin, J
Exploring the roles of the centrosomal RASSF proteins, RASSF1A &amp; RASSF7, in stem cells &amp; cancer

The Ras – Association Domain Family (RASSF) is a group of ten structurally related proteins that have been linked to a series of human pathologies. RASSF1A is the most widely studied member of this group and is a bona fide tumour suppressor gene that has been reported as the most frequently epigenetically silenced gene in human sporadic malignancies. Loss of RASSF1A expression is linked to poor prognosis and a more aggressive clinical phenotype. Recently, RASSF1A has been linked to the regulation of pluripotency via modulation of the Hippo pathway and the transcriptional output of YAP associated genes. Here, we present evidence that the asymmetric localisation and subsequent inheritance of RASSF1A can influence the fate determination of differentiating stem cells. We propose that this event is the molecular basis of the clinical observation that RASSF1A loss leads to increased stem cell signatures in patient tumours. We also demonstrate that the asymmetry of RASSF1A is correlated to centrosome age and describe for the first time a role for RASSF1A in the assembly of the primary cilium, an important sensory organelle involved in signal transduction and development. Furthermore, we present an explorative study of RASSF7 function. RASSF7 is a widely-underexplored member of the RASSF group. It functions typically as an oncogene, yet relatively little is known about its molecular role. We show that RASSF7 interacts with the Hippo core kinase MST2 and has an important role in its subcellular localisation. This thesis focuses primarily on further establishing the molecular roles of RASSF1A and RASSF7 to determine how their deregulation leads to tumourigenesis.

Advisor: O’Neill, E
A Brazilian at the BBC war-front: entertainment, propaganda and modernism in Antônio Callado’s radio dramas for the Latin American service (1941-1947)

This thesis analyses a series of radio drama scripts written by Brazilian journalist, novelist and playwright Antônio Callado (1917-1997) for the BBC Latin American Service (LAS) during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath (1941-1947). Although previous studies on Callado abide by a consensus that dates the beginning of his literary output to the 1950s, the recent discovery of these radio drama scripts in the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC) debunks the official chronologies. The aim of this thesis is to shed light on his work as a radio playwright for the BBC LAS and on the formative years he spent in Britain during the war. It investigates how Callado’s experiences at the BBC influenced his writing and impacted on the formulation of themes he would revisit consistently throughout his literary career. I cross-reference the radio drama scripts with other documents found at the BBC WAC, such as copyright receipts, internal memos, and minutes of BBC LAS meetings, many of which had been so far unexplored. I added to this corpus complementary material found at Callado’s personal archives in the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, Rio de Janeiro, including letters, diaries and other documents produced by Callado and about him during the period analysed. I operated methodologically on different scales, from undertaking close reading and discourse analysis of scripts and documents to tracing intertextualities between Callado’s works and those of other BBC authors. As a result, this study assesses the complex network of institutions, material practices and beliefs which conditioned and made the very existence of these documents possible. Callado is among the most important Brazilian intellectuals of the twentieth century, and this thesis represents the first critical literature on his BBC radio dramas.

Advisor: Williams, C
‘Exploring finitude’: weakness and integrity in Isaac of Nineveh

This thesis examines the theme of human finitude, ‘weakness’, and suffering in the thought of Isaac of Nineveh, a 7th century East-Syriac writer from Qatar, who lived as a solitary monk in Western Iran. In Isaac, whose writings had a profound influence on Eastern Christian thought, the engagement with one’s ‘weakness’ (mḥilutā, in Syriac) plays a major role, which scholars have not yet explored extensively. This ‘weakness’, in Isaac, has an ontological nature, and should be understood as the condition distinctive of being a human, which refers to the limited nature of body and mind, exposed to suffering. This thesis analyses this theme through a phenomenological and hermeneutical method, based on the study of Isaac’s original edited and unedited writings. The analysis of the human condition in this ‘world’ reveals this condition as being marked by suffering and ‘weakness’. These, when perceived, awake the creature to the quest for God, conceived as the consolation and meaning of existence. The solitary life takes the shape of learning to inhabit suffering and ‘weakness’, by encountering and taking them on through the initiatory process of askesis. The limitations of askesis force the creature to contact his/her suffering self and to learn to be in relationship with it and the passions, that Isaac conceives as defensive reactions against one’s ontological condition of ‘weakness’. From this relational exercise ‘integrity’ can be born, to be understood as a condition of rootedness and groundedness able to adhere to one’s creatural status. The more one finds a relationship with one’s suffering self, the more one becomes able to be in a relationship with God’s mystery and other suffering creatures. The vital role of suffering and ‘weakness’ in Isaac is related to awakening the subject to this transformative process, through which the problem of human existence is experientially inhabited.

Advisor: Taylor, D
Eighteenth century women and the domestic mock heroic

This thesis examines women’s mock-heroic verse on domesticity, focusing on four female poets of the eighteenth century. Despite critical work on women’s poetry, on the mock-heroic, and on the rise of a cult of domesticity during the period, there has been little sustained criticism of women’s verse about domesticity, and even less about women’s use of mock-heroics. This thesis closes a gap in the work of the past few decades by adding the work of women poets to the discussion of domesticity and mock-heroic verse. The mock-heroic has been identified as ‘the exemplary mode of the eighteenth century’ and ‘the dominant idiom of the age’: a form which late seventeenth and early eighteenth century poets developed to criticise the status quo. The fact that female poets wrote mock-heroic poems and sections of poems in the mock-heroic mode, as well as the range of poems by women which may be considered mock-heroic, demonstrates that women’s use of what might be called the domestic mock-heroic merits more and different critical attention than it has received until now. This dissertation traces the use of mock-heroic poetry by four different female poets of the eighteenth century: Mary Leapor, Mary Jones, Elizabeth Moody, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. It demonstrates that the mock-heroic poems written by women differed significantly from those written by Scriblerians such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Gay – both in form and in tone. Further, it argues that mock-heroics by women contributed significantly to the form’s development throughout the century and to the intellectual shifts that occurred throughout the century.

Keywords: British literature
eighteenth century
Great Britain
mock-heroic
domesticity
Advisor: Gerrard, C
Investigation of soil-structure interaction for large diameter caissons

Large diameter open caissons are widely adopted in civil engineering infrastructure projects for deep foundations, underground storage and attenuation tanks, pumping stations, and launch and reception shafts for tunnel boring machines. These structures are commonly formed using cast in place reinforced concrete, with the structural self-weight in combination with soil excavation within the caisson, forcing the caisson continuously into the ground. This sinking process presents several engineering challenges for engineers, including maintenance of caisson verticality, control of the rate of caisson sinking, and minimisation of soil-structure frictional stresses through the use of lubricating fluids.
Controlled sinking of caissons requires a thorough understanding of the interaction between the caisson shaft and the surrounding soil, as well as the bearing capacity at the base of the caisson. New understanding has been developed by instrumenting a number of caisson shafts, on live construction sites, for the measurement of soil-structure interaction stresses, structural performance and caisson movements. All data was processed in real-time and displayed to the site construction team via wireless technology, giving the team control over the construction process and allowing them to respond rapidly to adverse responses. This unique set of field data provides new insight into soil-structure interaction stresses, lubrication and structural performance, as well as caisson movements in varying ground conditions.
Bearing capacity beneath the tapered face at the base of the wall was explored through experimental testing and numerical modelling. A simplified closed-form design method for the prediction of the bearing capacity of a sloped footing in clay is established, with insight into the bearing failure mechanisms in both sand and clay also established. The design methods are validated against the monitored data from the field projects as well as small-scale laboratory testing.

Advisor: Sheil, B
Byrne, B
Beyond electoral politics: crony capitalism, collective action and the distribution of public spending in Egypt

This research is a multimethod investigation into the drivers of spatial variation in public spending in hegemonic party systems. It challenges the narrow electoral focus of the distributive politics literature on vote buying to address the important question of “who gets what”, and unpacks the politics of it. Rather, it identifies two conditions salient to authoritarian regime persistence, and can in turn reshape the geography of public resource allocation in hegemonic party autocracies. These two conditions are the attainment of positive economic growth to earn performance legitimacy and the preclusion of threats of contentious collective actions.
In this research I argue that, by aiming to attain performance legitimacy, autocrats will seek to develop the economy in order to convince citizens of their political and economic mandates. To this end, they will nurture mutually beneficial relationships with a group of crony capitalists who can support the state in formulating and implementing its economic policies. Those business cronies, in return, will enjoy disproportionate access to scarce public resources which will be allocated to districts where they want to expand their businesses. Moreover, I make a case for the effect of contentious politics on the distribution of public resources. To consolidate political power, autocrats will attempt to buy off aggrieved actors who have strong capacity for undertaking collective action. The more organised and resourceful aggrieved actors are, the better the bargain they can strike with the state to accede to their demands for collective consumption services. The argument presented in this research is illuminated through the case of Egypt under Mubarak. It is based on a mixed-methods design and draws on 50 elite interviews, policy documents, minutes of parliament and regression analysis.

Advisor: Malik, A
Naczyk, M
The role of Fanconi anaemia factors in the response to transcription-replication conflict

Replication and transcription both require large, multi-protein complexes that bind and translocate DNA to facilitate genome duplication and gene expression. This shared requirement inevitably leads to conflict because, despite numerous cellular adaptations, these molecular machines will utilize the same areas of the DNA template during S-phase. This conflict results in transcription being a source of replication stress and ultimately genomic instability.
How these conflicts are managed and resolved is poorly understood - the current study attempts to investigate the role of the Fanconi anaemia (FA) pathway in resolving replication stress caused by conflict with transcription. The FA pathway is associated with the repair of interstrand cross-links (ICLs) produced by exogenous agents, but it is not clear if these types of lesions are produced endogenously or represent the only substrate of the FA pathway.
Loss of the FA pathway leads to an increased level of transcription associated DNA:RNA hybrids (R-loops) and associated replication defects and damage. The current study demonstrates that these structures are relevant to the pathology of FA, as they accumulate in cells derived from FA patients and in murine haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs).
This strongly suggests the FA pathway has a specific role in dealing with cell stress arising from transcription and R-loops. In line with this notion, this study demonstrates that depletion of the transcription-coupled repair factor CSB leads to increased transcription-replication conflicts that requires the action of FA factors. In the absence of FA proteins, the loss of CSB leads to replication fork stalling, mitotic catastrophe and reduced proliferation.
Overall, this data supports the growing evidence that the FA pathway is required to respond to conflicts between replication and transcription, as well as transcription-associated R-loops. My data suggests that replication fork collisions with transcription complexes and/or R-loops represents a major substrate of the FA pathway and suggests transcription-replication conflict could contribute to the attrition of HSCs in FA patients.

Advisor: Niedzwiedz, W
McHugh, P