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Density Functional Theory Study Of Dilute Transition Metal Phthalocyanines, Daniel Burrill

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Organometallic (OM) crystals are studied in fields ranging from spintronics to photovoltaics. This thesis focuses on studying a particular class of OM crystals known as transition metal-phthalocyanines (TM-Pc) - a molecular crystal composed of chains of planar OM molecules with a transition metal center and four coordinated pyrrole-aromatic rings joined by nitrogen atoms, similar to porphyrin. The structure resembles a dish rack pattern where the planar TM-Pcs of adjacent chains are oriented nearly perpendicular to each other. While TM-Pcs have been studied for decades due to their interesting optical properties and applications as dyes, there has been recent interest in …

The Mormon Battalion's Manifest Destiny: Expansion And Identity During The Mexican-American War, Natalie Brooke Coffman

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines the experience of the Mormon Battalion, a group of five hundred Mormon soldiers commissioned by President James K. Polk to enlist in the U.S. military and aid in the newly declared war against Mexico in 1846. The war was a result of a belligerent and aggressive form of territorial expansion justified by the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Polk and many other Americans believed it was their Manifest Destiny to dominate a continental nation, and the Mormon Battalion was assigned to march to California to conquer Mexican territory for the United States. An examination of the Mormon soldiers' …

Gene Expression Noise In Stress Response As A Survival Strategy In Fluctuating Environments, Javier Garcia-Bernardo

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Populations of cells live in uncertain environments, where they encounter large variations in nutrients, oxygen and toxic compounds. In the fluctuating environment, cells can sense their surroundings and express proteins to protect themselves against harmful substances. However, if the stressor appears infrequently or abruptly, sensing can be too costly or too slow, and cells cannot rely solely on it. To hedge against the sudden appearance of a stressor, cell populations can also rely on phenotypic diversification through bet-hedging. In bet-hedging, cells exploit noise in gene expression or use multistable genetic networks to produce an heterogeneous distribution of resistance-conferring protein levels. …

Living With Aortic Stenosis: A Phenomenological Study Of Patients' Experiences And Subsequent Health Choices, Gayle Ann Hagen-Peter

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Symptomatic aortic stenosis (AS) is an increasing phenomenon as more adults live longer. The gold standard for treating AS is surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR). Frequently, as older individuals with AS often have multiple comorbidities, a SAVR is determined to be too high risk. Therefore, a less invasive treatment option is available, namely a transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) or transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR). Such biomedical procedures have encouraged life extension and the decision to intervene commonplace with the aging population. Without an intervention, significant debilitating symptoms affect a person's quality of life (QoL). Multiple quantitative studies evaluating QoL …

Conceptualizing Contemplative Practice As Pedagogy: Approaches To Mindful Inquiry In Higher Education, Melissa Hammerle

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

A compelling argument has been made which claims that institutions of higher education focus disproportionately on transmitting basic skills to their students at the expense of supporting issues of central importance to the development of emerging adults, including clarifying values and identity and defining individual purpose and meaning (Palmer & Zajonc, 2010). As a result, an increasing number of postsecondary teachers are considering how they can refashion education by using contemplative inquiry to deepen student learning and personal growth. This movement to reframe the teaching-learning paradigm has led to the development of teaching methods that seek to cultivate emotional, psychological …

Thermokarst And Wildfire: Effects Of Disturbances Related To Climate Change On The Ecological Characteristics And Functions Of Arctic Headwater Streams, Julia Rose Larouche

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The Arctic is warming rapidly as a result of global climate change. Permafrost - permanently frozen ground - plays a critical role in shaping arctic ecosystems and stores nearly one half of the global soil organic matter. Therefore, disturbance of permafrost will likely impact the carbon and related biogeochemical processes on local and global scales. In the Alaskan Arctic, fire and thermokarst (permafrost thaw) have become more common and have been hypothesized to accelerate the hydrological export of inorganic nutrients and sediment, as well as biodegradable dissolved organic carbon (BDOC), which may alter ecosystem processes of impacted streams.

The biogeochemical …

Characterization Of A Non-Canonical Function For Threonyl-Trna Synthetase In Angiogenesis, Adam Christopher Mirando

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

In addition to its canonical role in aminoacylation, threonyl-tRNA synthetase (TARS) possesses pro-angiogenic activity that is susceptible to the TARS-specific antibiotic borrelidin. However, the therapeutic benefit of borrelidin is offset by its strong toxicity to living cells. The removal of a single methylene group from the parent borrelidin generates BC194, a modified compound with significantly reduced toxicity but comparable anti-angiogenic potential. Biochemical analyses revealed that the difference in toxicities was due to borrelidin's stimulation of amino acid starvation at ten-fold lower concentrations than BC194. However, both compounds were found to inhibit in vitro and in vivo models of angiogenesis at …

Exploring The Google Books Corpus: An Information-Theoretic Approach To Linguistic Evolution, Eitan Pechenick

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The Google Books corpus contains millions of books in a variety of languages. Due to this incredible volume and its free availability, it is a treasure trove that has inspired a plethora of linguistic research.

It is tempting to treat frequency trends from Google Books data sets as indicators for the true popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw novel conclusions about the evolution of public perception of a given topic. However, sampling published works by availability and ease of digitization leads to several important effects, which have typically been overlooked in previous studies. One …

Bayesian Filtering In Nonlinear Structural Systems With Application To Structural Health Monitoring, Kalil Erazo

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

During strong earthquakes structural systems exhibit nonlinear behavior due to low-cycle fatigue, cracking, yielding and/or fracture of constituent elements. After a seismic event it is essential to assess the state of damage of structures and determine if they can safely resist aftershocks or future strong motions. The current practice in post-earthquake damage assessment relies mainly on visual inspections and local testing. These approaches are limited to the ability of inspectors to reach all potentially damaged locations, and are typically intended to detect damage near the outer surfaces of the structure leaving the possibility of hidden undetected damage. Some structures in …

Spatiotemporally Periodic Driven System With Long-Range Interactions, Owen Dale Myers

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

It is well known that some driven systems undergo transitions when a system parameter is changed adiabatically around a critical value. This transition can be the result of a fundamental change in the structure of the phase space, called a bifurcation. Most of these transitions are well classified in the theory of bifurcations. Among the driven systems, spatiotemporally periodic (STP) potentials are noteworthy due to the intimate coupling between their time and spatial components. A paradigmatic example of such a system is the Kapitza pendulum, which is a pendulum with an oscillating suspension point. The Kapitza pendulum has the strange …

Helping Students Find Meaning While Finding My Own: A Scholarly Personal Narrative Navigating Single-Motherhood And A Career In Admissions, Amber Rich

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

ABSTRACT

In this dissertation, I explore my role as an administrator in higher education admissions at a major university and as a working mother who faces many real world challenges. The grueling travel demands, lofty enrollment goals, campus and inter-office politics, as well as the weekend and late night hours required, made it extremely difficult to achieve a healthy work life balance in admissions while also raising a small child. Additionally, "admissions" is increasingly becoming the "hot seat" within institutions of higher education. Gone are the days of an almost tenure like quality to enrollment professionals. If an enrollment director …

Wanting It Told: Narrative Desire In Cather And Faulkner, Monroe Street

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis explores the role played by narrative desire within two modernist experimentations with novel form: Willa Cather's 1918 novel My Antonia and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In it, I argue that Cather and Faulkner utilize framing narratives in order to present the main plot of each novel as a product of multiple narrators' desire for a story to emerge. In My Antonia, it is the expressed wish of Jim Burden's nameless writer friend that compels him to finish writing his account of Antonia, which constitutes the main plot of the novel. Meanwhile, in Absalom, Absalom! it is …

Dna Glycosylases Remove Oxidized Base Damages From G-Quadruplex Dna Structures, Jia Zhou

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The G-quadruplex DNA is a four-stranded DNA structure that is highly susceptible to oxidation due to its G-rich sequence and its structure. Oxidative DNA base damages can be mutagenic or lethal to cells if they are left unrepaired. The base excision repair (BER) pathway is the predominant pathway for repair of oxidized DNA bases. DNA glycosylases are the first enzymes in BER and are responsible for removing base lesions from DNA. How DNA glycosylases remove base lesions from duplex and single-stranded DNA has been intensively studied, while how they act on G-quadruplex DNA remains to be explored.

In Chapter II …

Quantification Of The Impact Of Intermittent Renewable Penetration Levels On Power Grid Frequency Performance Using Dynamic Modeling, Elizabeth Ann Kirby

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

As the technology behind renewable energy sources becomes more advanced and cost-effective, these sources have become an ever-increasing portion of the generation portfolios of power systems across the country. While the shift away from non-renewable resources is generally considered beneficial, the fact remains that intermittent renewable sources present special challenges associated with their unique operating characteristics. Because of the high variability of intermittent renewables, the frequency performance of the system to which they are connected can degrade. Generators assigned to regulate frequency, keeping it close to the desired 60 Hz, are forced to ramp up and down quickly in order …

A Randomized Pilot Trial: An Internet-Based Mind/Body Intervention To Mitigate Anxiety In Women Experiencing Infertility, Jessica Clifton

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Infertility is a frequently occurring chronic health condition, which often persists throughout the reproductive years. Heightened anxiety symptoms often are comorbid with infertility diagnoses. Women experiencing infertility, and particularly those with anxiety symptoms, characterize an emerging population that deserves special attention. However, women experiencing infertility have identified barriers to seeking psychotherapy (e.g., fears of being dismissed from fertility treatment and/or stigmatized). Consequently, women diagnosed with infertility need a psychotherapy that not only can reduce these symptoms, but can also be private and convenient. The current study translated an empirically tested in-person mind/body protocol into an internet-based intervention to suit the …