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Evaluating Nebulizer Efficiency For Phage Therapy In Drug-Resistant Pseudomonas Infections, Daniel Thompson

Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library

Background

The global rise of multidrug-resistant (MDR) Pseudomonas aeruginosa necessitates novel therapeutic approaches, particularly for patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). Bacteriophage therapy, delivered via inhalation, offers a targeted and potentially transformative treatment for pulmonary infections caused by MDR pathogens. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of nebulizer type and bacteriophage morphology on viable phage recovery and aerosol particle size distribution, hypothesizing that nebulizer-phage compatibility significantly influences the delivery of viable phages to the lower respiratory tract.

Methods

We conducted an in vitro study utilizing two clinically relevant nebulizer systems: the Pari LC Plus jet nebulizer and the Altera eFlow …

Litigating Landlessness: The U.S. Department Of The Interior And First Circuit Court’S Appropriations Of Self-Governance And Socialism In Puerto Rico, 1934-52, Carmen Lopez Villamil

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

In 1946, three Boston judges decided that the Puerto Rican legislature could redistribute American-owned sugar plantations to workers. Though deemed legal, the redistribution never happened. The unreported 1946 land rights case, People of Puerto Rico v. Eastern Sugar Associates, entangles how self-proclaimed socialist and anti-colonialist officials at the Department of the Interior administered a New Deal empire across Indigenous and island territories. In conjunction with the Department of the Interior’s published reports and Felix S. Cohen’s Papers at the Yale Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, case files from the Boston First Circuit Library reveal engagement between federal and military …

Confessions Of A Failed Revolutionary Subject: Toi Derricotte And The Black Notebooks In The Archive, Kavya Jain

Kaplan Senior Essay Prize for Use of Library Special Collections

In this essay, I use black feminist methodologies to theorize archival voice as opposed to silence, drawing from Toi Derricotte’s 1997 book The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey and its drafts. I examine Derricotte’s published and unpublished writings on the psychological wounds of racism, internalized antiblackness, shame, and the racial and relational politics of being white-presenting to understand her vision of how we free ourselves from the toxic imaginaries of race. I focus on Derricotte’s use of confession and her commitment to wayward speech, or saying the unsayable, to challenge political ideology’s domination of language and harness the political possibility …

Provider Perspectives On Gestational Diabetes In Samoa: A Qualitative Study Of Barriers, Facilitators, And Opportunities, Andriana Nicole Marijic Buljubasic

Public Health Theses

Background: Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is associated with significant maternal and neonatal risks, with Samoa facing a disproportionate burden of GDM linked to high obesity (76.7% of women), type 2 diabetes (19.5%), and cultural-systemic barriers to care[1]. Despite GDM accounting for 38% of pregnancy complications at Tupua Tamasese Meaole (TTM) Hospital, qualitative insights into GDM care or provider experiences remain limited. This study applies a socio-ecological framework to explore multi-level influences on GDM care within Samoa’s unique cultural context and healthcare landscape.

Aim: To understand the barriers and facilitators to effective care-team response when treating gestational diabetes patients at TTM …

Bringing Culinary Medicine Teaching Principles To Children In The New Haven Community: An Interventional Pilot Study, Rachel Lutz

Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library

Culinary medicine is a growing field dedicated to combining culinary skills and evidenced-based practices to promote health. While it has proven to be efficacious in improving biometrics for chronic diseases in adults, potential remains for its application in pediatric populations. This pilot study creates and evaluates a one-time community-based culinary medicine intervention for a mixed-age pediatric group. The intervention included a didactic lecture and five interactive stations for 20 research participants and 22 non-research participants at a community site. The intervention was evaluated for knowledge, attitudinal, and behavioral impact using pre-post surveys. Given the importance of food access in the …

The Shaping Of Religion Through Empire In Modern Korea, 1876-1948, John Grisafi

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation covers the roles of multiple empires in the discursive formation of religion in modern Korea, with emphasis on the period from 1876 through 1948. I argue that although semi-analogous terms and ideas to “religion” existed in Korea prior, the coinage of the modern Korena term for religion, chonggyo (종교, 宗敎) in 1883 and its subsequent discursive development were heavily shaped by imperialism, colonialism, and modern globalization. The pressures and influences of empires triggered a coalescence of Korean concepts of religion and related ideas. But the involvement of multiple empires as well as Korean interests, and the beliefs and …

A Framework For Icu Culture In Australia & New Zealand, Smriti Sukesh Kumar

Public Health Theses

Organizational culture is increasingly recognized as a fundamental determinant of operational performance and clinical outcomes in healthcare, particularly within high-acuity settings such as Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Despite a growing body of international literature affirming this relationship, there is a paucity of context-specific evidence on the role of organizational culture within ICUs in Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand. This absence has constrained the capacity of health systems in these regions to design and implement culture change interventions tailored to local realities. In response to this gap, this thesis offers a conceptual framework that maps domains of organizational culture hypothesized to …

The Role Of Climate Change In The Pandemic Agreement Negotiations, Cristina Arnes Sanz

Public Health Theses

Introduction: For over three years, Member States of the World Health Organization (WHO) have been negotiating a treaty to prevent, prepare for, and respond to future pandemics. The Pandemic Agreement is anticipated to be adopted at the World Health Assembly in May 2025. Growing scientific evidence underscores the effects of climate change on infectious diseases, including those that could lead to pandemics. This thesis examines how climate change has been addressed in the drafting and negotiations of the Pandemic Agreement.

Methods: All the references related to climate change in the transcripts of the publicly broadcast Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) meetings …

Mechanisms Of Heart And Major Vessel Development: Nup107 And Cacna1g As Novel Regulators, Valentyna Kostiuk

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Congenital Heart Disease (CHD) is the most common congenital malformation and a leading cause of infant mortality. While advances in genomic sequencing technology have enabled a fast and inexpensive candidate gene identification, the molecular mechanisms of CHD remain mostly unknown. Both nup107 and cacna1g are novel CHD genes identified in CHD patients with no plausible mechanisms explaining their roles in cardiac development. Here, we show that nup107 plays a key role in early embryonic patterning and subsequent organ development. The loss of Nup107 has a direct impact on germ layer specification, Left-Right patterning and downstream cardiac looping. Specifically, Nup107 depletion …

Deep Learning For Large-Scale Harmonic Analysis: A Corpus Study Of Western Harmony From 1700-1900, Malcolm Sailor

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation trains deep learning models for the Roman numeral analysis and applies these to the analysis of a corpus of over 12,000 movements of Classical music composed between 1700 and 1900. The Roman numeral analysis models obtain performance that is, as of this writing, state of the art. At the same time, this is the first work of scholarship to employ such models at scale for a music-theoretic corpus study. Consistent with music-historical expectations, this corpus study shows that, along many dimensions, such as the distribution of keys employed or the proportion of chromatic scale degrees, harmonic complexity rose …

Water, Sanitation, And Hygiene (Wash) Services Among Households, Healthcare Facilities And Schools In Rural Ghana, Samantha Gillis

Public Health Theses

Introduction: Soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections affect more than 1 billion people globally, particularly in low-income areas with poor sanitation. While mass drug administration is a common control strategy, long-term elimination requires a broader, integrated approach with an emphasis on sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) practices, community-led initiatives, and economic development. Currently, there are critical gaps in understanding the impacts of WASH infrastructure in households, healthcare facilities, and schools on hookworm prevalence, specifically in rural Ghana. Methods: Using qualitative surveys, we characterized the current WASH landscape among households, healthcare facilities and schools in the Bono East region of Ghana. Hookworm …

The Death And Afterlife Of The Coptic Language In Mamluk Egypt., Ramona Teepe

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

My dissertation, The Death and Afterlife of the Coptic Language in Mamluk Egypt, argues that although Coptic “died” out as a spoken language in the thirteenth century, Coptic intellectuals purposefully developed a way to teach Coptic as a classical language and thus set the course for its survival as a liturgical language until today.

The Arab conquest of Egypt in 642 CE conventionally marks the end of the period which Coptic studies covers. After the conquest, Arabic slowly superseded Coptic as a language of politics, administration, and finally (roughly by the end of the twelfth century) of everyday life. …

Evaluating Saliva Based Glucose Testing For Accessible Diabetes Care In Tanzania, Shannon Dhindsa

Public Health Theses

Background: In Tanzania, limited healthcare infrastructure and reliance on invasive diagnostic methods significantly hinder effective diabetes screening and management. Individuals with diabetes often go undetected and have lower immune systems that make them prone to further infectious complications. Thus, properly managing this chronic condition can prevent additional infectious diseases. Salivary glucose testing offers a non-invasive, innovative alternative with the potential to transform the early detection and management of diabetes, especially in resource-constrained settings.

Design: This cross-sectional study, conducted at Muhimbili National Hospital's Diabetes Clinic in Dar es Salaam, evaluates the feasibility of salivary glucose testing using a colorimetric glucose-oxidase-peroxidase point-of-care …

Disability, Cure, And (Anti)Normativity In Modern And Contemporary Spanish Literature, Martha Engvall

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

In my dissertation, I examine the role of disability, diagnosis, and cure in modern and contemporary Spanish novels. In the first three chapters, I show how authors of the late 19th and early 20th century used disability’s relationship to race, gender, and social class to question exclusionary social norms. I analyze critiques of industrialization in Galdós’s Marianela (1878) and Blasco Ibáñez’s Del vivir (1904); examine portrayals of leprosy in Galdós’s Misericordia (1897), Pardo Bazán’s La prueba (1890), Miró’s Del vivir (1904) and El obispo leproso (1926), and Hoyos y Vinent’s El monstruo (1915); and explore connections between disability, sexuality, and …

Exploring Squamate Evolution Through Focused Taxonomic And Anatomic Lenses: A Taxon-Character Approach To A Taxon-Character Problem, Dalton Meyer

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Among the living terrestrial vertebrates, the greatest diversity of verifiable species is seenamong the squamates, the group which contains the lizards and snakes. With a global distribution limited only by their general intolerance to long periods of cold temperatures, they are a ubiquitous component of modern ecosystems. Furthermore, over their roughly 180-million-year evolutionary history they have achieved tremendous morphological disparity and a range of body sizes that spans three orders of magnitude. However, our understanding of the origins and early evolution of squamates remains obscured due to persistent conflict in hypotheses generated from morphological and molecular data. This discordance is …

Russian Forms: Race, Sex, And The Making Of Russian Literature, Fiona Bell

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation argues that the elaboration of Russian racial imaginaries was coterminous with the construction of the Russian literary canon and Russian literary theory. Beginning with the global debates concerning the abolition of slavery and serfdom in the 1850s and concluding with the first wave of emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1920s, the dissertation demonstrates how canonical Russian authors—Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Viktor Shklovsky, and others—wrote fiction that, in mobilizing the racial implications of intimacy, kinship, and heredity, articulated arguments about racial difference and the conceptual “fit” of “race” for the Russian Empire. Literary authors make arguments about …

Warm Life, Cold Stones: The Effigial Tomb In Late Medieval English Literature, Maia Ruth Béar

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The effigial tomb is one of the defining features of Gothic sacred art. Tombs topped with grand effigies populated the churches, cathedrals, and chapels of late medieval England and many survive to this day. This dissertation explores the encounter with these tombs as represented in the literature of the period, in particular hagiography, romance, and narrative poetry. Although it literally demarcates the boundary between dead and living, the tomb is a powerful site of boundary-breaking in these texts at which the distinctions between life and death, flesh, and natural and artistic bodies are tested and often complicated. I consider various …

Description’S Displacements: Writing Experience In Musil, Benjamin, And Bachmann, Aida Feng

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation unfolds the ways in which description emerged as an active site for reconfiguring human experience in the writing experiments of the 20th century. Description, as a procedure for presenting and arranging the phenomena of reality, typically constructs an epistemological realm of experience that progresses toward comprehension and internal consistency. Understood in this way, description mediates one kind of experiential reality while foreclosing others. This project enlarges description’s operative capabilities toward a presentational mode that does not merely re-describe the phenomenal objects in this reality. To do so, it foregrounds writers and thinkers who conversed directly with philosophical traditions …

Epidemiologic And Immunologic Characterization Of The Post-Acute Sequelae Of Covid-19, Christine Marie Miller

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Since its emergence in late 2019, SARS-CoV-2 has infected over 15 million people—and the number continues to rise. The global impact of this novel coronavirus has been profound, reshaping not only public health infrastructure but also our understanding of human biology. The full extent of the virus’s effects on the immune system remains incompletely understood and will likely take years to fully unravel. What is already evident, however, is that SARS-CoV-2 uniquely modulates both innate and adaptive immunity, with consequences that span the developmental spectrum—from fetal and pediatric stages through adulthood. While many individuals recover without overt clinical sequelae, an …

Associations Between Mental Health Conditions And Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes Among Active-Duty Servicewomen, Laura Manzo

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Active duty servicewomen (ADSW) have increased risk for mental health conditions compared to civilian women. Civilian research demonstrates that women with mental health conditions experience serious pregnancy complications at rates 50% higher than those without mental health conditions. Although mental health conditions are the leading underlying cause of maternal mortality, there is limited research on the prevalence of perinatal mental health conditions among active duty servicewomen (ADSWs) or their association with adverse pregnancy outcomes. This study aimed to explore associations of mental health conditions and adverse pregnancy outcomes in a population of ADSW. Methods Department of Defense Birth and Infant …

‘Soñando En Un Futuro Mejor’: U.S. Empire, Racial Capitalism, And Garífuna And Afro-Caribbean Radicalism In Caribbean Honduras, 1920-1963, Cristian Jose Padilla Romero

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation argues that Afro-Caribbean and Garífuna radicals in 20th-century Honduras forged, at different times, radical, race-conscious, and sometimes anti-imperialist and nationalist politics that contested both U.S. corporate domination and the racialized exclusions of the U.S and Honduran nation-state. Focusing on the period between 1920 and 1963, it traces struggles across the Caribbean coastal cities of La Ceiba, Trujillo, Puerto Cortés, and Tela. By foregrounding Black and Indigenous working-class actors, like Centeno García and Alfonso Lacayo, it highlights how racial capitalism, labor radicalism, and anti-Black state and corporate repression intersected in Honduras’ banana economy. The stories of individuals like Centeno …

Manufactured Enchantments: Technologizing The Self In The Twentieth-Century Americas, Isabel Ortiz

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Manufactured Enchantments examines the way in which forms of enchantment worked at various sites—from culture industries, to self-help doxa, to esoteric and occult practices, to intellectual life—to construct an ideal self tailored to geopolitical violence in the U.S. and Latin America during the twentieth century. The dissertation studies five technologies—psychoanalysis, film, the rotoscope, the enneagram, and the tarot—that each suggested a self that could be stretched, modified, or altered to meet conditions of violence, uncertainty and precarity stemming from pre- and peri-Cold War U.S. imperial expansion efforts in the Americas. In each case study, I examine how the featured technology …

Satellite Galaxy Kinematics: A Competitive And Complementary Probe Of The Galaxy-Halo Connection And Cosmology, Kaustav Mitra

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Most cosmological analyses of galaxy surveys under-utilize the data from the smallest scales. Firstly, analytical calculations become challenging in the fully non-linear regime. Moreover, the small scales are inherently plagued by several systematic uncertainties, such as the effects of baryons. Interestingly, analyses that have delved into the non-linear regimes of structure formation, mostly using galaxy clustering or weak gravitational lensing, often show an ongoing tension with the probes of early Universe physics, such as the cosmic microwave background, about the exact values of some of the cosmological parameters. This begs the following questions: (a) Can we think of a new …

Mental Health Disparities From Climate Change: Age Differences And Structural Drivers Across California, Elizabeth Choa

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Background: The health impacts of climate change are shaped by a complex interplay of geopolitical, ecological, and socioeconomic forces. Climate events impose substantial personal and societal costs, draining resources and deepening existing vulnerabilities within communities. Yet few studies examine how these dynamics affect groups often overlooked in climate–health discourse, including LGBTQ+ individuals, informal caregivers, and older adults. Objective: To examine how individual, community, and structural-level factors influence both climate vulnerability (defined as susceptibility to adverse health impacts) and climate resilience (the capacity to adapt to and withstand climate-related stressors). Focusing on diverse adult populations in California, this dissertation aims to …

Limbic Circuit Control Of Stress And Neuroinflammation, Alexa Renee Soares

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Individuals are constantly subjected to various forms of stress, which shape the brain in different ways. The brain, in turn, must coordinate a response to adapt to the demands of the stressor. This response is coordinated via interactions between several neuromodulatory and neuroinflammatory signaling pathways. The limbic system, particularly the amygdala and hippocampus, has been highlighted as an important site for integration of these signals. These areas are critical for engaging neural, autonomic, and behavioral responses to acute stress and for plasticity-driven learning that can shape future responses to stress through a process called allostasis. Chronic exposure to stress can …

Reducing Dementia Risk By Identifying And Promoting Social Determinants: A Multi-Site And Multi-Method Study, Jose M. Aravena

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Background: Dementia is one of the leading causes of disability and death, and the most feared condition by older adults. Although encouraging evidence has shown that lifestyle can play a pivotal role in dementia prevention, dementia incidence is still increasing in those groups that are at most risk. A largely unexplored explanation for this phenomenon in high-risk groups is the effect of social determinants of health (SDH), a range of structural (i.e., social position, healthcare services) and psychosocial determinants (ageism, social perceptions of dementia) that can be a major modifiable driver of brain and cognitive health. Thus, by using three …

Exploring Communication In Pediatric Oncology And Parental Bereavement Outcomes: A Mixed Methods Study, Na Ouyang

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The first two years after a child’s death, defined by parents as early bereavement, are a particularly vulnerable period for parents. More than 40% of bereaved parents report severe, prolonged grief symptoms during early bereavement. High-quality parent-clinician communication, which is delivered honestly, clearly, and with sensitivity, helps parents make informed decisions about medical care, address their complex needs during their child’s end-of-life (EOL), and is related to lower severity of prolonged grief symptoms many years after a child’s death. However, research rarely focuses on the parent experience in early bereavement, and little is known about which specific components of parent-clinician …

In Terms Of Theory, Samuel Steinmetz

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

In Terms of Theory attends to theory in relation to the eighteenth-century novel and to early twentieth-century film, primarily as the taking account of the possibility of form—of the novel, of film, and of theory. The overarching argument of the dissertation, developed in chapter 1, is that the novel and film, as modern forms unknown to classical aesthetics, present particularly rich cases for exploring what theory does, what it looks like, how it relates to its subject, and what kind of knowledge it offers. The rest of the dissertation presents independent case studies: chapter 2 analyzes and contextualizes the style …

The Science Of Not Knowing: Systems Thinking Between Vienna And The United States, 1900-1972, Libby S. O'Neil

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation is a history of the interdisciplinary field of systems theory from the perspective of Central European scientists and intellectuals who migrated to North America during the 20th century. It is a story about how people, ideas, and techniques circulated in new ways across a period of global upheaval, about how the philosophy of science became a stage for urgent political questions, and about how scientists tried to grasp the whole without surrendering authority over its constituent parts. This project reveals how European interwar debates were encoded into technical practices of control and communication in the postwar United States, …

Cræft-Ing The Assembly: Political Vision In The Age Of Alfred, Megan Renz Perry

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation presents an early medieval vision of pastoral education and its desired political effects through analysis of the Old English Pastoral Care, which was translated from Latin in the ninth-century Alfredian educational revival. My study is grounded in the educational formation of the clerics whom Alfred recruited in the decade prior to the initiative: men of letters from neighboring Wales, Mercia, and Francia. These grammarian-translators envisioned forming vernacular readers in prudentia, that is, practical wisdom. I read Latin and Old English sources in light of the educational (chs. I- III), linguistic (ch. IV), philosophical (ch. V), and political (ch. …