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Things That Work - Meditations On Materiality In Archival Discourse, Anneli Sundqvist

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The renewal of archival theory since the 1990s has drawn upon the abstract and functional qualities of records, while their material aspects have been more or less excluded from theoretical discourse. Even if an emerging interest in materiality could be noticed, its impact and conceptual implications still need to be elucidated. This essay will explore the concept of materiality and how it has been dealt with in archival discourse, and discuss in what sense records could be regarded as material. It can be shown that while materiality is seldom explicitly addressed, it is an underlying theme in much archival discourse …

Complications Of Bone Morphogenetic Protein-2 Use In Open Transforaminal Lumbar Interbody Fusion, Allison Miller

Yale School of Medicine Physician Associate Program Theses

Transforaminal Lumbar Interbody Fusion is commonly performed with the use of off-label recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein-2. Despite its widespread use, bone morphogenetic protein-2 has been linked with postoperative complications in observational studies. However, no experimental study has supported this association nor has the relative risk as compared to iliac crest bone graft been quantified. In this study, we will compare the incidence proportion of radiculopathy, heterotopic ossification, and vertebral endplate osteolysis following Transforaminal Lumbar Interbody Fusion in patients who receive recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein-2 versus patients who receive iliac crest bone graft. Specifically, we will carry out a …

Preventing Postpartum Preeclampsia With Low-Dose Aspirin: A Randomized Controlled Trial, Katrina Jimenez

Yale School of Medicine Physician Associate Program Theses

Preeclampsia, defined as new or worsening hypertension along with new onset proteinuria and/or end organ damage throughout pregnancy, is one of the leading causes of perinatal and maternal morbidity and mortality. Antepartum preeclampsia has been extensively studied, and prophylaxis with 81mg aspirin starting between 12- and 16-weeks’ gestation is the current standard for prevention. However, little is known about the prevention of new onset postpartum preeclampsia, which can present up to 6 weeks postpartum. In this study, we will evaluate the efficacy of aspirin in preventing the incidence of new onset postpartum preeclampsia. Using a randomized controlled trial, we will …

Space-Praxis: Towards A Feminist Politics Of Design, Mary C. Overholt

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

Outside of the academy and professionalized practice, design has long been central to the production of feminist, political projects. Taking what I have termed space-praxis as its central analytic, this project explores a suite of feminist interventions into the built environment—ranging from the late 1960s to present day.

Formulated in response to Michel de Certeau’s theory of spatial practices, space-praxis collapses formerly bifurcated definitions of ‘tactic’/‘strategy’ and ‘theory’/‘practice.’ It gestures towards those unruly, situated undertakings that are embedded in an ever-evolving, liberative politics. In turning outwards, away from the so-called masters of architecture, this thesis orients itself toward everyday practitioners …

The Impact Of Community Masking On Covid-19: A Cluster Randomized Trial In Bangladesh, Jason Abaluck, Laura H. Kwong, Ashley Styczynski, Ashraful Haque, Md. Alamgir Kabir, Ellen Bates-Jeffries, Emily Crawford, Jade Benjamin-Chung, Shabib Raihan, Shadman Rahman, Salim Benhachmi, Neeti Zaman, Peter J. Winch, Md. Maqsud Hossain, Hasan Mahmud Reza, Abdullah All Jaber, Shawkee Gulshan Momen, Faika Laz Bani, Aura Rahman, Tahrima Saiha Huq, Stephen P. Luby, Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Background: Mask usage remains low across many parts of the world during the COVID- 19 pandemic, and strategies to increase mask-wearing remain untested. Our objectives were to identify strategies that can persistently increase mask-wearing and assess the impact of increasing mask-wearing on symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections. Methods: We conducted a cluster-randomized trial of community-level mask promotion in rural Bangladesh from November 2020 to April 2021 (N=600 villages, N=342,126 adults). We cross-randomized mask promotion strategies at the village and household level, including cloth vs. surgical masks. All intervention arms received free masks, information on the importance of masking, role modeling by community …

Blood At The Root, Jarrett Martin Drake

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

What is the sound of silence and what is the sight of absence? The following essay situates itself along those two questions by devoting close ethnographic attention to the lives and afterlives of seven people—Delia, Renty, Jem, Alfred, Fassena, Drana, and Jack—whose reflections resonate and resound throughout the world of archives. I argue that a theory of archival power must consider the role of process and place in the shaping of modern memory practices. The article begins by narrating the story of how these seven people came to occupy the center of the archival universe. Next, it traces a tale …

Essays On Labor Economics, Marianne Bernatzky Koehli

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The first chapter studies the life-cycle behavior of two cohorts of American women: those born in the 1960s and those born in the 1980s. Millennial women are more likely to work full time, work in professional, health, and education-related occupations, and be childless in their mid-thirties than women born in the 1960s. I build a life-cycle model that incorporates labor supply, occupation, and fertility choices, and estimate the model for the older cohort. I analyze the role of two forces in explaining the data patterns: (i) labor market factors, including changes in the wage structure and in the initial joint …

Sociocognitive Development Through A Comparative Developmental Lens, Alyssa Mcsherry Arre

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Early human life is marked by robust developmental shifts in sociocognitive abilities. While we know a lot about these developmental patterns in human primates, we know relatively little about whether nonhuman primates share these early life trajectories. In this dissertation, I identify and explore three open questions using this comparative developmental psychology method. In Chapter 2 (Arre, Clark, and Santos, 2020), I compare the developmental trajectory of an early emerging theory of mind ability— the capacity to represent what others see— in a primate species to the existing established trajectory in human infants. In Chapter 3 (Arre, Stumph, & Santos, …

Computational Discovery Of Structured Non-Coding Rna Motifs In Bacteria, Kenneth Ivan Brewer

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation describes a range of computational efforts to discover novel structured non-coding RNA (ncRNA) motifs in bacteria and generate hypotheses regarding their potential functions. This includes an introductory description of key advances in comparative genomics and RNA structure prediction as well as some of the most commonly found ncRNA candidates. Beyond that, I describe efforts for the comprehensive discovery of ncRNA candidates in 25 bacterial genomes and a catalog of the various functions hypothesized for these new motifs. Finally, I describe the Discovery of Intergenic Motifs PipeLine (DIMPL) which is a new computational toolset that harnesses the power of …

Fisb Mediated Membrane Fission During Sporulation In Bacillus Subtilis, Martha Braun

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Membrane fusion and fission are important to all forms of life as they are required for processes such as cellular division, intracellular trafficking, and synaptic vesicle recycling. While membrane fission is extensively studied in eukaryotes, little is known about bacterial membrane fission even though it is required for every cell cycle. Membrane fission also occurs during sporulation. When nutrients are scarce, certain bacteria (e.g. Bacillus subtilis) are able to sporulate, thereby creating resistant endospores that can withstand harsh environmental conditions, such as radiation and drought, for hundreds of years. The first step of sporulation is asymmetric cell division which generates …

Natural Language Processing And Graph Representation Learning For Clinical Data, David Chang

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The past decade has witnessed remarkable progress in biomedical informatics and its related fields: the development of high-throughput technologies in genomics, the mass adoption of electronic health records systems, and the AI renaissance largely catalyzed by deep learning. Deep learning has played an undeniably important role in our attempts to reduce the gap between the exponentially growing amount of biomedical data and our ability to make sense of them. In particular, the two main pillars of this dissertation---natural language processing and graph representation learning---have improved our capacity to learn useful representations of language and structured data to an extent previously …

Early Shh-Dependent Telencephalic Patterning Disruptions In Tourette Syndrome, Melanie Victoria Brady

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Ventral telencephalic development gives rise to the basal ganglia, a subpallial brain region responsible for motor function and coordination. This brain region is implicated in many movement disorders, including Tourette Syndrome (TS). TS is a heterogenous neurodevelopmental disorder and its etiopathophysiology is unknown. To date, TS has been investigated in animal models and postnatal human subjects, but early development of this disorder has not been studied. Previous work in adult TS post mortem basal ganglia tissue has shown a reduction in striatal interneurons, which serve to largely regulate striatal output. However, possible mechanisms for this neuronal loss and whether or …

Acetylcholine Signaling In The Basolateral Amygdala During Reward Learning, Richard Blake Crouse

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Animal survival relies in part on the ability to learn the outcomes that environmental stimuli predict and recall those associations to make decisions later in life. Learning is not monolithic, but instead is mediated by different brain regions depending on the type of information processed. Learning can happen at happen at different speeds, and memories can vary in their longevity. Much is still unknown about the neurobiology underlying learning and memory, thus further research into these processes is necessary to build foundational understanding of these critical phenomenon, and also to develop novel treatments for patients suffering from learning and memory …

Unsupervised Machine Learning Algorithms To Characterize Single-Cell Heterogeneity And Perturbation Response, Daniel Bernard Burkhardt

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Recent advances in microfluidic technologies facilitate the measurement of gene expression, DNA accessibility, protein content, or genomic mutations at unprecedented scale. The challenges imposed by the scale of these datasets are further exacerbated by non-linearity in molecular effects, complex interdependencies between features, and a lack of understanding of both data generating processes and sources of technical and biological noise. As a result, analysis of modern single-cell data requires the development of specialized computational tools. One solution to these problems is the use of manifold learning, a sub-field of unsupervised machine learning that seeks to model data geometry using a simplifying …

Rough Beginnings: Imagining The Origins Of Agriculture In Late Medieval And Early Modern Britain, Clio Doyle

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The Renaissance had both apocalyptic and hopeful visions of the future, but both were tied into the idea of the Golden Age, a past age that could be described as perfectly fertile or hopelessly barren, as a time of plenty or of hunger. The idea of a time before agriculture was approached with ambivalence: it was at once the innocent, ideal beginning and the feared end. I argue in my dissertation, “Rough Beginnings: Imagining the Origins of Agriculture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain,” that stories about the invention of agriculture allowed writers of poetry, drama, history, and husbandry …

Figuring Collectivity In The Age Of Climate Crisis, Maximilian Elihu Chaoulideer

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation confronts a contradiction that has come to define human life over (at least) the past quarter millennium: though we have, collectively, become the first species to inscribe ourselves into the geological record, we have, individually, diminishing power over the shape of the world toward which we blindly work. While imperial expansion and unfettered fossil fuel extraction threaten to undermine the material conditions of all human life, there is, I argue, a more fundamental problem manifest in anthropogenic climate change, one that poses a representational challenge. Because of its own globality, the threat posed by something as diffuse and …

Regulation Of Mek Signaling And Inhibitor Sensitivity In Melanoma, Eunice Cho

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, is characterized by aberrant hyperactivation of the ERK mitogen-activated protein kinase signaling pathway. Genetic lesions in the core components of the RAS-RAF-MEK-ERK protein kinase cascade as well as its upstream regulators are key features of melanoma progression and drug resistance. MEK, the central kinase within the cascade, is constitutively activated by many upstream oncogenic events and is an important drug target. MEK inhibition in combination with BRAF inhibition is the standard of care for treating BRAFV600E melanoma. However, not all BRAFV600E melanomas respond to these inhibitors, and those that do respond eventually acquire …

Palladium-Catalyzed Cross-Coupling And Related Reactions Of Non-Classical Electrophiles Focusing On Esters, Amira Hanafi Dardir

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This thesis summarizes work related to the development of mild palladium-catalyzed cross- coupling reactions of phenyl- and benzyl- esters, which undergo different C-O bond cleavage selectivity, the scope of the reactions and applications, and mechanistic understanding of precatalyst activation and the oxidative addition steps. The first chapter of this thesis is an introduction summarizing palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions of non-classical electrophiles. The second chapter focus on the development of mild palladium-catalyzed non- decarbonylative Suzuk-Miyuara and Buchwald Hartwig cross-coupling reactions of phenyl aryl- and alkyl-esters to generate ketenes and amides, respectively. The third chapter is the extension of the Suzuki-Miyuara reactions to …

Structural Insights Into Heterodimerization And Catalysis Of The Human Cis- Prenyltransferase “Ngbr/Dhdds” Complex, Ban H. Edani

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Cis-prenyltransferses (cis-PTases) constitute a family of enzymes involved in the synthesis of isoprenoid lipids required for various biological functions across all domains of life. The eukaryotic cis-PTase catalyzes the rate-limiting step in the synthesis of dolichyl phosphate, an indispensable glycosyl carrier lipid required for protein glycosylation in the lumen of endoplasmic reticulum. Based on enzyme composition, cis-PTases can be either homomeric or heteromeric enzymes. The human cis-PTase possesses a heteromeric configuration consisting of the two evolutionary related subunits: NgBR (dehydrodolichyl diphosphate synthase accessory subunit, first identified as a Nogo-B receptor) and DHDDS (dehydrodolichyl diphosphate synthase catalytic subunit). Recently, several mutations …

Loss Of Atrx Confers Dna Repair Defects And Parp Inhibitor Sensitivity In Glioma, Jennifer Mary Garbarino

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Alpha Thalassemia/Mental Retardation Syndrome X-Linked (ATRX) is mutated frequently in gliomas and represents a potential target for cancer therapeutics development. ATRX is known to function as a histone chaperone that incorporates the histone variant, H3.3, into the genome. Studies have implicated ATRX in key DNA damage response (DDR) pathways, including non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), homologous recombination (HR), and replication stress response, but a distinct role for this protein in DNA repair has yet to be fully elucidated. To further investigate ATRX function in glioma, I created CRISPR knockout clones in multiple glioma cell lines. These cell lines were found to …

Temporal Articulatory Stability, Phonological Variation, And Lexical Contrast Preservation In Diaspora Tibetan, Christopher Alden Geissler

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

This dissertation examines how lexical tone can be represented with articulatory gestures, and the ways a gestural perspective can inform synchronic and diachronic analysis of the phonology and phonetics of a language. Tibetan is chosen an example of a language with interacting laryngeal and tonal phonology, a history of tonogenesis and dialect diversification, and recent contact-induced realignment of the tonal and consonantal systems. Despite variation in voice onset time (VOT) and presence/absence of the lexical tone contrast, speakers retain a consistent relative timing of consonant and vowel gestures. Recent research has attempted to integrate tone into the framework of Articulatory …

Patterns Of Adaptive And Purifying Selection In The Genomes Of Phocid Seals, Stephen John Gaughran

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Modern genomic sequencing technologies provide the opportunity to address long-standing questions in molecular evolution with empirical data. In this dissertation, I combine this new technology with advances in statistical population genetics to describe how deleterious mutations and adaptive evolution have shaped the genomic evolution of phocid seals. In Chapter 1, I model historical demographic processes using whole genome sequences of eight seal taxa: the Hawaiian monk seal, the Mediterranean monk seal, the northern elephant seal, the southern elephant seal, the Weddell seal, the grey seal, the Baltic ringed seal, and the Saimaa ringed seal. Through this, I establish that the …

Discovery And Validation Of Riboswitches And Other Ncrnas In Over 50 Bacterial Genomes, Gadareth Higgs

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) were previously overlooked by molecular biology. But their importance is being increasingly recognized in science. Between 1989 and 2020, seven scientists shared three Nobel Prizes for their discovery and work in ncRNAs. I suspect that this trend will pick up over the following decades. Of ncRNAs, riboswitches stand out for their versatility and prospects for future discovery. Bacterial riboswitches consist of an aptamer region and an expression platform. The aptamer binds a ligand, usually a signaling molecule, coenzyme, inorganic ion, nucleotide derivative, amino acid, or other metabolite. This then causes a conformational change in the downstream expression …

The Manifold Of Neural Responses Informs Physiological Circuits In The Visual System, Luciano Dyballa

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The rapid development of multi-electrode and imaging techniques is leading to a data explosion in neuroscience, opening the possibility of truly understanding the organization and functionality of our visual systems. Furthermore, the need for more natural visual stimuli greatly increases the complexity of the data. Together, these create a challenge for machine learning. Our goal in this thesis is to develop one such technique. The central pillar of our contribution is designing a manifold of neurons, and providing an algorithmic approach to inferring it. This manifold is functional, in the sense that nearby neurons on the manifold respond similarly (in …

Identifying Mechanisms Of Drug Tolerance In Egfr Mutant Lung Cancer, Bomiao Hu

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

The majority of EGFR mutant lung adenocarcinomas respond well to EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs). However, the majority of these responses are partial with drug tolerant residual disease remaining even at the time of maximal response. This residual disease serves as a reservoir for the emergence of acquired resistance and tumor relapse, which inevitably occurs in patients treated with TKIs. It is thus critical to understand the biology of residual tumor cells and find out the mechanisms that underlie drug tolerance. Knowledge of such mechanisms could lead to the identification of potential strategies to forestall the emergence of drug resistance. …

Rna Methylation And Ythdf Readers In Posttranscriptional Regulation And Development, Cassandra Kontur

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Development in animals requires precise and coordinated changes in gene expression. This genetic remodeling is achieved through extensive regulatory networks of proteins and RNAs that function together to specify new cell fates and patterns. One developmental event heavily reliant on these regulatory networks is the maternal-to-zygotic transition (MZT), a universal step in metazoan embryogenesis in which a fertilized oocyte is reprogrammed into a pluripotent embryo. The earliest stages of the MZT are governed by maternally inherited gene products, which are required for cellular functions in the initially transcriptionally silent embryo. To shift developmental control to the zygote, these maternal mRNAs …

Phage Selection Against Antibiotic Resistance Or Virulence In Opportunistic Bacterial Pathogens, Kaitlyn Kortright

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Bacteriophages (phages) are prolific, ubiquitous viruses that infect bacterial cells. Phages have proven to be invaluable tools of the biological sciences, enabling the discovery and description of some of the foundations of molecular biology and genetics; excellent systems for the study of evolutionary dynamics; and their seemingly limitless diversity promises to produce interesting new biology for many years to come. As natural predators of bacteria, phages might additionally be employed for phage therapy, the therapeutic use of phages to treat bacterial infections. Lytic phages impose strong selective pressure on bacteria to evolve resistance to phage infection. Under certain environmental conditions …

Immune-Metabolic Regulation By The Transsulfuration Pathway, Aileen Heeyeon Lee

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Pro-longevity interventions such as caloric restriction (CR) and methionine restriction (MR) can improve metabolic health. However, despite decades of extensive studies, the mechanisms that underlie the benefits of these dietary interventions are still being characterized. Particularly, the effect of these diets on immune cells in mediating their metabolic benefits has been largely unexplored. This work aimed to expand our understanding of how these dietary interventions may regulate immune responses and identify novel immunomodulatory pathways that could be harnessed during inflammatory and metabolic pathologies.In line with other studies in animal models, we identified that the transsulfuration pathway (TSP) was induced in …

A Secreted Signal From The Gut Inhibits Axon Regeneration In C. Elegans, Alexander Tianma Lin-Moore

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

Injured axons must regenerate to restore nervous system function, and regeneration is regulated in part by external factors from non-neuronal tissues. Many of these extrinsic factors act in the immediate cellular environment of the axon to promote or restrict regeneration, but the existence of long-distance signals regulating axon regeneration has not been clear. Here we show that the Rab GTPase rab-27 inhibits regeneration of GABAergic motor neurons in C. elegans through activity in the intestine. Re-expression of RAB-27, but not the closely related RAB-3, in the intestine of rab-27 mutant animals is sufficient to rescue normal regeneration. Several additional components …

Elucidation Of Vps13 And Pikfyve Proteins Functioning In The Regulation Of Eukaryotic Lipid Homeostasis, Peiqi Li

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations

In eukaryotic cells, organelles are surrounded by membranes, which act as barriers to the cytosolic environment. Each subcellular membrane has a distinct lipid composition that is required for its unique organellar function, and is therefore is fundamental for cellular physiology. The unique distributions of organellar lipids result from highly regulated lipid transport networks and the activity of lipid metabolizing enzymes. Most phospholipids are initially synthesized in the ER and transferred to different organelles via vesicular or non-vesicular lipid transport pathways. Lipid transfer proteins (LTPs) localized at membrane contact sites mediate non-vesicular lipid transport. They contain a hydrophobic cavity to solubilize …