Digital Commons Network^™

Avian Symbionts Of Sulawesi: Identifying And Correlating Malaria Parasites And The Microbiome In Communities Of Endemic Avian Hosts, Rachael Joakim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since the evolution of complex organisms, there have been communities of symbionts inhabiting them. Thanks to the development of parallel sequencing techniques, DNA of entire microbial communities can be sequenced from a single sample. Some microbes can be parasitic in nature, such as Haemosporida, an order of eukaryotes causing malaria. While most symbionts form a more commensal host relationship in wild systems, host-symbiont dynamics can vary in pathogenicity based on biotic and abiotic factors. In vertebrates, microbial communities in the gut play a major role in host function, including immune responses to Haemosporida. Though this relationship is most commonly explored …

Making And Unmaking Multiethnic Black Neighborhoods: Immigration, Race, And Gentrification In New York And Paris, Maura Mcgee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a transatlantic comparative study of gentrification in multiethnic Black neighborhoods in New York and Paris. It draws on neighborhood case studies conducted in Crown Heights in Brooklyn and la Goutte d’Or in Paris, home respectively to African ancestry immigrant communities from the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa. It looks specifically at the causes and consequences of changes in neighborhood social spaces—the commercial landscape and social institutions—rather than at shifts in residential patterns.

Three main questions guide this research. First, what roles do race and immigration play in the process of gentrification, which has historically been most prevalent in …

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations Of “Peau D’Âne” In Contemporary French And English Texts, Amy M. Martin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unnatural Issue: Gendered Adaptations of “Peau d’Âne” in Contemporary French and English Texts explores trans-genre and transmedia adaptations of Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century fairy tale using feminist and narratological theories to examine gendered aspects of storytelling and the treatment of father-daughter incest and blame in the work of selected French, British, and American creators. Texts are read comparatively, with analyses of the adaptations’ plots, motifs, characterizations, and modifications, both in relation to Perrault and to the other adaptations. This dissertation features prose and poetry texts by female authors—including Christine Angot, Catherine Cusset, and Emma Donoghue—in the first two chapters. Reading these …

Complicating Confidence: A Critical Analysis Of Confidence In A Girls' Empowerment Organization, Kimberly M. Belmonte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the popular imagination, confidence is thought of as a positive or healthy state. Yet there is also a pervasive belief that adolescent girls are at risk of losing their confidence or of not having enough confidence, particularly compared to boys. The larger field of youth development theorists and practitioners see confidence as a positive, normative, and measurable aspect of healthy adolescent development (e.g., Lerner et al., 2015). Conversely, critical feminist scholars assert that confidence has become hegemonic, mandated, and commodified (e.g., Banet-Weiser, 2015; Gill & Orgad, 2016)—taken up by a neoliberal, post-feminist climate as a technology of the self …

Studies Of Oxidopyrylium Ylide Dimers And Their Utility In The Synthesis Of Densely Functionalized Troponoids, Daniel V. Schiavone

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Herein, we describe our efforts to investigate mechanistic considerations of oxidopyrylium ylides and their use in cycloadditions to form complex bicyclic structures and the advancement of these cycloadducts to the synthesis of densely functionalized tropolones. This work also describes applications of tropolones as biologically relevant structures and dynamic fluorophores.

In Chapter 1, we expand upon previous studies done in the Murelli Lab describing the ability of 3-hydroxy-4-pyrone derived oxidopyrylium dimers to revert back to ylides in situ and as result can be used as a clean oxidopyrylium ylide source in accessing oxabicyclic compounds. Intermolecular cycloadditions of these ylides can be …

Breaking Down Bias: A Comparative Analysis Of General Public And Police Officer Attitudes Toward Mental Illness And Officer Decision-Making In Mental Health Crises, Therese L. Todd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Police responses to persons with mental illness (PMIs) compared to those without appear to be more likely to result in negative outcomes, underscoring the importance of understanding these interactions and the factors that may influence them. Relatively little research has examined officer attitudes toward mental illness, and no study has examined implicit bias toward mental illness among police officers or how police culture may impact outcomes in mental health crises. The present study sought to: 1) measure explicit and implicit bias toward PMIs among the general public and police officers to understand how these constructs may vary among these populations; …

On The Order-Type Complexity Of Words, And Greedy Sidon Sets For Linear Forms, Yin Choi Cheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work consists of two parts. In the first part, we study the order-type complexity of right-infinite words over a finite alphabet, which is defined to be the order types of the set of shifts of said words in lexicographical order. The set of shifts of any aperiodic morphic words whose first letter in the purely-morphic pre-image occurs at least twice in the pre-image has the same order type as Q ∩ (0, 1), Q ∩ (0, 1], or Q ∩ [0, 1). This includes all aperiodic purely-morphic binary words. The order types of uniform-morphic ternary words were also studied, …

White Supremacist Print Culture And The Creation Of White Working-Class Ideology In 1860s New York City, Anna Meyer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

J. H. Van Evrie believed in the biological basis of white racial supremacy and Black inferiority beliefs which he spread in his publications throughout the 19^th century. He generated support for Copperhead politicians, pro-slavery Northern Democrats, who would enact his racial policies, in his newspaper the Weekly Caucasian, published in New York City during the Civil War. He adapted the presentation of his racial theories to appeal to the economic concerns of among working-class white men and Irish immigrants by using allegories about the Civil War. The newspaper created a sense of white nationalism and racial solidarity with …

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, And Disgust In The Work Of Virginia Woolf And Zinaida Gippius, Yelizaveta Shapiro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Confounding Body: Female Corporeality, Androgyny, and Disgust in the Work of Virginia Woolf and Zinaida Gippius examines how the discourses of degeneration, eugenics, and sexology shaped representations of women’s bodies in British and Russian modernist literature. Focusing on the writing of Zinaida Gippius (1869-1945) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), I challenge the longstanding argument that both authors attempted to escape the material body by resorting to androgynous tropes. I argue that the material female body takes center stage in both Gippius’s and Woolf’s work and functions as a powerfully paradoxical entity: one that generates disgust and enables oppression while housing …

Expanding The Role Of The Temporal Dimension In Ecological Niche Models: A Study On Mexican Montane Small Mammals, Gonzalo E. Pinilla Buitrago

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ecological niche models (ENMs) are commonly used to estimate the potential geographic distributions of species and have various uses, such as predicting invasive species' potential distribution, assessing vulnerability to climate change, or estimating paleodistributions. However, ENM developments have primarily focused on solving spatially related issues, underemphasizing the temporal dimensionality of occurrence and environmental data collected over the last century. One limitation of ENMs is the common practice of using recent environmental averages that fail to capture the gradual environmental change over the time span of the occurrence records and can hide trends in environmental variables, a critical piece of information …

Thermodynamics Of Learning With Parametric Probabilistic Models, Shervin Sadat Parsi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study delves into the learning process within the Probabilistic Parametric Models (PPMs) framework from a unique thermodynamic perspective. By exploring the core concepts of thermodynamics and its innate connection with information theory, we showcase how this interdisciplinary approach can effectively contribute to the domain of machine learning. In the initial chapter, we establish the link between the learning problem in PPMs and a thermodynamic process by reframing various elements of the learning process within the context of thermodynamics. We introduce novel information-theoretic measurements that provide insights into the information learned in both the parameter space and the overall performance …

Determining The Influence Of Abiotic And Biotic Predictors On Ecological Niche Models, Erica Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Biotic variables, including those reflecting interactions such as competition and parasitism, are generally assumed to have negligible effects on broadscale species distributions and are typically excluded from ecological niche models (ENMs). However, the role such interactions play in shaping species distributions is increasingly recognized, sparking the development of methods for their integration into ENMs.

Among the most common approaches are those that limit the ENM output of the focal species by the distribution of biotic interactors (post-processing) and those that incorporate biotic interactors as predictor variables. These endeavors hold widespread and critical usages, such as predicting the impacts of climate …

Changes In The Epigenetic Landscape Of Oligodendrocyte Progenitor Cells With Time, David K. Dansu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most neonatal oligodendrocyte progenitors (nOPCs) give rise to myelinating oligodendrocytes during development, while a proportion are retained as proliferative undifferentiated cells in the adult brain (aOPCs). Previous studies have reported distinct properties for those two populations but the molecular mechanisms underlying these intrinsic differences are not well understood. Using RNA-sequencing and unbiased histone proteomics analysis, we identify transcripts and histone marks that are higher in aOPCs than nOPCs. The genome-wide ChIP-sequencing analysis of chromatin from aOPCs compared to nOPCs detects greater occupancy of the H4K8ac mark at loci corresponding to the higher transcript levels of oligodendrocyte-specific transcription factors and lipid …

Posthuman Lessons For Writing And Well-Being: Reparative Practices, Anna A. Larsson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The influence of post-humanist interdisciplinary theories on Writing Studies has displaced its conventional preoccupation with the cultivation and management of subjects via First-Year Writing (FYC), to productive but at times artificially divisive ends. This project aims at an inclusive, anti-racist first-year writing ecology through theories of networked consciousness and digital “making.” I reread and recuperate earlier variants of posthumanist writing theory and draw from feminist materialism and mindfulness studies to establish a vision of well-being that I call networked reparative practices. To bring the abstract into the tangible, an often-valued endeavor in a field historically defined by teaching, I introduce …

Epistemic Virtue And Receptivity To Science In Policing, Braden L. Campbell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the underexplored relationship between character epistemology and its potential to explain behavior, decision-making, and culture within the criminal justice system, particularly the police. Building on the existing theoretical framework of evidence-based policing (EBP) and the recognized gap in understanding police receptivity to science, this study hypothesized that intellectual character at personal and collective levels positively correlates with science receptivity.

Epistemic character was defined through the aggregation of four traits: open-mindedness, defensiveness, insouciance, and groupthink. Science receptivity was measured by openness to change, desire to learn, reliance on intuition, and mistrust of science. Data were collected through surveys …

Extreme E-Service Learning: Remote Learning For Undergraduate Students And Telehealth Intervention For Children With Autism, Madiha S. Muzammal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Extreme e-service learning courses in higher education, in which all components of the course including the instruction and service is provided online (Waldenr et al., 2012), offer rich educational experience as well as mutual benefits to the students, community and the higher education institutes. Very few studies have examined extreme e-service learning. We examined an undergraduate extreme e-service learning course in psychology; students learned through a virtual class and provided telehealth behavioral intervention services to children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Utilizing mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative measures including student observations, assignments, and self-reports) and a mixed design (single subject …

A Novel Therapeutic Strategy For Alzheimer’S Disease: Sex-Dependent Mechanisms Altered By The Hdac Inhibitor Rg2833 In A Transgenic Rat Model, Kelechi Ndukwe

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia. In the United States, AD affects about 6.2 million Americans and is projected to reach 13.8 million by 2050. Currently, there are no effective therapies for AD and therapies targeting epigenetic mechanisms have shown to be effective in improving cognitive performance in animal models of AD. However, until now no study has reported sex-dependent mechanisms leading to differential expression of genes that contribute to changes in AD pathology. From our in silico studies, we identified an FDA-approved drug, RG2833 (N-[6-(2-aminoanilino)-6-oxohexyl]-4-methylbenzamide) that penetrates the blood brain barrier and can potentially ameliorate …

Narratives In, On, And Around Contemporary Queer Film: A Study Of Adam And Its Paratexts, Jeremy Stoller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Film’s ability to present and inspire desire, and to realize alternate worlds, render it a uniquely potent medium for expressing queerness. Because of this potency, and because films are among the most prominent ways that LGBTQ+ people are represented in society, queer film can feel both deeply personal and highly political for LGBTQ+ identifying audiences. But movies do not merely offer statements about political systems, they are also made within and reflective of those systems.

Scholars have thoroughly investigated films and our relationships to them for productive ways of seeing gender, sexuality, desire, and oppression. But the conversations about how …

Freedom Song: Uncovering A Politics Of Dignity In Black Feminist Thought And Praxis, Abegail M. Dobson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This master's thesis delves into Intersectionality as an organizing framework and critical social theory, emphasizing the significance of Black feminist thought to social justice initiatives that challenge prevailing intersectional violence. The central inquiry of this project is uncovering a Black feminist conceptualization of dignity as articulated in foundational texts. I scrutinize the essence of dignity within Black feminist theory and praxis, particularly addressing the question: How valuable is a "right" when societal experiences consistently undermine one's basic needs and protections required to live a dignified life beyond survival?

Black feminist thought, encompassing praxis, is posited as a profound space for …

Phase Transitions And Thermal Stability Of The Magnetic Dual Chiral Density Wave Phase In Cold, Dense Qcd, William G. Gyory

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The correct description of strongly interacting matter at extreme densities and low temperatures remains poorly understood. We analyze the magnetic dual chiral density wave (MDCDW) phase, an inhomogeneous chiral condensate that arises in cold, dense quark matter in a magnetic field. We first review the background theory and derive the free energy of the condensate. Then we show how the phase transitions can be studied using a generalized Ginzburg-Landau expansion, and we derive a convenient all-orders formula for the coefficients. Using these tools, we compute the order parameters, critical temperature, and threshold temperature over a range of chemical potentials and …

Nursing Perspectives On Intimate Partner Violence Screening In The Emergency Department, Justin Cabrera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Using descriptive and quality descriptive (QD) analysis, emergency department nurses from around the country completed a modified version of the Physician Readiness to Manage Intimate Partner Violence Survey (PREMIS) tool to gain insight on their attitudes, knowledge, and preparedness about working with patient survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) regarding their willingness to and comfort in engaging in IPV screening practices. In total, 1,523 responses were received from emergency department nurses currently or formerly in practice.

Findings show that there was no correlation between emergency department nurses’ education and training on IPV and willingness and comfort with IPV screening with …

Reflections On The Digital Memory Of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Vinh T. Pham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Within the scope of digital humanities scholarship, this thesis interrogates ‘memory’ as a conceptual frame for remembering Black life, both past and present, in the face of missing historical data and in the afterlife of trans-Atlantic slavery. Such a concept—increasingly taken up as method in the humanities, along with related allusions to the ephemeral, spectral, or haunted—is sought to refuse historiographical and techno-scientific claims to empirical certainty or transparency, and instead affirm its gaps and absences as themselves productive sites for self-reflexive speculation on the complexities of lived experience. Applied to the digital study of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, memory comes …

Pedagogies Of Reform: The Role Of Game-Based Learning In Recontextualizing Education, Hamad Sindhi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Game-based learning, the learning games industry, and the work of learning game designers is enmeshed in a neoliberalized education system and shifting educational, economic, and technological contexts in the United States. There’s a lot of discussion and debate about various educational technologies and learning games in schools, but how much do we look at the work that goes into making those products? Technology has been a key part of school reform in the United States for the last 50 years at least. This dissertation offers an account of tech-based school reform that centers the role of pedagogy vis-à-vis learning games …

Completive 'Todo': Implications For Possessives, Existentials, And Locative Expressions, Carolina Fraga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Spanish, the element todo ‘all’ agrees in gender and number with the noun it quantifies over (todas las ventanas ‘all.F.PL the.F.PL windows.F.PL’). In this work I discuss a novel construction in Rioplatense Spanish, restricted to existentials and possessives, in which todo agrees in gender and number with a given nominal in the structure but is neither syntactically nor semantically related to it (e.g., Hay toda agua en el baño (have.PRS all.F.SG water.F.SG in the bathroom) ‘There’s water over the whole bathroom floor’). I argue that the syntax and the …

Synthesis Of Biologically Active Tropolones And Stereochemically Rich Compounds Via Cross-Coupling Reactions, Nana B. Agyemang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the past years the Murelli lab has established research based on the synthesis and biological evaluations of alpha-hydroxytropolones (alpha-HTs). These seven-membered aromatic rings have three contiguous oxygen atoms that chelates to metals, thus, biologically having the ability to bind dinuclear metalloenzymes and promoting inhibition. Synthetic routes to alpha-HT’s are scarce and therefore has been the main driving force in developing efficient and general synthetic methods to obtain variations in alpha-HTs, enabling SAR studies. The Murelli lab have therefore developed an oxidopyrylium cycloaddition/ring-opening strategy that is able to generate polysubstituted alpha-HTs starting from kojic acid, a cheap and readily available …

Icons In Lyari: Resonance, Visibility, And Global Blackness In An Indian Ocean Port Town, Zehra Husain

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This doctoral dissertation studies the resonances of boxing, football, and rap music in Lyari Town, a working-class neighborhood located in Pakistan’s commercial port city Karachi. Based on 12 months of in-person and remote ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation traces the circulation of iconographies of Blackness and global sports as they sediment in a port town on the Indian Ocean. Lyari has long been in the news for gang violence and urban strife, but is also noted for its talented boxers, footballers and more recently rap musicians, some of whom are of Afro-Baluch descent. These “two faces” of Lyari Town informs its …

Stereospecific Cross-Coupling Reactions With Enantioenriched Electrophiles, Iv Kraja

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We have developed a novel palladium-catalyzed stereospecific C(sp³)–C(sp³) Stille cross-coupling reaction between carbastannatrane nucleophiles and α-(trifluoromethyl) benzylic tosylates. This constitutes the first example of a stereospecific C(sp³)–C(sp³) cross-coupling reaction using an enantioenriched electrophile and an alkyltin nucleophile. This system has the potential to be extended to cross-coupling reactions using configurationally stable enantioenriched nucleophiles, thus enabling stereochemical control of two newly formed contiguous stereocenters. Generating enantioenriched α-(trifluoromethyl) benzylic compounds also has importance in pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries.

Through the development of this reaction, our findings show that the addition …

On The Spectrum Of Quaquaversal Operators, Josiah Sugarman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1998 Charles Radin and John Conway introduced the Quaquaversal Tiling. A three dimensional hierarchical tiling with the property that the orientations of its tiles approach a uniform distribution faster than what is possible for hierarchical tilings in two dimensions. The distribution of orientations is controlled by the spectrum of a certain Hecke operator, which we refer to as the Quaquaversal Operator. For example, by showing that the largest eigenvalue has multiplicity equal to one, Charles Radin and John Conway showed that the orientations of this tiling approach a uniform distribution. In 2008, Bourgain and Gamburd showed that this operator …

This Little Light Of Mine: The History Of The Amalgamated Nursery School, Kimberly F. Vanderbilt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research focuses on the history of one small nursery school to analyze the factors that influenced the school: the labor unionists founders, the changing neighborhoods of the Bronx, the Progressive Education Movement and the Women's Leadership Movements that helped define and support the school. Recent policy changes have had impact on this school and on all early childhood programs in New York City.

Demarcating Psychopathologies: Nosology, Validity, And The Taxonomic Problem In Psychiatric Medicine, Julia Zentz Kolak

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I argue that the discussion surrounding the role of values in the conceptualization of mental disorders is reproduced in critical debates surrounding the issue of reliability and validity in a psychiatric nosology. In so doing, I oppose the conventional separation of the demarcation problem and the crisis of validity in psychiatric classification, arguing instead that they are inextricably linked. After drawing out the intersection between these literatures in the conceptual history of the DSM and its much-maligned transition to an etiologically neutral taxonomy of mental disorders, I consider Carl Hempel’s proposed conciliation between descriptive and theoretical systematization …