Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Deciphering The Roles Of Hopd1 In Carbon Metabolism During Pathogen Infection, Yali Sun

All ETDs from UAB

Plants are equipped with various immune responses including MAMP-triggered immunity (MTI) and effector-triggered immunity (ETI) to fight against pathogens, while virulent pathogens release virulent proteins (effectors) and phytotoxins to compete with host immune responses. Comprehensively, plant-pathogen interactions involve multi- layered and highly coordinated processes, and dynamic regulation at both transcriptional and translational levels plays a pivotal role in plant defense. For example, NPR1, a key immune regulator, is regulated by hosts and manipulated by pathogens at different levels during different stages of plant-pathogen interaction. However, besides the competition over immune responses, bacterial pathogens also need to gain nutrients from host …

Examining The Role Of The Unfolded Protein Response In Depression, Matthew Timberlake

All ETDs from UAB

Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide and impacts nearly 350 million people with a disproportionate representation in women with a 1:1.7 ratio of occurrence compared to men. This disorder is characterized by shifts in mood to include feelings of hopelessness, sadness, and lethargy as well as changes in diet, motivation, and sleep patterns. Further, over 50% of patients who struggle with depression also have suicidal ideation and as many as 10% of those commit suicide. At present, treatment plans include behavioral therapy (often) in conjunction with antidepressant medications which act on monoamines and their circuits in the central …

Recognizing Compound Expressions And Emotion Intensity, William Wagner

All ETDs from UAB

Six facial expressions of emotion (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise) have been identified as panculturally recognizable. Though recognition of those facial expressions appears to be developmentally innate, there is variation in emotion recognition between individuals. Specifically, those with autism spectrum disorder often have difficulty with this skill, contributing to issues in their social interactions. Another important skill for social interactions is identifying when someone feels more than one emotion at a time, and some evidence suggests that those emotional states are expressed with panculturally recognizable affects, termed compound expressions. Yet another skill involves determining the intensity of someone’s …

Mike And Ikes 'N Buttered Bricks: My Adventures In Scouting, Kasey Duane Hullett

All ETDs from UAB

I started my time in the Boy Scouts of America at age eight. Some of my earliest memories in the cub program consisted of pine wood derbies, tying square knots, and looking up at the stars at Moundville Archaeological Park. I was a kid tied to the outdoors and the organization always allowed me to nurture that relationship. Over the years, I went up in the ranks. I made it through the five ranks of the Cub Scouts to get my Arrow of Light to transition to the Boy Scouts. Once there, I earned over 50 merit badges that ranged …

Stories From Rwandan Churches Prior To The Genocide; A Collection Of Oral Histories, Carmen Ava Lau

All ETDs from UAB

STORIES FROM RWANDAN CHURCHES PRIOR TO THE GENOCIDE: A COLLECTION OF ORAL HISTORIES CARMEN A. LAU ANTHROPOLOGY PEACE & HUMAN RTS ABSTRACT As a tragedy in which religion did not serve as demarcation between rival groups, the Rwandan Genocide provides an example of Christians killing Christians. I use interviews from 14 Rwandan survivors who were Seventh-day Adventists, a Protestant group to which both heroes and villains belonged. Based on Eisler’s Theory of Cultural Transfor-mation, I assume that narratives inform action. I examine oral histories through a frame-work that searches for elements of Girard’s Mimetic Rivalry that might have influenced Adventists …

Person Re-Identification By Deep Structured Prediction: A Generative Approach, Xinpeng Liao

All ETDs from UAB

Visual appearance based person re-identification (re-ID) is the task of assigning the same identifier to all instances of a particular individual captured in images or videos, even after the occurrence of significant gaps over time or space. The state-of-the-art methods can be categorized into two main approaches: Given a set of gallery images with known IDs, the task is to infer either the ID label of a probe image individually (person re-ID via image retrieval) or the collective ID labeling of all probe images simultaneously (person re-ID via a highly-crafted re-ID structure). This dissertation is primarily focused on exploring the …

Kinetics Of Thermal Decomposition And Polymerization During Continuous Cooling, Tatsiana Liavitskaya

All ETDs from UAB

The processes that naturally occur on heating such as thermal decompositions and polymerizations can be made to proceed on cooling. Studying the resulting cooling kinetics is the major objective of this work. The kinetics of the reactions are explored by using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) in combination with isoconversional kinetic analysis. The kinetic parameters obtained on cooling are compared to the ones evaluated on heating and physical insights into the differences and similarities in the kinetics of the processes on heating and cooling are proposed. The study is driven by the hypothesis that the kinetics on …

Biopsychosocial Correlates Of Pain In Youth With Eosinophilic Esophagitis: A Comparison To Other Pediatric Patients, Mary Kenna Lynch

All ETDs from UAB

EoE is a chronic, clinico-pathological, esophageal disease with symptoms that include dysphagia, reflux, vomiting, feeding aversion, and epigastric pain. Diagnosis requires clinical symptom presentation and histologic findings of eosinophil-predominant inflammation of the esophagus. While the pediatric patient’s epigastric pain is predictive of their quality of life, little is known about their pain experience. Through two studies, the pain experience, sleep quality, and internalizing symptoms of youth with Eosinophilic Esophagitis (EoE) have been examined. Through individually evaluating each of these factors as well as testing their relations with each other, the model proposed by Lynch and colleagues (2015) to understand the …

The Benefit Of Resilience: Examining The Roles Of Family Resilience And Parental Education In Child Anxiety, Bria Kathryn Morgan

All ETDs from UAB

Extensive literature addresses the associations between parental education and children’s mental health outcomes; however, the role of parental education and family resilience in child anxiety is unclear. The purpose of this study is to obtain a greater understanding of the role of parental education in child anxiety. Additionally, the study aims to investigate the role and potential varying effects of family resilience. Building upon Bowen’s Family Systems Theory and Walsh’s Systems Theory of Family Resilience, I hypothesize that parental education will be negatively associated with child anxiety and that family resilience will be negatively associated with child anxiety. I also …

Automating Personal Safety Among Different Age Groups, Jayun Patel

All ETDs from UAB

Personal Safety has always been crucial to one’s life. Many different threats are faced by people in their day to day lives. These threats differ with different age groups that affect their health and well being. Different threats affect people, which include birth defects, falls, drowning, health problems, abuse, suicide, homicide, and sexual violence [39]. Many other threats occur every day but these threats are the common threats that are faced by most of the people at different ages. These threats can affect the victims in terms of the health of the person, and the physical and mental well being …

Synthesis And Ion Conducting Properties Of Barium Zirconate Based Thin Films, Eric Remington

All ETDs from UAB

Solid oxide fuel cells are electrochemical systems that convert chemical energy into electricity using ion-conducting oxide ceramics as electrolytes. These devices are widely considered as an important technology in addressing the future demands for low-carbon electrical power generation. Oxide ceramics in which the active ionic species is the proton ion (H+), are of particular current interest because they exhibit ionic conductivities that are two-to-three orders of magnitude higher than ceramics that rely on transport of oxide ions (O2−). Accordingly, these so-called protonic oxide conductors are being investigated vigorously in a variety of bulk and thin film configurations. A major goal …

Perceptions Of The Police By Queer Women, Marshall Lorraine White

All ETDs from UAB

Queer communities have historically had a strained relationship with the police. In recent years, scholars have begun to examine perceptions of the police by these communities in an attempt to fill an important gap in the literature. The current study examines perceptions of the police by queer women in Birmingham, AL. The focus on queer women is attributed to recent findings that queer women (lesbian, bisexual, transgender, etc.) report more negative perceptions of the police than others in queer communities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 self-identified White, queer women about their experiences growing up, broad views about the police, …

Comparison Of Longitudinal Voxel-Based Morphometry (Vbm) And Tensor-Based Morphometry (Tbm) For Detecting Structural Use-Dependent Neuroplastic Changes After Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy, Brent Maddox Womble

All ETDs from UAB

Constraint-Induced Movement therapy (CI therapy) is an efficacious physical rehabilitation intervention for lateralized upper-extremity motor deficits resulting from neurological injury or disease, which has been shown to result in use-dependent structural and functional neuroplasticity. While use-dependent neuroplasticity has been shown to result in structural changes in brain tissue density, thickness, and volume, the exact cellular mechanisms underpinning this neuroplasticity in humans have yet to be determined. The present study involved a novel use of synthetic data, with the overall aim of elucidating the nature of structural use-dependent neuroplasticity produced by CI therapy. Longitudinal voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and tensor-based morphometry (TBM) …

Structural Elements Underlying The Neuroplastic Changes Produced By Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy In Chronic Stroke, Yue Zhang

All ETDs from UAB

Constraint-Induced Movement Therapy (CIMT) is a rehabilitation treatment that produces large motor function improvements in patients with chronic stroke. One of the hypothesized mechanisms by which CIMT achieves its therapeutic effect is the large functional and structural plastic changes that it produces in the brain. The goal of the present project was to determine the neural underpinnings of cortical reorganization produced by CIMT in chronic stroke using proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS). Before applying the proposed 1H-MRS techniques (i.e., single voxel spectroscopy/SVS and whole brain magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging/WB-MRSI) to evaluate longitudinal changes in brain metabolites after CIMT, it is …

Self-Tracking Practices: The Roles Of Social Contexts And Chronic Conditions, Aowen Zhu

All ETDs from UAB

The rapid development of mobile health (mHealth) technologies is propelled by the culture of disease prevention and management. Smartphone applications and wearable devices provide valuable personal data for self enhancement. In addition to health promotion, people with chronic conditions are using apps and devices to monitor symptoms and behaviors. There is great potential for self-tracking practices to reduce health care cost and improve population health. However, the emphasis on personal responsibility of individuals’ health may hinder the long-term effectiveness of self-tracking practices. The purpose of the study is to examine the associations between social contexts and self-tracking practices, chronic health …

Quality Of Life And Mental Health After Pediatric Central Nervous System Tumor Treated With Surgery Only, Alexandra Cutillo

All ETDs from UAB

Benign pediatric central nervous system (CNS) tumors treated with surgery alone have been considered relatively harmless to long-term health. However, a developing line of research has identified several late effects experienced in this population including psychological, adaptive, behavioral, neurological, and cognitive problems. Quality of life of children after resection alone has not previously been evaluated, especially in comparison to that of healthy children and children with chronic illness. Further, there has been no research geared toward developing psychosocial programs to address the late effects identified in this population. The following manuscripts contribute to the literature by evaluating and providing potential …

Respect And The Role It Plays In Explaining The Disproportionate Number Of African-Americans Incarcerated, Tina B. Craddock

Theses and Dissertations

This was a quantitative research study that examined the roles respect and self-esteem play within the African American population. There is no disagreement among social scientists that there is a disproportionate number of African Americans incarcerated. This study attempts to offer one possible explanation. This was a quasi-replication of a study conducted nearly two decades ago using African American adolescent males between the ages of 14 to 18. This research study identified a sample population consisting of African American males and females between the ages of 18 and 50. A cross-sectional analysis was utilized using convenience sampling. The research instruments …

Genomic Insight Into The Gut Microbiome Of The Sea Urchins Lytechinus Variegatus And Strongylocentrotus Purpuratus Revealed Distinct Community Compositions And Their Metabolic Profiles, Joseph Antoine Hakim

All ETDs from UAB

For over 500 million years, our planet’s self-replicating prokaryotes have colonized multicellular host organisms, forging complex interdependent relationships under the selective pressures of the natural environment. Recently, the use of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technology targeting metacommunity DNA has uncovered the unprecedented diversity and metabolic processes of these communities. Such information has extensively been investigated in the guts of higher bilaterian organisms, such as mammals including humans. One of the early bilaterian organisms that have been linked to humans are the sea urchins, the gut microbiota of which have not been sufficiently studied. Thus, the objective of this dissertation was to …

A Scalable Nearline Disk Archive Storage Architecture For Extreme Scale High Performance Computing, Hampton Walker Haddock

All ETDs from UAB

Parallel file systems that exploit Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Devices (RAID) as the mechanism for greater resilience are primarily intended to provide high bandwidth and low latency. Quantifying and studying the trade-offs among reduced run time (bandwidth and latency), resilience (availability and integrity), and cost (energy and capital) is important. For instance, distributing the checksums of RAID systems appears in conflict with the canonical parallel access patterns in high performance computing such as long sequential reads, random access, and checkpoint operations. Choices consequently have to be made between performance, concurrency, latency, energy, capital, integrity and availability of the data for …

The Weight Of Social Relationships: Social Network Analysis In An Adult Weight Loss Program, Alena Borgatti

All ETDs from UAB

Adult behavioral obesity interventions often show improved attendance and weight loss when delivered in a group, as opposed to individual, therapy format. However, research on the exact mechanisms through which group therapy confers additional weight loss is lacking. Pediatric obesity interventions have recently begun to utilize social network analysis (SNA) to identify structural ties that may improve adherence and weight loss; however, this research is limited and has yet to be replicated in an adult weight loss program. The current study is the first to evaluate social networks in an adult behavioral weight loss intervention. Four weight loss groups were …

High-Pressure Studies On Borosilicate And Bulk Metallic Glasses, Kathryn Jinae Ham

All ETDs from UAB

Multi-angle energy-dispersive X-ray diffraction (EDXD) and white-beam radiography studies were conducted on a borosilicate glass sample (17.6% B2O3) to 13.7 GPa in a Paris-Edinburgh (PE) press at Beamline 16-BM-B, HPCAT, The Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Laboratory. The measured structure factor S(q) to q = 19 Å-1 was used to determine internuclear bond distances between various species of atoms contained in the glass sample. Bond distances for Si-O, O-O, and Si-Si were determined from the reduced pair distribution function G(r) and were measured as a function of pressure. The sample height, as determined via white-beam radiography, showed an overall …

Relationship Between Frustration Tolerance And Psychological Self-Regulatory Mechanisms In Weight Loss Maintenance, Samantha Kaytana Henry

All ETDs from UAB

The present study investigated the relevance of frustration tolerance and other psychological regulation factors (e.g., trait mindfulness, executive function) to long-term weight maintenance. Using a cross-sectional design, participants (N=91) were recruited from three behavioral weight loss interventions and categorized dichotomously (maintainer vs. regainer) based on their level of success in maintaining weight loss long term. Participants completed the Frustration Discomfort Scale (FDS), objective measures of executive functioning (EF), and self-report questionnaires. Poorer frustration tolerance was significantly associated with lower trait mindfulness, higher negative affectivity, and greater difficulties in self-reported EF. There were no differences by race or weight maintenance status. …

Perceptions Of African-American Teachers Concerning African-American Youth, D'Antranett Hicks-Stewart

All ETDs from UAB

Perceptions of African American youth have been illustrated by how they are perceived on television: as deviants, criminals and unteachable. These perceptions are also illustrated in the behaviors of teachers in both inner-city and suburban schools. African American teachers in the inner-city schools have hope of changing the world for the better until they are met with difficult challenges presented by African-American students. Some students are excellent and some not so excellent. The structural environment of African-American youth can so strongly influence their behavior, that they begin to take on their perceptions. This can be seen in their choice friends, …

The Initiation: Relations Of Power In Women-Forward Indie Horror Films, Shannon House

All ETDs from UAB

This thesis aims to investigate the role of female characters in three recent horror indie films: It Follows, Hereditary, and The Witch. Current criticism of these films regale them as women-forward stories of what it means to struggle with mental illness, religious beliefs, or long-held virtues of womanhood. Before analyzing the relations of power between male and female characters in these films and their placement in a patriarchal dystopia or matriarchal utopia, the horror film genre as a whole is discussed to bring context to the prevailing attitudes against horror films for their overt violence or sexualization of female characters. …

Emergence Of Restricted Repetitive Behaviors In Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder And Tuberous Sclerosis Complex, Helen Root

All ETDs from UAB

Genetic disorders are ideal populations through which to study the development of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD; Moss, Richards, Nelson & Oliver, 2012). Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC) is a particularly compelling population due to the high prevalence of ASD and prenatal diagnostic ability (Jeste, Wu, Senturk, Varcin, McCarthy, Shimzu, ScM, Vogel-Farley, Sahin & Nelson, 2014; McDonald, Varcin, Bhatt, Wu, Sahin, Nelson & Jeste, 2017; Sundberg & Sahin, 2015). However, findings related to the two core symptom domains of ASD within TSC are mixed, with little research examining restricted repetitive behaviors (RRBs). The current study aimed to define the presence and profile …

Uncovering The Role Of Women In Two Social Movements: The Intricacies Of Black Feminine Leadership, Ajanet Schauron Rountree

All ETDs from UAB

ABSTRACT The historical conceptualization of social movements on the space-time continuum is often androcentric. Heavy reliance on male leadership perspectives negates the female point of view and creates what Marable labels an “idealized interpretation” that skirts the actual relationship between individuals and the evolution of history. This research is the deliberate recovery of the purposefully omitted while elucidating the intricacies of the leadership of Black women. It foregrounds and clarifies the leadership narratives of Black women who navigated the gendered and racialized spaces of their churches and communities in the struggle for civil and human rights during the Civil Rights …

Beyond Access: Predictors Of Unmet Need For Health Care From Adolescence To Young Adulthood, Sarah B. Rutland

All ETDs from UAB

Background: Unmet need (UN) can be characterized as a person not getting care even when they think they need it. Younger populations are understudied for UN, even though UN can emerge as early as adolescence. The aim of this dissertation is to use the national Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to examine whether adolescent socioeconomic status (SES) or health factors better predict UN over time, and how UN differs by race/ethnicity. Life course perspective, cumulative advantage and disadvantage hypothesis, and fundamental cause theory inform my hypotheses. Primary hypotheses: 1) The likelihood of UN will increase over …

Fractional Calculus And Applications To Fractional Oscillation And Anomalous Diffusion, Norman W. Schmitz

All ETDs from UAB

Fractional calculus has existed since 1695, when L'Hôpital asked Leibniz about his notation for a derivative, $\dfrac{d^nf\left(x\right)}{dx^n}.$ L’Hôpital asked what the result would be if $n$ were $\dfrac{1}{2}$. Leibniz's response: ``An apparent paradox, from which one day useful consequences will be drawn.'' While fractional calculus has only been intensely explored in recent decades, this prediction seems to have been true, with fractional derivatives often seeming contradictory and difficult to work with. However, our exploration has found that these definitions are far more compatible after looking at their non-local properties, in particular their ability to account for causality. We then looked …

Inverse Problems, Regularization And Its Applications, Abinash Nayak

All ETDs from UAB

Inverse problems arise in a wide spectrum of applications in fields ranging from engineering to scientific computation. Connected with the rise of interest in inverse problems is the development and analysis of regularization methods, such as truncated singular value decomposition (TSVD), Tikhonov regularization or iterative regularization methods (like Landerweb iterations), which are a necessity in most inverse problems due to their ill-posedness. TSVD can be used when dealing with (small) finite dimensional linear problems, but is computationally very expensive, and sometimes even unfeasible, for large scale linear problems or nonlinear problems. In such scenarios, Tikhonov regularization is an attractive alternative, …

Deities And Devotion In Mongolian Buddhist Art, Charles Mason, Andie Near, Tom Wagner

Kruizenga Art Museum Exhibition Catalogs

Design by Tom Wagner. Produced by Storming the Castle Pictures (StCP) as a catalog for the Kruizenga Art Museum exhibition “Deities and Devotion in Mongolian Buddhist Art,” August 30 – December 14, 2019.

Kruizenga Art Museum Online Collection - Exhibition Gallery