"'Inflamed by Daily Practices': John Cassian and Ethical Formation" is the first inter-disciplinary treatment of the ethical program fostered by the fifth-century Christian ascetic John …
The DNA base excision repair (BER) pathway is compromised of several enzymes, including DNA glycosylases, apurinic/apyrimidinic (AP) endonuclease 1 (APE1), DNA polymerase β (pol β) …
nheritable differences in DNA sequence are a major focus of the genetic community, as such differences are known to play a role in phenotypic variation, …
The implicit and explicit political significance of sports is often underestimated; sports functions as an ideational community linking together millions of Americans, as well as …
Neutrophil-mediated host defense against pathogens includes the extrusion of a lattice of DNA and microbicidal enzymes known as Neutrophil Extracellular Traps (NETs). The receptor:ligand interactions …
Volatile elements (C, H, F, S, and Cl) have a profound impact on the evolution and differentiation of planetary bodies and their atmospheres. Therefore, constraining …
The modern study of animal camouflage has received renewed interest in the past two decades. Rapid adaptive camouflage is particularly interesting because it allows us …
Advertising Love: Personal Ads, Product Advertisements, and the Consumption of Romance considers how love has been used in attempts to sell consumer goods; how cultural …
My dissertation aims at throwing new light on the problem of agency, by pursuing a reductionist project about agent causation. In Chapter 1, I provide …
Animal behavior is driven by perception of biological need and environmental context. Internal representations of the external world help us to interact with and navigate …
The endoderm germ layer gives rise to the epithelial lining of the respiratory and digestive tracts and their associated organs. Gastrulation and formation of the …
Understanding the fundamental mechanisms, and forces, underlying cell migration holds the promise of effective approaches for treating diseases and promoting cellular transplantation. One such disease …
This dissertation presents methods for statistical analysis of social network data. First, we develop a Bayesian hierarchical model that calibrates self and peer-reports in order …
It has long been acknowledged that one of the most influential urban planners of the twentieth century, Ebenezer Howard, began his career as a social …
Aspartyl-asparaginyl-β-hydroxylase (AAH) is a ~86 kD protein abundantly expressed in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and downregulated by chronic ethanol exposure, contributing to alcoholic liver disease (ALD). …
Background: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is estimated to affect as many as 1 in 88 children. Epilepsy is a common …
GPUs are increasingly utilized for scientific and general-purpose workloads as cheap and efficient hardware accelerators. Despite the GPU's popularity, many codes ported to the GPU …
The detection of the primordial B-mode spectrum of the polarized cosmic microwave background (CMB) signal may provide a probe for inflation. However, the B-mode signal …
Non-allelic homologous recombination (NAHR) plays a major role in genome rearrangement and is implicated in numerous genetic disorders. But detection of NAHR poses a serious …
This project foregrounds the connections between American, European, and Latin American influences in American art history as signaled by the use of “transnational” in my …
Echolocating mammals such as bats, dolphins, and toothed whales perceive images of objects with hyper-resolution and navigate seamlessly through obstacles in complex acoustic environments. The …
Abstract of "Biological Application of Magnetic Nanoparticles in Targeted Therapeutics and Diagnostics" by Aruna Sigdel, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2014 Theranostics, the combination of diagnosis …
The gold standard to estimate the causal effect of an exposure on an outcome is a completely randomized design. Randomized designs are attractive for estimating …
Infectious diseases are the 2nd leading cause of death worldwide and pose a global health problem that requires constant effort towards the discovery of new …
Athens in the fourth century BCE faced many economic and military pressures, to which the Athenians responded with a multitude of political experiments. This dissertation …
We provide complete proofs for some statements made by David Wigner and Lawrence Brown and introduce a “Grothendieck topologies” approach to working with the cohomology …
This thesis presents experimental measurements and modeling of multi-scale collective behaviors characteristics of hierarchical interfaces in lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) during cycling. Two interfacial mechanisms are …
This dissertation evaluates the impact of public policies and economic conditions on human capital investment decisions. Chapter 1 examines the wide-ranging effects of subsidizing college …
The specificity and extent of RNA editing by ADAR enzymes is determined largely by local primary sequence and secondary structural imperfections in duplex RNA. Here, …
The premise of the emerging field of computational psychiatry is to use models from computational cognitive neuroscience to gain deeper insights into mental illness. In …
Energy storage is a crucial aspect of integrating renewable energy sources in power grids, portable electronic devices and vehicle applications, making the development of efficient …
Background: Chronic alcoholic liver disease is associated with hepatic insulin resistance, inflammation, oxidative and ER stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and DNA damage. Peroxisome proliferator activated receptor …
In sexual reproduction, fusion of haploid sperm and egg cells (gametes) are required to produce a unique diploid individual that represents the next generation. Despite …
Social network models have emerged as one of the most popular techniques for the analysis of how people interact. The growing popularity of networks has …
Climate variability in the Indian Ocean region affects the livelihoods of billions of people. Paleoclimate reconstructions can provide critical insights into the fundamental oceanic-atmospheric processes …
This dissertation investigates the thought of Mill and Nietzsche in order to consider the relationship between democracy and human flourishing. Chapters One and Two argue …
Medicine can be divided into two central components: the diagnosis of a disease and its treatment. Both components of medicine are being transformed by the …
Over the past few decades, remarkable progress has been made in the development of analytical biosensors for use in medical diagnostics. This dissertation focuses on …
Extending work of Kapouleas and Yang, we construct sequences of closed minimal surfaces embedded in the round unit 3-sphere and converging to a Clifford torus …
Preterm children are at risk for language delays and deficits. By 2 years, very preterm/low birthweight children tend to have smaller vocabularies and use less …
A fundamental understanding of cell-nanomaterial interaction is essential for biomedical diagnostics, therapeutics, and nanotoxicity. Here we perform theoretical analysis to investigate the cellular uptake of …
In the modern digital society, individuals, businesses and governments perform numerous everyday tasks such as shopping, banking and commuting using electronic media. Although these electronic …
Three energy-related studies are described in this thesis (1) studies on the capability of conducting polymers (CP) to store electrochemical energy, (2) studies on the …
We study both analytically and numerically the experimentally observed nonaxisymmetric droplet deformation and orientation in a uniform DC electric field. The theoretical model shows that …
The discovery of uranium and its radioactive properties has an important impact on scientific research related to actinide chemistry in nuclear energy and environmental science. …
Pharmaceutical policy interventions are often promulgated with the implicit assumption that responsiveness is uniform across all patient groups in the population. The purpose of the …
Abstract of “Endocrine Disruption of the Developing Human Fetal Prostate” by Camelia M. Saffarini, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2014 Prostate cancer is a major concern …
This dissertation reframes contemporary investments in political performance through an analysis of the politics and practices of the FTA, a GI-oriented antiwar variety show led …
“Entrepreneurs in the Age of Chinese Exclusion” tells the story of Chinese restaurants transforming from an ethnic enclave business into one of the largest mass-consumer …
The social safety net provides financial security for millions of Americans, yet few studies have explored its influence on firm formation. In three papers, I …
The fate of nitrate (NO3-) in marine sediments depends on a balance of microbially mediated processes that remove or recycle available nitrogen (N), i.e. denitrification …
Abstract of “Epitaxial growth of SiC/AlN and Si quantum dot heterostructures by molecular beam epitaxy,” by Yana Cheng, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2014 SiC has …
Changing expectations of future house price growth are thought to play an important role in housing boom and bust cycles, but investigating such hypotheses is …
An important goal in neuroscience is to understand how experience affects the selection, execution and maintenance of different action plans, and how this is reflected …
According to the numbers, Peru’s economy is growing rapidly with poverty rates declining apace. Yet Peruvians themselves remain skeptical of this success. They argue that …
Future brain-computer interfaces will require technologies that enable efficient, reliable and high-speed transmission of broadband multichannel neural data out of the brain with minimal number …
This dissertation analyses the discursive trope of cannibalism as a recurrent mode of representation of New World indigenous peoples in early modern travel accounts and …
A wealth of astrophysical evidence confirms that 26% of the energy density of the universe is comprised of a mysterious, non-baryonic, dark matter. A leading …
This work presents several experiments designed to explore the use of spatial memory by echolocating big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus) through observable flight behavior, specifically …
Recent climate extremes, including floods, droughts, and hurricanes, have had devastating effects worldwide, driving new research aimed at developing better prediction of such events. Understanding …
This dissertation explores how Israelites regarded foreign lands, relates this to the debate about biblical categorizations of pollution and purification, and points to larger questions …
Recent data from orbital spectrometers at the Moon have, for the first time, directly identified the mineral structure of plagioclase feldspar on the lunar surface. …
The exquisite morphology of neurons requires responses to stimuli in a spatially regulated manner. One means to achieve spatially-restricted control is through local translation, where …
My dissertation places rural-urban migrants at the center of an exploration of urban inequality by examining their success as urban residents in India. Along with …
Abstract of “Functional and Anatomical Pathways Supporting the Cognitive Control of Memory Retrieval” by Jennifer Barredo, Brown University, May 2014. Functions of the left ventrolateral …
Abstract of “Gaining Virtue, Gaining Christ: Moral Development in the Letters of Paul,” by Laura B. Dingeldein, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2014 Inhabitants of the …
This dissertation examines why and how states create irregular military units. Security is conventionally viewed as the state’s quintessential and exclusive domain. Centralization, bureaucratization, and …
This dissertation uses a life course perspective to investigate migration and marriage as separate and inter-related life events. It explores the gendered nature of migration …
During Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s nearly fifteen years in office, he was both celebrated as a revolutionary hero and vilified as an autocratic populist. The …
Determining the sequences of alleles co-inherited on a single chromosome, or haplotypes, is fundamentally important in genomics, molecular biology, and genomic medicine. Experimental methods for …
As the CMOS downscaling continues, the requirements for lower power supply voltage and power consumption become more stringent. New device operating principles and new material …
This dissertation examines how states and international organizations (IOs) can be held democratically accountable for respecting human rights. Political theorists have criticized the democratic deficit …
This project evaluates the twinned discourses of globalism and humanitarianism through an analysis of the body in the postcolonial novel. In offering celebratory accounts of …
The aim of this thesis is to investigate how grain boundary (GB) strength and separation mechanisms affect strength and ductility of nanocrystalline materials. Such nanoscale …
This dissertation is composed of three chapters on comparative development and political economy. Chapter I examines empirically the role of historical political centralization on the …
In our approach to understanding the biomechanics of concussions, we have defined head impact exposure as a multifactorial term that includes the frequency, magnitude, and …
Chapter 1 investigates the role of group procurement in targeting a distributional program. Food security programs in developing countries often provide transfers in the form …
Throughout the years, there have been many subconvexity results of L-functions. However, most of these results focus on one chosen aspect of the L-function. This …
Upon hypervelocity impact, projectile and target materials are frequently shocked to pressures and temperatures sufficient to induce complete vaporization. Vaporization associated with impacting comets and …
Studying the biological mechanisms of the aging process in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has been crucial to the advancement of the field. In particular, …
Gliomas are a family of extremely aggressive brain cancers, which, despite current treatment options, have poor prognoses. There are distinct subtypes of gliomas, and accurately …
Ownership of photographic depictions was as contentious in the nineteenth century as it is today. In 1852, a photography journal queried: “Why is it that …
Nitrogen oxides (NOx=NO+NO2) play a key role in atmospheric chemistry, contributing to production of ground-level ozone, aerosol chemistry, and acid deposition through the conversion to …
In polities headed by divine kings, the public performance of hierarchy and inequality is essential to political power. Yet what happens to that inequality when …
Lagrangian data assimilation is the process of estimating a velocity flow field, given observations of the locations of passive drifters whose trajectories are determined by …
For decades we have known that the medial temporal lobe (MTL), particularly the hippocampus, plays a critical role in the formation of episodic and spatial …
We study a general class of mean field interacting particle systems with a finite state space. Particles evolve as exchangeable jump Markov processes, where finite …
The water wave equations describe the motion of an incompressible inviscid fluid under the influence of gravity which is bounded above by a free surface …
Auditory and visual information interact in the brain to produce a wide variety of behavioral and cognitive phenomena, however much is unknown about the mechanisms …
We are often told that ours is a “late” age. Lateness—as in the “late work” or “late capitalism”—simultaneously suggests something that has survived beyond its …
Seismic anisotropy in olivine and orthopyroxene mineral crystals enables us to infer first-order flow characteristics in the asthenospheric mantle and the preserved tectonic history in …
We study the moduli stacks of logarithmic stable maps when the target variety X is equipped with an action of a one-dimensional torus C*. Specifically, …