Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by Title
Now showing items 139-158 of 6097
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Adaptation and Invention during the Spread of Agriculture to Southwest China
(2013-09-04)The spread of an agricultural lifestyle played a crucial role in the development of social complexity and in defining trajectories of human history. This dissertation presents the results of research into how agricultural ... -
Adaptation and Specialization in the Evolution of Bacterial Metabolism
(2014-06-06)Specialization is a balance of evolutionary adaptation and its accompanying costs. Here we focus on the Lenski Long-Term Evolution Experiment, which has maintained cultures of Escherichia coli in the same, defined seasonal ... -
Adaptation in the forest deer mouse: evolution, genetics, and development
(2015-05-16)Variation in the shape, size, and number of segments along the vertebral column underlies a vast amount of vertebrate diversity. Although the molecular pathways controlling vertebrate segmentation during normal development ... -
Adaptations to Life on an Oxidizing Planet – insights from the evolutionary ecophysiology of iron-respiring bacteria
(2022-06-06)For more than 1 billion years, life on a young Earth evolved in oceans that were essentially devoid of oxygen (O2) and rich in dissolved, un-oxidized iron (Fe2+). However, with the advent of oxygenic photosynthesis and the ... -
Adapting Fairness-Intervention Algorithms to Missing Data
(2023-06-30)Missing values in real-world data pose a significant and unique challenge to algorithmic fairness. Different demographic groups may be unequally affected by missing data, and standard procedures for handling missing values ... -
Adapting Quantitative Protein and Phosphorylation Analyses to a Proteome-Wide Scale
(2013-09-30)Liquid chromatography coupled tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) has become the preferred method for large-scale peptide and phosphopeptide identification and quantification. The dominance of LC-MS/MS is the result of ... -
Adapting Verified Compilation for Target-Language Errors
(2022-02-24)Verified compilers have the potential to greatly improve users’ trust in their code by providing machine-checked proofs of compiler correctness. In recent years they have become increasingly sophisticated and practical, ... -
Adaptive Evolution of the SIV Envelope Protein During Early SIV Infection
(2016-03-08)Primate lentiviruses (PLVs), including human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), HIV type 2 (HIV-2), and the simian immunodeficiency viruses (SIVs), cause persistent lifelong infections despite the presence of virus-specific ... -
ADAR1 and RNA editing in triple-negative breast cancer
(2022-03-17)The family of Adenosine Deaminases Acting on RNA (ADARs) regulate global gene expression output by catalyzing Adenosine-to-Inosine (A-to-I) editing of double-stranded RNA and through interacting with RNA and other proteins. ... -
Adding Value to Value-Added: Theory and Applications to Teachers and Bureaucrats
(2018-01-17)Value-added estimators are extensively used to study teachers and other groups. In addition to estimating an individual's causal impact on outcomes, value-added models describe the dispersion of individual effects: For ... -
Addressing Missing Data in Viral Genetic Linkage Analysis Through Multiple Imputation and Subsampling-Based Likelihood Optimization
(2015-06-26)This thesis addresses the intersection of two important areas in epidemiology and statistics: genetic linkage analysis and missing data methods, respectively. Genetic linkage analysis is a promising method in viral ... -
Addressing pharmacological challenges to the treatment of pediatric brain tumors using modern technology
(2021-07-12)Despite decades of research, several obstacles remain a challenge to effectively treat and manage pediatric brain tumors. Tumor type, drug delivery, and drug distribution are three factors that contribute to the obstacles ... -
Addressing Urban Stormwater Management Under Climate Change: a Case Study of Cambridge
(2017-07-13)Stormwater management relies on methods of prediction and modeling to inform decisions on risk-based infrastructure. As climate change threatens disrupt and exacerbate weather conditions, the methodologies of single-event ... -
Adipose tissue FABP deficiency promotes metabolic reprogramming and positively impacts healthspan
(2014-02-25)The adipose tissue lipid chaperones aP2 and mal1, also known as fatty acid binding proteins (FABPs), are significant molecules contributing to metabolic homeostasis, whereby their absence promotes physiological changes ... -
Adolescent mental health: influences of early life adversity, pubertal timing, and sleep
(2023-11-21)Adolescence is a time marked by physiological change and dynamic socioemotional development. It is also a period of changes to sleep patterns and a sharp increase in incident psychiatric conditions. Nationally representative ... -
Adolescent Vaping: Multiple Substance Use and Implications for School-based Prevention Programs
(2023-05-12)Adolescent e-cigarette use (or vaping) is a prevalent behavior among adolescents. The national 2022 Monitoring the Future Survey found that past 30-day nicotine vaping was 20.7% among 12th graders and 14.2% among 10th ... -
Advanced Metallization Processes for Complex Structures in Microelectronics by Direct-Liquid-Evaporation Chemical Vapor Deposition
(2017-07-27)With the rapid advancement of semiconductor industry, fabrications of complex microelectronic devices are going beyond the conventional planar geometries into three-dimensionality (3D). Besides, since the emerging of ... -
Advanced Physical Techniques in Inorganic Chemistry: Probing Small Molecule Activation
(2016-05-16)Robust and efficient catalysts are necessary for realizing chemical energy storage as a solution for the intermittency associated with renewable energy sources. To aid in the development of such catalysts, physical methods ... -
Advances in Ab Initio Modeling of the Many-Body Effects of Dispersion Interactions in Functional Organic Materials
(2015-12-04)Accurate treatment of the long-range electron correlation energy, including dispersion interactions, is essential for describing the structure, dynamics, and function of a wide variety of systems. Among the most accurate ... -
Advances in Crystal Growth and Assembly for Imparting Novel Photonic Properties to Semiconductor Nanowires
(2015-08-17)Semiconductor nanowires comprise a versatile materials platform with which to characterize the properties of nanomaterials. The vast range of structural and compositional diversity of nanowires has also enabled their use ...