Browsing FAS Theses and Dissertations by Title
Now showing items 69-88 of 6136
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A Promised Wilderness: Colonial Encounters and Landscape in the Late Medieval Baltic
(2021-05-14)This dissertation explores the German colonization of northeastern Europe between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, taking the Baltic region of Prussia as a case study. It focuses primarily on the Teutonic Order, a ... -
A quantum network node based on a nanophotonic interface for atoms in optical tweezers
(2021-05-04)Efficient interfaces between photons and memory qubits constitute fundamental build- ing blocks for quantum networking and large-scale quantum information processing. Our approach utilizes a photonic crystal cavity to ... -
A Quantum Network Node Based on the Silicon-Vacancy Defect in Diamond
(2021-07-12)Entangling spatially separated quantum bits is an important tool for quantum key distribution, quantum sensing, and scalable quantum computing. The negatively charged silicon-vacancy center in diamond (SiV) is unique in ... -
A Regional Study of the Relationship Between Rainfall and Violent Conflict in Ethiopia
(2017-10-13)This paper presents an exploration of the relationship between Ethiopian precipitation anomalies and violent conflict. Interest in a possible connection between climate and conflict is booming. However, there is disagreement ... -
A Robophysical Mantis Shrimp Model to Study Ultra-Fast "Impulsive" Biological and Synthetic Systems
(2022-11-23)Breakthroughs in multi-scale, multi-material rapid fabrication and new materials have led to the increased use of robots as tools to understand biological systems in a growing field known as robophysics. Here, a mesoscale ... -
A search for long-lived particles with large ionization energy loss in the ATLAS silicon pixel detector using 139 fb^{-1} of sqrt{s} = 13 TeV pp collisions
(2021-07-12)The results from a search for long-lived, heavy charged particles with the ATLAS Run-2 dataset are presented. As charged particles move through a material, the amount of energy they lose via ionization depends only on their ... -
A Search for Sterile Neutrinos at the NOνA Far Detector
(2016-12-08)NOνA is the current United States flagship long-baseline neutrino experiment designed to study the properties of neutrino oscillations. It consists of two functionally identical detectors each located 14.6 mrad off the ... -
A Sensor System for Autonomous UAV Landing
(2021-07-14)Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have recently surged in popularity and are now seen as viable tools for use in commercial delivery, search and rescue operations, and planetary exploration. A challenge in utilizing UAVs for ... -
A Shīʿī Scholar Between Safavid Iran and Mughal India: The Life, Works, and Thought of Nūrullāh Shūshtarī (956–1019/1550–1610)
(2023-09-06)This dissertation seeks to reconstruct the life, contextualize the works, and interpret the thought of Nūrullāh Shūshtarī (956–1019/1550–1610), a Shīʿī scholar who gained prominence during the late tenth/sixteenth and early ... -
"A Sick Philosopher is Incurable": Herman Melville and William James on Hope
(2022-09-09)This dissertation is about hope. It examines works by two nineteenth-century Americans, Herman Melville and William James—particularly Benito Cereno—to make a case for the importance of exercising this religious virtue ... -
A Sociocultural Paradigm for Pricing: How Status, Cognitive Authority, and Professional Culture Qualify Market Values
(2017-04-18)Two economic paradigms—neoclassical orthodoxy and behavioral heterodoxy—dominate modern price theory. Especially in actual practice, economics monopolizes discussions around pricing with most market actors paying little ... -
A stochastic model of starvation-survival of Escherichia coli
(2022-06-02)In most natural environments, bacteria experience frequent phases of starvation in between growth periods \cite{Barcina97, Hoehler13, Kjelleberg93, Moriarty93, Morita93, Reese18, Siegele92}. While the kinetics of starvation ... -
A Story of Human Capital: Why the Paycheck Protection Program Had Huge Geographic Disparities
(2021-06-17)This thesis studies the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)—a 660 billion dollar small business loan program enacted in April 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of small businesses could apply for (and ... -
A structure-based mechanism for recognition of oskar mRNA by Tropomyosin 1
(2022-06-06)During Drosophila development, the transport of oskar (osk) mRNA to the oocyte posterior pole is driven by dimerization of its cis-acting Oocyte Entry Signal (OES) and interactions with the tropomyosin 1 I/C isoform ... -
A Study of Anthraquinone Structural Changes for Aqueous Redox Flow Ballery Materials
(2022-09-13)The transition away from fossil-fuel-based electricity production is critical for cutting the emissions of climate change causing carbon dioxide emissions. Renewable energy sources, including solar and wind energy, are now ... -
A study of prolyl hydroxylase domain 3 (PHD3): protein biochemistry and the development of inhibitors
(2022-06-06)Prolyl hydroxylase domain 1-3 (PHD1-3) enzymes form a distinct subfamily of 2-oxoglutarate-dependent dioxygenases best known for their role in oxygen-sensing. Since the seminal discovery around the 2000s that PHDs transduce ... -
A synthetic Centaur generation pipeline and other support for a big-data Centaur search
(2022-05-23)We complete three supporting components of a search for Centaurs, a type of minor planet, in Pan-STARRS1 telescope data. First, we build a software pipeline which generates a high-fidelity synthetic Centaur population and ... -
A System for Applying Deep Reinforcement Learning to Soft Robotic Control
(2022-03-07)Soft robots offer a host of benefits over traditional rigid robots, including inherent compliance that lets them passively adapt to variable environments and operate safely around humans and fragile objects. However, ... -
A Systems Biology Approach to the Modeling and Control of Circadian Rhythms
(2021-05-10)Circadian rhythms are endogenous, daily, biological oscillations which emerge from two cellular-level transcriptional-translational feedback loops. These rhythms align to environmental cues in order to appropriately time ... -
A Tale of Brothers, Sisters, Aunts and Uncles: Using Genomics and Modeling to Uncover the Nature of P. Falciparum Polygenomic Infections and Cotransmission
(2018-01-17)A curious feature of malaria epidemiology is the presence of polygenomic (multiple strain) infections in natural parasite populations. Polygenomic infections are an important aspect of malaria transmission and a necessary ...