Chapter 1: Munchnones and mesoionic heterocycles The reactivity, regioselectivity, and synthetic applications of munchnones (1,3-oxazolium-5-olates) is a common theme which runs through Chapters 2-5. The definition, structure, and reactivity of...
A yearly breast contrast-MR scan is recommended to high-risk women because of MR's high sensitivity to breast tumors. However, breast contrast-MR yields a high number of false positives that lead to expensive and sometimes unnecessary biopsy...
Continual improvements to clinical breast imaging technologies have led to ever earlier detections and increasingly accurate localizations of female breast cancers. While these advancements have certainly improved the prognoses of many patients,...
As the visual effect and movie industries are striving for realism and high fidelity images, physically based lighting, global illumination, realistic materials, and highly tessellated geometry are gradually accepted and used in movie and game...
MicroRNA-10b (miR-10b) is considered a marker of disease aggressiveness in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), in view of the fact that lower levels of miR-10b are associated with better response to neoadjuvant therapy, likelihood of surgical...
Estradiol is a key regulator of immune protection in the female reproductive tract (FRT). Its concentration varies during the menstrual cycle, leading to changes in innate immune protection. In this thesis, I demonstrate the multiple levels at...
Radio relics are extended regions of synchrotron radio emission that have been found in the outskirts of a few dozen galaxy clusters. Relics are often associated with clusters undergoing merger activity. They are not associated optically with a...
Accurate chromosome segregation in human oocytes requires that meiotic sister chromatid cohesion remain intact for decades and work in model organisms indicates that deterioration of meiotic cohesion over time may be a major determinant of...
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in the USA and worldwide causing 160,000 and 1.5 million deaths per year, respectively. Due to the late stage of diagnosis, poor efficacy of chemotherapies (targeted and pleiotropic), and...
Production of fuel ethanol from cellulosic materials is a potentially attractive way to meet sustainability, energy security, and environmental goals. However, the high cost of processing using current technology has thus far prevented...
Many protocols for adoptive T cell therapy (ACT) include preparative conditioning strategies to deplete host lymphocytes prior to T cell infusion. Total body irradiation and high-dose chemotherapy regimens not only relieve immunosuppression, but...
Thermodynamics, and the classic balance between entropy and enthalpy, provides a proverbial zoo of exotic phase behaviour that chemists can harness to create new materials out of simple liquids and polymers. The diversity of self-assembling...
We have a limited understanding of how an opinion is originated, how an opinion and information supporting and explaining it gets conveyed, and how the communicated opinion is perceived and processed by others. One direction of current research...
The purpose of this thesis is to describe methods for detecting hidden crevasses on glaciers in Polar regions. Crevasses form in ice sheets as a result of forces imposed upon the brittle ice. The crevasses are hidden from view by bridges of soft...
Objectives: This dissertation comprises three essays on geographic variations in healthcare, and the association between utilization and health outcomes. I first explore associations between outpatient visits and Medicare beneficiaries'...
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the leading cause of acquired disability in children, yet innate repair mechanisms are incompletely understood. A possible innate mechanism to repair injury after insult is neurogenesis - the birth, migration,...
During our fieldwork with real-world organizations---including those in Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), network configuration management, and the electrical power grid---we repeatedly noticed that security policies and related security artifacts...
As methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) hospitalizations keep increasing, the understanding of the characteristics that make one isolate more successful over another is paramount. Strain variations among Staphylococcus aureus observed...
Molecular optical imaging in vivo has potential for functional assessment of tumor tissue at the cellular and subcellular level. Advances in biological understanding of genomics and proteomics have increased the knowledge of possible cellular...
A new type of analytic expansion for use in stability calculations is presented and applied to the question of the stability of laminar solutions of the Navier-Stokes equation. This leads in a natural way to a model of the transition from laminar...
Patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) are susceptible to respiratory tract infections at an early age; with the most frequent initial isolate being the Gram-positive pathogen Staphylococcus aureus. Subsequently, these patients become chronically...
This thesis presents data from ground camera observations of the aurora conducted from Alaska during the winters of 2005 through 2007. In conjunction with these camera observations, conjugate radar observations of the auroral ionosphere were...
The identification and characterization of functional genetic variation is essential for future advances in molecular diagnostics, pharmacogenomics, and personalized medicine. Recent attempts at identifying nucleotide level variation (somatic...
After decades of searching we have yet to find the progenitor systems for type Ia supernovae. In fact most of what we know about this homogeneous class of supernovae is from spectral features associated with the incinerated remains of the C+O white...
Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. The discovery of breast tumor subtypes and the subsequent development of treatments aimed at them has allowed a reduction in the mortality of breast cancer. However, tumors with similar...
Access control is a core component of any information-security strategy. Researchers have spent tremendous energy over the past forty years defining abstract access-control models and proving various properties about them. However, surprisingly...
Estrogen -- Receptors -- Regulation. Selective estrogen receptor modulators. Receptor-ligand complexes. Breast -- Cancer -- Chemoprevention. Colon (Anatomy) -- Cancer -- Chemoprevention.
We have previously shown that the selective estrogen receptor modulator, Arzoxifene (Arz), and the rexinoid, LG100268 (268) synergistically prevent breast cancer in an ER+ breast cancer model. This study was designed to determine the mechanism of...
While anthropogenic emissions of the toxic element mercury (Hg) to the atmosphere are currently rising, major uncertainties remain in determining the relative impacts of anthropogenic activity and natural processes on the global Hg cycle. In this...
Recent years have witnessed a new class of monitoring applications that need to continuously collect information from remote data sources. Those data sources, such as web click-streams, stock quotes, and sensor data, are often characterized as...
Fluorescence molecular imaging will have an important clinical impact in the area of guided oncology surgery, where emerging technologies are poised to provide the surgeon with real-time molecular information to guide resection, using targeted...
PDZ protein-protein interaction domains recognize short linear motif (SLiM) sequences typically at the extreme C-terminus of a target protein. These domains often act as scaffolds, connecting target proteins to additional interaction and catalytic...