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...
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...
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...
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...
Cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs) and their associated cyclins are key regulators of cell cycle progression. Caenorhabditis elegans has two predicted A- type cyclins, encoded by the genes cya-1 and cya-2. Cyclin A has been shown to be required for...
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...
We present new forensic tools that are capable of detecting traces of tampering in digital images without the use of watermarks or specialized hardware. These tools operate under the assumption that images contain natural properties from a variety...
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...
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...
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...
Leukemia represents a small percentage of human cancer, accounting for about 5% of all cases of cancer in adults, but, interestingly, for about 50% of all cases of cancer in children. The behavior of leukemia is often regulated by the chromosomal...
Annual screening mammograms are recommended for all women above 40 years of age for early detection of breast cancer, and are known to improve cancer mortality rates. However, mammography is hampered by low sensitivity and a high rate of false...
Protein phosphorylation is an important regulatory mechanism for the control of countless processes in living systems. The delicate management of phosphate attachment to, and removal from, serine, threonine and tyrosine residues in proteins...
Gustatory pheromones regulate mating behaviors in Drosophila melanogaster and represent an important model for understanding how sensory stimuli can drive behavior. However, the genes and cells involved in pheromone detection have remained poorly...
Studies presented in this dissertation focus on the transcriptional targets and cellular functions of [Delta]Np63[alpha], the predominant TP63 isoform expressed in epithelial stem cell compartments. TP63, a member of the p53 family of...
Temperature has powerful effects on all scales of biological organization from biochemical reactions to ecosystem processes. Despite the well-appreciated influence and thorough understanding of the physiological and population consequences of...
This project focuses on the development of research tools and methods that are used to study the relationship between neural activity and subsequent hemodynamic responses in the human brain. This relationship, referred to as neurovascular coupling,...
Opinion dynamics is a complex procedure that entails a cognitive process when it deals with how a person integrates influential opinions to form revised opinion. Early research on opinion formation and social influence can be traced back to the...
In utero exposure to maternal malnutrition is associated with increase offspring susceptibility to cardiometabolic and neuropsychiatric disease. Epigenetic mechanisms mediate, at least in part, fetal adaptations to adverse in utero environments...
Epilepsy is associated with cognitive impairments which often manifest as a higher prevalence of memory impairments. Memory impairments in patients with epilepsy may persist even with sufficient control of seizures, suggesting other factors may...
RNA binding proteins are fundamental components of crucial biological processes in all domains of life. The development of techniques to study RNA binding protein complexes is, therefore, broadly impactful. I employed multiple genome-wide...
The overarching goal of this thesis was two-fold. First, to determine if the effects of chronic anabolic androgenic steroid (AAS) treatment on anxiety-like behaviors are sex-specific and second to determine how different environmental modulators...
Although genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and other high-throughput initiatives have led to an information explosion in human genetics and genetic epidemiology, the mapping from genotype to phenotype remains challenging as most of the...