The genetic information in DNA is transcribed to mRNA and then translated to proteins, which form the building blocks of life. Translation, or protein synthesis, is hence a central cellular process. Decades of experimentation have elucidated a vast wealth of molecular information about discrete translation steps, but the sheer complexity...
Beside the Point: Places in Nabokov's The Gift Peter-John Thomas This dissertation is devoted to the habits of thought embodied in Vladimir Nabokov's last Russian novel, The Gift. Nabokov is famous for creating intricate verbal structures which, however, resist conversion into rigorous propositions. Two major categories of critical response have...
This study in media anthropology uses participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, and recorded broadcasts to analyze how people use FM radio technology in the Koutiala area of southeast Mali, and particularly how they use FM radio to produce locality by relating audience members to one another, to the dominant national culture,...
Background: More than 81 percent of African-American women are overweight or obese. In addition to being heavier than Whites, African-Americans have a harder time losing weight and are less likely to engage in physical activity. A growing body of literature suggests several barriers to physical activity that prevent African-American women...
The studies in this thesis are directed towards defining the signaling mechanisms that regulate astrogliosis after SCI and towards developing potential therapeutic techniques for modifying this process. The central hypothesis is that alteration of the extracellular milieu after SCI can limit the deleterious effects of glial scar formation and enhance...
All-optical switches have far reaching applications in both quantum and classical information processing. Most current all-optical switches depend on intense interactions between light and nonlinear media which may be extremely inefficient. The need for high switching beam powers have prevented all-optical switching from being very useful in most applications. Our...
Interfacial phenomena play a considerable role in many physical, chemical and biological systems. Some of these systems exhibit interaction of several interfaces. This thesis contains a study of two types of systems characterized by interacting interfaces. First, a theory of the formation of nanoscale porous structures in oxides of metals...
Problems involving irregularly shaped domains or embedded interfaces occur in a wide range of mathematical models. These include models in computational biology, fluid mechanics, and solidification. Numerical solutions for this type of problem can be difficult to obtain, and therefore a variety of methods have been devised to solve them....
My dissertation, entitled "Mobile Islands: Home, Migrancy and Identity in French Caribbean Narratives", examines the representation of home, space and migration in French-Caribbean literature and film. Using original narratives of Guadeloupean and Martinican writers and filmmakers, I demonstrate that the sociological phenomenon of mobility between the Caribbean and France has...
Recent assessment of material property requirements for blast resistant applications, especially for the naval ship hulls, has defined the need to design steels with high stretch ductility and fragment penetration resistance, along with high strength and adequate toughness. Using a system based computational materials design approach, two series of austenitic...