There is more responsibility on heaven and earth than dreamt of in most philosophy. This dissertation explores three debates in three sub-fields of philosophy, highlighting in each responsibilities agents find themselves with whether they like it or not. In the chapter Trust Logic, Not Tortoises, I propose an answer to...
Successful restoration depends on the establishment and survival of selected species, and sowing seed is the most cost-effective method to ensuring a successful restoration. Generally, a locally sourced seed is thought to be better adapted to local environmental conditions and, therefore, more likely to thrive. In addition, a local seed...
One of the challenges of interrogating the increasing precarity of living conditions in some regions of the Americas is seeking for a way of productively addressing the intersections between inequality, climate crisis, and systemic violence. This dissertation analyzes a corpus of contemporary Latin American and Latinx literary and visual works...
The study of solid-state organic chromophores has been soaring in the last decade owing to their wide applications in organic photovoltaics. These organic chromophores can absorb light in the visible region and form free charge carriers with proper design in molecular structure and device fabrication. In solid state, chromophores are...
The dentate gyrus is the first region for information processing within the classic hippocampal trisynaptic circuit, and this position makes it an important structure for the formation of associative memories. The dentate gyrus contains two major types of excitatory neurons: granule cells and mossy cells. While previous work has shown...
This dissertation examines how eighteenth-century ethics were reimagined by Enlightenment-era and Romantic women writes to better afford the grounds for political revolution and responsive reform. Whereas Adam Smith’s theatrical model of sympathy casts individuals in the passive role of spectators who feel deeply but are not necessarily moved to act,...
Peptides consists of a series of amino acids connected via an amide type of covalent chemical bond. A diverse field of applications such as biosensors,2 catalysis,4 and biomedicine6 include the oligomeric forms of peptides due to their genuine features comparing to other biomacromolecules. Particularly, peptides in the field of biomedical...
Nanocarriers, structures with at least one dimension on the nanoscale (1-1000 nm), have been engineered for delivery of various cargoes. The shape and flexibility of nanocarriers are important parameters that influence their biological performance. Self-assembling polymeric filamentous nanocarriers, known as filomicelles (FM), are of great interest to nanomedicine due to...
Ovulation is the process by which an ovulatory follicle releases a mature egg and is essential for fertility and maintaining female reproductive cycle. Understanding the mechanisms of ovulation have implications for the development of non-hormonal contraceptives and treatments of anovulatory diseases. We developed a 3D alginate encapsulated in vitro follicle...
Receptor for activated C kinase 1 (RACK1) is a core small (40S) ribosomal subunit protein whose structure is highly conserved among eukaryotes apart from a C-terminal extended loop. We previously showed that a poxvirus kinase phosphorylates this flexible loop in human RACK1, mimicking endogenous negative charge in plant RACK1 to...