Making the Coast Pacific is an environmental history of violence against places, plants, and people. Mexico's Pacific Coast region was a key site for oilseed agriculture and industrialization, which resulted in environmental violence and injustice. Since the region with Mexico's largest population of afro-descendants, Costa Chica, was also Mexico's leading...
Each second, living organisms take in sensory input from an ever-changing environment and respond appropriately. Identifying and contextualizing stimuli is critical for survival, and it often necessitates distinguishing between sensory experiences that are similar to each other. Pattern separation characterizes the mechanisms by which neuronal networks extract and highlight differences...
A massive amount of data is generated every second all around the world. Machine learning becomes the most attractive solution to consume the data fuel and transform it into productivity. It has yielded great results in many fields, such as healthcare, marketing, finance, etc. Machine learning models are usually designed...
Nucleic acid therapeutics can be drug molecules with high programmability, minimal off-target effects, and the capability to address “undruggable” targets for diseases. In addition, each time a new drug is needed, one needs to only change the sequence as opposed to finding an entirely new structure. One nucleic acid type...
Understanding the photophysical processes of organic materials is important for utilizing them as functional photonic materials. Typical photophysical processes include intersystem crossing, charge transfer (CT), symmetry-breaking charge separation (SB-CS), singlet fission (SF), etc. There are serval factors that can lead to different photophysical processes, such as the molecular energy levels,...
Industrial processes heavily rely on catalysts to control product selectivity and lower energy barriers required for chemical transformations. Catalysts are most commonly solid heterogeneous catalysts that facilitate separations from reaction mixtures and enhance recyclability. Heterogeneous catalysts used in industrial processes exhibit efficacious results, but in certain instances drawing structure-function relationships...
Genetic variation in genes regulating metabolism may be advantageous in some settings but not others. The non-failing adult heart relies heavily on fatty acids as a fuel substrate and source of ATP. In contrast, the failing heart favors glucose as a fuel source. A bootstrap analysis for genes with deviant...
Early life adversity predicts greater health risk in later life across multiple outcomes, including cardiovascular disease (CVD) and all-cause mortality. While biological pathways are incompletely understood, evidence is increasingly highlighting immune function, specifically chronic inflammation, which is implicated in cardiometabolic diseases, certain cancers, and all-cause mortality. Links between early adversity...
One of the fundamental questions in developmental biology is how a single cell gives rise to a complex organism. More specifically, how a totipotent egg divides into cells that become increasingly restricted in their potential. Development is a process of increasingly restricted cellular potential, and here I home in on...
In this dissertation, I conducted 2 studies that resulted in 3 manuscripts. This dissertation consists of 6 chapters that include the 3 manuscripts. The overarching research question is How does context affect the work of quality improvement (QI) practitioners? To answer this larger research question, which is central to the...