Increasing opportunities for higher education in the Middle East has meant that many women who would not traditionally have attended post-secondary education are now encouraged to access higher education. This change has come with many potential problems as the traditional role of women in a conservative society is redefined. It is a change which is embraced by some and challenged by others and it presents potential problems for higher education institutions. This thesis is a...

ABSTRACT This research thesis seeks to better understand the financial behavior of members of an Immigrant Ghanaian church community in the United States, by inquiring into the reasons behind their behavior. The enhanced understanding gained is then leveraged to find, develop and enact appropriate financial strategies to effectively manage members’ financial behavior toward improved financial behavior and wellbeing of members and the church organization as a whole. Unlike extant immigrant financial behavior literature, none of...

The work in this thesis characterised the virological outcomes of HIV-1 patients on second-line ART switching to boosted-darunavir maintenance monotherapy in sub-Saharan Africa and explored their determinants, with the aim of providing evidence to inform practice and policy. Firstly, I took advantage of samples and data collected within a trial of maintenance monotherapy that was conducted in Yaoundé, Cameroon, between August 2014 and July 2015. The trial population was composed of HIV-1 positive adults who...

Aircraft wings in high-speed flight experience detrimental flow unsteadiness. Its interaction with the flexible wing structure and resulting dynamic loads are addressed in the certification specifications which stipulate a cruise design point free from any structural vibration and buffeting. One such flow unsteadiness is shock buffet and its inherent dynamics near the onset of unsteadiness are addressed herein. Specifically, an extensive experimental dataset of a large aircraft wing geometry and complementary scale-resolving simulations are scrutinised....

The optimal performance of short-wavelength free-electron lasers (FELs), driven by high-energy bunches of electrons, is limited by collective interactions that occur due to the self-fields of particles within the bunch. An understanding of these collective effects is therefore crucial for current and future machines. In particular, it is important when designing and operating such a machine that these effects are understood, and mitigated as much as possible. In order to achieve such an understanding, a...

Interpreting flush-mounted Langmuir probes at small angles of magnetic field incidence –routinely found in tokamak plasma facing components (PFCs) by design – is notoriously problematic due to the difficulty of accounting properly for sheath expansion. The Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak Upgrade (MAST-U) has 850 probes installed with a novel probe tip designed to mitigate the effects of sheath expansion. This angled-tip design has been investigated through experimental and computational means, to both verify that the...