The genetic counseling (GC) community has long struggled with increasing racial and ethnic diversity within the profession, with the most recent Professional Status Survey (PSS) in 2021 indicating 90% White membership. While several studies have tried to pinpoint what barriers exist that make it difficult for applicants who are historically underrepresented in medicine (hURM) to enter the profession, none have examined the GC admissions process itself and how that may contribute. The aim of this...

Butter-lider is a musical setting of prerecorded samples of four Yiddish texts, recited by the writers themselves. I intend for these sounds to showcase the musicality of a language that has previously been stereotyped as a “jargon” and had its cultural products neglected and ridiculed even by its own members. I also wish for this project to investigate the role that recordings and preservationist ideologies have had in redefining Yiddish language and culture across today’s...

Contrary to the long-accepted “standard narrative” of a nineteenth century collapse, agri- culture in Massachusetts was stable through the first half of the twentieth century and reached its peak—“both in pounds and in dollars”—during World War II. Farmers made the transition from family-oriented production to commercial production over the course of the nineteenth century, and like the rest of the country’s farmers, intensified their operations in the twentieth century. Farmers specialized in a handful of...

Cochlear Implants (CIs) have seen increasing use among older adults with severe to profound hearing loss who can no longer benefit from conventional hearing aids. Although the sounds produced by CIs are severely degraded as compared with natural speech, under ideal circumstances many post-lingually deafened young and older adult CI users can perform quite well on clinical tests of sentence comprehension and recall. A notable deficit appears, however, when CI users hear especially rapid speech,...

There are millions of blind and low vision individuals in the United States, and many genetic disorders are associated with vision loss. Coupled with the growth of the genetic counseling field, it is important that we identify ways to improve the genetic counseling experience for this patient population. As genetic counseling strives to be more accessible to all, regardless of race, socioeconomic, or disability status, it is important to gather the opinions of those groups...

Summer camps are powerful educational tools that have been utilized for decades as socialization enterprises to espouse values that meet an organization’s or individual’s vision of a better future. For many years, those educational tools included the stereotypical portrayal of Native American and Black cultures, in the pursuit of creating ideal American citizens. After World War II, Jewish Americans were situated somewhere in between black and white in the racial matrix that existed in the...

Human caseinolytic peptidase B (CLPB) protein is an enzyme found in the intermembrane space (IMS) of the mitochondria but with a largely unknown function. It belongs to the AAA+ family of proteins that couples ATP hydrolysis to perform mechanical work. CLPB is thought to be an analog of the prokaryotic ClpB (caseinolytic peptidase B) protein and the lower eukaryotic yeast heat shock proteins (Hsp) 78 and Hsp104, each of which works to resolubilize proteins following...

Neural circuit development is profoundly influenced by experience-dependent processes. The visual system serves as a robust model for understanding how experience affects sensory perception and the circuit mechanisms required for processing of the visual world. Decades of research have focused on cortical processing of visual receptive field properties and the early plasticity of cortical neurons, with less concentration on the contributing inputs to visual cortex. In this thesis I focus on the lateral geniculate nucleus...

Molecular chaperones are crucial machines that maintain protein homeostasis in the cell. In the ER, the two major chaperones performing this function are the Hsp70 BiP and Hsp90 Grp94. While BiP interacts with every nascent polypeptide targeted to the ER and has a specific client binding motif, less is known about how Grp94 chooses its clients. Here, I explore how BiP and Grp94 can work together and set the groundwork for studies exploring a shared...

Rajiv Mohabir is a dazzling poet of linguistics crossovers, who works in English, Bhojpuri, Hindi and more. He is as prolific as he is polyglot (three books in 2021!) and has undertaken a remarkable array of projects includes the prizewinning resurrection of a forgotten century-old memoir about mass involuntary migration. He joined John and first-time host Ulka Anjaria (English prof, Bollywood expert and Director of the Brandeis Mandel Center for the Humanities) in the old...

The catalytic asymmetric α-C-H functionalization of amines features as an ideal strategy for the synthesis of advanced chiral amines from abundant prochiral amines. However, the difficulty of activating inert C-H bond and the elusive reactivity and selectivity of the carbanion intermediates limited its development. We discovered organocatalytic amine α-C-H functionalization reactions through 1,4-addition reaction. In these reactions, various primary amines including aliphatic amines and α-fluorinated amines underwent both functionalization reactions smoothly affording versatile chiral amines....

“The Poetics of the Sharing Economy” analyzes the conflict between two rival paradigms of social value – the paradigm of monetary capital vs. the paradigm of infinitely shareable public goods – in the works of Shakespeare, Hobbes, Milton, and Locke. The aim of this project is to uncover the now neglected history of a fundamental conceptual clash that not only played a decisive role in the elaboration of modern liberalism, but which has also once...

Abstract Chapter 1: Circular RNA regulation at the single cell and tissue specific levelExonic circular RNAs (circRNAs) are highly abundant RNAs generated mostly from exons of protein-coding genes. Assaying the functions of circRNAs is not straightforward as common approaches for circRNA depletion tend to also alter the levels of mRNAs generated from the hosting gene. In this work we describe an shRNA approach to knock down (at a post- transcriptional level) circular RNAs (circRNAs) without...

Enzymes govern biological processes as they are biocatalysts that increase the rate of chemical reactions within cells, which would not spontaneously occur. Kinases catalyze the transfer of phosphate groups from high-energy molecules to their substrates. Since these processes are crucial for many biological signaling processes, dysregulation of kinases is correlated with many human diseases. Thus, inhibition of kinases has been investigated as a means of disease treatment for many years, but mainly via orthosteric sites....

It is valuable to identify an integrated method of analysis that focuses on the variousmodes of interaction between the electronic and acoustic elements in mixed music, concentrating on the spaces in which these elements intersect. In mixed music, intersection analysis is a tool that focuses on the points in which acoustic and electronic elements interact, and it is what happens at these points that will be the focus of this document. At the point of...

This thesis argues that, in the Annals, Tacitus writes the stories of three imperial women, Livilla, Messalina, and Poppaea Sabina, to echo Livy’s Lucretia narrative. The imperial women considered here play Lucretia’s role in these stories, but Tacitus has them differ from Lucretia in a very important way: all three willingly commit adultery just as Tacitus begins his references to Livy’s famous story. Tacitus’ echoes of Livy’s narrative are thus inversions, the three imperial women...

Homeostatic plasticity is a countervailing and necessary balance to a neural system capable of learning. When firing rates change over time, perhaps as a result of learning causing connections to vie for influences on a cell’s output, firing rate homeostasis is the force that bidirectionally enforces stability. Taken to its logical extreme, the tendency for cells that fire together to wire together (Hebbian plasticity) would mean that any reciprocally connected circuit would eventually fire perfectly...

In this project, I explore how the US media represents the situation regarding MS-13 in El Salvador and within its own borders. I give a broad overview of Salvadoran history to re-contextualize the narratives shared by Salvadoran media and its government. Through a historical context, I revisit the blame placed on Salvadoran youth for the country's destabilization. I then explore similarities between US media’s portrayal of MS-13 and Salvadoran life to define common patterns of...

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) was a critical component of the Chinese government’s efforts to modernize the economy during the early reform period. Through a statistical analysis of infrastructure density and case studies of Jiangsu and Liaoning province, this thesis investigates the policy options available to provincial governments for promoting inward FDI, as well as their limitations and potential dependency on central and local government actions. I find that although provincial governments had many choices for...

This project explores what it means to have personal autonomy that is of value in a relational world. I describe and depict what a 'life that is one's own' may look like, realistically, through describing the experience of personal autonomy. This project demonstrates the necessity of including the psychological element of agency and interpersonal relationships (including group identity) in an account of autonomy. Here, I explore autonomy as an experience which is supported by agential...

In today's political era, interest groups are infamous for their ability, both real and perceived, to affect political outcomes. Because interest groups are so influential, it is all the more important to understand how exactly they function and influence politics. One set of influence strategies deals in mobilizing their members to take political action, which is called outside lobbying. However, the existing literature does not have an answer as to what interest groups can do...

Mammalian Target of Rapamycin (mTOR) is a Ser/Thr kinase that acts as a master regulator of cellular metabolism and growth via its incorporation into two complexes, mTORC1 and mTORC2, that collectively control the cellular transition between anabolism and catabolism, respectively. Regulation of mTORC1 integrates nutrient, growth, and stress signals to enact precise control of anabolic processes like protein translation, fatty acid synthesis, and nucleic acid synthesis. These are all vital processes in the progression of...

Since 1978, when China enacted economic reforms, cities all around China have encouraged the construction of skyscrapers. China has witnessed significant urbanization, as evidenced by the rise in the percentage of residents living in cities from 41% in 2004 to just over 60% in 2019 (Lu, 2022). It is believed that building high-rise structures is a common method to effectively develop urban land, which is becoming scarce over time since more people are choosing to...

Since the first case of racial housing discrimination was documented in 1855, Massachusetts has had a history of widespread institutionalized practices and policies such as racially restrictive covenants and redlining that have directly disadvantaged minorities from purchasing, owning, or obtaining a mortgage for family homes. My thesis looks at conforming first-lien conventional mortgages sourced from HMDA data from 2018 to 2020 and uses summary statistics and regression analysis to examine whether current Massachusetts mortgage lending...

The development of child welfare systems in the Yishuv (lit. settlement; communities of Jewish residents of Palestine) is an overlooked, yet foundational part of the story of the Jews in Palestine and the establishment of the State of Israel. The thought, flexibility, and responsiveness put into the rescue, care, education, and training of thousands of Jewish children before the rise of Nazi Germany—and then tens of thousands of children thereafter—was the basis of not only...