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...

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...

A necessity for cell survival is finely tuned signaling inputs and the propagation of those signals. Protein kinases that phosphorylate signaling proteins are known as the “writers” of these signals, whereas phosphatases are known as the “erasers.” The interplay between these two proteins is crucial for signal propagation. When these signals are not tightly regulated, they often lead to a wide variety of cancers. A commonly studied protein kinase family is the Src family kinases...

This thesis reports the vector boson fusion production cross section for the Higgs boson in the $\hwwlnln$ final state measured as a function of kinematic observables sensitive to the Higgs boson production and decay properties as well as integrated in a fiducial phase space. The analysis is performed using the proton-proton collision data collected by the ATLAS detector in the LHC Run-2 at $\sqrt{s}= 13$ TeV center-of-mass energy, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139...

To resolve the issue of the exponentially increasing computational complexity of the expectation-maximization process as the emission space of a system operating according to the mechanics of a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) expands, a specialized HMM algorithm recontextualizing the possible inputs thereof as a Poisson process was developed and used by Gat et al., among others (1997). However, little work has been done to test how the ground truth parameters of the observation sequences used...

This report studies balancing an external visual object, which may share a common process with the clinically important task of maintaining upright bipedal balance. Participants were instructed to keep a virtually simulated unstable object in its upright position by moving a joystick. The unstable object was a circular array of random dots rolling about its center according to the equation of motion of a simple inverted pendulum, with a calibrated pendular rate constant. Information about...

The attacks carried out in the Shingal Region of northern Iraq by the so-called Islamic State uprooted almost the entire Yezidi community from their homeland in 2014. Most Yazidis sought refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, an autonomous region in northern Iraq. In my dissertation, I trace the lived experiences and quotidian deliberations of internally displaced Yezidis living in an interstitial space between transnational humanitarian regimes of care and Iraqi sectarian politics. In focusing on the category...

Executive function (EF) impairment is a transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology. Evidence also suggests that stress reactivity may be an important risk factor with broad health implications. However, despite research suggesting that the autonomic nervous system (ANS) reactivity to acute stress is bidirectionally associated with EF, very little research has directly tested these relations. The current study addresses this gap by evaluating how baseline EF predicts ANS stress reactivity during a stress manipulation, and how...

Calcium/calmodulin-dependent kinase II (CaMKII) is best known for its roles in learning and memory, but it also plays a role in cancer and cardiac function. Due to its ability to become autonomous upon autophosphorylation, it is proposed to act as a molecular memory. Overactivity of CaMKII, however, is linked to cancer and heart failure. Finding inhibitors of CaMKII could therefore have important health applications. During a mass spectrometry study, our lab discovered that Nme1, a...

Initially, we tried to use DNA-mediated transformation to test gene functions. Instead, we discovered an efficient gene-silencing mechanism. We used the ump gene, which is involved in the synthesis of uracil and converts 5-fluoroorotic acid [FOA] into a toxin. When the ump gene is silenced, the cells can grow in the presence of FOA, allowing for selection of “transformed” cells. Introduction of a ump gene with engineered deletions causes efficient FOA-resistance, absence of ump RNA,...

<strong>Background:</strong> The burden of mental illness remains a public health problem that continues to grow. Research into the benefits of community gardening and urban farming (CG/UF) primarily focuses on physical health benefits, but there is less understood about the mental health benefits among racial/ethnic minorities, especially among those who tend to experience longer and more severe cases of mental illness. Examining the participants from Everett Community Growers (ECG), a local non-profit, this study aims to...

The Outer Banks of North Carolina are comprised of several islands that run alongside the mainland. These islands have access to estuaries and smaller bays, which host a rich marine habitat, thereby having a diverse collection of prehistoric to historic archaeological sites. One island is called Cape Creek, where many archaeology studies have found a vast number of Indigenous artifacts including thousands of pottery sherds, or pieces, which archaeologists have sorted into defined categories. This...