Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second most common cancer in American men and has led to approximately 29K deaths in 2018. The androgen signaling pathway plays a pivotal role in the pathogenesis of PCa, and androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) has been the main therapeutic approach for PCa. However, almost all...
Pediatric high-grade gliomas (pHGGs) are aggressive pediatric CNS tumors and an important subset are characterized by mutations in H3F3A, the gene that encodes Histone H3.3 (H3.3). Substitution of Glycine at position 34 of H3.3 with either Arginine or Valine (H3.3G34R/V), was recently described and characterized in a large cohort...
Chapter 1. Undergraduate Gender Diversity and Direction of Scientific Research (with Ashley Wong) Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Diverse researchers can bring new questions and perspectives, but exposure to diversity may also inspire scientists, regardless of demographic identity, to pursue new topics. This...
Chapter 1. Undergraduate Gender Diversity and Direction of Scientific Research (with Francesca Truffa) Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Diverse researchers can bring new questions and perspectives, but exposure to diversity may also inspire scientists, regardless of demographic identity, to pursue new topics. This...
This dissertation addresses problems in the source properties of major earthquakes. It is composed of four largely independent studies. In chapter 2, we explore the possible theoretical origin of the distance-depth correction q(, h) introduced 75 years ago by B. Gutenberg for the computation of the body wave magnitude mb,...
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...
Protein-protein interactions are ubiquitous in living systems, and mediate important cellular processes from decision making to immunity against pathogens. Furthermore, protein-protein interactions are key to many protein therapeutics, pathogen diagnostics, and numerous synthetic biology applications. As a result, there has been significant effort to develop methods to express potential protein...
Exploratory phase stability analysis in Materials Science has two primary goals: (a) Characterizing the evolution of the materials single phase field in composition space to identify solubility and electronic dopability limits and (b) Accelerated prediction of new phases of technological importance. In this thesis we reorganize defect theory --- the...
A greater number of strategies in one’s coping repertoire (i.e., the number of diverse strategies used across stressors or use habitually across several situations) may be beneficial and a precursor to coping flexibly across situations (Bonnano & Burton, 2013). Indeed, previous studies have demonstrated a benefit of having larger number...
Human skin oils are significant scavengers of atmospheric oxidants in occupied indoor environments. Many techniques used to study gas-phase transformations of surface films indoors have been limited to off-line bulk analysis, although more surface-selective methodologies are emerging. Here, we present a multi-prong analytical approach to characterizing skin oil ozonolysis. Skin...