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The People Look Like Flowers at Last: Coweeta College, Assisted Migration, and American Loneliness
No full textThis thesis posits that the bonded movement of plants and people can productively engage with American loneliness. The project expands Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory in western North Carolina into a forestry college campus. As the country’s 10th “work college”, Coweeta herein adds the production and management practices of climate-ready species to the traditional university outputs of liberal knowledge and social bonds. The campus, near the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, leverages McKaye’s project at once as a climate transect and social region, where the college’s cuttings and seeds are available to the trail’s 3,000 annual “thru-hikers” for distribution to a network of 56 Appalachian Trail communities. Through an “aesthetics of the infinite”, the thesis suggests reciprocal relationships between representation and land ethic. As a grassroots reorientation of assisted migration, the thesis claims landscape architecture as the operative medium for tethering people to place in the age of the “Mega-Eco” project
Repairing Modern First Edition Dust Jackets Without Fills or Inpainting: A Conservative Approach
No full textThis poster presents a minimally invasive method for repairing damaged modern first edition dust jackets. The technique uses lightweight kozo tissue precoated with Klucel G (hydroxypropyl cellulose) adhesive and visually fills losses by placing a toned or printed secondary jacket beneath the original. This approach preserves the dust jacket’s authenticity, while allowing it to appear complete from a short viewing distance during exhibition. Depending on curatorial needs, the jacket’s condition can be either visually improved or its wear emphasized.
Developed for a curatorial brief at Harvard’s Houghton Library in early 2023, this reversible strategy was used to reunite and stabilize the dust jacket for E.E. Cummings’s The Enormous Room (1922), enabling its display and subsequent storage with the book. The aim was to create the illusion of completeness without invasive or time-consuming fills, preserving the original material as much as possible.
By sharing this method in the Book and Paper Group Annual, I hope to highlight a conservative yet visually satisfying alternative to the widespread use of in-painting and invasive fills in dust jacket restoration.Version of Recor
Mortal God: The Religious Imagination and The Making of The Leviathan
No full textThe most famous work of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, was greeted by his contemporaries with a fierce hostility. It was claimed that Hobbes had reduced “every thing in the whole world that is good” into power, gutted precious theological concepts of any content, and produced a set of political doctrines fit only to promote tyranny. In the almost four-hundred years since, Hobbes has become part of the proverbial political furniture. Certainly, he is famed for an unrelenting materialism and a strident absolutism, but he is also recognized as the quasi-founder of many, now familiar, liberal concepts. This dissertation is an effort to rediscover an older Hobbes; to unearth the depths of the transformation that his contemporaries recognized in his work, and to do so with a particular focus on Hobbes’s employment of man’s “religious imagination.”
If Hobbes’s trademarks are absolutism and fear, the complementary role played by “power invisible” has often been overlooked. In this dissertation, I argue that—like many who came before and after him—Hobbes discovered that his political principles would be most secure if they were firmly planted within a dogmatic or religious tendency in man. The result is a thoroughgoing integration of the sacred and the secular, the religious and the political. While this has been recognized to varying degrees by scholars to this day, it has also been tempered by an acute awareness of Leviathan’s acerbic critique of clerics and a general sense that, on balance, Hobbes was no friend to religion. Notwithstanding that criticism, a thoroughgoing analysis of just how Leviathan employs man’s natural religiosity (and Christianity more specifically), in the service of its political project, remains wanting.
To this end, two major contentions form the core argument of this dissertation. The first is that Hobbes offers a far more scientific vision for constructing a Commonwealth than has usually been supposed. If the series of statements regarding natural religiosity, honor, power, projection and grace, are pieced together, the concrete possibility of creating a “Common Power” emerges. The Leviathan, State, or “Artificial Man,” may be seen as truly being made through the compounding of individual wills and judgments in man’s imagination. What the mutual covenant formalizes is the existence of what is perceived as an omnipotent force, demanding of obedience by a rational necessity. The rationale of power brings into being a shared epistemic standard of justice, while preserving and even augmenting liberty, and so makes the institution of a “Mortal God” possible.
The second major contention is that the religiously inflected nature of the Commonwealth’s creation makes better sense of (and indeed, is illumined by) the second half of Leviathan. Hobbes’s explication of scriptural narratives may be understood as an historical demonstration of the principles outlined in the first parts of the work. The Kingdom of God is achieved where God is taken to be sovereign in a Commonwealth; and those who serve as his vice-regents exercise rule only indirectly, that is, as mere representatives of God (or the Mortal God). Rather than do away with a divine sanction in politics, Hobbes inaugurates a vision of legitimacy and consent tied to the omnipotence and necessity of an all-powerful state. Christianity emerges as the religion most compatible with reason, and God remains accessible only by a rational representation in history, one that enthrones the promises attached to scientific pursuit and artifice aimed at the securing of man’s felicity.
The final contention of this dissertation is that the emphasis on fear in Hobbes’s thought has readily obscured more optimistic notes entailed by his historical, eschatological vision. I conclude by speculating that Hobbes set in motion a movement towards greater “Enlightenment,” and that this is best seen in his cooptation of Christian categories. In particular, Hobbes makes clear that the Kingdom of Grace enables a transformation via obedience that is in motion towards a Kingdom of Glory—progress that depends upon overcoming the irrationalities of the Kingdom of Darkness. Such a hope, however, entails the alignment of an interior assent and an exterior obedience—a congruence between the realm of reason and the potentialities of man. In this way, the worry that Hobbes espouses both a despotic impulse and a more liberal vision of progress is clarified. In the process Hobbes is made both more and less familiar to his long-time readers
Expression of Free Fatty Acids and their Receptors on Oral Neutrophils in Oral Lichen Planus
No full textObjectives: The aim of this project is to assess expression of specialized pro-resolving lipid mediators (SPMs) and inflammation resolution receptors on oral neutrophils (oPMNs) in oral lichen planus (OLP) compared to healthy controls. FFAR2 binds short chain fatty acids, FFAR4 binds long chain fatty acids, ERV1 binds Resolvin E1, and ALX binds Lipoxin A4. We hypothesize that in OLP, there is decreased oPMN surface expression of inflammation resolution receptors and decreased levels of SPMs, reflecting a failure of the distinct process of inflammation resolution, and hence progression from acute to chronic inflammation in the disease pathogenesis. SPMs activate the inflammation resolution pathways and are potential therapeutic options, especially for steroid refractory OLP.
Methods: OLP cases and healthy controls were recruited from the oral medicine clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Oral rinse samples were collected for oPMN isolation and lipidomics analysis using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. oPMNs were labeled and analyzed by flow cytometry. The number/percentage of cells positive for inflammation resolution receptors, quantities of receptors per cell, and levels of lipid mediators of inflammation were compared using two-sample t-tests. Principle component analysis (PCA) was performed to identify clustering trends in lipid profiles and exploratory biomarker analysis was conducted to identify potential salivary biomarkers for OLP.
Results: A total of 27 healthy controls and 17 OLP cases were included. Cases had almost double the number of mean total oPMNs (14x10^3, p.01) and viable (CD16+) oPMNs (8x10^3, p=0.01). The mean percentage of ERV1+ oPMNs was higher in cases than controls (84% vs. 67%, p.01). The mean fluorescent intensity (MFI) for receptors in cases vs controls were: 63x10^3 vs. 90x10^3 for ERV1 (p.01), 83x10^3 vs. 66x10^3 for FFAR2 (p=0.02), 53x10^3 vs. 36x10^3 for FFAR4 (p=0.02), and 604x10^3 vs. 690x10^3 for ALX (p=0.45). Overall, pro-inflammatory lipid mediators were upregulated while pro-resolving lipid mediators were downregulated in OLP cases compared to controls. PCA identified that the lipid mediator profiles were generally different between the two groups by the distinct clustering of samples. Prostaglandin F2 alpha (PGF2α) and 20-hydroxy leukotriene B4 (LTB4) had significantly higher levels in cases and showed good discriminatory potential as biomarkers for OLP.
Conclusion: In OLP, there were more ERV1+ oPMNs, but less expression of ERV1. There is variation in the lipid mediator profiles between cases and controls, with downregulation of pro-resolution mediators in OLP. These findings possibly indicate a failure of inflammation resolution in OLP, and potentially explain acute/symptomatic exacerbations of this chronic condition. Further research is required to support translational studies using topical preparations of SPMs in the management of OLP
Factors of Climate Change and Their Influence on Lyme Disease Infection Rates
No full textLyme disease is carried solely by the Blacklegged Tick, or Ixodes scapularis,
which transmit it from host animal to host animal. I. scapularis causes most Lyme
disease infections as they are the best at feeding on animals that carry the disease and live
a long enough life where they can transmit the disease to another animal. Not everywhere
in the world has Lyme disease. The environment must be conducive, and ticks must be
able to molt, reproduce safely, and live long enough to carry the disease. One such place
they are prevalent is the state of Pennsylvania. With the variety of flora, fauna, and
temperate climate, I. scapularis flourishes there. But the question is, what makes them
grow so well and continue to increase the Lyme infections they cause? This study
analyzes how climate change factors – snow fall, precipitation, and average air
temperature – affect the number of Lyme disease cases. Within the timespan of 2008 to
2019, data on Lyme cases, snowfall, precipitation, and average air temperature in each
Pennsylvanian county was analyzed and used to calculate the rate of change values. The
rate of change values represented positive and negative slopes of each data set. Those
slopes were compared and contrasted to see which had the most influence on the slopes
from the Lyme disease data set. Between snow fall, precipitation, and average
temperature, precipitation is the climate change factor that most influences whether Lyme
disease cases rise or fall. This study provides evidence in the form of line graphs,
projected values, and calculated rates of change to support this theory
UV Completeness: From Quantum Field Theory to Quantum Gravity
No full textOne of the main goals of theoretical physics is to describe physics at all energy scales. The usual renormalization scheme of quantum field theory provides a way to investigate the details of physical systems at different energy scales, potentially up to some energy cut-off. When a theory is predictive at arbitrarily high energies and hence the cut-off can be removed, we say the theory is UV complete.
The importance of UV completeness lies in its ability to explain physical phenomena at arbitrarily small distances or high energies. However, when standard techniques from quantum field theory fail to provide such a description, new degrees of freedom are expected to become important.
In this thesis, we investigate two types of UV completions; one associated with conformal field theories and the other with quantum gravity. For the former, we study the fixed points of the renormalization group where one needs to integrate-in light solitonic particles/strings in the context of supersymmetric conformal field theories. For the latter, we review the challenges of UV completing quantum gravity and the severe constraints that such a completion is expected to provide for the low-energy physics. The study of such constraints constitutes the idea behind the Swampland program, which aims to identify theories that are inconsistent when coupled to gravity.
A guiding tool for further understanding and constructing both classes of theories is string theory, which provides a framework to analyze strongly coupled systems. In particular, it can be used to provide a classification framework for five dimensional superconformal field theories. However, string theory, being a theory of quantum gravity, can also be used to analyze the possible landscape of supergravity theories. We reconstruct some of the results suggested by string theory from bottom up and in particular focus on questions related to the finiteness of quantum gravity. Our results are suggestive of a possible string universality for supersymmetric gravitational theories
Vertical Publics: Landscape Transformation of Vacant Office Towers
No full textVertical Publics explores the potential for reimagining vacant modernist urban office towers through transformative public space interventions. It challenges the conventional use, access, and ownership by blurring the boundaries between landscape and architecture, public and private, street and building. Set in the speculative future of 2058, this thesis introduces the Urban Arboretum Network (UAN) program and uses the Seagram Building as the first experimental site in New York City. This project vertically expands the streetscape by creating solar voids, programmed vertical surfaces, and an accessible circulation system that threads through the new urban experiences
Essays on Stakeholder Welfare & Equality
No full textThere is a growing interest among scholars and the public in understanding how firms impact the well-being of their stakeholders, especially customers and employees. The three chapters of my dissertation tackle this topic in various settings.
Chapter 1 looks at the association between hospital management practices and patient health outcomes across a representative large-scale sample of U.S. hospitals. It is one of the first papers to analyze the results of the Census-conducted Management and Organizational Practices Survey for hospitals. In multivariate adjusted analyses, hospitals adopting more structured management practices were associated with overall higher quality of care, including lower mortality (-1.3%, p=0.01) and lower readmissions (-1.2%, p=0.03) for acute myocardial infarction, and higher patient satisfaction (+13.4%, p=0.02). Hospitals adopting structured management practices were also associated with better financial performance, including higher profit margins (+1.3%, p=0.02). This suggests that improving the adoption of structured management practices in hospitals may be a critical element in translating national quality goals into improved value of care for patients and hospitals.
Chapter 2 looks at the impact of a food delivery platform on the welfare of gig workers. Gig work provides worktime flexibility and a sense of being one’s own boss, but comes without certain protections that employees enjoy. Thus, my co-author and I study the work patterns of a large sample of drivers in the food delivery business to better understand the value of worktime flexibility. Our results indicate that the vast majority of drivers place significant value on flexibility. We then use our estimates to study how flexibility concerns, earnings considerations, and worker welfare influence the regulation of gig work. Our context is Proposition 22, a recent California ballot initiative that protects gig workers’ worktime flexibility and provides an earnings guarantee. We find that counties where drivers drove longer hours were more likely to vote against Proposition 22, suggesting that voters seek to protect drivers who behave more like employees. However, we do not find that voters take the value of flexibility or the value of the earnings guarantee into account. Instead, the largest predictor of support for Proposition 22 is the share of registered Republicans in the county. These results suggest that voters do not have a holistic understanding of how Proposition 22 affects drivers in their county, so they mainly consider political ideology when making voting decisions.
Chapter 3 examines whether firms are pressured to ”walk the talk” of gender equality after they make public statements on the topic. I use a difference-in-differences approach to see if firms follow through on their statements in situations where they are likely to be accused of hypocrisy by monitors. To do this, I use #MeToo as a shock to the likelihood of these accusations and use firms’ gender-related tweets on Twitter as a measure of their statements. I find that, compared to firms who did not ”gender tweet” in the three years before #MeToo, firms who gender-tweeted add 32% more female board members in the four years after #MeToo. This change is larger for firms for whom hypocrisy accusations pose a bigger threat. However, I find no such effect for female senior managers. I speculate that this difference is due to the fact that adding female senior managers is more costly and less expected of firms than adding female board members. These results underscore the importance of monitoring to prevent firms from woke-washing, and suggests that efforts should be taken to make desired actions (such as hiring female senior managers) more feasible for firms
Multiphysics simulation of fluid–structure interaction
No full textFluid–structure interaction (FSI) underpins the life and locomotion of living organisms, as well as the behavior of engineering systems. It encapsulates many complex physical phenomena in the coupled dynamics of solids immersed in fluids. Simulations have been an attractive complement to studying FSI, enabling us to uncover scientific discoveries that are inaccessible via theory or experiment. However, simulating FSI is a nontrivial task. The fundamental challenge lies in how to computationally represent both solids and fluids. As solid stress is induced by strain, solids are naturally modeled in a Lagrangian framework; while fluids are often described in an Eulerian framework, given that fluid stress is induced by strain rate. In addition to this natural dichotomy in the preferred discretization framework for solids and fluids, modeling multi-body interactions or capturing the material and geometric nonlinearity in solids further complicates FSI simulations. In this thesis, we explore the development of multiphysics simulation of FSI from three perspectives: experimental, numerical, and artistic.
In Chapter 2, we examine the one-way FSI in the context of cryo-plunging experiments. We simulate plunge freezing for sample preparation in cryogenic electron microscopy and develop a computational framework to create three-dimensional (3D) "digital twins" of sample vitrification in liquid ethane. By integrating experimental protocols, adaptive mesh refinement, and parallelization, our 3D simulations provide a lens to visualize heat transfer during cryo-plunging and quantify the effects of plunging protocols on cooling rates. Validated against experimental data, this framework lays the groundwork for engineering fluid dynamics to improve cryo-vitrification.
In Chapter 3, we focus on the method development for simulating two-way FSI. We extend the lattice Boltzmann (LB) method to model finite-strain solids on one fixed Eulerian grid with the reference map technique (RMT). We introduce a new Eulerian boundary condition to model multiple moving deformable solids with different densities. The resulting LBRMT is fully explicit, and therefore suitable for parallelization. It is validated against benchmark problems and applied to simulate multi-body interactions between soft solids and fluids such as rotating and mixing. This general method offers a new computational approach to the LB community for simulating many-body FSI problems involving hundreds of deformable solids in fluids, using modest computational resources.
In Chapter 4, we explore an ancient art form, marbling, and examine how the use of thin tools to craft stable and intricate artwork on a viscosified fluid surface constitutes an intriguing FSI problem. Through a showcase of various marbling patterns, we uncover a physical explanation of the workings of marbling and the roles of interfacial tension, surfactants, and viscosity. Additionally, we introduce a basic computational framework for capturing sharp color interfaces inspired by the reference map technique
Purification and characterization of checkpoint blockade enhancing molecules from Coprobacillus cateniformis.
No full textCheckpoint blockade treatment enhancement is one of the frontline areas of study in cancer treatment, however it comes with two large drawbacks, the limited number of cancer lines in which efficacy is shown and the difficulty in tolerating the treatment. An increase in the efficacy of checkpoint blockade treatment has been shown to correlate to the presence of individual members of the human gut microbiota and the microbial contributions to immune training and regulation within the host. Coprobacillus cateniformis has been shown to enhance anti-PD-L1 and anti-PD-L2 treatments in a mouse tumor model, even when cotreated as a dead bacteria indicating the presence of an immunomodulatory molecule on the surface of the bacteria. I compared three chemical extraction techniques to determine the most efficient and effective method for molecular isolation. After isolation, I used low pressure size exclusion chromatography paired with a second ion exchange chromatography method to remove superfluous bacterial extract products. Further characterization of the bacterial product was performed through chemical analysis via gas chromatography mass spectroscopy, enzymatic degradation, and NMR spectroscopy. The sum total of the chemical analysis led to the characterization of a small surface associated bacterial lipid that may be attached to a xylose polysaccharide that we have shown increases the efficacy of anti-PD-L1 and anti PD-L2 treatments in our mouse tumor models