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Brazzaville's Diaspora: Colonial Development, Counterinsurgent Violence, and the Struggle for Self-Determination, 1941-1958
No full text“Brazzaville’s Diaspora” explores the relationship between colonial reform and mass violence during the revolutionary independence struggles in Madagascar (1947-48), Indochina (1945-1954), and Algeria (1954-1962). After the Second World War and especially following the Brazzaville Conference of 1944, officials throughout the French Empire confronted local demands for national autonomy and international calls for self-determination. This work demonstrates how French administrators appropriated the discursive foundations of anti-colonial nationalism – including doctrines of minority rights, national self-determination, and human development – to justify and perpetuate campaigns of unprecedented brutality wherever their rule was threatened. It traces how these liberal discourses intersected with long-standing French fears of “detribalization” and racial mixing, catalyzing colonial practices of violence including torture, mass population relocation, and state-sponsored civil war. Employing a multi-scalar approach, it sheds light on this process from both local and transnational perspectives. In particular, it reveals the integral role that local elites allied with the colonial government played in igniting cycles of intercommunal violence from Algiers to Saigon.
This text makes two central contributions to the study of decolonization and the history of the international order. First, it complicates the scholarly consensus positing national self-determination and nation-state sovereignty as the defining features of the international system after 1945. Instead, it illuminates an alternative vision of postcolonial sovereignty – fractured along racial, ethnic, or so-called “civilizational” lines – that advocates of European colonialism wove into the very foundations of the postwar international order. It argues that this alternative to the nation-state radicalized the violence of decolonization and helped create inter-communal rifts across the Global South that endure to the present. The work also challenges that prevailing historiographical view that attributes the extreme brutality of French colonial conflicts to “fascistic” officers and European settler communities. Tracing the entangled and transnational trajectories of France’s postwar colonial reformers, it illuminates the crucial enabling roles of colonial liberals and anti-fascists in repressive campaigns responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. It argues that the forms and norms of violence that the French army deployed overseas emerged from within the liberal civilizational project of the postwar French Republic.Histor
Effect of calcium supplementation in pregnancy on maternal anaemia and iron status: Findings from two randomized trials in India and Tanzania
No full textIntroduction: Iron-folic acid (IFA) and calcium supplementation are recommended during pregnancy; however, calcium may inhibit iron absorption. While recent trials have shown daily low-dose 500 mg calcium supplementation to be noninferior to the recommended high-dose 1500 mg regimen for prevention of preeclampsia, its effects on maternal anaemia and iron status remain unclear.
Methods: We conducted two individually randomized, non-inferiority trials in India and Tanzania (N=11,000 each) comparing daily 500 mg to 1500 mg calcium supplementation during pregnancy. All participants received standard IFA (60 mg iron) and were counselled to take calcium supplements several hours apart from the IFA. All participants had haemoglobin measured at baseline and at 32 weeks of gestation, while a random subset of participants had ferritin quantified at the same time points. Using an intention-to-treat approach, we assessed effects of 500 mg compared to 1500 mg calcium supplementation on mean haemoglobin and inflammation-adjusted serum ferritin concentrations using generalised linear models, and on anaemia, and iron deficiency anaemia using log-binomial models.
Results: Third-trimester haemoglobin and serum ferritin were measured in 8,953 and 1,336 participants in India, respectively. In Tanzania, 8,496 participants had haemoglobin and 882 had ferritin assessed. In both trials, there was no difference between 500 and 1500 mg calcium supplementation on third-trimester haemoglobin [India: mean difference (MD) 0.01 (95% confidence intervals (CIs): -0.03, 0.04); Tanzania: MD -0.02 (95% CIs: -0.07, 0.03)], anaemia [India: relative risk (RR) 1.01 (95% CIs: 0.95, 1.07); Tanzania: RR 1.00 (95% CIs: 0.96, 1.05)], or iron deficiency anaemia [India: RR 1.20 (95% CIs: 0.93, 1.57); Tanzania: RR 0.94 (95% CIs: 0.77, 1.15)].
Conclusion: Low and high-dose calcium supplementation showed no differences in third-trimester hematologic outcomes. Future studies should assess co-administering or combining calcium and IFA into a single tablet on adherence and maternal iron status.Author's Origina
Power through Industry: Counteracting Contemporary Industrial Trends based on World War II Production and Technology
No full textThe rise of the United States as a global superpower following World War II was not merely a consequence of industrial capacity or geopolitical happenstance but the result of a deliberate and multifaceted strategy. While mainstream narratives emphasize America’s wartime production capabilities and economic resilience, this paper argues for a broader systemic perspective. The United States strategically integrated industrial power, education, and economic policy, drawing on German-inspired technical education models and Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical theories. This interplay of factors enabled the nation to outproduce its adversaries, consolidate global influence through institutions such as NATO and the IMF, and secure key resources essential for sustained economic dominance. By positioning itself at the helm of international institutions and leveraging strategic economic policies, the U.S. institutionalized its influence in the post-war order. Understanding this interconnected framework provides a more comprehensive view of how America’s superpower status was not merely inherited but meticulously constructed.Extension Studie
Peri-implant soft tissue health in relation to depth of implants
No full textPositioning the implant-abutment interface deeper than 3mm apical to the buccal gingival zenith is frequently observed in the clinical setting. While histological evidence from animal studies has shown that deeper implants exhibited greater biologic widths with greater ratios of junctional epithelium to connective tissue attachment that may impede the effectiveness of oral hygiene practices, there is a lack of evidence from human trials. The objective of this clinical study is to evaluate peri-implant soft tissue health in relation to the depth of implants by evaluating peri-implant inflammation levels. Sixteen subjects with Straumann Bone Level Tapered SLActive Roxolid implants were divided into deep (>3mm) and shallow (≤3mm) groups by digitally measuring the distance from the implant platform to the buccal gingival margin. Peri-implant soft tissue health was evaluated clinically by measuring probing depths, modified plaque indices, and gingival indices. Pro-inflammatory cytokine levels (IL-1β and TNF-α) were measured by collecting peri-implant crevicular fluid via paper strips and performing laboratory analysis. Multiplex protein analysis was performed by the Multiplex Core Facility at ADA Forsyth (Cambridge, MA). Differences between deep and shallow groups were assessed with the Mann–Whitney U test. Probing depths, modified plaque indices, and gingival indices exhibited no statistically significant difference between the two test groups (P > 0.05). Both pro-inflammatory cytokines (IL-1β and TNF-α) showed no statistically significant difference between the two groups (P > 0.05). However, a trend was observed in the data where the deep group demonstrated higher values across IL-1β levels, modified plaque indices, and modified gingival indices. The depth of implants relative to the peri-implant soft tissue margin is expected to be a critical factor in the ability to resolve peri-implant mucositis and effectively prevent peri-implantitis. The results did not mirror those of similar studies on natural teeth, namely that the effectiveness of oral hygiene practices around teeth decreases as pocket depth increases. However, the trend observed in the data may be a starting point for future controlled clinical trials for more evidence that may help both patients and clinicians with better long-term maintenance of dental implants.Prosthodontic
Variation and Therapeutic Potential of Immune Cell States
No full textThe immune system plays a pivotal role in safeguarding the body by targeting pathogens, parasites, and abnormal self-cells, including cancerous ones. Immune cells exhibit significant heterogeneity, which is shaped by their development during hematopoiesis, signaling environments, tissue contexts, and disease. This diversity offers numerous opportunities for therapeutic interventions. This dissertation explores the interplay between immune cell variability and therapeutic potential across diverse contexts, emphasizing their roles in hematopoiesis, cancer immunotherapy, and plasma cell dyscrasias.
In the context of cancer immunotherapy, we dissect the cellular and molecular mechanisms driving immune-related adverse events (irAEs) and therapeutic efficacy. Using anti-CD40 immunotherapy in mice, we demonstrate that TH1-promoting cytokines IL-12 and IFN-γ are central to liver toxicity, with Kupffer cells and neutrophils driving inflammatory damage, while dendritic cells and CD8+ T cells mediate tumor control. These findings illuminate pathways to decouple immunotherapy efficacy from associated toxicities, providing strategies to mitigate irAEs while preserving therapeutic benefits. Separately, an in-depth analysis of neutrophil heterogeneity reveals a Sellhi neutrophil subset with an ISG signature whose infiltration is linked to tumor control in immunotherapy. This study provides strategies to harness neutrophils to enhance immunotherapy outcomes.
We further investigate the bone marrow as a site in both health and disease, focusing on plasma cell dyscrasias such as AL amyloidosis. By combining single-cell RNA sequencing, clonal profiling, and microenvironmental analysis, we uncover unique transcriptional states and niche dynamics associated with disease. Complementing this, we present an early effort to construct an atlas of hematopoietic variation across healthy individuals, revealing demographic and environmental influences on immune cell composition. Together, these studies bridge fundamental immunology with clinical applications, advancing our understanding of immune cell variability in health, disease, and therapeutic innovation.Systems Biolog
Reading the Yellow Death: Pandemic, Climate, and Memory in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland
No full textThe First Plague Pandemic ravaged Europe and the Mediterranean from its appearance in 541 through the middle of the eighth century. Until recently, little evidence existed to concretely link plague to an enigmatic disease event in Britain and Ireland called the mortalitas magna in Latin and ‘the Yellow Death’ in the vernacular. Motivated by the recent emergence of molecular evidence proving plague’s presence in Britain and Ireland, this dissertation investigates the textual tradition of the Yellow Death through the framework of current advances in plague studies. The first half of this dissertation collates and assesses all attested references to mass mortality within the Insular textual record of the sixth and seventh
centuries. These events are analysed for a potential identity of plague and contextualised within the wider history of the First Plague Pandemic in Europe and the Mediterranean. Significantly, this study identifies four plague amplification events (545–554, 576, 664–670, and 680–684) and proposes models for the transmission of plague into the Insular world. The second half of this dissertation assesses the textual history of plague, examining how memory of the pandemic shaped the development of medical vocabulary and hagiographic tropes. By tracing the references to the ‘Yellow Death’ from the first Insular annals entries of the sixth century through to the writings of Gerald of Wales in the twelfth, this dissertation demonstrates that despite patchy multi-linguistic textual record, there was a continuous shared textual memory of plague across all three major Insular literary traditions (Irish, Welsh/Breton, and English) from the end of the pandemic until the beginning of the Second
Plague Pandemic in the fourteenth century.Histor
Windows to the Universe: Improving the Sensitivity of High Throughput Millimeter Telescopes
No full textMillimeter-wave refracting telescopes targeting the degree-scale structure of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have recently grown to diffraction-limited apertures of over 0.5 meters. These instruments are entirely housed in vacuum cryostats to support their sub-kelvin bolometric detectors and to minimize radiative loading from thermal emission due to absorption loss in their transmissive optical elements. The large vacuum window is the only optical element in the system at ambient temperature, and therefore minimizing loss in the window is crucial for maximizing detector sensitivity. This motivates the use of low-loss polymer materials and a window as thin as practicable. However, the window must simultaneously meet the requirement to keep sufficient vacuum, and therefore must limit gas permeation and remain mechanically robust against catastrophic failure under pressure. I report on the development of extremely thin composite polyethylene window technology that meets these goals. Two windows have been deployed for two full observing seasons on the BICEP3 and BA150 CMB telescopes at the South Pole. On BICEP3, the window has demonstrated a 6\% improvement in detector sensitivity.
The larger apertures also produce a challenging anti-reflection (AR) design problem for refracting and transmissive optics. AR layers are required to minimize the light lost at each transmissive interface within a receiver, which therefore improves the optical throughput of the instrument. The plastic optics require consistently thin polymer coats across a wide area, while wide bandwidths require multilayer designs. I present multilayer AR coats for plastic optics of the BICEP Array receivers (30--300 GHz) utilizing an expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE) membranes. These ePTFE membranes can be fine-tuned to the ideal quarter wavelength solutions with heated compression, and some types of ePTFE can be layered and compressively heat-bonded to generate thicker stacks. This heated compression process allows for a range of densities (from 0.3 g/cc to 1 g/cc) and thicknesses (0.05 mm) over a wide radius (33 cm), opening the parameter space of potential AR coats in interesting directions. The ePTFE anti-reflection coats have produced band average reflections close to the ideal for the polyethylene optics on all four receivers in BICEP Array.
The four receivers that make up BICEP Array target different frequencies to aid in measuring and separating the polarized astrophysical components along the line-of-sight to the CMB. We measure the frequency dependent optical throughput of these receivers with a Fourier transform spectrometer (FTS), and our ability to constrain cosmological parameters is dependent on our understanding of the systematics of this optical throughput measurement. I report the biases induced in the eight parameter cosmological model by the bandpass shifts within our maximum likelihood search framework; the maximum shift in the tensor to scalar ratio was found to be 9.1 \pm 3.8\pow{-4} with conservative 2\% shifts to bandcenters.Astronom
Hormone Replacement Therapy, Breast Cancer & Renovascular Disease
No full textThis thesis investigates the risks and benefits of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in high-risk populations, particularly in women who have undergone prophylactic risk-reducing surgeries (PRRS) to prevent familial ovarian cancer and women with chronic kidney disease. It comprises two manuscripts that address the effects of HRT on breast cancer and chronic kidney disease (CKD) progression.
Manuscript 1 focuses on the association between breast cancer risk and HRT use after PRRS in women at increased risk of familial ovarian cancer. A systematic review and meta-analysis were conducted, synthesizing data from 8 studies involving 2,689 participants. The analysis revealed no significant increase in breast cancer risk for women using HRT post-PRRS, suggesting that HRT may be a safe option for managing menopause symptoms in this high-risk population. Despite previous concerns over estrogen’s potential to elevate breast cancer risk, the results indicated that estrogen-only HRT did not increase the risk compared to non-users.
Manuscript 2 explores the association of exogenous estrogen use with CKD progression and adverse cardiovascular outcomes in women with CKD, using data from the Chronic Renal Insufficiency Cohort (CRIC). The study demonstrated that estrogen use was associated with a 47% lower risk of CKD progression, although it did not show a reduction in adverse cardiovascular events or all-cause mortality. This finding provides some reassurance for the use of estrogen in women with CKD, particularly for those at risk of kidney decline.
In both manuscripts, the results emphasize the need for personalized treatment strategies and further prospective studies to validate these findings. This research contributes to understanding the role of HRT in managing risks related to ovarian cancer, breast cancer, and CKD in high-risk women.Graduate Educatio
In the Blink of an Eye: A Unified Theory for Feature Emergence in Generative Models
No full textGenerative models, which produce samples of data such as text or images, are transforming the way we interact with technology. However, they often fail quickly in problematic and unintuitive ways. For example, a language model given a software engineering problem suddenly switched from coding to searching for pictures of Yellowstone National Park, and these rapid shifts in behavior have been observed in reasoning traces and hacks. This phenomenon is not unique to language models: in image generation models, key features of the final output, like objects in the background or the color, are also decided in narrow “critical windows” of the generation process.
While critical windows for a particular type of image generation model called diffusion have been studied at length by statistical physicists, existing theory relies on the specifics of diffusion and strong assumptions on the distribution of model generations. In this thesis, we develop a unifying framework for critical windows that shows that they emerge generically when the sampler specializes to a sub-population of the distribution it models. Drawing on tools from information theory, machine learning, high-dimensional probability theory, and statistical physics, our theory improves upon previous work by using rigorous mathematical tools and is agnostic to the underlying model type or distribution, applying to both language models and diffusion. The key insight of our approach is to exploit the powerful formalism for generative models of stochastic localization, which has roots as a proof technique in probability theory.
Leveraging our consolidated theory for critical windows, we apply it to different examples of critical windows in theoretical and empirical contexts. We provide a novel interpretation of the all-or-nothing phase transition in statistical inference as a critical window and use our framework to explain different failure modes of language models. We finally validate our predictions empirically for real-world models, and demonstrate that critical windows have applications towards improving the safety, privacy, and fairness of generative models.Computer Scienc