Honors Projects
Showing 451 - 500 of 662 Items
Effects of the plasticizer tributyl phosphate (TBP) on the intrinsic properties of mammalian lumbar motor neurons This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-16
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Connor Joseph Latona
Access: Embargoed
The Scars of War: The Demonic Mother as a Conduit for Expressing Victimization, Collective Guilt, and Forgiveness in Postwar Japanese Film, 1949-1964
Date: 2017-05-01
Creator: Sophia Walker
Access: Open access
- Contemporary American viewers are familiar with the vengeful and terrifying ghost women of recent J-Horror films such as Ringu (Nakata Hideo, 1998) and Ju-On (Shimizu Takashi, 2002). Yet in Japanese theater and literature, the threatening ghost woman has a long history, beginning with the neglected Lady Rokujo in Lady Murasaki’s 11th century novel The Tale of Genji, who possesses and kills her rivals. Throughout history, the Japanese ghost mother is hideous and pitiful, worthy of fear as well as sympathy, traits that authors and filmmakers across the centuries have exploited. This project puts together four films that have never before been discussed together -- Kinoshita Keisuke's Shinsaku Yotsuya Kaidan (1949), Nakagawa Nobuo's Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan (1959) Mizoguchi Kenji's Ugetsu (1953), and Shindo Kaneto's Onibaba (1964) -- and discusses them as four different iterations of the demonic mother motif, presented as a projection of the Japanese collective’s postwar uncertainty over both the memory of suffering during World War II and the question of personal culpability.
Women’s Bodies Between Market and State: Lineages of the Transnational Indian Surrogacy Industry Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Shea Cristina Necheles
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
An Output Sensitive Algorithm for Computing Viewsheds and Total Viewsheds on 2D Terrains Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Andrew P Prescott
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Investigating the effect of Fuc-O-NAP on the glycosylation of Helicobacter pylori Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Panhasith Ung
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
"Cooperate with Others for Common Ends?": Students as Gatekeepers of Culture and Tradition on College Campuses
Date: 2017-05-01
Creator: Pamela Zabala
Access: Open access
- As colleges and universities have increased efforts to make their campuses more racially and ethnically inclusive, students of color still perceive their campuses as hostile spaces to racial and ethnic minorities. On the other hand, white students often feel as though their institutions do too much, leaving administrators to balance the interests of both groups. This thesis draws on archival, ethnographic, and interview data collected at Bowdoin College to examine the relationship between students and between students and administrators given the role of students as major agents of change on college campuses. I have found that when students feel threatened by institutional change, they go into crisis and create spaces of resistance on campus. Institutions are incapable or unwilling to find solutions that meet the needs of the various constituencies within the student body. Therefore, students and administration become locked in a power struggle that produces only surface-level institutional change rather than meaningful reform in the face of rising racial tensions.
Mathematical Modeling of the American Lobster Cardiac Muscle Cell: An Investigation of Calcium Ion Permeability and Force of Contractions
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Lauren A Skerritt
Access: Open access
- In the American lobster (Homarus americanus), neurogenic stimulation of the heart drives fluxes of calcium (Ca2+) into the cytoplasm of a muscle cell resulting in heart muscle contraction. The heartbeat is completed by the active transport of calcium out of the cytoplasm into extracellular and intracellular spaces. An increase in the frequency of calcium release is expected to increase amplitude and duration of muscle contraction. This makes sense because an increase in cytoplasmic calcium should increase the activation of the muscle contractile elements (actin and myosin). Since calcium cycling is a reaction-diffusion process, the extent to which calcium mediates contraction amplitude and frequency will depend on the specific diffusion relationships of calcium in this system. Despite the importance of understanding this relationship, it is difficult to obtain experimental information on the dynamics of cytoplasmic calcium. Thus, we developed a mathematical diffusion model of the myofibril (muscle cell) to simulate calcium cycling in the lobster cardiac muscle cell. The amplitude and duration of the force curves produced by the model empirically mirrored that of the experimental data over a range of calcium diffusion coefficients (1-16), nerve stimulation durations (1/6-1/3 of a contraction period), and frequencies (40-80 Hz). The characteristics that alter the response of the lobster cardiac muscle system are stimulation duration (i.e., burst duration), burst frequency, and the rate of calcium diffusion into the cell’s cytoplasm. For this reason, we developed protocols that allow parameters representing these characteristics in the calcium-force model to be determined from isolated whole muscle experiments on lobster hearts (Phillips et al., 2004). These parameters are used to predict variability in lobster heart muscle function consistent with data recorded in experiments. Within the physiological range of nerve stimulation parameters (burst duration and cycle period), calcium increased the cell’s force output for increased burst duration. For example, increased duration of stimulation increased the muscle contraction period and vice versa. In terms of diffusion, a slower rate of calcium diffusion out of the sarcoplasmic reticulum decreased both the calcium level and the contraction duration of the cell. Finally, changes in stimulation frequency did not produce changes in contraction amplitude and duration. When considered in conjunction with experimental stimulations using lobster heart muscle cells, these data illustrate the prominent role for calcium diffusion in governing contraction-relaxation cycles in lobster hearts.
Characterization of expression of Sema1a variants in high-plasticity areas of the Gryllus bimaculatus nervous system
Date: 2018-05-01
Creator: Sara Spicer
Access: Open access
- The well-conserved semaphorin family of guidance molecules is known to play multiple complex roles in directing the growth and orientation of dendrites and axons within the developing invertebrate central and peripheral nervous system. Additionally, the expression of select semaphorins is maintained within some highly plastic areas of the adult central nervous system, such as the mushroom bodies, where they are associated with guidance of newly-born neurons as well as with synapse formation and modification. Within the cricket species Gryllus bimaculatus, deafferentation of the prothoracic ganglia and subsequent dendritic rearrangement of the auditory interneurons is associated with fluctuations in the expression of transmembrane Sema1a and diffusible Sema2a. Here, we characterize the expression of two different variants of Gryllus Sema1a, termed Horch Sema1a and Extavour Sema1a, in tissues associated with both developmental neuronal guidance and adult structural plasticity: the embryonic limb buds, the mushroom bodies of the brain, and the non-deafferented adult prothoracic ganglion. Although we were unable to visualize the expression of Extavour Sema1a in any tissue, we demonstrate via phylogenetic analysis that both Sema1a variants have homologs in species across the Insecta class, suggesting that Extavour SEMA1a is a conserved protein sequence. We observe no expression of Horch Sema1a in the embryonic limb bud, and suspect that Extavour Sema1a, which has a high pairwise identity with Schistocerca Sema1a, could be facilitating guidance of the tibial pioneer neuron growth in the limb bud, along with Sema2a. In the adult brain, we observe a colocalization of Horch Sema1a and Sema2a in the mushroom bodies and in a vertical stripe across the calyx, which may be indicative of interactions between Horch SEMA1a and SEMA2a in maintaining synaptic plasticity and guiding newly-born Kenyon cells. We also report a colocalization of Horch Sema1a and Sema2a in the anterior and posterior of the prothoracic ganglia on the ventral side, in the region of auditory interneuron cell bodies, suggesting the possibility that auditory interneurons may express both Horch Sema1a and Sema2a, which could interact with each other or with Plexin receptors to regulate dendrite morphology at the midline.
An Investigation of Genetics-Based Machine Learning as Applied to Global Crop Yields Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2017-05-01
Creator: William Gantt
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Mythologies modernes : à la recherche des écrivaines dans la capitale littéraire de Paris de l’entre-deux-guerres This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2029-05-16
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Stephanie Ruth McCurrach
Access: Embargoed
Examining the role of GRP and LIK1 in Wall Associated Kinase (WAK) perception of pectin in the plant cell wall
Date: 2017-01-01
Creator: Jack Ryan Mitchell
Access: Open access
- Wall associated kinases (WAKs) are cell membrane bound receptor kinases that bind pectin and pectin fragments (OGs).The binding of WAKs to pectin sends a growth signal required for cell elongation and plant development. WAKs bind OGs with higher affinity than native pectin and instead activate a stress response. Glycine rich proteins (GRPs) are secreted cell wall proteins of unknown function. Seven GRPs with 65% sequence similarity are coded on a 90kb locus of Arabidopsis chromosome 2. GRP3 and WAK1 have been shown to bind in vitro, but single null mutations have no discernible phenotype, suggesting that the GRPs are redundant. Low recombination frequency has made multiple mutations difficult to achieve, but in this thesis, CRISPR/Cas9 technology was used to induce deletions of the GRP locus. The promoters pYAO and pICU2 drove Cas9 expression in transformed Arabidopsis plants. The presence of a deletion and Cas9 were detected by PCR. While somatic mutations were induced, there was no inheritance of the GRP deletion, indicating that pYAO and pICU2 do not drive Cas9 to induce deletions in progenitor cells. LIK1 is a CERK1 interacting kinase implicated in mediating response to various microbe associated molecular patterns (MAMP) such as chitin, flagellin, and peptidoglycans. LIK1 exhibits a drastic increase in phosphorylation in response to OG treatment, making it a candidate for a co-receptor to WAK. T-DNA insertions to the 5’UTR of LIK1 were used to examine the effect of a lik1 mutation on the OG induced stress response. lik1/lik1 mutant seedlings were grown in the presence and absence of OGs, and RNA was isolated. qPCR was used on cDNA to examine FADLOX expression, a reporter for the transcriptional response to OGs. The lik1/lik1 mutant caused a reduction in the OG induced transcriptional response. However, increased LIK1 expression was associated with the T-DNA insertion indicating that LIK1 inhibits the WAK stress response pathway. Understanding the roles of GRP and LIK1 in moderating WAK mediated pathogenic response in Arabidopsis will enable a better understanding of plant resistance to pathogen invasion in the greater plant kingdom.
The Ethiopian Student Movement and the Dilemma of Eritrean Sovereignty
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Liat G. Tesfazgi
Access: Open access
- From the perspective of Ethiopian royalists, Pan-Africanists, Marxist internationalists, supports of union, and the broader international community, Eritrean nationalism revealed distressing fissures in many different arguments for preserving Ethiopian territorial unity– arguments not necessarily or explicitly problematic, but nevertheless in opposition to Eritrean demands for the right to national self-determination. For the Ethiopian Student Movement (ESM) specifically, Eritrean sovereignty demanded a reconfiguration of Pan-African unity that conflicted with Ethiopian exceptionalist historiography. Through an analysis of student politics at Haile Selassie University, from 1960-1974, this thesis seeks to complicate existing historiography on the ESM by examining the periodically divergent experiences of Eritrean student activists.
Self-Censorsh** in the Classroom This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2027-05-14
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Sarah Greenberg
Access: Embargoed
Neural compensation in response to salinity perturbation in the cardiac ganglion of the American lobster, Homarus americanus
Date: 2024-01-01
Creator: Josephine P. Tidmore
Access: Open access
- Central pattern generator (CPG) networks produce the rhythmic motor patterns that underlie critical behaviors such as breathing, walking, and heartbeat. The fidelity of these neural circuits in response to fluctuations in environmental conditions is essential for organismal survival. The specific ion channel profile of a neuron dictates its electrophysiological phenotype and is under homeostatic control, as channel proteins are constantly turning over in the membrane in response to internal and external stimuli. Neuronal function depends on ion channels and biophysical processes that are sensitive to external variables such as temperature, pH, and salinity. Nonetheless, the nervous system of the American lobster (Homarus americanus) is robust to global perturbations in these variables. The cardiac ganglion (CG), the CPG that controls the rhythmic activation of the heart in the lobster, has been shown to maintain function across a relatively wide, ecologically-relevant range of saline concentrations in the short-term. This study investigates whether individual neurons of the CG sense and compensate for long-term changes in extracellular ion concentration by controlling their ion channel mRNA abundances. To do this, I bathed the isolated CG in either 0.75x, 1.5x, or 1x (physiological) saline concentrations for 24 h. I then dissected out individual CG motor neurons, the pacemaker neurons, and sections of axonal projections and used single-cell RT-qPCR to measure relative mRNA abundances of several species of ion channels in these cells. I found that the CG maintained stable output with 24 h exposure to altered saline concentrations (0.75x and 1.5x), and that this stability may indeed be enabled by changes in mRNA abundances and correlated channel relationships.
Understanding the Truce of the Irish War of Independence Through Regional Newspaper Editorials
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Janet Elizabeth Briggs
Access: Open access
Characterizing the organizational/activational role of ovarian hormones in the mediation of
adversity-induced anxiety in female rats Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Cassidy J. Scott
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Random Walks on Finite Groups: an
Application of Group Representations
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: David Guan
Access: Open access
- Playing cards, a set of fifty-two cards with four suits and thirteen numbers, appear every- where in ourdaily lives. In particular, theyare commonly used ongambling tables in casinos. Before every game, the dealer needs to shuffle those cards to put them into a random order so that the game is fair. (Is it really the case in casinos?) One may wonder whether a shuffling technique is really efficient or not, i.e. whether it can turn the deck into a random configu- ration in a small number of rounds. Mathematically, this can be interpreted as a problem of random walks on the symmetric group of 52 elements S_{52} and we aim to determine how fast the random walk becomes (uniformly) random. This paper aims to explain an important application of group representations to this type of problems; in particular, techniques from group representations can provide a (roughly) accurate approximation. There will be six chapters in this paper. Chapter 1 is an introduction to problems of random walks. Chapter 2 and 3 discuss group representations in general, and a key lemma for application is discussed at the end of Chapter 3. Chapter 4 is an application to the easiest random walk one can encounter. Chapter 5 focuses on discussing properties distinctive to symmetric groups, and Chapter 6 discusses a card-shuffling example in details. Contents in Chapter 5 are mostly from the second chapter of [Sag01]; the key result in Chapter 6 along with the rest of the paper are mostly from [Dia88] with a few exceptions. This paper is written in a self-explanatory way, so anyone with necessary background of linear algebra, group theory, and probability will be able to follow the entirety of it.
Exploring the Effect of Core Tactics and Demographics on Squash
Gameplay Patterns Using Computer Vision
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Abhiroop Reddy Nagireddygari
Access: Open access
- This paper presents a computer vision system for analyzing common tactical and training pat- terns in squash using player locations and movement dynamics. Leveraging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) such as YOLO and TrackNet, we extract player coordinates on a squash court through a lightweight, single-camera framework. Match footage and detections are segmented by gender, skill level, and match phase to enable contextual comparisons. From 2D coordinates, we generate heatmaps of player locations, court coverage percentages, and distance-over-time graphs to visualize movement tendencies. Our results show that women demonstrate greater ball control and accuracy than men across all levels, while professional players exhibit more aggressive court usage than amateurs. We also identify that games 2 and 3 are the most physically demanding, highlighting a balance between slow starts and fatigue.
Tree Level Amplitudes for Yang-Mills and Complex Scalar Field Theory using Perturbiner Methods
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Abigail R. Chriss
Access: Open access
Associations between Autistic Camouflaging, Autistic Burnout, Authenticity, and Mental Health Challenges: Exploring A Mediation Model Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Yaerin H. Wallenberger
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Healthcare Practitioners as Educators: Perspectives on Preventing Sexual Violence
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Aidan N. Michelow
Access: Open access
Group-theory constraints on color-ordered five-point amplitudes in SU(N) and SO(N) gauge-theories Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Nathan Clay Bailey
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
The Physiological Effects of Acute Exposure to MPTP on the Mammalian Lumbar Central Pattern Generator Network Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Ephraim Kyenkyenhene Boamah
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Energy Policy is a Highway: Federal Energy Policy Evolution in the United States Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Chelsea Moody
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Out of Time: Queer Resistance to Chrononormativity in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Elana Sheinkopf
Access: Open access
Demagogues of Disunion: The Role of Honor in Southern Secession Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Evan Robert Cote Chapman
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
La representación literaria y la construcción espacial de la pampa argentina – un
análisis de textos desde el siglo XIX hasta el XXI
Date: 2025-01-01
Creator: Kaitlyn Brunner
Access: Open access
- This paper analyzes the spacialization of the pampa in Argentine literature, both canonical works and contemporary ones. How is rurality and the Argentine countryside represented in these works? How do they expand upon or challenge each other? The immensity of the pampa and its vast plains has served as a focal point of fascination for various authors and Argentine political leaders, intimately related to ideas of frontier and progress. It has served as a site for various political dreams and agendas throughout history and presidential administrations, even to propel its own extermination project to assert dominion over the pampa and assassinate its own Indigenous people. The various conceptualizations of the pampa and the people who inhabit and care for the land—the gauchos and indigenous communities—demonstrate a larger dichotomy of the city and the urban versus the countryside and the rural, or as Sarmiento puts it—civilization and barbarie. The effort to tame the ‘wild’ pampa produces the immense projects of agricultural development that we see today, degrading the land and poisoning the bodies of rural people. More contemporarily, the spacialization of the city and the country in contemporary Argentine literature begins to subvert and defy the traditional binary thinking of the two spaces. I analyze Argentine literature from the 19th century to the 21st century to show how the locus of the pampa and other rural spaces has changed over time, showing the reconfiguration of the country’s landscape in literature.
GEM-PSO: Particle Swarm Optimization Guided by Enhanced Memory
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Kevin Fakai Chen
Access: Open access
- Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a widely-used nature-inspired optimization technique in which a swarm of virtual particles work together with limited communication to find a global minimum or optimum. PSO has has been successfully applied to a wide variety of practical problems, such as optimization in engineering fields, hybridization with other nature-inspired algorithms, or even general optimization problems. However, PSO suffers from a phenomenon known as premature convergence, in which the algorithm's particles all converge on a local optimum instead of the global optimum, and cannot improve their solution any further. We seek to improve upon the standard Particle Swarm PSO algorithm by fixing this premature convergence behavior. We do so by storing and exploiting increased information in the form of past bests, which we deem enhanced memory. We introduce three types of modifications to each new algorithm (which we call a GEM-PSO: Particle Swarm Optimization, Guided by Enhanced Memory, because our modifications all deal with enhancing the memory of each particle). These are procedures for saving a found best, for removing a best from memory when a new one is to be added, and for selecting one (or more) bests to be used from those saved in memory. By using different combinations of these modifications, we can create many different variants of GEM-PSO that have a wide variety of behaviors and qualities. We analyze the performance of GEM-PSO, discuss the impact of PSO's parameters on the algorithms' performances, isolate different modifications in order to closely study their impact on the performance of any given GEM-PSO variant, and finally look at how multiple modifications perform. Finally, we draw conclusions about the efficacy and potential of GEM-PSO variants, and provide ideas for further exploration in this area of study. Many GEM-PSO variants are able to consistently outperform standard PSO on specific functions, and GEM-PSO variants can be shown to be promising, with both general and specific use cases.
Lie to Me: Linguistic Markers of Deception in Relation to Individual Differences in Executive Control Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Lauren Pashkowski
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
"I Deny Your Authority to Try My Conscience:" Conscription and Conscientious Objectors In Britain During the Great War
Date: 2019-05-01
Creator: Albert William Wetter
Access: Open access
- During the Great War, the Military Service Act was introduced on January 27, 1916 and redefined British citizenship. Moreover, some men objected to the state’s military service mandate, adamant that compliance violated their conscience. This thesis investigates how the introduction of conscription reshaped British society, dismantled the “sacred principle” of volunteerism, and replaced it with conscription, resulting in political and popular debates, which altered the individual’s relationship with the state. British society transformed from a polity defined by the tenets of Liberalism and a free-will social contract to a society where citizenship was correlated to duty to the state. Building off Lois Bibbings’ research on conscientious objectors, this thesis nuances the analysis with the case studies of David Blelloch and Norman Gaudie. Framed by two theories—Benedict Anderson’s imagined community and Barbara Rosenwein’s emotional community—these case studies demonstrate how conscientious objectors exposed the incongruence of the British imagined and emotional community, and the redefinition of citizenship. By weaving these theories into the British Great War tapestry, this thesis contends that the British nation was imagined differently before the war than it was after the war because of the introduction of conscription. Drawing from parliamentary debate transcripts, newspaper articles, and archival material from the Imperial War Museum in London, and the Liddle Personal Collection at the University of Leeds, Blelloch’s and Gaudie’s respective case studies ultimately bait the question: “What does it mean to be British?”
Using metabolic oligosaccharide engineering to induce immune-mediated cell killing of bacterial pathogens Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Brendan H. Pulsifer
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Phenylisocyanide Ligand Synthesis and Coordination to a Cobalt Catalyst for Dimerization of Linear Alpha Olefins Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Julia Hazlitt Morris
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
It's All Under Control: Essays Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Jack Tarlton
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Word Embedding Driven Concept Detection in Philosophical Corpora
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Dylan Hayton-Ruffner
Access: Open access
- During the course of research, scholars often explore large textual databases for segments of text relevant to their conceptual analyses. This study proposes, develops and evaluates two algorithms for automated concept detection in theoretical corpora: ACS and WMD retrieval. Both novel algorithms are compared to key word retrieval, using a test set from the Digital Ricoeur corpus tagged by scholarly experts. WMD retrieval outperforms key word search on the concept detection task. Thus, WMD retrieval is a promising tool for concept detection and information retrieval systems focused on theoretical corpora.
Chambers of Reflection: Rousseau, Tocqueville, and Self-Government in the Digital Age
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: John Sweeney
Access: Open access
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville each warn that the dominant cultures of their days may hinder the project of self-government. Against the backdrop of advancing Enlightenment philosophy, Rousseau writes that as social visibility increases relative to intimate connection, the drive for recognition corrupts self-love. Following the American and French revolutions, Tocqueville explores the democratic erosion of social hierarchies. He writes that a rise in individualism may obscure “self-interest well-understood”—the perspective gained through collaboration with others, thoughtful reflection, and reverence for truths that lie beyond the dictates of cursory instincts. In this project, I apply these political theories to the Digital Age. I explain how the distinction between the physical world and the digital realm has actualized Rousseau’s depiction of double men, “always appearing to relate everything to others and never relating anything except to themselves alone.” In the era of social distancing, technological evolution threatens to induce regression in the sociability and reflective agency that promote our capacity for self-government. Accordingly, I argue that Rousseau’s theory of corrupted drive for recognition and Tocqueville’s theory of individualism inform a new danger to political freedom: digital tribalism.
Genetic Analysis of Cellular Adhesion in Arabidopsis thaliana
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Andrew Close Bolender
Access: Open access
- Plant cell adhesion is mediated by the extracellular matrix (ECM) or cell wall and plays an important role in plant morphogenesis and development. The amount, modification, and cleavage of pectin in the cell wall are major contributors to the adhesive properties of the ECM. To gain a more complete picture of plant cell adhesion processes, Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings were previously mutagenized and screened for hypocotyl adhesion defects. Genomic sequencing of one plant exhibiting an adhesion defect, isolate 242, showed that two mutations, one in cellulose synthase (CesA1) and another in a sugar transporter, are candidates for the causative mutation. This thesis reports that CesA1 is necessary for proper plant cell adhesion, while the sugar transporter encoded at At4g32390 is not. Dark grown seedlings homozygous for mutations in CesA1 stain in ruthenium red, indicating atypical adhesion, while those homozygous for null mutations in At4g32390 do not. Previous study of another adhesion mutant revealed ELMO1, a Golgi protein necessary for plant cell adhesion, and four additional homologs ELMO2-5 in the A. thaliana genome. Two of these homologs, ELMO2 and ELMO3, fused to GFP, colocalized with mCherry-MEM1 markers in the Golgi, but not mCherry-NLM12 ER markers, indicating that ELMO2 and ELMO3 are also Golgi proteins.
A Foray into the Camp: Human and Ecological Liberation in Contemporary Queer Conversion Therapy Literature
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Mitchel Jurasek
Access: Open access
- Through the analysis of two contemporary conversion therapy novels in North America, this project explores the intersections of biopolitics (specifically camp theory), queer theory, ecocriticism, and YA literature. Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Nick White’s How to Survive a Summer are paired with scholars such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Joshua Whitehead, Greta Gaard, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Claudio Minca, Catriona Sandilands, Luce Irigaray, and Michael Marder to create a complex and intricate understanding of how ecologies impact queer youths’ experience in conversion therapy camps. The effect of such an intersectional and ecological understanding of queer becomings creates a foundation for further discovery and offers examples for current and future people to find mutual liberation with the ecologies we exist in.
Solvent Effect on Excited State Proton Transfer Mechanism of 8-Amino-2-Naphthol
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Gabrielle Vandendries
Access: Open access
- Photoacids, compounds that undergo excited state proton transfer (ESPT), have been utilized in different solar energy and lithographic applications.1, 2 The addition of functional groups and solvent can both change the ESPT mechanism of photoacids. In this study, the effect of solvent on the ESPT mechanism was explored using a model diprotic photoacid, 8-amino-2-naphthol (8N2OH). The photochemistry of 8N2OH in water and common nonaqueous solvents, acetonitrile, tetrahydrofuran (THF), and methanol, were studied using UV/Vis absorption, steady-state emission, and time-correlated single photon counting (TCPSC) emission spectroscopy. The results were analyzed using the Kamlet-Taft parameters. It was found that the ESPT mechanism of the cation in water is different from the mechanism in acetonitrile and THF. In water the excited cation forms the zwitterion, i.e. the OH site undergoes ESPT, while in acetonitrile and THF, the excited cation forms the neutral species, i.e. the NH3+ site undergoes ESPT. No ESPT was observed for 8N2OH in methanol. The effect of solvent mixtures on photoacidity was also investigated using acetonitrile and water mixtures. The solvent effects were more subtle; the time-resolved emission measurements showed the greatest stabilization of the excited neutral 8N2OH species at 20/80% acetonitrile-water mixtures. Finally, the ability to extend the solvent studies to ionic liquids, 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium (Im) trifluromethanesulfonate (OTF), was demonstrated. The combined studies reveal that solvent plays a large role in determining the ESPT mechanism and stabilization of 8N2OH.
Placemaking and Community-Building among Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer (LBQ) Women and Non-Binary People during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Gabby Unipan
Access: Open access
- This paper draws on data collected through in-depth interviews with multi-generational participants recruited from various online sites to explore the place-making strategies among lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women and trans- and gender-non-conforming people (tgncp) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Historically denied public space, placemaking in immaterial space (i.e., digital spaces) has been essential to the production and maintenance of communities for LBQ women and tgncp. Because these populations rely on non-traditional placemaking strategies that are not always instantiated in material space, sociologists often overlook their efforts to create place for themselves. This paper corrects this omission by exploring how communities create place through the deployment of subcultural capital onto immaterial space. Introducing four main strategies of community placemaking, material-constant communities, material-transient communities, immaterial-constant communities, and immaterial-transient communities, this article expands sociological conceptions of space to accommodate the placemaking strategies of marginalized communities who might lack the economic and political resources to foster communities in material spaces. Beyond the investigation of lesbian-queer placemaking, this research contributes to the growing sociological literature exploring the multifaceted, fluid, contested, and ephemeral nature of place and placemaking in the context of increasing Internet use.
Application of the Landau-Zener Model and Fermi's Golden Rule to Estimate Triplet Quantum Yield for Organic Molecules Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2014-05-01
Creator: Nathan D Ricke
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Rehab, Restitution, or Reform? Drug Policy, Race, and Swing Voters in Ohio Politics, 1983-2015 Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Grace Louise Cawdrey
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Metabolic Inhibitors Induce Species-Specific Defects in Bacterial Glycosylation Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Ilana R. Olin
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Examination of tooth-specific cis-regulation of the dlx2b gene during zebrafish development This record is embargoed.
- Embargo End Date: 2025-05-14
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Yujin Moon
Access: Embargoed
Calculating the Local Biotic Exchange Ratio of O2 and CO2 at Harvard Forest: Using Flux Measurements to Improve Past Estimates Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
- Restriction End Date: 2025-06-01
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Diana Katalina Grandas
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Democracy Promotion in U.S. Counterinsurgency: Tracing Post-War Security Sector Reconstruction in El Salvador and Iraq
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Emma Redington Lawry
Access: Open access
- Throughout the 21st century, certain facets of the democratic peace theory have informed American foreign policy, as policymakers credit democracy promotion with long-term stability and peace. In contrast, many political scientists have documented the often destabilizing and violent effects of democratization, particularly in underdeveloped states. How can we reconcile these tensions, and in what ways do they affect American foreign policy abroad? Under the lens of just war theory, or the doctrine of military ethics detailing the conditions under which it is morally acceptable to go to war, wage war and restore peace after war, this paper seeks to examine security sector reconstruction in post-counterinsurgency eras. In doing so, my analysis documents the effects of electoral processes on security and underscores the many difficulties of post-war rebuilding processes. In understanding these difficulties, I attempt to extract crucial lessons from the “best case” scenario of El Salvador and the “worst case” scenario of Iraq, both of which illuminate the fundamental tension between democratization and stability.
Directed interactions during episodic memory Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
- Restriction End Date: 2025-06-01
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Rhianna J Patel
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
An Ode to the Birth Justice Movement Birthing, Battling, Being: Black Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Eskedar Girmash
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Investigating enhancer regulation through chromatin conformation in Drosophila Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2020-01-01
Creator: Hannah D. Konkel
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Applying IsoTaG to understand Helicobacter pylori’s glycoprotein biosynthesis Access to this record is restricted to members of the Bowdoin community. Log in here to view.
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Chiamaka Doris Okoye
Access: Access restricted to the Bowdoin Community
Promises Unfulfilled: Integration and Segregation in Metropolitan Philadelphia Public Schools, 1954-2009
Date: 2021-01-01
Creator: Nina Nayiri McKay
Access: Open access
- Even though Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in public schools in 1954, many American children still attend schools that are racially and, increasingly, socioeconomically segregated. Philadelphia, a northern city that did not have an explicit policy of segregating children on the basis of race when Brown was decided, nevertheless still has entrenched residential segregation that replicates in public schools. The metropolitan area became a segregated space in the years around World War II, when housing discrimination, employment discrimination, lending discrimination, suburbanization, and urban renewal started the years-long trajectory of growing white suburbs surrounding an increasingly non-white and under-resourced urban core. These patterns had profound implications for school segregation, which city organizers began trying to fight shortly after Brown v. Board. However, the first court case to take on segregation in Philadelphia schools—Chisholm v. The Board of Education—was largely unsuccessful, with overburdened NAACP and ally lawyers struggling to meet the judge’s expectations of concrete proof of an intent to segregate on the School District of Philadelphia’s part. In the early 1960s, though, the state’s Human Relations Commission obtained a legislative mandate to take on school desegregation. It won its first integration victory in the Pennsylvania port city of Chester before moving to Philadelphia, where it pushed for school integration from 1968 to 2009. The city’s political and ideological battles over those decades reflect national trends around the rise of conservatism and neoliberalism in suburban politics and school reform, limiting the possibilities for change.