This paper will discuss the creation of my artwork, which has been inspired by my experiences and understandings of Catholicism and its icons. I will consider how iconography works in art, its influence, and how and why I have created this artwork dealing with my beliefs. I will also refer to the works of contemporary artists Duane Michals and Michael Wesely to help explain my exhibition, which I have titled "Doubting Thomas: The Testaments."

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The subject of dance and injury has become an increasingly important area of study for sports medicine, education, and dance studies. However, the majority of current research focuses on professional dancers or pre-professional dancers in a conservatory training context. The research typically overlooks dancers in a university setting who pursue baccalaureate-level dance programs. This small-scale research study therefore focuses on collegiate dancers in their first year of study in a liberal arts dance program. As this population often sustains injuries, the thesis project seeks to examine the management of injury strategies and to create injury prevention guidelines for the liberal arts dance department, its dance classes, and a hypothetical syllabus for a first-year injury prevention course. The research methodology adopts three approaches: a survey of the incoming freshman dance class at Temple University; a detailed study of six previously or currently injured dance students through interview; and a critical assessment of the research on dance injury. The injury prevention guidelines developed from the student injury surveys, interviews, and assessments will focus on basic, yet essential, information regarding injury management and misconceptions, and the guidelines will prepare collegiate-level dancers for future injury challenges they may face. / Dance

Changing Lines is a collection of five short stories that focus on pairings of opposites. In the title story, a boy in split custody chooses whether to live with his fundamentalist Christian father or his occult mother. In "Diminishing Returns," a gifted girl is paired with an incompetent girl for a badminton tournament in her high school gym class. In "Invisible Orbits," a talented guitarist in poverty joins the band of a wealthy and well-connected singer. In "Unable to Die," an older therapist confronts her past as she consoles a grieving student facing his uncertain future. The collection closes on "The Color in Your Cheeks," the story of a successful game developer who finds out his younger brother has run away from home to make adult videos with their childhood next-door neighbor. The stories all center on the tension and change liable to occur when heavily contrasting individuals are forced to interact, portraying how these worldviews are formed with an aim at psychological and sociological nuance. While each story is told in a traditional linear narrative style, the collection is varied in its use of point of view and vantage point. Questioning truisms serves as the main driving force of the collection, while the themes of how neuroses are formed in childhood, spirituality, projection of one's own weakness onto others, coping mechanisms, the psychological effects of demographical status, and internalized contempt are all explored in varying degrees.

The effects of climate change have made the need to develop sustainable production practices for biofuels and other chemicals imminent. The development of the green economy has also led to many industries voluntarily improving the sustainability of the products they produce. The microbial production of fatty acid-derived chemicals allows for the opportunity to reduce petroleum-based chemicals in the marketplace. However, for microbial produced chemicals to be industrially competitive, significant work is needed to improve the production capacity of industrial strains. There are a number of bottlenecks and challenges related to the production of various fatty acid derivatives that need to be addressed. One of these key challenges relates to the source of the fermentation feedstock. While sources such as corn or sugar cane are currently common, these feedstocks compete with food supply and require nutrient-rich soils. The use of lignocellulosic feedstocks is preferred to combat this issue, however these feedstocks present their own unique challenges. Pretreatment is required to release fermentable sugars, and this process also results in various fermentation inhibitors released into the solution. A better understanding of how engineered strains utilize these fermentable sugars as well as improving resistance to the inhibitors will help to improve the chemical production capacity of these chemical products. This work will focus on describing key bottlenecks related to fatty acid-derived products, while also evaluating proposed solutions to these bottlenecks. / Master of Science / Currently, many common household products and plastics are developed using petroleum-based components. From plastic bottles to common cosmetics, these contain ingredients that are derived from petroleum. In order to combat our reliance on petroleum for these every day products, it is essential to develop alternate sources for these materials. A potential source involve using plant material and by-products to produce these same compounds that we are able to produce from petroleum. While there has been significant research to produce useful products such as bioethanol from corn, this is not an ideal crop. Corn requires more water and space than other crops such as grasses. In addition, these grasses can grow in soil that food crops are unable to grow in, so we don’t utilize valuable land to develop common household products. However, these grasses are much more difficult to treat and process in order to form these basic chemical ingredients. In order to use grass-based crops, it is possible to engineer organisms such as yeast to process the raw material into valuable chemical precursor. This work aims to genetically engineer yeast in order to produce some of these chemical precursors from a grass-like feedstock. In addition, this work also analyzes how physical characteristics of yeast affect the final product formation. Finally, a model was developed to show how yeast ferments corn-like and grass-like feedstocks differently.

Le contexte de ce projet de thèse était d’approfondir la compréhension du métabolisme de Trypanosoma brucei. Les trypanosomes utilisent différents types de sources de carbone, des hydrates de carbone ainsi que des acides aminés pour alimenter leurs besoins énergétiques et biosynthétiques (conditions imitant réellement l'environnement dans la mouche tse-tse). Les différences de thioesters d'acyl-CoA sont encore inconnues dans ces conditions. Une telle élucidation est essentielle pour comprendre les adaptations métaboliques de l'organisme au cours de son cycle de vie. Cet objectif pourrait être complété par une combinaison d'analyses sensibles de divers groupes de métabolites, de délétions dirigées de gènes ou de régulations négatives. Ces derniers développements intègrent un flux de travail complet d'analyse des flux métaboliques par 13C à l’état-instationnaire. Ce flux de travail combine les méthodes existantes pour la collecte d'échantillons, la métabolomique quantitative basée sur MS et l'analyse isotopique d'acides organiques, d'acides aminés, de composés phosphorylés en plus des thioesters d'acyl Coenzyme A (acyl-CoAs), qui représentent un point central entre le métabolisme central du carbone et les voies anaboliques. Ce flux de travail a d'abord été évalué et validé sur l'organisme modèle Escherichia coli et a fourni de nouvelles idées sur son fonctionnement métabolique. Par la suite, ce flux de travail a ensuite été exploité pour étudier le métabolisme de T. brucei, pour lequel les résultats préliminaires sont décrits et discutés dans cette thèse. / Unusual metabolism of protozoan parasite causing deadly sleeping sickness, Trypanosoma brucei, has been enigmatic for many years. In the past decades, targeted genetic perturbations combined with metabolic analysis have advanced the view on complex compartmentalized metabolism of this organism, but acyl-CoA metabolism on the crossroad between catabolic and anabolic pathways, remains largely uncharacterized. Present work aims at clarifying mitochondrial operation and topology of acyl-CoA network of T. brucei, as well as its interconnections with the rest of metabolism. This has required the development of a complete framework for investigation of acyl-CoA metabolism in T. brucei integrating isotope labeling experiments with metabolite quantification. Sensitive LC-MS method for identification and quantification of acyl-CoAs based on high-resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) with LTQ-OrbiTrap has been established and applied to investigate acyl-CoA metabolism in the protozoan parasite, as well as in the model organism in systems and synthetic biology, Escherichia coli. Complete workflow from cell cultivation, measurement of extracellular fluxes and analysis of isotopic profile which is result of enzyme-specific incorporation of isotopic tracer allowed modelling of metabolic network and calculation of metabolic fluxes. The entire workflow has been biologically validated and has clarified the link between acyl-CoA and central carbon metabolism in E. coli. The proposed framework has been adapted to T. brucei, for which several sample collection methods have been evaluated thoroughly. It was possible to extract, identify and quantify main acyl-CoA species produced from glucose catabolism. This optimised setup for acyl-CoA analysis will allow collection of data for NMR-based analysis of metabolic end products as well as collection of intracellular metabolites from same sample.

La présente thèse traite, au travers d’une analyse fondamentale et expérimentale, l’effet de texturation par détente instantanée contrôlée (DIC) sur les phénomènes de transfert au cours des processus de séchage, d’extraction mécanique et de comportement rhéologique. Les produits concernés ont été les graines de caroube (gomme et germe) et deux variétés de graines de tournesol (linoléique et oléique). La texturation DIC permet d’agir sur la cinétique de séchage par flux d’air ce qui conduit à une intensification des processus de séchage par flux d’air tout en assurant une bonne préservation de la qualité nutritionnelle du produit fini. L’étude expérimentale a été couplée à une analyse phénoménologique de la cinétique à travers une modélisation de type CWD (coupled Washing/Diffusion). Cette dernière étude conduit à une évaluation de l’impact de la texturation sur la diffusivité effective Deff et l’accessibilité initiale δWs. D’autre part, l’étude expérimentale en vue de l’optimisation de l’opération a été réalisée à travers la méthode des plans d’expériences. La modification des paramètres opératoires fonctionnels de la DIC, à savoir la pression absolue de vapeur d’eau saturée sèche (P), et le temps de traitement thermique (t), ainsi que le nombre des cycles (c) sur l’ensemble des performances de l’opération a été établie sur le comportement rhéologique de la gomme de caroube. Une deuxième partie de la thèse a été consacrée à l’étude fondamentale et expérimentale des procédés d’extraction d’huile de tournesol des deux variétés de graines linoléiques et oléiques. Le traitement thermomécanique par détente instantanée contrôlée (DIC) permet, à travers une modification contrôlée de la structure de la matière première, d’agir sur l’extraction mécanique par presse à froid des huiles de tournesol, ainsi que sur l’extraction par solvant de l’huile à partir du tourteau résiduel. Un complément à cette opération a consisté en l’extraction par solvant (n-hexane) opérée sur l’ensemble des graines de tournesol. La texturation DIC a conduit à une grande augmentation du rendement en huile pour les variétés linoléique et oléique. La préservation de la qualité de l’huile et du tourteau prouve l’adéquation de la DIC avec l’absence pratique de la dégradation chimique. Notre étude a également concerné la définition d’un nouveau procédé de désodorisation. Il s’agit de l’utilisation de l’Autovaporisation Multi-Flash MFA sur le raffinage de l’huile de tournesol. Cette technologie innovante de désodorisation se distingue par son faible niveau de température assurant ainsi une sévérité nettement inférieure à celle des méthodes conventionnelles à haute température. / This thesis deals with a fundamental and experimental analysis of the effect of instant controlled pressure drop (DIC) on the transfer phenomena and rheological behavior, which occurs during the drying process and mechanical and solvent extraction. The products concerned were carob seeds (gum and germ) and two varieties of sunflower seeds (linoleic and oleic). DIC texturing makes it possible to greatly modify the drying kinetics, leading to an effective intensification of the drying processes while maintaining a good preservation of the nutritional quality of the finished product. The experimental study was coupled with a phenomenological kinetic model using the CWD (coupled Washing/Diffusion). This study leads to evaluate the impact of texturing on the effective diffusivity Deff and the initial accessibility δWs. On the other hand, the experimental study for the optimization of the operation was carried out through an adequate experimental design method. The impact of the DIC processing parameters, namely the absolute pressure of saturated dry water vapor (P), and the heat treatment time (t), as well as the number of cycles (c) was established on the rheological behavior of the carob bean gum. A second part of our work was devoted to the theoretical and experimental study of sunflower oil extraction processes of the two types of linoleic and oleic seeds. By acting as a controlled modification of the raw material, (DIC) texturing allowed increasing the yield of sunflower oil by both cold pressing and solvent extraction from the residual cake. DIC texturing has led to a large increase in oil yield for both linoleic and oleic varieties. The preservation of the quality of oil demonstrates that DIC was perfectly adequate with a perfect absence of chemical degradation. Our study also involved the definition of a new deodorization process. This is the use of the Multi-Flash Autovaporization MFA on the refining of sunflower oil. This innovative deodorization technology is characterized by its low temperature level, thus ensuring a much lower severity than conventional high temperature methods.

Treasure is a feature-length narrative fictional film directed by Chris Williamson as part of the requirements for earning a Master of Fine Arts in Entrepreneurial Digital Cinema from the School of Visual Arts and Design at the University of Central Florida. This thesis is a documentary record of the film production from concept to completion. In this thesis the concerns of authorship are explored from the perspective of the author as the executive producer, writer, and director of the film.