This dissertation is a study of groundwork in Engaged Science, Technology, and Society (STS) research. Engaged STS scholars reframe STS knowledge and move it beyond the traditional scope and boundaries of the field. They use various methods such as critical participation, making and doing, situated interventions, and experimentation to critically engage with their fields of study. These scholars have evaluated their work within the context of the disciplinary outsider, described their use of high-level pragmatic frameworks, and used the arts to bring critical social issues to the public eye. Yet, when I decided to use STS engagement methods to bring visibility to the lesser-known communities in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Tech, I found a lack of work documenting the groundwork and experience of engagement. I could not locate groundwork regarding negotiation, designing the most appropriate intervention, collaboration strategies, or confronting my fears and doubts about being in the field. Therefore, in this dissertation, I identify and examine my engagement experience in three interventions within the ECE department to bring visibility to the groundwork of STS engagement. The limited-series podcast Engineering Visibility was a platform to bring visibility to the less dominant communities in the ECE department. Highlighting the experiences of women in engineering, the first-generation student, inclusion and diversity, and the non-traditional student fostered a shared identity and sense of belonging within the ECE department. On the ground, this project examined the need to protect participants' visibility through invisibility. Interventionist Protectivity conceptualizes how I combined trust, accountability, and social awareness to protect my participants' from social scrutiny. The second project was a seminar titled "Expand Your ECE Career." The seminar exposed students to a "broader range of careers" by challenging the traditional ideas of success. The seminar featured four ECE alumni with successful careers in law, finance, and fashion entrepreneurship. Additionally, this intervention pointed out the inadequacies of traditional forms of project assessment. I describe how I measured intervention success through other assessment methods such as "assessment per mobility." The last project was a data-driven white paper that translated the care work of the undergraduate academic career advisors and framed it to be understood by the ECE faculty. The care work done by the academic advisors was underappreciated in its connection to undergraduate student success. On the ground, I discussed the importance of identifying the advisors and the faculty's social construction to create an intervention that translated the advisors' work to be valued by the faculty. Lastly, I conclude with a discussion summarizing the overall lessons learned from the three interventions and discussing my experience of engagement. My engaged STS experience is discussed through my framing of the concept of self-confrontation and the work of avoiding the term of STS being deemed as useful. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation is a study of groundwork in engaged Science, Technology, and Society (STS) research. Recent advances such as critical participation, making and doing, and situated intervention are reframing boundaries between knowledge and action in STS, offering scholars new approaches for improving scientific and technological communities. When I attempted to utilize these theories and methods in a culture change project, however, I found a lack of scholarship documenting the experience of engagement. How does one design the most appropriate intervention? What strategies are required to collaborate and negotiate? How do engaged scholars confront their fears and doubts in their communities and concerning the knowledge they bring back to STS? These groundwork questions confront both novice and seasoned STS scholars and are crucial to successful engaged scholarship, but they rarely are documented and analyzed. Utilizing a matters-of-care framework and self-reflective methods, I describe how and why I sought to change the culture of a large engineering department by making visible unseen and sometimes under-appreciated stakeholders. To do so, I created three interventions: a limited-series podcast to showcase the diversity of experiences in the department, an alternative-career seminar to redefine what counted as success in engineering, and a data-driven white paper to showcase the indispensable care work of academic advisors. I analyzed these projects' construction, application, and outcomes to highlight the complexities and significance of groundwork for STS engagement.

This study explored the relationship of Deep Approaches to Learning (DAL) with overall students' satisfaction and perceived employability skills in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) for the undergraduate seniors in the U.S. The study also aimed to investigate whether there is a difference between students in STEM and non-STEM fields on the relationship of DAL to overall student satisfaction and students' perceived employability skills. The data for the analysis was taken from the National Study of Student Engagement (NSSE) data. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis was applied to explore the relationship between students' Deep Approaches to Learning (DAL), overall students' satisfaction and their perceived employability skills. The measurement invariance testing explored whether estimated factors are measuring the same constructs for STEM and non-STEM groups. The findings of the study show that HO and RI construct was found to have statistically significant positive total (direct and indirect) effect on overall student satisfaction. Further, the results show that HO and RI learning activities were identified as the statistically significant factors in predicting students' perceived employability skills for STEM students. The HO and RI have a statistically significant positive effect on perceived employability skills for STEM and the non-STEM students. The STEM students have a higher effect of HO learning activities on perceived employability skills than the non-STEM students. Further, the direct effect of perceived employability skill on overall student satisfaction is also positive for both the groups. The findings of the study confirmed the indirect effect of employability on overall students' satisfaction for both STEM and non-STEM students. This study has created strong groundwork for future researchers to use the measurement models and the hypothesized full structure model for invariance testing among the groups of STEM and non-STEM in higher education in the U.S. Thus, this measurement model has a strong generalizability to both STEM and non-STEM groups. The implications and limitations of study are further discussed. / Doctor of Philosophy / There is an increasing consensus that for a society to solve complex problems that are related to climate, health, general economic development, and security, study in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields is critical to develop the skills that are needed to tackle those issues. However, there are reports on STEM education in the U.S. that have revealed that there is a general concern among policymakers and industrial leaders about the shortage of workers who are trained in STEM fields. To enhance the students' academic achievement, cognitive development, personal and social development, and to encourage them to be life-long learners, postsecondary institutions need to build a learning atmosphere that supports their deep learning approaches. This study explored the relationship of Deep Approaches to Learning (DAL) with overall students' satisfaction and perceived employability skills in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) for the undergraduate seniors in the U.S. The study also investigated whether there is a difference between students in STEM and non-STEM fields on the relationship of DAL to overall student satisfaction and students' perceived employability skills at higher education. It has further shed a light on why the difference in patterns exist and can give direction on how teaching and learning can be improved in STEM and non-STEM fields. The findings of the study suggests that Higher order (HO) and Reflective/Integrative (RI) have a positive effect on overall students' satisfaction for STEM students. The HO has a statistically significant higher effect on perceived employability skills for STEM students the for the non-STEM students. The effect of perceived employability skills on overall students' satisfaction on STEM and non-STEM students is positively high for both the groups. In order to enhance students' overall satisfaction with their university experience, the universities need to continuously develop new strategies and programs to make sure students are well-equipped with perceived employability skills.

No / The duocarmycins belong to a class of agent that has fascinated scientists for over four decades. Their exquisite potency, unique mechanism of action, and efficacy in multidrug-resistant tumour models makes them attractive to medicinal chemists and drug hunters. However, despite great advances in fine-tuning biological activity through structure-activity relationship studies (SARS), no duocarmycin-based therapeutic has reached clinical approval. In this review, we provide an overview of the most promising strategies currently used and include both tumour-targeted prodrug approaches and antibody-directed technologies.

Mesoscale design involving control of material distribution pattern can create a statistically heterogeneous material system, which has shown increased adaptability to complex mechanical environments involving highly non-uniform stress fields. Advances in multi-material additive manufacturing can aid in this mesoscale design, providing voxel level control of material property. This vast freedom in design space also unlocks possibilities within optimization of the material distribution pattern. The optimization problem can be divided into a forward problem focusing on accurate predication and an inverse problem focusing on efficient search of the optimal design. In the forward problem, the physical behavior of the material can be modeled based on fundamental mechanics laws and simulated through finite element analysis (FEA). A major limitation in modeling is the unknown parameters in constitutive equations that describe the constituent materials; determining these parameters via conventional single material testing has been proven to be insufficient, which necessitates novel and effective approaches of calibration. A calibration framework based in Bayesian inference, which integrates data from simulations and physical experiments, has been applied to a study involving a mesostructured material fabricated by fused deposition modeling. Calibration results provide insights on what values these parameters converge to as well as which material parameters the model output has the largest dependence on while accounting for sources of uncertainty introduced during the modeling process. Additionally, this statistical formulation is able to provide quick predictions of the physical system by implementing a surrogate and discrepancy model. The surrogate model is meant to be a statistical representation of the simulation results, circumventing issues arising from computational load, while the discrepancy is aimed to account for the difference between the simulation output and physical experiments. In this thesis, this Bayesian calibration framework is applied to a material bending problem, where in-situ mechanical characterization data and FEA simulations based on constitutive modeling are combined to produce updated values of the unknown material parameters with uncertainty. / Master of Science / A material system obtained by applying a pattern of multiple materials has proven its adaptability to complex practical conditions. The layer by layer manufacturing process of additive manufacturing can allow for this type of design because of its control over where material can be deposited. This possibility then raises the question of how a multi-material system can be optimized in its design for a given application. In this research, we focus mainly on the problem of accurately predicting the response of the material when subjected to stimuli. Conventionally, simulations aided by finite element analysis (FEA) were relied upon for prediction, however it also presents many issues such as long run times and uncertainty in context-specific inputs of the simulation. We instead have adopted a framework using advanced statistical methodology able to combine both experimental and simulation data to significantly reduce run times as well as quantify the various uncertainties associated with running simulations.

Yes / Organelle biogenesis is concomitant to organelle inheritance during cell division. It is necessary that organelles double their size and divide to give rise to two identical daughter cells. Mitochondrial biogenesis occurs by growth and division of pre-existing organelles and is temporally coordinated with cell cycle events [1]. However, mitochondrial biogenesis is not only produced in association with cell division. It can be produced in response to an oxidative stimulus, to an increase in the energy requirements of the cells, to exercise training, to electrical stimulation, to hormones, during development, in certain mitochondrial diseases, etc. [2]. Mitochondrial biogenesis is therefore defined as the process via which cells increase their individual mitochondrial mass [3]. Recent discoveries have raised attention to mitochondrial biogenesis as a potential target to treat diseases which up to date do not have an efficient cure. Mitochondria, as the major ROS producer and the major antioxidant producer exert a crucial role within the cell mediating processes such as apoptosis, detoxification, Ca2+ buffering, etc. This pivotal role makes mitochondria a potential target to treat a great variety of diseases. Mitochondrial biogenesis can be pharmacologically manipulated. This issue tries to cover a number of approaches to treat several diseases through triggering mitochondrial biogenesis. It contains recent discoveries in this novel field, focusing on advanced mitochondrial therapies to chronic and degenerative diseases, mitochondrial diseases, lifespan extension, mitohormesis, intracellular signaling, new pharmacological targets and natural therapies. It contributes to the field by covering and gathering the scarcely reported pharmacological approaches in the novel and promising field of mitochondrial biogenesis.

No / The Division of Dementia Studies at the University of Bradford has a 3-stage strategy to involve service users with dementia in practitioner education. This year¿s conference will be a perfect opportunity for us to show how the involvement of people with dementia in our Dementia Studies courses has moved from rhetoric to reality over the past three years. We now have people with dementia involved in the management, delivery and assessment of our degree programmes. A participatory video outreach project carried out in a day centre for people with dementia in 2009 produced a variety of audio-visual material including voice recordings, photographs, and film which people with dementia were directly involved in making, and which are now used as learning resources for students. In a parallel project, former carers contributed to a DVD that was developed as part of a dedicated training programme for Bupa care staff. Students on the MSc Dementia Studies (Training in Dementia Care) pathway are now also beginning to include people with dementia in the training they provide in order to complete their award. A further project to pilot methods of involving service users in long-term care, including those with severe dementia is to begin in March 2011, and early findings from this will also be presented. The presenters include an academic course lead, a MSc student, a researcher, a service user/campaigner, and current and former family carers. We will present using a variety of formats including small case studies, film, audio, photographs and service user narratives. We will also be open to questions and comments about the practical, ethical and educational challenges arising from this ongoing work.

No / The clinical and social epidemiology of living with a life-threatening or life-limiting illness, frail ageing, long-term caregiving, and grief and bereavement is well documented in the palliative care, psycho-oncology and psychiatric literature but this investigation asks what interest exists from the mainstream public health sector in these health and illness experiences. This paper reports a content analysis of 7 key British public health journals, 14 major public health textbooks and 3 public health websites employing key word and synonym searches to assess the size and quality of interest in populations related to ageing, dying, caregiving, and grief and bereavement. Compared with other public health issues, such as obesity and tobacco use, for examples, interest in the social experience and epidemiology of end-of-life experiences is extremely low. Reasons for this lack of interest are explored.

Notre projet de recherche ambitionne de mesurer l’impact sur les activités d’apprentissage des élèves du recours, par les acteurs de la situation didactique, à un enchainement de canaux de communication. Ce phénomène d’enchaînement orchestrant les activités du faire apprendre et de l’apprendre, sont nommés transitions codiques. Il s’agit dans un premier temps d’en montrer l’enjeu scientifique dans le champ de la didactique. Ensuite, il est question d’en circonscrire les caractéristiques essentielles. Enfin, il s’agit d’étudier l’impact différentiel de ces caractéristiques sur les gestes d’étude des élèves. Cette étude, en s’inscrivant dans le paradigme de l’interactionnisme symbolique, exige l’exploitation croisée de trois cadres théoriques en didactique : celui de la théorie des situations didactiques (TSD) qui identifie des typologies de situations organisées autour d’étapes dans la construction d’une connaissance en jeu, celui de la théorie anthropologique du didactique (TAD) qui articule au savoir en jeu la notion de rapport au savoir, et qui substitue cette notion de savoir à celle de praxéologie, et enfin celui de la théorie de l’action conjointe en didactique (TACD), organisé autour de l’idée essentielle que le savoir scolaire ne se définit pas de façon descendante et prescriptive, mais relève aussi d’une transposition ascendante qui induit la nécessaire prise en compte des dimensions d’épistémologie pratique de l’enseignant dans son institution, des actions didactiques et de ces différents descripteurs. Le dispositif mis en place, nous inscrit dans les perspectives comparatistes en didactique selon une approche descriptive et compréhensive en croisant des entretiens, des observations vidéos, et traces prises au vol.Les résultats obtenus mettent en évidence que les transitions codiques constituent l’essentiel du temps d’interaction et s'organisent selon une charge directionnelle, des délais, des degrés d’ostension qui évoluent dans le temps et qui renseignent sur le registre d'action enseignante. Ces caractéristiques varient également selon le mode de convocation des savoirs qui les sous-tendent, à l’interface entre cognition consciente et intuition. Elles structurent une rythmique de l’intervention et de l’interaction différentielle au regard des niveaux de pratique et du genre. Elles pilotent en conséquence les gestes d’étude des élèves. / Our research project aims to measure the impact on pupils' learning activities of the use, by the actors of the didactic situation, of a series of channels of communication. This phenomenon of sequencing orchestrating the activities of learning and learning are called code transitions. It is a question of first showing the scientific stake in the field of didactics. Then, it is a question of circumscribing its essential characteristics. Finally, it is a question of studying the differential impact of these characteristics on the students' gestures of study.This study, in keeping with the paradigm of symbolic interactionism, requires the cross-exploitation of three theoretical frameworks in didactics: that of the theory of didactical situations (TSD) which identifies typologies of situations organized around stages in the construction of a knowledge at stake, that of the anthropological theory of didactics (TAD) which articulates to the knowledge at stake the notion of relation to knowledge, and which substitutes this notion of knowledge for that of praxeology, and finally that of the theory of joint action in didactics (TACD), organized around the essential idea that school knowledge is not defined in a top-down and prescriptive way, but is also an upward transposition which induces the necessary consideration of the dimensions of practical epistemology of the teacher in his institution, didactic actions and these different descriptors.The system put in place, inscribes us in the comparatist perspectives in didactics according to a descriptive and comprehensive approach by crossing interviews, video observations, and traces taken in flight.The results show that the codic transitions constitute the bulk of the interaction time and are organized according to a directional charge, delays, degrees of evolution which evolve over time and which inform the action register. teacher. These characteristics also vary according to the mode of convocation of the knowledge that underlies them, at the interface between conscious cognition and intuition. They structure a rhythm of intervention and differential interaction in terms of levels of practice and gender. They pilot the pupils' gestures of study accordingly

This research explored Chinese college English teachers’ beliefs and conceptual change in relation to the government-mandated shift from the traditional grammar-based approaches to language teaching to communicative language teaching (CLT). This study employed an ethnographic approach and was conducted at a university in China. Six Chinese college English teachers agreed to participate in a three-month study during which their classroom teaching was observed and they were interviewed about their teaching experiences, understanding of the new teaching methods, and interpretations of the curriculum change. Three patterns of conceptual change were found in their beliefs about language teaching and learning: (a) change in teaching methods but no significant change in conceptions and beliefs, (b) change in both teaching methods and conceptions accompanied by painful conceptual conflict, and (c) change in both teaching methods and beliefs and an acquisition of broader curriculum perspectives. The stories and experiences of the participants indicate the complex, non-linear nature of conceptual development in their beliefs about language teaching. They struggled to expand their conceptual space by dwelling in the Zone of Between—between Chinese and Western educational traditions, between social, cognitive, and psychological processes of conceptual growth, between teaching and educating, and between curriculum-as-plan and curriculum-in-use. This study is expected to have suggestions for ongoing college English teaching in China, provide insight for the research of teachers’ beliefs related to curriculum development in other cultural contexts, and inform language teacher education and development programs. / Thesis (Ph.D, Education) -- Queen's University, 2008-08-17 09:08:34.638

In this disseration we propose semi-automated top-down policy engineering approaches for attribute-based access control (ABAC) development. Further, we propose a hybrid ABAC policy engineering approach to combine the benefits and address the shortcomings of both top-down and bottom-up approaches. In particular, we propose three frameworks: (i) ABAC attributes extraction, (ii) ABAC constraints extraction, and (iii) hybrid ABAC policy engineering. Attributes extraction framework comprises of five modules that operate together to extract attributes values from natural language access control policies (NLACPs); map the extracted values to attribute keys; and assign each key-value pair to an appropriate entity. For ABAC constraints extraction framework, we design a two-phase process to extract ABAC constraints from NLACPs. The process begins with the identification phase which focuses on identifying the right boundary of constraint expressions. Next is the normalization phase, that aims at extracting the actual elements that pose a constraint. On the other hand, our hybrid ABAC policy engineering framework consists of 5 modules. This framework combines top-down and bottom-up policy engineering techniques to overcome the shortcomings of both approaches and to generate policies that are more intuitive and relevant to actual organization policies. With this, we believe that our work takes essential steps towards a semi-automated ABAC policy development experience.