Much research has been done to understand the complex process of facial growth and development for decades. Recently, the form and function of the human mandibular symphysis has been of interest. The human symphysis theoretically experiences three types of strains during function, which may influence symphyseal shape and development. These forces are influenced by the size and position of the mandible relative to the muscles that act upon it. The purpose of this study is to determine whether an increase in mandibular length through surgery leads to increased skeletal indicators of resistance to wishboning forces. We retrospectively collected a sample of 47 subjects who had undergone mandibular advancement surgery and compared their pre- and post-surgical radiographs to examine for any changes. The results of our analysis did not provide any evidence to suggest increased wishboning resistance as a result of surgical lengthening. Perhaps there were truly not changes in the symphysis, or that we were unable to detect them due to limitations of using two-dimensional images on an adult population with a relatively short follow-up. Further research is needed to understand the role of function in the form of the human mandibular symphysis.

The Finnish composer Yrjö Kilpinen is not well known today, but in the early twentieth century in Scandinavia, Germany, and England, he was hailed as the successor to Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf in the line of Romantic Lied composers. Many have argued for the inclusion of his music in the American voice studio, but there remain impediments to the performance of his songs in their original language. One of his most poignant and famous cycles, Tunturilauluja, Opp. 52-54, remains inaccessible to most singers who are not fluent in Finnish and do not understand the Finnish culture upon which the songs are based. This essay is a performance guide to these songs and endeavors to make them accessible to sing in their original language. The essay addresses many of the issues that have heretofore prevented performance of this cycle. A guide to Finnish translation and lyric diction is provided in addition to literal and poetic translations and an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription of the cycle. Kilpinen's life and song style is considered, with particular interest afforded to reasons for his marginalization after World War II. The essay contains the first English language source, however brief, on the cycle's obscure poet, the Laplander Vilho Edvard Törmänen. Kilpinen's setting of the poetry, guidelines for choosing individual songs, and the cycle considered as a whole are also discussed. This performance guide takes a multidisciplinary approach to the songs, frequently referencing Finnish culture and Lapland geography, which sheds light on specific links between the landscape, poetry, and music. The essay contains discussions of Finnish art, National Landscape Imagery, and photographs from the author's personal research. This methodology facilitates non-fluent singers to sing this cycle in Finnish.

The conceptual foundation for my creative thesis work is based in research into the development of science, particularly the field of cosmology, and its related visual vocabulary. Three interrelated projects encompass my interests in unique artists' books and variable editions, research based projects, codified presentation of data, and universal interconnectedness, or oneness in all things, that was at the heart of medieval cosmology and is embraced by some 21st century subcultures. The thematic timeline of the artwork spans developments in the Early Middle Ages related to astronomy and cosmology and through 20th century guidebooks and NASA's social media accounts. The resulting artwork includes an artist's book, sculptural bookwork, monoprints, and an edition of broadsides.

Catholics is an artist's book, a limited-edition memoir that makes use of text, image, and tactility. It relates the author's Catholic upbringing as it interweaves several themes: Church history, pre-Christian mythology, and the places where such spiritualities resonate with twentieth-century pop culture.

Transcriptional enhancers represent the primary basis for differential gene expression. These elements regulate cell type specificity, development, and evolution, with many human diseases resulting from altered enhancer activity. To date, a key gap in our knowledge is how enhancers select specific promoters for activation. To fill this gap, in this thesis, I first developed an Integrated Method for Predicting Enhancer Targets (IM-PET). Leveraging abundant “omics” data, I devised and characterized multiple genomic features for distinguishing true enhancer-promoter (EP) pairs from non-interacting pairs. I integrated these features into a probabilistic predictor for EP interactions. Multiple validation experiments demonstrated a significant improvement over extent state-of-the-art approaches. Systematic analyses of EP interactions across twelve human cell types reveals global features of EP interactions. Second, we used a well-established viral infection model to map the dynamic changes of enhancers and super-enhancers during the CD8+ T cell responses. Our analysis illustrated the complexity and dynamics of the underlying EP interactome during cell differentiation. Taking advantage of the predicted EP interactions, we constructed stage-specific transcriptional regulatory networks, which is critical for understanding the regulatory mechanism during CD8+ T cell differentiation. Third, recent progress in mapping technologies for chromatin interactions has led to a rapid increase in this type of interaction data. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive depository for chromatin interactions identified by all major technologies. To address this problem, we have developed the 4DGenome database through comprehensive literature curation of experimentally derived interactions. We envision a wide range of investigations will benefit from this carefully curated database.

An estimated 170.38 million elderly adults suffer from some stage of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) worldwide, a vision defect that damages the macula, the central region of the retina required for sharp vision, such as reading, driving, and recognizing faces. Genetic factors strongly modify one's risk for developing AMD, and most of these genetic changes are found in genes of the alternative complement cascade, a component of the immune system. The lack of effective AMD prevention calls for the identification of druggable molecules and pathways. In my research, I use microarrays and RNA sequencing to investigate the events occurring in early AMD, the reasons for macular susceptibility to AMD, and the events triggering aberrant blood vessel growth in late AMD. First, I found that genes associated with endothelial cells tend to be expressed at lower levels in human donors eyes affected by early AMD than in control eyes, concordant with previous studies indicating loss of choriocapillaris in early AMD. Second, I found that molecular signals across regions of the retina, retinal pigment epithelium, and choroid generally mirror the distribution of cell types in these regions. Third, I found that damage to cultured primate chorioretinal endothelial cells by the end product of complement activation, membrane attack complex, produces an environment conducive to choroidal neovascularization, a symptom of late-stage AMD. I propose a model that bridges genetic variants in the complement cascade genes with blood vessel loss in early AMD and the pathological growth of blood vessels in late AMD.

Orofacial clefts are among the most common congenital defects in the United States, affecting roughly 1 in 600 births annually. A majority of these cases are considered to be “isolated” clefts of the lip and/or palate (ICLP). However the term “isolated” is somewhat of a misnomer, as functional deficits frequently accompany ICLP. One of the most problematic yet understudied of these deficits involves the high prevalence of reading disabilities in this population. It has been estimated that as high as 46% of children with ICLP will be diagnosed with a reading disability, particularly dyslexia. Despite this high prevalence and the well-established neurological basis of dyslexia, relatively little attention has been paid to the role that brain development plays in the reading problems in ICLP. Previous studies from our lab have demonstrated significant changes in brain structure in children with ICLP (that have importantly correlated with functional measures). However we have yet to combine both a structural and functional neuroimaging study with an in-depth analysis of reading dysfunction in this population. The current study examined boys with ICLP, age 8-12 (boys have a higher prevalence of ICLP and show more significant reading problems that girls with ICLP) compared to healthy control boys. Measures of cognitive functioning were obtained with an emphasis on reading and language skills. In addition MRI scans were obtained which included volumetric measures, diffusion-weighted measures (DWI; white matter), and connectivity measures (resting-state fMRI). Even after controlling for the effect of socioeconomic status, boys with ICLP showed significant decreases in reading and language skills (particularly reading fluency). Boys with ICLP did not show significant differences on phonlogical measures (the primary cause of dyslexia). In addition, phonological measures were not predictive of reading fluency, while object naming tasks were predictive of reading fluency in boys with ICLP. For white matter integrity, measures of fractional anisotropy (FA) were found to be increased in the right occipital lobe for boys with ICLP indicating more organized white matter in this region. This increase in right occipital FA was also predictive of better reading outcomes, particularly reading fluency. For more specific white matter tracts, only the fornix and the tapetum (both associated with the temporal lobes) showed a significant difference with a decrease in FA for boys with ICLP. The decrease in FA in the tapetum was also predictive of better reading outcomes in ICLP. When looking at resting-state networks, boys with ICLP showed an increase in connectivity within posterior and subcortical regions when compared to healthy control boys, indicating stronger network connections within the posterior language regions of the brain. Taken together, these results point to differences in both structural and functional connectivity in the brains boys with ICLP. Furthermore, this pattern is different than that found in children with developmental dyslexia as there appears to be no disruption of the posterior reading systems. Cognitive measures also indicate normal phonological awareness in this group, further distinguishing them from dyslexic children. Boys with ICLP instead may be over-relying on these posterior, more visually oriented reading systems as a compensatory mechanism to overcome problems with the development of the typical “lexical route” of reading.

The purpose of this D.M.A. Essay is to highlight the legacy of duo-pianists, Bill and Pat Medley. To that end, this essay will explore: (a) the early biographical information of the Medleys (developing their musical talents in the Depression and World War II Era), (b) the Medleys' concert touring career, including a section on the logistics of travelling with their own concert grand pianos across the United States and Canada, (c) the Medleys' teaching career which included both secondary and pre-college levels, (d) a collection of comical stories learned through personal interviews with the Medleys that speak to their many years of concertizing, and (e) the Medleys' composing and arranging career, which includes a detailed overview of The Medley Way method book series published by The Hal Leonard Corporation and a detailed review and analysis of twenty-two of their educational solos, which were published by the Alfred Music Company, The FJH Music Company, and The Willis Music Company. Bill Medley stated, "As I look back on our lives and the past sixty years, I see two teenagers striking out on a journey that would take them to unfathomable destinations. It would not be done alone, by any means, but with the help of many, many people..." It is my hope that this essay will shed light on a career that has endured sixty plus years and counting. The Medleys' touring career allowed small town communities to experience the art of classical music, who otherwise would not have experienced such beauty. The Medleys' teaching career passed along a musical lineage from their teachers, including Pierre Luboshutz and Genia Nemenoff, along with a composing and arranging career that continues to serve as a pedagogical essence of quality to this day.

The study of Melkisedeq has been highly fragmentary among modern scholars, proving to be difficult to discuss over the long Second Temple Period. This study will focus on the social memory of Melkisedeq to understand the evolution of the tradition surrounding his character among sectarian groups in the Second Temple Period. Through an analysis of the components from the Hebrew Bible that compromise the social memory of Melkisedeq a deeper understanding of how his memory is used by later groups can be made. The redaction and expansion of his character changes greatly over time. The study of social memory allows scholars to understand how different memories form within a collective group, thus exploring the societal and ideological elements of disparate groups that form the over-arching memory of Melkisedeq. In order to properly identify these memories, redactional, historical, and textual criticisms will be employed to analyze the texts of Melkisedeq, answering such questions as: Who is Melkisedeq? What is the relationship between Melkisedeq and the king of Sodom? What is a priest-king? Did Abram tithe to Melkisedeq? This study will address the Near Eastern context of Melkisedeq in Genesis 14, in order to examine which features of his social memory are accentuated or excluded in Second Temple literature.

In this thesis, topologically massive Yang-Mills theory is studied in the framework of geometric quantization. This theory has a mass gap that is proportional to the topological mass m. Thus, Yang-Mills contribution decays exponentially at very large distances compared to 1/m, leaving a pure Chern-Simons theory with level number k. The focus of this research is the near Chern-Simons limit of the theory, where the distance is large enough to give an almost topological theory, with a small contribution from the Yang-Mills term. It is shown that this almost topological theory consists of two copies of Chern-Simons with level number k/2, very similar to the Chern-Simons splitting of topologically massive AdS gravity model. As m approaches to infinity, the split parts add up to give the original Chern-Simons term with level k. Also, gauge invariance of the split CS theories is discussed for odd values of k. Furthermore, a relation between the observables of topologically massive Yang-Mills theory and Chern-Simons theory is obtained. It is shown that one of the two split Chern-Simons pieces is associated with Wilson loops while the other with 't Hooft loops. This allows one to use skein relations to calculate topologically massive Yang-Mills theory observables in the near Chern-Simons limit. Finally, motivated with the topologically massive AdS gravity model, Chern-Simons splitting concept is extended to pure Yang-Mills theory at large distances. It is shown that pure Yang-Mills theory acts like two Chern-Simons theories with level numbers k/2 and -k/2 at large scales. At very large scales, these two terms cancel to make the theory trivial, as required by the existence of a mass gap.