Browsing Duke Dissertations by Title

Now showing items 774-793 of 1769

Identifying Critical Biological Effectors in Glioma Initiating Cells

Wang, Hui (2012)

Glioblastoma (GBM) represents the most common and lethal brain tumor in adults, with glioma initiating cells (GICs) implicated to play a critical role in its progression and recurrence. However, the molecular mechanisms ...
Identifying Novel Cardiomyopathy Genes Using Drosophila melanogaster

Casad, Michelle (2012)

Traditional <italic>Drosophila</italic> hearts screens have focused on early patterning and development, and adult heart phenotypes have only recently been pursued due to difficulty in accurately measuring cardiac ...
Identifying Search Space

Dutt, Nilanjana (2013)

This dissertation studies how organizations, when solving a specific problem, identify a set of potential solutions which we call "Search Space." By drawing from evolutionary theory and related literatures on strategic ...
Ideological Segregation: Partisanship, Heterogeneity, and Polarization in the United States

Sparks, David Bruce (2012)

I develop and justify a measure of polarization based on pairwise differences between and within groups, which improves on previous approaches in its ability to account for multiple dimensions and an arbitrary number ...
I. Formal Synthesis of SCH 351448. II. Synthesis and Characterization of Largazole Analogues.

Park, Heekwang (2012)

Part I: Extensive studies for treating hypercholesterolemia, one of the major causes of human morbidity throughout the world, have led to the development of statin drugs-the most prevalent drug prescribed today. In ...
Imagined Democracy: Material Publishing, War, and the Emergence of Democratic Thinking in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, 1855-1867

Haile, Adam (2010)

This dissertation traces the evolution of Whitman's democratic thinking across the first four editions of Leaves of Grass, covering the auspicious years 1855, 1856, 1860 and 1867. While democracy is the master political ...
Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics

Llenín-Figueroa, Carmen Beatriz (2012)

<italic>Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics</italic> confronts islands -at once as a problem, a concept, and a historical and mythical fact and product- by generating a tidalectical encounter between some of the ...
Imaging and Characterizing Human Prostates Using Acoustic Radiation Force

Zhai, Liang (2009)

Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common non-cutaneous cancer in men in the United States. Early detection of PCa is essential for improving treatment outcomes and survival rates. However, diagnosis of PCa at an early ...
Imaging the Cell-Basement Membrane Interface during Anchor Cell Invasion in C. elegans

Hagedorn, Elliott Jennings (2012)

Basement membrane (BM) is the thin, dense, highly cross-linked form of extracellular matrix that underlies all epithelia and endothelia, as well as surrounds muscle, nerve and fat. These sheet-like networks function ...
Imagining Irelands: Migration, Media, and Locality in Modern Day Dublin

Thornburg, Aaron (2011)

This dissertation explores the place of Irish-Gaelic language (Gaeilge) television and film media in the lives of youths living in the urban greater Dublin metropolitan area in the Republic of Ireland. By many accounts, ...
The Immune Response to Acute HIV-1 Infection and the Effect of HAART and HLA Alleles on the Control of Viral Replication

Frahm, Marc (2012)

A fraction of HIV-1 patients are able to successfully control the virus and avoid developing AIDS. It has become increasingly clear that variations in the immune response during the initial days of acute infection ...
Immunity in Caenorhabditis Elegans: a Tale of Two Transcription Factors

TeKippe, Michael Jon (2009)

Recently, the study of invertebrate innate immunity has garnered considerable attention after the discovery that mammalian homologues of the <italic>Drosophila melanogaster</italic> Toll pathway play a role in ...
Impact of Particle Aggregation on Nanoparticle Reactivity

Jassby, David (2011)

The prevalence of nanoparticles in the environment is expected to grow in the coming years due to their increasing pervasiveness in consumer and industrial applications. Once released into the environment, nanoparticles ...
Impacts of Geological Variability on Carbon Storage Potential

Eccles, Jordan Kaelin (2011)

The changes to the environment caused by anthropogenic climate change pose major challenges for energy production in the next century. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a group of technologies that would permit the ...
Imperial Splenda: Globalization, Culture, and Type 2 Diabetes in the U.S. and Japan

Armstrong-Hough, Mari Jean (2011)

Globalization scholars have disagreed about the effects of globalization on the production and reproduction of difference: Do fundamental differences endure, do cultures converge, or is there hybridization? This ...
Implicated Role of Endocytosis in the Internalization and Intracellular Transport of Plasmid DNA During Electric Field-Mediated Gene Delivery

Wu, Mina (2011)

Electric field mediated gene delivery (EFMGD) or electrotransfection is a popular, non-viral gene delivery method that has been used in a variety of studies and applications ranging from basic cell biology research to ...
Implicit, Eclipsed, but Functional: the Development of Orthographic Knowledge in Early Readers

Kaefer, Tanya (2009)

Although most models of reading development present orthographic knowledge as a more advanced and later developing form of knowledge than phonological knowledge, this dissertation presents a model of the development of ...
Improved Endocardial Border Definition with Short-Lag Spatial Coherence (SLSC) Imaging

Lediju Bell, Muyinatu A. (2012)

Clutter is a problematic noise artifact in a variety of ultrasound applications. Clinical tasks complicated by the presence of clutter include detecting cancerous lesions in abdominal organs (e.g. livers, bladders) and ...
An Improved W Boson Mass Measurement using the Collider Detector at Fermilab

Zeng, Yu (2012)

The mass of the $W$ boson is one of the most important parameters in the Standard Model. A precise measurement of the $W$ boson mass, together with a precise measurement ...
Improving Models of Forest Carbon and Water Cycling: Revisiting Assumptions and Incorporating Variability

Ward, Eric Jason (2012)

This dissertation examines issues concerning sap flux scaled estimates of the canopy-averaged transpiration rate of trees per unit leaf area (EL) and stomatal conductance (GS), as well as their ...