School of Biology Theses and Dissertations
Original work in partial fulfillment of a graduate degree in the School of Biology
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Recent Submissions
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Ecological Community Assembly in the Face of Anthropogenic Environmental Changes
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-11-11)Anthropogenic environmental changes, such as increased nitrogen (N) deposition, changes in precipitation regimes, and habitat loss and fragmentation, are known to affect Earth’s ecosystems. Understanding mechanisms regulating ... -
QUANTITATIVE METHODS TO UNDERSTAND REPRODUCTIVE ISOLATION THAT CONTRIBUTE TO SPECIATION
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-10-29)Ever since Darwin’s qualitative theory of the origin of species, there is growing demand for quantitative methods to study mechanisms underlying the speciation process. One key component towards new species formation is ... -
Bioinformatic platforms and methods for worldwide polygenic risk scores
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-08-20)Genetic diversity underpins much of observed human phenotypic diversity and plays an important role in human health and disease. This dissertation is focused on exploring the genetic architecture of phenotypic diversity ... -
Public Health Informatics - Strategy and Decision Modeling
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-08-21)My research is composed of three studies focused on providing decision modeling and analytical tools with the objective of protecting public health. The first study introduces an agent-based simulation platform that serves ... -
Building a systematic analytic pipeline – big data innovation in healthcare
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-08-27)Electronic Health Records (EHR) containing large amount of patient data present both opportunities and challenges to industry, policy makers, and researchers. Data-driven healthcare utilizing big data in EHR has the potential ... -
Biochemical Characterization and Cryo-EM Studies of a Highly Active Spinach Photosystem II Complex
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-11-13)Photosystem II (PSII) is a large, photosynthetic membrane protein complex responsible for water oxidation and the formation of oxygen on Earth. Understanding the structure of this protein is important for studying ... -
Probing pseudomonas aeruginosa physiology during infection using –omics techniques, phenotypic assays and mouse models
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-07-22)The opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa causes severe disease in people with compromised immune systems or co-morbidities such as diabetes or cystic fibrosis. Since even intense antibiotic regimens are often ... -
Fine-mapping of human genetic regulatory variants
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-05-13)The majority of GWAS (Genome-Wide Association Study) identified common genetic variants map to regulatory regions of gene, and are likely to influence disease risk by affecting gene expression. One of the most important ... -
Analysis of the impact of a p53 mutation in a homogeneous genetic background
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-04-21)In more than 50% of cancers, p53, a tumor suppressor gene involved cell cycle arrest and apoptosis, has been seen to be heavily mutated making it an important gene to study. There are several studies on p53 and its role ... -
Climate change & the physiology, ecology, and behavior of coral reef organisms
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-03-16)The magnitude of ocean acidification (OA) and warming predicted to occur within the next century could have significant negative effects for organisms that inhabit coral reefs. Our understanding of how these stressors ... -
Efficient alignment-free software applications for next generation sequencing-based molecular epidemiology
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-01-09)Public health agencies increasingly couple next generation sequencing (NGS) characterization of microbial genomes with bioinformatics analysis methods for molecular epidemiology. The overhead associated with the bioinformatics ... -
Evolutionary benefits of latency in within-host HIV infection dynamics
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-04-30)HIV is a retrovirus that infects helper T cells (CD4 + T cells) in the human immune system. At the cellular scale, HIV generates both actively and latently infected cells. Ac- tively infected cells produce mature virions ... -
Analysis of the role of miRNAs in ovarian cancer metastasis
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-03-27)Cancer mortality is primarily due to metastasis. Metastasis is a complex multi-step process involving, on the molecular level, regulatory control of two key development pathways: epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) ... -
Integrative immunotranscriptomic analysis of long-lived plasma cells
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-05-21)Long-lived plasma cells are a key component of serological memory encoded by the adaptive immune response. To date, prior studies of these cell types have largely assessed plasma cells as one homogenous population. The Lee ... -
Human genetic ancestry, health, and adaptation in Latin America
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-11-05)Genetic admixture is the process that occurs when populations that were previously reproductively isolated, and consequently genetically diverged, come back together and exchange genes. Recent studies of modern and ancient ... -
Global dysregulation of gene expression and tumorigenesis: Data science for cancer
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-09-03)Dysregulation of gene expression is a hallmark of cancer. Broadly speaking, my research is focused on the changes in gene expression that characterize the transition from normal to cancerous states, i.e. tumorigenesis. To ... -
Exploring the ecological and evolutionary consequences of clonal and aggregative development during the transition to multicellularity
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-09-03)Multicellular organisms form groups in one of two basic ways: cells can ‘stay together’ due to incomplete separation following cellular division (clonal development), or cells can ‘come together’ via aggregation (aggregative ... -
Genetic epidemiology algorithms for tracking drug resistance variants and genomic clustering of plasmodium species
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-09-03)The goal of this thesis is to develop algorithms for the analysis of P. falciparum, P. brasilianum, and P. malariae. Malaria is endemic in many parts of the world, including regions of central Africa, South America, and ... -
Densely packed yeast: A tool to study evolution of group dynamics and to enhance biomanufacturing
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2019-08-19)Yeast can thrive in dense assemblages of its own, or our making, resulting in patterns of behavior that differ markedly from that of single planktonic cells. We first studied unicellular yeast that create their own assemblage ... -
Integrating traditional microbiology with cutting-edge (meta-)genomics to advance pathogen detection and to elucidate microbiome signatures of infection
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2018-11-08)Microbes play a central role in human health. Through normal everyday activities, the human body is exposed to countless microorganisms from the environment in addition to the hundreds of species that colonize the human ...
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