In-Work Recovery Among Hybrid Employees: Examining the Relationships Between Stressors, Recovery Experiences, and Strains

There has been a drastic increase in the number of hybrid employees (i.e., employees who work remotely for part of a workweek) since the COVID-19 pandemic. While previous research has highlighted some of the benefits and costs of remote work, research on hybrid work is still in its early stages. One area that remains unclear is how hybrid work relates to stressor experiences and in-work recovery from work. The present study examined how levels of specific stressors (i.e., workload, availability pressure) vary depending on whether employees work remotely or in the office, and how the variations of these stressors across days relate to strain outcomes (i.e., emotional exhaustion, work-family conflict). It also examined how levels of in-work recovery experiences (i.e., relaxation, enjoyment, break-need fit) vary depending on work location and relate to strain outcomes. Lastly, recovery experiences were examined as a potential moderator in the stressor-strain relationship. Data were collected from 64 participants across 10 workdays. Multilevel analyses found that on days when employees worked from home, they experienced lower workload and higher levels of recovery experiences compared to days when they worked in the office. Further, recovery experiences were negatively related to emotional exhaustion and work-family conflict, while workload and availability pressure were positively related to work-family conflict. Only workload but not availability pressure was positively related to emotional exhaustion. Lastly, relaxation was the only significant moderator in the stressor-strain relationship with relaxation moderating the positive relationship between workload and work-family conflict. Findings of this study extend our understanding of how hybrid employees\u27 stressor and in-work recovery experiences vary depending on work location, their impact on hybrid employees’ strains, and how in-work recovery affects stressor-strain relationships

Rational Design of Peptide-Based Materials Informed by Multiscale Molecular Dynamics Simulations

The challenge of establishing a sustainable and circular economy for materials in medicine and technology necessitates bioinspired design. Nature\u27s intricate machinery, forged through evolution, relies on a finite set of biomolecular building blocks with through-bond and through-space interactions. Repurposing these molecular building blocks requires a seamless integration of computational modeling, design, and experimental validation. The tools and concepts developed in this thesis pioneer new directions in peptide-materials design, grounded in fundamental principles of physical chemistry. We present a synergistic approach that integrates experimental designs and computational methods, specifically molecular dynamics simulations, to gain in-depth molecular insights crucial for advancing the design of sustainable, bio-inspired (nano)technology for both biological and materials applications

Beyond the Reach of Legal Process – Lessons From United States v Rafiekian

The influence of foreign agents on the domestic affairs of countries is now a major issue in global affairs. This issue gained significance after foreign influence was blamed for a massive protest demanding fair election, rocked Moscow in 2011. It has been amplified after Russian involvement was cited for Donald Trump’s surprised election as President of the United States in 2016. There is now great anxiety among nations that foreign actors could influence electoral outcomes. Consequently, the past decade has seen a proliferation of laws regulating the operation of foreign agents within a country. Aggressive enforcement of Foreign Agents laws has brought to the foreground, the question of jurisdictional sovereignty. When is someone beyond the reach of legal process of a country? As countries seek to blunt the impact of foreign influence in their domestic affairs, they are finding novel ways to test the limit of their jurisdiction. This article explores the limit of the criminal jurisdiction of a country. It does so through the lens of United States v. Rafiekian and the decision of a small state to serve foreign criminal summonses in the U.S. to obtain jurisdiction over persons within the United States

K-pop Fan Activism: The Intercultural Expectations of Korean Entertainment Companies Engaging in Global Social Movements

This paper examines the K-pop fan activism directed at Korean entertainment agencies to urge engagement with the Black Lives Matter movement. Data was gathered fans’ hashtag campaigns on Twitter (now known as X) during June 2020 and analyzed through content analysis. The resulting comparative study asks how activist campaigns affected international opinion of the K-pop industry. Through this analysis, I seek to understand how fans’ desire to see foreign companies engage with a global social movement, and how the company\u27s resulting action impacts fans\u27 perception of the industry as a global culture force

Stereospecific Cross-Coupling Reactions of Vinyl Triflates and An Investigation of the Synthesis and Reactivity of Activated Alkyltricyclohexylstannanes

Organic chemistry exists in all aspects of everyday life from polymers to pharmaceutics. Formation of carbon-carbon bonds is essential for the synthesis of complex organic compounds. This goal can be achieved by using transition metal catalysts. Second-row transition metals such as Pd, Pt, Rh, and Ir have shown remarkable efficacy in these reactions. Metal-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions form carbon-carbon bonds between electrophiles and nucleophiles using transition metal catalysts. Pd is mainly used in this reaction. Transition metal-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions that form a bond between two C(sp2) carbons have been widely studied over the past decades. C(sp2)-C(sp3) cross-coupling, however, faces many complications that can result in unwanted products, including the formation of isomers, racemates, and elimination products. The Stille reaction uses organotin compounds as nucleophiles in cross-coupling reactions. Our lab has designed reaction conditions to avoid unwanted β-hydride elimination pathways and enable unactivated alkyl tin compounds to undergo transmetallation and proceed through the catalytic pathway to give the desired cross-coupling product. Furthermore, we show that our system is highly stereospecific. While cross-coupling reactions between a C(sp3) organotin compound and an aryl C(sp2) electrophile have been previously studied, vinyl systems have not been used as electrophiles. The third chapter of this report focuses on our attempt to study the cross-coupling between vinyl systems as electrophiles. Another challenge in Stille reaction arises from the undesired transmetallation of spectator ligands from tin to palladium. Our lab showed when using tricyclohexyl groups as spectator ligands on tin if the 4th ligand is slightly more activated than a secondary alkyl group, we can selectively transmetallate the desired ligand unto tin. The 5th and 6th chapter of this report addresses the formation and reactivity of several of these alkyl tin compounds

Epistemic Theatres: The Dramaturgy of Knowledge in Twenty-First Century Theatre

In this dissertation, I draw upon theatre and performance literature, science and technology studies, and art theory to attend the distinctive dramaturgical features of lecture-performance and other contemporary examples of epistemic theatres. After theorizing their roots, their causes, and their objectives, I build on the intrinsic and mutual links these performances develop between theatre and knowledge to justify and develop novel academic modes of response that consider theatre as a method, and not merely an object, of humanistic study. I propose that a theatricalization of knowledge—or rather, a more explicit acknowledgement of knowledge’s engrained theatricality—helps in developing intellectual-academic responses not only to the new forms of theatre, but also to the spirit of information that birthed it

Teaching in the “Home Language” Is not Enough: Navigating Spanish Raciolinguistic Ideologies in a Dual Language Bilingual Program

This ethnographic case study examines how fourth graders in a New York City Spanish/English dual language bilingual public school navigate hegemonic language ideologies about Spanish. Drawing on the scholarship of raciolinguistic ideologies—those that position the language practices of people of color as inherently deficient (Flores & Rosa, 2015), I analyze the discourse of seven Kiskeyanx students to examine how they navigate the widespread raciolinguistic marginalization of Kiskeyanxs— a demographic that is racialized as more Black than other Spanish-speaking groups. As a first-generation Kiskeyana-New Yorker, a bilingual teacher educator and researcher, and a former dual language bilingual public-school teacher, it was important for me to center self-reflexivity in this research. Before beginning the case study, I engaged in autohistoria-teoría—an Anzaldúan framing of autoethnography— to examine my own experiences navigating hegemonic ideologies. By analyzing personal and collective herstories, poems, letters, photos, and reflexive memos, I was able to see all the choques (Anzaldúa, 1987) I’ve experienced from kindergarten to the present day— the collisions, contradictions, and complicated dynamics brought on by trying to survive within oppressive systems. Similarly, my analysis of student interviews, classroom observations, and students’ schoolwork brings to light the complex and contradictory ways in which the raciolinguistically marginalized fourth graders navigate oppressive ideologies about themselves. Guided by el conocimiento del cuerpo (Juarez Mendoza & Aponte, 2021) and moment analysis (Li Wei, 2011), I observed tensions and choques in the ways students both aligned with hegemonic ideologies about Kiskeyanxs while also resisting dominant perceptions about their speech. While students expressed pride in their Dominicanness and critiqued limiting raciolinguistic ideologies, they also conveyed an internalization of raciolinguistic ideologies that conflate Kiskeyanxs with linguistic deficiency and inferiority. Students communicated the need to surveil their speech based on discourses of appropriateness (Flores & Rosa, 2015) that relegate their “Dominican” language practices as appropriate for home and Whitestream Spanish as appropriate for school. Ideologies of linguistic purism were also evident in the ways students held themselves to monoglossic expectations of what it means to be fluent in Spanish. This dissertation calls attention to the hegemony of violent colonial ideologies that pervade even this dual language bilingual school that works intentionally to counter them. To move towards the anti-racist bilingual schooling that civil rights activists envisioned, I discuss potentials for an anti-colonial approach to bilingual education that addresses the deep-seated racist colonial foundations of raciolinguistic ideologies

Digital Rhetoric of the Invisible: Bisexual Literacy Practices on TikTok, 2020–2021

This dissertation uses auto- and digital-ethnographic methods to analyze the literacy practices of bisexual TikTok users primarily during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, during which time TikTok exploded in popularity among U.S. social media users, especially among young adults. It is also an exercise in neuroqueer composing, diverging at times from the norms of academic writing and the dissertation genre to perform and intentionally draw attention to neuroqueer styles of thinking and communication. I argue that bisexual invisibility and contemporary bi+ rhetorical activity must be understood within the context of LGBTQ+ political history, particularly debates around separatism versus solidarity. Videos posted in the #BiTok (bisexual TikTok) hashtag on TikTok show bisexual users using strategies such as humor, reparative reading (especially the fandom practice of headcanoning), reclamation of negative stereotypes, and intentional (although tongue-in-cheek) generation of new stereotypes to create a sense of shared bisexual culture and signifiers that differentiate bi+ people from monosexual lesbian and gay people while affirming bi+ people’s place within the broader LGBTQ+ community (or “alphabet mafia,” as it’s known on TikTok) and combatting heteropessimism. These literacy practices mark a positive evolution of bi+ social media culture (such as it exists) compared to the discursive environment on Tumblr approximately 10 years earlier. Throughout the dissertation, I also attempt to grapple with the ethical and political responsibilities of studying bisexual digital literacies during a time of historic attacks on trans people both in the United States and around the world, and how scholarly research sometimes exists at odds with more immediate political exigencies

Targeting Strategies to Optimize the Therapeutic Potential of Gold Compounds Against HER2-Positive Breast Cancers

The overexpression of HER2 accounts for 20-30% of breast cancer tumors and not only serves as a marker for poor predictive clinical outcomes but also as a target for treatment. Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) combine the selectivity of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) with the efficacy of chemotherapeutic drugs to provide targeted treatment without toxicity to normal tissue. Most of the ADCs currently in the clinic for cancer chemotherapy are based on complex organic molecules. In contrast, the conjugation of metallodrugs to mAbs has been overlooked when there is enormous potential in this area with the resurgence of metal-based drugs as prospective cancer chemotherapeutics. In this study, we have evaluated the efficacy of gold(I)- based cytotoxic payloads in ADCs based on the HER2 targeted mAb, Trastuzumab, Pertuzumab and THIOMAB®. The ADCs were selective and highly efficacious towards HER2-positive breast cancer cells. We then assessed the anti-tumor efficacy of a selected gold-based ADC in a HER2- positive tumor-bearing mouse model and found the ADCs to be exceedingly potent in reducing tumor size by 81% with little to no toxicity in the animals. In addition to this, we aimed to develop a method of drug delivery combining liposomal formulations and HER2 targeted mAbs in the form of immunoliposomes to further increase the cytotoxic gold-payload content. These nanocarriers are advantageous in that they have an extended blood circulation time, allowing for higher accumulation in the tumor, they are much more sensitive towards the tumor micro-environment, and they allow for precise control of drug release. We have demonstrated that immunoliposomes containing gold(I)-phosphane species are cytotoxic and selective to HER-2 positive breast cancer cells. The encapsulation of a gold compound containing a fluorescent phosphane, allowed us to study the localization of the free vs. encapsulated drug by confocal microscopy. These studies showed that while the free drug localizes to lysosomes to be sequestered and degraded, the encapsulated and targeted drug accumulated more inside the cells and localized to the mitochondria and ER, indicating that protection by liposomal vesicles prevents early degradation of the compound and better internalization. Taken together, the development of gold- based ADCs and immunoliposomes with specific targeting and cytotoxic abilities exhibit tremendous potential in the field of metal-based drugs and nanocarrier systems and may be highly relevant for clinical translation