The Quest for a Technocratic Utopia in Russian Subnational Governance

Technocratic selection could help address two challenges faced by the Russian political regime: the need to prevent the opposition from mobilizing and gaining support through subnational competitively elected offices and the need to ensure popular legitimacy. What we see, though, is technocratic selection either being used for the wrong offices or being applied selectively, rendering it useless or even harmful

SELECTING WISE RULERS? INSTITUTIONAL DETERMINANTS OF POLITICAL LEADERS' PREFERENCES AND BEHAVIOR

Numerous studies explore the effects of leader selection institutions, such as meritocratic appointments or popular elections and their properties, on leader quality and policies. Taking this scholarship one step further, I focus on specific mechanisms connecting selection institutions and leader behavior. In the three articles that constitute this dissertation, I analyze the less studied effects of selection with a particular emphasis on the way it affects perceptions and behaviors of political actors, specifically through mechanisms of self-selection, blame-shifting, and perception of central signals. In the first paper, I demonstrate that the properties of the selection process change the way citizens think when deciding whether to pursue a political career. In a lab experiment, I show that properties normally associated with popular elections lead to the self-selection of more risk-seeking candidates. In the second paper, I demonstrate how the selection of subnational leaders is only a part of the multi-level governance system, in which autonomy also means fewer opportunities to shift blame for policy failures upwards. Based on observational data on Russian municipalities, popularly elected and financially more independent municipal officials make decisions with shorter time horizons – compared to appointed or financially dependent on higher-level budgets. In the third paper, I further explore subnational selection with a focus on appointed governors in Russia. I show that in the years before appointment events, governors adjust regional budget spending to demonstrate alignment with centrally declared policy priorities.Doctor of Philosoph

Synthesis of pyrrolidine-3-carboxylic acid derivatives via asymmetric Michael addition reactions of carboxylate-substituted enones

To concisely synthesize highly enantiomerically enriched 5-alkyl-substituted pyrrolidine-3-carboxylic acids, organocatalytic enantioselective Michael addition reactions of 4-alkyl-substituted 4-oxo-2-enoates with nitroalkanes have been developed. Using the developed reaction method, 5-methylpyrrolidine-3-carboxylic acid with 97% ee was obtained in two steps

Optimized Immobilization of Biomolecules on Nonspherical Gold Nanostructures for Efficient Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance Biosensing

Plasmonic biosensing techniques employ metal nanostructures, commonly gold (Au), often with biomolecules attached to their surfaces either directly or via other linkers. Various surface chemistry methods based on dispersion and covalent interactions are used to attach biomolecules to Au. As a result, when immobilizing a molecule on a metal surface, quantitative estimates of binding efficiency and stability of these surface chemistry methods are needed. Most prior work to compare such methods deals with bulk/thin film configurations or spherical nanoparticles, and very little is known about immobilization of biomolecules on plasmonic nanostructures of different shapes. Besides, due to rapid advancement of modern nanofabrication techniques, there is a growing need to determine an efficient surface chemistry method for immobilization of biomolecules on nonspherical plasmonic nanostructures. Previous comparison of immobilization methods on spherical Au nanoparticles has shown that physical adsorption resulted in the highest concentration of immobilized antibodies. In our work, we conducted a similar study and compared four representative Au surface functionalization methods as well as estimated how efficient these methods are at attaching biomolecules to nonspherical plasmonic Au nanostructures. We estimated the concentration of immobilized antibody that is specific to human C-reactive protein (anti-hCRP) by measuring the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) shifts after exposing the surface of Au nanostructures to the antibody. Our results differ from the previously reported ones since the highest concentration of anti-hCRP was immobilized using 11-mercaptoundecanoic acid (MUA) chemistry. We demonstrated that immobilized antibodies retained their stability and specificity toward hCRP throughout the immunoassay when diluted hCRP or hCRP-spiked human serum samples were used. These findings have important implications for the fields of biosensing and diagnostics that employ nonspherical plasmonic nanostructures since an overall performance of these devices depends on efficient biomolecule immobilization

Estimating Protein-Protein Interactions with High Aspect Ratio Plasmonic Nanopillars

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are crucial for biochemical processes within or among cells, which makes characterizing these interactions essential for understanding the fundamentals of every living organism. PPIs occur between two or more protein molecules that come into physical contact with each other, and are caused by combinations of electrostatic forces, van der Waals interactions, hydrogen bonding, and hydrophobic effects determined by the geometry of these molecules. Due to various interactions taking place even within a single protein molecule, quantifying magnitudes of PPIs in terms of net attraction forces or affinity between different biomolecules remains a challenge. In addition, protein characterization techniques aimed at measuring binding affinities are often time-consuming, require large volumes of analytes, or lack statistical power. To address these issues, I developed a high-throughput technique for quantitative estimation of magnitudes of PPIs inside a microchannel in real-time. I performed these measurements by utilizing the flexible nature of polymer-based nanopillars that were high in aspect ratio (≥ 10), coated with plasmonic metal films, and were positioned inside a microfluidic platform. In the recent years, plasmonic systems have gained significant interest since plasmonic nanostructures have been proven to be extremely sensitive to the refractive index changes in the surroundings, and thus allow highly accurate measurements of concentrations of biomolecules. In this thesis, I built a novel biosensing platform by reshaping the surface of the polystyrene thin film into an array of polystyrene nanopillars using anodized aluminum oxide membranes as templates, followed by deposition of thin films of Ag/Al mixture on the nanopillars’ surface. Next, I compared four most common surface chemistry methods for biomolecule immobilization on non-spherical plasmonic nanostructures, and identified that 11-mercaptoundecanoic acid linkers led to the most reliable and reproducible biosensing results when Ag/Al-coated polystyrene nanopillars were used. Finally, I used this platform to quantify changes in the magnitudes of the transverse resonance modes detected from the sensor surface and utilized that to quantitatively estimate magnitudes of PPIs within streptavidin-biotin and modified streptavidin-biotin biological systems, as well as proposed an analytical method for identifying optimized flow rate conditions for straight microchannels with rectangular cross section. Overall, this opto-microfluidic platform containing high aspect ratio plasmonic nanopillars can be applied to various biomolecular systems, laying foundations to high-throughput realtime detection and quantitative estimation of PPIs based on the detected optical signals with an additional potential of providing an option of multiplex and multiparametric screening.Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate Universit

Management of regional social and economic conflicts under the conditions of the russian crisis 2014-2017: case of the republic of Tatarstan

This paper analyzes various regional conflicts in the conditions of the current Russian social and economic crisis. These conflicts are universal, and arise even in dynamically developing territories and in donor regions. As an example, the case of the Republic of Tatarstan is use

Methods of critical mind’s formation of students, studying "the philosophy’s fundamentals" discipline

This article reviews the problems of critical mind’s formation of students, studying “the philosophy’s fundamentals” discipline. Integrated description of professional competencies given for young experts. Practical application of technology’s basic model of critical mind’s developing on philosophy’s lessons, which can be used in the teacher’s work, is given special emphasis. Author concludes what critical orientation in the work should become the basis for philosophy’s teaching methods of young generation

Budget Priorities in Hybrid Regimes: Elections and the Effect of Crisis

This research project uses public spending to approximate for policy decisions in hybrid regimes. I look at two specific kinds of challenges that may destabilize hybrids - and external economic crisis (in the same way it affects other regimes) and popular elections (which create uncertainty and a dual challenge from masses and elites to the incumbent’s power). Starting from the well-developed research literature on regime survival, I argue that regime stability will depend not only on the severity and nature of challenge to the regime, but also on the response strategy adopted by the incumbent leader. Exploring response strategies through the lens of spending dynamics in the Russian regions in 2001-2014, I build and use a two-dimensional decision space, containing the trade-off between long-term (investment) and short-term (consumption) spending strategies, as well as redistribution between the elites and the mass groups in the short term. I show that the economic crisis is associated with a decrease of spending on supporting the economy and health care (long-term) and an increase of spending on social welfare (short-term). Elections are shown to have a positive effect on spending on the bureaucracy (elite) and a negative effect on mass social welfare programs. That supports the hypotheses that an economic crisis motivates redistribution to immediate needs, and leaders facing elections prefer redistribution to elite groups to ensure their support. Election competitiveness strengthens the latter effect. The proposed theory adds to our understanding of nondemocratic regime functioning and dynamics.Master of Art

Causes of corrosion cracking of pipe metal and methods for their protection

The article is devoted to studying the problem of corrosion cracking of pipelines and methods of their protection. An analysis of the main factors that determine the phenomenon of corrosion cracking is given. The article deals with the issue of identification of corrosion cracking based on the “carbonate theory”. The main methods of protection of metal structures from corrosion cracking are given