Macromolecular approaches to prevent thrombosis and intimal hyperplasia following percutaneous coronary intervention.

Cardiovascular disease remains one of the largest contributors to death worldwide. Improvements in cardiovascular technology leading to the current generation of drug-eluting stents, bioresorbable stents, and drug-eluting balloons, coupled with advances in antirestenotic therapeutics developed by pharmaceutical community, have had a profound impact on quality of life and longevity. However, these procedures and devices contribute to both short- and long-term complications. Thus, room for improvement and development of new, alternative strategies exists. Two major approaches have been investigated to improve outcomes following percutaneous coronary intervention including perivascular delivery and luminal paving. For both approaches, polymers play a major role as controlled research vehicles, carriers for cells, and antithrombotic coatings. With improvements in catheter delivery devices and increases in our understanding of the biology of healthy and diseased vessels, the time is ripe for development of novel macromolecular coatings that can protect the vessel lumen following balloon angioplasty and promote healthy vascular healing

Balancing Incentives: The Tension Between Basic and Applied Research

This paper presents empirical evidence that the intensity of research workers' incentives for the distinct tasks of basic and applied research are positively associated with each other. We relate this finding to the prediction of the theoretical literature that when effort is multi-dimensional, firms will balance' the provision of incentives; when incentives are strong along one dimension, firms will set high-powered incentives for effort along other dimensions which compete for the worker's effort and attention (Holmstrom and Milgrom, 1991). We test for this effect in the context of pharmaceutical research using detailed data on individual research programs financed by private firms. Consistent with the complementarity hypothesis, we find strong evidence that firms who provide strong promotion-based incentives for individuals to invest in fundamental or basic' research also provide more intense incentives for success in applied research through the capital budgeting process. The intensity of these bonus' incentives is weaker in firms who use a more centralized research budgeting process. We interpret this latter finding as providing support for theories which emphasize substitutability between contractible and non-contractible signals of effort (Baker, Gibbons, and Murphy, 1994).

The Diffusion of Science-Driven Drug Discovery: Organizational Change in Pharmaceutical Research

Recent work linking the adoption of key organizational practices to productivity raises an important question: if adoption increases productivity so dramatically, why does adoption across an industry take so long? This paper explores this question in the context of one particularly interesting practice, the adoption of science driven drug discovery by the modern pharmaceutical industry. Over the past two decades, the established pharmaceutical industry has slowly shifted towards a more science-oriented drug discovery: (a) adopters experienced substantially higher rates of R&D after the late 1970s and (b) the rate of adoption across the industry was extremely slow. Motivated by the apparent contradiction between large boosts in performance and slow rates of adoption, this paper characterizes the sources of differences in rates of adoption between 1980 and 1993. The principal finding is that adoption of a science-oriented research approach was a function of initial conditions, or subject to 'state dependence': some firms simply began the sample period at a much higher level of science orientation. Moreover, while these effects attenuated over time, our empirical results suggest that it took more than ten years before adoption was unrelated to initial conditions. In addition, consistent with theories developed in the context of technology adoption, we find that relative diffusion rates depend on the product market positioning of firms. More surprisingly, adoption rates are seperately driven by the composition of sales within the firm. This latter finding suggests the potential importance of differences among firms in terms of the internal structure of power and attention, an area which has received only a small amount of theoretical attention.

The early middle Palaeolithic of Britain; origins, technology and landscape

This thesis examines technological behaviour during the early British Middle Palaeolithic (Late OIS 9-7), as reflected by lithic artefacts. The British data-set, whilst containing few high-resolution sites providing information relevant to ethnographic-scale behavioural reconstruction, actually forms a valuable corpus of well-contextualised locales within a tightly constrained chronostratigraphic framework. Lithic artefacts from these sites can be used to address broader questions concerning the emergence and nature of particular "Middle Palaeolithic" behaviours; specifically, the emergence of, and variability within, Levallois technology in Britain, and increasing complexity in the organisation of technology in the landscape. The assemblages analysed in this thesis comprise the nine best-preserved British sites dated to this period, which can be placed within secure chronological, geographical and ecological contexts. Whilst previous surveys have emphasised the typological composition of such assemblages, this thesis considers the specific technological behaviours evident at particular locales, in terms of which stages of lithic reduction are represented, what specific Levallois preparatory and exploitation strategies were applied, and how the choices between such options are explicable. On this basis, it is possible to discuss the development of a technologically complex treatment of particular places in the landscape during the early Middle Palaeolithic, linked to the increased transport and curation of particular Levallois products. Whilst on a European scale, such patterns are seen as typical of the Middle Palaeolithic but are essentially undated; this study shows that such behaviours are apparent from at least OIS 8 onwards in Britain, with concomitant implications for our understanding of developing Middle Palaeolithic behaviours in Europe

Meat My Hero: “I have a Dream” of Living Language in the Work of Donna Haraway, Or, Ride ‘Em Cowboy!

Meaning is the product of dialectical negotiations of competing meanings that have their origins in cultural, subcultural, and idiosyncratic differences. Below obvious, surface, or dominant understandings, latent meanings wait to bubble up. This dynamic process of meaning-making suggests that language is, to a certain degree, uncontainable and very lively. Donna Haraway\u27s work can be characterized by an attention to this \u27latency\u27 in language. I argue that Haraway’s use of language is not merely a way of communicating ideas, but constitutes a methodology, theory and praxis all at once, because she obtains “data” by mining latency, because she theorizes the significance of undercurrents and assumptions in phenomena, and because her writing itself demonstrates the very latency she is keen to explore. Here, language demonstrates an immensely generative capacity, such that we can understand language as being “living” – perhaps a companion species, and not merely dead “meat.” Through an analysis of American meat culture and what I call “meat heroism," I mime the infinite recursion in Haraway’s work, adopting her praxis in order to illuminate her praxis in order to illuminate her method which illuminates her theory. This paper is about language, failure, humour, cowboys, hero sandwiches, Martin Luther King Jr., and protein

Predictors of Fish Assemblage Structure and Dynamics in Atlantic Coastal Plain Streams

Effective management of freshwater fishes requires a mechanistic understanding of the drivers of assemblage composition; in other words, what determines who is where and when. Stream fish assemblages are potentially influenced by environmental factors that act on multiple spatiotemporal scales, but the relative influence of these drivers may vary between geophysically distinct regions. This study sought to determine the patterns and drivers of fish taxonomic and functional assemblage composition in the coastal plain, a region possessing unique hydrologies, faunas, and physiochemical conditions. I addressed this goal using two complementary chapters, both of which utilized environmental and biotic data collected from twenty-six wadeable coastal plain streams in the Altamaha, Ogeechee, and Savannah River basins in Georgia during the summers of 2016 and 2017. In the first chapter, I compared the relative influence of both regional landscape-scale (e.g. land use, ecoregion memberships) and local habitat-scale (e.g. water chemistry, stream morphology) environmental factors on species richness and taxonomic assemblage composition. In the second chapter, I tested the abilities of six longstanding ecological models to predict observed longitudinal changes in habitat and fish assemblages in coastal plain streams. Results from this study indicate that both species richness and taxonomic composition of assemblages were influenced by environmental conditions acting at multiple scales, including drainage area, channel sinuosity, water chemistry, and substrate. In addition, coastal plain fish assemblages sorted spatially into two distinctive assemblage types (i.e. “fluvial” and “nonfluvial”) that were characterized by differences in key environmental variables, most of them local in scale. Taxonomic assemblage composition remained stable over time, despite significant annual differences in hydrology. As frequently observed elsewhere, I detected increasing species richness in larger, downstream reaches. However, other longitudinal gradients in environmental conditions and species’ traits showed variable influence for stream size, providing substantial support for the River Continuum Concept, modest support for the Habitat Template Concept, and little support for four other models. I posit that this was because of the naturally harsh physiochemical regime and variable hydrology of coastal plain systems which limited the action of longitudinal filtering mechanisms observed in other regions. This study allows for a better understanding of how and why coastal plain stream fish assemblages are structured taxonomically and functionally, and lends insight into how communities may respond to environmental changes