Postpartum Fatigue in the Active Duty Military Woman

Up to 16,000 military women annually experience the birth of a child. Barring complications, regulations require a return to work 42 days postpartum, making them susceptible to the effects of postpartum fatigue. The purpose of this descriptive, longitudinal study of 109 military women was to describe fatigue levels across the first 6–8 weeks postpartum; to describe the relationship among selected psychological, physiological, and situational variables of fatigue; and to examine the relationship between predictor variables, fatigue levels, and performance after childbirth. The majority of the sample were married or partnered enlisted women in the U.S. Navy with a mean age of 25 (±5) years. Descriptive statistics, repeated measures ANOVA, correlation, and regression were used to analyze the data. Women were found to be moderately fatigued across time and there was no change in fatigue levels from 2 to 6–8 weeks postpartum. Study variables of type of delivery, lactogenesis, depression, anxiety, maternal sleep, and infant temperament correlated with fatigue during hospitalization and at 2 weeks postpartum. Depression, anxiety, maternal sleep, and performance correlated with fatigue at 6–8 weeks postpartum. Regression analyses indicated that maternal anxiety during hospitalization and at 2 weeks postpartum explained 6% and 20% of the variance in fatigue at 6–8 weeks postpartum. Over half of the women had not regained full functional status when they returned to work and 40% still displayed symptoms of postpartum depression and anxiety. Future research is needed to examine issues surrounding depression and anxiety of military women, including exploration of its causes in both the prenatal and postpartum periods. Designing interventions to reduce fatigue symptoms among military postpartum women may result in improved parenting, decreased healthcare costs, workplace accidents, increased job satisfaction, breastfeeding rates, and physical readiness. Reducing fatigue in this population has the potential benefit of a significant cost-savings to the United States government as well as an improved quality of life for military families

Some Exactly Solvable Models And Their Asymptotics

In this thesis, we present three projects studying exactly solvable models in the KPZ universality class and one project studying a generalization of the SIR model from epidemiology. The first chapter gives an overview of the results and how they fit into the study of KPZ universality when applicable. Each of the following 4 chapters corresponds to a published or submitted article. In the first project, we study an oriented first passage percolation model for the evolution of a river delta. We show that at any fixed positive time, the width of a river delta of length L approaches a constant times L²/³ with Tracy-Widom GUE fluctuations of order L⁴/⁹. This result can be rephrased in terms of a particle system generalizing pushTASEP. We introduce an exactly solvable particle system on the integer half line and show that after running the system for only finite time the particle positions have Tracy-Widom fluctuations. In the second project, we study n-point sticky Brownian motions: a family of n diffusions that evolve as independent Brownian motions when they are apart, and interact locally so that the set of coincidence times has positive Lebesgue measure with positive probability. These diffusions can also be seen as n random motions in a random environment whose distribution is given by so-called stochastic flows of kernels. For a specific type of sticky interaction, we prove exact formulas characterizing the stochastic flow and show that in the large deviations regime, the random fluctuations of these stochastic flows are Tracy-Widom GUE distributed. An equivalent formulation of this result states that the extremal particle among n sticky Brownian motions has Tracy-Widom distributed fluctuations in the large n and large time limit. These results are proved by viewing sticky Brownian motions as a diffusive limit of the exactly solvable beta random walk in random environment. In the third project, we study a class of probability distributions on the six-vertex model, which originates from the higher spin vertex model. For these random six-vertex models we show that the behavior near their base is asymptotically described by the GUE-corners process. In the fourth project, we study a model for the spread of an epidemic. This model generalizes the classical SIR model to account for inhomogeneity in the infectiousness and susceptibility of individuals in the population. A first statement of this model is given in terms of infinitely many coupled differential equations. We show that solving these equations can be reduced to solving a one dimensional first order ODE, which is easy to solve numerically. We use the explicit form of this ODE to characterize the total number of people who are ever infected before the epidemic dies out. This model is not related to the KPZ universality class

Ludwig Spohr und Friedrich Rochlitz : ihre Beziehungen nach ungedruckten Briefen

Die hier zum ersten Male gedruckten Briefe stammen aus der Autographen-Sammlung des Herrn Fritz Donebauer in Prag, der mir in der liebenswürdigsten und zuvorkommendsten Weise deren Veröffentlichung gestattet hat. Dafür danke ich ihm im eigenen Namen aufs wärmste, aber ich darf ihm sicher auch im Namen aller derjenigen danken, die vielleicht einmal aus dem interessanten Inhalt dieser Briefe Einzelheiten für Arbeiten über Spohr oder über Rochlitz oder über das Oratorium finden, Details, denen bisher in der in Frage kommenden Literatur keine Beachtung geschenkt werden konnte. Von Spohr kann ich leider nur 5 Briefe an Rochlitz mitteilen, dagegen 32 Briefe Rochlitz' an Spohr. ..

Selective Enrichment and Identification of Azide-tagged Cross-Linked Peptides Using Chemical Ligation and Mass Spectrometry

Protein-protein interaction is one of the key regulatory mechanisms for controlling protein function in various cellular processes. Chemical cross-linking coupled with mass spectrometry has proven to be a powerful method not only for mapping protein-protein interactions of all natures, including weak and transient ones, but also for determining their interaction interfaces. One critical challenge remaining in this approach is how to effectively isolate and identify cross-linked products from a complex peptide mixture. In this work, we have developed a novel strategy using conjugation chemistry for selective enrichment of cross-linked products. An azide-tagged cross-linker along with two biotinylated conjugation reagents were designed and synthesized. Cross-linking of model peptides and cytochrome c as well as enrichment of the resulting cross-linked peptides has been assessed. Selective conjugation of azide-tagged cross-linked peptides has been demonstrated using two strategies: copper catalyzed cycloaddition and Staudinger ligation. While both methods are effective, Staudinger ligation is better suited for enriching the cross-linked peptides since there are fewer issues with sample handling. LC MSn analysis coupled with database searching using the Protein Prospector software package allowed identification of 58 cytochrome c cross-linked peptides after enrichment and affinity purification. The new enrichment strategy developed in this work provides useful tools for facilitating identification of cross-linked peptides in a peptide mixture by MS, thus presenting a step forward in future studies of protein-protein interactions of protein complexes by cross-linking and mass spectrometry

Large vector spaces of block-symmetric strong linearizations of matrix polynomials

Given a matrix polynomial P(lambda) = Sigma(k)(i=0) lambda(i) A(i) of degree k, where A(i) are n x n matrices with entries in a field F, the development of linearizations of P(lambda) that preserve whatever structure P(lambda) might posses has been a very active area of research in the last decade. Most of the structure-preserving linearizations of P(lambda) discovered so far are based on certain modifications of block-symmetric linearizations. The block-symmetric linearizations of P(lambda) available in the literature fall essentially into two classes: linearizations based on the so-called Fiedler pencils with repetition, which form a finite family, and a vector space of dimension k of block-symmetric pencils, called DL(P), such that most of its pencils are linearizations. One drawback of the pencils in DL(P) is that none of them is a linearization when P(lambda) is singular. In this paper we introduce new vector spaces of block,symmetric pencils, most of which are strong linearizations of P(lambda). The dimensions of these spaces are O(n(2)), which, for n >= root k, are much larger than the dimension of DL(P). When k is odd, many of these vector spaces contain linearizations also when P(lambda) is singular. The coefficients of the block-symmetric pencils in these new spaces can be easily constructed as k x k block-matrices whose n x n blocks are of the form 0, +/-alpha I-n, +/-alpha A(i), or arbitrary n x n matrices, where a is an arbitrary nonzero scalar.The research of F. M. Dopico was partially supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain through grant MTM-2012-3254

(+)-Hexacyclinol

A sample of the title compound [systematic name: (1aS,2aS,3S,5aS,6aS,7R,7aS,7bS,8R,8aS,10R)-7-hydr­oxy-3-(1-meth­oxy-1-methyl­ethyl)-10-(2-methyl-1-propen­yl)-1a,5a,6a,7,7a,7b,8,8a-octa­hydro-2H-8,2a-(epoxy­methano)phenanthro[2,3-b:6,7-b′]bis­oxirene-2,5(3H)-dione], C23H28O7, was generated by enanti­oselective synthesis. There are three mol­ecules of the compound in the crystallographic asymmetric unit. Hydrogen bonding between alcohol H atoms and keto groups of adjacent mol­ecules appears to stabilize the structure. The compound is enanti­omerically pure but the absolute configuration could not be determined directly in this study. Accordingly, the illustrated configuration was assigned on the basis of the nature of the chiral nonracemic precursor used in the synthesis

Stereodivergent Synthesis of Enantioenriched 4-Hydroxy-2- cyclopentenones

Protected 4-hydroxycyclopentenones (4-HCPs) constitute an important class of intermediates in chemical synthesis. A route to this class of compound has been developed. Key steps include Noyori reduction (which establishes the stereochemistry of the product), ring-closing metathesis, and simple functional group conversions to provide a set of substituted 4-HCPs in either enantiomeric form