ORIENTING NEW INTERNATIONAL COLLEGE STUDENTS DURING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC: SPATIALITY’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO STAFF WORK PRACTICES

U.S. colleges must increasingly respond to a wide range of complex forces and simultaneously fulfill their missions and support students. To address many of these forces, some have turned to internationalization efforts like recruiting and enrolling international students. In light of these efforts, critics have called for institutions to better, more appropriately support these students, given their challenges and needs. This call has amplified during the recent COVID-19 global health pandemic. Traditional student support services tend to center around Tinto’s Theory of Student Departure. Examples of support programming are frequently shared, yet rarely detail how institutional staff actually perform them through everyday work within the institution as a complex organization. This study addresses these critiques by drawing upon alternative lenses to explore how spatiality contributes to how staff work to produce a new international student orientation event, as form of student service. To do so, this dissertation utilizes concepts of relational space, spatiality, and events, which situate orientation work as a network of diverse social and material relations. A mini-ethnographic case study permitted the tracing of different sociomaterial relations between several staff members and the objects with which they interacted at Southeastern Urban University. Following observations, participant interviews, and artifact review, several central, material actors shaped staff work practices within the orientation-network: U.S. immigration policy, institutional policy, technologies-in-use, uncertainty, and risk. Analysis revealed that the pre-COVID-19 orientation-network remained stable over time, due to the power and agency of certain actors to hold it together. The fall 2020 orientation-network was disrupted, though still yielded an event, due to fluid actors and staff improvisation. Findings suggest that the event during the pandemic required a unique assemblage of people and materials, much due to a constant presence of uncertainty and risk. Staff adapted work practices to maintain their ability to produce the orientation. With these findings, this study offers recommendations that challenge dominant notions of space, materials, and other actors as possessing inherent qualities. Utilizing a relational view of practices like orienting, as consisting of messy actor-networks offers a way of opening up student support services and (re)imaging how they could transform to enable U.S. colleges to fulfill their priorities while optimally serving their students

Advising Experiences of First Year International Doctoral Students

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how international doctoral students were matched with their faculty advisors and how their advising experiences and satisfaction were shaped by their academic discipline. We applied the lens of developmental advising to situate the advising experiences of our sample because of the framework’s emphasis on holistic support and student development. We conducted individual semistructured interviews with 21 international doctoral students attending a large research-intensive university in the Southeast. Most participants were assigned to an interim advisor, but the data revealed concerning differences in the type of advising experiences and support based on academic discipline. This study contributes to the body of literature by exploring advisor–advisee matching among international doctoral students and by further analyzing how disciplinary cultures shape perceptions of satisfaction with advising

The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

Strategies to Target Tumor Immunosuppression

The tumor microenvironment is currently in the spotlight of cancer immunology research as a key factor impacting tumor development and progression. While antigen-specific immune responses play a crucial role in tumor rejection, the tumor hampers these immune responses by creating an immunosuppressive microenvironment. Recently, major progress has been achieved in the field of cancer immunotherapy, and several groundbreaking clinical trials demonstrated the potency of such therapeutic interventions in patients. Yet, the responses greatly vary among individuals. This calls for the rational design of more efficacious cancer immunotherapeutic interventions that take into consideration the “immune signature” of the tumor. Multimodality treatment regimens that aim to enhance intratumoral homing and activation of antigen-specific immune effector cells, while simultaneously targeting tumor immunosuppression, are pivotal for potent antitumor immunity

Search for dijet resonances using events with three jets in proton-proton collisions at root s=13 TeV

A search for a narrow resonance with a mass between 350 and 700 GeV, and decaying into a pair of jets, is performed using proton-proton collision events containing at least three jets. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 18.3 fb(-1) recorded at root s = 13 TeV with the CMS detector. Data are collected with a technique known as "data scouting", in which the events are reconstructed, selected, and recorded at a high rate in a compact form by the high-level trigger. The three-jet final state provides sensitivity to lower resonance masses than in previous searches using the data scouting technique. The spectrum of the dijet invariant mass, calculated from the two jets with the largest transverse momenta in the event, is used to search for a resonance. No significant excess over a smoothly falling background is found. Limits at 95% confidence level are set on the production cross section of a narrow dijet resonance and compared with the cross section of a vector dark matter mediator coupling to dark matter particles and quarks. Translating to a model where the narrow resonance interacts only with quarks, upper limits on this coupling range between 0.10 and 0.15, depending on the resonance mass. These results represent the most stringent upper limits in the mass range between 350 and 450 GeV obtained with a flavor-inclusive dijet resonance search. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.Peer reviewe

Measurement of the Y(1S) pair production cross section and search for resonances decaying to Y(1S)μ⁺μ⁻ in proton-proton collisions at √s = 13 TeV

The fiducial cross section for Y(1S) pair production in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV in the region where both Y(1S) mesons have an absolute rapidity below 2.0 is measured to be 79±11(stat)±6(syst)±3(B) pb assuming the mesons are produced unpolarized. The last uncertainty corresponds to the uncertainty in the Y(1S) meson dimuon branching fraction. The measurement is performed in the final state with four muons using proton-proton collision data collected in 2016 by the CMS experiment at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 35.9fb⁻¹. This process serves as a standard model reference in a search for narrow resonances decaying to Y(1S)μ⁺μ⁻ in the same final state. Such a resonance could indicate the existence of a tetraquark that is a bound state of two b quarks and two b antiquarks. The tetraquark search is performed for masses in the vicinity of four times the bottom quark mass, between 17.5 and 19.5 GeV, while a generic search for other resonances is performed for masses between 16.5 and 27 GeV. No significant excess of events compatible with a narrow resonance is observed in the data. Limits on the production cross section times branching fraction to four muons via an intermediate Y(1S) resonance are set as a function of the resonance mass

Determination of the strong coupling constant α_S(m_Z) from measurements of inclusive W± and Z boson production cross sections in proton-proton collisions at √s = 7 and 8 TeV

Twelve measurements of inclusive cross sections of W± and Z boson production, performed in proton-proton collisions at centre-of-mass energies of 7 and 8 TeV, are compared with perturbative quantum chromodynamics calculations at next-to-next- to-leading order (NNLO) accuracy obtained with the CT₁₄, HERAPDF2.0, MMHT₁₄, and NNPDF_(3.0) parton distribution functions (PDFs). Data and theory agree well for all PDF sets, taking into account the experimental and theoretical uncertainties. A novel procedure is employed to extract the strong coupling constant at the Z pole mass from a detailed comparison of all the experimental fiducial cross sections to the corresponding NNLO theoretical predictions, yielding α_S(m_Z) = 0.1163^(+0.0024)_(−0.0031) (CT₁₄), 0.1072^(+0.0043)_(−0.0040) (HERAPDF_(2.0)), 0.1186 ± 0.0025 (MMHT₁₄), and 0.1147 ± 0.0023 (NNPDF_(3.0)). Using the results obtained with the CT₁₄ and MMHT₁₄ PDFs, which yield the most robust and stable α_S(m_Z) extractions, a value α_S(m_Z) = 0.1175^(+0.0025)_(−0.0028) is determined

Search for physics beyond the standard model in events with jets and two same-sign or at least three charged leptons in proton-proton collisions at s=13 TeV\sqrt{s}=13\,{\text {TeV}}

A data sample of events from proton-proton collisions with at least two jets, and two isolated same-sign or three or more charged leptons, is studied in a search for signatures of new physics phenomena. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 137fb$^{-1}$ at a center-of-mass energy of 13TeV, collected in 2016–2018 by the CMS experiment at the LHC. The search is performed using a total of 168 signal regions defined using several kinematic variables. The properties of the events are found to be consistent with the expectations from standard model processes. Exclusion limits at 95% confidence level are set on cross sections for the pair production of gluinos or squarks for various decay scenarios in the context of supersymmetric models conserving or violating R parity. The observed lower mass limits are as large as 2.1TeV for gluinos and 0.9TeV for top and bottom squarks. To facilitate reinterpretations, model-independent limits are provided in a set of simplified signal regions

A measurement of the Higgs boson mass in the diphoton decay channel

A measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson in the diphoton decay channel is presented. This analysis is based on 35.9 fb(-1) of proton-proton collision data collected during the 2016 LHC running period, with the CMS detector at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. A refined detector calibration and new analysis techniques have been used to improve the precision of this measurement. The Higgs boson mass is measured to be m(H) = 125.78 +/- 0.26GeV. This is combined with a measurement of m(H) already performed in the H -> ZZ -> 4l decay channel using the same data set, giving m(H) = 125.46 +/- 0.16GeV. This result, when further combined with an earlier measurement of m(H) using data collected in 2011 and 2012 with the CMS detector, gives a value for the Higgs boson mass of m(H) = 125.38 +/- 0.14GeV. This is currently the most precise measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.Peer reviewe

Measurement of the cross section for t(t)over-bar production with additional jets and b jets in pp collisions at root s=13TeV

Measurements of the cross section for the production of top quark pairs in association with a pair of jets from bottom quarks (sigma(t (t) over barb (b) over bar)) and in association with a pair of jets from quarks of any flavor or gluons (sigma(t (t) over bar jj)) and their ratio are presented. The data were collected in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2016 and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 35.9 fb(-1). The measurements are performed in a fiducial phase space and extrapolated to the full phase space, separately for the dilepton and lepton+jets channels, where lepton corresponds to either an electron or a muon. The results of the measurements in the fiducial phase space for the dilepton and lepton+jets channels, respectively, are sigma(t (t) over bar jj) = 2.36 +/- 0.02 (stat)+/- 0.20 (syst) pb and 31.0 +/- 0.2 (stat)+/- 2.9 (syst) pb, and for the cross section ratio 0.017 +/- 0.001 (stat)+/- 0.001 (syst) and 0.020 +/- 0.001 (stat)+/- 0.001 (syst). The values of sigma(t (t) over barb (b) over bar) are determined from the product of the sigma(t (t) over bar jj) and the cross section ratio, obtaining, respectively, 0.040 +/- 0.002 (stat)+/- 0.005 (syst) pb and 0.62 +/- 0.03 (stat)+/- 0.07 (syst) pb. These measurements are the most precise to date and are consistent, within the uncertainties, with the standard model expectations obtained using a matrix element calculation at next-to-leading order in quantum chromodynamics matched to a parton shower.Peer reviewe