This thesis project has been conducted in accordance with The Founder’s Lab initiative which is sponsored by the W. P. Carey School of Business. This program groups three students together and tasks them with creating a business idea, conducting the necessary research to bring the concept to life, and exploring different aspects of business, with the end goal of gaining traction. The product we were given to work through this process with was Hot Head, an engineering capstone project concept. The Hot Head product is a sustainable and innovative solution to the water waste issue we find is very prominent in the United States. In order to bring the Hot Head idea to life, we were tasked with doing research on topics ranging from the Hot Head life cycle to finding plausible personas who may have an interest in the Hot Head product. This paper outlines the journey to gaining traction via a marketing campaign and exposure of our brand on several platforms, with a specific interest in website traffic. Our research scope comes from mainly primary sources like gathering opinions of potential buyers by sending out surveys and hosting focus groups. The paper concludes with some possible future steps that could be taken if this project were to be continued.

In this essay, I set out to explore and analyze how Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and the character of Eleanor Vance in particular, disrupts and redefines the traditional conventions of the Female Gothic within the context of the 20th century. I utilize Tania Modleski's gendering of Freud's theory of psychoanalysis in her exploration of the ‘Female Uncanny,’ arguing that the source of the Uncanny in the Female Gothic can be found in the "fear of being lost in the mother." I argue that Jackson's complex personal life, including her fraught relationship with her mother and her difficult marriage with literary critic Edgar Hyman, color her fiction and the primary motivations of her protagonist, Eleanor Vance. I also outline the traditional structure of the Gothic novel and the heroine's journey. With the necessary context provided, I then explain how Eleanor Vance’s character rejects these Gothic traditions and ushers in a new era of Female Gothic fiction.

Microfluidic devices represent a growing technology in the world of analytical chemistry. Serial femtosecond crystallography (SFX) utilizes microfluidic devices to generate droplets of an aqueous buffer containing protein crystals, which are then fired out as a jet in the beam of an X-ray free electron laser (XFEL). A crucial part of the device is its method of droplet detection. This project presents a design for a capacitive sensor that uses a unique electrode configuration to detect the difference in capacitance between the aqueous and oil phases. This design was developed using MATLAB and COMSOL Multiphysics simulations and printed using high-resolution 3D printing. Results show that this design can successfully distinguish between the two immiscible liquids, confirming it as a possible detection method in future SFX experiments.

When discussing gay literature in the French, contemporary sphere, one of the most up
and coming and prominent authors is Édouard Louis. His works’ focus on the realism and
violence of the working class offers a critical and necessary perspective of the gay experience in
modern-day France. While recent in their creation, Louis’ works follow a connecting thread that
is inseparable from other autofiction novels that have a narrator with same sex attractions such as
Annie Ernaux’s Ce qu’ils disent or rien and Didier Eribon’s Retour à Reims. Often commonly
discussed as French LGBT literature, these autofictional works that extend from Gide to Eribon
to now Louis demonstrate how the proposed societal dualities, limitations, and hierarchies
described by philosophers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler affect homosexual
performativity. Louis’ first novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, published on January 2, 2014,
offers another illustration of this analysis. It specifically describes the metaphysical
(metaphysical being the relationship between the outer stimuli and internal perspective) effects
and constraints of current poverty on homosexual performativity. By analyzing En finir avec
Eddy Bellegueule through this theoretical framework of power and poverty, this thesis adds a
theoretical and intersectional nuance to the narrative voice that current literature focusing on the
novel’s landscape mentions but does not reflect on. I argue that it is important to attach an
autofictional timeline that is necessary to promote and apply future ontological doctrines to this
genre.

This analysis explores what the time needed to harden, and time needed to degrade is of a PLGA bead, as well as whether the size of the needle injecting the bead and the addition of a drug (Vismodegib) may affect these variables. Polymer degradation and hardening are critical to understand for the polymer’s use in clinical settings, as these factors help determine the patients’ and healthcare providers’ use of the drug and estimated treatment time. Based on the literature, it is expected that the natural logarithmic polymer mass degradation forms a linear relationship to time. Polymer hardening was tested by taking video recordings of gelatin plates as they are injected with microneedles and performing RGB analysis on the polymer “beads” created. Our results for the polymer degradation experiments showed that the polymer hardened for all solutions and trials within approximately 1 minute, presenting a small amount of time in which the patient would have to remain motionless in the affected area. Both polymer bead size and drug concentration may have had a modest impact on the hardening time experiments, while bead size may affect the time required for the polymer to degrade. Based on the results, the polymer degradation is expected to last multiple weeks, which may allow for the polymer to be used as a long-term drug delivery system in treatment of basal cell carcinoma.

This paper explores the psychological experiences of domestic workers in three contemporary Latin American films: Roma (Mexico, 2018), Crímenes de familia (Argentina, 2020) and Que Horas Ela Volta? (Brazil, 2015). Specifically, the motherhood of these three protagonists is explored and analyzed using psychological research that pertains to motherhood, trauma, and the relationships between domestic workers and the families that employ them. This paper reveals that contemporary Latin American cinema portrays domestic workers as having negative experiences of motherhood as a direct result of their occupation and proposes for further protections, policy change, and psychological research to take place for domestic workers in Latin America and beyond.

Green Pages is a sustainability-focused magazine publication created by our team in response to the need for increased post-secondary awareness and interest in the ethical circular economy. The magazine, designed and written by Dale Helvoigt, Caroline Yu, and Anne Snyder is available digitally and free of charge so that students and non-students alike have access to information and resources regarding sustainability. Each article is thoroughly researched with references provided so our readers seek to continue their education into our content. The end goal of Green Pages is to foster interest in all individuals, especially young people, on the current environmental climate and the sustainable practices that can be adopted into one's lifestyle in pursuit of a "greener" future.

The use of enzyme-catalyst interfaces is underexplored in the field of biocatalysis, particularly in studies on enabling novel reactivity of enzymes. For this thesis, the HaloTag® protein tagging platform was proposed as a bioconjugation method for a pinacol coupling reaction using lipases, as a model for novel reactivities proceeding via ketyl radical intermediates and hydrogen-bonding-facilitated redox attenuation. After an initial lipase screening of 9 lipases, one lipase (Candida rugosa) was found to perform the pinacol coupling of p-anisaldehyde under standard conditions (fluorescein and 530nm light, 3% yield). Based on a retrosynthetic analysis for the photocatalyst-incorporated HaloTag® linker, the intermediates haloamine 1 and aldehyde 6 were synthesized. Further experiments are underway or planned to complete linker synthesis and conduct pinacol coupling experiments with a bioconjugated system. This project underscores the promising biocatalytic promiscuity of lipases for performing reactions proceeding through ketyl radical intermediates, as well as the underdeveloped potential of incorporating bioengineering principles like bioconjugation into biocatalysis to overcome kinetic barriers to electron transfer and optimize biocatalytic reactions.

The use of discourse markers (DMs) is present in speech to both structure and organize the discourse (Fung & Carter, 2007). However, despite the different studies about the use of DMs, less attention has been paid to specific Spanish DMs such as pues, ‘so, well’ luego, ‘then, therefore’ and entonces ‘so, then’ about their reduction. The focus of this study is on the phonetic variation of these DMs from a corpus of speakers of Mexican Spanish from Salinas, California (Brown & Alba, 2017). This paper analyzed dependent and independent variables to show their influence on the reduction of DMs. Also, chunking phenomena and special reduction were part of the study as they can reflect patterns of change in the language.