Doctoral Thesis
Recent Submissions
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Revertant Listeria monocytogenes and conditions for their persistence as intracellular L-forms
(2021)L-forms are cell wall deficient forms of bacteria that are able to survive and multiply without a rigid cell wall. Since their discovery in 1935, numerous case studies have reported an observation or isolation of such bacterial L-forms in diseased patients or animals. They have largely been associated with in chronic or recurrent diseases, where L-forms are believed to represent a strategy that allows the bacteria to escape from eradication ...Doctoral Thesis -
Between Walls and Fences: How Gated Communities in Bogotá Shape Exclusive and Insecure Public Spaces Outside the Gates
(2021)Gated communities in Bogotá house 2.7 million people, or almost 40% of all households. Today, all socioeconomic groups in Bogotá find a home behind gates and walls, and 20% of the urban poor live in gated communities. With the rise of the gated community in Latin America and worldwide, a new type of public space has been emerging in recent decades: streets bordered by walls, fences, and the occasional gate, formed when two gated communities ...Doctoral Thesis -
Effects of gene flow of GM maize into non-GM maize and wild relatives
(2021)Evaluating the consequences of gene flow in general, regardless of whether or not transgenes are involved, is a challenge because it is difficult to predict the ecological and evolutionary effects of genes that are expressed in distinct ecological contexts and genetic backgrounds. Maize (Zea mays) is a wind-pollinated outcrossing plant with no known biological barriers to transgene flow from genetically modified (GM) to non-GM plants, ...Doctoral Thesis -
Development of Techniques for Neuroimaging at Nanoscale
(2021)A wide range of diseases is associated with alterations of the brain morphology. Multiscale three-dimensional visualization of continuous volumes of unstained brain tissue is important to gain insight to pathologically relevant processes of neurological diseases. Many pathological processes in neurodegenerative disorders affect myelinated axons, which are a critical part of the neuronal circuitry. Cryo-ptychographic X-ray computed tomography ...Doctoral Thesis -
Navigating the Latent Spaces of Deep Neural Networks using Adversarial Techniques
(2021)Deep learning has become a pervasive tool in the field of machine learning, delivering unprecedented advances in fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition. Deep neural networks, which comprise the class of models behind deep learning, transform their input signal into the desired output by means of sequential, layer-wise transformation of that data into successive latent representations. The ...Doctoral Thesis -
Robustness and Regularization of Deep Neural Networks
(2021)Deep learning has seen tremendous growth, largely fueled by more powerful computers, the availability of ever-larger datasets and advances in software infrastructure, with deep neural networks setting a new state-of-the-art in virtually every task considered in machine learning. The empirical success of deep neural networks is undisputed, but there is still a big gap in our understanding of why these models work (when they do) and there ...Doctoral Thesis -
Fairness-driven urban design and planning
(2020)Understanding the various needs and interests of the citizens is of high importance for the urban design and planning. This thesis proposes the fair urban design and planning framework with the capability to support professionals to integrate the perspectives of citizens into decision-making, therefore improving the fairness of urban design and planning. The main idea of the thesis is derived from the fairness research in human computer ...Doctoral Thesis -
Investigating the Role of Meso-scale Structure on the Mechanical Response of Skeletal Muscle Tissues
(2020)Skeletal muscle tissues are highly hierarchical materials with multifarious fibre bundles embedded in sheaths of extracellular matrix (ECM), which manifests as a honeycomb structure like scaffolding. These tissues are often modelled as transversely isotropic materials with a constitutive form incorporating homogenised (or lumped) material properties of their constituents. The often employed assumption of non-contributing muscle fibres in ...Doctoral Thesis -
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Mathematical analysis of subwavelength metamaterials: sensors, waveguides and biomimicry
(2021)Doctoral Thesis -
Different Perspectives of Metabolism: Gut Feelings and Love Handles
(2021)Obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D) are on the rise globally. As obesity is one of the major risk factors for T2D, the two diseases are irrevocably connected with each other. Two organs that play a central role in the disease etiology of obesity and T2D are the adipose tissue and the gut. Both are essential in orchestrating metabolic processes throughout our body. The adipose tissue is the safe storage place in our body for excess energy, ...Doctoral Thesis -
Numerical Modeling and Simulation of Electric Arcs
(2021)This thesis is concerned with three aspects of numerical simulations of electric arcs: Part 1 extends a previous numerical scheme in 1D to 3D and non-constant timestepping for a plasma defined in an Euler-Maxwell framework. The main feature of the scheme is that it allows for the scaled Debye length as a modeling parameter to continuously blend between the full Maxwell system and the eddy current model; this feature is ...Doctoral Thesis -
Hybrid Art Spaces
(2020)Over the past decades, we saw a proliferation of data that was generated in cities and, at the same time, a growing complexity of urban planning tasks. The advent of social media — including a variety of geographic, temporal and so- cial metadata, has created an abundant (big) data source waiting to be explored and put to use for planning. This dissertation aims to add to the discourse on smart cities and human-centred planning, or so-called ...Doctoral Thesis -
Investigation of strongly correlated electron systems with resonant X-ray scattering techniques
(2021)Doctoral Thesis -
Study of the physiological impact of early life trauma from multiomics to reproductive biology
(2021)In many species, environmental factors and life experiences can change the phenotypic traits of exposed individuals and their progeny. Traumatic stress is a type of environmental experience that can modify behavior, cognition and physiological functions such as metabolism, in mammals. Many of the effects of traumatic stress can be transmitted to subsequent generations even when individuals from these generations are not exposed to any ...Doctoral Thesis