http://hdl.handle.net/10150/129652 2026-04-21T13:30:26Z 2026-04-21T13:30:26Z Lee, Chunghee http://hdl.handle.net/10150/679928 2026-04-05T01:09:56Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

REIMAGINING HWANG JINI AS OPERATIC HEROINE: THROUGH SELECTED COMPARISONS WITH VIOLETTA AND CIO-CIO-SAN Lee, Chunghee Female entertainer protagonists in opera, Violetta from La Traviata and Cio-Cio-San from Madama Butterfly, embody sacrificial love by conforming to 19th-century Parisian or Meiji Japanese social norms. In contrast, Hwang Jini from Lee Young Jo’s opera Hwang Jini challenges the social stigma of the Joseon Dynasty. Through an exploration of historic cultural context and a review of each character’s responses to societal constraints, coupled with an analysis of how Hwang Jini’s sijo-changs reflect her perspicacity and devotion to personal agency in defying social norms, this paper presents Hwang Jini as a modern shift from the traditional female entertainer protagonists.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z Flowers, Matthew http://hdl.handle.net/10150/679927 2026-04-05T01:09:49Z 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

Headache: The Patient and the Mechanism Flowers, Matthew Migraine is a highly prevalent and disabling primary headache disorder, and medication-overuse headache (MOH)—most often arising on a migraine background—represents a particularly severe, high-frequency phenotype associated with substantial functional impairment, psychiatric and sleep comorbidities, and elevated healthcare utilization. Despite major advances in acute and preventive therapies, many patients experience incomplete relief, relapse, or progression to chronic headache patterns, underscoring a need for mechanism-informed strategies and a clearer understanding of how headache phenotypes intersect with long-term brain health.Increasing attention has focused on the endocannabinoid system (ECS) as a modulatory network relevant to headache and pain. The ECS regulates synaptic signaling through the canonical endocannabinoids 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG) and anandamide (AEA), their cannabinoid receptors, and a set of synthetic and degradative enzymes that shape region- and context-specific lipid “tone.” Preclinical and clinical observations implicate altered endocannabinoid signaling during headache states, motivating therapeutic approaches that target endocannabinoid metabolism rather than direct receptor agonism. ABHD6, a key 2-AG hydrolyzing enzyme, is positioned to influence local lipid microdomains within pain-modulatory circuits and may represent a tractable lever for modifying headache-like hypersensitivity. The first arm tests whether ABHD6 inhibition can reverse MOH-like pain and characterizes accompanying ECS remodeling across pain circuits. In female Sprague–Dawley rats, 7-day sumatriptan infusion (0.6 mg/kg/day) produced robust periorbital allodynia, and acute ABHD6 inhibition via KT-182 (2 mg/kg, i.p.) transiently reversed established allodynia without affecting baseline sensitivity in saline controls, with effects emerging at ≈300–360 minutes post-dose. Naïve profiling showed KT-182 produced an ethanolamide-biased lipid signature with minimal monoacylglycerol effects, whereas chronic sumatriptan expanded monoacylglycerol pools and modestly remodeled ECS transcripts/proteins across cortex, periaqueductal gray, rostral ventromedial medulla, and trigeminal nucleus caudalis. In sumatriptan-exposed animals, KT-182 predominantly elevated ethanolamide-class and polyunsaturated endocannabinoid-like lipids in a region- and state-dependent manner, supporting ABHD6 as a circuit-relevant, lipid-centric target for MOH-like hypersensitivity. The second arm evaluates long-term neurological outcomes associated with migraine and MOH using matched cohorts in the PearlDiver Mariner database. In Study 1 (1,289,469 matched per group), “any migraine” was not associated with higher 10-year Alzheimer’s disease (AD) risk compared with controls (1.16% vs 1.28%), though modest elevations appeared in comorbidity-defined subgroups (e.g., migraine + IBS: 1.30% vs 1.10%; migraine + fibromyalgia: 1.10% vs 0.90%). In Study 2 (~42,000 per group), migraine cohorts had lower 10-year incidence than controls across AD, Parkinson’s disease (PD), and all-cause dementia, whereas MOH identified a higher-risk subset relative to migraine and showed outcome-specific divergence versus controls (vs controls: no difference for AD; higher PD; lower dementia). Exploratory stratification within MOH suggested higher 10-year dementia incidence with opioid and NSAID overuse than with triptan overuse (3.76% and 3.07% vs 1.08%), underscoring clinically meaningful heterogeneity. The third arm of this dissertation advances translational outreach by operationalizing a patient- and public-facing model for communicating “invisible” neurological signals. Hearing the Invisible (HTI) converted open-source EEG recordings into an immersive, multisensory installation integrating sound, light, and augmented reality. The centerpiece was a large-scale interactive brain with illuminated EEG “nodes” and an AR experience that enabled visitors to explore neural rhythms through movement and sonification, complemented by educational stations, live EEG-derived musical performance, and an academic poster component. Audience reflections and assessment data indicated strong engagement and suggested that multisensory presentation enhanced conceptual understanding of EEG and neurological disease while fostering empathy toward conditions that are not readily visible. In summary, this dissertation links mechanism, population evidence, and public translation to address headache as both a biological disorder and a lived experience. Mechanistically, the findings support ABHD6/endocannabinoid modulation as a state-dependent lever capable of reversing MOH-like hypersensitivity while reshaping lipid signaling across pain circuits. Epidemiologically, large, matched claims cohorts demonstrate that migraine-coded diagnoses are not uniformly associated with increased long-term neurodegenerative risk, whereas MOH and comorbidity-defined subgroups show distinct patterns that warrant targeted clinical attention. Finally, HTI provides a scalable framework for translating complex neurological data into accessible, emotionally resonant experiences that may improve understanding and empathy for invisible illness.

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z Rose, Copland Harris http://hdl.handle.net/10150/679926 2026-04-05T01:09:42Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

New Mixed-Instrument Duets with Trombone: Etudes for Developing Collaborative Musicianship Rose, Copland Harris Given the pedagogic and performance experience of many trombonists, including the author of the present study, chamber music participation is an area of music performance that requires better efforts and attention. Music students, particularly those who play trombone, should have opportunities to develop their collaborative skills through chamber music. Chamber music in educational settings has shown to be highly effective in developing musical skills and independence for its participants. Along the same lines, trombone teachers should encourage their students to form small ensembles and incorporate chamber duos into their curriculum. There are a number of high-quality chamber works that include the trombone, though many of these may be difficult to acquire or perform, especially for students who may lack the proper financial resources or access to music libraries. Duets, by nature, are the smallest possible chamber ensemble configuration. Therefore, they provide the most flexibility in how they can be rehearsed and performed. It is the goal of the author to compose a multitude of new, mixed-instrument duo etudes that contain an array of pedagogic benefits and spark a greater interest in chamber music education in the wider trombone community. Trombone students, in turn, can foster a stronger sense of musical self-determination known as “autonomy of musicianship.”

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z You, Ruilin http://hdl.handle.net/10150/679925 2026-04-05T01:09:34Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

High-Throughput Microscopy via Ptychographic Imaging You, Ruilin The core ideas of ptychographic imaging grew out of coherent diffraction imaging (CDI),which was originally developed for measuring periodic crystalline structures in the last century. As interest shifted toward recovering phase changes introduced by a sample under coherent illumination, researchers began to reconstruct the complex-valued object (amplitude and phase) from measured diffraction intensities. These concepts were soon extended beyond periodic crystals to a much wider range of applications, including biomedical imaging, complex materials, and optical metrology. The term ptychography comes from the Greek word ptych¯e, meaning “fold,” reflecting the use of overlapping measurements. The central idea of ptychography is to exploit redundancy in a series of overlapping intensity measurements to recover information that conventional optical systems cannot directly provide, such as quantitative phase and resolution beyond the native limit of the imaging optics. The demand for high-throughput microscopy spans many fields, from biomedical imaging to industrial inspection, and ptychography has emerged as a robust approach for extending imaging performance beyond conventional optical microscopes. This dissertation aims to demonstrate ptychographic imaging as a unifying framework for high-throughput microscopy across a broad range of applications. By recording only intensity measurements and computationally recovering the complex object, ptychographic methods can overcome limitations of traditional optical systems in biomedical imaging, metrology, materials characterization, and large-scale circuit inspection. The dissertation begins with an introduction and background on ptychographic imaging. Chapter 1 presents the historical development of ptychography from CDI, reviews prior research and its evolution into many specialized variants tailored to different applications, and summarizes key advances relevant to high-throughput microscopy. The chapter concludes by positioning ptychographic imaging within the broader landscape of computational imaging methods, highlighting related techniques and discussing their respective advantages and trade-offs for different imaging tasks. Chapter 2 presents a self-calibrating FPM framework that addresses one of the most critical challenges in practical FPM, namely model mismatch due to system misalignment and other experimental imperfections. We introduce an algorithmic framework based on automatic differentiation (AD) to jointly correct illumination misalignment and other forward-model discrepancies, thereby greatly enhancing the robustness of FPM in real-world settings and opening a more viable path toward routine deployment. The capability of the proposed selfcalibrating FPM framework is demonstrated through both numerical simulations, where it is compared against conventional FPM reconstruction methods, and experimental validation on cervical cell samples. In particular, we show deep ultraviolet (DUV) label-free imaging of cervical cells over an extremely large FOV, illustrating the potential of the proposed self-calibrating FPM approach for high-throughput biomedical imaging applications. Chapter 3 extends the self-calibrating FPM framework to a compact reflective RFPM architecture operating in the DUV regime. The newly designed reflective configuration enables the acquisition of both bright-field and dark-field images with a significantly simpler experimental layout than previous RFPM implementations, reducing the number of optical components and alignment degrees of freedom. This compact geometry makes it easier to integrate deep-ultraviolet Fourier ptychographic microscopy (DUV-FPM) into different platforms for surface metrology, while maintaining nanometer-scale height sensitivity over an extremely large FOV. We demonstrate the compact DUV-FPM system on semiconductor chip standards, highlighting its capability for defect detection in potential large-area integrated circuit inspection. In addition, we characterize mirror surfaces, including surface roughness and machining traces, illustrating the potential of the proposed RFPM configuration for high-throughput, quantitative optical metrology. In Chapter 4, we focus on coded ptychography (CP) for high-throughput lensless imaging, a relatively recent development in the ptychographic imaging family. We first introduce the general forward model, the initial experimental setup, and several potential application scenarios. We also compare FPM with CP to emphasize the conceptual and practical differences between these two approaches, and to clarify how they are related. Finally, we present experimental results demonstrating large–FOV biomedical imaging, including highthroughput screening of red blood cells (RBCs) and cervical cells, highlighting the strengths and limitations of CP in realistic biomedical settings. In Chapter 5, we introduce a recently developed CP approach. We propose and demonstrate a cost-effective, motionless lensless imaging system based on CP for high-throughput microscopy. A new reconstruction algorithm is developed that is specifically tailored for motionless CP using a 3D-printed phase mask. The design, fabrication, and integration of the customized phase mask into the imaging device are described in detail. The resulting lensless architecture requires minimal calibration, making it well-suited for portable and adaptable imaging platforms in diverse application scenarios. This approach enables imaging beyond conventional limits, achieving millimeter-scale FOV with micron-scale resolution without using lenses or any mechanical scanning. The motionless CP system can also capture full red-green-blue (RGB) color reconstructions and phase imaging simultaneously. Experimentally, we demonstrate the proposed setup on murine organ histology slides and diffractive optical elements (diffractive optical elements (DOEs)), illustrating the broad applicability of the system to both biomedical imaging and structured optical components. Relevant prior work in coded and lensless computational imaging is systematically compared and summarized in a table, providing context for the proposed method and outlining directions for future research. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses future directions for advancing ptychographic imaging, with a focus on making the methods developed in this dissertation more practical and broadly applicable. Building on the self-calibrating FPM, compact DUV-FPM, and motionless CP frameworks presented in the previous chapters, we outline strategies to further reduce the reliance on strict prior knowledge and precise calibration of the imaging system. These directions are essential for translating ptychographic methods into robust, user-friendly tools for high-throughput microscopy in real-world settings. Chapter 5 also summarizes the main remaining technical challenges and practical obstacles, and discusses potential avenues to overcome them in future work.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z