Background: In 2016, close to 45 million adults in the United States had some form of mental illness, but only 43% received treatment for their condition. This unmet need for mental health (MH) services has been attributed to the cost of care or insufficient insurance coverage. Research has also shown that patients with comorbid MH and medical conditions are at a higher risk for health complications and are frequently high utilizers of health services. Research Objective: I aimed to assess the potential benefits of MH staffing within health centers (HCs) funded by HRSA, a crucial part of the safety net which provides primary care services regardless of patients’ ability to pay. My research questions are whether licensed MH staffing within a patient’s HC is associated with higher likelihood of MH service utilization (paper 1) and lower likelihood of high utilization of outpatient and acute care services (paper 2). Data and Sample: In the first study I use data from HRSA’s 2014 Health Center Patient Survey and administrative data on patients’ HCs from the UDS 2013 report. The study sample included 4,575 patients aged 18-64 who identified their HC as their usual source of care. In the second study, I use patient level encounter data from California’s Low-Income Health Program (LIHP) from 2011-2013, and administrative data on patients’ HCs from California’s OSHPD 2012 Primary Care Utilization report. This study sample included 26,833 patients between the ages of 19-64, enrolled in LIHP and assigned to an HC as their medical home. Results: My first research paper showed that more overall licensed MH staffing at HCs (versus none) increased the likelihood of patients receiving MH treatment anywhere and on-site (at the patient’s HC), and any level of psychiatrist staffing also increased the likelihood of receiving MH treatment on-site. My second study showed that licensed MH staffing of at least 0.5 FTE (versus none) was associated with high patient utilization of outpatient visits. I also found that any level of psychiatrist staffing (versus none) increased the likelihood of having three or more ED visits, and any level of LCSW staffing decreased the likelihood of 3 or more ED visits and any hospitalization. Discussion: Access to MH services for low-income populations continues to be a challenge in the United States. Due to the strategic location of HCs in medically under-served areas, co-locating an adequate number of licensed MH providers at HCs is likely to help reduce disparities in access to MH services. Staffing levels for specific types of providers in these studies may have been too low to help reduce high utilization of services. More research is needed on the role of specific types of MH providers and the necessary level of FTE to adequately meet patient needs.

Romance: The Emulation of Empire

This dissertation offers a symptomatic reading of romance and explores the ideological force of the genre’s chiastic structure. The trajectory of this project follows the temporal and spatial migration of romance from the colonial context of early seventeenth England, beginning with William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, then enters the American post-revolutionary context of the early and late nineteenth century with James Fennimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” and ends with Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don. This study examines the contradictory narrative desires within romance. While the genre is identified with foundational narratives that bespeak a desire for national unification, it is also associated with a desire for conquest and empire. I argue this paradoxical genre constructs an equally paradoxical heroic national identity that forgets its tragic beginnings by imperialistically asserting its right to rule (its authority) in emulation of those whose rights it would usurp.

The heroic figure, after tragically losing his authority and identity to a rival, begins as a desiring subject whose quest for fulfillment and recognition initiates the romance plot. The hero finds recognition by emulating the actions of the rival who originally usurped his identity. Through the pathos of emulation, the hero is able to forgive and share the bonds of national kinship with his rival. By imitating the actions of his rival, the hero is translated into a representation of his rival. The hero’s earlier tragic identity is foreclosed and projected onto another who is foreign to the hero’s struggles. This “foreign” other becomes a representation of the hero who is himself a representation of the rival. Hence, the apparent threatening other is transformed into a representation of a representation, the rhetorical condition of the genre itself. The dark intent projected onto the foreign other in these romance narratives indeed originates with the hero, but the hero’s dark design is in fact an emulation of the antagonist’s or rival’s action. The imperialistic quality of the genre is a result of its repetitive and crossed structure that calls into being more imperial subjects, but the inclusion promised by national romances is dependent on the tragic exclusion of objectified others.

The main objective of this work was to analyze the effect of boron (B) deficiency on nodule organogenesis. Boron is an essential micronutrient for plants and for the Rhizobium-legume symbiosis development. Boron deficiency has a strong effect on components involved in plant-bacteria molecular and cell interactions during the development of the legume-rhizobia symbiosis. Because nodule organogenesis is driven by rhizobia-legume interactions, the effect of B deficiency on cell cycle regulation during nodule development was studied in Pisum sativum and Medicago sativa plants.

Migrant Figures: Visual Embodiments of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in US Central American-Latinx Culture argues that twenty-first-century migrant figures visually embody the ideological complexities undergirding the present-day US immigration crisis. My interdisciplinary and multimedia cultural study sutures together migrant figures depicted in post-1980s literature, film, and visual art emerging across Central American, Mexican, Caribbean, and North American cultural contexts. Through readings of Carlos Guillermo Wilson’s novel Chombo (1981), Edwidge Danticat’s fictional and nonfictional writing, Cary Fukunaga’s film Sin Nombre (2009), Diego Quemada-Díez’s film La Jaula de Oro (2013), Marc Silver’s documentary Who is Dayani Crystal? (2014), and Beatriz Cortez’s performance piece “No Cages No Jaulas” (2020), I demonstrate how migrant figures constellate visual embodiments of meaning entwined with politicized migrant subjectivities. Drawing upon feminist and queer materialist thought, my project’s visual reading practice of “embodied perception” traces a “politics of dis/embodiment” in which migrant figures visually de/materialize through co-constituted racial, gendered, and sexual processes. Grating against Western liberal renderings of a unified human migrant subjectivity, I argue for the need to ground cultural and theoretical investigations of migrant culture in frameworks that emerge from embodied forms of knowledge practices. Understood as a relational ontology, the migrant figure houses alternative affective, material, and social affinities that expand the conceptual perimeters of race, gender, sexuality, immigration, and citizenship and the epistemic parameters of US Central American and Latinx studies. This project makes significant interventions in visual studies, intersectional thought, and cultural politics of migration.

Previous work on the DNA damage checkpoint in Saccharomyces cerevisiae has shown that two complexes independently sense DNA lesions: the kinase Mec1-Ddc2 and the PCNA-like 9-1-1 complex. To test whether co-localization of these components is sufficient for checkpoint activation, we fused these checkpoint proteins to the LacI repressor and artificially co-localized these fusions by expressing them in cells harboring Lac operator arrays. We observed Rad53 and Rad9 phosphorylation, Sml1 degradation and metaphase delay, demonstrating that co-localization of these sensors is sufficient to activate the checkpoint in the absence of DNA damage. Our tethering system allowed us to examine checkpoint activation in the absence of damage processing and checkpoint protein recruitment. Thus, we were able to establish that CDK functions in the checkpoint pathway downstream of damage recognition. We found that CDK-dependent phosphorylation of Rad9 is required for efficient checkpoint activation. Lastly, we began analysis of the regulation by CDK on Rad9 in its ability to activate Rad53. We found that the Rad9 CDK mutant was not phosphorylated by Mec; and was not able to find Rad53 efficiently after DNA damage.