Black student activism in the 21^st century has gained international notoriety with popular movements such as #StudentBlackOut, #FeesMustFall, and #ConcernedStudent1950. Between 2014-2017, Black students manipulated the momentum of a larger social movement (the Movement for Black Lives) in order to secure organizing victories for racial justice, both on and off their college campuses. This essay explores the meaning making processes of Black student activists who participated either in on campus or off campus activism between 2014-2017. Emerging themes from the interviews have demonstrated that Black student activists are both politicized and enter movement organizing because of catalytic events, and they see themselves as resource brokers who funnel university resources, labor, and energy into dispossessed communities. I argue that students use their racialized subjectivities in the neoliberal university space to leverage resources. In addition, Black students are highly aware of their positionality, and they raise critiques of their class-fluid positions as college students and the protections that student identity provides them.

Large-scale simulations of time-dependent partial differential equations are, at present, largely reliant on massively parallel computers. As a result, the parallel scalability of numerical methods for partial differential equations is of crucial importance. In recent years, continuous space-time finite element methods have emerged as a promising technique for approximating these equations in a scalable, flexible way. In a space-time finite element method, the space and time variables of a time-dependent equation are treated as a single unified variable in higher-dimensional space. The higher-dimensional space-time domain is discretized into a collection of simplices and finite element methods may then be defined over this discretization. Parallelization is then achieved through domain decomposition techniques.

In this dissertation, we extend the theory of space-time finite element methods to a more general class of problems. We prove new theoretical results describing the stability of space-time methods applied to parabolic partial differential equations with nontrivial convection and reaction terms. In particular, we define a streamline-upwind scheme which upwinds in the direction of the space-time convection. The stabilized method is proved to be coercive with respect to an energy norm and asymptotic error bounds are derived.

This dissertation also proposes several operations for the construction and refinement of unstructured, conforming four-dimensional simplex meshes. We define a simple algorithm which takes as input any tetrahedral mesh and produces a corresponding four-dimensional, simplicial space-time mesh. Our algorithm always produces conforming triangulations and may be run concurrently for each spatial element. In addition, we describe how four-dimensional simplex elements can be bisected in order to achieve local spatiotemporal refinement.

Youth Organizing as a tool for social change has helped to not only change material conditions in some respects, but it has also equipped youth with the critical tools needed to engage in long term social movement building. As a result, youth activists and organizers have been able to increase investments in the highest needs communities, gain access to college, and even defund and abolish school police. This dissertation focuses on youth activism and the political engagement of Black young men and boys. More specifically, this study focuses on the experience of Black young men and boys in community-based programs that engage in racial justice-based activism and community organizing.

Drawing upon interviews from 22 Black male youth activists, 19 interviews with youth workers who engage Black male youth, and five years of field notes as a community organizer working with four community-based organizations in Los Angeles, this study elevates the political imaginaries that Black young men and boys adopt based on their political activism and how they were educated in community based organizations. In the political moment of COVID-19 and the global fight to address anti-Black racism, how have Black boys and young men engaged in the fight for their own lives? To them, what is agency and how do they use their agency to transform their conditions?

Building upon frameworks such as Transformational Resistance, Critical Civic Praxis, and Black Critical Theory, I chronicle how Black boys and young men engage in Black Transformative Agency, which I define as an axis of processes that Black boys and young men adopt to both politicize their peers and fight against anti-Black racism in their communities. How Black young men and boys imagine their agency, however, varies depending on how they were politicized and what forms of activism they engage in, which is deeply influenced by their understandings of gender, geography, class, and comparative race relations. This study provides insights and implications for social movement scholars, education scholars, and across the social sciences more broadly who are interested in the ways that youth produce meaning of social change

It is imperative that we improve clean and renewable energy technology in the face of growing energy demand. Solar energy is potentially abundant, but we need to capture, convert and store solar energy in usable forms. Hydrogen could be ideal for energy storage, if made using sunlight energy to split water by oxidizing water to dioxygen and protons and using the released electrons to reduce protons to hydrogen in a net transfer of electrons. In Chapter 2, we explored water oxidation which is believed to be the more challenging of the two steps. We found evidence for catalyst degradation while using iridium complexes with ceric ammonium nitrate (CAN) as a sacrificial oxidant, possibly forming iridium oxide nanoparticles. Chapter 3 describes studies of analogs of well-known ruthenium water oxidation catalysts with bipyridine ligands that were designed to be bifunctional, by adding potential pendant bases such as hydroxy, alkoxy, amino, and heterocyclic amines, and some combinations of these groups. One successful catalyst was the methoxy complex which proved to be more robust than the parent unsubstituted complex while using CAN. Extended π systems, e.g. naphthyridine were found to lead to less active catalysts; therefore, we attempted to slow degradation and increase duration of catalysis by protecting the complex with sterically hindered groups, but we suspect that ligand loss interfered. Chapter 4 focused on ligands that would support formation of binuclear complexes which could improve catalysis, taking into account one of the proposed mechanisms for water oxidation involving two metal complexes

Work presented in Chapter 1 involves synthesis (by direct metalation of C-H bonds) and characterization of bis protic N-heterocylic carbene (PNHC) pincer complexes of platinum, palladium, and even nickel, in addition to their reactivity with alkynes and under basic conditions. Alkynes were converted to aldehydes as the major anti-Markovnikov addition products. The complexes were treated with different bases to form proposed trifunctional complexes containing one PNHC and one basic imidazolyl ligand. Addition of sodium alkoxide yielded dimeric species and lithium bases gave LiCl-imidazolyl adducts, which proved to be moisture sensitive but did not lose LiCl and undergo ligand exchange with substrates.