How long does it take to heal from trauma? Is healing the end goal? This collection of poems explores the ways trauma and beauty can coexist in the moments of daily life. Set in rural Maryland, the poems navigate themes of home, family, estrangement, and desire that are all haunted by a painful past. The collection explores how events, relationships, and languages shattered by trauma can be rebuilt over time.

As epithelial tissues, the cornea epithelium and epidermis share many functional, morphological and regulatory similarities. They both serve important barrier functions, protecting the organism and underlying tissues from the external environment, and undergo constant cell turnover, requiring a precise balance of proliferation and differentiation to maintain tissue integrity. To accomplish this balancing act, they make use of similar mechanisms, and integrate information from pre-existing regulatory domains with the expression and actions of lineage-specific transcriptional regulators. The importance of transcription factor binding to distal regulatory regions is demonstrated by our finding that SNPs linked to disease in cornea or epidermis cause alterations in enhancing ability, and disrupt transcription factor motifs, a potential mechanism underlying the observed increased risk for disease. GRHL3 is an important regulator of both epidermal keratinocyte differentiation and migration; we have identified unique mechanisms of action for this single factor under the two different physiological conditions: GRHL3 associates with enhancers and super enhancers to activate structural and barrier genes in differentiating keratinocytes, and with promoters to repress genes involved in inhibition of migration. Selectivity may come about through differential association with co-factors during migration and differentiation. Based on opposing expression patterns for KLF4 and KLF7 in cornea epithelium, we characterize and define a role for KLF7 in maintaining corneal epithelial progenitor cells in an undifferentiated state, acting antagonistically to KLF4, a pro-differentiation factor. Our work with CLIMs points to the importance of these factors in corneal epithelium development and maintenance, in part through regulation of noncoding RNA H19.

This research reorients a clinical question regarding the relationship between overly narrow femoral intercondylar notches and anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury within an anthropological perspective. I argue that biomedical research tends to assume that the dimensions of the notch are only related to genetics or previous ACL rupture. This view, while intended to help determine risk factors for narrow notch development, is a biologically deterministic one that ignores how differential access to resources and opportunities shape individuals’ life experiences and health outcomes. To address this shortcoming, I shift the question from a medical perspective – which groups are most likely to suffer narrow notches and therefore ACL injury? – to an anthropological one: to what degree do genetics, metabolic stress, and mechanical factors influence femoral intercondylar notch morphology, and what is the importance of the historical socioeconomic context on these factors? To answer this question, I analyzed historically documented remains from the mid-19th to mid-20th century Santa Clara Valley and use the osteological data to draw conclusions about assigned racial categories, the construction of Whiteness in this region, lived experiences, and their relationship to morphological outcomes at the knee joint.The six most important findings from this research are presented as an enumerated list in the concluding chapter, and consist of the following: (1) notch width index and notch volume are not redundant measures and do quantify the notch in noticeably different ways, (2) experiences of metabolic stress, particularly those resulting in porotic hyperostosis, are positively correlated with notch volume, (3) notch volume is not linked to femoral rousticity or shaft shape, (4) notch volume scales with body size, (5) genetics do not seem to significantly influence notch volume, and (6) osteological results support that the category of whiteness in California and the Santa Clara Valley was enlarged compared to other regions of the U.S. during this time period.

Forests are experiencing dieback due to drought, making it imperative to understand the mechanisms of drought-induced mortality to better predict and manage forests under a changing climate. My research goal was to capture the link between xylem function and cambial viability in Sequoia sempervirens saplings under drought. Greenhouse-grown saplings were exposed to water potentials known to cause 50% and 88% loss of water transport due to air expansion in the xylem cells (embolism). These water potentials were identified as levels of mild and severe stress. Xylem water transport and cambial viability were assessed at these targets, and compared against well-watered controls. The cambium was viable under mild drought and able to recover under rewatering regime, but not under severe drought stress. The cambium produces new growth rings each year, so understanding its ability to recover from drought will provide a critical mechanistic link between xylem function and potential for recovery.