Within the last three decades there has been a surge of interest in how teacher beliefs affect the teaching and learning process. A major focus of the research in teacher beliefs has been in understanding the nature of teacher self-efficacy beliefs and how ot affects the choices, decisions, and effectiveness of teachers. Bandura's work (1982, 1986, 1993,1996,1997), developed and defended the idea that our beliefs in our abilities affect our behavior, motivation, and ultimately our successes and failures.Bandura(1986), Dewey (1997), and Parajes (1992) suggest beliefs are the best predictors of individual behaviors and that beliefs influence teachers' perceptions, judgments, and practices.

This study, a cross-sectional design experiment, examines key variables that might influence teacher expectations. To that end, this study seeks to: (a) provide a limited overview of teachers' self-reported efficacy beliefs; (b) examine the influence of these beliefs on student groups, and (c) understand which efficacy beliefs may influence teacher practice.

Offered, is a discussion of understanding teacher self-efficacy beliefs and the variables - particularly locus of control - that may influence teacher expectations, thus, how teacher efficacy beliefs may contribute to the choices teachers make in their instructional practices which may subsequently affect student academic outcomes. While significant limitations restrain the strength of the findings, the study will begin to provide a basis for modifying teachers' sense of self-efficacy beliefs and to understand how stated beliefs affect practices that may subsequently affect student academic outcomes.

Several theoretical parameter spaces are analysed using techniques from machine learning. First, machine learning is used to leverage high dimensional detector information to constrain the mass and coupling of a simplified model which extends the standard model with a heavy Z' boson. The high dimensional information is seen to improve the exclusion contours of the analysis relative to a low dimensional analysis that instead uses summary statistics. Next, generative models are used to sample a high dimensional parameter space of a supersymmetric model subject to a constraint. Generative models are seen to provide an increase in efficiency of over an order of magnitude in a search for models that satisfy the constraint when compared to random sampling. Finally, we analyse a dataset of supersymmetric theories to understand how they may best discovered in experiment. We propose a set of experiments to be performed at the Large Hadron Collider that are most sensitive to these models.

This project began with the intention to examine the connection between the aesthetic and the political in American literature's construction of African-American subjectivity, or the relationship between resistance and representation in literary portrayals of the African-American subject. I was specifically interested in the moments in American literature where the convergence between aesthetic form and political practice creates a particular crisis in representation for African-American subjectivity,

many times rendering scholarly discussion of these problematic texts dismissive of their purported politics, or even non-existent. Some of the questions I wanted to grapple with included how one accounts for texts that have "good politics" in mind when written, yet still possess racist or "bad political" aspects through the manner in which they are presented, and the manner in which the subject position of the author affects our

perception of the text.

I chose to discuss American fictional texts whose readers and critics have experienced difficulty reconciling the text's aesthetic properties with the political moves they seemed to be making in their representation of African-American subjectivity. Through close analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frances Harper's abolitionist and post-Civil War poetry, and her novel Iola Leroy, Mark Twain's Puddn'head Wilson, Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and research of the criticism surrounding these texts, I found that we should not necessarily reject the notion that aesthetic representation always implies a political stance. However, if ideology and form are so closely connected, than closely examining the aesthetics of a text becomes crucial to understanding its political repercussions and the cultural work it is performing. Ultimately, I end with a plea that we acknowledge the complexity of resistance for the African-American subject and expand the ways in which we as readers

and critics tend to define it. It is our continuing exploration of the complexity of racial representation in literature and cultural subject formation/construction that aids us in understanding and overcoming racism.

The post-translational modification ADP-ribosylation, whereby ADP-ribose subunits are attached to proteins to alter their function, has been previously implicated in processes including DNA damage repair and certain stress responses. However, the mediators of this modification are poorly understood; in particular, little is known about a diverse class of ADP-ribose binding domains called macrodomains, beyond a general affinity to bind to ADP- ribose. Experiments were thus undertaken to determine if different macrodomains show differences in their ADP-ribose binding activity. In addition, as several members of the macrodomain family are suspected to be involved in some host-pathogen conflict, potential alterations of macrodomains’ ADP-ribose binding in response to immunological signals were also investigated. Initial experiments utilized an Ni-NTA column to purify proteins based on their ability to bind to a macrodomain; although initial experiments proved that such a system could purify ADP-ribosylated proteins, further refinement to this system is needed. Further experiments to address this question of differential binding of ADP-ribose by macrodomains utilized fluorescent proteins fused to macrodomains, which allow for the localization of the macrodomain inside a cell to be observed. These experiments were successful in demonstrating that different macrodomains localize to different cellular compartments, suggesting that they each bind to different sets of ADP-ribosylated proteins. Experiments to identify alterations in ADP-ribosylation in cells following exposure to immunological signals, however, were unsuccessful. Refinement of a pulldown assay to purify ADP-ribosylated proteins would be advantageous for future exploration of macrodomain binding activity.

With increased accountability and newly introduced alternative paths to administrative licensure, stakeholders are compelled to re-conceptualize the preparation of principals from a front-loaded process during the pre-service phase to a well-distributed plan across a principal's career. In a recent review of state policy, states have shifted their focus from university-based leadership development programs to a system of continuous professional development, specifying a shared responsibility for such development (Roach, Smith and Boutin, 2011). Such regulatory shifts force employing schools and districts to reflect upon and accept their role in supporting the successful entry of new principals, that is, to formally and informally induct new school leaders into their organization as well as the profession.

The purpose of the study is to contribute to the research base on the induction of principals by focusing on an increasingly popular induction support strategy, that is, the coaching of new principals. This study sought to thoroughly explore new principals' experiences with coaching, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of the effects of coaching to emerge from the principal's perspective. This study utilized a mixed method, cross-case study design that began with the traditional satisfaction survey, moved to follow-up telephone interviews and then examined new principal conceptions of the coaching experience through in-depth interviewing. Rather than start with a priori definitions and codes of points of investigation, new principals emergent descriptions reveal their deeper understanding of satisfaction with an individualized induction support.

In part one of this thesis, the interactions and resulting complexes between heme proteins and their associated electron-transferring redox partner proteins, termed here as heme protein redox partners, are carefully studied. Such complexes navigate a delicate balance between achieving fast turnover and tight, specific binding. To probe how Nature has balanced these seemingly opposing forces, a series of studies were conducted on three separate heme protein redox partner systems that have achieved a working balance using different approaches; Cytochrome P450cam and its redox partner putidaredoxin, Leishmania major peroxidase and its partner Leishmania major cytochrome c and finally the multi-domain nitric oxide synthase. Each system was initially probed using computational methods including molecular dynamics, Brownian dynamics, and modeling before being experimentally validated against previous findings, novel studies or both.

In part two, the focus is shifted from protein interactions to water behavior on organic surfaces. Studying the behavior of water on such organic surfaces can have wide-ranging impacts on our understanding of not only fundamental water dynamics, but also atmospheric chemistry and chemistry on urban surfaces. Self-assembled monolayers (or SAMs) have long served as a model system to probe how differences in organic surface chemistry may affect water behavior. To this point, the behavior of water on a variety of SAMs were investigated using molecular dynamics in a series of studies including one with experimental validation to deepen our understanding of the dependence of water behavior on the structural makeup of both a pristine idealized surface and more realistic defective SAM systems.

Finally, three additional separate studies are presented in the third and last part of this thesis. These distinct and independent studies 1) cover the conformational dependence of a central protein residue on the conformation of its neighbors, 2) computationally study the binding of a membrane associated protein to a target lipid in a lipid bilayer and 3) experimentally determine the crystal structure of Bacilus subtillis arginase. When combined with the two series of studies previously presented in this thesis, the great potential in applying a combined experimental and computational approach to address unanswered questions is highlighted and explored.