Recent Submissions

Medical nanotechnology applications in regulatory science: strategic policy development for the regulatory assessment of nanotechnology-enabled health products 

Rodríguez Gómez, Francisco Diego (Date of defense: 2024-07-22)

Nanotechnology promises to revolutionize healthcare, but complex regulations slow its market introduction. This thesis examines the gap between nanomedicine research and its commercialization, addressing the 'valley of ...

A 3D multi-modal approach to study neuronal differentiation and tissue growth in the zebrafish hindbrain 

Blanc, Matthias (Date of defense: 2024-07-19)

The process by which the diversity of neurons making up the brain are produced relies on precise adjustments across space and time. Proneural genes are main drivers of neurogenesis across the different areas of the brain ...

The Fight for Intersectional Claims: An Analysis of Women in Movement 

Muñoz-Puig, Marina (Date of defense: 2024-05-17)

This dissertation examines women's political representation and participation from an intersectional perspective in Catalonia. It encompasses three different, yet interconnected research articles. The first paper analyses ...

Intercultural cities, convivencia and public spaces: Perspectives of policymakers, policy implementers and target groups of Barcelona interculturality plan 

Karaoğlu, Iren Eylül (Date of defense: 2024-03-06)

This Ph.D. thesis is a compilation of three articles that aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of the intercultural policies by focusing on the perspectives of different actors about urban encounters and public ...

Normalizing flows for neuroimaging research 

Masias Bruns, Mireia (Date of defense: 2024-07-08)

Psychotic disorders are characterized by poorly understood pathophysiological mechanisms, with a remarkable heterogeneity among patients, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. This results in a lack of definitive ...

Cinematic volume rendering solutions for the advanced exploration of medical images 

Baseer, Irum (Date of defense: 2024-07-04)

Medical visualization, commonly used in clinical routine for exploring cardiac data, is based on traditional techniques including multiplanar reformations, maximum intensity projection, and volume rendering that rely ...

Essays in Heterogeneous Panel Data Econometrics 

Mozorov, Vladislav (Date of defense: 2024-05-27)

This thesis consists of three essays on identification, estimation, and inference on distributional features of heterogeneous parameters using panel data. In the first chapter, Christian Brownlees and I consider the ...

A Discurse afterlife: representations of the political life, death, and continued presence of Marielle Franco] 

de la Presa, Lucia (Date of defense: 2024-03-05)

This dissertation is an exploration of discourses representing the political life, death, and continued presence of Marielle Franco following her assassination on 14 March 2018. Marielle Franco was a councilwoman in the ...

Periodisme i acadèmia Meta-anàlisi de la recerca en periodisme a Espanya 

Salvador-Mata, Bertran (Date of defense: 2024-06-25)

Aquesta recerca analitza la producció científica en la disciplina acadèmica del periodisme a Espanya (1980-2022). Per fer-ho, utilitza l’eina de clusterització algorítmica citation topic (InCites Clarivate Analytics, Web ...

Crime control as social interaction. A conversation analysis of police border checks 

Mora Rodríguez, Michael (Date of defense: 2024-05-14)

This doctoral thesis examines police border checks organised in the Spain – France border area (La Jonquera – Le Perthus). The main objective of these police checks is to prevent illegal activities (i.e., crime control). ...

Exploring the nexus of language and thought: a comparative analysis of spontaneous speech in aphasia and schizophrenia spectrum disorders 

Zhang, Han (Date of defense: 2024-05-13)

Our language capacity emerges robustly and universally in development, it lies at the heart of our human experience from the beginning of a human life, and remains relatively stable across the lifespan. Yet its vulnerability ...

Brain resilience, vulnerability, and modifiable risk factors in populations at risk of Alzheimer's disease 

Akıncı, Müge (Date of defense: 2024-07-18)

This thesis explores early pathophysiological processes related to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and their associations with modifiable factors in cognitively unimpaired, middle-aged individuals at risk of AD. Through five ...

CSDE1 isoforms in cancer progression and suppression 

Ciocia, Annagiulia (Date of defense: 2024-07-18)

The RNA-binding protein CSDE1 is a key regulator of mRNA stability and translation, involved in a wide range of biological processes. Alterations of CSDE1 expression and/or genetic mutations have been found in neurode ...

Interpreting the learning dynamics of language models 

Weber, Lucas (Date of defense: 2024-05-03)

Language models (LMs) have evolved to become remarkably capable yet similarly complex and intransparant systems. Our ability to understand how they achieve their outstanding traits – i.e. making them interpretable – can ...

Contributions to fully homomorphic encryption 

Rovira Cisterna, Sergi (Date of defense: 2024-05-29)

In recent years, the field of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) has become one of the main pilars for privacy-preserving technologies. However, many challenges still remain to be tackled before this technology can be ...

Promoting socio-emotional interactions and regulation in computer supported collaborative learning: design, implementation and evaluation of technology features and affordances to facilitate the socio-emotional side of CSCL 

Velamazán Martínez, Mariano (Date of defense: 2024-05-16)

This thesis, a compendium of publications, aims at contributing knowledge to better design CSCL tools for promoting socioemotional interactions and regulation. We started with a field study in which we observed groups ...

Discovery and evolutionary analysis of novel genes and translated ORFs 

Montañés Domínguez, José Carlos (Date of defense: 2024-07-11)

This thesis analyzes the generation of new genes created de novo and evaluates their evolution mainly in yeast but also in flies. First of all, we used next generation sequencing technology to analyze both new sequences ...

El Derecho a la rectificación en Ecuador y su aplicación en torno a la Ley Orgánica de Comunicación durante los gobiernos de Rafael Correa y Lenin Moreno: percepciones 

Guin Freire, Cindy Patricia (Date of defense: 2024-04-26)

La siguiente investigación ha tenido como objetivo conocer las percepciones que la aplicación del derecho a la rectificación, en torno a la Ley Orgánica de Comunicación, tuvo en Ecuador durante los gobiernos de Rafael ...

Evaluación de la calidad de los agregadores de noticias chinos: propuesta de un nuevo instrumento de evaluación con patrones de diseño centrados en el usuario 

Li, Mingzhu (Date of defense: 2024-04-17)

Esta tesis se centra en el estudio de una de las aplicaciones más utilizadas por la ciudadanía en China para informarse, los agregadores de noticias. Tiene como objetivo general la identificación de las características que ...

Beyond the spectrum: prosodic, noise-enhanced and self-supervised features for speech recognition 

Cámbara Ruiz, Guillermo (Date of defense: 2024-04-02)

This dissertation investigates three methods for improving speech recognition in challenging conditions, focusing on feature enhancement and extending beyond spectral features. First, it demonstrates that incorporating ...