Doctoral Thesis
Recent Submissions
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Modeling and Control of Nanosecond Repetitively Pulsed Discharge for Plasma-Assisted Ignition
(2024)Robust ignition of hard-to-ignite fuels is essential for future spark ignited internal combustion engines, particularly for introducing efficiency-enhancing diesel-like process parameters like air excess or high amounts of exhaust gas recirculation (EGR). Adopting novel plasmabased ignition systems like Nanaosecond Repetitively Pulsed Discharge (NRPD) is promising in extending the ignition limits and the early flame development speed. ...Doctoral Thesis -
Jet streak dynamics from a PV gradient perspective
(2024)The jet stream is a high-altitude circumpolar band of westerly winds and acts as a guide to large-scale weather systems, making it a crucial feature of the global atmospheric circulation. While the subtropical jet stream is in agreement with the thermal wind balance, the eddy-driven jet is closely connected to the storm tracks in the major ocean basins. The evolution of the North Atlantic jet stream in a warming climate is an important ...Doctoral Thesis -
Trophic dynamics in meta-ecosystems: Insights from compound-specific stable isotopes
(2024)Food webs are crucial for understanding how carbon and nutrients flow within ecosystems, influencing sustainability and carbon fluxes. Ecosystems are interconnected, exchanging energy, nutrients, and organic matter—a concept captured by meta-ecosystem theory. Consequently, changes in one ecosystem can have cascading effects on others. This interconnectedness becomes increasingly important as global change drives significant alterations ...Doctoral Thesis -
Game Dynamics on Networks: Exploring Behavior Evolution with Multi-type Interactions
(2024)Doctoral Thesis -
Fouling Physics on Soft Materials and the Rational Engineering of Antifouling Heat Transfer Surfaces
(2024)Fresh water and energy are essential resources in our daily lives, interdependent, and vital for numerous processes. Water is necessary for energy production as a cooling medium, while energy is needed for effective water treatment and distribution. The limited availability of these resources, combined with challenges like climate change and population growth, stresses their interconnection, known as the water-energy nexus. A key ...Doctoral Thesis -
Local Complexity: New Results and Bridges to Other Fields
(2024)This thesis presents new results for the theory of local complexity in distributed computation and builds bridges to other areas of theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, such as parallel, distributed, and sublinear algorithms, descriptive combinatorics, and finitary factors. We begin the thesis with an extended introduction to the area of local algorithms, particularly focusing on recent complexity-theoretic developments. ...Doctoral Thesis -
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Adaptation in Salmonella Typhimurium during infection
(2024)Salmonella infects millions of people worldwide every year. To cause disease, Salmonella Typhimurium (S. Tm) and other enteric bacterial pathogens must adapt to ever-changing conditions during and between infection. This study aims to provide insights into how these pathogens adapt, survive, and evolve under various conditions, which can help in developing new therapeutic strategies to combat infections and antibiotic resistance. Many ...Doctoral Thesis -
Modelling Global Human Displacement Risk from Weather- and Climate-Related Disasters
(2024)Human displacement, which describes the involuntary movement of people from their homes or places of habitual residence due to external stressors such as natural hazards, armed conflicts, or general violence, has seen a marked increase in attention in policy-relevant discussions. Among all the stressors, weather and climate-related disasters contribute to over 300 million of people being displaced since 2008, as reported by the Internal ...Doctoral Thesis -
Semialgebraic groups and generalized affine buildings
(2024)We develop the theory of algebraic groups over real closed fields and apply the results to construct a geometric object $B$ and to prove that $B$ is an affine $\Lambda$-building. Real closed fields are ordered fields that have particularly nice properties in the context of \emph{semialgebraic geometry}, where objects are defined by polynomial equalities and inequalities. Over the real numbers, algebraic groups are Lie groups and have been ...Doctoral Thesis -
Guardians Within: Exploring Prophage-Encoded Bacterial Defence Systems
(2024)Bacteria have evolved numerous defence systems to protect themselves from phage infections. These systems are encoded in bacterial core genome and mobile genetic elements, including prophages, enabling an efficient exchange of defence mechanisms between different bacterial strains. Investigation of bacterial immunity is of high interest, as the molecular mechanisms have a huge importance for fundamental science, exploration of diverse ...Doctoral Thesis -
Hypothalamic neuromodulation strategy for control of anxiety and epileptic seizures
(2024)The lateral hypothalamus plays a crucial role in regulating vital physiological processes that maintain homeostasis, or the stable internal environment necessary for optimal functioning. Disruptions in homeostasis are implicated in various disorders, including anxiety and epileptic seizures, which manifest as a result of deviations from normal physiological conditions. In this context, we have developed a novel hypothalamic strategy, ...Doctoral Thesis -
Renewable Energy Infrastructure Finance & Development Through the Technology Lifecycle
(2024)Doctoral Thesis -
Inductive Bias of Neural Networks and Selected Applications
(2024)This thesis is concerned with the inductive bias of (deep) neural networks (NNs) NN_θ ∶ X → Y. For commonly used loss functionals L, a large set of functions f ∶ X → Y minimizes L equally well. Therefore, it is up to the learning method (e.g., a NN architecture, with certain hyper-parameters including a certain training algorithm) to choose one function among all functions with sufficiently small loss. The preference underlying this choice ...Doctoral Thesis -
Simulating Urban Complexity for City Co-Creation on Three Scales
(2024)The challenges associated with the planning, management, and global sustainability of urban areas due to their expansion require new resources for city-making. This cumulative thesis illustrates the use of computational modeling and simulation to enhance and improve existing policy-making and city planning processes, supporting co-creation by taking into account urban complexity. Simulation empowers people by providing a more complete ...Doctoral Thesis -
Scattering theory and applications to topological condensed matter
(2024)This thesis explores, deepens and extends the already fruitful connection between scattering methods and topological matter. It sits in the context of non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics and is concerned, for the most part, with non-interacting insulating and superconducting systems. The manuscript can be subdivided into three parts: (1) An introduction to the field of topological condensed matter and overview of relevant literature; ...Doctoral Thesis