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    Mapping the Health Information Seeking Journey of Patients with Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome: A Qualitative Study
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-02) Parthipan, Meera
    Background: Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome (PMOS), is a complex and heterogeneous condition with reproductive, metabolic, dermatological, and psychological implications. Existing literature shows that people living with PMOS frequently report unmet information needs, including limited guidance at diagnosis and around treatment and long-term management. As a result, many seek information beyond healthcare encounters through online resources, books, social media, peer networks, and health and wellness professionals. However, less is known about how health information-seeking behaviour (HISB) evolves across symptom onset and recognition, diagnosis, and treatment/management. There is also limited understanding of how individuals navigate and reconcile information from multiple sources, and how personal and contextual factors shape these experiences over time. Research Questions: How do people with PMOS engage in HISB across key stages of the care pathway (symptom onset and recognition, diagnosis, and treatment/management), and how does it evolve over time? In what ways do personal antecedents (e.g., demographics, identity, psychological factors) and contextual antecedents (e.g., culture, language, social support, technological access) shape the nature and quality of HISB among people with PMOS? How does HISB shape understanding, decision-making, and coping at each stage? What are the perceived outcomes of HISB among people with PMOS at each stage of the care pathway? How do people with PMOS navigate and reconcile conflicting information from healthcare providers, online sources, and peer networks? Methods: This study used a qualitative research design guided by interpretivist and critical theory paradigms. Twelve participants with PMOS living in Ontario were purposively recruited between January and May 2026. Participants were eligible if they were pre-menopausal, between 18 and 45 years of age, resided in Ontario, and had received a formal PMOS diagnosis from a healthcare professional at least six months prior to participation. Twelve semi-structured narrative interviews were conducted virtually through Zoom between March and May 2026 and typically lasted between 50 minutes and 1 hour and 20 minutes. Participant-informed journey mapping, guided by the Journey Mapping in Applied Public Health and Social Sciences (J-MAPHS) framework, was used to visually represent participants’ PMOS and information-seeking experiences over time. Interview and journey-mapping data were analyzed concurrently using inductive thematic analysis following Braun and Clarke’s six-phase framework. Findings: HISB was dynamic and evolving, with participants’ information needs and behaviours changing across their PMOS journeys. During symptom onset and recognition, participants often lacked the knowledge to connect bodily changes to PMOS, while social and cultural factors shaped whether symptoms were recognized as requiring further information. Receiving a diagnosis helped explain some previous experiences and symptoms but did not necessarily resolve information needs, with differences in the amount, framing, and relevance of information provided. During treatment/management, information seeking became increasingly self-directed and individualized as participants navigated multiple sources, evaluated credibility and personal relevance, and used their own experiences to guide management, contributing to both empowerment and the burden of remaining informed Conclusions: This study demonstrates that HISB is an evolving and interconnected process shaped by changing information needs, experiences, and circumstances across the PMOS journey. Findings highlight the need for accessible, individualized, and ongoing informational support that helps people with PMOS understand their condition, navigate conflicting information, and make informed decisions throughout their care.
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    Working flexible still: remote work, hybrid work, and the future of work in Ontario’s technology sector
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-02) Blackman, Tyler
    In this thesis, I addressed three main topics directly. First, I examined the future of work discourse as it is shaped through expertise performances and particular work and worker framings, via event ethnography. Second, I investigated how looming restrictions on flexible remote work, together with continuing intensive layoffs, produced an association between flexibility and precarity among tech workers. Third, I explored how tech workers’ encounters with the flexibility paradox generates tension between resistance to and adoption of exploitative dimensions of being flexible. Between June 2023 and August 2025, I engaged in participant observation in future of work settings and semi-structured interviews with tech workers. Analysis was carried out both during and after this period. I present three standalone manuscripts that each develop my discursive and qualitative analysis of participant observation and interview data. In this thesis, I examined the “future of work” as both a discourse and as flexible work practices. Temporally, my research spanned what can be described as the initial “post-COVID-19 era”: the period following easing lockdown measures and relative COVID-19 vaccination availability in Canada. I analyzed how the future of work discourse was constructed around long-standing and emergent anxieties concerning labour and the meaning of work, in both social and technical ways. To do so, I analyzed several future of work conferences and massively open online courses (MOOCs), professionally oriented events aimed at extending expertise. I also examined how particular flexible work framings and experiences, perceived value, and workers’ engagement with flexible work are shifting in the post-COVID context. Drawing on the example of tech workers in Ontario, Canada, I illuminate how flexible work has changed amid increasing precarity in high-status professional employment and rapidly evolving flexibility cultures. This approach analyzes how flexible work practices are produced, reproduced, and internalized by workers. It highlights the long-standing and emergent processes through which flexibility has been naturalized as a self-rationalizing and self-exploitative force, even as it is sometimes contested. Rather than demanding less work or more equitable working arrangements, tech workers remained ambivalent toward flexible work’s ambiguity and paradoxical nature in their lives, even as the future of work continues to be premised on a narrow worker ideal in the face of change. Importantly, I argue that high-status professional work is increasingly shaped by flexible work practices that normalise precarity, overwork, and insecurity. While flexibility maintained certain benefits, it simultaneously generated forms of white-collar work that discipline workers toward self-management and self-exploitation. I approached the future of work and flexible work as interdisciplinary concerns. By examining future of work discourse and flexible working practices among Canadian tech workers, I contributed to ongoing work in economic geography, labour geography, and the sociology of work that calls for closer attention to economic futures, variable forms of precarity across different kinds of labour, and the micro-level workplace and flexibility spaces. More broadly, I foreground culture’s role as a dominant rather than peripheral dimension of economic thinking. I conceptualized the future of work by its overdetermination and futurity, understanding the future as a process of becoming enacted in the present. I also conceptualized contemporary flexible work experiences not as a straightforward means of producing economic value, but as practices that shape work cultures, meanings, attitudes, and worker subjectivities. I argue that understanding future as a process is central to structuring and maintaining capital’s hegemony over labour, though not without resistance.
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    Multiresponsive Liquid Crystal Networks and Elastomers (LCN/LCE) for Fluidic Environment Soft Robotics
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-02) Tejedor Garcia, Irving Hafed
    soft robotics, liquid crystal elastomers, liquid crystal networks, hydrogels, hybrid materials, Möbius strip, azobenzene, Zero-Elastic-Energy Modes, isothermal actuation, targeted drug delivery, biocompatibility, surface engineering, magnetic navigation, stimuli-responsive polymers.
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    Data-Driven Mobile Sensor Planning and Interpretation
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-02) Karki, Anand
    Accurate reconstruction of an unsteady flow from a small number of measurements depends critically on where those measurements are collected. Fixed Eulerian sensors may miss structures that move through the domain, while passively advected Lagrangian sensors may become concentrated in only a subset of the dynamics. This thesis develops two complementary data-driven approaches for designing and interpreting mobile sensing strategies using only offline snapshot data. The first contribution extends Proper Orthogonal Decomposition with column-pivoted QR factorization (POD--QR) from static sensor placement to mobile sensor trajectory planning. A sequence of sliding temporal windows is used to identify time-varying POD--QR target locations. These unordered targets are connected into consistent multi-sensor trajectories using minimum-distance assignment, and the resulting sensor motion is constrained by a prescribed maximum speed. Across the Lamb--Oseen vortex, double-gyre advection, forced Kolmogorov turbulence, and cylinder vortex shedding, the resulting Moving POD--QR strategy improves reconstruction accuracy relative to fixed Eulerian and passively advected Lagrangian sensing at practical sensor counts. Although these trajectories determine where a small number of sensors should move, they provide only a sparse view of the sensing objective and are therefore difficult to interpret over the full domain. The second contribution introduces the Information Flow Field, or InfoFlo, a dense time-varying vector field that represents locally preferred sensing motion. InfoFlo is constructed by applying POD--QR independently over overlapping space--time regions and converting each locally selected measurement location into a displacement direction. Comparisons using cosine similarity, divergence, and finite-time Lyapunov exponents show that the resulting sensing-induced geometry often differs from material transport. Together, Moving POD--QR and InfoFlo provide a model-free framework for both generating informative mobile sensor trajectories and understanding the spatial structures that drive them.
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    From Single Binders to Sequence Populations: SELEX-Based Molecular Recognition for Environmental Detection and Cancer Cell Profiling
    (University of Waterloo, 2026-09-02) Lui, Nathania
    Aptamers are single-stranded DNA or RNA oligonucleotides selected through Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential Enrichment (SELEX) that fold into defined three-dimensional structures capable of high-affinity, high-specificity target recognition. This thesis explores two complementary applications of SELEX-based aptamer technology: the isolation of a highly selective small-molecule aptamers for environmental biosensing, and the use of early-round, high-throughput sequencing data for computational cancer cell profiling. In the first study, capture-SELEX incorporating extensive negative selection against 17β-estradiol (E2) was used to isolate a DNA aptamer selective for 17α-ethinylestradiol (EE2), a synthetic estrogen and priority environmental contaminant that is structurally very similar to its natural counterparts, estrone (E1) and E2. After eighteen rounds of selection, the aptamer EE2-1 was identified, exhibiting nanomolar affinity for EE2 (Kd = 200 nM by thioflavin T fluorescence; 138 nM by isothermal titration calorimetry) with minimal cross-reactivity toward E1 and E2. Mutational analysis confirmed that binding is mediated by a conserved loop region, and binding was shown to be independent of Mg2+. EE2-1 was incorporated into a label-free fluorescent biosensor capable of detecting EE2 in both buffer and wastewater, representing the first experimentally validated aptamer selected directly against EE2. In the second study, single-round cell-SELEX against HeLa and MCF-7 cancer cell lines, combined with deep sequencing and automated 6-mer frequency analysis, was used to test whether minimally enriched sequence populations encode cell-type-discriminatory information. Differentially enriched motifs distinguishing the two cell lines were identified as early as Round 1, including several novel candidate MCF-7-associated sequence families. Longitudinal analysis across Rounds 1, 4, and 6 revealed that this discriminatory landscape evolves substantially during selection, with a broadly enriched “pan-cancer” motif emerging by Round6 in both cell lines. Comparison of 18- and 30-nucleotide randomized libraries further showed that library architecture influences the information recovered during early selection. Together, these studies demonstrate that SELEX can be exploited in two complementary ways: iterative enrichment with negative selection to isolate individual highly selective aptamers, and computational analysis of minimally enriched populations to extract biologically meaningful molecular fingerprints. This work broadens the scope of aptamer technology for both environmental monitoring and cancer cell profiling and highlights the growing role of bioinformatics in aptamer research.