Mycobacterium abscessus (Mabs) is a non-tuberculous mycobacterium (NTM) that can cause pulmonary disease in individuals with underlying lung conditions and is difficult to treat due to its intrinsic resistance to many antibiotics. Mabs exhibits two morphotypes: smooth (MabsSm), which is believed to be the infecting form, and rough (MabsRg), which can arise after infection. The difference between morphotypes is determined by the presence of glycopeptidolipids (GPLs) in MabsSm or the lack of GPLs in MabsRg. The MabsSm-to-MabsRg morphotype switch can occur after years of infection due to unknown triggers. MabsRg is associated with increased resistance to antibiotics and phagocytosis. The mycobacterial CRISPR interference (CRISPRi) inducible knock-down (iKD) system was utilized to create reversible MabsSm <-> MabsRg morphoswitching strains that induce the morphotypic switch at-will by repressing target genes that are required for GPL biosynthesis and transport. After CRISPRi cloning, the strains were tested by growing Mabs in the presence of anhydrotetracycline (ATc), which induces the CRISPRi iKD system, to determine the rate of morphotype switching upon increasing ATc concentration. Upon induction with 100 ng/mL ATc, 70-90% of the colonies converted to the Mabs conditionally rough (MabscondRg) morphotype. With 500 ng/mL ATc induction, 92-96% of the colonies converted to the MabscondRg morphotype. The morphoswitching strains were reversible upon the removal of ATc, while maintained the MabscondRg morphotype in the continued presence of ATc. Furthermore, aggregation profiling was established as a sufficient method of differentiation of MabsSm and MabscondRg in liquid culture. Overall, these findings provide a foundation for tunable, inducible control of the MabsSm <-> MabsRg morphotype switchable and reversible strains.

Private Set Operations (PSOs) enable multiple parties to collaboratively evaluate functions over their private input sets, ensuring that no party learns more than the intended output. The functionality includes set union, intersection, cardinality, and so on.This dissertation advances the state-of-the-art in PSO by proposing novel protocols that address long-standing efficiency and scalability challenges in the multi-party setting and by exploring real-world applications in privacy-preserving bio-computation.

The first contribution introduces the first practical protocol for multi-party Private Set Union (mPSU) in the dishonest majority setting. This protocol is built on public-key techniques and a newly introduced primitive, membership oblivious transfer (mOT).
Implementation and evaluation demonstrate significant performance improvements in both runtime and communication cost over existing protocols.
Further optimizations enable compact execution by introducing parallelization, achieving substantial speedups for a large number of participants.

The second contribution presents new protocols for Private Set Intersection Cardinality (PSI-CA) in both two-party and multi-party settings, with and without the assistance of a helping server. These protocols are highly efficient by using only symmetric-key primitives without the usage of heavy generic secure computation frameworks.
The resulting constructions offer significant performance gains over prior works.
The detailed study of two applications — heatmap computation and association rule learning — also supports the practical usage of proposed protocols.

The final contribution investigates the application of PSO techniques to secure edit distance computation. A new protocol for approximate edit distance is proposed based on private set difference, offering a flexible trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.
In addition, a new protocol for exact edit distance computation is introduced, outperforming prior approaches by a factor of up to 24× in practical benchmarks.

Collectively, these contributions establish new theoretical foundations, propose efficient cryptographic primitives, and provide real-world implementations that significantly enhance the practicality of PSOs and their applications in bio-computing.

This dissertation explores play through posthumanist and new materialist theoretical frameworks, using the outdoor Global Positioning System-based game of GeoCaching. The GeoCaches used for the study are situated in urban outdoor spaces to encourage material interactions among human participants, non-human living entities, and material landscapes. This approach specifically explores adult play to foster connections between human and more-than-human worlds. Grounded in the scholarly field of play, the study challenges anthropocentric assumptions by exploring how playful, embodied engagements with local ecologies generate new forms of relationality and learning.A posthumanist research design was implemented, primarily utilizing video recordings from wearable GoPro technology. Additional methods-including participant observation, photographs, audio recordings, and three types of interviews (walking, debrief, and semi-structured)-further enriched the documentation of multisensory and emergent play. Data were collected from two adult participants as they engaged in geocaching across a total of seven cache sites.
Three analytical concepts-proximity, stickiness, and camouflage-emerged from the analysis, highlighting how material play is co-constituted through human and more-than-human intra-actions. Proximity foregrounds the ethical pulls between bodies and materials, framing play as a relational negotiation rather than a linear pursuit of goals. Stickiness draws attention to the affective and material bonds that linger, positioning play as a process of entanglement and interdependency, where traces persist beyond the game. Camouflage is understood as a more-than-visual correspondence with material, highlighting how attunement to subtle environmental cues fosters deeper, reciprocal relationships with the more-than-human world.
Findings demonstrate that play provides opportunities for heightened awareness and material sensitivity, as participants may become attuned to the agency of objects, landscapes, and more-than-human bodies. Concept creation served as a dynamic sense-making tool, tracing complex, emergent relationships within human and more-than-human assemblages. The GeoCaching app functioned as both a navigational tool and provocateur, prompting tactile engagement with landscapes and positioning play as a dialogue between technology, bodies, and materials.
By foregrounding material agency, this research contributes to scholarship advocating for less binary approaches between play and learning, while also reflecting critically on the study’s methodological limitations, unexpected challenges, and the researcher’s own positionality.