Schlumprecht, Thomas2010-10-122010-10-142017-04-072010-10-122010-10-142017-04-072009-082010-10-12http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2009-08-7100We study the relationship of dominance for sequences and trees in Banach spaces. In the context of sequences, we prove that domination of weakly null sequences is a uniform property. More precisely, if $(v_i)$ is a normalized basic sequence and $X$ is a Banach space such that every normalized weakly null sequence in $X$ has a subsequence that is dominated by $(v_i)$, then there exists a uniform constant $C\geq1$ such that every normalized weakly null sequence in $X$ has a subsequence that is $C$-dominated by $(v_i)$. We prove as well that if $V=(v_i)_{i=1}^\infty$ satisfies some general conditions, then a Banach space $X$ with separable dual has subsequential $V$ upper tree estimates if and only if it embeds into a Banach space with a shrinking FDD which satisfies subsequential $V$ upper block estimates. We apply this theorem to Tsirelson spaces to prove that for all countable ordinals $\alpha$ there exists a Banach space $X$ with Szlenk index at most $\omega^{\alpha \omega +1}$ which is universal for all Banach spaces with Szlenk index at most $\omega^{\alpha\omega}$.en-USupper estimatesuniform estimatesweakly null sequencesSzlenk indexuniversal spaceembedding into FDDsEfros-Borel structureanalytic classesBook