On March 11, 1966, Indonesian President Soekarno suddenly transferred executive power to the Army, which has played a role in the Indonesian state and society since the late 1950s. This act replaced Soekarno’s own government with a military dictatorship dubbed the New Order, which lasted for nearly 32 years. Why...
The planarian flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea is capable of recovery from nearly any injury, including regenerating an entire brain after decapitation, made possible by a pool of pluripotent stem cells which maintain all of the worm’s tissues into adulthood. However, the signals that control the production of new neurons in these...
Organic solar cells (OSC) are a next generation solar energy technology that offers the advantages of scalable fabrication, light weight, flexibility, and earth-abundant starting materials. Despite tremendous advances in OSC power conversion efficiency (PCE) over the last decade, active layer material selection and optimization is still largely empirical. In order...
Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs) are a low-emission, efficient and fuel flexible energy conversion devices, which have been extensively applied in electricity generation systems. Moreover, it can also be operated in electrolysis mode as Solid Oxide Electrolysis Cell (SOEC) or Reversible Solid Oxide Cell (ReSOC) for intermittent renewable energy storage....
This dissertation consists of three essays in microeconomic theory. In the first two chapters, I study a class of partnerships where partners can exit and continue to free-ride on the remaining partners' efforts. The crucial force to deter players from strategic exiting is the ripple effect that it may trigger...
Manufacturing processes are known for their intricacies in changing material shapes and properties. New generations of manufacturing technologies, known as flexible manufacturing, are moving toward design freedom, which allows producing parts with optimized geometries and high customizations at an affordable cost even for low-volume productions. Two prominent flexible manufacturing processes...
Self-assembly of colloidal particles at the nano- and microscale has been a powerful tool for producing structures with emergent properties in applications ranging from electro-mechanical systems to photonics and biomedical devices. Great success has been achieved in experiments, where a variety of exotic phases have been discovered and even reconfigurable...
This dissertation analyzes how suburban school districts made sense of and planned to reduce inequality between 2019–2021. Previous literature has found that suburban schools, despite their reputation as the best in the country, are deeply unequal (Lewis and Diamond 2015; Lewis-McCoy 2014). Building on this previous scholarship, I ask: How...
The hippocampus has been identified as a critical structure for supporting spatial memory processes in both humans and animals alike. Many of these processes such as the ability to self-localize in a given environment as well as engage in goal-directed navigation are thought to depend on the location-specific firing of...
The field of materials discovery is undergoing an unprecedented transition from laboratory tocomputer. Behind this transition is the new ability to accurately compute material properties, especially
energetic stability, from first principles with density functional theory (DFT). However,
DFT remains computationally expensive, and DFT-based materials discovery is intractable, especially
in high...
One method of cancer treatment is to thermally ablate (destroy) tumor masses using heat caused by electric current, or Joule heating. This particular modality is called radiofrequency ablation (RFA), due to the use of electric currents in the 100 kHz to 800 kHz frequency range. Computationally, RFA is simulated as...
This dissertation examines how nineteenth century German literature constructed and experimented with an entangled concept of “the environment” based not in (Romantic) philosophical and literary conceptions of nature, but in the theory and science of color perception. As the visual point of interaction between an observer and their surrounding world,...
As sound changes advance across large geographic areas, they progress unevenly across populations. The speakers who lead these changes often share macro-social identities, like place or social class affiliations (e.g. Nesbitt 2018; Wagner et al. 2016). But the features undergoing these macro-level sound changes also hold social meanings related to...
When attached to another species (e.g. a nanoparticle), the sequence specificity of DNA can be repurposed to program interactions between such entities and to direct their formation into ordered structures. The research presented in this thesis aims to push the boundaries of structures that can be made via this approach....
We consider general utility models and information structures of the agents and illustrate when economic conclusions for designing simple mechanisms in classical settings extends for general environments. We show that whether economic conclusions can be generalized depends on the details of the generalizations. For example, in single-item auction, competition and...
Rapid changes in global climate are pushing nations to reduce CO2 emissions and adopt clean energy technologies for renewable energy generation and storage. As wind and solar are implemented worldwide, a commensurate response in energy storage will need to be installed to meet fluctuations in peak energy demands and generation...
This thesis focuses on the application of neural networks to three types of classification tasks, each work with its own chapter. The objective of the first work is to take advantage of deep neural networks in order to make next day crime count predictions in a fine-grain city partition. We...
In this dissertation, we aim to develop efficient algorithms with theoretical guarantees for several data-driven decision making problems. Specifically, we study the data-driven deci- sion making from three different perspectives: statistical learning, nonconvex optimization, and control of stochastic system. This dissertation contains three parts. In the first part, we study...
Understanding associative memory is fundamental for a variety of neurological and neurodegenerative diseases, however, a large proportion of this research has excluded female subjects due to unsubstantiated bias. By including intact females, ovariectomized females and males in the study of associative memory, clear sex differences in acquisition emerged. Female mice...
We study modular forms, Jacobi forms, and hermitian formal Fourier-Jacobi series over imaginary quadratic fields. In the first section, we prove that the ring of classical Jacobi forms of a fixed genus g, varying index m and weight k is generated by theta functions. From this result we show that...
Since Infrared radiation was discovered in 1800s, the research and applications on the infrared regime have been continually developed. The infrared detectors are the key technology in these applications and have been successfully used for medical imaging, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), free-space optical communication, target tracking and object identification...
Nanocarriers as structures with at least one dimension in the nanometer scale are capable of loading small molecule therapeutics that would otherwise have poor bioavailability, non- specific uptake, and off target effects. Polymeric nanocarriers can be modified to tune their chemical and biological behavior to better suit the intended application....
The negative early and late health consequences from exposure to artificial sources of radiation are particularly apparent in victims of radiological emergencies who were diagnosed with cancer, radiation pneumonitis, among other conditions. The renaissance of nuclear energy, increased use of ionizing radiation in the medical field, and nuclear threats from...
Harnessing the metabolic potential of methanotrophic bacteria is a compelling strategy for the bioremediation of environmentally harmful methane gas. Methanotrophs can activate a 105 kcal/mol C-H bond in methane at ambient conditions using metalloenzymes called methane monooxygenases (MMOs). Particulate methane monooxygenase (pMMO) is a copper-dependent, membrane-bound enzyme that is the...
In this thesis, we consider the spherical spin glass models at zero temperature. We first determine the structureof the Parisi measure at zero temperature for the spherical p+s spin glass model. We then
consider the spherical mixed p-spin model and show that for the spherical spin models with
n components,...
Economic growth in contexts of state weakness presents a puzzle. If the state’s provision of property rights is necessary for financial investment and related pro-growth behaviors, then why do we observe private investment and commercial transactions in settings where state institutions are far from reliable property guarantors? This study addresses...
Water vapor condenses into liquid water when it encounters a cold surface. If the surface temperature is sufficiently low, freezing follows the condensation step, and the process is holistically referred to as condensation frosting. Both phase change processes are fundamental to many industries ranging from water harvesting, thermal management, solar...
Directed energy deposition (DED) has pushed the frontiers of manufacturability by enabling the creation of multi-material, functionally graded components, the repair or modification of existing components, and the addition of wear resistant coatings. This additive manufacturing method creates a 3D object by depositing powder directly into a small molten pool...
As social media are intricately woven into the fabric of everyday life, people are increasingly expressing their emotions, feelings, and thoughts on these platforms. Particularly, social media have become an outlet for sharing negative emotions and stressful experiences. This dissertation examines factors that influence how and why people share negative...
Recent advances in high-performance computing have resulted in massive databases of materials properties calculated with techniques such as ab initio density functional theory. In fact, some of the largest of such databases have calculations of nearly all distinct, ordered, experimentally-reported compounds. This thesis discusses the application of data in one...
Selective attention enables people to focus on a small number of objects, features, or events with good resolution. Sometimes attention may also be less selective and distributed across numerous items, which allows more information to be processed at a lower resolution. The degree to which attention is more or less...
Polymers occupied nearly every facet of our daily lives, and enhancing their mechanical and fracture properties has long been an important topic in the field of polymer science. Based on the various need in applications, polymers are designed to have a range of characteristics such as tackiness, optical properties, mechanical...
The dissertation builds on my current research to demonstrate the connection between affect and learning through machine learning and qualitative analysis of interactions where players use a complex systems game. The project is threefold: First, I developed a thinking and learning intervention, the agent-based modeling simulation Ant Adaptation. I showed...
Central nervous system (CNS) regeneration is one of the most challenging regenerative medicine targets in mammals due to the natural inhibitory mechanisms that occur in response to injury. In the case of spinal cord injury (SCI), the initial inflammatory response protects damaged tissue, but over time creates a hostile microenvironment...
Abstract This dissertation aims to understand how the domestic high courts in Latin America rely on the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The “relationship between courts” is a phenomenon that happens in domestic and international politics when domestic high courts start to resist or follow international jurisprudence....
Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TDMCs) are one of many families of two-dimensional (2D) beyond graphene, that started to gain more attention due to the need for miniaturization and their unique electrical, mechanical, and optical properties. Some members of TMDCs, such as MoS2, has direct band gap in its monolayer form, making...
The reprogramming of somatic cells to a spontaneously contracting cardiomyocyte-like state using defined transcription factors has proven successful in mouse fibroblasts. However, this process has been less successful in human cells, thus limiting the potential clinical applicability of this technology in regenerative medicine. We hypothesized that this issue is due...
The spatial autoregressive model has been widely applied in science, in areas such as economics, public finance, political science, agricultural economics, environmental studies and transportation analyses. The classical spatial autoregressive model is a linear model for describing spatial correlation. In this work, we expand the classical model to include time...