The Spectral Body: Theology and Economy in Dostoevsky and Melville’s Fiction This dissertation examines the intersections and tensions between religion and economy in Dostoevsky and Melville’s fiction. I argue that Christian theology of the body—as the site of both salvation and economic production—is at the center of their concern. These...
Preschool television has historically not been representative of the world young childrenlive in. Although progress is being made, “representation matters” is still a phrase that rings true to this day. This dissertation focused on representation within STEM television shows because STEM education involves learning important skills such as problem solving...
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the second most common cancer in American men and has led to approximately 29K deaths in 2018. The androgen signaling pathway plays a pivotal role in the pathogenesis of PCa, and androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) has been the main therapeutic approach for PCa. However, almost all...
Granular mixing has received less attention than fluid mixing due to the unique properties of granular materials and the complexity of their flow behaviors. Unlike fluid flows, where a continuum perspective accurately captures flow behavior, neither a continuum nor a discrete perspective by itself can describe the global behaviors of...
We study the complexification of Laplace Eigenfunctions on the Grauert tube of a compact real analytic manifold. Our main results concern scaling asymptotics of Fourier coefficients of the Szego kernel on the Grauert tube boundary in a Heisenberg frequency scaled neighborhood of the geodesic flow. We show that in the...
This dissertation investigates the nature of the interface between morphosyntax and cognition. My goal is to connect formal semantic theories of meaning with theories of cognition, drawing on the initial hypothesis that the interface between language and cognition is transparent. I look at different forms of adjectival comparatives -- positive...
Heterogenous catalysis is the pillar of chemical production and a crucial aspect for optimization toward a sustainable future. To improve the current design of heterogeneous catalysts of maximal activity and product selectivity, gaining fundamental understanding of the catalytic active sites is crucial. The nature of active sites has been the...
Skeletal muscle is one of the most abundant tissues in the body and makes up over 40% of the total body mass. It is important for mobility and posture maintenance as well as plays a central role in whole body metabolism. Skeletal muscle is made up of bundles of muscle...
This dissertation explores the fundamental science of flexoelectricity and its implications using a combined experimental and theoretical approach. I begin by introducing the flexoelectric effect and formalizing the basics of strain gradients, polarization, and flexoelectric coefficients. Next, I describe the development of a flexoelectric characterization system based upon three-point bending...
This dissertation consists of three papers on methods for meta-analysis with few studies. These papers are concerned with proper inference from meta-analysis models that combine data from a small number of studies using fixed and random-effects models. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to meta-analysis, the motivation for this work and...
Polymer and polymer/ceramic composites known as bone cements are commonly used in musculoskeletal reconstructive surgeries where bone tissue fixation, reinforcement, or void filling may be needed. Polymethylmethacrylate, PMMA, was the initial (and currently only) FDA-approved bone cement for bone-void filling applications yet faces many inherent material-based challenges that impacts its...
Discrete molecules, linear and branched polymers, and disordered cross-linked networks are well studied objects of chemical synthesis. However, two-dimensional polymers (2DPs) have been long missing from this continuum of molecular architectures, both in chemical synthesis and in Nature. Recently, new polymerization strategies and characterization methods have enabled the unambiguous realization...
From visualizing thousands of social relationships, operationalizing measures that offer us insight into our theories, to characterizing cultural change over the span of centuries, computational methods appear to provide sociology a means to reveal patterns otherwise unknowable. While these methods are persistently critiqued for their inability to generate social theory,...
This dissertation purposely prioritizes Tibetan and Himalayan tsunmas’ perspectives on the topic of restoring a full ordination lineage for ordained women. To do so, it examines the gendered landscapes of Buddhist women’s ordination, which has been a contentious issue throughout Buddhism’s twenty-six-hundred-year history, beginning with the Buddha’s eventual acceptance of...
Young children can sometimes acquire new vocabulary words—even property terms—through indirect learning (e.g. Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We explore two factors that contribute to this ability—perceptual alignment and linguistic contrast. We propose that spontaneous comparison processes lead children to notice key commonalities and differences that facilitate indirect property word learning....
Biologically active small molecules remain the foundation for the medical management of human disease. Their impacts on human health, longevity, culture, and society are difficultly overstated. In large part, medicines derived from organic compounds are the result of the tireless efforts of chemical practitioners––both past and present––who have dedicated much...
This dissertation traces the historical development of diasporic Filipino American activism after the watershed 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and during the military dictatorship of Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines. Using multi-country archival research and approximately sixty oral history interviews, it analyzes labor, student, anti-dictatorship, and human rights activists...
Bacteria often coordinate virulence factors to fine-tune the host response during infection. These coordinated events can include toxins counteracting or amplifying effects of another toxin or though regulating the stability of virulence factors to remove their function once it is no longer needed. Multifunctional autoprocessing repeats-in toxin (MARTX) toxins are...
Winner, 2012 Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award
Women of the Washington Press argues that for nearly two centuries women journalists have persisted in their efforts to cover politics in the nation’s capital in spite of blatant prejudice and restrictive societal attitudes. They have been held back by the...
Intestinal immunity is a critical contributor to host health. The immune system in the intestine maintains both defense against pathogens and homeostasis of intestinal tissue, which is exposed to environmental influences, including microbes and ingested foods. Proper regulation of the immune response is required to prevent damage to the host....
Surface appearance represents the sense impression of the surface. In visual art, the artists try to use the appearance of their artworks to express their mental state and philosophy. Researchers in the cultural heritage community has been trying to use different analysis approaches to interpret artworks. In Computer Graphics and...
Shale gas is a critical energy resource that is comprised primarily of light gases that are expensive to transport. Because these gases are geographically spread-out and there is insufficient capacity to transport them to centralized processing facilities, they must often be flared, leading to great sources of resource waste and...
The last two decades have seen tremendous growth in the development of techniquesfor molecular state control. The goal of achieving complete control over the quantum states
of a molecule is motivated by a plethora of applications ranging from many-body physics
to precise tests of fundamental physics. The level of control...
The increasing availability of large-scale scholarly datasets offers an unprecedented opportunity to understand the fundamental predictability, uncertainty, and dynamics of science and innovation. In this dissertation, I present some of my contributions to the science of science and innovation in three distinct but related settings, through a combination of canonical...
Deep learning is a new area of machine learning research that allows deep neural networks composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction. Deep learning has helped in achieving the objective of pushing machine learning closer to one of its original goals of...
This dissertation explores our understanding of corporate credit ratings. In the first chapter I examine the issue of split ratings. S&P and Moody’s often differ in their initial ratings at bond issuance, producing what is referred to as a split rating. The consensus view in the literature and in practice...
Granular materials consisting of discrete particles, are a pervasive material in nature and play a major role in disparate fields of science and technology. To control and manipulate the granular materials in engineering, enriching our understanding of their fundamental characteristics and mechanical behavior is crucial. In this context, one of...
The escalating climate crisis is a global social problem requiring multidisciplinary and multi-institutional coordination to solve. In recent years, health practitioners and institutions have become increasingly involved in the climate crisis, recognizing that climate change poses a serious public health threat across a range of health issues. This dissertation draws...
Additive manufacturing is a promising process that has the capability to build components with complex geometries for structural and biomedical applications. Due to the rapid and localized directional solidification of molten metallic alloys, unique phase transformations occur at the melt pool that can provide for components with greater strength and...
In this thesis, I study the effects of spillovers in all-pay auctions and the effects ofregulating wages and hours on the labor market. In the first chapter, I study a model of
asymmetric all-pay auctions with spillovers. In this model, players compete for a prize, and
the sunk effort players...
Neurons are sensitive to the mechanical properties of their environment and show better growth, survival and differentiation when they are cultured in soft environments with mechanical properties similar to those of the brain compared to other tissues. Within the central nervous system (CNS), there is also a range of mechanical...
This thesis describes a series of fundamental studies that address the role of electrostatic interactions in modulating i) the permeability of the ligand shell of a colloidal quantum dot (QD) to an anionic redox probe; ii) the resulting yield of photoinduced electron exchange within the QD ‒ redox probe complex;...
To be tempted is to be conflicted, but the conflict is not one of oscillation between two good options. Rather, it is normally easy to act on temptation and difficult to act against it. But this is puzzling, because unless temptation is a force that acts on us, it’s not...
Literature screening is the process of identifying all relevant records from a pool of candidate paper records in systematic review, meta-analysis, and other research synthesis tasks. This process is time consuming, expensive, and prone to human error. Screening prioritization methods attempt to help reviewers identify most relevant records while only...
Air pollution is a pervasive environmental issue that has significant impacts on human health. Urban areas are particularly susceptible to high levels of air pollution due to concentrated emissions and populations. Urban air pollution has been linked to a range of adverse health effects, including respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases,...
Knee injury causes a loss of stability in the joint and frequently leads to secondary degeneration of the cartilage in the months and years after injury, which can further impair joint function and cause pain and disability. Moreover, the secondary damage to the joint appears to be worse for females...
As national, state, and local educational leaders grapple with how to effectively address the needs of gender-expansive students, more research is needed to inform policy. Gender-expansive youth experience high rates of chronic social stressors such as victimization, discrimination, and rejection. These stressors have academic, mental and physical health consequences; however,...
Sensorimotor integration is a general term to describe how task-specific motor output is generated from the selective and rapid processing of sensory and motor information. The rodent vibrissal (whisker) system is an important model for the study of sensorimotor integration and active tactile sensing. This research uses the rodent vibrissal...
Neural networks have revolutionized the field of computer vision since they provide solutions to a number of previously unsolved problems and achieve promising performance both in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. It has increasingly become recognized as providing high performance for applications as diverse as image classification, object detection,...
Multiple facets of the natural trajectory of glioma remain poorly understood, which results in a universally poor prognosis for patients with glioma. Many patients with glioma experience tumor-associated epilepsy (TAE) throughout their disease course, but the mechanism by which TAE occurs, who is at continued risk for TAE, and whether...
Biological systems that perform critical reactions like carbon dioxide reduction, water oxidation, or phosphonate ester hydrolysis consist of many separate components with many different degrees of
freedom. While the functionality of pieces of these systems can be replicated synthetically to some
degree, the integration of synthetic catalysts into an overall...
Coiled-coil helix coiled-coil helix domain containing 10 (CHCHD10) is a nuclear gene that encodes for a mitochondria-enriched protein of unknown function. This type of protein is typically imported into mitochondria via the disulfide relay system which facilitates the formation of disulfide bridges between each coiled-coil helix, resulting in maintenance of...
This dissertation examines connections between North and South Korean art during the late Cold War period. Despite the radical social and political differences between the two countries, in the 1980s and early 1990s conspicuous connections emerged between the work of state-sponsored North Korean artists and South Korean artists associated with...
The worldwide community of patients affected by Basal Cell Carcinoma of the skin (BCC) is larger than that of any other cancer. While BCC is rarely lethal, currently available treatment strategies often leave patients with disfiguring scars on their faces, heads, and necks. Moreover, the high recurrence rates of BCC...
Single-use plastic waste pollution will cause significant harm to the environment if left unaddressed. One possible mitigation strategy is to develop processes, e.g. catalytic hydrogenolysis, that can convert (i.e. upcycle) waste plastics into value-added products capable of participating in a circular economy. Platinum (Pt) catalysts on strontium titanate nanocuboid supports...
One of the fundamental observations in oncology is that the rate of cancer malignancy increases with age, which applies to most human malignancies including breast cancer. Therefore, it is crucial to elucidate the mechanistic connection between aging and carcinogenesis. The NAD+-dependent sirtuin family, specifically SIRT3, the primary mitochondrial deacetylase, which...
The BCR-ABL negative Myeloproliferative Neoplasms (MPNs) are clonal hematopoietic stem-cell disorders characterized by abnormal proliferation of differentiated myeloid lineages. MPNs include 3 clinically distinct disorders: Polycythemia Vera (PV), Essential Thrombocythemia (ET) and Primary Myelofibrosis (PMF). 95% of MPNs are characterized by driver mutations in Janus Kinase 2 (JAK2), Thrombopoietin receptor...
Islet transplantation is a therapy in which insulin-producing beta (β) islet cells are infusedinto the liver via the portal vein to restore glycemic control. This therapy is beneficial for patients
suffering from chronic pancreatitis or type I diabetes. However, islet transplantation is not widely
implemented due to the instant blood-mediated...
Esophageal hypervigilance, or the increased awareness and amplification of esophageal symptoms, is a psychological process known to drive symptom experience in individuals with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). However, current understanding lacks a conceptual framework with known biomarkers and relationships to other psychophysiological variables. The aim of the current study is...