Prostate cancer is the most common cause of cancer among men in the United States, and the second most common cause of cancer-related death, accounting for significant morbidity and mortality. This dissertation describes the genomic landscape of prostate cancer from multiple angles to identify mechanisms of disease heterogeneity amongst patients....
Current technologies capable of establishing bioresorbable orthopedic fixation devices and stents have broad utility for biomedical applications to improve constructive tissue remodeling. Recent studies and investigations on bioresorbable conductors, semiconductors, dielectrics, and polymer substrates offer a promising opportunity to propel the existing non-degradable bioelectronic devices to the promising bioresorbable electronics,...
Cell-based therapies are an exciting frontier in medicine. This field is built on a simple premise—cells can be engineered to recognize and treat various human diseases. The paradigm of cell-based therapy uses biosensors to interrogate a cell’s environment and distinguish disease from health, intracellular signaling pathways and genetic circuitry to...
Electrochemical cell devices are increasingly being sought for energy conversion and storage applications due to their high efficiencies and their potential for operating free of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Solid Acid Electrochemical Cells (SAECs), which most commonly employ CsH2PO4 (CDP) as the electrolyte component, are uniquely suited to meet the...
Plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) is an essential mediator of senescence and a potential therapeutic target for preventing aging-related pathologies. Cellular Senescence is associated with organismal aging and related pathologies. In our study, we investigate the efficacies of PAI-1 inhibitors in both in vitro and in vivo models of homocysteine...
This dissertation examines how China’s involvement in transnational LGBTQ activism, adaptation and innovation of queer media technologies, and the global pink economy have influenced queer men’s understandings of selfhood, sexual desires, and the relationships among queer subjects. It is based on extensive fieldwork in Beijing and digital ethnography on China’s...
Assistive robotics focuses on human-robot systems that provide physical support and assistance to the elderly and people with motor-impairments. While assistive machines, such as the powered wheelchair, can significantly enhance the functional independence of individuals, many users are challenged by their direct operation, the manner in which such systems are...
Lubrication is the most means for sliding interface failure prevention because it helps separate two interacting surfaces, reduce asperity contacts and thus extend the working life of the parts. Improving the tribological performance of lubricated interfaces is a challenging work, as several influence factors are involved, such as coating, plasticity,...
This dissertation aims to redefine the concept of pain as it appears in literary studies and demonstrate how the new definition garners insight into the interwovenness of literature and physiology in the mid-eighteenth century. It challenges the claim that pain is opposed to language by adopting a new materialist concept...
Since their introduction nearly a century ago, protein vaccines and therapeutics have revolutionized our ability to prevent and treat human disease. However, existing production processes for biopharmaceuticals are technically complex and rely on living cells, which necessitates highly centralized manufacturing in large-scale production facilities, specialized equipment, and cold-chain distribution. With...
Human skin oils are significant scavengers of atmospheric oxidants in occupied indoor environments. Many techniques used to study gas-phase transformations of surface films indoors have been limited to off-line bulk analysis, although more surface-selective methodologies are emerging. Here, we present a multi-prong analytical approach to characterizing skin oil ozonolysis. Skin...
This dissertation explores black litigation strategies, black legal culture, and the effect of black litigation on civil law. Not only did African Americans sue white southerners and white-owned companies for white-on-black violence under Jim Crow, they shared their collective legal knowledge through a network of black newspapers and contributed to...
Stories and fantasy represent an important aspect of consumer life and comprise a huge marketing enterprise within consumer entertainment. Each year, upwards of $82 billion is spent on books, games, and other fantasy industries in the United States alone. Likewise, fantasy has important implications for consumers’ sense of identity. In...
With growing system complexity and closer cyber-physical interaction, there are stronger needs for cyber-physical systems to adapt to the dynamic environment and improve their runtime performance. However, especially for safety-critical systems, the ability of such adaptation and improvement is often restricted by multiple factors, such as limited resources, stringent timing...
Every object emits radiation depending of their temperature. Objects between 300K to 100K emit radiation in the infrared range (1-12µm). These radiations cannot be seen by the human eyes. Infrared detectors find applications in many aspects of life, from night vision and target tracking for homeland security and defense, to...
Does the Russian Federation in the Putin-Medvedev era follow a grand strategy, and if so, what does it look like, and how can we discern the making of Russian grand strategy? However, Russian grand strategy is neither formally codified nor readily accessible, and it remains opaque at best. In this...
In the late Middle Ages, the Italian word fama had a wide semantic range that encompassed such vitally important topics as reputation, honor, community memory, and trustworthiness. In this dissertation, I examine how fama manifested within sodomy prosecutions in late medieval Italy and what insights such prosecutions can give into...
The predominant, categorical system used to classify and diagnose psychiatric disorders suffers from several critical scientific limitations, including extensive comorbidity, unreliability, and disorder heterogeneity. As such, clinical psychological scientists are increasingly moving away from this traditional, categorical system, and toward empirically-based, dimensional, and transdiagnostic alternatives such as the Hierarchical Taxonomy...
Episodic memory provides a means by which we are able to reflect on the past, make decisions about the future, and form a learned identity. Even subtle changes to our memory can have a detrimental impact on our daily lives. Memory declines as we age, and clinically salient impairment is...
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of Venetian women began musical training in childhood to become professional musicians, known as figlie di coro (daughters of the choir), in the four charitable Ospedali Maggiori. These women overcame childhood poverty and abandonment to awe prestigious guests with their skills and even...
Two-dimensional (2D) materials and heterostructures have attracted significant attention for a variety of nanoelectronic and optoelectronic applications. At the atomically thin limit, the material characteristics and functionalities are dominated by surface chemistry and interface coupling. Therefore, methods for comprehensively characterizing and precisely controlling surfaces and interfaces are required to realize...
This thesis consists of three chapters: two are empirical studies of policy design in small-business lending markets, while the final is a large-scale retrospective of retail mergers. Chapter 1 examines moral hazard in loan guarantee programs. To address credit constraints in small-business lending markets, policymakers frequently rely on loan guarantees,...
In the Maximum-a-Posteriori (MAP) Inference problem, for any given probability distribution, the goal is to find the point in the support of that distribution with the highest probability. Potts models and Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) are probabilistic models that were introduced in the context of statistical physics several decades ago....
Throughout history, the development of materials has relied heavily on the empirical judgment of scientists and engineers and on prolonged experiments proton to errors. Due to the complexity of material behavior, successful discovery of new candidates has been serendipitous, and down-selection of candidates remains a time-consuming process that requires repetitive...
As machines take over the work of producing, organizing, and curating culture, it becomes increasingly important to examine the influence of algorithms in public memory work, through which the past is selectively and subjectively reconstructed to make meaning in the present. Accordingly, this dissertation intervenes at the intersection of public...
In my dissertation I explore several applications of collective household models with limited commitment to study the behavior of singles and couples in the modern US marriage markets in presence of endogenous risk of divorce. In the first chapter, I show that the model is capable of rationalizing the patterns...
Natural gas is likely to become one of the main sources of carbon-based chemicals in the next century due to rapidly increasing natural gas production levels. This has created new incentives to find materials that are active and selective towards alkane partial oxidation reactions that are relevant for natural gas...
The dissertation consists of three self-contained papers. In Chapter 1, we study the inventory management problem in a dual sourcing system, where there are two supply sources or modes with different sourcing costs and lead times. We provide closed-form solutions to a robust optimization model for inventory management in a...
We prove the Rigidity Conjecture of Goette and Igusa, which states that, after rationalizing, there are no stable exotic smoothings of manifold bundles with closed even dimensional fibers. The key ingredients of the proof are fiberwise Poincaré–Hopf theorems generalizing earlier such results about the Becker–Gottlieb transfer. These theorems show how...
This dissertation is divided into three chapters. Chapter one studies changes in market concentration and productivity growth in the United States from the 1990s to the 2010s. Chapter two measures the impact of a banking crisis, the British Panic of 1825, on non-financial firms. Chapter three examines how women's employment...
Cancer is a top leading cause of deaths worldwide, among which pancreatic cancer and liver cancer are top leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Despite recent developments in cancer treatment, pancreatic and liver cancers still have a high mortality and low life expectancy, especially when diagnosed at advanced stages. Earlier cancer...
This dissertation explores the reciprocal relationship between international politics and digital computation since the 1960s by examining the first attempts to use computer simulation to credibly forecast our planet’s economic and environmental future on a global scale. In particular, this project offers the first sustained historical analysis of the origins...
This dissertation investigates how US Americans in the nineteenth century began to apply the category of religious fanaticism to individuals and communities deemed dangerous. Contributing to scholarship on secularism, racial governance, and American religious history, this dissertation argues that fanaticism is not a neutral category of description. It tracks how...
A core problem in many computer vision applications is visual recognition (including object classification, detection and localization). Recent advances in artificial neural networks (aka ”deep learning”) have significantly pushed forward the state-of-the-art visual recognition performances. However, due to the lack of semantic structure modeling, most current deep learning approaches do...
The fact that informational asymmetries impose a significant barrier in path of smooth functioning of markets has been well known in Economics since the 1970s. Communication and information exchange allow to mitigate these barriers to a certain extent. The existing Economic literature allows to get a good grasp of static...
The unique ability of plasmonic nanoparticles to localize and enhance resonant electromagnetic fields has enabled a wealth of discoveries from enhanced spectroscopies to driving chemical reactions on the nanoscale. In this thesis, we strive to both drive and observe chemistry on plasmonic surfaces. First, we examine the possibility of driving...
Nature and Civilization is a focused interpretation of Kant’s politics insofar as it bears on the distinction between nature and civilization. It seeks to answer the question, How is Kant’s distinction between nature and civilization informing his global political thought? Kant thinks that in moving from the state of nature...
The prospect of being evaluated by others is oftentimes psychologically crippling. At the core of feeling evaluated is perceiving other minds capable of possessing (judgmental) thoughts and feelings. While research on mind perception in evaluative situations oftentimes examines positive aspects (e.g., increased prosocial behavior), this dissertation looks into how mind...
This dissertation studies three aspects of healthcare market regulation.
Chapter 1 studies the optimal design of quality scores for health insurance plans. Regulators often generate quality scores to help consumers with limited information about product quality, as in schooling, healthcare, and financial markets. When designing scores, regulators must not only...
In the nineteenth century, Jews across Europe entered a period of emancipation, at best a vaguely defined term that indicated the granting of equal civil and political rights, though sometimes conditionally and often incrementally. Concurrent to this, art music was dominated by deep divisions of stylistic and aesthetic approaches to...
The Operating System (OS) kernel is a key component of modern computing infrastructure, yet it is prone to numerous vulnerabilities, many of which cause memory corruptions that can be exploited by attackers to perform malicious activities. While various techniques have been introduced to secure the Linux kernel, it still constantly...
This dissertation examines the legal, economic, and social transformations experienced by American widowed women from the Salem Witchcraft Trials to the Civil War to expand how scholars of literature, the law, and American history define women’s citizenship prior to suffrage. Emphasizing literature’s importance to nineteenth-century nation-building during the era of...
We study plurisubharmonic functions and their applications to K\"ahler geometry. We begin by studying regularity of envelopes of plurisubharmonic functions, particularly when the reference form is degenerate. This is then applied to show regularity of geodesic of K\"ahler metrics on singular varieties, as well as regularity of certain geodesic rays....
This dissertation examines how one pervasive state institution¬—schools—shapes the political behavior of young people along the lines of race and ethnicity. I make four primary claims. First, I show that the content of traditional civic education courses privileges the political experiences of white political actors. Second, I argue that this...
The task of classification has been increasingly attracting attention from researchers in recent years. The objective is to assign labels given attributes of samples. The classification task is practical in real-world applications and is widely explored in fields such as computer vision, natural language processing and information retrieval. The recent...
With the ever-increasing demand for more complex functionalities and miniaturization of photonic devices, the design of such devices requires a whole new different approach, deviating from classical photonic design approaches. Conventionally, the design of a typical photonic device starts with a prior knowledge, intuition, and practical experience of specific behavior...
Use of bio-renewable polysaccharides to produce materials with a high technological impact has gained a lot of attention recently. Efforts have been made, for example to produce triboelectric generators from cotton, as well as, nanostructures of chitosan gels for drug delivery. Another well-known example is the use of β-Cyclodextrin (β...
This dissertation investigates a number of models and algorithms in the context of optimization under uncertainty. The focus is on risk-averse optimization, where risk aversion is modeled via stochastic dominance, utility theory, and distributionally robust optimization. We first investigate an investment model with fixed contribution rates, optimize asset-allocation decisions in...
In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, we have witnessed a surge of public interest in and discussion around racial reckoning. Universities in the United States and across the globe are grappling with their historical associations with transatlantic and chattel slavery. This dissertation takes up the question of...
The three dimensional structure of a protein determines its biological function. How a protein folds, however, has been the central research problem for decades. The intermediates on the folding paths, which the protein can assume transiently, are of particular interest as they not only reveal the structural dynamics of a...