The surge in "unconventional" oil projects such as Alberta's Tar Sands in the last decade signals a shift in global production from relatively accessible conventional reserves to "frontier" oil. This paper examines one aspect of the oil/environment tension – the environmental regulatory system surrounding the tar sands – by adopting...
Social engagement, or shared attention between a child and caregiver, is a critical process for language and social development. Although previous EEG studies have investigated child social processing in closely controlled, experimental studies, no study has examined the interactive, reciprocal process of naturalistic social engagement. In my first paper, we...
To analyze institutional dynamics, it is first necessary to determine when change has occurred, when not, and the nature and magnitude of change. If social institutions are defined in terms of rules, then a change of rules forms the core of institutional change. A number of complications arise from the...
Are the lending programs of the International Monetary Fund bad for democracy? The conventional wisdom is that the implementation of IMF conditional lending programs triggers cycles of austerity, social protest, and government repression that result in democratic backsliding. We present evidence which suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong. We...
This essay discusses the role of the ulama (Islamic scholars) in the 2007 Nigerian elections. Based on interviews and the political activities and statements of the twelve members of the ulama, most of whom are from Kano, the author observes four areas of consensus among these scholars: 1) The compatiblity...
Most scholars think of courts as a single category of adjudicative bodies or triadic dispute adjudication. But courts play a variety of roles in the domestic political system. Increasingly, the roles and tasks delegated to International Courts (ICs) mimic in form and content the roles and tasks delegated to courts...
Recent discoveries of black hole (BH) candidates in galactic and extragalactic globular clusters (GCs) have ignited interest in understanding how BHs dynamically evolve in a GC and the number of BHs (NBH) that may still be retained by today's GCs. Numerical models show that even if stellar-mass BHs are retained...
On February 22, 2022, I gave a talk hosted by the African Studies Program of Georgetown University. Two days later, Russian battalions were sent across Ukraine’s borders by President Vladimir Putin. In real time, viewers around the world have seen immense distress unleashed on innocent citizens. In Africa, distress has...
Regulatory T (Treg) cells are required to control immune responses and maintain homeostasis, but are a significant barrier to antitumor immunity. Conversely, Treg instability, characterized by loss of the master transcription factor Foxp3 and acquisition of proinflammatory properties, can promote autoimmunity and/or facilitate more effective tumor immunity. A comprehensive understanding...
Halide perovskites, AMX3 (A = monocation, B = Ge, Sn, or Pb, and X = halogen), present a versatile class of solution-processable semiconductors made from earth abundant materials with outstanding electrical and optical properties. Their solar cell efficiencies have dramatically increased from ~9% to ~22% in less than five years...
Transposable elements (TEs) have been recognized as potentially powerful drivers of genomic evolutionary change, but factors affecting their mobility and regulation remain poorly understood. Chaperones such as Hsp90 buffer environmental perturbations by regulating protein conformation, but are also part of the PIWI-interacting RNA pathway, which regulates genomic instability arising from...
NiTi shape memory alloy (SMA) has drawn a great deal of attention for its various applications in the medical field (orthodontics, cardiovascular stents technology, etc.) and in other engineering fields (aerospace, aircraft, automotive, etc.) as it shows shape memory effect, superelasticity and biocompatibility. The fatigue-related issues, however, are pronounced in...
Affective science has long been interested in the coherence between different emotion response systems (e.g., subjective emotional experience, behavior, physiology). Although evolutionary functionalist accounts of emotion hold that emotional coherence should be related to greater adaptation, few studies have analyzed links between emotional coherence and wellbeing. Thus, in this laboratory-based...
Contemporary Ethiopian is, without question, facing enormous challenges. At the core of these challenges lay a state-building process major constituencies and elite groups were either alienated from, forced to acquiesce to, or coopted into. Unable to derive political legitimacy from democratic participation, successive governments largely relied on coercion and neopatrimonialism,...
Included in this submission are the following supplementary materials that were unable to be included in the article, but the authors would like to make available for other researchers:
● Raw data csv files and R analysis code
● Supplemental graphs
● Full bibliography
● Sources of Materials document
●... and Below is the abstract for the forthcoming Book and Paper Group Annual article at the time of this submission.
Rigid polysaccharide gels are a vital area of research for library and paper conservation, as they are still a relatively new material in the field. This experiment investigates anecdotal concerns of...
The theorists who developed Social Justice Education (SJE) claim that its goals are: to critically analyze how oppression operates on an individual, cultural, and institutional level, to harness empathy and respect for others, and, ultimately, to commit to working for lasting change. However, the literature lacks research on how to...
In this thesis we study minimal measures for Lagrangian systems on compact manifolds. This thesis consists of three parts which are closely related.
The first part is Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. In Chapter 3 and 4, we consider geodesic flows on compact surfaces with higher genus. We show that...
The idea of the unity of audition and vision has been a topic of interest since the time of ancient Greece. Investigation of this idea has continued to grow in many areas, especially in psychology, music, visual art, and computer science, most notably since the invention of the world's earliest...
The semiconductor-based Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) offers several key advantages over gas lasers, solid-state lasers, and other semiconductor-based mid-infrared lasers. While the QCL has historically operated best in the λ ~ 7-9 μm range using InP-based materials, a major challenge has been to achieve a high-power, room-temperature continuous-wave (CW) operation...
The overall objective of this thesis is to develop a package of high-resolution, non-invasive experimental and numerical approaches to observe in situ pore-scale geometry modification due to colloid deposition, and quantitatively predict its effects on the large-scale transport properties of the porous medium. High-energy synchrotron-based X-ray difference micro-tomography (XDMT) was...
Funding risky Research and Development (R&D) and New Product Development (NPD) projects is crucial for the long term health of any large company. Such funding decisions are multiobjective and are undertaken with sparse data. Therefore prescriptive or algorithmic solutions are not adopted by practitioners. Descriptive solutions that provide managerial insights...
Visual object tracking, i.e. consistently inferring the motion of a desired target from image sequences, is a must-have component to bridge low-level image processing techniques and high-level video content analysis. This has been an active and fruitful research topic in the computer vision community for decades due to both its...
This dissertation analyzes the transformation of fantasy sports from a deviant, outside-the-mainstream fan culture to a billion-dollar industry that comprises almost 20 million North American participants. Fantasy sports are games in which participants adopt the simultaneous roles of owner, general manager, and coach of their own teams of real athletes...
Inactivation of tumor suppressors genes, which encode regulatory proteins critical for maintaining normal cellular function, is a common occurrence in cancer. Ikaros is a hematopoietic-specific zinc finger protein that functions as a differentiation regulator and has properties of a tumor suppressor. Ikaros functions to regulate gene expression as a component...
A comprehensive understanding of how image processing occurs in the primary visual cortex (V1) requires learning what aspects of neuronal responses are driven by strong feed-forward input from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), and what aspects arise due to the densely recurrent network operating within the cortex itself. From an...
The first chapter of this dissertation investigates the pricing of systematic variance risk in the equity options market. Cross sectional tests on synthetic variance swap returns reveal no evidence of a negative market variance risk premium. Furthermore, we show that a class of linear factor models cannot simultaneously explain index...
This work investigates children's early semantic representations of gradable adjectives (GAs) and proposes that infants perform a probabilistic analysis of the input to learn about abstract differences within this category. I first demonstrate that children as young as age three distinguish between relative (e.g., 'big', 'long'), maximum standard absolute (e.g.,...
Surfaces and interfaces, which are ubiquitous in the environment, control the mobility,speciation, and ultimate fate of groundwater species. The presented work provides insight into the interfacial behavior of three environmental pollutants: hexavalent chromium, oxytetracycline, and morantel. Model surfaces are employed for these studies, including (1-102) α-Al<sub>2</sub>O<sub>3</sub> and a carboxylic acid-terminated...
Activin, a member of the TGF-b superfamily, controls a variety of physiological events from the cell cycle to reproductive health. Activin activates the Smad signaling pathway through ActRII/B and ALK4 receptors. The regulation of activin signaling is carried out in part by the inhibitor protein follistatin. The mechanistic details of...
This study investigates the causes and welfare consequences of unravelling in two-sided matching markets. "Unravelling" arises when agents contract with one another at an early stage, before much of the relevant information is available. Such early matches may lead to ex-post inefficiencies and are perceived as socially harmful. This study...
Local structure determination in amorphous and disordered systems, which are crystallographically intractable, is critical for gaining an understanding of their properties. X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) is an excellent tool for local structure determination in amorphous and disordered environmental materials. Amorphous manganese oxides produced by the freshwater bacterium Leptothrix discophora SP6...
This dissertation presents submillimeter polarimetry methods and scientific results. The scientific results focus on revealing the magnetic field structure of giant molecular clouds (GMCs). The basic principles, instrumentation, observing strategy, and data analysis methods of submillimeter polarimetry are introduced. The scientific data were acquired by SPARO during the observing campaign...
Reactivation of latent human cytomegalovirus is of significant concern in immunocompromised transplant patients. However, the mechanisms controlling reactivation of latent CMV have not been understood. It is likely that reactivation is initiated by induction of IE gene expression. In this thesis, I studied molecular mechanisms leading to transcriptional activation of...
Understanding how root traits vary within and among species, and how they respond to heterogeneous environments, can provide important insight into functional plant attributes that influence plant survival in competitive environments. Selecting plant material with root traits that will support its survival in competitive environments may help improve the outcomes...
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a powerful analytical technique that can detect single molecules and simultaneously obtain structural information. When an analyte molecule binds to a nanostructured noble metal surface, the otherwise weak normal Raman signal is enhanced by as much as a factor of 108. This makes SERS the...
This dissertation contains three empirical studies in economic history and labor economics. The first chapter discusses two sources of historical data on work stoppages in the United States: the Third Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1888) and the Tenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1896). It...
Substance abuse is one of the most critical public health problems affecting juvenile detainees. Previous research suggests that a significant proportion of juvenile detainees with substance use disorders do not receive treatment prior to or during detention. Using data from the Northwestern Juvenile Project, a large-scale longitudinal study of juvenile...
The purpose of this mixed methods study was to learn about the ways that instrumental music teachers in Chicago navigate the urban landscape. The design of the study most closely resembles Creswell and Plano Clark's (2007) two-part Triangulation Convergence Mixed Methods Design, with the addition of an initial exploratory focus...
The morphological evolution due to coarsening is analyzed for two distinctive types of microstructure. First, the feasibility of characterizing spatial correlations of interfacial curvature in topologically complex structures is demonstrated with the analysis of bicontinuous two-phase mixtures produced using phase field modeling. For structures produced with both conserved and nonconserved...
This thesis is organized into three essays, each with particular insights involving public policy and family formation:
In the first essay, I address the well-documented correlation between the prestige of the university and the labor market income of its graduates by investigating whether a possible medium for this effect is...
This dissertation addresses the process-pathways running between immigrant adolescents' life experiences and their engagement in school by providing an ecocultural perspective on self-regulation. While the role of social context, such as stress and resources, has been identified as critical in its influence on different dimensions of adolescent development, research on...
The segmental prestressed concrete box girder of Koror-Babeldaob (KB) Bridge in Palau, which had the record span of 241 m (791 ft.), presents a striking paradigm of serviceability loss due to excessive multi-decade deflections. The data required for analysis have recently been released and are here exploited to show how...
The leptonic and inclusive hadronic decay branching fractions of the W boson are studied using 35.9 $fb^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data collected at $\sqrt{s}=13~TeV$ during the 2016 run of the CMS experiment. Events characterized by the production of pairs of W bosons from \ttbar and \tW processes are selected. Multiple...
Recent discoveries in vitamin D research indicate that vitamin D is a necessary component to several organs and tissues that extends beyond bone formation Furthermore, recent research indicates that vitamin D deficiency is rampant across the globe. Historically, anthropological research has focused on the adaptive significance of skin color to...
Despite prevention and treatment, substantial risk for cardiovascular disease(CVD) remains in the population and CVD has been the leading global cause-of-death in past years.While high-density lipoprotein (HDL) markers such as HDL cholesterol (HDL-C) and HDL efflux (a cholesterol-transport-function assay) are associated with decreased risk of CVD, the mechanism of this...
This dissertation contains three essays. In the first essay, "The Role of Connections in Congressional Lawmaking", I investigate the role of connections in congressional lawmaking by studying how legislators' deaths impact their peers' capacity to sponsor and advance bills in the U.S. House of Representatives. I focus on legislators who...
Breast cancer cells acquire many genetic alterations in apoptotic signaling pathways rendering them resistant to apoptosis. Human Epidermal growth factor Receptor-2 (HER-2/ErbB2/neu) is amplified or overexpressed in approximately 30% of breast and ovarian tumors and correlates with poor prognosis. Although HER-2 is an orphan receptor, it forms potent signaling heterodimers...
PilD is an enzyme that processes prepilins that are part of the type II protein secretion apparatus and the type IV piliation machinery. Using a <em>Legionella pneumophila pilDlacZ</em> fusion strain to measure transcription, we observed a 20% increase in beta-galactosidase levels at 30°C vs. 37°C. At 25°C and 17°C vs....
Phylogenetic analysis of HIV is a useful tool in determining factors that may contribute to transmission cluster growth. To better target HIV prevention, it is necessary to understand how research and surveillance data can be combined in a meaningful way.HIV genetic sequences were collected in the RADAR cohort of YMSM...
Recently, much public attention has been focused on racial inequalities in who is subjected to exclusionary school disciplinary policies, and consequently, forced to miss hours of instruction. Over the past two decades, researchers have documented the disparate impacts that zero-tolerance policies have had on students of color, low-income students, and...
Pediatric participants performed a series of trials that involved stepping up onto a raised platform. Body weight load was modulated during this task from -20% to +15% in 5% increments (excluding -5%). Outcome measures include peak hip abduction moments, peak support moments, and individual hip, knee, and ankle percent contributions...
Patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) experience lifelong struggles with both chronic and acute pain, often requiring medical intervention. Pain can be managed with medications, but dosages must balance the goal of pain mitigation against the risks of tolerance, addiction and other adverse effects. Setting appropriate dosages requires knowledge of...
On college campuses, one in five women will experience sexual assault in some capacity over the course of their undergraduate experience. College men in fraternities are three times more likely to commit sexually assaultive acts than non-Greek students. Despite pervasive knowledge that fraternity members are often involved in rape on...
This project is comprised of primary source research on the field of semiconductor microscopy. We were interested in determining a more interdisciplinary application of this technology, as the most frequently cited applications are for defense purposes such as drug screening or infrared imaging. When we researched, we found that these...
Much has already been discovered about the Hedgehog (Hh) signaling pathway and its involvement in patterning and tissue development in embryos, but the specific functions its key components play has not yet been fully elucidated. One potential component is the protein kinase Dop, which is involved in cellular trafficking. Here,...
This project was originally motivated by a lifelong love of the Harry Potter series and a teenage love for fan fiction and other fancreated works. I was motivated to do research when I stumbled upon the lack of inclusivity in many fan communities, which I found to be shocking. In...
The E-Science Working group designed a survey in 2013 to investigate how researchers at Northwestern University manage data and to help determine researchers’ needs or requirements for data storage, preservation and sharing.
The 21 question survey looked at several areas involving data and data management, including the types and size...
Chapter 1 investigates asks the question how do financial frictions affect the type of human capital investments that students make in college? To study this question, I build a novel dataset covering more than 700,000 U.S. students, merging commencement records with address histories, credit bureau records, and professional resumes. I...
Early life adversity predicts greater health risk in later life across multiple outcomes, including cardiovascular disease (CVD) and all-cause mortality. While biological pathways are incompletely understood, evidence is increasingly highlighting immune function, specifically chronic inflammation, which is implicated in cardiometabolic diseases, certain cancers, and all-cause mortality. Links between early adversity...
Importance: Despite its efficacy, low tidal volume ventilation (LTVV) remains severely underutilized for patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Physician under-recognition of ARDS is a significant barrier to LTVV use. We propose a computational method that addresses some of the limitations of the current approaches to automated measurement of...
Chapter 1. Undergraduate Gender Diversity and Direction of Scientific Research (with Francesca Truffa) Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Diverse researchers can bring new questions and perspectives, but exposure to diversity may also inspire scientists, regardless of demographic identity, to pursue new topics. This...
This work is composed of two separate projects that contribute to the field’s understanding of Neisseria gonorrhoeae genetics and physiology. First, I showed that N. gonorrhoeae mounts a substantial transcriptional program in response to hydrogen peroxide (HP), a prominent reactive oxygen species (ROS) encountered during infection. We measured which strain...
Evolutionary theory predicts that reproduction entails energetic costs that detract from somatic maintenance, accelerating biological aging. In women, such ‘costs of reproduction’ (CoR) are thought to arise predominantly during pregnancy and lactation, while in men the physiological effects of the steroid hormone testosterone (T) are believed to be a major...
The high-temperature oxidation/reduction behaviors of iron and its oxides are important to a variety of energy conversion and storage technologies, such as the solid-oxide iron-air battery and chemical looping combustion. The useful lifetime of iron redox materials is limited, however, by structural degradation arising from (i) sintering, accelerated by phase...
Type IIb supernovae (SNe) are important candidates to understand mechanisms that drive the stripping of stripped-envelope (SE) supernova (SN) progenitors. ', 'While binary interactions and their high incidence are generally cited to favor them as Type IIb SN progenitors, this idea has not been tested using models covering a broad...
Post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS) and, more specifically, RNA interference (RNAi) include the processes by which a small double-stranded RNA, 19 to 22 nucleotides (nts) long, negatively regulates the expression and/or translatability of a target RNA, which harbors reverse complementarity to that small RNA, by recruiting the so-called RNA-Induced Silencing Complex...
Background: Cancer-related cognitive impairment (CRCI) is among the most frequently reported adverse events during and following cancer treatment. Between 17% to 75% of chemotherapy-treated cancer patients evidence long-term cognitive deficits as many as 20 years after treatment. The variability in prevalence and the mechanisms of persistent CRCI are not well...
This technical report shows the findings of acoustic emission and strain gage monitoring tests conducted by research engineers of Infrastructure Technology Institute from Northwestern University on April 18, 1997 in Sacramento, California.
Prions are self-perpetuating, alternative protein conformations associated with neurological diseases and normal cellular functions. Saccharomyces cerevisiae contains many endogenous prions – providing a powerful system to study prionization. Previously, the Li Lab demonstrated that Swi1, a component of the SWI/SNF chromatin-remodeling complex, can form the prion [SWI+]. A small region,...
Abstract The overall purpose of this paper is to reconsider the narrative usage and function of a literary phenomenon like ‘opposition/tension/contradiction.’ Throughout my analysis of Alain-Robbe Grillet’s La jalousie, Chloé Delaume’s J’habite dans la television and Jean Genet’s Le Balcon I was focused on investigating the use of this phenomenon...
A greater number of strategies in one’s coping repertoire (i.e., the number of diverse strategies used across stressors or use habitually across several situations) may be beneficial and a precursor to coping flexibly across situations (Bonnano & Burton, 2013). Indeed, previous studies have demonstrated a benefit of having larger number...
Of the half million new cases of invasive cervical cancer (ICC) reported globally each year, over 80% occur in Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs)1. Nigeria is one of these countries with a huge burden of ICC incidence and mortality.2 As reported in the Global Burden of Cancer 2013, cervical cancer is...
This folder contains data and replication code for the calculations contained in the article: Stephanie Holmes Didwania, "Regressive White-Collar Crime," 97 Southern California Law Review (2024).
People sometimes gain a sudden idea through insight after being stuck on a problem. Researchers have been studying insight as a crucial component of creative problem-solving in the past decades. However, the role of insight in mathematical problem-solving remains unclear, while mathematics is essential in scientific development and ubiquitous in...