This dissertation contains four essays. The first essay, Strategically Giving Service: The Effect of Real-Time Information on Service Efficiency, analyzes the impact of the increased availability of real-time information on the behavior of strategic agents and the implications of this phenomenon for service efficiency using data from one of the...
Localized corrosion involves the selective attack of a metal at a small, exposed site. This can be particularly devastating for load-bearing structures like bridges, which can fail catastrophically even with very little material loss. Unfortunately, such corrosion is very hard to prevent, predict, and detect. Corrosion can be prevented by...
Records of temperature and precipitation during Quaternary interglacial periods on Greenland are notably scarce, limiting assessment of the magnitude and rate of local environmental response to orbitally-driven Arctic warming. It is largely unknown if warming across Greenland was spatially uniform through past interglacials, and if warming was accompanied by major...
In solar energy conversion ranging from artificial photosynthesis to photocatalysis, transition metal complexes (TMC) are essential building blocks due to several attractive properties: intense absorption within the solar spectrum, presence of charge-transfer excited state, and substrate binding capability through coordination geometry changes. In order to gain insight into controlling solar...
Proteins represent a critical class of biomolecules, universally employed by all living organisms to fulfill essential structural, functional, and enzymatic roles necessary to support life. In nature, these polymers are composed generally of twenty natural amino acid (AA) building blocks, which can be modified with covalent adducts known as post-translational...
This dissertation researches the Cenomanian, Turonian, and Coniacian Stages (100.5 - 86.3 Ma) of the Cretaceous Period, a geologic interval of interest due to its extreme global warmth, iconic faunas, and oceanic anoxic events (OAEs). Five globally dispersed geochemical and stratigraphic case studies reconstruct interactions of the mid-Cretaceous carbon cycle...
Organic semiconductors have shown great promise for optoelectronic applications, particularly solar photovoltaics. Critical to their success is the ability to understand and manipulate the relationship between molecular structure and bulk properties. Substantial progress on understanding structural influences on electronic properties has been made for the conjugated polymers and small molecules...
In this paper, we study the basic locus in the fiber at $p$ of a certain unitary Shimura variety with a certain parahoric level structure. The basic locus $\widehat{\CM^{ss}}$ is uniformized by a formal scheme $\CN$ which is called Rapoport-Zink space. We show that the irreducible components of the induced...
The study of magnetic frustration has attracted considerable interest in the fields of materials science and condensed matter physics. Artificial Spin Ices (ASIs) are the primary systems in which magnetic frustration has been studied. To date, most studies on ASIs have been on fully periodic systems. In this thesis, we...
Owing to policy action as well as continued cost declines, solar and wind resources are projected to play a central role in many future electricity systems. Since the technological characteristics and cost structures of these resources differ significantly from traditional thermal technologies, many have questioned how market designs will need...
Blockchains are an exciting new type of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) distributed systems, which enable parties to transact directly, and maintain the record of said interactions in a distributed manner. A unique feature of blockchains is their ability to maintain a consensus without requiring knowledge on the number of participants, nor their...
In multiatomic systems, high applied pressures reduce interatomic contact distances. At pressures comparable to those inside planets, this relatively simple principle completely changes the guiding principles of chemistry and physics established at near-ambient conditions. High-pressure investigations of precisely how the laws of nature evolve in the gigapascal and megabar regime...
This dissertation explores two topics in macroeconomics related to aggregation assumptions and microfoundations. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the representative agent aggregation assumption in the context of open economies, using both an empirical as well as a theoretical approach. Chapter 3 on the other hand, deals with the microfoundations...
Plasmonic metasurfaces are leading the development of next-generation optical devices with unprecedented compactness and functionality. In contrast to bulk refractive optics, these planar surfaces manipulate light with rationally designed subwavelength building blocks. This thesis focus on how emerging materials and design methods advance the eld of metasurfaces. Chapter 1 reviews...
Chromatin, a complex nuclear structure comprised of DNA, histones, RNA, and other nuclear proteins, is one of the most critical components within the cell because it houses the genetic information and its organization regulates important cellular functions, such as transcription, replication, and repair. Its structural organization is well understood at...
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used widely and frequently in the clinical setting to image and diagnose patients. In addition to the anatomical scans that can be acquired using MRI, different kinds of physiological parameters, such as blood flow, can be obtained by utilizing pulse sequence, scan protocol and post-processing....
Polymer nanocomposites are a designer class of materials where nanoscale particles, functional chemistry and polymer matrix combine to yield unprecedented combinations of superior physical properties. While well-defined data representation and quantitative models have been developed in material science domains such as metallic alloys, polymer nanocomposites have remained a largely untouched...
The brain is known to shrink in normal aging or neurodegenerative disease and yet the neurobiological underpinnings of the cortical atrophy remain elusive. The structural changes that represent cortical atrophy can be measured during life using the reliable and quantitative method known as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Primary progressive aphasia...
Electrochemical reactions on the nanoscale play a pivotal role in a variety of areas, including electrocatalysis, energy conversion and storage, corrosion prevention, plasmon driven chemistry, and so forth. An in-depth knowledge of how site-specific compositions and morphologies locally affect the electron transfer kinetics will greatly benefit the design of catalysts,...
Phenotypic variation is the functional unit that evolution acts upon and is the main contributor to the diversity of species. The phenotype of an individual is shaped by genetic and environmental factors. These genetic and environmental factors contribute to biomedically relevant traits such as an individual’s susceptibility to disease and...