Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration for women has risen significantly. Black women are disproportionately represented among incarcerated women. Formerly incarcerated women and men face similar barriers upon release from incarceration, such as obtaining stable and gainful employment, securing safe and affordable housing, and reconnecting with children...
The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a masterwork of biology, and its development was a key part of the transformation from monocellular to multicellular life. With an ECM, cells acquired the ability to cooperatively build a dynamic support network that facilitated their movement, specialization, and communication. This ECM is a hierarchical...
Metaphor is an important and pervasive phenomenon in language and cognition. The vast majority of psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on noun metaphors (e.g., That surgeon is a butcher; That lawyer is a shark), while relatively little has investigated the processing of verb metaphors (e.g., The car limped down...
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...
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, causing devastating disabilities in both motor and non-motor domains following the degeneration of dopamine (DA) producing neurons of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc). Current treatments are highly limited in efficacy, and no established treatments currently exist to alter disease...
With the advancement of high-throughput sequencing technology, it has become much easier to extract gene expression data and to discover gene-disease associations more efficiently. Longitudinal gene expression data offer more insight into expression patterns for distinct patient groups compared to cross-sectional data. For instance, patients diagnosed with subclinical acute rejections...
This dissertation comprises three distinct essays in mechanism design and economic theory. The first chapter studies the welfare implications of consumer data ownership and voluntary disclosure. I formalize this setting within a model of mechanism design with evidence and construct the seller's optimal mechanism. Perhaps surprisingly, I find that allowing...
As our world is increasingly filled with data visualizations, having the skills to leverage data visualizations is essential for participation in society. Confident engagement with data visualizations is critical for being an educated member of society; however, research has shown that it is difficult for individuals to digest and gain...
Motivated by rhythms in the brain, we investigate the synchronization of noisy and all-to-all pulse-coupled oscillators. We consider a case where the oscillatory excursions are of varying amplitude and where only sufficiently large excursions result in the output pulses that drive the interactions between the oscillators. In the regime of...
This dissertation aims to understand the contribution of schools to reducing bullying behaviors and, in turn, to examine the benefits for students of attending a school that effectively reduces bullying. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to the literature on bullying by a) locating the school as a key environment...
Understanding the characteristics of interfaces between materials and solvent media such as structure, chemistry, and charge remains crucial to determining the properties and performance of numerous systems and technologies. This thesis focuses specifically on characterizing the interactions of water at oxide interfaces. A large collection of questions remains unanswered about...
In the Western Common Law tradition, legal decisions constrain and guide future cases involving the same legal issues. Although the legal academy disagrees about the specific nature of such precedential reasoning, including about the role of analogy in legal reasoning, there is ample evidence from cognitive science that analogical learning...
Genetic studies have found variants in the protein-degrading autophagy-lysosomal pathway (ALP) to be among the most common risk factors for developing Parkinson’s disease (PD). Macroautophagy (MA) is the arm of this pathway which delivers cytosolic components to lysosomes for degradation and is essential for neuronal health. The defining pathological protein...
Christian artists use dramatic license and theatrical representation to mold idealized versions of the Bible into recreational spaces for popular consumption, such as immersive theaters, theme parks, and museums. For these Christian artists, the impulse to evangelize through theatrical representation overcomes deeply ingrained religious sentiments of antitheatricality and result in...
Efficient and sustainable utilization of global resources represents a grand but achievablechallenge. By leveraging biology, we can transform abundant, but recalcitrant resources like lignin
to products ranging from fuel to medicine to polymers. Efforts to do so are expansive, but
challenges remain, due in no small part to the difficulty...
Solid acid fuel cells confer unique advantages over nearby technologies, such as polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) or solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), due to the solid acid electrolyte – a solid-state, anhydrous, intermediate-temperature proton conductor.Despite these encouraging unique properties, solid acid fuel cells have performed unfavorably in comparison...
Situated at the intersection of literary, religious, and economic studies, this dissertation examines how late medieval writers used commercial practice to invent new modes of penitential piety. Challenging scholarship that characterizes the relationship between church and commerce as exclusively antagonistic or corrosive, I argue that the convergence of these two...
Many estimation and inference procedures rely on asymptotic approximations for quantities that are unknown to researchers. While often convenient, such approximations can be poor in practice, even when the number of observations is ostensibly large. One response is to eschew asymptotics in favor of finite sample bounds. While remarkable progress...
Light is a powerful tool for manipulating and probing magnetic states in solid state systems. In particular, optically-induced spin orientation, the ability to orient spin with polarized light, has been extensively utilized in low-dimensional III-V and II-VI semiconductors to pioneer spintronic research. Even though traditional semiconductors have found a wide...
As of 2020, there are currently 5.8 million people in the United States suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), a debilitating and progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Of these nearly six million people, two-thirds are women. While it has been suggested that women’s longer lifespan accounts for this disparity, the overall lifetime risk...
This dissertation examines how racially, ethnically, and sexually minoritized women embodied and contested competing images of national identity between World War II and the Cold War. I challenge dominant narratives of modern dance, which overlook gender politics as women left the art form and white men gained prominence in it...
Cultural appropriation is a topic well-discussed in public discourse and theorized in the philosophical literature, however, it remains vastly understudied in psychology. Existing conversations center on whether cultural appropriation even exists, how it is defined, and if there are psychological and social impacts of being appropriated. No research to date...
Conventionally cross-linked polymers, which comprise the vast majority of commercial thermosets, cannot be decross-linked after curing or flow upon heating. Therefore, they cannot be effectively recycled into high-value products at end-of-life. Their lack of recyclability is due to the permanent cross-links, which restrict the flow of the chains in the...
This dissertation is a review of three projects I worked on during my time in the Computational Photography Lab at Northwestern University. First, a source separation problem for the X-Ray Fluorescence images of painted works of art is addressed through the incorporation of Hyperspectral Reflectance data. Following this, a discussion...
Visual localization is a critical capability for autonomous systems, enabling them to accuratelyestimate their position and orientation within an environment using visual data. This thesis focuses
on achieving a robust and reliable visual localization on both local and global level to enhance
localization performance in a wide range of environments....
Voltage-gated potassium (KV) currents play a crucial role in shaping and controlling the firing patterns that serve as the fundamental basis for the differential signal processing from the ear to the auditory cortex, with distinct firing patterns observed with high- and low-frequency phenotypes. This is an interesting phenomenon, in the...
Lackluster BA completion rates have made it clear that improving postsecondary outcomes in the U.S. is not simply a matter of raising college enrollment rates. In addition to increasing the number of people who attend college, it is also important to increase the number of people who graduate. Over the...
Tailoring the design of surfaces and interfaces with nanoscale features has the ability to significantly impact biological functions for a swath of applications including drug delivery, structure assembly, and biomedicine. For example, creating spatially defined nanoscale patterns has been known to contribute to changes in cellular architecture and mechanical properties,...
The Ohio River Valley was the site of an intense rivalry between Protestants and Catholics in the nineteenth century, as members of each group vied to extend their control through the development of churches, schools, orphanages, and other institutions. This dissertation explores the process and analyzes the effects of Catholic...
Popular histories of United States mass incarceration often focus on federal wars on crime, law and order policing, and the passage of harsh sentencing laws to explain how the United States transformed into the world’s leader in incarceration. My dissertation on the crisis of state prison overcrowding and prisoner resistance...
In this thesis, we discuss classical and recent results around the damped wave equation on compact and noncompact manifolds. We firstly show that on asymptotically cylindrical and conic manifolds, the geometric control condition and the network control condition give exponential and logarithmic decay rates respectively. We then show that a...
Stimulation of the cGAS-STING (cycle GMP-AMP synthase-Stimulator of Interferon Genes) pathway increases T cell activation and tracking into the tumor and reverses the immunosuppressive phenotype of myeloid cells. Direct targeting of the STING receptor using synthetic cyclic dinucleotide (CDN) ligands represents an attractive immunotherapeutic strategy for the treatment of lymphocyte-depleted...
Political theorists generally ascribe to the state a decisive role in the formation and protection of property rights, a view especially prevalent in the historiography of financial property in the United States. Given the capacities of government at the American Founding, however, such accounts are implausible. Drawing on writings composed...
Recent developments have enabled L12-strengthened Co-based superalloys, which have thepotential to surpass Ni-based superalloys as the material of choice for the hottest sections of turbine
blades due to cobalt’s 40 ºC higher melting point. The most-studied branch of Co-based
superalloys are based on the L12 phase Co3(Al,W); however, there is...
Caught between world wars and Stalin’s consolidation of power, citizens of Soviet Russia of the 1920s and 1930s had little to laugh about. Yet a unique tendency toward disruptive humor surfaces in poetry and prose over these two decades. I explore disruptive humor in select longer poetry of Nikolai Zabolotsky,...
This dissertation consists of three chapters about education policies in developing countries. The first chapter examines two extrapolation approaches to make out-of-sample predictions using cash transfer experiments in Malawi and Morocco. The second chapter evaluates India's workfare program in terms of targeting efficiency and effects on school enrollment, in comparison...
We present both semiclassical asymptotics for the wave equation on a stationary Kaluza-Klein spacetime and an index theorem describing the difference of the positive-frequency
spectral projectors for two stationary regions in a globally hyperbolic spacetime. The
first result involves analyzing the restrictions of the wave trace to isotypic subspaces for...
This dissertation focuses on two topics in international macroeconomics: the identification of the international spillovers of US interest rate shocks, and the study of its main transmission channels. In Chapter 1, I present the Spillover Puzzle of US Monetary Policy - the fact that in response to a US interest...
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...
From daily hygiene habits, such as brushing teeth, to the ingestion of pharmaceuticals, many forms of healthcare are commonly practiced in daily life, at home. How have household healthcare practices changed over time in urban America? Taking Washington, DC as my case study, I examine patterns of household pharmaceuticals access...
This dissertation aims to understand how Black Chicagoans work with institutions and neighbors they distrust to pursue common policy goals – in this case, to remedy state and community violence. I introduce the theory of distrustful cooperation. Using three Chicago neighborhoods as cased studies: Greater Englewood, Bronzeville, and Calumet Heights,...
Motor abnormalities (e.g., dyskinesia, psychomotor slowing, neurological soft signs) are core features of schizophrenia observed from the premorbid period through chronic illness, suggesting motor dysfunction may reflect the pathophysiology of psychosis. Among this list of motor abnormalities, psychomotor slowing in particular is one of the most consistently observed and robust...
Atomistic methods offer a powerful set of tools in the study of materials systems, as they allow materials scientists to ask questions with a high degree of specificity. They are well suited for studying and designing energy materials, critical due to the climate crisis, in part due to their ability...
The importance of understanding indoor microbial exposure is increasingly recognized, particularly concerning the emergence of pathogens and antimicrobial resistance. With the advancements of sequencing technologies, our capability of exploring indoor microbial communities has dramatically increased. However, huge challenges remain to translate sequence-based knowledge to actionable interpretations to support human health...
Every music theorist has their own personal reasons for engaging in the craft of theorizing about music. Many discover that there is something special about a theoretic disposition which differs from other sorts of interactions with music. It is often this special something that draws musicians into the discipline: specifically,...
This dissertation explores the economics of health and housing policies. In the first chapter, I discuss information disclosure policies in healthcare. Information disclosure programs can help consumers make better choices, but the consumers who respond the most to the information may not benefit the most or generate the most savings...
Heteroanionic materials are a class of materials of interest for their unique and tunable electronic, ionic, thermal, and optical properties, which are distinct from their homoanionic counterparts due to their multi-anionic nature. Oxynitrides, a type of heteroanionic material, are useful catalysts due to the effect of mixing oxygen and nitrogen...
Astronomy has entered a “multimessenger” era: one that combines electromagnetic “sight” with gravitational “touch.” This dissertation serves as a roadmap of the multimessenger frontier, to join the littered environments of dead and dying starswith their unclear origins. To uncover stars’ innermost secrets, we explore rare, transient glimpses into single, double,...
Very few studies have examined school racial climate in racially diverse school contexts. School racial climate refers to “perceptions of interracial interactions and the socialization around race and culture in a school” (Byrd, 2017, p. 700). The association between interracial peer interactions, psychological well-being, and academic outcomes is well documented,...
This dissertation comprises three essays in distinct areas of economic theory, yet all are related to experimentation and learning. In the first chapter, I study how organizations assign tasks to identify the best candidate to promote among a pool of workers. Task allocation and workers’ motivation interact through the organization’s...