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...
Systems of accountability for police who violate the U.S. Constitution are broken. Among other mechanisms of accountability, the judicial system should provide a path for victims to obtain a remedy when their constitutional rights are violated. Yet unless the law is clearly established beyond debate, the doctrine of qualified immunity...
Bio-integrated electronics with advanced monitoring capabilities have garnered considerable interest as a means of expanding patient care beyond traditional hospital and clinic settings. These mechanically soft microsystems, many of which are bioresorbable and wireless, have the potential to replace bulky, rigid, and wired medical technologies by matching or exceeding their...
This dissertation explores accounting information's role in forming R\&D alliances and subsequent innovation. Specifically, I utilize the effect of the recent revenue recognition rule change, Accounting Standard Codification (ASC) 606, on drug development firms. ASC 606 allows managers to change revenue recognition timing and increases disclosure requirements. I first document...
``Hazy decisions: The effect of dementia on medical decision-making'' \\ I estimate the causal effect of having dementia on the course of treatment for unrelated diseases by leveraging differences in the relative time of onset of dementia and the other condition in a difference-in-differences event-study framework. To demonstrate this approach...
Lithium-ion battery technology is a critically important component of the emerging renewable energy infrastructure. Since battery technology was first commercialized in the 1990s, significant progress has been made in materials development, motivated by the prospect of higher energy and power densities, increased cycling longevity, and faster charging and discharging rates....
Every day, we communicate through computers on projects ranging from a group lunch order to booking a flight to learning critical medical information. And every day, we also miscommunicate through computers: We don’t pick up on an intentionally humorous response, or we miss the criticality of a request. This is...
SCN2A encodes the NaV1.2 voltage-gated sodium channel, which is thought to contribute to the development of the central nervous system. Pathogenic variants in SCN2A have been associated with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD), including developmental and epileptic encephalopathies (DEE), intellectual disability (ID), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). These disorders represent a significant...
The speed of the storage device has long lagged behind the computation speed of processors.As a result, the I/O performance of storage systems in a supercomputer fails to keep up with its computational power.
This gap continues to widen in modern supercomputers.
On future exascale supercomputers, this issue can worsen...
Visual processing often requires the coordination of different neurophysiological regions in the visual system to independently represent and then re-integrate the different features of an object to gain an accurate and coherent representation of that object. Yet, under certain circumstances, this process can go awry and result in illusory misbindings,...
The basal ganglia operate largely in closed parallel loops, including an associative circuit for goal-directed behavior originating from the dorsomedial striatum (DMS) and a somatosensory circuit important for habit formation originating from the dorsolateral striatum (DLS). An exception to this parallel circuit organization was proposed to explain how information is...
This dissertation consists of three chapters on theoretical and empirical industrial organization. The first chapter highlights a previously unnoticed property of commonlyused discrete choice models, which is that they feature parallel demand curves. The second chapter studies how a behavioral consumer preference with “price reference effect” can overturn the standard...
This dissertation is a collection of three studies on topics in economic history and labor economics, in the United States. In the first chapter, I investigate the relationship between temporary paternal absence and long-term labor market outcomes. Specifically, I exploit the natural experiment of fathers’ WWII conscription, combined with longitudinal...
Simple sensorimotor tasks, such as lifting a cup or balancing a tray, requires not only controlled motor output, but also the ability to accurately perceive sensory information. After a hemiparetic stroke, individuals often experience sensory deficits in addition to motor impairments. However, research on the extent of changes in sensory...
As more thermoelectric materials/devices make it into the market for various applications, severalaspects need to be explored and optimized, beyond simply targeting high conversion efficiency at
the material levels. One critical aspect is the guarantee of mechanical stability at both the material
and the device level, which demands deeper understanding...
The potential association between Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and the incidence of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) has been a part of academic discourse for three decades. By considering the mixed reports on the association between FGM and HIV so far, this dissertation contributes to the current state of research by...
This dissertation considers how women’s spectatorship—how women are imagined as viewing subjects, and what are defined as feminine ways of watching—is transformed by digital technologies, and what it reveals about the shifting nature of privacy and visibility. It maps the contours of our current configuration of gendered looking relations by...
Machine learning is seeping into every fabric in various practical domains such as autonomous driving, wearable computing, and smart buildings. However, in the actual development and integration, especially when the learning-based components are frequently included as components of large complex systems where the physical instances can be included as interactable...
As polymer science has advanced as a field, so too have the uses for polymeric materials. We encounter polymers and plastics on a daily basis, and while their presence has greatly improved our quality of life, they have also had a profound and often negative impact on our environment. Plastic...
Task-oriented conversational systems are becoming increasingly popular, as shown by the rise of conversational recommendation systems across multiple platforms (e.g., Google Home, Alexa, and Siri) and domains (e.g., local establishments, e-commerce, books, music, and movies). However, users are still largely limited in what preferences they can express and how, as...
Increasingly, governments contract with private firms to provide publicly funded or subsidized goods and services, ranging from defense contracts, social insurance programs to small business loans. In such publicly funded, privately provided markets, governments set specific rules and policies to allow efficient provision or allocation of goods and services. Given...
Russia and Turkey occupy a significant portion of current global news as the rest of the world analyzes the trajectories of these countries. Most scholars focus on the socio-political landscapes of the two while disregarding cultural and literary studies. Such a top-down approach fails to consider the profound identity crises...
The physical structure of chromatin has recently emerged as a key contributor to genome regulation and cellular function. Chromatin packing dictates the conformation of the 2-meter-long DNA polymer within the ~10 μm cell nucleus. This conformation can influence gene function by regulating the accessibility of molecular regulators to DNA, altering...
Pediatric high-grade gliomas (pHGGs) are aggressive pediatric CNS tumors and an important subset are characterized by mutations in H3F3A, the gene that encodes Histone H3.3 (H3.3). Substitution of Glycine at position 34 of H3.3 with either Arginine or Valine (H3.3G34R/V), was recently described and characterized in a large cohort...
In this thesis, we consider the categories of sheaves with singular support on certain Lagrangians and the categories of microlocal sheaves with support on certain Lagrangians obtained by microlocalization, and study properties of functors between these categories.First, we study one class of the microlocal restriction functor for open inclusions, namely...
In my dissertation, I explore the connection between economic history and political economy in three ways.Chapter 1, studies the effects of a postal program in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century and its role in increasing access to higher education. Chapter 2, co-authored with Alexey Makaring and...
Social networks play a crucial role in developing economies. One of their most important functions is facilitating the flow of information, particularly about the efficacy of new technologies. This dissertation explores three aspects of this research agenda. First, I study how economists can estimate the structure of a social network...
In this paper, I analyze a piece of music that I wrote called The Health, a 90-minute musical ceremony that comprises speech, action, video projections, costumes, lights, chant, song, recomposed hold music, diagnostic exams, and renaissance magic. I wrote the piece for Mocrep and myself to perform, the initial run...