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....
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...
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...
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...