The work presented in this thesis is aimed at developing surface coatings for two specific applications: 1) the self-cleaning surfaces and 2) fouling control in water filtration membranes. Since all materials interact with their environment through their surfaces, tailoring surface properties by implementing surface coatings can greatly affect their performances...
Metal Additive manufacturing (AM) processes build 3D objects by heating and consolidating material in a point-by-point manner. Unlike traditional manufacturing methods, AM allows the material properties of each point in the build to vary by controlling process conditions locally. The process parameters can be considered as inputs to the AM...
This project uses the political and environmental history of maquiladoras—duty-free assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border—to offer new insights into two pivotal moments in the history of the U.S political economy: the poverty eradication plans of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the neoliberal growth models of the late twentieth century....
Creating sustainable and clean sources of energy is an outstanding problem of importance for the current generation of scientists to solve. Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are a promising renewable energy source but require improvements to their architectures and better fundamental understanding of the effects of organic chromophore morphology on the resulting...
In this work, I try to understand how the movements, attitudes, styles, and positions of the body in representational artworks can be understood as gestures—that is, as moments that interrupt the unfolding of narrative time and produce an interval. The interval is not merely a space that opens up between...
Chapter 1 proposes and tests a model where a country aligns with a foreign power to obtain its support and reduce its geopolitical risks, which also depend on the country's exposure to the other foreign powers. We show that the country's alignment with a given foreign power is increasing in...
Sea urchins are virtuosi of biomineralization, the process by which organisms build mineralized tissues. The embryonic animal exemplifies this with the formation of its endoskeletal spicule. The primary mesenchyme cells (PMCs) undertake spicule synthesis, which involves deposition of the initial granule, elongation of the spicule, and several choreographed changes...
In the wake of environmental catastrophe, active intervention is needed to heal trauma, resist erasure, and navigate changing communities. Focusing on New Orleans after the federal levee failures following Hurricane Katrina, this dissertation looks across a diverse mix of case studies to theorize how communities utilize performance to navigate mass...
Between the 1880s and the 1980s, typography mutated from an entirely manual, craft-based practice to a comprehensively mechanized, then a fully digitized one. With the arrival of Apple’s Macintosh computer in 1984, the graphic design profession found itself in the midst of a deep transformation of its tools, techniques, and...
Superconducting circuits are electrical circuits fabricated from superconducting materials. Due to the engineered strong interactions and suppressed sensitivity to environmental noise, such systems hold substantial promise as quantum bits, in which quantum information can be stored and manipulated with high fidelity. Over the decades, great efforts have been devoted to...
A series of theories and models are developed and used to investigate the growth of protective oxide films on metal and alloy surfaces for cases in which Wagner's classical model of oxidation does not hold. First, irreversible thermodynamics is applied to formulate a model for the outward growth of rocksalt...
Recovering three-dimensional (3D) structural information of a specimen from a single two-dimensional (2D) measurement remains an important but challenging task in microscopic imaging. A conventional 2D microscopic image has a shallow depth-of-focus (DoF). Thus, recovering 3D information usually requires sequentially z-scanning the focal planes. This process is time consuming and...
Nucleic acids not only are the building blocks of life but also a class of attractive macromolecular therapeutics. However, the delivery of therapeutic oligonucleotides into cells has been a major challenge due to their large size and highly negatively charged backbone. Spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) are a class of emerging...
When a cell divides, it must assemble a microtubule-based structure called a spindle, which provides the forces that physically segregate the chromosomes. In most cell types the microtubules that comprise the spindle are nucleated and organized by centriole-containing centrosomes. In many species, however, oocyte meiosis is carried out in the...
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...
In this dissertation, advances are made in understanding both the way hyporheic exchange impacts riverbed morphodynamics and the physical processes that lead to turbulent momentum transfer in the first few grains of riverbed sediments. In terms of physical advances in understanding the interplay between bedform movement and hyporheic exchange, we...
This dissertation theorizes the relation between blackface minstrelsy and contemporary Black performance. The project analyzes the use of nineteenth-century blackface minstrel conventions in Black theatrical performances during later eras where its usage seems counter-intuitive: during the Black freedom struggles of the 1960s; within Black feminist and queer performance of the...
Unmournable Void: Tending-Toward the Dead and Dying in Contemporary Black Performance and Visual Art, explores critical artistic practices that tend to the historical conditions of anti-black violence resulting from transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. This triad of regimes produced the Black condition as the unmournable void lived in close proximity...
The Quincke effect is an electrohydrodynamic instability which gives rise to a torque on a dielectric particle in a uniform DC electric field. Previous studies reported that a sphere initially resting on the electrode rolls with steady velocity. In this thesis I report the experimental discovery of another regime, where...
Automated sketch collaborators might help us create more dynamic intelligent tutoring systems, work out designs, reduce bias in solving spatial social problems, and organize our ideas. Here, we examine some properties of sketch recognition methods designed to help serve that goal. Structure Mapping techniques are applied to symbolic structural descriptions...
This dissertation reconstructs North and South Carolina Lowcountry plantation waterfronts as a means of better understanding mobility, inequality, and human-environment interactions in the antebellum Lowcountry. Using a theoretical framework of hydrosociality, the author undertook archaeological and archival research to investigate the question: how did the built environment of navigable waterways...
Part I - Experimental Studies of Spin Waves in a Micrometer-Thick Yttrium Iron Garnet filmAn investigation of spin wave dispersion in a micrometer-thick ferrimagnetic yttrium iron garnet (YIG) film has been conducted in various regimes. In the linear excitation regime, the dispersion of spin waves was characterized in an yttrium...
Mammalian transcriptional regulation is well-known to be complex and highly context dependent. Different genetic and epigenetic features, including single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that function as cis- or trans-expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs), transcription factor (TF) interaction profile with cis-regulatory elements (CREs), methylation of CpG dinucleotide sequences, and histone modification that...
Molecular-oriented single-site heterogeneous catalysis is a powerful approach to address the long-lasting challenge of the structure-activity relationship in catalysis, as it allows molecular level control of the catalytic centers and thus the elucidation of reaction mechanisms. In this dissertation, single-site molybdenum-dioxo species have been immobilized on carbon supports, i.e. activated...
I present the body of work I have pursued over the course of my doctoral study at Northwestern University. First, I conduct an analysis of the measurement abilities of distinctive LISA detector designs, examining the influence of LISA's low-frequency performance on the detection and characterization of massive black hole binaries....
In nearly all Eukaryotes, the membrane-enclosed nucleus contains the vast majority of the cellular genome. Within this sub-cellular compartment, the nuclear architecture facilitates genomic chromatin organization. Controlling chromosomal loci’s spatial positioning relative to subnuclear structures and each other can have local and global effects on gene expression. Moreover, chromatin organization...
Competitive gaming, or esports, is a high-skill endeavor embedded in a highly gendered social context. Using multiple methodological approaches, this dissertation argues that gender-gaming inequality is a result of changeable stereotypes that impact women throughout their lives. Specifically, gender-gaming stereotypes limit women’s initial access to gaming, discourage their continued interest...
We use Goerss-Hopkins theory to show that if E is a p-local Landweber exact homology theory of height n and p > n^2 + n + 1, then there exists an equivalence hSpE ≃ hD(E∗E) between homotopy categories of E-local spectra and differential E∗E-comodules, generalizing Bousfield’s and Franke’s results to...
This dissertation contains two topics. The first topic focuses on how to use information design to minimize costs of implementing a policy that guarantees 100% passing rate of all participants by providing enough compensation for the their effort. The second topic explores an auction setting which involves financially distressed business...
The answer to the question “Why do we sleep?” lies in understanding the biological underpinnings of homeostatic drive to sleep. Wakefulness is correlated with numerous changes in brain activity, structure and gene/protein expression that re-normalize following sleep however which of these elements is sufficient to cause sleep drive and how...
Skeletal muscle is a highly sexually dimorphic tissue, with males and females exhibiting differences in muscle size, gene transcription, and metabolism. This thesis describes two models wherein males and females responded to an intervention with the same physiological adaptation but through two distinct mechanisms. In the first model, mice of...
Unlike other products or services, electricity cannot be easily stored, and its delivery cannot be delayed by keeping customers in queues. The electricity supply has to be instantly available to serve a continuously varying demand. Traditionally, electric utilities would match their supply to the demand by adjusting the production output...
Fluorescence microscopy has become a widely used tool in many research areas. However, its spatial resolution, limited to 250 nm by the diffraction limit of light, has restricted direct observation of details of ultrastructural biology. In recent years, spectroscopic single-molecule localization microscopy (sSMLM), one of super-resolution imaging techniques, has been...
Rising social inequality across economic, gender, and racial lines is a pressing issue of our time. Despite widespread agreement that inequality exists, there are stark ideological disagreements about its extent, its victims, and about what – if anything – should be done to address it. Prior work demonstrates that the...
Robots can be capable partners when interacting with humans, but their value is largely dependent on how information is communicated in that partnership. In physical human-robot interaction, information is communicated via motion---configurations, velocities, forces, and torques. The autonomy interprets these implicit signals using metrics, which ultimately drive the the autonomy....
Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) was first recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2012 to prevent uncomplicated malaria in children and began implementation in Burkina Faso in 2014 under programmatic campaigns. Systematic assessment of the impact of national SMC campaigns requires data with weekly or monthly temporal resolution over...
The need to rapidly develop and produce life-saving vaccines and therapeutics is critical for overcoming pandemics in a global economy. Recent advances in automation and cell-free systems have opened new avenues for expediting optimization and production of biologic vaccines and therapeutics. A key consideration for the development of protein biologics...
Over the past decade, wearables have become pervasive in our lives. Healthcare wearables like a smartwatch continuously monitor personal health status and provide personalized feedback to motivate progress towards medically recommended goals. While present set of on-body electronics empowers users to visualize health status outside of clinic spaces, its traditionally...
In the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, I find that Aristotle endorses two distinct forms of political activity. The first form, which I term statesman activity, is intrinsically valuable. Aristotle thinks that we should value this kind of political activity because it is constitutive of human well-being. The second form, which...
Integrating the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined future, narrative identity is a person’s internalized and evolving story of the self, functioning to provide life with some degree of meaning, purpose, and temporal coherence (McAdams & McLean, 2013). Moreover, narrative identity has been found to be associated with...
ABSTRACT This dissertation moves work on school discipline into the digital era by filling a gap in the literature which has largely ignored how data from digital student ecosystems are mined and processed by school authority. My dissertation interrogates the role youth of youth online behavior in school discipline decision-making....
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an important gram-negative opportunistic pathogen whose large genome allows it to thrive in diverse environments. There is a wide range of phenotypic variation within the species, which can be attributed both to variation in sequences present in most isolates (the core genome) or the presence or absence...
This thesis develops novel methods for generating space-filling designs inside a designspace and subsampling from a data set. It incorporates materials from two papers by the
author: Shang and Apley 2021; Shang, Apley, and Mehrotra 2022a. Chapter 1 discusses space-filling designs of computer experiments, which is publishedas Shang and Apley...
The apolipoprotein E (APOE) E4 isoform is the strongest genetic risk factor for sporadic Alzheimer’s disease (AD). While APOE is predominantly expressed by astrocytes in the central nervous system, neuronal expression of APOE is of increasing interest in age-related cognitive impairment, neurological injury, and neurodegeneration. Here we show that endogenous...
Yugoslav wartime television news often conformed to the demands of the political regimes. Informed by this knowledge, scholars have argued that TV as a medium incited and legitimized the wars by fostering ethnonationalist ideologies. Using archival and textual analysis, this project examines how television reacted to the political constraints imposed...
How well do Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis (PSHA) maps forecast ground shaking due to earthquakes? This question is central to ensuring the safety, security, and economic well-being of citizens. PSHA maps are an important product for users including seismologists, engineers, insurers, and policymakers. PSHA, which has been used worldwide for...
Colloidal crystals engineered with DNA are fascinating structures that constitute an emerging form of programmable matter. Indeed, the use of DNA as a programmable bond has led to thousands of new crystal types, with exquisite control over crystal symmetry and lattice parameters. However, synthesizing large (> 100 µm) single-crystals has...
This thesis presents methods to improve the manipulation capabilities of robots. People and animals can effectively handle objects of many shapes, sizes, weights, and materials using a variety of manipulation primitives such as grasping, pushing, sliding, tipping, rolling, and throwing. In contrast, most robots manipulate objects by pick-and-place. Restricting robots...
We structure our lives around social groups – belonging to them and thinking about them. In this dissertation, I develop a new stereotype content measure to assess the attributes associated with groups in America today, propose and support a theory of sociocultural essentialism, and explore the strategic activation of sociocultural...
In the United States, those who have lower income, education level, and occupational prestige, are more likely to develop, have worse symptoms of, and die from a wide range of chronic diseases. This phenomenon prompted much research trying to delineate the underlying pathways, and inflammation has been highlighted as a...
RAS is one of the most frequently mutated oncogenes in cancer with ~30% of all human tumors harboring a mutation in either HRAS, NRAS, or KRAS isoforms. Despite countless efforts for the development of small molecule inhibitors for RAS, it remains an elusive target in the clinic. Here I demonstrate...
Natural Language Processing methods have become increasingly important for a variety of high- and low-level tasks including speech recognition, question answering, and automatic language translation. The state of the art performance of these methods is continuously advancing, but reliance on labeled training data sets often creates an artificial upper bound...
Sequential batches of time-evolving data for a set of persistent identifiable entities (e.g. online shopping behavior by month for a customer ID, or economic figures by year for a collection of countries) can exhibit temporal shifts in their underlying clustering structure. Methods for recovering this evolutionary clustering structure exploit natural...
A massive amount of data is generated every second all around the world. Machine learning becomes the most attractive solution to consume the data fuel and transform it into productivity. It has yielded great results in many fields, such as healthcare, marketing, finance, etc. Machine learning models are usually designed...
The protein homeostasis (proteostasis) network, a critical cytoprotective system that restores homeostasis in response to molecular stress, comprises distinct pathways, including the heat-shock response, unfolded protein response, oxidative stress response, and autophagy. These distinct pathways are all co-opted by tumor cells to cope with cancer-associated stress, and their activation in...
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a high-resolution, non-contact, three-dimensional imaging technique, which has revolutionized the diagnosis and treatment of retinal diseases. Visible-light OCT (vis-OCT) extends OCT by enabling retinal oximetry – the measurement of oxygen saturation of hemoglobin from within individual retinal blood vessels. Three advances in the vis-OCT technique...
Over the past decade, concepts and expressions derived from Black feminist theory, a line of intellectual thought historically produced from Black women’s unique lived experiences that asks us to consider how one’s material realities are co-constituted by multiple, interlocking systems of the oppressed, have traveled into the public sphere through...
Over the past 15 years, there have been significant developments in expanding the singlet fission (SF) library and understanding the SF mechanism. SF has been a topic of interest in recent years due to its potential applications in organic photovoltaics. During SF, a singlet exciton energetically down-converts into two triplet...
This dissertation argues that the nineteenth-century construction of “emotional susceptibility” turned a much-derided quirk of psychology—the long retention of one’s earliest affective impressions—into a basis for radical interventions into thinking about attachment, ethics, and the Victorian novel. I focus in particular on the work of Henry Mackenzie, Charlotte Brontë, George...
Aging is the greatest known risk factor for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD); however, the molecular mechanisms underlying aging and how it can initiate and or exacerbate AD, is still unknown. Epigenetic regulation has been widely accepted to play an essential role in aging or AD-related processes; however, whether dysregulations of histone...
This dissertation has three chapters. Chapter one evaluates the effects of Short-Time Workin Germany during the great financial crisis. Chapter two describes how British inventors
during the industrial revolution worked on more central technologies. This in turn resulted
in faster growth. Chapter three builds on a novel patent data set...
The field of time-domain astronomy has seen significant advancements in the latest years as increasingly sensitive, deep and wide-field surveys of the sky at all wavelengths are being carried out more and more frequently. Furthermore, the addition of gravitational wave detectors around the world has opened an entirely new window...
The blueprint of life is contained within the sequence of an organism’s genome. While virtually all cells of an individual multicellular eukaryotic organism contain a near identical code of nucleic acid sequences, an organism must give rise to and maintain a varied set of cells and phenotypes. As such, sequence...
Part I: Design of Photo-Responsive Molecules towards Biomedical ApplicationsThe use of light to control systems provides numerous advantages such as spatiotemporal precision, non-invasive penetration, and precise energy input. Specifically, molecules that undergo photoinduced cleavage, photoremovable protecting groups (PPGs) have emerged as an active area of research due to their broad...
Non-covalent and ion-specific interactions in the context of charged polymers are ubiquitous in nature and in synthetic applications. For example, mussels utilize metal-coordinate bonds to form tough underwater adhesion to a wide range of substrates. The sandcastle worm uses coacervation of oppositely charged polymers to build robust structures for self-defense....
Market growth is an important goal for consumer businesses, often leading to lower marginal cost, higher operational efficiency, and larger assortment size - all of which help achieve dominance over competition. Yet, retailers and manufacturers alike should carefully manage their supply chains to sustain growth in customer base and extract...
Optical interferometers and resonators are commonly used for precision measurement. These devices can accurately measure the phase shifts of light induced by small changes in the optical path in the device. To meet the need for ultra-sensitive measurement, researchers have developed various approaches to build better and more sensitive devices....
More than half of proteins in humans are modified with carbohydrates in a process called glycosylation, yet this process remains poorly understood even though approximately 1% of the expressed human genome encodes biosynthetic machinery for glycosylation. Unlike genomics and proteomics where high throughput tools are now routinely used to generate...
Automobile transportation is among the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and reducing vehicle miles traveled must be part of our climate change mitigation efforts. One recent trend that, if accelerated, could aid in this effort is the increase in bicycling for transportation in large US...
Surface patterns that can reconfigure under external stimuli are important for tailoring diverse properties such as surface adhesion, optical transmittance, and wettability depending on the feature size and orientation. Wrinkling a stiff skin layer on a pre-strained elastomer substrate has emerged as a method to create responsive structures without using...
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) images the retina noninvasively with micrometer-scale volumetric resolutions. It is an invaluable resource in the clinic for identifying, monitoring, and treating blindness-causing diseases. By shortening illumination wavelengths to the visible range, visible-light OCT (vis-OCT) improves image resolution, provides new scattering contrasts, and enables oxygen saturation (sO2)...
In recent years, the understanding and identification of quantum materials supporting non-trivial band topology has progressed rapidly. This progress has been motivated in part by the potential application of topological quantum materials in quantum computers, sensors, and other next-generation devices. Despite this progress, the computation of bulk topological invariants in...
The pp → W + W − process is important as it allows the test of electroweak theory. Mea-surements of this processes have lead to reduced uncertainties on many other processes one
of which being the Higgs. There have been discrepancies between predicted and measured
cross-section values for pp →...
ABSTRACT Genome Mining in Actinobacteria via a Hybrid-Omics Discovery Platform James Hudson Tryon Natural products isolated from Actinobacteria are a vital source of medicines, agrochemicals, and commodity chemicals. The traditional, activity-driven fractionation pipelines that provided access to many of these natural products have delivered diminishing returns in recent decades. However,...
Over the past decade as smartphones and wearable tracking devices have grown in popularity, more individuals have begun collecting their own health and behavioral data. Innovations in sensor technology now allow individuals to continuously collect data over long periods of time with minimal effort. As a result, more data has...
The retina detects light, processes the visual signal, and sends a complex set of parallel information channels to the brain via a functionally diverse set of retinal ganglion cells types. This manuscript examines these retinal ganglion cell types, the visual features they encode, and the computational mechanisms leading to their...
Parshin's conjecture expects that the higher algebraic $K$-groups of smooth projective varieties over a finite field are torsion. In this thesis we prove that with the assumption of finite generation of higher \'etale algebraic $K$-theory of smooth projective varieties over a finite field, one can reduce Parshin's conjecture to the...
Slow-moving landslides are common in mountainous area worldwide. Most of them mobilizes slowly over long periods of time, which causes continuous damage to proximal infrastructure and habitats. Most notably, some slow-moving landslides can experience catastrophic acceleration at some point in their life cycle, with potentially fatal consequences. It is therefore...
Conventional polymer network materials, e.g., rubber tires, cannot be efficiently recycled for high-value applications because of their permanent network structures. Therefore, at the end of use, none or only a small fraction of the economic value can be recovered from these materials. Scrapped tires demonstrate well this issue along with...
Voltage-gated Na channels are expressed in all neurons, and are responsible for the upstroke of the action potential. They are part of a complex of proteins that includes pore-forming α subunits and auxiliary subunits that modify their trafficking, gating, and function. The modulation of Na channels by auxiliary subunits is...
Human olfactory function is important for a myriad of behaviors, including food seeking, social cognition, memory, emotional regulation, and detecting environmental threats. In animal models, particularly dense olfactory inputs have been shown to target orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a region involved in multimodal sensory integration, reward coding, and flexibly guiding our...
Deduplication, also referred to as "entity resolution", is a common and crucial pre-processing step in the construction of social networks. Traditional deduplication methods compare the attributes (such as name and age) of potential matching pairs to estimate a match probability for a pair. Recently research has used clustering techniques for...
In the United States there is little material culture that foster youth share in common while in state custody. Removed from alleged circumstances of abuse or neglect, these young people frequently relocate between residential care settings like group homes, institutional treatment centers, or single family foster homes. Due to perpetual...
The complex structure of typical heterogeneous catalysts, where nanoparticles of active material are dispersed onto the surface of a thermally stable support with a high surface area, complicates the understanding of how the support can affect the resulting catalyst structure and properties. Using well-faceted and shape-controlled oxides as supports would...
In this Thesis, I describe some recent developments in the field of artificial molecular machines to which I have made contributions. In Chapter 1, I survey the rise and promise of molecular nanotopology, a relatively new discipline focusing on molecular knots and links that offers unprecedented opportunities to access high-energy...
This thesis studies inter vivos transfers in twenty European countries during the years 2004 to 2017. Inter vivos transfers are transfers made during the lifetime of the donor and the donee. They participate in the intergenerational transmission of inequality and they are an expression of familial values of solidarity and...
The idea that structure determines the properties of a material is a powerful concept in chemistry and in all fields in which chemistry is important, including engineering, medicine, and materials science. My research aims to better understand the structure-property relationships of a class of materials known as metal–organic frameworks (MOFs)....
We establish the criterion for chaos in three-planet systems, for systems similar to those discovered by the Kepler spacecraft. Our main results are as follows: (i) The simplest criterion, which is based on overlapping mean motion resonances (MMRs), only agrees with numerical simulations at a very crude level. (ii) Much...
Rocky exoplanets are indicated to be common in the galaxy. Future instruments including the {\it James Webb Space Telescope} (JWST), high resolution ground-based spectrographs, and direct imaging missions for under consideration by the 2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics are poised to unlock the atmospheres of habitable zone planets...
Interactions with pollinators are thought to be a major driver of the evolution and diversification of angiosperms, yet questions remain about how pollinators mediate plant divergence at early stages and across entire species distributions. Here, I address this knowledge gap using two study groups in the recently-radiating and florally diverse...
Electrochemical devices play a vital role in the efforts towards a sustainable green future. Solid acid based electrochemical cells, employing super protonic CsH2PO4 (CDP) as the electrolyte component, offer unique application advantages due to their operability at intermediate temperatures 250°C. At these temperatures, one can achieve improved reaction kinetics over...
This work examines important heterogeneous processes of organic molecules on surfaces, in the contexts of atmospheric and indoor environments. In large forest ecosystems, biogenic secondary organic aerosols (SOAs) constitute a dominant fraction of organic particulate matter in the atmosphere. The formation of SOAs starts from the emission of volatile organic...
The hippocampus has a well-established role in episodic memory and serves as a hub in a network of distributed brain regions (i.e., hippocampal-cortical network; HCN). Theta-band (4-8 Hz) neural activity recorded in the hippocampus have been associated with memory processing, and synchronized theta oscillations among the hippocampus and HCN regions...
Art has been tied to scientific and technological advancements throughout history, providing methods and mediums for communication, expression, and exploration. Art is a dialogic domain that evolves with the technological advances in society–incorporating technology and computational tools to create new genres of art. We live in an increasingly computational and...
How do exporting firms react to changes in the cost of credit? To answer this question, we exploit an exogenous variation in banking regulation which increases the cost of financ- ing for exports in the European Union. Using a unique dataset which combines customs, firm-level, and credit registry data on...
They Left Us Dead: Anti-Black Violence, Black Evidence, and The Insistence of Black Life examines the mercurial, though seemingly fixed, notion of evidence as it is brought into relation with anti-blackness, Black death and, ultimately, Black life. They Left Us Dead queries how and why certain forms of documentation and...
Over the past decade the market for children’s digital play activities focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has grown exponentially. One benefit to the growth in digital STEM play is that it can provide children opportunities to engage the cognitive skills and practices that can be valuable for...
Using the context of the oil and natural gas boom of North Dakota and Montana brought on by advances in hydraulic fracturing technology, this dissertation studies how changing economic conditions affect basic social well-being in a rural setting. Using methods of causal inference, specifically difference-in-differences regressions and comparative interrupted time-series...
Different features of the visual world are conveyed to the retino-recipient regions of the brain by more than 40 types of retinal ganglion cells (RGCS). Feature detection by RGCs depends on a combination of intrinsic and morphological properties where the interplay of excitatory and inhibitory inputs occurs through local retinal...
Otoacoustic emissions are currently used for various clinical purposes; however, stimulus frequency otoacoustic emissions (SFOAEs) evoked using a single one are not utilized clinically due to uncertainties regarding their generation mechanism, their spatial source(s) in the cochlea, and their susceptibility to various cochlear insults, particularly in humans. Over the years,...