The staggered (or imbricated) lamellar ``brick-and-mortar" nanostructure of nacre endows nacre with strength and fracture toughness values exceeding by an order of magnitude those of the constituents, and inspires the advent of new robust biomimetic materials. While many deterministic studies clarified these advantageous features in the mean sense, a closed-form...
In Chapter 1, I investigate whether physical capital anchors the spatial distribution of economic activity and how capital destruction affects local economic activity in the short and the long term. I investigate these questions by examining the 1975 frost that damaged coffee trees in the Brazilian state of Paraná. I...
The mammalian retina contains three classes of photoreceptors: rods, cones and the recently discovered intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs). ipRGCs express the photopigment melanopsin and were initially thought to be a homogeneous population of cells that drive subconscious visual behaviors such as circadian photoentrainment and pupil constriction. However, recent...
Thermoelectric modules that convert heat into electrical energy are attractive for improving global energy management. This thesis reports the synthesis and characterization of two new families of lead and tin chalcogenide alloys and focuses on the impact of the grain boundaries, phase segregation, and atomic vacancies on the electronic and...
Stimuli-responsive colloidal crystals with reconfigurable structures and properties have garnered significant interest in fields focused on the development of on-demand optics, adaptive catalysts, as well as chemical and biological sensors. A variety of different assembly techniques have been developed to engineer colloidal crystals. However, most reported structures are static as...
This study is a response to the observation that people articulate meanings of rules in flexible and context-specific ways, but that literature on international legal, norm-based, strategic-logical, and ethical/moral rules typically treats them as pregiven, stable objects. By examining people’s evolving justifications of practices related to firefighting (protecting against and...
Over the last several decades, market-driven needs created a vast assortment of products with micron-sized features. To achieve the necessary levels of precision and accuracy, a synergistic approach was undertaken, where both material addition and subtraction was employed in the creation of the desired parts. However, currently employed micromanufacturing processes...
This dissertation is a wide-range study of the relationships between the three central elements of the production function: technology, capital and its financing, and labor. Chapter 1 analyzes the relationship between labor and recent wave of automation and digitization technologies, showing that while they typically substitute for workers, in several...
There has been significant growth in applying composite materials for various engineering applications in the past several decades. Composites allow engineers to tailor material microstructures and constituents for desired structural properties that usually outperform traditional engineering materials such as alloys. However, due to the heterogeneous nature of composites' microstructure, composite...
Uterine leiomyoma (LM), the most common tumor of women, causes severe morbidity. LM cells can be separated into three molecularly and functionally distinct cell populations based on the expression pattern of CD34 and CD49b: stem (LSC, CD34+/CD49b+), intermediate (LIC, CD34+/CD49b-), and differentiated cells (LDC, CD34-/CD49b-). Progesterone via progesterone receptor (PR/PGR)...