Visual understanding is an important area in artificial intelligence. Many researchers have proposed novel deep learning models for this, which have achieved impressive results. However, deep learning models of visual understanding do not model human-like cognition and are still far from human-level ability. Standard deep learning models do not model...
This dissertation takes up Islam’s relationship to Black nationalism across the Atlantic diaspora of Muslims that I call “the Fugitive Islamicate.” Scholars most often have described this relationship as commencing in the twentieth century with the rise of “Black Muslim religion,” a U.S. religious movement that begins with Noble Drew...
In this essay I examine George Aperghis’ process-based compositional thought in the score and performance practice of Retrouvailles, with a focus on the non-hierarchical and simultaneous use of interdisciplinary elements. I demonstrate how Aperghis sets up the complex dramaturgy of superimposed, suggestive narratives in this work as a case-study of...
Existing nonlinear optimization methods have proven reliable over the past few decades for a wide range of applications but have critically relied on accurate function and gradient evaluations. Modern nonlinear optimization problems arising from machine learning and scientific computing applications are increasingly complex and large scale, which make accurate evaluations...
Tooth enamel, the outermost layer of human teeth, is a complex, hierarchically structured biocomposite. The details of this structure are important in multiple human health contexts, from understanding the progression of dental caries (tooth decay) to understanding the process of amelogenesis (enamel formation) and related developmental defects.While much is known...
Imagine someone who was raised to hold a number of irrational and objectionable beliefs. There seems to be an important sense in which they lack control over these beliefs, and so we might think they are not responsible for them. But many of our beliefs are like this: they are...
This dissertation is composed of three articles that focus on the electoral support coalitions of populist parties in Latin America. Using typologies, comparative-historical analysis, and experimental methods, the articles conceptualize and explain variation across several dimensions of these coalitions: their size and scope, their level of organization, and the identities...
Many species of rodents rely on the set of exquisitely sensitive facial vibrissae (whiskers) to guide rich behaviors in which other senses are inadequate. Although whiskers are, like all hairs, inert strands of keratin, they provide the animal with a rich landscape of tactile information which is used to guide...
Biomedical imaging is an essential part of medicine that enables the non-invasive observation of biological phenomena. This, in turn, allows for more accurate and earlier diagnoses, monitoring of therapies, and even fundamental research into biological processes. Molecular imaging, a fast-growing subdiscipline of biomedical imaging, seeks to image biochemical processes at...
In this dissertation, I summarize my findings of the dynamics of colloidal suspensions over a large range of volume fractions in two systems: drop impact and film rupture. The existence of a deformable surface in both these systems allows me to capture the consequences of non-Newtonian flow using high-speed imaging....
Magnetic resonance imaging is a powerful research tool for studying anatomical processes in intact large organisms, as it is capable of generating high resolution images with unlimited penetration depth and excellent soft-tissue contrast. However one of the challenges faced by those seeking to use the technique to answer biochemical questions,...
Advanced wireless soft electronics integrate a wireless power transfer circuit and a small battery. It is skin-compliant, and lightweight accommodating the complex motion of the body. These unique features of the device provide a continuous physiological measurement without discomfort and spatial constraints. Using the device, we can observe and track...
Historians have long argued that humanitarianism—what Thomas Haskell once described as “alleviating the suffering of distant strangers”—first emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as part of a complex set of perceptual changes involving capitalist growth, Enlightenment ideas, and Christian values. Given these claims, it is no coincidence that humanitarianism has often been...
Heart failure due to genetic cardiomyopathy is associated with a range of phenotypic expression. The studies in this body of work interrogated the role of noncoding variation in modifying cardiomyopathy phenotypes. We used cap analysis of gene expression in heathy and failed left ventricles to define the regulatory environment of...
The U.S. population is rapidly changing with recent projections showing that soon whites will no longer be the majority. This information, when shown to white Americans, can generate a sense of threat. Across the three studies of this dissertation, I frame this group threat (i.e., a change in the demographic...
Pharmaceutical companies pay more than $2 billion to physicians every year. Most of these payments are for food and beverage, speaking, honoraria, consulting, and travel and lodging, which are termed “general payments.” These payments have come under increased scrutiny as critics of pharmaceutical promotion argue that they influence prescribing in...
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...
Reducing the high incidence of metabolic syndrome especially among older people living in low income communities is a goal of the health system. Residents of the Austin community of Chicago suffer from a heavy burden of health issues related to metabolic syndrome leading to disproportionally higher morbidity and mortality rates...
Lower-SES (socioeconomic status) couples tend to face more challenges in their relationships. Relative to higher-SES couples, they are less likely to marry, more likely to divorce, and less satisfied with their relationships—but they do not value their romantic relationships any less. Drawing on risk regulation theory and theories of social...
As the pursuit for higher performance and lower cost photovoltaics, and for new applications of optoelectronic devices moves beyond crystalline silicon, there are many unique opportunities for materials research into hybrid organic-inorganic, and organic semiconductors. This dissertation focuses on both hybrid organic-inorganic materials and organic materials for optoelectronic applications. In...
This dissertation reorients political theory to the concepts of use and utility for a more critical and emancipatory perspective on contemporary communal life. The reorientation entails a recovery of Aristotle’s and Marx’s overlapping approaches to use, whose contemporary reception indexes the surprising alignment of critical political theory with economics. That...
The problem of theological normativity concerns the conflict between the purported eternal, universal, and ahistorical nature of Christian theological and ethical claims and the fact that such claims are always articulated in a particular time and place and, therefore, seem to bear the marks of cultural and historical contingency. My...
This dissertation explores the role and relation of capitalism in contemporary political life, with the aim to reveal the inherent oppression of what I refer to as capitalist culture. To this end, the project follows three main objectives: (1) to identify the widespread and pervasive nature of capitalist culture (2)...
The purpose of this thesis is to study the empirical measure of the t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding algorithm (t-SNE) when the input is given by n independent, identically distributed inputs.We show that this sequence of measures converges to an equilibrium measure, which can be described as the solution of a...
In this dissertation, we study models and methods to address uncertainties that can vary in optimization problems. Robust optimization is a popular approach for optimization under uncertainty, especially if limited information is available about the distribution of the uncertainty. It models the uncertainty through sets and finds a robust optimal...
Uterine leiomyomas (fibroids) are a major source of gynaecologic morbidity in reproductive age women and are characterised by the excessive deposition of a disorganised extracellular matrix, resulting in rigid benign tumours. Clinically, leiomyoma patients usually present with pelvic pain, urinary incontinence, as well as heavy cyclic and non-cyclic bleeding. Curative...
This dissertation focuses on the development of quantitative approaches for characterizing endogenous signaling pathways and designing new pathways in mammalian cells. I demonstrate how mathematical descriptions that are formulated to explain gene expression patterns can also serve as a powerful springboard for deeper analyses into the properties and functions of...
This dissertation explores how American television portrayed canonical European classical music in the Cold War era. I analyze televisual negotiations of music-cultural hierarchies to complicate common narratives about the postwar decades as a peak moment of polarity between “high” and “low” culture, and between ideologies of consensus and rebellion. Drawing...
Ultrafine particles are often used as lubricant additives because they can enter tribological contacts to reduce friction and protect surfaces from wear. They tend to be more stable than molecular additives under high thermal and mechanical stresses during rubbing. However, in lubricant oil, ultrafine particles tend to aggregate together to...
Amyloid beta oligomers (AβOs) are a key instigator of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The work presented in this thesis includes three disease-modifying approaches to disrupt pathological AβO-related mechanisms in AD: (1) inhibiting AβO buildup, (2) blocking AβO-induced tau phosphorylation, and (3) neutralizing AβOs. These three approaches were tested in...
Individuals with psychotic disorders experience profound challenges in maintaining a coherent sense of self and identity over time. Although disturbances in the basic, momentary sense of self are core features of psychotic experiences, less is known about psychosis’s impact on the autobiographical self, the experience of being a coherent and...
Nucleic acid drugs promise to revolutionize the development of therapeutics. They offer a platform for digital medicine, where systematic changes to the nucleic acid sequence can be utilized to target the entire human genome. However, nucleic acids suffer from a number of drawbacks, such as negligible cellular uptake and rapid...
Relative to individual level exposures (such as childhood trauma, life events, and bullying exposure), contextual or systems level environmental factors have received relatively less attention in the psychology literature. While landmark epidemiological and sociological studies have uncovered key insights with regards to systems, this knowledge has not often been translated...
We often criticize people for having beliefs that are not sufficiently supported by the total available evidence. We do this even if those beliefs are instrumental to satisfying their desires. This leads to a question: why should people care about following the evidence, especially when doing so is not instrumental...
Mineral inclusions in diamond, brought to the surface through kimberlitic eruptions, provide a unique glimpse into the geochemical inner workings of Earth’s deep interior. Diamonds source a wide range of depths in the mantle. While most diamonds originate from the upper 200 km of the Earth’s mantle, aptly called super-deep...
Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption ranks as one of the most original and innovative works of the modern period. Thinkers as diverse as Buber, Benjamin, Levinas, Strauss and Derrida have all acknowledged its influence. Yet, there has not been any consensus on the book’s main objective or agenda. Some...
Polymers permeate almost all facets of modern life. For end use applications, these materials are typically processed into products at elevated temperatures under which molten polymers are subjected to flow. Particular interest lies in the flow-induced crystallization behavior of polymer melts under extensional flow, which is a flow type dominant...
This dissertation is an in-depth exploration of Clarke Distributions (for 10), an original musical composition based on the use of text to establish interrelational listening and performance patterns between performers, in place of any fixed musical material. Inspired by research into improvisation, cognition, aesthetics, and linguistics, these patterns manifest as...
Understanding structure-property relationships for polymer nanocomposites is one of the primary challenges in discovering new, light weight, multifunctional advanced materials. Polymer nanocomposites are a class of advanced materials comprised of soft polymer matrix and nano-filler inclusions. While it has been found qualitatively that enhancements of material properties could be achieved...
Across the United States, public school districts are facing critical budget crises. To keep cuts away from the classroom, bus transportation is a common area to look for cost reductions. This thesis studies two fundamental problems that arise in public school transportation: the bus route design problem and the school...
Aristotle says that true assertions in practical philosophy are true “for the most part.” I argue an assertion is true “for the most part” if it refers to the hypothetical realization of a substance’s essential capacities under some set of impediments. The removal of impediments to the full realization of...
Broadly speaking, this dissertation project seeks to address the following question: how do religious people think about the cultural authority of science, and to what extent does this vary across different contexts? Despite the predictions of classical modernization theorists, religious institutions continue to significantly shape public discourse—and rule-making—in the vast...
The construction of new C–C bonds remains a central facet of organic chemistry due to its critical role in the synthesis of pharmaceutical compounds and organic materials. Mild and selective methodologies are often required for efficient formation of these bonds in natural product total synthesis, medicinal chemistry campaigns, and more....
This critical/theoretical history of performance art investigates the relationship between the body of the artist and the infrastructure of the city in Los Angeles and New York City between 1970 and 1985, with specific attention to how performance art resists, renegotiates, and responds to architectural functionalism. Using performance studies as...
Since their discovery, polymeric and protein-based materials are key to technological innovation and are indispensable in our lives. However, these natural and man-made soft materials usually have complex and hierarchical structures, with basic functional units in submicron scale. Therefore, a major challenge in understanding and designing these materials lies...
This thesis consists of three projects, centered around the aim to better model real-world systems under uncertainty, specifically, under stochastic disruptions, using optimization. A stochastic disruption is a type of infrequent event in which the timing and the magnitude are random. We introduce the concept of stochastic disruptions and a...
The world is awash in data and much of artificial intelligence focuses on learning models of the underlying structure in this data or the mechanisms governing its evolution. Both neural and symbolic models have weaknesses that make these models sub-optimal from a use perspective. Much of this data is in...
Contactin associated protein like 2 (CNTNAP2) has emerged as a prominent susceptibility gene implicated in multiple complex neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorders (ASD), intellectual disability (ID), and schizophrenia (SCZ). The presence of seizure comorbidity in many of these cases, as well as inhibitory neuron dysfunction in Cntnap2 knockout (KO)...
Understanding how spin waves propagate through ferromagnets is an important component of a wider international effort to create spintronic devices. In this thesis, we develop a propagating spin wave spectroscopy to make a variety of measurements on thin films of Yttrium Iron Garnet (YIG), a material known for having long...
Topology optimization is a powerful tool for maximizing structural performance, enabling multifunctionality of the structure, and reducing the materials waste and cost for sustainable manufacturing. However, current topology optimization tools are limited to a few scales, and the potential of nested topology optimization in engineering design has yet to be...
This dissertation explores lasting familial relationships and friendships among southern African Americans from the antebellum years to the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on southern Maryland, the dissertation shows how free and enslaved African Americans cultivated familial and non-familial relationships in towns and rural neighborhoods. Over the course of...
People need to feel authentic at work, but authenticity is not always a priority in organizations. This dissertation shows feeling authentic is essential to feeling human. Chapter 1 provides an overview of research on authenticity and self-dehumanization, describing why feeling inauthentic leads to self-dehumanization. Chapter 1 empirically supports the association...
In this dissertation, I cover three different topics in macroeconomics. In Chapter 1, I explore the macroeconomic implications of an increase in business competition and its micro transmission channels. In Chapter 2, I document a rise in savings and cash holdings by non-financial corporations across advanced economies and show that...
Epigenetics, the study of heritable changes in organisms not caused by mutations to DNA,holds tremendous promise for future medical applications. Although still in its infancy, feature selection in statistics plays an important role in correlating epigenetic changes with
diseases and various health issues. Feature selection may also be used in...
This study aims to explain variations in student movement successes and failures during regime transitions. Examining the 1998–99 Indonesian student movement that helped ending the Suharto regime, this study argues that the degree of state repression influences the degree of coordination and assistance from opposition groups and actors to students,...
The concealed information test (CIT) has garnered more empirical support than other methods of recognition detection and has a firm theoretical foundation. Because it occurs involuntarily, even when recognition is denied, P300 amplitude is a robust indictor of concealed information. Although the P300-based CIT shows great promise for field use,...
Recent estimates indicate that 21 million US adults live with Type II Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM). The management of the condition often requires patients to take multiple prescription medications to prevent disease progression; yet prescribed regimens themselves can become burdensome. Studies have shown that for patients with T2DM, the average regimen...
The societies of the former Yugoslavia are only a quarter-century removed from extensive warfare, yet collectively represent one of the fastest-growing tourism destinations in the world. This dissertation employs a global and relational lens to examine how contested narratives of recent conflict history are marketed, performed, and narrativized in settings...
The tension-spoke bicycle wheel owes its stiffness and strength to a cooperative relationship between the rim and the spokes: the rim holds the spokes in tension to prevent them from buckling under external loads, while the spokes channel external forces to the hub and prevent the rim from becoming severely...
Over the course of disease progression, half of adults with type II diabetes also develop diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN), peripheral nerve damage precipitated by the downstream metabolic effects of hyperglycemia, insulin resistance, and dyslipidemia. This multifactorial pathogenesis of DPN leads to various structural and physiological changes within the nerve, ultimately...
The structure of the North American crust and mantle was investigated using P wave teleseismic tomography and the links between seismic tomographic models, locations of volcanism, sediment isopachs, and continental scale crustal structures via plate reconstruction modeling. Nearly 50,000 teleseismic P wave delay times were measured from seismograms recorded by...
Understanding the mechanisms associated with chemical catalysis is vital for not only the rational improvement of their capabilities, but also for the advancement of the fundamental knowledge affiliated with the systems in question. These new insights can help predict new reactivities towards more challenging substrates which will allow for easier...
Semiconductor nanocrystals possess unique photophysical properties that make them desirable for many optoelectronic applications such as photovoltaics, LEDs, and quantum computing. When the size of a semiconductor is reduced to below the excitonic Bohr radius of the material, its carriers becomes quantum confined resulting in drastic changes to optical, electronic,...
Early-stage oxidation and corrosion mechanisms of CoCrMo and NiCrMo alloys can be analyzed on the nanoscale by transmission electron microscopy. Both alloys are attractive for a broad array of applications such gas turbines and aircraft engine components as they are known for their excellent corrosion resistance and mechanical properties at...
Dynamical modeling aims to capture the essential mechanics at work in real-world systems while remaining tractable enough to yield mathematical insights for predictions and interventions. The work presented here first takes this approach to the system of political ideology and influence, establishing a model for the continuous-time evolution of individual...
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...
Infidel(itie)s of Colour: Unruly Black Bodies, Modernity and Performance in Post-Apartheid South Africa focusses on the ways that queer and feminist artists of colour draw upon their traditional black cultural heritage and spiritual practises as a means of laying claim to cultural citizenship and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. I...
In my dissertation, I unveil a concept of the dramatic protagonist in Soviet drama that I propose to call a modern superfluous man. To note, this is not an attempt to trace the entirety of the superfluous man tradition from its origins to the present but rather a selective consideration,...
Early transition metal organometallics chemisorbed on extremely Brønsted acidic sulfated metal oxides such as sulfated alumina (AlS) and sulfated zirconia (ZrS) produce highly active single-site catalysts for olefin polymerization, alkene and arene hydrogenation, and alkane hydrogenolysis, typically with a large percentage of catalytically significant sites. The low support conjugate basicity...
Singlet Fission (SF) is a down-conversion process in organic chromophores where one high-energy singlet exciton is converted into two low-energy triplet excitons. Such carrier multiplication aspects of SF are promising in increasing the solar cell efficiency. The generation of two bound spin triplet states from the same singlet exciton also...
Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and their associated Cas proteins provide an immune-like response in many prokaryotes against extraneous nucleic acids. CRISPR-Cas systems are classified into different classes and types that vary widely in composition, target recognition, and overall mechanism. The main division of CRISPR-Cas systems occurs between...
The engineering of human reproduction is one of the defining scientific advances of the past century. Methods to specifically engineer the testis have an equally long and rich history, and have experienced significant progress over the past two decades, leading to current-day breakthroughs which are shifting the paradigms by which...
Constrained optimization problems are prevalent in all areas of science and engineering, and many well-known numerical methods have been developed to solve these problems. Yet, when there exists random quantities in the model under consideration, most of the deterministic methods are no longer effective. In this dissertation, we address parameter...
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...
Chapter 1: If patients can be persuaded to switch between licensed providers on the basis of authoritative opinions, policy-makers can harness such reporting as a tool to implement incentives for high-quality care. I employ the landmark Flexner Report (1910) medical school evaluations to show that existing consumer beliefs and market-specific...
Perturbations to the physiology or impairments in the formation of synapses within the cochlea, specifically the ribbon synapses, result in decreased sensitivity to auditory stimuli. In example, prolonged exposure to moderately intense auditory stimuli, like power tools, can result in the swelling of nerve terminals, retraction of the postsynaptic membrane,...
The focus of this thesis is on evaluating, designing, and applying statistical methods that elucidate molecular mechanisms by seeking to understand the pathways that contribute to disease. Chapter 1 introduces the field and motivates the work in this thesis. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 describe original work. Chapter 5 recapitulates...
Photochemistry allows chemists to harness the energy in specific wavelengths of light and use it to achieve new chemical transformations. These chemical transformations are often impossible or energetically demanding under traditional thermal conditions. My dissertation focuses broadly on different strategies to apply visible-light photochemistry and photocatalysis to the development of...
Policies supporting families with young children provide an important context for human development. The two primary public policies available to caregivers around and after childbirth are parental leave and early care and education (ECE). A substantial body of research evaluates the effects of parental leave and ECE policies on various...
Economic development is a complex and multi-faceted process. Among its many causes, two are particularly consequential: government and technology. By shaping the landscape of economic incentives, they impact how agents interact, invest, and innovate, which in turn affects the creation of wealth. In this dissertation I explore how this interaction...
This dissertation observes interaction to explore the influence of group argument in decision-making in mock juries. The goals of this investigation were to observe two-sided deliberations of a task-oriented decision-making group, map the dichotomous arguments and provide insight into what influences were at play in the final decision. The study...
The groups that we identify with help to make us who we are. This dissertation investigates the impact of the way that each of us understands those identities, through the newly introduced construct of collective self-concept clarity (Gardner & Garr-Schultz, 2017). Two aspects of collective self-concept clarity are introduced and...
The halide perovskites AMX3 (A = large cation, B = Sn or Pb, and X = halide) have been the subject of intense investigation due to their outstanding optical and electronic properties, which have enabled high solar cell efficiencies thanks to a beneficial electronic structure and long charge carrier lifetimes....
Motor planning is fundamental to the performance of everyday reaching movements. The influence of planning is not limited to voluntary movements but extends to involuntary movements initiated in response to sensory stimuli, such as postural perturbations applied to the arm. Stroke alters voluntary reaching and the involuntary response to perturbations,...
How molecular chirality manifests at the nano- to macroscale has been a scientific puzzle since Louis Pasteur discovered biochirality. In general, amphiphilic molecules can organize into a variety of assembly shapes including micelles, spherical vesicles, cylindrical micelles, and planar bilayers. However, when such amphiphilic molecules are chiral, helical ribbons, helicoidal...
This project addresses the uses of coalition in US political imaginaries throughout the 1930s and 1960s. Throughout this period, public familiarity with “coalition” undergoes a marked transformation: whether deployed as argument, performance, or organizational form. Analysis focuses on three case studies: accounts in the national and Black press of a...
This dissertation concerns the probabilistic aspects of diffusion processes generated by a family of differential operators, which is similar to the family of hypoelliptic Laplacian operators, acting on the tangent bundle of a compact Riemannian manifold. By lifting the processes to the product of the frame bundle and the euclidean...
Originally motivated by the emergence of networked systems lacking central coordination such as multiprocessors, wireless sensor networks and smart grids, the study of distributed optimization algorithms has been an active field of research spanning multiple decades. More recently, the rapid growth in the availability of high-dimensional datasets has posed the...
This dissertation explores the experience of violence and precarity among Central American youth as they travel through Mexico to the United States. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted across Mexico from 2015 to 2019, I illustrate how the journey of these youth migrants is, in its basic expression, an...
Despite improvements to diagnostics and treatment methods, colorectal cancer remains the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Colonoscopies, the gold standard for colorectal cancer screening, can significantly increase the patient’s chance of survival through early detection. However, colonoscopy cost, surgical complications, and patient bowel preparations limit...
Nanomaterials offer unique properties not seen in their macroscopic kin. They can be used in printed electronics, as catalysts, and so much more. However, their diminutive size complicates materials processing techniques. They can easily aggregate become no longer useful. A solution to this is to use a polymeric surfactant such...
This thesis explores the potential of two-dimensional (2D) or van der Waals (vdW) materials for printed optoelectronic devices. The research focuses on the development of processing, imaging, and modeling of materials and thin-film devices to optimize performance and introduce novel properties. A gate-dependent resistor network model is presented that establishes...
This dissertation is a wide-ranging study on real estate and the effect of financial constraints on economic activity. In the first chapter, I use granular data on home builder housing developments to provide new evidence that firms spread negative revenue shocks across projects via their internal capital markets. I analyze...
This dissertation explores the interrelationship between time, labor, and literature during the rise of British industrial capitalism. By tracing a tradition of social criticism from Percy Shelley to William Morris that runs through the Chartist movement, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens, it isolates and explicates a distinctive existential mood, or...
In the U.S., approximately 840,000 Americans die from cardiovascular disease (CVD) each year, and it is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The prevalence of CVD is on the rise and widespread disparities in CVD exist across economic, racial, and ethnic groups. In order to address the rising...
“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” is the name for one of French artist Paul Gauguin’s most influential paintings. Unsurprisingly, these very questions have occupied the minds of countless philosophers, artists, and scholars since the beginning of human civilization. These questions become especially salient...
Much of our understanding of human becoming and the process by which possible futures are developed has been based on narrow samples of human experience, which are usually more privileged and provide a narrow view of variability in human life and development. The developmental and educational pathways of minoritized young...
The physical boundary layer, or interface, between two different phases of matter is the site of chemical and physical processes that are critical to many research fields. Many of these interfaces contain electric charge, which influences the structure and composition of the interfacial region and the interactions between the interface...
Commercial agriculture and industrial manufacturing have contaminated freshwater sources with persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals, and radioactive species. Effective mitigation of this pollution is paramount to safeguarding human health, animal and aquatic life, and the environment. Conventional adsorbents such as activated carbon, metal oxides, resins, and polymers attain moderate to...
Supported vanadium oxide materials have been extensively studied for alkane oxidative dehydrogenation (ODH) reactions due to their high activity and selectivity. The catalytic activity of supported VOx materials is influenced by the surface coverage of VOx sites and hence the distribution of V=O, V-O-V, and V-O-S (S, support) bonds. The...