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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Meiosis is a specialized form of cell division that gives rise to haploid reproductive cells by replicating the genetic material once and undergoing two rounds of partitioning. While most forms of cell division require centrosomes to assemble a bipolar microtubule-based spindle that segregates chromosomes, female gametes (oocytes) are unique in...
As opposed to the nanoscale deposition techniques often used for material syntheses, here, I focus on mesoscale material depositions and how to design interfaces to efficiently manage such deposition and potential accumulation. These deposition processes include condensation, condensation frosting, particle capture, and vaporization. Through the lens of energy and sustainability,...
Mindfulness is the dynamic process of building and maintaining awareness of one’s environment and paying attention to stimuli (Langer, 1989; Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007). A cognitively effortful endeavor, mindfulness requires “the capacity to respond to unanticipated cues or signals from one’s context” (Levinthal & Rerup, 2006, p. 504). Mindful...
This thesis focuses on exploring the explanatory and discovery potential of the four-neutrino and enhanced neutrino magnetic and electric dipole moments hypotheses when
applied to the NOvA/T2K discrepancy and the XENON1T anomaly, respectively. Firstly,
we study the effect of a very light (sub eV) sterile neutrino on the NOvA/T2K anom-...
Recommender systems (RSs) have become essential tools that provide personalized recommendations to their users. These systems may consider user, item provider, and system requirements simultaneously. With the inclusion of possibly clashing considerations, there is a growing focus on solving multiple-objective recommender system (MORS) problems as efficiently as possible. The constrained...
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...
A great deal of work has been done in recent years to construct algebraic invariants ofLegendrian knots, and their higher-dimensional analogues. Here we employ the diagram-
matic calculus developed in [3], in order to develop an iterative method for computing the
so-called vexillary functions of a class of Legendrian surfaces....
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID) are two of the most highly prevalent neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), each affecting roughly 2% of the population. Despite the need for therapies, few exist due to a myriad of challenges, such as the complex underlying genetic etiology and historic inaccessibility of neural...
The production and spread of digital news involves a wide range of actors: journalists and the organizations that employ them, social media platforms, audiences, and myriad commentators, citizen journalists, bloggers, and other actors who contribute to the news ecosystem without inhabiting an official role. These actors interact in flexible, often...
This dissertation presents an affect-centered approach to the analysis and interpretation of the experience of music and its attendant meaning in selected works of literature and cinema. Music’s interpretative mutability often charges it with meaning, though in infinite gradations of singularity rather than any universal sense. Rather than undertake a...
Vertebrate brains evolved to facilitate a diverse array of behaviors and internal cognitive processes. Theories of neural function have proposed that neural computation is organized within populations or ensembles of neurons. Here, we identify ensembles of neurons in the striatum, the main input nucleus of the basal ganglia, in which...
This dissertation studies three markets with regulated prices. I focus on how these regulations shape the behavior of firms along non-price dimensions. Chapter 1 studies the effects of community rating regulations in the US individual health insurance exchange market. In this market, the Affordable Care Act established community rating areas...
The dissertation project considers the generative possibilities to envision Black subjectivity that emerges from a sustained consideration of different forms of difficult racial and sexual intimacies. The artists whose work is engaged throughout the project, Leasho Johnson, Ajamu X, and NIC Kay recognize that to be Black is to always...
Chapter 1. Caste, Bureaucracy, and the Limits to Political Affirmative Action. The aim of political affirmative action policies is to ensure that disadvantaged groups are represented in their governments and, in turn, that laws preferred by this group are more likely to be instituted. Often, however, they have not been...
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...
In the first part of the thesis we,given a dg-Lie algebra $\g$, a commutative
dg-algebra $A$ and a twisting cochain $\mu$ in
$A \otimes \g$, we construct a map
from the functor of curved deformations of $\g$ to the
functor of curved deformations of the twisted tensor product
$A \otimes_\mu...
Neuroblastoma is one of the most common childhood cancers with one of the lowest survival rates, accounting for 15% of childhood cancer mortality. Approximately 15% of patients do not respond to initial treatment, and about half of children treated for high-risk neuroblastoma will relapse following remission. Ionizing radiation has long...
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...
Technology that processes text, audio and video, as well as location data, has revolutionized many industries by enabling innovative operations for customer retention. To retain transactions for a platform and viewers for advertisers, this dissertation leverages novel digital tools to analyze consumer behavior, proposes original economic frameworks to guide platform...
The on-going demand for miniaturized optical and on-chip photonic systems of the future has led to a few potential solutions in the literature. Recent advances in van der Waals and 2-dimensional materials signal a bright future for the next generation, compact electronic and photonic devices. With reduced dimensionality and material...
Human communication has become increasingly reliant on systems made and managed by large technology companies like Google, Apple, Twitter, and Meta (formerly Facebook). These systems offer people many benefits, but they also present new challenges for society. In recent years, researchers, lawmakers, and journalists have suggested that large technology companies...
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...
The esophagus plays a crucial role in the functioning of the gastrointestinal tract and esophageal disorders are associated with reduced quality of life. Several studies have reported that there is a high worldwide prevalence of esophageal disorders. Esophageal disorders are related to the mechanical properties and function of the esophageal...
Nanomaterials present an exciting landscape of innovation at length scales below 100 nm, wherein controllable synthesis and materials metrology have led to tunable structure-property relationships and next-generation products. The disruptive field of nanotechnology is poised to capitalize upon the exotic chemistry and physics of these nanomaterials to enable more efficient...
In Chapter 1, I analyze optimal capital structure using a model in which firms issue securities in order to (1) finance investments in operations and (2) recapitalize the firm. In this trade-off model, firms balance the tax benefits of debt against the costs of financial distress. Key to the analysis,...
As the technology enabling touch-sense rendering of virtual textures grows in efficacy and prevalence, so too grows the need for a standardized means of storing, transferring, and reconstituting textural signals. Furthermore, to achieve the ultra-low-latency requirements of the next generation of global communications networks, this digital texture representation must be...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
This dissertation introduces several novel computational imaging techniques that capture and analyze the 3D surface shapes and internal layered materials. The research proposes user-friendly and non-invasive imaging systems, constructed using only commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, which provide accurate measurement of 3D information that was previously inaccessible. The dissertation focuses on...
Soft materials are inherently fluxional, with morphologies and behaviors that are dictated by their solvation state. Thus, many organic systems cannot be reliably imaged by static dry state or cryogenic-transmission electron microscopy (TEM). This motivated us to pursue liquid cell (LC) TEM method development to study our own materials and...
CD95/Fas ligand (CD95L) is a well characterized activator of extrinsic apoptosis. CD95L protein binds to its cognate receptor, CD95/Fas/APO-1, inducing apoptotic signaling in sensitive cells. However, expression of CD95L is toxic even in the absence of CD95. We previously reported that the CD95L open reading frame (ORF) is enriched for...
Involuntary motor activities such as spasms arise from hyperreflexia in about 70% of individuals with spinal cord injuries (SCI). Despite this prevalence and the negative impact on health and safety, it is unclear what determines the severity of the spasms that develop. This study investigated the impact of injury severity...
Uranium is a unique, multifaceted element that possesses rich chemistry and promise for challenging reactions. Pressing demands within nuclear stockpile stewardship and the nuclear energy sector call for development of this relatively understudied element. Uranium metal–organic frameworks (U-MOFs), a class of nanoscale hybrid materials, harness the exceptional attributes of uranium...
In the 1960s, the International Theatre Institute (ITI), the organization sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) with a mission to represents the world’s theaters, was faced with a crisis of representation. After twenty years of existence, the institution had not succeeded in substantially expanding beyond...
Monetary Policy plays a crucial role in modern economies by supporting price, financial and economic stability. Its efficacy, however, exhibits variation both over time and across space leading to partially unpredictable and inconsistent outcomes. This thesis shows that the variation in the efficacy of monetary policy crucially relates to the...
The goal of this thesis is to prove that topological restriction homology, TR, is locally even in the quasi-syntomic topology in characteristic p. This local evenness was already known for the other main trace theories, but is more subtle for TR.
We consider data-driven approaches for universal texture modeling via generative adversarial networks and inversion methods. We investigate the properties of the learned representation spaces and demonstrate that a strong link between texture analysis and synthesis is the key to successful texture modeling. First, we visit the problem of texture synthesis...