Many estimation and inference procedures rely on asymptotic approximations for quantities that are unknown to researchers. While often convenient, such approximations can be poor in practice, even when the number of observations is ostensibly large. One response is to eschew asymptotics in favor of finite sample bounds. While remarkable progress...
Light is a powerful tool for manipulating and probing magnetic states in solid state systems. In particular, optically-induced spin orientation, the ability to orient spin with polarized light, has been extensively utilized in low-dimensional III-V and II-VI semiconductors to pioneer spintronic research. Even though traditional semiconductors have found a wide...
As of 2020, there are currently 5.8 million people in the United States suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), a debilitating and progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Of these nearly six million people, two-thirds are women. While it has been suggested that women’s longer lifespan accounts for this disparity, the overall lifetime risk...
This dissertation examines how racially, ethnically, and sexually minoritized women embodied and contested competing images of national identity between World War II and the Cold War. I challenge dominant narratives of modern dance, which overlook gender politics as women left the art form and white men gained prominence in it...
Cultural appropriation is a topic well-discussed in public discourse and theorized in the philosophical literature, however, it remains vastly understudied in psychology. Existing conversations center on whether cultural appropriation even exists, how it is defined, and if there are psychological and social impacts of being appropriated. No research to date...
Conventionally cross-linked polymers, which comprise the vast majority of commercial thermosets, cannot be decross-linked after curing or flow upon heating. Therefore, they cannot be effectively recycled into high-value products at end-of-life. Their lack of recyclability is due to the permanent cross-links, which restrict the flow of the chains in the...
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...
Visual localization is a critical capability for autonomous systems, enabling them to accuratelyestimate their position and orientation within an environment using visual data. This thesis focuses
on achieving a robust and reliable visual localization on both local and global level to enhance
localization performance in a wide range of environments....
Voltage-gated potassium (KV) currents play a crucial role in shaping and controlling the firing patterns that serve as the fundamental basis for the differential signal processing from the ear to the auditory cortex, with distinct firing patterns observed with high- and low-frequency phenotypes. This is an interesting phenomenon, in the...
Lackluster BA completion rates have made it clear that improving postsecondary outcomes in the U.S. is not simply a matter of raising college enrollment rates. In addition to increasing the number of people who attend college, it is also important to increase the number of people who graduate. Over the...
Tailoring the design of surfaces and interfaces with nanoscale features has the ability to significantly impact biological functions for a swath of applications including drug delivery, structure assembly, and biomedicine. For example, creating spatially defined nanoscale patterns has been known to contribute to changes in cellular architecture and mechanical properties,...
The Ohio River Valley was the site of an intense rivalry between Protestants and Catholics in the nineteenth century, as members of each group vied to extend their control through the development of churches, schools, orphanages, and other institutions. This dissertation explores the process and analyzes the effects of Catholic...
Popular histories of United States mass incarceration often focus on federal wars on crime, law and order policing, and the passage of harsh sentencing laws to explain how the United States transformed into the world’s leader in incarceration. My dissertation on the crisis of state prison overcrowding and prisoner resistance...
In this thesis, we discuss classical and recent results around the damped wave equation on compact and noncompact manifolds. We firstly show that on asymptotically cylindrical and conic manifolds, the geometric control condition and the network control condition give exponential and logarithmic decay rates respectively. We then show that a...
Stimulation of the cGAS-STING (cycle GMP-AMP synthase-Stimulator of Interferon Genes) pathway increases T cell activation and tracking into the tumor and reverses the immunosuppressive phenotype of myeloid cells. Direct targeting of the STING receptor using synthetic cyclic dinucleotide (CDN) ligands represents an attractive immunotherapeutic strategy for the treatment of lymphocyte-depleted...
Political theorists generally ascribe to the state a decisive role in the formation and protection of property rights, a view especially prevalent in the historiography of financial property in the United States. Given the capacities of government at the American Founding, however, such accounts are implausible. Drawing on writings composed...
Recent developments have enabled L12-strengthened Co-based superalloys, which have thepotential to surpass Ni-based superalloys as the material of choice for the hottest sections of turbine
blades due to cobalt’s 40 ºC higher melting point. The most-studied branch of Co-based
superalloys are based on the L12 phase Co3(Al,W); however, there is...
Caught between world wars and Stalin’s consolidation of power, citizens of Soviet Russia of the 1920s and 1930s had little to laugh about. Yet a unique tendency toward disruptive humor surfaces in poetry and prose over these two decades. I explore disruptive humor in select longer poetry of Nikolai Zabolotsky,...
This dissertation consists of three chapters about education policies in developing countries. The first chapter examines two extrapolation approaches to make out-of-sample predictions using cash transfer experiments in Malawi and Morocco. The second chapter evaluates India's workfare program in terms of targeting efficiency and effects on school enrollment, in comparison...
We present both semiclassical asymptotics for the wave equation on a stationary Kaluza-Klein spacetime and an index theorem describing the difference of the positive-frequency
spectral projectors for two stationary regions in a globally hyperbolic spacetime. The
first result involves analyzing the restrictions of the wave trace to isotypic subspaces for...