This thesis consists of three papers studying applied microeconomics and economic history. The chapters are broadly organized around two different topics: the political effects of media and the consequences of disruption to human capital. In the first chapter, joint with Susan Ou, we study the role of media in the...
Many industrial fluid flow problems involve the interaction between heavy, rigid objects and one or more fluid phases. For several decades, there has been a vested interest in simulating these fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems in order to improve engineering design processes. However, numerical simulations of these problems can be challenging...
Political leaders often engage in open fights for recognition, announcing that some crucial element of their state’s identity, status, or history, has not been properly acknowledged and respected in the conduct of diplomacy. Among international relations scholars, these instances are usually ascribed to the fact that states, like individuals, need...
Slow-wave sleep (SWS) is important for overall health since it affects many physiological pathways from cardio-metabolic health to cognitive function. Sleep and autonomic nervous system (ANS) functioning are closely coupled at anatomical and physiological levels. Sleep-related changes in ANS function are likely the main pathway through which SWS affects many...
Power and energy are becoming the limiting factors for computer designs and systems, and energy efficient functional units are getting more popular in such systems. Some of the design methodologies that are getting more common include voltage overscaling and employing imprecise instructions. These functional units need to be characterized correctly...
Phononic crystals and acoustic metamaterials exhibit unique wave propagation properties rising from periodicity and the heterogeneity in material/structure design. One important property is tailoring the propagation of elastic waves from band gaps in such systems – frequency ranges of strong wave attenuation. This thesis first explores the idea of gaining...
What explains the difference in the timing of female enfranchisement in Latin America? Despite constituting an essential process of inclusion for democratization, no comparative analysis of the region has sought to explain the differences observed in the timing of reform. Common explanations – developed for other regions – concerning the...
Granular materials are ubiquitous elements of our daily life, representing some of the most manipulated materials on Earth and playing a key role in disparate fields of science and engineering. Considerable research has been performed to explore the factors that impact the mechanical behavior of granular materials. Within this context,...
The theory of how humans and machines control and communicate with each other is at the core of the scientific field known as Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Researchers in this sub-discipline of robotics are therefore particularly interested in developing methods to chuppahreduce the inherent friction in this communication and control channel....
This thesis describes fundamental photophysical studies of quantum dot (QD)-molecule complexes, aimed at discovering strategies for enhancing the efficiency of QD-photocatalyzed and QD-sensitized multi-electron catalytic reactions, for the purpose of solar fuels production. Photosensitization of molecular catalysts that are active for reactions such as the reduction of carbon dioxide or...
Store-operated Ca2+ entry (SOCE) is a principal mechanism for generating cellular Ca2+ signals. Store-operated Ca2+ release-activated Ca2+ (CRAC) channels serve an essential role in generating Ca2+ elevations needed for transcriptional, enzymatic, and secretory effector cascades in many cell types. CRAC channels, comprised of the ER Ca2+ sensor STIM and the...
In monolayer materials with a honeycomb-like lattice an emergent degree of freedom arises for charge carriers corresponding to their valley index. Due to spatial inversion asymmetry and the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling, this valley degree of freedom strongly affects the optoelectronic properties of carriers in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides...
Platelets are circulating anucleate discs derived from megakaryocytes, and play major roles in hemostasis, inflammation, thrombosis, and vascular biology. Multi-phase culture systems for inducing in vitro platelet production from mature megakaryocytes have been explored to allow progenitor expansion, megakaryocyte maturation, and promotion of platelet formation and shedding. In this thesis,...
Abstract The overall purpose of this paper is to reconsider the narrative usage and function of a literary phenomenon like ‘opposition/tension/contradiction.’ Throughout my analysis of Alain-Robbe Grillet’s La jalousie, Chloé Delaume’s J’habite dans la television and Jean Genet’s Le Balcon I was focused on investigating the use of this phenomenon...
This dissertation traces the rise and the demise of the Amerasian in the years roughly set by the Amerasian Immigration Act (1950-1982). I argue that an Amerasian is not simply an individual fathered by a US servicemen in Asia, nor is it just a racial descriptor used to term mixed...
Transcription is tightly regulated to ensure genes are appropriately expressed both temporally and spatially. This tight regulation governs various processes within the cell, such as differentiation and cell identity, cellular maintenance, and dynamic responses to external signals. Transcription factors (TFs) coordinate these various gene programs and in particular, are key...
This dissertation presents two projects with the goal of understanding how to quantitatively describe biological data, particularly data that is highly dynamic. The first study presents an improved quantitative tool for the analysis of particulate trajectories. Particulate trajectory data appears in several different biological contexts, and the majority of analyses...
Endothelial cells (ECs) require glycolysis for proliferation and migration during angiogenesis; however, the necessity for the mitochondrial respiratory chain during angiogenesis is not known. In this study, we report that inhibition of respiratory chain complex III impairs proliferation, but not migration of ECs in vitro by decreasing the NAD+/NADH ratio....
Herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE) is a rare and severely debilitating life-threatening disease caused by herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) infection of the human central nervous system (CNS). The severe and often fatal outcomes of HSE contrast starkly with the more frequent and largely benign consequences of herpes labialis. Whole...
Rhythmic oscillations in the brain are widespread. Extracellular recordings of local field potentials (LFPs) using methods ranging from microelectrodes to scalp electroencephalography (EEG) have demonstrated that oscillatory dynamics play a vital role in operations such as network synchronization, sensory tuning and information packaging. Empirical and computational evidence suggest that these...
Biomass has the potential to be our country’s leading renewable source of energy. Specifically, fast pyrolysis is a promising method for the conversion of biomass to valuable fuels and chemicals. Given that fast pyrolysis has a residence time of about two seconds, computational methods are particularly useful in obtaining product...
Quantum technologies have the capability of greatly increasing the security of communication systems. Many components are required for a full quantum network including memory, repeaters, routers, and detectors. The efficiencies of quantum communication technologies suffer greatly due to their inherent sensitivity to loss. Low-loss propagation and high detection efficiency can...
Newcomers, or new members to organizations or professions, bring insights that are critical to the advancement of society. Yet newcomers often have low self-efficacy, or low beliefs in their abilities to achieve a task, which can impact performance and retention. Research suggests that self-efficacy can be developed through in-person social...
Economic and political processes are heavily intertwined. Political processes put constraints on economic activity while economic development influences the way the political system operates. This interconnection is especially tight in developing countries and transition economies with less secure property rights, less stable political institutions, and more rapid economic changes. In...
Cancer progression is a complex process, leading to metastatic spread of primary tumor cells that colonize distant vital organs and mortality if not stopped. Since clinical strategies to stem this progression are still being developed, it is of great importance to detect this end stage metastatic spread as early as...
End-stage renal disease, or kidney failure, can result from acute kidney injury or sustained kidney damage in the form of chronic kidney disease. As the prevalence of end-stage renal disease continues to rise, the gold-standard treatment—kidney transplantation—is increasingly restricted by the shortage of transplantable donor kidneys. Bioengineered kidney tissues may...
The structural aspects of biological systems are tightly paired with their functions. This understanding has been demonstrated over a broad range of length scales, spanning the ultrastructure of a cell to the macroscopic architecture of organs. Connecting structure and function relies on the integration of physical and biological sciences to...
Organic semiconductors are an active area of research with great promise for delivering next generation electronics and clean energy technologies. As the field matures, understanding the connection between molecular structure, materials’ properties, and device performance will be critical in finding the right material for an intended application. An effective strategy...
Supported transition metal oxides are an important class of catalysts with a wide range of industrially relevant applications. However, commonly used synthesis techniques to prepare these catalysts often result in a complex mixture of surface species. This inhomogeneity makes it difficult to understand what specific structures might be responsible for...
This dissertation combines perspectives from social networks and teams research to advance understanding of team self-assembly. Across three substantive chapters, I explore team member search behaviors and invitation patterns in contexts where individuals exercise agency to select team members. First, I consider the search for team members in a social...
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) encompasses a group of neurodegenerative disorders characterized by cognitive and behavioral impairments. Heterozygous mutations in progranulin (PGRN) cause familial FTD and result in decreased PGRN expression, while homozygous mutations result in complete loss of PGRN expression and lead to the neurodegenerative lysosomal storage disorder neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis...
Responsiveness -- the time it takes for a message recipient to respond to a message -- has long been of interest to scholars in the fields of computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction. It has been hypothesized that responsiveness is used to signal emotional information, and many empirical studies have demonstrated...
Abstract The work presented in this dissertation addresses three broad areas of video signal processing: video transmission, motion estimation and error concealment. In the first category, focused on the source-side, we present two machine learning models for efficient content-aware resource allocation and packet prioritization for video transmission over shared/constrained, lossy...
Glioblastoma (GBM) is a highly malignant brain tumor that accounts for the most commonly diagnosed type of primary brain tumors in adults. It has a poor prognosis of only 15 months from the time of diagnosis. The gold standard therapy regimen consists of radiotherapy and the chemotherapeutic temozolomide. Both of...
This dissertation focuses on two topics: macroeconomic implications of consumer inertia, and sovereign debt. In Chapter 1, I explore the role of consumer inertia---persistence in households' consumption choices---as a driver of the rise in corporate profits and decline in the share of young firms in the US economy during the...
Microfluidic technologies enable multi-tissue culture and precise control of media exchange and therefore have significant potential to create more complex in vitro models of reproductive systems, including endocrine cycles. However, microfluidic technologies have largely been applied to gamete-level culture in reproductive biology, with very little progress in organ-level culture. Herein...
Pathogenic bacteria scavenge essential nutrients including metals, amino acids and peptides to survive within the hostile host environment. Bacteria utilize ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters, powered by the energy of ATP hydrolysis, to move substrates across cellular membranes. The substrate-binding protein (SBP) shuttles substrate in the periplasm and directs the substrate...
A functional democratic society rests on the premise that the mass public holds clear preferences for policies, candidates, and more. To arrive at these preferences, many citizens rely on their social identities, making political decisions based on what they see as benefitting the groups to which they belong. They may...
In an 18-month ethnographic and interview-based study of Afghan Americans in the greater Bay Area, California, I explore the relationship of culture and religion amongst this refugee community. As a majority of refugees in the past decade have been Muslim, it is important to understand what their process of integration...
Methylation of histone 3 lysine 4 (H3K4) catalyzed by the COMPASS family of lysine methyltransferases is universally associated with eukaryotic transcription. However, despite thousands of published studies examining the deposition, dynamics, and genomic positions of this chromatin modification, there is no clear consensus as to the molecular function or biological...
Oocyte meiosis is a specialized, but error prone, form of cell division that is poorly understood. Errors during meiosis often result in aneuploidy, or abnormal chromosome number, that impacts human health and fertility. Aneuploidy is the leading cause of miscarriages and birth defects, such as Down's syndrome in which cells...
Visual matching is an important and fruitful research topic in computer vision area. Starting from the early face recognition, super-resolution, object tracking to the most recent person re-identification, cross-model retrieval, visual matching plays an important role as the core component in these tasks. The quality of visual matching directly and...
Emotion perception is multisensory and involves decoding and integrating input from both visual and auditory modalities. This dissertation investigates the influence of cultural and linguistic experience on multisensory perception of emotion. Experiment 1 examines the effect of cultural background on modality bias (i.e., the amount of influence a modality exerts...
The study of the translucent interstellar medium (ISM) is important for understanding the behavior of the ISM as it transitions from hot, tenuous gas to dense, star-forming regions. This regime is know to be associated with the initial formation of persistent molecular material, and thus represents the first stages of...
The rapid development of flexible electronics enables a huge amount of bio-integrated applications with advantages of the mechanical compliance, stretchability and comformability of the devices. My dissertation further advances this area by a series of projects, which include designing and optimizing novel compliant structures, proposing novel elastomer encapsulation process for...
Successfully grappling with the widespread linguistic variation of daily life requires speakers to adapt to systematic variation in the environment while discarding incidental variation, based on their prior experience. In the case of phonotactics, speakers’ prior experience is that talkers who differ in their language background are likely to vary...
Wastewater and bioreactors in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are reservoirs for antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), which can pass through treatment processes and migrate into the environment as they are released in effluent. WWTPs harbor a variety of ARGs that can be spread by horizontal gene transfer facilitated by mobile genetic...
Store-operated Ca2+ entry through Orai1 channels mediate transcriptional, proliferative, and effector cell programs in many cells and are activated through a unique inside-out mechanism involving binding of the endoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ sensor, STIM1, to cytoplasmic sites on Orai1. Mutations in Orai1 that block channel activation or evoke constitutive channel activity...
This dissertation explores hip-hop as a moral philosophy in action; a set of aesthetic and ethical values that manifest in young people’s perspective about the good life. Hip-hop is an arts movement of rap, movement, and style originating among Black and Latinx youth in the South Bronx during the late...
Numerous photophysical processes in both natural and artificial systems are dictated by the interaction between chromophores. For example, in photosynthesis, light is absorbed by an antenna complex composed of an array of chlorophyll chromophores that collectively transfer the energy to the reaction center where interactions between a series of redox...
Social comparison is a ubiquitous part of social life. People compare themselves to others to establish and maintain a sense of social hierarchy and structure, to develop and sustain interpersonal relationships, and even to help understand themselves. In this dissertation, I focus on how the referent of social comparison –...
The critical importance of alternative mRNA splicing and the RNA binding proteins that orchestrate this essential layer of post-transcriptional gene regulation is increasingly recognized in gene regulatory programs. We and others have shown that alternative splicing plays a causal role during the Epithelial-Mesenchymal transition, a cell-developmental program that is hijacked...
Viral Verses investigates the influence of social media publication on the relationship between poetry and community formation in southeastern Africa. As more artists in the global South reach wider audiences through online publication, poetic form has shifted to reflect social media’s aesthetic norms, embracing urgency, contemporaneity, and populism. Digital media...
Increasing industrialization and the resulting negative environmental impacts highlight the need to develop alternative renewable energy sources. The Sun is a massive source and organic solar cells are a growing field of study. As new materials are synthesized, the efficiencies of organic solar cells continue to grow, but without an...
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a powerful analytical technique that can detect single molecules and simultaneously obtain structural information. When an analyte molecule binds to a nanostructured noble metal surface, the otherwise weak normal Raman signal is enhanced by as much as a factor of 108. This makes SERS the...
This work combines the use of high-throughput mass spectrometry with peptide arrays for to monitor reactions on peptides. The Mrksich lab introduced a high-throughput, label-free, biochemical assay that relies on self-assembled monolayers on gold and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry, termed SAMDI-MS. This dissertation introduces new applications of SAMDI-MS and...
Organismal development depends upon countless cell decisions to adopt particular fates at the appropriate time and place. These decisions are executed by systems of biochemical reactions called regulatory networks. Elucidating the general principles underlying the structure and function of these networks is vital to understanding all developmental processes, as well...
This study examines how Latino migration politics developed in Chicago from the 1930s to the 1970s. Although scholars usually identify the emergence of Latino immigration activism in the 1960s and predominantly in the region of the Southwest with the farm workers movement, this study argues that immigration activism began much...
One of the grand challenges in materials chemistry and nanochemistry is the development of functional materials through ordered, hierarchical structures using synthetic building blocks. Nature has done this through evolution of molecular components such as nucleic acids, saccharides, lipids, amino acids, and inorganic crystals. The precise spatial positioning of these...
This thesis centers around the development and application of novel high throughput lithography tools. These advances help: 1) establish the field of nanocombinatorics, where massive libraries (termed megalibraries) of materials can be prepared in a positionally encoded manner and then screened for functional activity, and 2) advance stereolithographic 3D printing...
Type I interferon (IFN) is the primary antiviral cytokine establishing a broad and potent antiviral response to protect mammalian cells from virus infection. The functional repertoire of IFN extends to innate and adaptive immunity, neoplastic transformation, resistance and cancer immunotherapy. IFN functions are primarily mediated through the Janus kinase (JAK)...
This dissertation contains three empirical studies in economic history and labor economics. The first chapter discusses two sources of historical data on work stoppages in the United States: the Third Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1888) and the Tenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (1896). It...
The vast majority of interactions between customers and service providers are experiences that extend over time. Service systems that deliver excellent customer experience achieve greater customer satisfaction and therefore customer loyalty, and eventually raise revenue. The temporal aspects of service delivery have not yet been analyzed as carefully as its...
Nanocarriers are nanometer-sized (1-1000 nm) structures capable of encapsulating cargo. This encapsulation can drastically alter the pharmacokinetic properties of the cargo, while also allowing for the rational design and engineering of the nanocarrier itself. Poly(ethylene glycol)-block-poly(propylene sulfide) is an amphiphilic diblock copolymer capable of self-assembling into diverse nanocarriers. The purpose...
Nanomaterials are broadly defined as materials that exhibit at least one dimension that is less than 1,000 nm. Encompassed within nanomaterials are a class of constructs known as nanocarriers, which are applied as delivery vehicles for both encapsulated and covalently bound payloads. Poly(ethylene glycol)-block-poly(propylene sulfide) (PEG-b-PPS) is an amphiphilic block...
The cellular innate immune response to viruses is a defense mechanism executed by most cells in the human body to form the initial barrier to virus replication. Detection of viral nucleic acids initiates widespread gene expression changes that combine to establish an antiviral state and stimulate professional immune cell activation....
Functional electronic materials are difficult to design due to the complex interplay among chemistry, atomic structure, and electrical properties. This dilemma is further amplified in transition metal compounds which can defy the band-theory description of non-correlated electrons. Exploring the vast possible design space completely with experiments or first-principles simulations is...
International media immediately lambasted plans to build a Louvre and a Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE) as the whimsy of wealthy sheikhs using oil money to “buy culture.” The museums are part of a $27b development project called Saadiyat Island. While Saadiyat is spectacular, dismissing it...
The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the adoption of active mobility through the lens of three fundamental concepts: scale, segment, and neighborhood. Scale refers to both the aggregation of geospatial data and the measurement of latent constructs through behavioral survey instruments. Segment refers to the various clustering approaches...
The work in this thesis focuses on computational methods for the identification of novel enzymatic pathways. In particular this work focuses on the utilization of the Biological Network Integrated Computational Explorer (BNICE) software suite to predict de novo enzymatic pathways for the production of commercially relevant compounds and on improvements...
Musical meter is often described as an objective grid-like system of time-points that is created by musical sounds. I define meter instead as any pattern of felt beats an individual listener chooses to hear, a physical and cognitive interpretation of the music that is (re-) created in the moment of...
Biomaterials have immense potential for studying fundamental biological processes and developing therapies to help regenerate or replace the structure and function of injured tissues. In order to accomplish this, they need to be designed to mimic the structure and function of Nature’s most important material, the extracellular matrix (ECM) surrounding...
Nanoelectromechanical (NEMS) systems fabricated using atomically-thin materials have low mass and high stiffness and are thus ideal candidates for force and mass sensing applications. Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) offer certain unique properties in their few-layered form – such as piezoelectricity and a direct band gap in some cases – and...
The dissertation systematically delineates the mechanically-guided deterministic assembly of three-dimensional (3D) mesostructures by compressive buckling, covering topics from mechanics concepts, design and analysis, fabrication techniques, to application opportunities. The development of approaches to form complex 3D functional mesostructures in advanced materials is a topic of broad interest, thanks to the...
Plato's readers struggle to reconcile his combination of conceptual argument and mimetic fiction. In this dissertation, I suggest we can understand this discomfiting combination if we understand the dialogues as "the mimesis of people in speech." Because speech is both referential and performative, speech is a hybrid of thought and...
The development and use of organic anionic chromophores that absorb the entire visible spectrum & into the near-infrared region while providing highly reducing equivalents is pinnacle for artificial photosynthesis. This dissertation investigates the rational design of new donor-acceptor systems for artificial photosynthesis that couple naphthalene diimide (NDI)/perylene diimide (PDI) radical...
Abstract The relationship between truth and politics is an ancient and venerable problem in political philosophy. But just as the traditional subordination of politics to philosophy has obscured central categories and experiences of politics (like action and freedom), it has also obscured the distinctive problem of truth in politics, or...
I. The distribution of tsunami amplitudes in the open ocean is controlled by source mechanism and bathymetry geometry. Although detailed studies have considered heterogeneity effects in earthquake tsunami sources, little or no attention has been paid to the effects of physical resolution of detailed bathymetry on tsunami waveforms in the...
Conservation efforts start with understanding the life cycle and interactions of species. For example, orchid conservation requires understanding pollinators as well as mycorrhizal fungi because these are mutualisms orchids require. For instance, all orchids require assistance from orchid mycorrhizal fungi (OMF) to germinate and some orchid species continue to be...
Proper size control of organs and tissues is critical to their function, and it is necessary for the millions of precisely sized tubes that make up those organs— for example, excessive cell growth can lead to devastating diseases such as Polycystic Kidney Disease. The regulation of tube growth is therefore...
“Repurposing Queens: Excavating a Black Feminist Eco-ethic in a Time of Ecological Peril,” articulates how Black feminist theories of race, gender, and science critique both conservative and liberal trends in environmentalism and environmental studies. The project is transnational in scope in that it analyzes figures/objects from the United States and...
The mammalian oocyte undergoes large fluctuations in zinc content as it matures from a prophase I arrested oocyte to a metaphase II egg and finally is fertilized to become a zygote. These changes in total zinc content are necessary for proper progression, as disruption to egg’s ability to acquire and...
This dissertation focuses on subgroup identification in longitudinal studies. There are two different but related topics. In chapter two and chapter three, several longitudinal based methods for subgroup identification with enhanced treatment effect are proposed to correct the deficiency in measuring treatment effect by simply using a summary statistic. In...
Bioresponsive imaging probes act as beacons to allow detection, tracking, and study of otherwise invisible actors in biological systems. Understanding how these underlying systems function in their native context is essential to identifying dysfunction and generating effective remedies. Magnetic Resonance techniques are particularly interesting for this application because of the...
The presence of subjective cognitive decline (SCD) among cognitively normal-for-age older adults is increasingly hypothesized to represent a preclinical stage in the development of Alzheimer’s dementia (Jessen et al., 2014). This project aimed to characterize this construct with regard to its cognitive, motor, emotional, and functional features. The first study...
The term Connected Vehicle (CV) is broadly used to identify any ‘smart vehicle’ with wireless connectivity to the roadside infrastructure and other vehicles. CVs with automation capabilities are called connected automated vehicles (CAVs). With real-time communication and data transmission capability, CAVs have the potential to improve the transportation system’s traffic...
The embryonic neural crest is a unique vertebrate stem cell population that has the ability to retain its stem attributes while neighboring cells in the embryo undergo lineage restriction. These cells possess multi-germ layer developmental potential and can give rise to a diverse array of derivatives such as components of...
Introduction: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a disorder of gut-brain interaction associated with reduced quality of life, increased rates of depression and anxiety, and high economic burden to society and the individual. Current behavioral interventions, which target well-known symptom exacerbating factors such as catastrophizing and gastrointestinal- specific anxiety, have demonstrated...
“Love’s Limits: In Persian Poetry and Film” explores the unbounded, unruly, anarchic, border-traversing potential of love through the works of Iranian poets and filmmakers spanning a millennium. In each of the works examined in this study, love precipitates a crisis in relation to a different set of questions or problems...
Affect infusion occurs when feelings elicited by one stimulus (an affect-laden cue) influence reactions to a different stimulus (an attitude object). This effect often happens when the two stimuli are experienced closely in time and space. According to Gestalt principles, a spatial/temporal covariation of the two stimuli can make them...
Individuals within a species vary in complex phenotypes, such as responses to toxins. This drug-response variation causes patients who are treated with the same medicine to experience a range of side effects, ultimately decreasing the efficacy of some drugs. Particular genetic variants among individuals might contribute to differential drug responses,...
“Speculative Justice” asks how U.S. terrorism cases with numerous indicators of entrapment prevail in federal court despite case law designed to prevent these very policing practices. Drawing on a combination of two case studies, an original archive of digital court filings from over 250 defendants, and a collection of over...
The advent of next-generation sequencing technologies has greatly promoted the devel- opment of metagenomics, and the analysis of compositional dataset has a wide range of application in this area. Because of the constraint that the sum of species relative abun- dance being 1, many traditional and classical statistical methods cannot...
Annual age-adjusted breast cancer incidence rates in the United States have been static for decades. More recently, the development of massively parallel, high throughput DNA sequencing has enabled the cataloging of somatic mutations in cancer. Mutations are non-random and occur within sequence motifs. These motifs provide us with evidence to...
Currently, platelet transfusions, possessing profound clinical importance in the clotting of blood and healing of wounds, are entirely derived from human volunteer donors. This approach is limited by a 5-day shelf life, the potential risk of contamination, and differences in donor/recipient immunology. In vivo, platelets are formed when bone marrow...
Human activities have significantly increased riverine fluxes of carbon and nutrients. River-groundwater interactions facilitate retention and transformation of carbon and nutrients, and therefore profoundly impact carbon and nutrient cycles. From water column to the streambed, there is extensive variations in hydrodynamic transport and biogeochemical reaction over space and time. However,...
Biped robots utilize varying contact conditions and collision between their hands and feet and the walking and climbing surfaces in their environment to navigate their surroundings. This thesis presents a method for generating a continuum of gaits in a unified and extensible framework for physically-symmetric bipeds (bipeds with left and...
My dissertation is entitled “Post-civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South.” Post-civil rights discourse as a specific object of investigation has been under theorized, it has primarily been understood as a fundamental marker of racial progress in the United States...
In the near future, self-driving or driverless vehicles will operate without human control, enabling passengers to use their time in new ways. This opens up avenues for designing new interactions and experiences for individuals or groups traveling in an automobile. For that scenario, automobile manufacturers propose developing bigger and better...
This dissertation is a theoretically informed project that blends ethnographic and archival research methods to examine how queer and transgender performance artists deploy monstrosity as a tactic to question the terms by which LGBTQ people are granted or denied humanity in twenty-first century United States. While there is an abundance...