One of the fundamental questions in developmental biology is how a single cell gives rise to a complex organism. More specifically, how a totipotent egg divides into cells that become increasingly restricted in their potential. Development is a process of increasingly restricted cellular potential, and here I home in on...
In this dissertation, I conducted 2 studies that resulted in 3 manuscripts. This dissertation consists of 6 chapters that include the 3 manuscripts. The overarching research question is How does context affect the work of quality improvement (QI) practitioners? To answer this larger research question, which is central to the...
This thesis presents results on photophysics and spin dynamics of photoactive organic molecules that possess one unpaired electron spin in the ground state and two or three unpaired spins upon photoexcitation. The excited state dynamics of the systems were studied using transient optical absorption spectroscopies and non-Boltzmann population on the...
Dopamine (DA) neurons are involved in many brain functions, and their dysfunction is associated with several neurodegenerative diseases. In recent years, our lab and others have found that DA neurons are molecularly diverse through single-cell gene expression profiling. An outstanding question in the field is whether this heterogeneity is encoded...
Selecting the best material to deliver optimum performance in real-world applications is one of the most significant challenges in engineering. Hundreds of thousands of computationally-predicted, but experimentally unexplored materials exist today in the public inorganic material databases as candidates for consideration. This thesis discusses three projects in the domain of...
This research questions how institutional logics shape and change through the event sequencing of institutional reforms. Literature reviewed on sequences of social events underspecifies the enchainment of events, i.e., the set of social processes that both links events and also renders the sequence meaningful beyond summing its individual events. My...
Superconducting-circuit based platforms are strong contenders in the race to build a quantum computer.While the transmon has had extraordinary success as the leading superconducting qubit modality, there are reasons to believe that other types of qubits could possess relative benefits in terms of noise immunity, anharmonicity, or extensibility. In this...
Since the dawn of mankind, humans have used materials and tools to dominate the world. As our understanding of the fields physics, chemistry and engineering is growing, we are able to artificially create advanced materials with engineered responses. Next step would be to create ‘ smart’ or intelligent materials capable...
From colonial practices designed to civilize indigenous communities, to counter-terrorism initiatives aimed at de-radicalizing dissidents in the wake of the War on Terror, to controversies over blasphemy and religious harm cases in international law, religious passions have been cast as a specter of unreason, treason, and radicalization. These assumptions sustain...
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...