In 2015, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 1 in 6 Americans fall ill with a foodborne infection annually, resulting in more than 3000 fatalities and an estimated $15 billion in economic burden due to combined medical costs, productivity loss, and death. On a per-case basis, infections...
To accelerate the implementation of technologies enabled by two-dimensional (2D) nanomaterials, the human health and environmental implications of these materials need to be addressed. Fundamental studies which elucidate the mechanisms of toxicity and environmental fate will allow for the safer design of these materials and promote their widespread use. This...
Active traffic management systems aim to relieve recurring and non-recurring congestion by using estimated and predicted traffic conditions to guide trip makers before and after entering the network as well as to design control strategies to improve system performance. With external disruptions and interventions (e.g., weather, special events, and incidents),...
Desmoplakin (DP) is a component of desmosomes, critical adhesive complexes found in cardiac intercalated discs. DP is often mutated in arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (AC), an inherited disorder that is a frequent cause of sudden cardiac death. The disease progression of AC is characterized by cardiomyocyte cell death and replacement of the...
This thesis focuses on the role of upcoming neutrino oscillation experiments for the search for beyond-the-Standard-Model physics in the neutrino sector. Specically, I focus on the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment and Hyper-Kamiokande neutrino experiment, and the experimental sensitivity to non-standard neutrino interactions, sterile neutrinos, incorrect signals of CP-violation, differences between...
In the wake of Hurricane Katrinas dramatic demographic changes, scholars, journalists, and politicians have discussed Mexican migration to New Orleans as a new phenomenon and an unwelcome threat to the citys social order, rich culture, and tourist economy. This dissertation challenges these ideas and demonstrates some of the myriad ways...
The moduli stack of bundles on a smooth complete curve over a field, is an immensely rich geometric object and is of central importance to the Geometric Langlands program. This thesis represents a contribution towards a motivic, in the sense of Voevodsky and Morel-Voevodsky, understanding of this stack. Following the...
This dissertation aims to understand the ways that the social, specifically race, ethnicity, and neighborhood, intersects with the religious identity, beliefs, and practices of early-generation Americans in Chicago. This dissertation asks at the most general level: What is the relationship of race, ethnicity, and religion for early-generation Americans? More specifically,...
In 1964 the Second Vatican Council encouraged a switch from Latin Mass, celebrated by Roman Catholics across the globe in standardized form since the 16th century, to Mass in the languages spoken by the local people and with some adaptation to local circumstances. This event is familiar to scholars of...
While scholarship over recent decades has complicated the traditional classification of the Bavlis texts into the field has still maintained a model of two separate, though fundamentally interrelated, discourses. According to this model, the Bavli consists of a normative, non-narrative, legal discourse alongside an antinomian, narrativized discourse of stories. Through...
This dissertation approaches J. M. Coetzees work through the lens of critical animal studies. Puzzling out the frequent appearances of animals in his work, numerous scholars have attempted to answer the following question: What is Coetzee writing about when he writes about animals? But while many have engaged with the...
Parents play a crucial role in shaping the contexts within which young children develop, particularly in the early years of a childs life (Bornstein, 2002; Brooks-Gunn & Markman, 2005; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). Parenting is also one of the key pathways through which socioeconomic factors, such as maternal education, may...
What does it mean for writing from the former French imperial territories of the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia) to become Maghrebi literature? How does literature come to count as belonging to or appertaining to a particular place? Today, in the international spheres of the university and the literary market,...
Synthetic organic chemistry continues to be a driver in the discovery and development of new molecules for applications in biology, medicine, crop science, polymer science, and materials science. Central to the continued development of this field is the pursuit of new strategies and methods for the efficient construction of molecules...
Techniques in atomic physics have delivered some of the most precise measurements ever made, with frequency measurements reaching fractional precisions of 10^18 . High precision measurements can be used to test fundamental physics, such as pursuing a variation in fundamental constants. A finite drift in measurable constants such as the...
As monolinguals and bilinguals hear words unfold over time, they experience competition from words that share sounds within the same language (e.g., st- activates strict and stamp). Unique to bilinguals is that they are also prone to competition from similar sounding-words between their two languages. In the present dissertation, we...
There has long been an interest in the idea of generativity the concern for and commitment towards promoting the well-being of future generations. In Western societies, generativity can be characterized through societal contributions and acts dedicated towards others. Since the early 1960s, when Erikson proposed generativity as the major developmental...
Hannah Arendt claimed that aœtotalitarianisma emerged as a new word to designate a new form of evil in politics. However, she added, the use of a new word does not imply that we understand what this novelty consists in. This dissertation is an attempt to understand the novelty of totalitarian...
The rat whisker system has been a longstanding and fruitful model system for sensory neuroscience, because of its status as an œexpert active sensing system, and many open avenues of research still remain. One large-scale goal of the field is to œclose the loop from sensation to movement, modeling how...
Cultivating Citizens: Ecology and Nationality in U.S. Immigrant Literature explores how and why American ecosystems became objects of appreciation, intervention, and attachment within immigration literature published during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century. Fictional and nonfictional stories about US-bound immigrants represented naturalization and nationality as materializing through interactions within human/nonhuman assemblageswhat we...