Mechanisms for sensing fluid flow are well studied in arthropods and in some aquatic mammals, but we know very little about how terrestrial mammals detect and localize airflow (Chapter 1). In this thesis, I will describe a series of studies in rodents that investigate the behavioral, mechanical, and neural basis...
The limits of miniaturization of electronic device components and the steady need for faster computation power have motivated the discovery and cultivation of low-dimensional materials. Among these, two-dimensional (2D) materials have exhibited a wide range of superlative optoelectronic, thermal and mechanical properties. The interest in 2D materials took-off with the...
Metabolic engineering of microorganisms to produce useful compounds from renewable substrates is a promising means for sustainable, on-demand production of chemicals. However, efforts to design and engineer microbial cell factories are constrained by costly and slow “build” times in which each genetic variation requires re-engineering a new strain for each...
Totipotent cells have the highest developmental potential and can only be created by nuclear transfer into oocytes. Identities of maternal factors that can induce this reprogramming remain a mystery. In this report, we demonstrate induction of totipotency on mouse embryonic stem cells by introducing six factors, Hist1h2aa, H3f3b, H1foo, p-Npm2,...
X-ray Fluorescence Microscopy (XFM) is a useful technique for study of biological samples. XFM was used to map and quantify endogenous biological elements as well as exogenous materials in biological samples, such as the distribution of titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles. TiO2 nanoparticles are produced for many different purposes, including development...
Understanding electrical circuits can be difficult for novices of all ages (Grotzer & Sudbury, 2000; Osborne, 1983; Shipstone, 1984; Tarciso Borges, 1999). Research shows that novices tend to have inadequate understandings of what happens at the level of atoms and electrons, leading to difficulty predicting the outcomes of electrical circuits...
Greater interest in self-directed professions, like entrepreneurship, have led to a growth in informal workplace communities and social technologies that support new ways of working. However, we have little understanding of how these socio-technical environments support opportunities for professional skill development. The goal of this dissertation is to understand how...
One seismologist’s noise is another seismologist’s signal. What was once disregarded is now routinely processed as dense arrays of broadband seismometers continuously record small amplitude Earth motions, presenting an immense wealth of data. This dissertation presents three projects where ambient seismic noise, generated by ocean wave interactions with the solid...
The studies presented in this dissertation combine radiogenic and stable strontium isotope ratios (87Sr/86Sr and 88/86Sr, respectively), radiogenic and stable carbon isotope ratios (Δ14C and 13C, respectively), and bulk ion geochemistry to trace the sources and cycling of C in three glaciated environments (New Zealand, Iceland, and Greenland). A primary...
The anode and cathode are main components in a battery system. In this dissertation, Group IV inter-metallics and LiMn2O4 are studied as anode and cathode materials for Li-ion batteries respectively. Preliminary investigation of a multi-valent cathode material for next generation batteries is also introduced.
Group IV inter-metallics electrochemically alloy with...
The unprecedented crimes of World War Two, especially those committed by the Nazi state, unleashed an equally unprecedented effort to hold perpetrators accountable and secure justice for millions of victims. This effort encompassed hundreds of trials of thousands of individuals in the immediate postwar period and continues to the present...
Spinal cord injury occurs with a worldwide incidence of 13-33 cases per million per year, and more than 2.5 million patients worldwide suffer from spinal cord injury (SCI)-related disability (1, 2). Different methods have been attempted to promote axonal regeneration, including neurotrophin injection, hydrogel injection, olfactory ensheathing cells implantation and...
The aim of this dissertation is to make sense of nearly a century and a half's worth of observations concerning skin based electroadhesion phenomena. While this is a noble goal in and of itself, further motivation of this work is drawn from fact that the electroadhesive effect is increasingly being...
Gels are three-dimensional polymer networks capable of absorbing a large amount of solvent molecules subject to various external stimuli (pH, temperature, light, etc.). They exhibit a rich mechanical behavior and prominent nonlinearity owing to their high flexibility, stimuli-responsiveness and superabsorbency. More compelling are the intriguing morphologies and novel functionalities achieved...
Porous metal structures exhibit numerous advantages over dense materials due to their high specific stiffness, strength, damping, energy absorption, and surface areas, making them suitable for applications ranging from actuators to medical implants. However, traditional foam manufacturing methods do not provide sufficient control of the foam micro-architectures, and the creation...
This dissertation investigates a single-column model for Arctic energy balance in the limit as a smoothing parameter associated with ice-albedo feedback tends to zero. This limit is a common modeling approximation used in conceptual climate models, and we explore the implications of taking this limit on bifurcations associated with the...
The reforms called for by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (National Research Council, 2012; NGSS Lead States, 2013) involve students using scientific and engineering practices to construct disciplinary knowledge with others. For this work to be meaningful, students need to understand what they were doing and how their actions...
Unveiling Baubo” describes how the mythical figure Baubo was constructed in nineteenth-century German. Associated with the act of exposing herself to the goddess Demeter, Baubo came to epitomize questions about concealment and unveiling in the budding fields of archaeology, philology, psychoanalysis and literary theory. As I show in my dissertation,...
Agents of online platforms often have to make purchase decisions in the face the uncertainty of the true value of an item. Observing the other agents’ actions and/or reviews is one common method to learn about an item. However such observational learning can lead to an information cascade, in which...
Following a stroke, precise, individuated control of single joints is often replaced by highly stereotyped patterns of multi-joint movement, due to a loss of independent joint control, which can negatively impact functional use of the paretic arm. Despite the debilitating nature of this impairment, the precise underlying neural mechanisms remain...
In recent decades, scholars and activists have written extensively on the immense growth of America’s penal system, its origins in fear-based, racially coded politics and neoliberal reformations, its distressingly ineffective and unjust outcomes, and its central place as a social institution in the contemporary United States. Yet this dominant discourse...
This dissertation consists of two papers united by a common element: they both study the behavior of heterogeneous agents across the business cycle.
In Chapter 1, I consider: what is the link between the drop in consumer credit during the Great Recession and increased unemployment? I build a heterogeneous household...
The purpose of the egg is to give rise to offspring in sexually reproducing organisms. Zinc thresholds became connected to egg quality from initial breakthrough discoveries in M. musculus which demonstrated that large-scale zinc fluxes occur during meiotic maturation, and these fluxes are required to maintain female egg viability. Numerous...
This dissertation narrates the circulation and institutionalization of an emergent category of talk performance within the late-twentieth century US avant-garde through the career trajectories of three artists from disparate disciplinary backgrounds working in and around the 1970s: theatrical monologist Spalding Gray, poet David Antin, and dance artist and filmmaker Yvonne...
My dissertation explores the dynamics of Northeast Asia’s island disputes, specifically the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute between Korea and Japan and the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute between Japan and China. I focus on three questions that are important for academic and policy purposes and are not well addressed by existing theories: 1) what explains...
The rational and deliberate assembly of functional materials from nanoscale building blocks requires a fundamental understanding of interactions between individual components as well as their collective behavior. This thesis investigates the hierarchical organization of nanoparticles using DNA into well-defined three-dimensional materials on the micrometer and millimeter length scales. This assembly...
Social media such as Twitter has risen as a powerful new communication medium for disseminating information on news, personal interests, experiences, and opinions. On social media, people talk about their lifestyle, health conditions and symptoms, search information on treatment options, and connect with people who have been through similar medical...
This thesis reports on the use of optical antennas, and more broadly, metal optics for the engineered collection and enhancement of infrared photodetectors. These ideas would be useful in enhancing at other wavelengths and other types of detectors, but this work is specifically focused on the Quantum Well Infrared Photodetector...
Computational models greatly benefit metabolic engineering efforts by helping to elucidate experimental observations and predict engineering targets for improved cellular performance. Additionally, supplementing experimental efforts with computational modeling can reduce the loss of time and resources in the lab by narrowing down testing conditions. In optimal cases, computational models can...
The discovery and tailoring of new useful organic molecules for applications such as medicine and materials science is highly driven by meaningful developments in chemical methodology, and some of the most impactful advances have invoked catalysis to increase efficiency and specificity. N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs) have continuously occupied a prominent space...
The thesis contains all four chapters of my Ph.D. research on deep learning and text mining. The first chapter, "Temporal Topic Analysis with Endogenous and Exogenous Processes'', proposes a topic model which mines temporal economy-related documents with an exogenous economic indicator, and finds the relationship between document topics and the...
Dictating Manhood: Refiguring Masculinity in Haitian Literature of Dictatorship, 1968-2010 explores the literary representations of masculinity under dictatorship. Through the works of Marie Vieux Chauvet, René Depestre, Frankétienne, Georges Castera, Kettly Mars and Dany Laferrière, my dissertation examines the effects of dictatorship on Haitian masculinity and assesses whether extreme oppression...
The diverse reactivity patterns, unique structural features imparted by the cumulated double bonds, and possibility of axial chirality have garnered allenes considerable attention in organic synthesis. Numerous methods have been described in the literature to afford optically active allenes starting from chiral starting materials, yet catalytic and asymmetric methods to...
Mucolipins are lysosomal cation channels, with high permeability to calcium ions, that are thought to regulate endolysosomal trafficking. While mucolipin 1 is expressed in all cells, mucolipin 3 is expressed in a small subset of cells (i.e. neonatal intestinal enterocytes, cochlear hair cells and marginal cells of stria vascularis). This...
Transcription by RNA polymerase II (Pol II) in metazoans is regulated in multiple steps, including preinitiation complex (PIC) formation, initiation, Pol II escape, productive elongation, cotranscriptional RNA processing, and termination. Genome-wide studies have demonstrated that the phenomenon of promoter-bound Pol II pausing is widespread, especially for genes that respond to...
Lithium ion batteries (LIBs) have been the most prominent electrochemical energy storage technology over the past decades and enabled the wireless evolution of portable electronic devices. Yet the expanded use of renewable but intermittent energy sources coupled with increasing demand for electric transportation vehicles put forward requirements to electrochemical energy...
Two-dimensional materials’ “all-surface” architecture presents a new paradigm for investigations into electron confinement effects and surface phenomena. However, synthesizing, characterizing, and ultimately engineering the properties of 2D materials represents a formidable challenge. This thesis presents several cases of isolating novel 2D materials via vapor-based syntheses. Vapor-based syntheses allow for reproducible...
A central question in neuroscience is how the brain plans movements. Here, I apply neural data analysis and machine learning methods to better understand both eye and arm movement planning, in particular focusing on naturalistic settings. First, I built encoding models to investigate the factors that led to neural activity...
Between 1815 and 1830, the western Atlantic experienced a surge in maritime piracy. The United States was confronted with the ancient specter of hostis humani generis, the enemy of all, which threatened the safety and prosperity of the young maritime nation. Questions emerged: Who was responsible for policing international waters?...
Computational catalysis is a challenging discipline because of the complexity of catalytic particles and the large number of reaction pathways that may occur in a given reaction. This thesis addresses these challenges with two strategies. First, an appropriate molecular model is defined that captures adequate physical and chemical details while...
Up to two thirds of individuals with chronic hemiparetic stroke suffer life-long residual impairments to their paretic hands, affecting their independence and quality of life. These impairments stem initially from losses of direct corticospinal projections that result in an increased reliance on indirect bulbospinal pathways. This reliance on the indirect...
The symbiotic relationships between ectomycorrhizal fungi (EcM) and host plants are vital for the survival and diversification of each group. Here we introduce the Suillus / Pinaceae model system to address evolutionary relationships between EcM fungi and host plants. Genus Suillus has higher host specificity than other groups of EcM...
The goal of this thesis is to develop practical algorithms with sound theoretical properties for three different subfields of nonlinear optimization: (i) Optimization Algorithms for Supervised Machine Learning; (ii) Derivative-Free Optimization; and (iii) Distributed Optimization. As such, the thesis is divided into three main chapters.
The focus of Chapter 2...
Unstructured data like text is plentiful and possibly contains valuable insights leading to a better decision-making process. Manually obtaining these insights can be costly and time-consuming. Text mining, also known as Text analytics, is developed to derive meaningful information from textual data. It is widely applied in various domains such...
My dissertation takes as its point of departure the commonly held premise that WWI forever changed the horizon of French literary production. While deemed indescribable, many authors did attempt to represent the battlefields and aftermath of WWI in literature. Distinct from previous heroic accounts of war, these descriptions had to...
The isolation of graphene by the simple Scotch-tape method led to the discovery of many novel two-dimensional (2D) materials. Since then, many new material growth and characterization techniques were proposed and many new phenomena were observed in layered 2D materials. Black phosphorous (BP) and topological insulator(TI) \ce{Bi2Se3} are examples of...
Plasmonic nanocavities consisting of metal nanoparticle (NP) arrays support surface lattice resonances (SLR) or lattice plasmon, emerged as an exciting platform for manipulating light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. Their recent prominence can be attributed to a combination of desirable photonic and plasmonic characteristics: high electromagnetic field enhancements extended over large...