Interfacial effects play a critical role in perturbing the properties of polymeric materials. The average properties of polymer materials with substantial specific interfacial area, e.g., ultrathin films, nanorods, and polymer nanocomposites, often deviate significantly from the bulk responses. Much of the past research has focused on systems in which free...
Volunteer-based physical crowdsourcing systems connect individuals to make unique contributions to solve local and communal problems and enable new services. A key challenge in enabling such systems is attracting enough willing volunteers who can make useful contributions to achieve desired system goals. While most volunteer-based systems provide volunteers flexibility to...
A fundamental understanding of the photophysics involved in solar energy capture and conversion is crucial to the development of carbon-neutral energy technologies. Taking inspiration from nature, the photosynthetic reaction center (PSRC) is often modeled by simpler versions of its elements to allow for better control over the system and for...
Structural colors originate from the interaction between the incident light and a surface with periodic submicron structures. They enable the creation of a spectrum of nonfading colors, potentially replacing toxic metal oxides and conjugated organic pigments. However, significant challenges remain, including lack of contrast needed for the complete gamut of...
Algorithmically-driven social platforms present a challenge for self-presentation and identity management by obscuring audiences behind algorithmic mechanisms. Users are increasingly aware of this and actively adapting through folk theorization, but we do not know how users are coping with the constant change endemic to these platforms. We also do not...
In this thesis we study two problems, one in unsupervised learning - k-means clustering and the other in a supervised learning setting with the presence of adversarial perturbations. We do a beyond-worst case style analysis and show that in either case instances that are resilient to adversarial perturbations are also...
Hypnaesthesis argues for understanding somnambulism, nightmare, and insomnia as aesthetic categories in the gothic and dark romantic traditions of antebellum American literature that provide critical insights into the experiential costs of the exhortations to normative vigilance prevalent in the American Enlightenment. During this period unceasing vigilance became the watchword for...
“Open Tables: Restaurants and Reform in Progressive Chicago” considers restaurants as contentious spaces where larger debates about gender, class, race and ethnicity, public health, and the role of the state were carried out between the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the 18th Amendment. Using Chicago as...
Conceptually, we can divide this dissertation into Chapter 1 which is in the tradition of information economics and comparative statics, and Chapters 2 to 4 which had all its genesis in the same project concerning identifying the value of product differentiation to consumers with minimal assumptions, and is therefore related...
There is strong evidence for the benefits of teaching parents of toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) intervention strategies for facilitating language development. A strategy at the core of early parent-mediated interventions for ASD is responsiveness, defined as providing a child with a verbal response each time she communicates. Responsiveness...
This dissertation addresses three distinct topics in development economics. The first chapter assesses the role of entry and exit in the measurement of misallocation in India. In the last decade, misallocation of productive inputs across firms has been proposed as a primary driver of differences in aggregate productivity over time...
Western scientific norms (e.g., Bacon, 1623/2005) dictate that mechanistic explanations like “rain falls because clouds form water vapor” are preferable to teleological ones like “rain falls so that plants should grow. Do people have preferences that naturally align with this? The predominant interpretation of past research is that they do...
Commonsense inference is a critical capability of modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The machines need commonsense knowledge to perform tasks exactly like human being does. Learning commonsense inference from text has been a long standing challenge in the field of natural language processing due to reporting bias -- people do...
How do perceivers stereotype people who are at the margins of multiple, interlocking social identities? The present dissertation proposes and tests a model of intersectional stereotyping called intersectional categorization theory (ICT). This model advocates the following core ideas: (a) that perceivers use one lens at a time for making sense...
Uttering Sonic Dominicanidad: Women and Queer Performers of Música Urbana Verónica Dávila Ellis What meanings are ascribed to the voices and sonic compositions of Caribbean and Latinx women and queer performers? What do their sounds tell us about Caribbean identity, gender, sexuality, and race? This dissertation centers the work of...
With the global rise of surveillance technology, contentious episodes may be captured on video from multiple perspectives. These perspectives include the third-person visual perspective such as red-light cameras and dashboard cameras, the first-person visual perspective such as body-worn cameras, and perspectives from written descriptions such as police reports and witness...
Reading informs our understandings of the world. Information we encounter in both academic and everyday reading situations can be integrated into our general knowledge, influencing our perceptions and decisions. When the information we read is valid, these influences are desirable. However, we are also routinely exposed to inaccurate information which,...
This dissertation studies the sense most neglected in literary studies, philosophy, and the history of the senses: olfaction. It argues that modernity has been marked by a tendency towards deodorization that attempts to establish a monosensorial and odorless civilization shaped by ocularcentrism. Against this tendency, the authors studied here (Friedrich...
There is a rich history on the study of the interplay between symmetry and synchronization in networks. At the most fundamental level, many synchronization patterns are induced by underlying network symmetries. However, when stability is taken into account, the relation between symmetry and synchronization is far from monotonic. In this...
Current genetic studies are largely biased towards European populations, leaving the discovery of genomics biomarkers and causative genetic variants unexplored in minority populations, such as African Americans. Meanwhile, African Americans are disproportionately affected by a variety of complex diseases and respond differently to many drug treatments. The disparity is due...
Mobile internet has brought a disruptive innovation to the ride-hail industry. The technology introduced by Uber, referred to as e-hail, matches passengers with drivers through their smart phones, while integrating transaction and feedback in a single app. In comparison to taxis hailed off street, or street-hail (s-hail hereafter), e-hail has...
In everyday conversations, listeners need to rapidly perceive and parse speech input as they receive it. While listeners with normal hearing may do this with relative ease, this is a multi-step process that requires listeners to recognize individual speech sounds as meaningful then integrate them to understand and respond almost...
Scholars of early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires—an international theatre hub— disproportionately emphasize Spanish-language performances. This tendency erases the histories of immigrant performing artists, such as Yiddish-speaking Jews who fled en masse to Argentina in order to escape rising antisemitism in Europe and Russia. By focusing on Yiddish theatre in Buenos Aires, this...
Information policies are an effective way to alleviate information asymmetries, but the effectiveness of such policies depends critically on the underlying incentives people face. This dissertation is comprised of three papers that study the welfare effects of various information policies using game-theoretic models. The first paper analyzes how networks of...
Iron is an essential nutrient and is critical for cellular growth and metabolism. Here, we delineate a novel mechanism by which iron alters amino acid homeostasis and mTOR activity by remodeling the cellular epigenetic landscape. We find that iron deficiency inactivates Jumonji-C domain containing histone-demethylases, resulting in histone hyper-methylation and...
Modern design practices rely more and more on computer simulations due to their low cost compared with physical experiments. However, it is still an elusive task to fully unleash the advantages of the simulation models while mitigating their disadvantages for designing complex engineering systems. In simulation-based design, computer simulation models...
This thesis contains three chapters studying the evolution of the American higher education landscape, the different forces that shaped their organization, and how they, in turn, influenced human capital accumulation. The chapters are organized into three time periods: 1850-1900, 1910-1940, and 1980-2010. In the first chapter, joint with Heyu Xiong,...
In this dissertation I examine how the government should respond to sovereign risk and show that it has implications on the optimal behavior of the government. In Chapter 1, I look into international reserve management. In Chapter 2, I analyze the effects of sovereign risk on the size of fiscal...
ABSTRACTUnderstanding Micro-macroscopic Phenomena of Tribological Fluids and Surfaces
Mechanical power and motion are transmitted through interfaces under contact and relative motion. Friction is inevitable, which can lead to higher operating and energy costs, and severe frictional rubbing can result in material damage and cessation of motion. A deep understanding of...
The work presented in this thesis is aimed at developing surface coatings for two specific applications: 1) the self-cleaning surfaces and 2) fouling control in water filtration membranes. Since all materials interact with their environment through their surfaces, tailoring surface properties by implementing surface coatings can greatly affect their performances...
This project uses the political and environmental history of maquiladoras—duty-free assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border—to offer new insights into two pivotal moments in the history of the U.S political economy: the poverty eradication plans of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the neoliberal growth models of the late twentieth century....
A series of theories and models are developed and used to investigate the growth of protective oxide films on metal and alloy surfaces for cases in which Wagner's classical model of oxidation does not hold. First, irreversible thermodynamics is applied to formulate a model for the outward growth of rocksalt...
Unmournable Void: Tending-Toward the Dead and Dying in Contemporary Black Performance and Visual Art, explores critical artistic practices that tend to the historical conditions of anti-black violence resulting from transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. This triad of regimes produced the Black condition as the unmournable void lived in close proximity...
The Quincke effect is an electrohydrodynamic instability which gives rise to a torque on a dielectric particle in a uniform DC electric field. Previous studies reported that a sphere initially resting on the electrode rolls with steady velocity. In this thesis I report the experimental discovery of another regime, where...
Fluorescence microscopy has become a widely used tool in many research areas. However, its spatial resolution, limited to 250 nm by the diffraction limit of light, has restricted direct observation of details of ultrastructural biology. In recent years, spectroscopic single-molecule localization microscopy (sSMLM), one of super-resolution imaging techniques, has been...
Robots can be capable partners when interacting with humans, but their value is largely dependent on how information is communicated in that partnership. In physical human-robot interaction, information is communicated via motion---configurations, velocities, forces, and torques. The autonomy interprets these implicit signals using metrics, which ultimately drive the the autonomy....
The need to rapidly develop and produce life-saving vaccines and therapeutics is critical for overcoming pandemics in a global economy. Recent advances in automation and cell-free systems have opened new avenues for expediting optimization and production of biologic vaccines and therapeutics. A key consideration for the development of protein biologics...
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an important gram-negative opportunistic pathogen whose large genome allows it to thrive in diverse environments. There is a wide range of phenotypic variation within the species, which can be attributed both to variation in sequences present in most isolates (the core genome) or the presence or absence...
This thesis presents methods to improve the manipulation capabilities of robots. People and animals can effectively handle objects of many shapes, sizes, weights, and materials using a variety of manipulation primitives such as grasping, pushing, sliding, tipping, rolling, and throwing. In contrast, most robots manipulate objects by pick-and-place. Restricting robots...
Sequential batches of time-evolving data for a set of persistent identifiable entities (e.g. online shopping behavior by month for a customer ID, or economic figures by year for a collection of countries) can exhibit temporal shifts in their underlying clustering structure. Methods for recovering this evolutionary clustering structure exploit natural...
The protein homeostasis (proteostasis) network, a critical cytoprotective system that restores homeostasis in response to molecular stress, comprises distinct pathways, including the heat-shock response, unfolded protein response, oxidative stress response, and autophagy. These distinct pathways are all co-opted by tumor cells to cope with cancer-associated stress, and their activation in...
Over the past 15 years, there have been significant developments in expanding the singlet fission (SF) library and understanding the SF mechanism. SF has been a topic of interest in recent years due to its potential applications in organic photovoltaics. During SF, a singlet exciton energetically down-converts into two triplet...
Part I: Design of Photo-Responsive Molecules towards Biomedical ApplicationsThe use of light to control systems provides numerous advantages such as spatiotemporal precision, non-invasive penetration, and precise energy input. Specifically, molecules that undergo photoinduced cleavage, photoremovable protecting groups (PPGs) have emerged as an active area of research due to their broad...
The pp → W + W − process is important as it allows the test of electroweak theory. Mea-surements of this processes have lead to reduced uncertainties on many other processes one
of which being the Higgs. There have been discrepancies between predicted and measured
cross-section values for pp →...
ABSTRACT Genome Mining in Actinobacteria via a Hybrid-Omics Discovery Platform James Hudson Tryon Natural products isolated from Actinobacteria are a vital source of medicines, agrochemicals, and commodity chemicals. The traditional, activity-driven fractionation pipelines that provided access to many of these natural products have delivered diminishing returns in recent decades. However,...
This thesis studies inter vivos transfers in twenty European countries during the years 2004 to 2017. Inter vivos transfers are transfers made during the lifetime of the donor and the donee. They participate in the intergenerational transmission of inequality and they are an expression of familial values of solidarity and...
The hippocampus has a well-established role in episodic memory and serves as a hub in a network of distributed brain regions (i.e., hippocampal-cortical network; HCN). Theta-band (4-8 Hz) neural activity recorded in the hippocampus have been associated with memory processing, and synchronized theta oscillations among the hippocampus and HCN regions...
Plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) is an essential mediator of senescence and a potential therapeutic target for preventing aging-related pathologies. Cellular Senescence is associated with organismal aging and related pathologies. In our study, we investigate the efficacies of PAI-1 inhibitors in both in vitro and in vivo models of homocysteine...
South Africa’s rates of mental, neurological, and substance use disorders are among the highest in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2016, the estimated 12-month prevalence for any psychiatric disorder was 16.2%, or approximately 9.1 million individuals. Despite these elevated rates of psychiatric morbidity, access to mental health treatment is poor: only 27%...
A significant portion of material science research is concerned with understanding theway that defects affect the properties materials. In the field of thermoelectrics introducingor removing point (0D), dislocation (1D), grain boundary (2D), or precipitate (3D) defectsare popular methods for altering a materials thermoelectric efficiency. Herein I discussdifferent studies conducted during...