This multi-study dissertation investigates the nature of musical independence in the instrumental large ensemble and the instructional practices that are used to foster its development. The dissertation is comprised of three separate papers, each addressing different aspects or approaches to the practice of independent musicianship in large ensembles. While each...
Chapter 1 examines the question of how to sell a firm when potential buyers do not know how many other potential buyers there are. The seller can choose to sell the firm either through bilateral negotiations or through an auction. In equilibrium, if the seller observes the number of buyers...
Developing an interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is an important precursor to pursuing a STEM career. Given the United States’ relatively low standings in science and math compared to similar industrialized nations and its desire to be competitive in an increasingly STEM-based global economy, policy makers are...
Immune checkpoint inhibitors have not been effective for immunologically “cold” tumors, such as prostate cancer, which contain scarce tumor infiltrating lymphocytes. We hypothesized that select tissue-specific and immunostimulatory bacteria can potentiate these immunotherapies. Here we show that a patient-derived prostate-specific microbe, CP1, in combination with anti-PD-1 immunotherapy, increased survival and...
The neural crest is a unique, vertebrate specific stem cell population that gives rise to a diverse set of derivatives in the embryo, including sensory neurons, glial cells, melanocytes, and craniofacial structures such as cartilage, bone, and connective tissue. Unlike other multipotent stem cell populations present at this time, neural...
While college attendance, persistence, and completion has consistently increased since the 1970s, increases in attainment were greater for students from high-income families compared their low-income counterparts. As a result, low-income students are the least likely to attend or complete college. While college costs and poorer academic preparation are often barriers...
The increasing production and use of nanoscale transition metal oxide materials in the next generation of consumer electronics and electric vehicle batteries, specifically lithium intercalation compounds, may lead to environmental release and exposure, with poorly understood biological outcomes. As the toxicity mechanism of nanomaterials may vary fundamentally from their bulk...
Organic Photovoltaic (OPV) materials are of great interest as a low-cost material the purposes of achieving wide spread, solar energy adoption. However, a limiting factor in materials development is the ability to proactively determine the active layer thin film morphology that largely informs device performance. Thus, understanding how materials design...
Organic Photovoltaic (OPV) materials are of great interest as a low-cost material the purposes of achieving wide spread, solar energy adoption. However, a limiting factor in materials development is the ability to proactively determine the active layer thin film morphology that largely informs device performance. Thus, understanding how materials design...
Understanding the chemical complexity of the extracellular matrix (ECM) and how chemical, biological, and physical cues bring changes to the behavior of cells has remained a grand challenge. Addressing these questions requires not only achieving systematic control over the interactions between cells and the ECM but also utilizing suitable analytical...
This dissertation provides an explanatory framework to explain the variations in battle-spaces, alternatively seen as wartime authority configurations across time and space. I place these variations along types of states along their functional dimension, and their respective forms of state power on the ground. I argue that these variations are...
This dissertation is a mixed-methods study of municipal building inspections in Chicago. Existing literature demonstrates links between housing, urban governance, perceptions of dilapidated buildings, and racial and economic stratification. Less is known, however, about the intermediary actors who work at the nexus of on-the-ground interpretative processes and city-wide regulation. Building...
Fused polycyclic scaffolds with three-dimensional complexity from an array of stereocenters compose the core structures of countless natural product families with a variety of desirable biological activity. The development of synthetic methods and strategies to afford rapid access to these structures is essential to expose a wealth of untapped biological...
At the interface of two dissimilar entities, something novel can emerge. This idea has driven a vast amount of fruitful work on semiconductor interfaces, and given us the digital revolution. In the past decade, remarkable progress has been made in the synthesis and understanding of interfaces between oxides, opening up...
Last two decades have seen a surge of interests in approaches that leverage network structure in machine learning models. For many networks, not only the connections of the network but also the network attributes, such as node attributes and dyadic attributes, are observed. This heterogeneity in networks raises new challenges...
Shared emotions are associated with thriving in relationships (Anderson, Keltner & John, 2004; Gonzaga, Campos, & Bradbury, 2007), and greater liking for new individuals (Larson & Gardner, 2015). However, the psychological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not well-understood. Emotions are fleeting experiential states and, seen through this lens, finding someone...
Modern cosmological simulations are some of the world's largest and most demanding numerical computations that are run on state-of-the-art supercomputers. The codes use N-body and mesh-based methods in gravity-only solvers, and both Lagrangian and Eulerian schemes to model gas dynamics. Even complex astrophysical effects such as of star formation and...
Charge-containing polymers have received considerable attention for many decades, as these polymers combine the flexibility of polymer chains with electrochemical properties of the ions to provide a highly tunable, chemically and mechanically versatile class of materials. These materials have found use in energy conversion devices, high-density energy storage devices such...
This dissertation focuses on policy issues in the area of Economics of Innovation. As developed countries are becoming increasingly reliant on innovation for economic growth, it is important to enhance our understanding of how public policies affect innovation.
The first chapter examines the effect of government research grants on firms'...
Personality traits and personal values represent individual differences that influence many forms of behavior including psychopathology (Hanel & Wolfradt, 2016; Jarden, 2010; Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006; Schwartz, 2006). Extensive research has highlighted the importance of personality traits in the development of psychopathology in children. However, the association between values and...
This document will examine the influence of sacred, Latin, polyphonic, Tudor, choral composition on the compositional style of contemporary British composer, Gabriel Jackson. This examination will lead to an acknowledgement and discussion of the larger trend in 21st-century choral music to incorporate older compositional models into new works.
The impetus...
The saxophone has long been an instrument at the forefront of new music. Since its invention, supporters of the saxophone have tirelessly pushed to create a repertoire, which has resulted today in an impressive body of work for the yet relatively new instrument. The saxophone has found itself on...
From 2008 to 2019, a range of new interactive and immersive digital formats that present new possibilities for musical and artistic expression have become available. In order to begin the work of uncovering what new compositional and experiential possibilities are now possible, this document will examine each format’s core concepts...
Distance learning has increased its presence in academia, and there is a growing trend among higher education music schools to utilize distance learning in tandem with a traditional curriculum. Many instrumental pedagogues do not understand the benefits even though distance learning has been used for close to twenty years in...
Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels are expressed in the heart and central nervous system where they regulate membrane excitability. Recently, inhibiting HCN channels in the hippocampus has been identified as a possible therapeutic intervention for the treatment of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). However, based on the high expression level of...
This dissertation explores topics in information economics. A particular focus in this dissertation is how competition affects incentives for information acquisition and information sharing between competitors. The first chapter studies a principal-agent setting where two principals compete for the services of one agent. The second chapter studies how competition in...
Drawing on over 400 legal decisions and other documentary materials, 40 semi-structured interviews with legal and scientific actors, and hundreds of hours of multi-sited ethnographic observation, I offer a fine-grained analysis of how expert evaluative practices become institutionalized in legal settings and result in divergent understandings of sexuality within the...
œRuling Sexuality: Law, Expertise, and the Making of Sexual Knowledge, brings together approaches from the sociologies of science, law, and sexualities to examine how the institutions of law and science jointly render sexual subjects legible to state institutions by measuring and categorizing sexualities. Through the comparative study of asylum claims...
Research on rat whiskers offers knowledge in neuroscience analogous to humans\' sense of touch and inspiration for efficient sensing robotics. The present work investigates the rat whisker system from a mechanical engineering perspective. First, key quasi-static and dynamic properties were quantified in Chapter 2 for individual whiskers in an array,...
Self-assembled monolayers as tunable chemical platforms broadly enable the study of the interaction between biological species and synthetic surfaces. Unlike small molecule chemistry where the freely diffusible product can interact with biological targets as an inhibitor or probe, interfacial chemistry allows for the controlled and multi-valent presentation of ligands to...
Spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) are a class of structures composed of spherical nanoparticle cores that are densely functionalized with radially oriented, linear DNA. SNAs exhibit properties that are distinct from those of their linear counterparts. These constructs can readily enter cells, evade nuclease degradation, and bind complementary DNA targets with...
Chapter 1: Product Market Strategy and Capital Structure: Evidence from Resale Price Maintenance', "This paper studies how a firm's pricing strategy affects its financial leverage. Retailers vary in pricing strategy, ranging from low markup (i.e., ``discount''), no frills retailers to high markup retailers that offer extensive service. The choice of...
The mammalian retina harbors more than 30 output channels, each playing a distinct role in processing visual images. A comprehensive understanding of the retinal code primarily relies on the functional knowledge of individual output neurons or retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Despite recent technical advances in imaging and genetics, the function...
The objective of this work has been the design of new lubricant additives to target friction in the boundary lubrication regime and the hydrodynamic lubrication regime. Modern automotive engines operate at higher temperatures and speeds than ever before, and therefore require new and more effective lubricant additives to meet higher...
The ability to efficiently sense and respond to molecular signals is crucial for any organism's survival. Sensitive, specific and timely, microbial sensing systems provide an excellent starting point for the engineering of single-celled organisms to detect new molecules of human interest. Towards this goal, our lab pursues the engineering of...
My dissertation consists of two chapters that empirically study policy-related questions in applied microeconomics by using structural econometric modeling developed in industrial organization. In the first chapter, I study the welfare effects of a cap-and-trade program. I develop an equilibrium framework that incorporates forward-looking behavior and transaction costs. In the...
Patterning hierarchical structures in three-dimension (3D) has created nature-inspired functional surfaces. Gecko feet structures have been mimicked for reversible adhesive properties, shark skin for reduced drag, and lotus leaves for self-cleaning surfaces. Rational design of out-of-plane patterns across multiple length scales is crucial because each micro- and nano-feature has different...
One of the main drivers of complexity in a service system is the dependence between different random variables describing the system. For example, the queue lengths at different time points and the waiting times of different items (jobs, customers) in queue are strongly dependent. To reduce dependence-related complexities, it is...
Ultrafast, multi-dimensional coherent spectroscopy (MD-CS) has enabled scientists to probe fundamental aspects of chemical and photo-physical reactions on the nanosecond to femtosecond timescales. Using MD-CS, scientific contributions ranging from increased understanding of energy transfer in photosynthetic biological proteins to correlating the motion of electrons in semiconductors have been achieved. Concurrent...
Self-assembly is an important process in biological system to build various bioactive structures from small amphiphilic molecules. The structural versatility of amphiphile self- assembly also provides a unique platform for the design of functional soft materials with controllable structural features. However, little is known about the correlation between external stimuli,...
This dissertation presents research on solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) cathodes. It specifically covers two main topics: the electrochemical performance of porous two-phase composite cathodes, and the degradation mechanisms of porous single-phase mixed conducting cathodes. Current-voltage measurement and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy were used extensively to evaluate the cell performance. The...
RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) is a powerful high-throughput tool to profile transcriptional activities in cells. The observed read counts can be biased by various factors such that they do not accurately represent the true relative abundance of mRNA transcript abundance. Normalization is a critical step to ensure unbiased comparison of gene expression...
Biopolymers are polymers synthesized by living organisms. Depending on the monomeric units, biopolymers can be classified as polynucleotides (e.g., DNA and RNA), polypeptides (e.g., protein), polysaccharides (e.g., cellulose) and so on. Biopolymers not only play an essential role in nature, but also have wide applications in various fields of industry...
Mounting evidence indicates that known schizophrenia susceptibility genes regulate dendritic spines supports the model that perturbations in the molecular network underlying spine plasticity are crucially involved in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. The Rac1- and RhoA-guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) kalirin is critical for spine morphogenesis on cortical pyramidal neurons, and...
The thermodynamics and kinetics of electron transfer reactions in catalysis, energy conversion and storage, and plasmon-driven chemistry depend strongly on nanoscale electrode surface structure. To elucidate the structure-function relationships that determine nanoscale electrochemical reactivity, it is necessary to observe electron transfer reactions one molecule at a time. Over the past...
Raising California Together, an ethnography of licensed family childcare homes, contributes significant theoretical and empirical knowledge to our understanding of workfare, immigration and education institutions that shape the lives of the youngest subject-citizens and of those who care for them. I draw from more than three years of participant observation...
Of the half million new cases of invasive cervical cancer (ICC) reported globally each year, over 80% occur in Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs)1. Nigeria is one of these countries with a huge burden of ICC incidence and mortality.2 As reported in the Global Burden of Cancer 2013, cervical cancer is...
Scholars frequently use the term œhymn-like to describe passages of instrumental music but the precise meaning of the term remains elusive. This dissertation examines, through the lens of topic theory, the characteristics, origins, and communicative potential of such passages in the music of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. I define...
A vast portion of the Universe is predicted to consist of an as-of-yet undetected, non-luminous form of matter, known as dark matter. Evidence of its existence has been corroborated by various astrophysical observations at many cosmological scales, and its relative abundance has been determined. However, knowledge of its nature and...
Mixed oxides including SiO2', 'and supported oxides on SiO2', 'comprise the majority of', 'heterogeneous catalysts employed in the chemical industry. SiO2', '-Al2O3', 'and microporous,', 'crystalline variants called zeolites have been used widely since the 1960s in petroleum', 'processing, commodity chemical production, and fine chemical synthesis [1]. SiO2', 'supported', 'TiOx catalysts...