This dissertation is a collection of three essays that study (dynamic) incentive provision in multi-agent settings with asymmetric information: delegation of projects in organizations, dynamic matching on a platform, and arbitration between partners in a dispute.', "The first chapter studies dynamic delegation of heterogeneous projects to agents with diverse capabilities....
The assembly of nanoscale building blocks into larger ensembles with well-defined architecture has the potential to create entirely new classes of designer photonic and plasmonic metamaterials with unique properties not found in nature. Electromagnetic metasurfaces, or 2D metamaterials, operating at optical wavelengths are of particular interest due to ease of...
My dissertation draws on Heideggers interpretation of Kant to argue that Kant overestimates the role that causality plays in structuring our experience. Heidegger suggests that Kants analysis of experience mistakenly universalizes a fraction of our experience: the experience of material things. I defend the merits of this suggestion by offering...
This dissertation examines the origins and social impact of New York stop-and-frisk law, which authorizes police to stop, question and frisk people without a warrant or probable cause to believe crime was committed. Several observers associate it with a recent history of racial profiling, or conservative policing practices of 1990s...
Segregation of granular materials with different particle properties (e.g.,~size and density) is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature and industry. In this thesis, different segregation mechanisms are studied in steady granular heap flows. Flow kinematics and segregation in transient granular flows are also explored. ', '\t', 'First, this thesis studies segregation...
Bimetallic polymerization catalysis represents a small, though active, area of research due largely to the interesting properties observed in the resulting product polymers, including higher molecular weight, increased comonomer incorporation, and enhanced tacticity. Current work is focused on furthering an understanding of the active catalytic species that give rise to...
Nonlinear optical (NLO) effects are used universally in modern day telecommunication and form the foundation of emergent photonic technologies. Twisted intramolecular charge transfer (TICT) chromophores, composed of a donor and acceptor fragment connected by a twisted bi-aryl bridge, combine large molecular NLO response with properties such as transparency in the...
The use of biomass as a feedstock for fuels and chemicals has been a long-standing challenge and opportunity for the chemical and basic materials industries. In order to unlock the value of biomass, it is necessary to first deconstruct its structural polymers, cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin, into low molecular weight...
When constructing buildings with basements in urban areas, the deformation levels during the excavation process must be carefully evaluated to prevent or minimize damage to adjacent structures. Because of uncertainties in predicting ground deformations during the design phase for a project, a robust monitoring program should be included in significant...
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...
Perovskite oxide materials for the wide array of properties that make them candidate materials for application ranging from catalysis, to electronics, to beyond-Moore computation. As many of these oxides share similar structures they can be combined in a seemingly-endless number of ways to produce the desired properties for a given...
Currently, the only treatment for end stage liver disease is transplantation, of which there is a critical shortage of available donor tissue. Recent developments in 3D printing have greatly accelerated progress in the field of liver tissue engineering. A variety of 3D printing and additive manufacturing techniques show great promise...
This dissertation develops computational models to study the optical coupling between plasmonic nanoparticles and quantum emitters. A large number of nanophotonic applications function by using either plasmon enhanced fields to enhance optical processes within quantum emitters or the sensitivity of plasmon resonances to their environment. Developing computational methods to fully...
Carbon-based materials, such as graphene and carbon fibers, have good prospects for applications in reinforcements of polymers as advanced structural composites. Hence, the study of the mechanical properties of the constituents and the composites is becoming increasingly popular in both academia and industry.', 'Graphene has been shown to have a...
This work presents a cognitive model of argument structure construction acquisition and application based on analogy. The claims of this model are that (1) constructions, pairings of form and meaning, are a productive unit of linguistic analysis that account for a broader range of phenomena than traditional approaches; (2) human...
The dissertation illuminates the centrality of communication to the way environmental policies and practices arise and unfold, and it shows how the living materiality of ecological phenomena are entangled with the social dynamics of communication. The work innovatively bridges insights from the field of political ecology with theory and method...
Like the majority of media studies, research on Latinx media is characterized by a focus on a single medium. As an alternative, this dissertation provides a media ecology of the city's Latinx mediascape between the years 1953 and 2012. This dissertation investigates four case studies: (1) Univision's former television affiliate,...
This dissertation seeks to investigate how social policy is made and implemented where established scripts and institutionalized schemas do not align with complex subjects and cases: how do policymakers classify subjects and cases when they cannot default to established categories, what are the implications of engagement in forms of evaluation...
Pressure swing adsorption (PSA) is a promising technology for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). However, while there has been much interest in PSA process development, the choice of adsorbent for the separation is just as important as the process configuration. Therefore, it is important to develop PSA processes in conjunction...
Platyrrhines are an enigmatic and intriguing radiation of New World monkeys that currently inhabit the western hemisphere from Argentina to Mexico. Platyrrhini, a taxonomic parvorder within Primates, is their formal taxonomic designation, as they represent the sister group of the Catarrhini or all of the Old World monkeys and apes....
This dissertation focuses on the topic of pseudowords and how speakers pseudoword processing relates to that of real words. Three main lines of inquiry are pursued with respect to pseudowords and real words: mechanisms of gradient well-formedness, theories of morphological decomposition, and indexical associations for morphemes in complex words. It...
Technology mediated experiences are becoming more common and creating new ways for us to work and learn together when separated by distance. However, these remote environments lack many of the rich non-verbal cues that we take for granted in co-located interactions, such as information about where your partner is looking....
In this work, we explore the utility of the three main types of neural networks: feed forward, convolutional, and recurrent. While using these networks, we develop a new way to model multiagent trajectory data, explore the use of multiple activation functions for neurons at each layer of a neural network,...
In this thesis, I investigate how the disagreements among market participants can affect markets in various settings. In the first chapter, I study how market participants with heterogeneous beliefs and non-commitment can create and manage counterparty risk in a sequentially and bilaterally traded market. I find that the equilibrium price...
This mixed-method dissertation explores how companies manage competing tensions in their corporate social responsibility platforms, with an emphasis on the activity of corporate philanthropy. While existing literature has overwhelmingly focused on the post-grant financial effects of corporate philanthropy, I shift our attention to various internal contestations between social impact and...
Many key crises of international security are tied to the spread of nuclear weapons and technology, but what makes a state nuclear remains subject to controversy. The possession of nuclear technology does not always grant legal and political nuclear status”a phenomenon evident not only in the recent debate over Irans...
Understanding bridge performance and detecting structurally deficient components are of increasing concern to modern infrastructure owners and managers. Concerns over possible effects of increased truck weights led to the opportunity to monitor a highway bridge, regularly subjected to heavy traffic due to logging activities typical of its locale. A weigh-in-motion...
Chromatin organization involves a hierarchy of length scales ranging from a few tens of nanometers in nucleosomes to hundreds of nanometers for chromosomal territories. This physical nanostructure is regulated by the genetic code, differential methylation and histone modifications that comprise the histone code, as well as non-molecular factors, such as...
The cerebellum contributes to movement initiation, execution, and adaptation. Primary cerebellar neurons receive synaptic inputs related to sensory stimuli and motor commands, leading to modulation of their firing. Furthermore, synaptic input differs substantially between cerebellum-dependent behaviors. I have made voltage- and current-clamp recordings from Purkinje and eurydendroid neurons in the...
In this dissertation, efforts are detailed to utilize semiquinoid bridging ligands to impart strong magnetic coupling between metal centers. Chapter 1 introduces the synthetic challenge of realizing molecule-based magnets with high operating temperatures due to weak magnetic coupling between spin centers through large, diamagnetic ligands. An alternative strategy is described...
This thesis studies three approaches for solving linear programs with complementarity constraints (LPCC). The focus of Chapter 2 lies on difference-of-convex (DC) penalty formulations and the associated difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA) for computing stationary solutions of LPCCs. We concentrate on three such formulations and establish connections between their stationary solutions and...
Holy Mediocrity: Saintly Matrons and the Dominicans in Late Medieval Italy', 'Julia Lauren Miglets', 'The task of this study is to explain why a cluster of female saints who were noted not for their miracles but for the moderate even boring quality of their sanctity, a paradigm I call holy...
It is pertinent now more than ever that we find sustainable alternatives to produce chemicals. For decades, scientists and engineers have turned to biological systems to help meet societal needs in energy, medicine, materials, and moreespecially when chemical synthesis is untenable. Often, biologically-produced small molecules are insufficient for production at...
This dissertation consists of three essays in Microeconomic Theory that study the interplay between mechanism and information design, provide insights into the design of efficient dispute resolution mechanisms for partnerships, and analyze the stability of fractional matchings in two-sided markets.', "In the first chapter, we study the optimal disclosure policy...
Small molecules such as indanes, chromanes, tetralins and their derivatives play a significant role in drug discovery due to their potent biological activity. This research herein presents a facile Brønsted acid-catalyzed allylsilane annulation methodology to generate fused ring systems such as indanes. The reaction goes through a homoallylic intermediate which...
In this dissertation thesis, I introduce three-dimensional (3D) image reconstruction algorithms for multi-focus microscopy (MFM). MFM provides a fast way to obtain 3D information of the sample by simultaneously capturing multiple focal planes on a single camera shot. However, stacking the sub-images from different focal planes does not provide a...
In the past decade, scholars, the news media, and the public have turned increased attention to the activity of atheists in the West. Atheism serves as a source of identity and community in todays society, signaling more than a simple lack of belief in god(s). This dissertation is a cultural...
Oxidation processes play an integral role in many industries, but questions still remain regarding the mechanisms of carbon-hydrogen bond activation and oxidation in free-radical and catalyzed processes. Microkinetic modeling is a powerful tool capable of examining oxidation processes at the mechanistic level to gain understanding and guide catalyst applications. This...
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,...
Research shows that psychometrically-assessed spatial abilities (e.g., spatial visualization and spatial orientation) can be improved through training, and that some training yields improvements that are transferable to novel contexts and tasks (Uttal et al., 2013). While the training of these spatial abilities may be valuable for some forms of STEM...
Many democratic theorists suggest that harmonious relationship between groups are critical for democracy; however, far less is known about how everyday experiences promote or impede such intergroup harmony. In this dissertation, I explore a common, but overlooked, form of intergroup contact casual, brief experiences with outgroup strangers. I propose a...
Maxwell equations are behind an incredible number of physical phenomena, explaining the behavior of light, electricity and magnetism, from Gamma rays to ultra-low frequency radio-waves. Since their inception in 1861, many approximations have been derived, many devices have been modelled and fabricated to manipulate the electromagnetic fields, and more recently...
Raytracing is a long-established means to simulate physically accurate light propagation. Increasing availability and power of highly-parallel computing, such as cloud-based clusters and dedicated graphics hardware, means that rendering algorithms can produce high resolution output very quickly. This means raytracing can now be used as a forward model in optimization...
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...
According to contemporary estimates, the 1933 Soviet famine killed six to eight million people, more than two million of them in Ukraine. This dissertation studies causes and consequences of this famine. ', 'Chapter one evaluates the causes of the 1933 famine offered by historians in Ukrainian context. Three main explanations...
Gene regulatory networks contain multiple components including microRNAs (miRNAs) that coordinate regulation of genes to produce higher level cell functions. miRNAs are small non-coding RNA molecules that modulate gene expression post-transcriptionally by binding to short target motifs on mRNA transcripts to down-regulate target genes. Because miRNA regulation of genes is...
This dissertation analyzes archival materials to examine the relationship between reproductive governance in India and the political and scientific dynamics of the Cold War. In 1952, India became the first country to institute anti-natalist population control as a national policy goal, concentrating its efforts on female sterilization and the building...
The use of polymeric membranes have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. From simple chip bags to million-dollar cockpits, these membranes find diverse applications in packaging, protective coating, electronic device, gas and liquid separation, and medicine. The 2-dimentional geometry of the membranes offered unique mechanical and interfacial properties that often...
Ultrathin optical platform including two-dimensional materials and metasurfaces have emerged as potential candidates for novel nanophotonic applications. In this dissertation, I will present the possibility to achieve full active control of the electromagnetic waves with the platform in the flatland. We could achieve the amplitude control, which will be useful...
2018-1The human visual system has a remarkable ability for understanding material properties on the basis of texture appearance, such as', 'telling whether the food is fresh, the fabric is soft, the soil is wet, or the skin is dry. Such visual judgments of material properties mostly rely on the perception...