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...