Mortgage brokers originate a large share of residential real estate lending. Exploiting state-level regulatory changes to local entry costs I am able to study the effect on credit quality and access. Using data from a major mortgage lender in the run up to the financial crisis I study how the...
Excess loading of reactive nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment from human activities has resulted in widespread eutrophication and the degradation of surface water quality and wildlife habitat. Wastewater is the dominant point source of nutrient loading into waterways, and thus represents a critical opportunity for treatment and prevention of...
Early life adversity predicts greater health risk in later life across multiple outcomes, including cardiovascular disease (CVD) and all-cause mortality. While biological pathways are incompletely understood, evidence is increasingly highlighting immune function, specifically chronic inflammation, which is implicated in cardiometabolic diseases, certain cancers, and all-cause mortality. Links between early adversity...
Despite the increasing interest in biogenic secondary organic aerosols (SOAs), their role in the climate system remains the greatest source of uncertainty in global models. Cloud formation, critical for the net cooling effect provided by cloud cover, is dependent on the abundance of SOA particles and their ability to activate...
The purpose of this multiple-case study was to examine the lived experiences of current collegiate music education majors, both students from under-represented minorities and their well-represented peers, with attention to racial/ethnic identity and social class. Dyads of current music education students at 8 separate colleges/universities—a student from an under-represented racial...
Macrophages are innate immune cells that are traditionally thought to be specialists in phagocytosis. More recent evidence suggest that macrophages reside in nearly every organ and readily adapt to local microenvironmental signals, leading to highly plastic phenotypes across and within tissues. Therefore, rather than treating it as a homogenous cell...
Unrestrained urban growth combined with the increase in the intensity and frequency of precipitation events, due to climate change, has become a major challenge for urban green spaces. Urban sprawl increases ecosystem degradation and the vulnerability of cities to floods as a result of excess stormwater runoff and non-point source...
One of the fundamental questions in developmental biology is how a single cell gives rise to a complex organism. More specifically, how a totipotent egg divides into cells that become increasingly restricted in their potential. Development is a process of increasingly restricted cellular potential, and here I home in on...
This project centers set design as the primary aesthetic, economic, and sociopolitical driver of the sitcom genre’s emergence and development during the first half of the twentieth century. My work treats sitcom set design as a category of historical architecture that can be (and has been) mapped, toured, built, and...
Van der Waals, or layered, materials offer a flexible platform to tune properties via exfoliation down to the single- or few-layer limit; they are at the forefront of cutting-edge materials science and engineering research because of the innumerable ways to tune materials as a function of thickness or composition. Due...
Children acquire linguistic competence via social interactions with adults and learn to converse in accordance with the norms of their communities. The present dissertation examined the communicative patterns of Thai-English bilingual mothers and children in their two languages, as well as compared the bilinguals’ conversations to each of their monolingual...
The development of new catalytic methodologies for the precision synthesis of carbon-carbon bonds is central to the advancement of synthetic organic chemistry. Significant focuses of these efforts are made on the enantio- and diastereoselective synthesis of carbon frameworks, especially as chemists and biologists become more aware of the impact of...
In this dissertation, I conducted 2 studies that resulted in 3 manuscripts. This dissertation consists of 6 chapters that include the 3 manuscripts. The overarching research question is How does context affect the work of quality improvement (QI) practitioners? To answer this larger research question, which is central to the...
Although elevated stress and dietary change have each been associated with metabolic health decline for resettled populations in the Global North, considerably less attention is paid to the links between these two biosocial pathways. Addressing these linkages can elucidate interrelated diet and stress mechanisms that affect population health disparities over...
Two-dimensional (2D) materials are a promising class of electronic materials that have generated great interest to improve and create new and existing technologies. The promise of this family of materials relies on their high surface-to-volume ratio and atomic thickness in addition to their unique (opto)electric properties. However, these morphological properties...
Submodularity is a well-known concept in integer programming and combinatorial optimization. Submodular set functions capture the diminishing returns phenomenon, which has wide-ranging applications in various domains. Typically, a submodular set function models the utility of homogenous items selected from a single ground set. Selecting an item or not is naturally...
This dissertation provides an introduction to the diffraction and scattering theory for the Aharonov--Bohm Hamiltonian with one or multiple poles on $\mathbf{R}^2$. It shows the propagation of diffractive singularities of the wave equation with the magnetic Hamiltonians with singular vector potential, which is related to the so-called Aharonov--Bohm effect. Based...
Synthesis opens the pathway to examine a plethora of complex structures. Whether the target is a naturally occurring compound or a proposed molecule never observed before, synthetic routes can be developed to help understand a variety of properties that the molecule can contain. Synthetic efforts have helped elucidate the absolute...
Nanocarriers, structures with at least one dimension on the nanoscale (1-1000 nm), have been engineered for delivery of various cargoes. The shape and flexibility of nanocarriers are important parameters that influence their biological performance. Self-assembling polymeric filamentous nanocarriers, known as filomicelles (FM), are of great interest to nanomedicine due to...
The production and spread of digital news involves a wide range of actors: journalists and the organizations that employ them, social media platforms, audiences, and myriad commentators, citizen journalists, bloggers, and other actors who contribute to the news ecosystem without inhabiting an official role. These actors interact in flexible, often...