Infection with the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, results in pneumonia and other respiratory symptoms as well as pathologies at diverse anatomical sites. An outstanding question is whether these diverse pathologies are due to replication of the virus in these anatomical compartments and how and when the virus reaches those sites. To...
Dental enamel is a complex bio-composite with compositional and structural features across a wide range of length scales. Defects in these features can compromise enamel’s ability to protect the tooth, resulting in adverse health outcomes. Acquired defects like tooth decay are familiar to most people and are the subject of...
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease characterized by motor neuron (MN) degeneration and resulting in progressive paralysis and death. ALS is genetically heterogeneous, disease pathophysiology is not completely understood, and there are no effective drug therapies. To develop broadly applicable therapeutics, we examine disease mechanisms in the...
Many processes in nature and human-made settings rely on the unique properties of charged metal oxide:aqueous interfaces. Despite their ubiquity, these buried interfaces are challenging to study, since any analytical technique aiming to overcome the relatively small number density of interfacial versus bulk species must be highly sensitive and surface-selective....
Political theorists generally ascribe to the state a decisive role in the formation and protection of property rights, a view especially prevalent in the historiography of financial property in the United States. Given the capacities of government at the American Founding, however, such accounts are implausible. Drawing on writings composed...
On 14 January 2017, President Donald J. Trump described the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as obsolete. During the first six months of his administration, President Trump discussed not honoring Article 5 commitments for NATO members who had not met the financial responsibilities outlined in the 2014 Wales Summit. His...
Conventional polymer networks are composed of strong, fixed covalent cross-links. The covalent cross-links render polymer networks with outstanding mechanical properties, heat stability, and chemical resistance; however, they also prevent polymer networks from being decross-linked or/and recycled into similar-value products at the end of their life, leading to environmental and economic...
Simple sensorimotor tasks, such as lifting a cup or balancing a tray, requires not only controlled motor output, but also the ability to accurately perceive sensory information. After a hemiparetic stroke, individuals often experience sensory deficits in addition to motor impairments. However, research on the extent of changes in sensory...
Platelets are circulating anucleate discs derived from megakaryocytes, and play major roles in hemostasis, inflammation, thrombosis, and vascular biology. Multi-phase culture systems for inducing in vitro platelet production from mature megakaryocytes have been explored to allow progenitor expansion, megakaryocyte maturation, and promotion of platelet formation and shedding. In this thesis,...
Abstract The overall purpose of this paper is to reconsider the narrative usage and function of a literary phenomenon like ‘opposition/tension/contradiction.’ Throughout my analysis of Alain-Robbe Grillet’s La jalousie, Chloé Delaume’s J’habite dans la television and Jean Genet’s Le Balcon I was focused on investigating the use of this phenomenon...
Recent developments have enabled L12-strengthened Co-based superalloys, which have thepotential to surpass Ni-based superalloys as the material of choice for the hottest sections of turbine
blades due to cobalt’s 40 ºC higher melting point. The most-studied branch of Co-based
superalloys are based on the L12 phase Co3(Al,W); however, there is...
Brain network organization, the emergence of cognition, and the accumulation of neurodegenerative pathology are interwoven concepts frequently studied under the umbrella of behavioral neurology, neuropsychiatry, neuropsychology, and neuropathology. One approach to studying the organization of cognitive processes is to study those with selective deficits in such networks. To understand how...
Regulatory RNAs are found throughout nature controlling critical cellular processes and enabling cells to sense and respond to their environment. In order to provide genetic regulation, these RNAs can selectively bind to target molecules, proteins, and invading pathogens, all while modulating gene expression on both the transcriptional and translational level....
This dissertation traces the rise and the demise of the Amerasian in the years roughly set by the Amerasian Immigration Act (1950-1982). I argue that an Amerasian is not simply an individual fathered by a US servicemen in Asia, nor is it just a racial descriptor used to term mixed...
With the rapid growth of demand for data center services, the energy and water use of data centers has become a critical concern in the contexts of energy use, climate change, and freshwater conservation. Therefore, understanding, quantifying, and optimizing the use of energy and water resources in data centers has...
This dissertation consists of three essays on spatially differentiated markets. Generally, I explore how firms and consumers behave in such markets using structural modeling, causal inference and machine learning techniques, as well as high-resolution spatial data. In the first chapter, I study the efficiency of firm location configurations in the...
Caught between world wars and Stalin’s consolidation of power, citizens of Soviet Russia of the 1920s and 1930s had little to laugh about. Yet a unique tendency toward disruptive humor surfaces in poetry and prose over these two decades. I explore disruptive humor in select longer poetry of Nikolai Zabolotsky,...
This dissertation is composed by three chapters. Chapter one is about productivity hysterisis in the U.S. after the Great Recession. The United States has been experiencing a slowdown in productivity growth for more than a decade. I exploit geographic variation across U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) to investigate the link...
Physiochemical phenomena in aqueous systems, such as corrosion, catalysis, and energy storage, are driven by the molecular-scale interactions of ionic species with charged solid surfaces. In particular, an electrical double layer (EDL) of ions forms within nanometers of a charged surface. The properties of the EDL have been explored from...
Asymmetric relationships between creators and consumers in peer-produced knowledge repositories produce inequitable knowledge representation--or knowledge gaps. These gaps result in unequal access to information, and downstream technologies that leverage peer-produced data perpetuate these inequities. Effective knowledge gap identification represents a necessary first step towards equitable knowledge representation. However, while prior...
Humans are prodigious learners. One of our most powerful learning tools is the ability to detect and transfer relational similarities between items and events, despite their perceptual differences. Previous research has found that the roots of this ability extend into infancy. As early as three months of age, infants can...
Transcription is tightly regulated to ensure genes are appropriately expressed both temporally and spatially. This tight regulation governs various processes within the cell, such as differentiation and cell identity, cellular maintenance, and dynamic responses to external signals. Transcription factors (TFs) coordinate these various gene programs and in particular, are key...
This dissertation consists of three chapters about education policies in developing countries. The first chapter examines two extrapolation approaches to make out-of-sample predictions using cash transfer experiments in Malawi and Morocco. The second chapter evaluates India's workfare program in terms of targeting efficiency and effects on school enrollment, in comparison...
This dissertation presents two projects with the goal of understanding how to quantitatively describe biological data, particularly data that is highly dynamic. The first study presents an improved quantitative tool for the analysis of particulate trajectories. Particulate trajectory data appears in several different biological contexts, and the majority of analyses...
Considerable progress has been made in characterizing the neural circuits that underlie stress, fear, feeding, and pain. However, little is known about how they affect each other. Stress bidirectionally regulates feeding, either increases (e.g., stress-induced binge eating) or decreases (e.g., stress-induced anorexia), depending on the types of stressors, duration of...
Gerotranscendence involves feelings of coherence with one’s sense of self, greater acceptance of one’s own life, and connectedness to others across time and space. Gerotranscendence is thought to increase with age. The present study is the first longitudinal effort to investigate changes in gerotranscendence across late midlife using life story...
This thesis focuses on identifying structure-property-performance relationships in supported nanoparticle catalysts, where an active catalyst material is supported on a high surface area substrate. Identifying these relationships in supported nanoparticle catalysts can be quite challenging, as the complex structure of these catalysts results in numerous potential sources for changes to...
Recent discoveries in vitamin D research indicate that vitamin D is a necessary component to several organs and tissues that extends beyond bone formation Furthermore, recent research indicates that vitamin D deficiency is rampant across the globe. Historically, anthropological research has focused on the adaptive significance of skin color to...
Endothelial cells (ECs) require glycolysis for proliferation and migration during angiogenesis; however, the necessity for the mitochondrial respiratory chain during angiogenesis is not known. In this study, we report that inhibition of respiratory chain complex III impairs proliferation, but not migration of ECs in vitro by decreasing the NAD+/NADH ratio....
Exposure to violence, which includes child abuse, neglect, witnessing domestic or community violence, crime, and sexual assault, is a national concern. Over the course of a year, 68% of children under age 17 are exposed to at least one form of violence (Finkelhor, Turner, Shattuck, & Hamby, 2015). Young children...
Herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE) is a rare and severely debilitating life-threatening disease caused by herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) infection of the human central nervous system (CNS). The severe and often fatal outcomes of HSE contrast starkly with the more frequent and largely benign consequences of herpes labialis. Whole...
Caves are accessible windows into the shallow subsurface, serving as transitional ecosystems between the photosynthesis-dependent surface and the deeper subsurface. Without a source of solar energy to ultimately power carbon (C) fixation (photolithoautotrophy), cave ecosystems are either reliant on surface-derived nutrients, recovering reducing power from the microbial oxidation of redox-sensitive...
Global dementia diagnoses are steeply increasing. While advances in neuroimaging, neuropathology, and genetics research have improved our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases causing dementia, precise antemortem diagnosis, as well as sensitive and specific biomarkers that can facilitate a differential diagnosis and aid in participant recruitment in clinical trials, remains elusive. The...
This dissertation explores critiques of mass education alongside the rise of the research university as they appear in the early writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin. More specifically, it traces the development of a theory of (un)learning that inserts distance into the pedagogical relation to produce a discretized educational...
Techniques for achieving complete quantum control over atoms have been developed and perfected over the past four decades with great success. This work has led to multiple Nobel prizes and has been the catalyst for rapid advances in a broad array of research fields. A natural progression forward is to...
Rhythmic oscillations in the brain are widespread. Extracellular recordings of local field potentials (LFPs) using methods ranging from microelectrodes to scalp electroencephalography (EEG) have demonstrated that oscillatory dynamics play a vital role in operations such as network synchronization, sensory tuning and information packaging. Empirical and computational evidence suggest that these...
Biomass has the potential to be our country’s leading renewable source of energy. Specifically, fast pyrolysis is a promising method for the conversion of biomass to valuable fuels and chemicals. Given that fast pyrolysis has a residence time of about two seconds, computational methods are particularly useful in obtaining product...
Cancer is a complex and heterogeneous disease characterized by aberrant gene regulation. Gene regulation is fundamentally orchestrated by the 3D genome organization which involves chromatin looping, compartmentalization, and the formation of topologically associating domains (TADs). Structural variations (SVs), such as genomic rearrangements, deletions, inversions, and duplications, are commonly observed in...
The creative process of an artistic work is a space, figuratively, in which every facet of our personal lives has an effect and, in turn, can be explored and altered. One of the most fundamental aspects of life, be it human or not, is the way in which one relates...
Superconducting qubits are among the leading competitors in the race towards building the first full-fledged quantum computer. Using this platform, researchers have for the first time demonstrated computational capability that is beyond the reach of the current classical machines. (This achievement is nicknamed "Quantum Supremacy".) Up to date, however, the...
From cyber theft of personal financial information to Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attacks, nowadays endpoint devices suffer from various intrusions which cause inestimable property and privacy loss. To protect the security on endpoints, endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems have been developed to serve as the powerful solution against those...
The Unquenchable Fire examines how the United States outsourced the work and costs of imperialism through arms exports after the Vietnam War. As wartime contracts disappeared and government officials confronted new limits to interventionism, a devastating recession pushed defense contractors abroad in the late 1960s and 1970s. While arms makers...
We present both semiclassical asymptotics for the wave equation on a stationary Kaluza-Klein spacetime and an index theorem describing the difference of the positive-frequency
spectral projectors for two stationary regions in a globally hyperbolic spacetime. The
first result involves analyzing the restrictions of the wave trace to isotypic subspaces for...
This dissertation contains three essays that study the operational challenges and business innovations in service industries. We investigate how service providers could use wisely designed business models and service systems to induce preferable customer behaviors, and therefore manage demand and optimize revenue. Using a stylized model, we study how customers...
Quantum technologies have the capability of greatly increasing the security of communication systems. Many components are required for a full quantum network including memory, repeaters, routers, and detectors. The efficiencies of quantum communication technologies suffer greatly due to their inherent sensitivity to loss. Low-loss propagation and high detection efficiency can...
This thesis studies the distributed optimization of protocols and linear precoding in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless networks. We consider cellular systems including millimeter wave (mmWave) systems, frequency-division duplex (FDD) systems, and wideband time-division duplex (TDD) systems. Firstly, for mmWave systems, we design an efficient beam training protocol with multiple access...
Newcomers, or new members to organizations or professions, bring insights that are critical to the advancement of society. Yet newcomers often have low self-efficacy, or low beliefs in their abilities to achieve a task, which can impact performance and retention. Research suggests that self-efficacy can be developed through in-person social...
This dissertation studies the limitations of incentive design in organizations and how they lead to inefficient outcomes. Chapter 1 studies how a coalition coordinates its members when they freely join and leave. It characterizes the conditions under which such coordination prevents the coalition from forming in the first place. In...
This dissertation contains three essays that study the operational challenges in healthcare-related fields. We strive to integrate analytical modeling and empirical methods to study decision-making under uncertainty for practice- and data-driven problems. We use large-scale datasets (millions) gathered from years of data collection. To gain access to these proprietary data,...
Economic and political processes are heavily intertwined. Political processes put constraints on economic activity while economic development influences the way the political system operates. This interconnection is especially tight in developing countries and transition economies with less secure property rights, less stable political institutions, and more rapid economic changes. In...