Gels are three-dimensional polymer networks capable of absorbing a large amount of solvent molecules subject to various external stimuli (pH, temperature, light, etc.). They exhibit a rich mechanical behavior and prominent nonlinearity owing to their high flexibility, stimuli-responsiveness and superabsorbency. More compelling are the intriguing morphologies and novel functionalities achieved...
Porous metal structures exhibit numerous advantages over dense materials due to their high specific stiffness, strength, damping, energy absorption, and surface areas, making them suitable for applications ranging from actuators to medical implants. However, traditional foam manufacturing methods do not provide sufficient control of the foam micro-architectures, and the creation...
This dissertation investigates a single-column model for Arctic energy balance in the limit as a smoothing parameter associated with ice-albedo feedback tends to zero. This limit is a common modeling approximation used in conceptual climate models, and we explore the implications of taking this limit on bifurcations associated with the...
The reforms called for by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) (National Research Council, 2012; NGSS Lead States, 2013) involve students using scientific and engineering practices to construct disciplinary knowledge with others. For this work to be meaningful, students need to understand what they were doing and how their actions...
Unveiling Baubo” describes how the mythical figure Baubo was constructed in nineteenth-century German. Associated with the act of exposing herself to the goddess Demeter, Baubo came to epitomize questions about concealment and unveiling in the budding fields of archaeology, philology, psychoanalysis and literary theory. As I show in my dissertation,...
Agents of online platforms often have to make purchase decisions in the face the uncertainty of the true value of an item. Observing the other agents’ actions and/or reviews is one common method to learn about an item. However such observational learning can lead to an information cascade, in which...
Following a stroke, precise, individuated control of single joints is often replaced by highly stereotyped patterns of multi-joint movement, due to a loss of independent joint control, which can negatively impact functional use of the paretic arm. Despite the debilitating nature of this impairment, the precise underlying neural mechanisms remain...
In recent decades, scholars and activists have written extensively on the immense growth of America’s penal system, its origins in fear-based, racially coded politics and neoliberal reformations, its distressingly ineffective and unjust outcomes, and its central place as a social institution in the contemporary United States. Yet this dominant discourse...
This dissertation consists of two papers united by a common element: they both study the behavior of heterogeneous agents across the business cycle.
In Chapter 1, I consider: what is the link between the drop in consumer credit during the Great Recession and increased unemployment? I build a heterogeneous household...
The purpose of the egg is to give rise to offspring in sexually reproducing organisms. Zinc thresholds became connected to egg quality from initial breakthrough discoveries in M. musculus which demonstrated that large-scale zinc fluxes occur during meiotic maturation, and these fluxes are required to maintain female egg viability. Numerous...
This dissertation narrates the circulation and institutionalization of an emergent category of talk performance within the late-twentieth century US avant-garde through the career trajectories of three artists from disparate disciplinary backgrounds working in and around the 1970s: theatrical monologist Spalding Gray, poet David Antin, and dance artist and filmmaker Yvonne...
My dissertation explores the dynamics of Northeast Asia’s island disputes, specifically the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute between Korea and Japan and the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute between Japan and China. I focus on three questions that are important for academic and policy purposes and are not well addressed by existing theories: 1) what explains...
The rational and deliberate assembly of functional materials from nanoscale building blocks requires a fundamental understanding of interactions between individual components as well as their collective behavior. This thesis investigates the hierarchical organization of nanoparticles using DNA into well-defined three-dimensional materials on the micrometer and millimeter length scales. This assembly...
Social media such as Twitter has risen as a powerful new communication medium for disseminating information on news, personal interests, experiences, and opinions. On social media, people talk about their lifestyle, health conditions and symptoms, search information on treatment options, and connect with people who have been through similar medical...