Unstructured data like text is plentiful and possibly contains valuable insights leading to a better decision-making process. Manually obtaining these insights can be costly and time-consuming. Text mining, also known as Text analytics, is developed to derive meaningful information from textual data. It is widely applied in various domains such...
My dissertation takes as its point of departure the commonly held premise that WWI forever changed the horizon of French literary production. While deemed indescribable, many authors did attempt to represent the battlefields and aftermath of WWI in literature. Distinct from previous heroic accounts of war, these descriptions had to...
The isolation of graphene by the simple Scotch-tape method led to the discovery of many novel two-dimensional (2D) materials. Since then, many new material growth and characterization techniques were proposed and many new phenomena were observed in layered 2D materials. Black phosphorous (BP) and topological insulator(TI) \ce{Bi2Se3} are examples of...
Plasmonic nanocavities consisting of metal nanoparticle (NP) arrays support surface lattice resonances (SLR) or lattice plasmon, emerged as an exciting platform for manipulating light-matter interactions at the nanoscale. Their recent prominence can be attributed to a combination of desirable photonic and plasmonic characteristics: high electromagnetic field enhancements extended over large...
Both the timing (i.e., ‘when’) and amount (i.e., ‘how much’) of language exposure have been shown to affect language-learning outcomes. Monolinguals and (most) bilinguals confound these two factors of early exposure and extended exposure (i.e., their first-acquired language is their most used or dominant language), making it difficult to isolate...
Ecological restoration is a land management tool for biological conservation in areas where ecosystems are subject to a suite of natural and anthropogenic disturbances. This approach is particularly critical in urban areas where disturbances are often frequent and substantial. Restoration projects aim to re-establish an entire ecosystem, including the native...
Plasmonic nanostructures are capable of trapping and confining light at the nanoscale, leading to interesting optical phenomena involving enhanced light-matter interactions. These responses arise in two forms: surface plasmon polaritons propagating on the surface of metal films and localized surface plasmons confined to the surface of metal nanoparticles. Plasmonic modes...
The ongoing generational shift whereby millennials are overtaking baby boomers as the largest generation in the U.S. population, along with the technology-fueled evolution of transportation patterns, offer opportunities for policy makers to leverage changing behavior and build a more sustainable future. Much research has emerged seeking to understand whether the...
In May 2018, the US Food and Drug Administration approved daily oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for adolescents under age 18. Although this is an important step toward HIV prevention for adolescents assigned male at birth who have sex with males (AMSM), limited research exists to gauge their awareness of PrEP...
Background: Evidence supporting a bidirectional relationship between depression and recurrent cardiovascular disease (CVD) appears strong, but there remains a need to better characterize the role of depression in CVD risk and cardiovascular health (CVH) promotion, especially in the context of comorbid risk factors such as cigarette smoking. In the present...
etal particles at the nanoscale display unique physical, chemical, and optical properties corresponding to their size, shape, and ligands. These factors can be manipulated to target specific biomedical applications, such as drug delivery and sensing, through functionalized surfaces. The development of specialized synthetic methods for the precise control of nanoparticle...
This dissertation proposes a new hyperpath-based truck equilibrium assignment model with bidding. Unique from other trucking assignment models that examine assigning trucks for a large fleet of vehicles under a company's control, this model considers the case of many independent but homogeneous carriers that are competing for loads by bidding...
outh in detention are at an increased risk for psychiatric disorders compared with youth in the general population. Hispanic youth have particularly pressing mental health needs in detention and as they age. Studies examining psychiatric disorders among Hispanic youth in detention do not differentiate by ethnicity; rather they consider Hispanics...
This dissertation examined gender differences in youth externalizing comorbidity via three studies. Study 1 was a meta-analytic review that provided the first robust estimate of gender differences in youth externalizing comorbidity. Studies 2 and 3 unpacked these gender differences at two levels of analysis: personality (Study 2 and 3) and...
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a Gram-negative pathogen that frequently causes severe nosocomial infections through expression of virulence factors, evasion of immune clearance and resistance to therapeutic antimicrobial agents. These factors have led the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) to identify P....
The first two chapters of my thesis are related to health economics, and explore how individual decisions affecting health can be impacted by different factors, including by government policy. The third chapter of my thesis (coauthored with Heyu Xiong) focuses on public economics in the Chinese context.
>In the first...
We prove a uniform scalar curvature bound for solutions of the conical Kahler-Ricci flow when the twisted canonical bundle is semiample and the cone divisor is obtained from the associated Iitaka-Kodaira fibration. In the course of the proof we establish uniform bounds for the potential of the metric and its...
Firms are facing reputational crises with increasing regularity. Despite this, relatively little is known about what types of firm actions consumers will judge to be reprehensible, and how firms should respond once a reputational crisis has occurred. In this dissertation I focus on two specific topics related to firm reputational...
As many retailers are extending their channels to both online and offline, consumers nowadays are increasingly buying products across different shopping platforms, ranging from traditional catalog and retail channels to Internet stores. Thus, it is important to understand how the purchasing experiences and the factors surrounding the multichannel shopping environment...