The advent of sequencing technologies has generated a large amount of biological and medical data. These data such as genetic sequencing data and lab experimental evidence data can help understand critical biomedical problems. This dissertation makes contribution in three different but related applications in biomedical research. In Chapter 2, we...
Natural products from fungi have had an immeasurable societal impact as both friends and foes to human health. This includes numerous therapeutics that have had widespread clinical success, mycotoxins that are implicated in fungal pathogenicity, and various agrochemicals. Recent genome sequencing efforts have revealed that fungal genomes contain the capacity...
This dissertation explores the interaction of debt covenants and firms’ investment behaviors, especially the association between debt covenants and project-level operations. Although previous research has examined the association between contractual terms or gross measures of investment and covenants, there is little known about the ways that covenants influence the choice...
Interactions between working memory and long term memory systems are still not well understood, as the systems have long been thought to be mostly separate. An interesting intersection of these memory systems is domain-specific expertise, whereby individuals are able to show supra-span memory for information related to the area of...
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia, and associated with increased risk for ischemic stroke and mortality. While the risk of stroke has been shown to be reduced with the use of oral anticoagulants like Warfarin, these medications are predictably linked with an increased risk of bleeding, and...
In machine learning, classification that assigns a label to a sample is a fundamental problem and serves a building block for various applications of artificial intelligence such as speech recognition, sentimental analysis, and image recognition. During the last years, deep learning rejuvenates artificial intelligence; in particular, it leads to tremendous...
This dissertation investigates the relationship between melancholy and the development of American and Iranian literary discourses as responses to the crisis of postwar sovereignty. While situating itself against the complicated backdrop of US/Iran relations since the Second World War, it explores the impact of religion on the formation of political...
I present the body of work I have pursued over the course of my doctoral study at Northwestern University. First, I conduct an analysis of the measurement abilities of distinctive LISA detector designs, examining the influence of LISA's low-frequency performance on the detection and characterization of massive black hole binaries....
Automobile transportation is among the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and reducing vehicle miles traveled must be part of our climate change mitigation efforts. One recent trend that, if accelerated, could aid in this effort is the increase in bicycling for transportation in large US...
Voltage-gated Na channels are expressed in all neurons, and are responsible for the upstroke of the action potential. They are part of a complex of proteins that includes pore-forming α subunits and auxiliary subunits that modify their trafficking, gating, and function. The modulation of Na channels by auxiliary subunits is...
The complex structure of typical heterogeneous catalysts, where nanoparticles of active material are dispersed onto the surface of a thermally stable support with a high surface area, complicates the understanding of how the support can affect the resulting catalyst structure and properties. Using well-faceted and shape-controlled oxides as supports would...
The effective capture and detoxification of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) is a pressing need in the modern world. Materials are needed for both the destruction of weapon stockpiles and personal protection via fabric coatings or respirators. Attractive candidates for these applications include metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) – highly crystalline materials composed...
Throughout a synthetic organic chemist’s career, reaction planning, execution, and analysis will be repeated countless times. The objective of my thesis research was to expedite this workflow to more efficiently access to novel, complex, and biologically useful molecules and synthetic methods. Since the mid 20th century there have been several...
As much as half of the gas mass in our Galaxy's dark matter halo may reside not in the galaxy itself, but in the surrounding volume, the circumgalactic medium (CGM). The vast gas content of the CGM, loosely defined as the volume immediately outside the galaxy but inside the dark...
Arising from the study of multiple ergodic averages, nilsequences and multiple correlation sequences lie at the crossroads of ergodic theory, combinatorics and number theory. We study these types of sequences along various subsequences of integers, and provide applications to ergodic theory and harmonic analysis. Our first result involves multiple correlation...
Fibrosis is a chronic pathology which commonly develops after chronic inflammation. Different specific kinds of inflammation have been linked to fibrosis across various tissues. When specifically occurring in the prostate, fibrosis can lead to urinary dysfunction. Prostate conditions that involve inflammation have also been linked to both prostate fibrosis and...
Digitization has led to dramatic cost reductions and reshaped both what and how products are sold. This dissertation examines the impact of digitization on the behavior of market intermediaries that bring together producers and consumers. Our empirical context is the transition from 35mm film to digital cinema technologies in the...
Inflammasomes are intracellular multiprotein signaling complexes that link Pathogen Associated and Danger Associated Molecular Patterns (PAMPs and DAMPs) by Pattern Recognition Receptors (PRRs) to the activation of Caspase-1, leading to the secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines interleukin (IL)-1β and IL-18, and the induction of pyroptosis. Nucleotide-binding oligomerization domain (NOD)-like containing a...
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...
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...
This dissertation contains three essays. In the first essay, "The Role of Connections in Congressional Lawmaking", I investigate the role of connections in congressional lawmaking by studying how legislators' deaths impact their peers' capacity to sponsor and advance bills in the U.S. House of Representatives. I focus on legislators who...
Gaussian process provides a principled and flexible approach for modeling the response surface or the latent function in many areas, including machine learning, statistics and computer experiment. In literature, Gaussian process models have already demonstrated their effectiveness and usefulness in a variety of applications. In this dissertation, we mainly focus...
Although flowing granular materials have been formally studied for over two hundred years, their behavior is still poorly understood relative to fluids, solids, and gases. Sheared granular materials with differing particle properties (e.g., size, density, shape) segregate (de-mix) due to percolation (small particles fall between large ones) and buoyancy (light...
Respiratory-swallow coordination is implicated as an essential component of safe and efficient swallowing, yet current evidence is incomplete regarding its relevance to swallowing impairment, assessment and treatment. Three studies were conducted that: 1) characterized and confirmed the optimal respiratory-swallowing coordination patterns in healthy adults, 2) identified linkages between deviations in...
This dissertation is on daily policing dynamics in China, centering around one core question: why coercive institutions can be extremely efficient for some issues but nearly dysfunctional for others in authoritarian regimes. The police may enforce the law relentlessly in some cases, even if there is no clear harm, but...
Agency is a broad orientation aimed to advance the self and one’s own abilities, whereas communion is a broad orientation aimed to interact with others and connect to people in a larger social context. In Chapter 1, I introduce a new framework to conceptualize the constructs of agency and communion....
Convolutional neural networks have become a staple in computer vision and image processing tasks. The capacity for these networks to perform visual pattern recognition in a data-driven fashion has prompted explosive growth in a myriad of applications. That said, despite their popularity, there are still facets of these networks that...
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have exceptional properties and are mass-producible at the ton scale as aggregated powders, but their difficulty in processing is a significant barrier to widespread use. Even after decades of research, there still isn’t a solvent for CNTs that is massively available, easily removable, and non-damaging. The need...
Transcriptome profiling including whole genome bulk and single cell RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) enables the quantitative study of transcript changes at either tissue or single cell level. With the advancement in next generation sequencing technology, it is now part of routine lab practice. More than other high-throughput technologies, computational algorithms are...
This thesis contains three chapters studying macroeconomics and trade. The chapters are organized into two topics: inflation expectations and perceptions, and the effect of trade intermediation on economic activity. In the first chapter, I investigate whether households are significantly harmed by inaccurate beliefs about inflation. The chapter analyzes two established...
Uterine leiomyomas (fibroids) are a major source of gynaecologic morbidity in reproductive age women and are characterised by the excessive deposition of a disorganised extracellular matrix, resulting in rigid benign tumours. Clinically, leiomyoma patients usually present with pelvic pain, urinary incontinence, as well as heavy cyclic and non-cyclic bleeding. Curative...
Across the United States, public school districts are facing critical budget crises. To keep cuts away from the classroom, bus transportation is a common area to look for cost reductions. This thesis studies two fundamental problems that arise in public school transportation: the bus route design problem and the school...
Early-stage oxidation and corrosion mechanisms of CoCrMo and NiCrMo alloys can be analyzed on the nanoscale by transmission electron microscopy. Both alloys are attractive for a broad array of applications such gas turbines and aircraft engine components as they are known for their excellent corrosion resistance and mechanical properties at...
The engineering of human reproduction is one of the defining scientific advances of the past century. Methods to specifically engineer the testis have an equally long and rich history, and have experienced significant progress over the past two decades, leading to current-day breakthroughs which are shifting the paradigms by which...
The groups that we identify with help to make us who we are. This dissertation investigates the impact of the way that each of us understands those identities, through the newly introduced construct of collective self-concept clarity (Gardner & Garr-Schultz, 2017). Two aspects of collective self-concept clarity are introduced and...
Background: Glioblastoma (GBM) tumors are the most malignant brain cancers and are characterized as Grade IV astrocytomas by the World Health Organization. GBM tumors can be classified into three molecular subtypes known as proneural, classical, and mesenchymal. In addition, GBM tumors also have a small population of cells known as...
In 2018, our ATRAP collaboration produced 5 trapped antihydrogen atoms per hour long trial. An apparatus with a Ioffe octupole trap and a faster magnet dump was used to confine and detect trapped antihydrogen atoms. This apparatus is unique in that four sideports spaced at 90 degrees from each other...
Recent decades have seen fan and “geek” culture become widely popular as the science fiction, fantasy, and superhero stories that used to be the preserve of a smaller subculture of die-hard fans conquered the box office, our televisions, and the best-seller lists. In that same time period, the Internet has...
Romantic and sexual relationships are an integral part of human development, with implications for emotional, social, and physical well-being across the lifespan. However, what, when, and how we teach young people remain pertinent questions. Using a combination of interview data from 24 recent high-school graduates and survey data from a...
Ataxic dysarthria is a disorder affecting the naturalness of speech due to damage to the cerebellum, a neural structure critical for the timing, scaling, and sequencing of speech movements (Ackermann, Vogel, Petersen, & Poremba, 1992; Diener & Dichgans, 1992; Duffy, 2013; Rampello, Rampello, Patti, & Zappia, 2016). In healthy individuals,...
Recent encouraging advances in computer vision and natural language understanding shed light on a very interesting yet challenging task: asking and answering questions about a given image (VQA). The study of this research problem is still in its infancy. Most existing VQA methods are neural network-based (NN-based) solutions that pursue...
With more jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields available than people to fill them, the United States is extremely focused on increasing STEM education to address this gap in the future workforce. This focus is not exclusive to higher education and secondary schooling, but rather, it has...
The planarian flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea is capable of recovery from nearly any injury, including regenerating an entire brain after decapitation, made possible by a pool of pluripotent stem cells which maintain all of the worm’s tissues into adulthood. However, the signals that control the production of new neurons in these...
Patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) experience lifelong struggles with both chronic and acute pain, often requiring medical intervention. Pain can be managed with medications, but dosages must balance the goal of pain mitigation against the risks of tolerance, addiction and other adverse effects. Setting appropriate dosages requires knowledge of...
Voices and Vision is a quarterly literary magazine to celebrate Black artists, poetry, photography, paintings, and drawings. The digitized collection represents the publication's resurgence from an earlier 1970s magazine called New Sense.
Banquet lecture for the 37th annual conference of the Sudans Studies Association in conjunction with the 70th anniversary of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University, May 12, 2018
Blackboard is the official publication of For Members Only (FMO). It provides Black students at Northwestern University with news and relevant campus editorials. Currently, the publication is digitized up to 2011. However, publications from 2012 to the present are available in print at University Archives.
1984-2003 (Not complete). Blackbeat is a biweekly newsletter aimed to supplement the quarterly Blackboard magazine, the official publication of For Members Only (FMO). It includes editorials, poetry, cartoons, and announcements to Black students at Northwestern University.
The newsletter of The Office of African-American Student Affairs. The mission of the publication is to expose undergraduate Black students to African American role models, Northwestern faculty, staff, alumni, and graduate students and support their personal and professional development of futures Black leaders.
Word from the House is a newsletter created by the Department of African American Student Affairs. It includes event announcements, tutoring schedules, faculty and staff highlights, and academic resources.
The Black Student Handbook includes on and off-campus resources for Black students at Northwestern University. It also has a brief history of the Black experience at Northwestern and the leadership structure of For Members Only (FMO). Additionally, it features a calendar of events for the academic year, a list of...
A quarterly literary newsletter. The literary expressions of African American students. New Sense was reissued in 1989, beginning with vol.6 no.1. Electronic reproduction
1984-2003 (Not complete). Blackbeat is a biweekly newsletter aimed to supplement the quarterly Blackboard magazine, the official publication of For Members Only (FMO). It includes editorials, poetry, cartoons, and announcements to Black students at Northwestern University.
[EXCERPT:] On April 2, 1982 a group of concerned alumni met to discuss the need for a Black Alumni Association at Northwestern University. These alumni recognized that such an organization could help serve the needs and aspirations of Black alumni and undergraduates from Northwestern. They decided it would be best...
In the early decades of the NAES College library, librarians kept a physical card catalog which described, organized, and made findable all of the materials faculty, students, staff, and their relations might need as part of their experience at the college. Representing a unique view of the library in the...
On October 2nd, an online conversation was conducted by the Program of African Studies of Northwestern University between Professor Chris Abani and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka.1 It was the resumption of a conversation between the two writers and scholars at the New York Public Library in November 2019. In response...