This multi-study dissertation investigates the nature of musical independence in the instrumental large ensemble and the instructional practices that are used to foster its development. The dissertation is comprised of three separate papers, each addressing different aspects or approaches to the practice of independent musicianship in large ensembles. While each...
Chapter 1 examines the question of how to sell a firm when potential buyers do not know how many other potential buyers there are. The seller can choose to sell the firm either through bilateral negotiations or through an auction. In equilibrium, if the seller observes the number of buyers...
Developing an interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is an important precursor to pursuing a STEM career. Given the United States’ relatively low standings in science and math compared to similar industrialized nations and its desire to be competitive in an increasingly STEM-based global economy, policy makers are...
Immune checkpoint inhibitors have not been effective for immunologically “cold” tumors, such as prostate cancer, which contain scarce tumor infiltrating lymphocytes. We hypothesized that select tissue-specific and immunostimulatory bacteria can potentiate these immunotherapies. Here we show that a patient-derived prostate-specific microbe, CP1, in combination with anti-PD-1 immunotherapy, increased survival and...
The neural crest is a unique, vertebrate specific stem cell population that gives rise to a diverse set of derivatives in the embryo, including sensory neurons, glial cells, melanocytes, and craniofacial structures such as cartilage, bone, and connective tissue. Unlike other multipotent stem cell populations present at this time, neural...
What sets this initiative apart is the commitment to deepening ties between African and non-African institutions and making them more seamless and routine. There is a need to make this case to US institutions - lobbying them to digitize/provide open access, creating relationships with African institutions, prioritizing partnerships and academic...
To aid in the successful execution of goal-directed walking (discrete movement from a start location to an end target) the central nervous system forms a predictive motor plan. For the motor plan to be effective, it must be adapted in response to environmental changes. Despite motor planning being inherent to...
While college attendance, persistence, and completion has consistently increased since the 1970s, increases in attainment were greater for students from high-income families compared their low-income counterparts. As a result, low-income students are the least likely to attend or complete college. While college costs and poorer academic preparation are often barriers...
The increasing production and use of nanoscale transition metal oxide materials in the next generation of consumer electronics and electric vehicle batteries, specifically lithium intercalation compounds, may lead to environmental release and exposure, with poorly understood biological outcomes. As the toxicity mechanism of nanomaterials may vary fundamentally from their bulk...
Organic Photovoltaic (OPV) materials are of great interest as a low-cost material the purposes of achieving wide spread, solar energy adoption. However, a limiting factor in materials development is the ability to proactively determine the active layer thin film morphology that largely informs device performance. Thus, understanding how materials design...
Organic Photovoltaic (OPV) materials are of great interest as a low-cost material the purposes of achieving wide spread, solar energy adoption. However, a limiting factor in materials development is the ability to proactively determine the active layer thin film morphology that largely informs device performance. Thus, understanding how materials design...
Understanding the chemical complexity of the extracellular matrix (ECM) and how chemical, biological, and physical cues bring changes to the behavior of cells has remained a grand challenge. Addressing these questions requires not only achieving systematic control over the interactions between cells and the ECM but also utilizing suitable analytical...
This book has to do with the period in which Britain’s mandate in Palestine ended, the state of Israel was born, and the Arab refugee problem originated. Many historians have written on these matters, and many more will do so. I arrived in Haifa, Palestine, on 23 December 1947, and...
This dissertation provides an explanatory framework to explain the variations in battle-spaces, alternatively seen as wartime authority configurations across time and space. I place these variations along types of states along their functional dimension, and their respective forms of state power on the ground. I argue that these variations are...
This dissertation is a mixed-methods study of municipal building inspections in Chicago. Existing literature demonstrates links between housing, urban governance, perceptions of dilapidated buildings, and racial and economic stratification. Less is known, however, about the intermediary actors who work at the nexus of on-the-ground interpretative processes and city-wide regulation. Building...
Fused polycyclic scaffolds with three-dimensional complexity from an array of stereocenters compose the core structures of countless natural product families with a variety of desirable biological activity. The development of synthetic methods and strategies to afford rapid access to these structures is essential to expose a wealth of untapped biological...
At the interface of two dissimilar entities, something novel can emerge. This idea has driven a vast amount of fruitful work on semiconductor interfaces, and given us the digital revolution. In the past decade, remarkable progress has been made in the synthesis and understanding of interfaces between oxides, opening up...
Last two decades have seen a surge of interests in approaches that leverage network structure in machine learning models. For many networks, not only the connections of the network but also the network attributes, such as node attributes and dyadic attributes, are observed. This heterogeneity in networks raises new challenges...
Shared emotions are associated with thriving in relationships (Anderson, Keltner & John, 2004; Gonzaga, Campos, & Bradbury, 2007), and greater liking for new individuals (Larson & Gardner, 2015). However, the psychological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not well-understood. Emotions are fleeting experiential states and, seen through this lens, finding someone...
Modern cosmological simulations are some of the world's largest and most demanding numerical computations that are run on state-of-the-art supercomputers. The codes use N-body and mesh-based methods in gravity-only solvers, and both Lagrangian and Eulerian schemes to model gas dynamics. Even complex astrophysical effects such as of star formation and...
Charge-containing polymers have received considerable attention for many decades, as these polymers combine the flexibility of polymer chains with electrochemical properties of the ions to provide a highly tunable, chemically and mechanically versatile class of materials. These materials have found use in energy conversion devices, high-density energy storage devices such...
This dissertation focuses on policy issues in the area of Economics of Innovation. As developed countries are becoming increasingly reliant on innovation for economic growth, it is important to enhance our understanding of how public policies affect innovation.
The first chapter examines the effect of government research grants on firms'...
Personality traits and personal values represent individual differences that influence many forms of behavior including psychopathology (Hanel & Wolfradt, 2016; Jarden, 2010; Ozer & Benet-Martinez, 2006; Schwartz, 2006). Extensive research has highlighted the importance of personality traits in the development of psychopathology in children. However, the association between values and...
This document will examine the influence of sacred, Latin, polyphonic, Tudor, choral composition on the compositional style of contemporary British composer, Gabriel Jackson. This examination will lead to an acknowledgement and discussion of the larger trend in 21st-century choral music to incorporate older compositional models into new works.
The impetus...
The villancico de negro is a Baroque paraliturgical subgenre that rose to popularity in the 17th and 18th centuries on the Iberian Peninsula. Colonialism promoted the spread of Spanish practices in the Americas, and the villancico de negro developed in both Spain and New Spain. This genre capitalized on misrepresentational...
The saxophone has long been an instrument at the forefront of new music. Since its invention, supporters of the saxophone have tirelessly pushed to create a repertoire, which has resulted today in an impressive body of work for the yet relatively new instrument. The saxophone has found itself on...
In this talk and related activities, I hope to inspire others to take up one of the greatest challenges of our era: narrowing the governance gap which is at the root of many of Africa’s development and security dilemmas. In view of the emergence of many fragile and failed states,...
From 2008 to 2019, a range of new interactive and immersive digital formats that present new possibilities for musical and artistic expression have become available. In order to begin the work of uncovering what new compositional and experiential possibilities are now possible, this document will examine each format’s core concepts...
Women in developing countries occupy a unique role in the economy that is often underappreciated, informal and highly vital to the country’s economic stability. Despite their high productivity and output, women in countries such as Morocco lack support from their government and communities as well as the infrastructure necessary to...
This project was originally motivated by a lifelong love of the Harry Potter series and a teenage love for fan fiction and other fancreated works. I was motivated to do research when I stumbled upon the lack of inclusivity in many fan communities, which I found to be shocking. In...
Past research suggests that stereotypes about collective identities (i.e. race, ethnicity, and gender) shape aspirations. However, less is known about how actual representation of collective identity relates to aspirations. The proportion of an identity in a given career will be used as an indicator of numeric representation and I hypothesize...
Much has already been discovered about the Hedgehog (Hh) signaling pathway and its involvement in patterning and tissue development in embryos, but the specific functions its key components play has not yet been fully elucidated. One potential component is the protein kinase Dop, which is involved in cellular trafficking. Here,...
Children come to understand race within a historically-established racial hierarchy, but they have the agency to accommodate or resist this establishment as they form their own racial identities. Previous research identified distinct narrative types that either reinforce existing societal structures (Master Narratives) or disrupt them (Alternative Narratives). The Counternarrative...
Image colorization is the process of artificially coloring a black and white image such that this fabrication appears realistic and authentic to the viewer. There are many nontrivial applications of this process, such as the colorization and augmentation of historical photos as well as the removal of color tone filters...
The Modern Orthodox Jewish (MO) community currently functions on the fantasy that MO teens are receiving all their messaging around sex from their Jewish schools and communities. The messaging these students receive tells them to refrain from sex and touching people of the opposite sex until marriage. This messaging can...
This project is comprised of primary source research on the field of semiconductor microscopy. We were interested in determining a more interdisciplinary application of this technology, as the most frequently cited applications are for defense purposes such as drug screening or infrared imaging. When we researched, we found that these...
According to the principle of free fall, only gravity acts upon an object in midair. However, as with all scientific principles, free fall plays out differently in practice. In my experiment, I first tested to see the effect of changing the glycerol weight-percentage of a drop of glycerol-water on its...
In humans, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is co-morbid with major depressive disorder. Individuals who are exposed to stress prior to a traumatic event have an increased likelihood of developing PTSD. To study this increased vulnerability, a rat model was developed using the Stress Enhanced Fear Learning (SEFL) paradigm. This study...
"The goal of our research has been to create software that extends the benefits of virtual reality
(VR) to mathematics education. We report on the design and evaluation of a VR application meant
to support students’ reasoning about objects in three-dimensional (3D) coordinate systems and to
explore the possibilities of...
Artificial agent development is motivated by the dream of making machines perform undesirable labor instead of humans. To replace humans in undesirable labor, it follows that the machines should not engage in actions that will lead to devastating consequences. They should be “moral” artificial agents. In my paper, I deal...
Research has found that both schizophrenia populations and populations at clinical high risk for psychosis show alterations in facial affect expressivity, specifically blunting. However, it is unknown whether these alterations occur prior to onset, or whether they develop as a consequence of psychosis onset processes. The current study sought to...
The study of local adaptation in plants is critical for understanding the evolution of traits that contribute to survival in a dynamic environment, the genes underlying them, and the general process of adaptation. However, in the study of natural, non-model plant species, population-level whole-genome sampling is not always feasible and...
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) affects over 422 million people worldwide. Within their multi-payer healthcare system, Germany has used standardized, evidence-based interventions called Disease Management Programs (“DMP”s) to manage T2D since 2002. Studies have shown markedly improved health care delivery and health outcomes, including reduced incidence of diabetic secondary complications, decreasing...
The study of local adaptation in plants is critical for understanding the evolution of traits that contribute to survival in a dynamic environment, the genes underlying them, and the general process of adaptation. However, in the study of natural, non-model plant species, population-level whole-genome sampling is not always feasible and...
The decision to breastfeed or formula feed is a largely contested one by mothers, healthcare administrators, and politicians. Yet, research suggests that both breastfeeding and formula feeding are healthy ways to provide nourishment to newborn babies. Considering this, I sought to analyze why this decision is such a site of...
Situated in the heart of urban Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (1976) stands as a monument to the eponymous first president of the Republic of China (ROC). Consisting of a main memorial hall, opera theater, Western concert hall, and surrounding gardens, the memorial complex was constructed...
This study reports on the results of a psychosocial questionnaire survey of professional symphonic musicians in the United States. The response rate was 12.36% (n= 395) and the sample was members of the International Conference of Symphonic and Opera Musicians (ICSOM) which is a conglomerate of the top 50 orchestras...
The theorists who developed Social Justice Education (SJE) claim that its goals are: to critically analyze how oppression operates on an individual, cultural, and institutional level, to harness empathy and respect for others, and, ultimately, to commit to working for lasting change. However, the literature lacks research on how to...
On college campuses, one in five women will experience sexual assault in some capacity over the course of their undergraduate experience. College men in fraternities are three times more likely to commit sexually assaultive acts than non-Greek students. Despite pervasive knowledge that fraternity members are often involved in rape on...
Distance learning has increased its presence in academia, and there is a growing trend among higher education music schools to utilize distance learning in tandem with a traditional curriculum. Many instrumental pedagogues do not understand the benefits even though distance learning has been used for close to twenty years in...
Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels are expressed in the heart and central nervous system where they regulate membrane excitability. Recently, inhibiting HCN channels in the hippocampus has been identified as a possible therapeutic intervention for the treatment of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). However, based on the high expression level of...
Advances in biosensor engineering have enabled the design of programmable molecular systems to detect a range of pathogens, nucleic acids, and chemicals. Here, we engineer and field-test a biosensor for fluoride, a major groundwater contaminant of global concern. The sensor consists of a cell-free system containing a DNA template that...
This dissertation explores topics in information economics. A particular focus in this dissertation is how competition affects incentives for information acquisition and information sharing between competitors. The first chapter studies a principal-agent setting where two principals compete for the services of one agent. The second chapter studies how competition in...
Drawing on over 400 legal decisions and other documentary materials, 40 semi-structured interviews with legal and scientific actors, and hundreds of hours of multi-sited ethnographic observation, I offer a fine-grained analysis of how expert evaluative practices become institutionalized in legal settings and result in divergent understandings of sexuality within the...
Using transcripts from Kansas State University Libraries’ (KSUL) virtual reference services (VRS), an experimental design was created to investigate the value and impact of different natural language processing techniques in the context of creating predictive models. Models were created to use only the first few word tokens supplied by VRS...
In the past few years, educators have been pushing for an integration of the arts into science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning in order to promote innovation and creativity in these fields. The present study explores the relation between creativity and STEM learning among young children in digital and...
The basal layer of human epidermis is composed of progenitor cells that both self-renew and differentiate to form stratified epidermal tissue; this process requires strict, dynamic regulation of gene expression. The Super Elongation Complex (SEC) regulates gene expression at the level of transcription elongation by releasing RNA Polymerase II from...
Bacterial microcompartments (BMCs) are proteinaceous organelles contained within prokaryotes used to facilitate reactions with increased efficiency, or to carry out reactions with intermediates that are harmful to the cell if released into the cytoplasm. Oftentimes, compartments are used to metabolize unique carbon sources, such as 1,2-propanediol (1,2-PD), whose metabolic pathway...
Free space optical communication (FSO) offers a promising solution to the “last mile” bottleneck of high-speed telecommunications. Data is encoded using a modulated laser and optically sent through the air to a receiving photodetector. Although this requires FSO systems to have direct line-of-sight between the emitter and receiver, this is...
Importance: Despite its efficacy, low tidal volume ventilation (LTVV) remains severely underutilized for patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Physician under-recognition of ARDS is a significant barrier to LTVV use. We propose a computational method that addresses some of the limitations of the current approaches to automated measurement of...
Harbor seal whiskers exhibit a tapering elliptical geometry uniquely suited to detect wakes (trails of water produced by upstream bodies) in ways a regular, tapering, or elliptical cylinder cannot. Previous studies into the matter have relied on idealized representations of the geometry the whiskers seem to take on and have...
Neural networks have revolutionized the field of computer vision since they provide solutions to a number of previously unsolved problems and achieve promising performance both in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. It has increasingly become recognized as providing high performance for applications as diverse as image classification, object detection,...
Recent advances in cell-free synthetic biology have spurred the development of in vitro molecular diagnostics that serve as effective alternatives to whole-cell biosensors. However, cell-free sensors for detecting manmade organic water contaminants such as pesticides are sparse, partially because few characterized natural biological sensors can directly detect such pollutants. Here,...
This file contains the supplementary online material that should accompany the paper "Defining and Measuring the Influences of GIS-Based
Instruction on Students’ STEM-Relevant Reasoning", published in Journal of Geography.
œRuling Sexuality: Law, Expertise, and the Making of Sexual Knowledge, brings together approaches from the sociologies of science, law, and sexualities to examine how the institutions of law and science jointly render sexual subjects legible to state institutions by measuring and categorizing sexualities. Through the comparative study of asylum claims...
Research on rat whiskers offers knowledge in neuroscience analogous to humans\' sense of touch and inspiration for efficient sensing robotics. The present work investigates the rat whisker system from a mechanical engineering perspective. First, key quasi-static and dynamic properties were quantified in Chapter 2 for individual whiskers in an array,...
Self-assembled monolayers as tunable chemical platforms broadly enable the study of the interaction between biological species and synthetic surfaces. Unlike small molecule chemistry where the freely diffusible product can interact with biological targets as an inhibitor or probe, interfacial chemistry allows for the controlled and multi-valent presentation of ligands to...
Spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) are a class of structures composed of spherical nanoparticle cores that are densely functionalized with radially oriented, linear DNA. SNAs exhibit properties that are distinct from those of their linear counterparts. These constructs can readily enter cells, evade nuclease degradation, and bind complementary DNA targets with...
Chapter 1: Product Market Strategy and Capital Structure: Evidence from Resale Price Maintenance', "This paper studies how a firm's pricing strategy affects its financial leverage. Retailers vary in pricing strategy, ranging from low markup (i.e., ``discount''), no frills retailers to high markup retailers that offer extensive service. The choice of...
The mammalian retina harbors more than 30 output channels, each playing a distinct role in processing visual images. A comprehensive understanding of the retinal code primarily relies on the functional knowledge of individual output neurons or retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). Despite recent technical advances in imaging and genetics, the function...
The objective of this work has been the design of new lubricant additives to target friction in the boundary lubrication regime and the hydrodynamic lubrication regime. Modern automotive engines operate at higher temperatures and speeds than ever before, and therefore require new and more effective lubricant additives to meet higher...
The ability to efficiently sense and respond to molecular signals is crucial for any organism's survival. Sensitive, specific and timely, microbial sensing systems provide an excellent starting point for the engineering of single-celled organisms to detect new molecules of human interest. Towards this goal, our lab pursues the engineering of...
My dissertation consists of two chapters that empirically study policy-related questions in applied microeconomics by using structural econometric modeling developed in industrial organization. In the first chapter, I study the welfare effects of a cap-and-trade program. I develop an equilibrium framework that incorporates forward-looking behavior and transaction costs. In the...
Patterning hierarchical structures in three-dimension (3D) has created nature-inspired functional surfaces. Gecko feet structures have been mimicked for reversible adhesive properties, shark skin for reduced drag, and lotus leaves for self-cleaning surfaces. Rational design of out-of-plane patterns across multiple length scales is crucial because each micro- and nano-feature has different...
One of the main drivers of complexity in a service system is the dependence between different random variables describing the system. For example, the queue lengths at different time points and the waiting times of different items (jobs, customers) in queue are strongly dependent. To reduce dependence-related complexities, it is...
Ultrafast, multi-dimensional coherent spectroscopy (MD-CS) has enabled scientists to probe fundamental aspects of chemical and photo-physical reactions on the nanosecond to femtosecond timescales. Using MD-CS, scientific contributions ranging from increased understanding of energy transfer in photosynthetic biological proteins to correlating the motion of electrons in semiconductors have been achieved. Concurrent...
Self-assembly is an important process in biological system to build various bioactive structures from small amphiphilic molecules. The structural versatility of amphiphile self- assembly also provides a unique platform for the design of functional soft materials with controllable structural features. However, little is known about the correlation between external stimuli,...
This dissertation presents research on solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) cathodes. It specifically covers two main topics: the electrochemical performance of porous two-phase composite cathodes, and the degradation mechanisms of porous single-phase mixed conducting cathodes. Current-voltage measurement and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy were used extensively to evaluate the cell performance. The...
RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) is a powerful high-throughput tool to profile transcriptional activities in cells. The observed read counts can be biased by various factors such that they do not accurately represent the true relative abundance of mRNA transcript abundance. Normalization is a critical step to ensure unbiased comparison of gene expression...
Biopolymers are polymers synthesized by living organisms. Depending on the monomeric units, biopolymers can be classified as polynucleotides (e.g., DNA and RNA), polypeptides (e.g., protein), polysaccharides (e.g., cellulose) and so on. Biopolymers not only play an essential role in nature, but also have wide applications in various fields of industry...
Mounting evidence indicates that known schizophrenia susceptibility genes regulate dendritic spines supports the model that perturbations in the molecular network underlying spine plasticity are crucially involved in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. The Rac1- and RhoA-guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) kalirin is critical for spine morphogenesis on cortical pyramidal neurons, and...
The thermodynamics and kinetics of electron transfer reactions in catalysis, energy conversion and storage, and plasmon-driven chemistry depend strongly on nanoscale electrode surface structure. To elucidate the structure-function relationships that determine nanoscale electrochemical reactivity, it is necessary to observe electron transfer reactions one molecule at a time. Over the past...
Raising California Together, an ethnography of licensed family childcare homes, contributes significant theoretical and empirical knowledge to our understanding of workfare, immigration and education institutions that shape the lives of the youngest subject-citizens and of those who care for them. I draw from more than three years of participant observation...