Solvent-rich polyelectrolyte complexes display a wide range of rheological properties, when different environmental parameters are applied. Due to the low energy barrier of the complexation (~10 kT), these materials possess tunable properties, with the states of these materials varying from Newtonian liquids to very tough hydrogels. This thesis aims to...
NSD2, a histone methyltransferase specific for methylation of histone 3 lysine 36 (H3K36), exhibits a glutamic acid to lysine mutation at residue 1099 (E1099K) in childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL). Cells harboring this mutation can become the predominant clone in relapsing disease. We studied the effects of this mutant enzyme...
Some of the oldest drugs targeting metabolism are the antifolates such as aminopterin and methotrexate (MTX). MTX started being used in the 1950s to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Aminopterin and MTX both target one carbon metabolism and inhibit proliferation of cells. MTX was a potent inhibitor of inflammation, because it prevented...
Connecting structure and function in nanoscale engineered materials and devices relies on the analysis of the fundamental arrangement of matter, frequently under dynamic conditions. The demand to image structures at fundamental length scales has touched inorganic materials, biology, and frequently hybrid hard/soft materials with unique phenomena driven by heterogeneous components....
Cancer radiation therapy relies on optimized treatment plans whose quality assessment is judged by dosimetric planning aims. It is computationally prohibitive to incorporate the planning aims into the optimization models. Therefore, there exists a disconnect between the two steps of (1) optimizing a plan and (2) evaluating the optimized plan,...
In this dissertation, we study different machine learning algorithms including probabilistic, sparse and deep learning based models applied to multi-sensory datasets. In many machine learning problems, samples are collected from more than one source or modality. Also, various feature extraction methods can be used to provide more than one set...
Children are known to be curious and persistent question-askers. The pervasiveness of voice interfaces represents an opportunity for children who are still learning to read and write to independently search the Internet by directing questions at conversational agents such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and the Google Assistant. However, little...
The Controlled, Site-Isolated Synthesis of Polyelemental Nanostructures in Polymer Nanoreactors Pengcheng Chen Polyelemental nanoparticles are an attractive class of materials due to their potential applications, which span the fields of catalysis, plasmonics, electronics, magnetics, targeted drug delivery, and bio-imaging. However, conventional synthetic methods for such structures are limited, especially when...
This thesis focuses on the development of a cochlear implant (CI) that uses photons to stimulate surviving auditory neurons in severe-to-profoundly deaf individuals. The benefit of optical over electrical stimulation is its spatial selectivity with the potential to create significantly more independent channels to encode acoustic information and likely enhances...
Conventional methods in industrial organization assume that firms are strategically sophisticated and set prices as best responses to their competitive environment. In the first two chapters of this dissertation, I use a detailed dataset of retail and wholesale prices from the newly legalized cannabis industry in Washington state to show...