This dissertation contains four essays. The first essay, Strategically Giving Service: The Effect of Real-Time Information on Service Efficiency, analyzes the impact of the increased availability of real-time information on the behavior of strategic agents and the implications of this phenomenon for service efficiency using data from one of the...
Localized corrosion involves the selective attack of a metal at a small, exposed site. This can be particularly devastating for load-bearing structures like bridges, which can fail catastrophically even with very little material loss. Unfortunately, such corrosion is very hard to prevent, predict, and detect. Corrosion can be prevented by...
Records of temperature and precipitation during Quaternary interglacial periods on Greenland are notably scarce, limiting assessment of the magnitude and rate of local environmental response to orbitally-driven Arctic warming. It is largely unknown if warming across Greenland was spatially uniform through past interglacials, and if warming was accompanied by major...
In solar energy conversion ranging from artificial photosynthesis to photocatalysis, transition metal complexes (TMC) are essential building blocks due to several attractive properties: intense absorption within the solar spectrum, presence of charge-transfer excited state, and substrate binding capability through coordination geometry changes. In order to gain insight into controlling solar...
Proteins represent a critical class of biomolecules, universally employed by all living organisms to fulfill essential structural, functional, and enzymatic roles necessary to support life. In nature, these polymers are composed generally of twenty natural amino acid (AA) building blocks, which can be modified with covalent adducts known as post-translational...
This dissertation researches the Cenomanian, Turonian, and Coniacian Stages (100.5 - 86.3 Ma) of the Cretaceous Period, a geologic interval of interest due to its extreme global warmth, iconic faunas, and oceanic anoxic events (OAEs). Five globally dispersed geochemical and stratigraphic case studies reconstruct interactions of the mid-Cretaceous carbon cycle...
Organic semiconductors have shown great promise for optoelectronic applications, particularly solar photovoltaics. Critical to their success is the ability to understand and manipulate the relationship between molecular structure and bulk properties. Substantial progress on understanding structural influences on electronic properties has been made for the conjugated polymers and small molecules...
In this paper, we study the basic locus in the fiber at $p$ of a certain unitary Shimura variety with a certain parahoric level structure. The basic locus $\widehat{\CM^{ss}}$ is uniformized by a formal scheme $\CN$ which is called Rapoport-Zink space. We show that the irreducible components of the induced...
The study of magnetic frustration has attracted considerable interest in the fields of materials science and condensed matter physics. Artificial Spin Ices (ASIs) are the primary systems in which magnetic frustration has been studied. To date, most studies on ASIs have been on fully periodic systems. In this thesis, we...
Owing to policy action as well as continued cost declines, solar and wind resources are projected to play a central role in many future electricity systems. Since the technological characteristics and cost structures of these resources differ significantly from traditional thermal technologies, many have questioned how market designs will need...