Complex fluids are ubiquitous, from natural materials to manufactured products. Understanding their behavior under flow is vital for engineering these materials. Extensional flow, despite being industrially relevant and often producing dominant impacts upon complex fluids, is an underserved topic compared to shear flow due to a lack of reliable apparatuses...
This dissertation develops a new framework and algorithms for statistical process control of stochastic textured surface data that have no distinct features other than stochastic characteristics that vary randomly (e.g., image data of textiles or material microstructures and surface metrology data of metal parts). All methods are general and nonparametric...
Polymer nanocomposites are a class of advanced materials comprised of soft polymer matrix and nano-filler inclusions. While it has been found qualitatively that enhancements of material properties could be achieved by dispersing inorganic nano-particles into organic polymer matrix, the intrinsic governing principles of such composite has not been thoroughly studied...
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...
The National Rifle Association (NRA) is much more politically powerful than we might expect it to be. Despite both shockingly high rates of gun violence and deep, durable public support for stricter rules on gun ownership, the NRA regularly defeats or weakens the content of gun control legislation. Its influence...
Interleukin 33 (IL-33) is a complex inflammatory cytokine with diverse functions. In the context of cancer development, depending on the model, the implementation and dosage, and the immune cells involved, IL-33 can elicit dramatically different outcomes. Recent studies, including our own, have explored definitive contributions of the adaptive immunity in...
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of nanoporous materials with highly tunable pore shape and chemistry. They are synthesized in a "building block" approach to form crystalline porous materials, which have been explored for diverse applications including gas storage and separations. Given the enormous size of the MOF design space,...
A stroke occurs when blood flow in the brain is impaired and often causes damage to corticospinal tract projections that control the muscles of the upper-extremity. Due to this damage, 50-70% of stroke survivors experience long-term upper-extremity functional deficits(Faria-Fortini, Michaelsen, Cassiano, & Teixeira-Salmela, 2011). These deficits result from motor impairments...
This dissertation investigates long-term biographies of seventeen small medieval settlements in the region of Hegranes, Skagafjörður, North Iceland, placing their creation, development, and reuse in the context of coupled social and environmental change. The individuals and households who lived at the Hegranes sites were at the nexus of both kinds...
Data mining is multidisciplinary process involving computer science, artificial intelli- gence, and machine learning. The aim of data mining is discovering knowledge from a vast amount of data. This process consists of a set of stages forming a pipeline. This pipeline process consists of multiple steps: 1) Finding the right...
Hybrid pixel detectors, comprising of pixelated sensors coupled to readout integrated circuits (ROICs) with complex in-pixel processing, are essential for many of today’s scientific instruments and imaging systems. Large-area detectors are required in a variety of systems: from detectors for synchrotron beamlines to telescopes for astronomy, which range from a...
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...
Blockchains are an exciting new type of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) distributed systems, which enable parties to transact directly, and maintain the record of said interactions in a distributed manner. A unique feature of blockchains is their ability to maintain a consensus without requiring knowledge on the number of participants, nor their...
In multiatomic systems, high applied pressures reduce interatomic contact distances. At pressures comparable to those inside planets, this relatively simple principle completely changes the guiding principles of chemistry and physics established at near-ambient conditions. High-pressure investigations of precisely how the laws of nature evolve in the gigapascal and megabar regime...
This dissertation explores two topics in macroeconomics related to aggregation assumptions and microfoundations. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the representative agent aggregation assumption in the context of open economies, using both an empirical as well as a theoretical approach. Chapter 3 on the other hand, deals with the microfoundations...
Plasmonic metasurfaces are leading the development of next-generation optical devices with unprecedented compactness and functionality. In contrast to bulk refractive optics, these planar surfaces manipulate light with rationally designed subwavelength building blocks. This thesis focus on how emerging materials and design methods advance the eld of metasurfaces. Chapter 1 reviews...
Chromatin, a complex nuclear structure comprised of DNA, histones, RNA, and other nuclear proteins, is one of the most critical components within the cell because it houses the genetic information and its organization regulates important cellular functions, such as transcription, replication, and repair. Its structural organization is well understood at...
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used widely and frequently in the clinical setting to image and diagnose patients. In addition to the anatomical scans that can be acquired using MRI, different kinds of physiological parameters, such as blood flow, can be obtained by utilizing pulse sequence, scan protocol and post-processing....
Polymer nanocomposites are a designer class of materials where nanoscale particles, functional chemistry and polymer matrix combine to yield unprecedented combinations of superior physical properties. While well-defined data representation and quantitative models have been developed in material science domains such as metallic alloys, polymer nanocomposites have remained a largely untouched...
The brain is known to shrink in normal aging or neurodegenerative disease and yet the neurobiological underpinnings of the cortical atrophy remain elusive. The structural changes that represent cortical atrophy can be measured during life using the reliable and quantitative method known as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Primary progressive aphasia...
Electrochemical reactions on the nanoscale play a pivotal role in a variety of areas, including electrocatalysis, energy conversion and storage, corrosion prevention, plasmon driven chemistry, and so forth. An in-depth knowledge of how site-specific compositions and morphologies locally affect the electron transfer kinetics will greatly benefit the design of catalysts,...
Phenotypic variation is the functional unit that evolution acts upon and is the main contributor to the diversity of species. The phenotype of an individual is shaped by genetic and environmental factors. These genetic and environmental factors contribute to biomedically relevant traits such as an individual’s susceptibility to disease and...
Women living with human immunodeficiency virus (WLWH) have unique health challenges. Understanding psychological strengths that help WLWH manage their disease and improve health outcomes could reduce disease burden. Although spirituality, a multidimensional construct that includes a search for meaning and purpose, connection with a higher dimension, and experiences and feelings...
I investigate the spillover effects of disclosure requirements imposed by state governments on oil and gas companies operating in the state. Recently, several state governments have begun requiring companies to publicly disclose information about chemicals used in their fracking operations. The chemicals can result in land and water contamination, thereby...
The Picard group is an important invariant of the $K(n)$-local category. If the prime $p$ is relatively large compared to the height $n$, the Picard group of the $K(n)$-local category is purely algebraic. In \cref{chapter:finitetype}, we describe the necessary and sufficient numerical condition when an element $X$ in the Picard...
Contest theory is an area of game theory that studies environments in which agents make sunk investments in order to get a prize. These investments could be money, effort, time, etc. Contest theory is used to study a wide range of applications, like political contests, research and development, advertisement campaigns,...
DNA topoisomerases are enzymes present in all domains of life. They are responsible for maintaining the topological state of DNA in cells through supercoiling, relaxation, catenation, decatenation, knotting and unknotting. DNA gyrase is a unique topoisomerase, present mainly in bacteria that can introduce negative supercoils into DNA utilizing ATP hydrolysis....
This thesis consists of three papers studying applied microeconomics and economic history. The chapters are broadly organized around two different topics: the political effects of media and the consequences of disruption to human capital. In the first chapter, joint with Susan Ou, we study the role of media in the...
Many industrial fluid flow problems involve the interaction between heavy, rigid objects and one or more fluid phases. For several decades, there has been a vested interest in simulating these fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems in order to improve engineering design processes. However, numerical simulations of these problems can be challenging...
Political leaders often engage in open fights for recognition, announcing that some crucial element of their state’s identity, status, or history, has not been properly acknowledged and respected in the conduct of diplomacy. Among international relations scholars, these instances are usually ascribed to the fact that states, like individuals, need...
Slow-wave sleep (SWS) is important for overall health since it affects many physiological pathways from cardio-metabolic health to cognitive function. Sleep and autonomic nervous system (ANS) functioning are closely coupled at anatomical and physiological levels. Sleep-related changes in ANS function are likely the main pathway through which SWS affects many...
Power and energy are becoming the limiting factors for computer designs and systems, and energy efficient functional units are getting more popular in such systems. Some of the design methodologies that are getting more common include voltage overscaling and employing imprecise instructions. These functional units need to be characterized correctly...
Phononic crystals and acoustic metamaterials exhibit unique wave propagation properties rising from periodicity and the heterogeneity in material/structure design. One important property is tailoring the propagation of elastic waves from band gaps in such systems – frequency ranges of strong wave attenuation. This thesis first explores the idea of gaining...
What explains the difference in the timing of female enfranchisement in Latin America? Despite constituting an essential process of inclusion for democratization, no comparative analysis of the region has sought to explain the differences observed in the timing of reform. Common explanations – developed for other regions – concerning the...
Granular materials are ubiquitous elements of our daily life, representing some of the most manipulated materials on Earth and playing a key role in disparate fields of science and engineering. Considerable research has been performed to explore the factors that impact the mechanical behavior of granular materials. Within this context,...
The theory of how humans and machines control and communicate with each other is at the core of the scientific field known as Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Researchers in this sub-discipline of robotics are therefore particularly interested in developing methods to chuppahreduce the inherent friction in this communication and control channel....
This thesis describes fundamental photophysical studies of quantum dot (QD)-molecule complexes, aimed at discovering strategies for enhancing the efficiency of QD-photocatalyzed and QD-sensitized multi-electron catalytic reactions, for the purpose of solar fuels production. Photosensitization of molecular catalysts that are active for reactions such as the reduction of carbon dioxide or...
Store-operated Ca2+ entry (SOCE) is a principal mechanism for generating cellular Ca2+ signals. Store-operated Ca2+ release-activated Ca2+ (CRAC) channels serve an essential role in generating Ca2+ elevations needed for transcriptional, enzymatic, and secretory effector cascades in many cell types. CRAC channels, comprised of the ER Ca2+ sensor STIM and the...
In monolayer materials with a honeycomb-like lattice an emergent degree of freedom arises for charge carriers corresponding to their valley index. Due to spatial inversion asymmetry and the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling, this valley degree of freedom strongly affects the optoelectronic properties of carriers in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides...
Platelets are circulating anucleate discs derived from megakaryocytes, and play major roles in hemostasis, inflammation, thrombosis, and vascular biology. Multi-phase culture systems for inducing in vitro platelet production from mature megakaryocytes have been explored to allow progenitor expansion, megakaryocyte maturation, and promotion of platelet formation and shedding. In this thesis,...
Abstract The overall purpose of this paper is to reconsider the narrative usage and function of a literary phenomenon like ‘opposition/tension/contradiction.’ Throughout my analysis of Alain-Robbe Grillet’s La jalousie, Chloé Delaume’s J’habite dans la television and Jean Genet’s Le Balcon I was focused on investigating the use of this phenomenon...
This dissertation traces the rise and the demise of the Amerasian in the years roughly set by the Amerasian Immigration Act (1950-1982). I argue that an Amerasian is not simply an individual fathered by a US servicemen in Asia, nor is it just a racial descriptor used to term mixed...
Transcription is tightly regulated to ensure genes are appropriately expressed both temporally and spatially. This tight regulation governs various processes within the cell, such as differentiation and cell identity, cellular maintenance, and dynamic responses to external signals. Transcription factors (TFs) coordinate these various gene programs and in particular, are key...
This dissertation presents two projects with the goal of understanding how to quantitatively describe biological data, particularly data that is highly dynamic. The first study presents an improved quantitative tool for the analysis of particulate trajectories. Particulate trajectory data appears in several different biological contexts, and the majority of analyses...
Endothelial cells (ECs) require glycolysis for proliferation and migration during angiogenesis; however, the necessity for the mitochondrial respiratory chain during angiogenesis is not known. In this study, we report that inhibition of respiratory chain complex III impairs proliferation, but not migration of ECs in vitro by decreasing the NAD+/NADH ratio....
Herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE) is a rare and severely debilitating life-threatening disease caused by herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) infection of the human central nervous system (CNS). The severe and often fatal outcomes of HSE contrast starkly with the more frequent and largely benign consequences of herpes labialis. Whole...
Rhythmic oscillations in the brain are widespread. Extracellular recordings of local field potentials (LFPs) using methods ranging from microelectrodes to scalp electroencephalography (EEG) have demonstrated that oscillatory dynamics play a vital role in operations such as network synchronization, sensory tuning and information packaging. Empirical and computational evidence suggest that these...
Biomass has the potential to be our country’s leading renewable source of energy. Specifically, fast pyrolysis is a promising method for the conversion of biomass to valuable fuels and chemicals. Given that fast pyrolysis has a residence time of about two seconds, computational methods are particularly useful in obtaining product...
Quantum technologies have the capability of greatly increasing the security of communication systems. Many components are required for a full quantum network including memory, repeaters, routers, and detectors. The efficiencies of quantum communication technologies suffer greatly due to their inherent sensitivity to loss. Low-loss propagation and high detection efficiency can...
Newcomers, or new members to organizations or professions, bring insights that are critical to the advancement of society. Yet newcomers often have low self-efficacy, or low beliefs in their abilities to achieve a task, which can impact performance and retention. Research suggests that self-efficacy can be developed through in-person social...
Economic and political processes are heavily intertwined. Political processes put constraints on economic activity while economic development influences the way the political system operates. This interconnection is especially tight in developing countries and transition economies with less secure property rights, less stable political institutions, and more rapid economic changes. In...
Cancer progression is a complex process, leading to metastatic spread of primary tumor cells that colonize distant vital organs and mortality if not stopped. Since clinical strategies to stem this progression are still being developed, it is of great importance to detect this end stage metastatic spread as early as...
End-stage renal disease, or kidney failure, can result from acute kidney injury or sustained kidney damage in the form of chronic kidney disease. As the prevalence of end-stage renal disease continues to rise, the gold-standard treatment—kidney transplantation—is increasingly restricted by the shortage of transplantable donor kidneys. Bioengineered kidney tissues may...
The structural aspects of biological systems are tightly paired with their functions. This understanding has been demonstrated over a broad range of length scales, spanning the ultrastructure of a cell to the macroscopic architecture of organs. Connecting structure and function relies on the integration of physical and biological sciences to...
Organic semiconductors are an active area of research with great promise for delivering next generation electronics and clean energy technologies. As the field matures, understanding the connection between molecular structure, materials’ properties, and device performance will be critical in finding the right material for an intended application. An effective strategy...
Supported transition metal oxides are an important class of catalysts with a wide range of industrially relevant applications. However, commonly used synthesis techniques to prepare these catalysts often result in a complex mixture of surface species. This inhomogeneity makes it difficult to understand what specific structures might be responsible for...
This dissertation combines perspectives from social networks and teams research to advance understanding of team self-assembly. Across three substantive chapters, I explore team member search behaviors and invitation patterns in contexts where individuals exercise agency to select team members. First, I consider the search for team members in a social...
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) encompasses a group of neurodegenerative disorders characterized by cognitive and behavioral impairments. Heterozygous mutations in progranulin (PGRN) cause familial FTD and result in decreased PGRN expression, while homozygous mutations result in complete loss of PGRN expression and lead to the neurodegenerative lysosomal storage disorder neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis...
Responsiveness -- the time it takes for a message recipient to respond to a message -- has long been of interest to scholars in the fields of computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction. It has been hypothesized that responsiveness is used to signal emotional information, and many empirical studies have demonstrated...
Abstract The work presented in this dissertation addresses three broad areas of video signal processing: video transmission, motion estimation and error concealment. In the first category, focused on the source-side, we present two machine learning models for efficient content-aware resource allocation and packet prioritization for video transmission over shared/constrained, lossy...
Glioblastoma (GBM) is a highly malignant brain tumor that accounts for the most commonly diagnosed type of primary brain tumors in adults. It has a poor prognosis of only 15 months from the time of diagnosis. The gold standard therapy regimen consists of radiotherapy and the chemotherapeutic temozolomide. Both of...
This dissertation focuses on two topics: macroeconomic implications of consumer inertia, and sovereign debt. In Chapter 1, I explore the role of consumer inertia---persistence in households' consumption choices---as a driver of the rise in corporate profits and decline in the share of young firms in the US economy during the...
Microfluidic technologies enable multi-tissue culture and precise control of media exchange and therefore have significant potential to create more complex in vitro models of reproductive systems, including endocrine cycles. However, microfluidic technologies have largely been applied to gamete-level culture in reproductive biology, with very little progress in organ-level culture. Herein...
Pathogenic bacteria scavenge essential nutrients including metals, amino acids and peptides to survive within the hostile host environment. Bacteria utilize ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters, powered by the energy of ATP hydrolysis, to move substrates across cellular membranes. The substrate-binding protein (SBP) shuttles substrate in the periplasm and directs the substrate...
A functional democratic society rests on the premise that the mass public holds clear preferences for policies, candidates, and more. To arrive at these preferences, many citizens rely on their social identities, making political decisions based on what they see as benefitting the groups to which they belong. They may...
In an 18-month ethnographic and interview-based study of Afghan Americans in the greater Bay Area, California, I explore the relationship of culture and religion amongst this refugee community. As a majority of refugees in the past decade have been Muslim, it is important to understand what their process of integration...
Methylation of histone 3 lysine 4 (H3K4) catalyzed by the COMPASS family of lysine methyltransferases is universally associated with eukaryotic transcription. However, despite thousands of published studies examining the deposition, dynamics, and genomic positions of this chromatin modification, there is no clear consensus as to the molecular function or biological...
Oocyte meiosis is a specialized, but error prone, form of cell division that is poorly understood. Errors during meiosis often result in aneuploidy, or abnormal chromosome number, that impacts human health and fertility. Aneuploidy is the leading cause of miscarriages and birth defects, such as Down's syndrome in which cells...
Visual matching is an important and fruitful research topic in computer vision area. Starting from the early face recognition, super-resolution, object tracking to the most recent person re-identification, cross-model retrieval, visual matching plays an important role as the core component in these tasks. The quality of visual matching directly and...
Emotion perception is multisensory and involves decoding and integrating input from both visual and auditory modalities. This dissertation investigates the influence of cultural and linguistic experience on multisensory perception of emotion. Experiment 1 examines the effect of cultural background on modality bias (i.e., the amount of influence a modality exerts...
The study of the translucent interstellar medium (ISM) is important for understanding the behavior of the ISM as it transitions from hot, tenuous gas to dense, star-forming regions. This regime is know to be associated with the initial formation of persistent molecular material, and thus represents the first stages of...
The rapid development of flexible electronics enables a huge amount of bio-integrated applications with advantages of the mechanical compliance, stretchability and comformability of the devices. My dissertation further advances this area by a series of projects, which include designing and optimizing novel compliant structures, proposing novel elastomer encapsulation process for...
Successfully grappling with the widespread linguistic variation of daily life requires speakers to adapt to systematic variation in the environment while discarding incidental variation, based on their prior experience. In the case of phonotactics, speakers’ prior experience is that talkers who differ in their language background are likely to vary...
Wastewater and bioreactors in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are reservoirs for antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), which can pass through treatment processes and migrate into the environment as they are released in effluent. WWTPs harbor a variety of ARGs that can be spread by horizontal gene transfer facilitated by mobile genetic...
Store-operated Ca2+ entry through Orai1 channels mediate transcriptional, proliferative, and effector cell programs in many cells and are activated through a unique inside-out mechanism involving binding of the endoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ sensor, STIM1, to cytoplasmic sites on Orai1. Mutations in Orai1 that block channel activation or evoke constitutive channel activity...
This dissertation explores hip-hop as a moral philosophy in action; a set of aesthetic and ethical values that manifest in young people’s perspective about the good life. Hip-hop is an arts movement of rap, movement, and style originating among Black and Latinx youth in the South Bronx during the late...
Numerous photophysical processes in both natural and artificial systems are dictated by the interaction between chromophores. For example, in photosynthesis, light is absorbed by an antenna complex composed of an array of chlorophyll chromophores that collectively transfer the energy to the reaction center where interactions between a series of redox...
Social comparison is a ubiquitous part of social life. People compare themselves to others to establish and maintain a sense of social hierarchy and structure, to develop and sustain interpersonal relationships, and even to help understand themselves. In this dissertation, I focus on how the referent of social comparison –...
The critical importance of alternative mRNA splicing and the RNA binding proteins that orchestrate this essential layer of post-transcriptional gene regulation is increasingly recognized in gene regulatory programs. We and others have shown that alternative splicing plays a causal role during the Epithelial-Mesenchymal transition, a cell-developmental program that is hijacked...
Viral Verses investigates the influence of social media publication on the relationship between poetry and community formation in southeastern Africa. As more artists in the global South reach wider audiences through online publication, poetic form has shifted to reflect social media’s aesthetic norms, embracing urgency, contemporaneity, and populism. Digital media...
Increasing industrialization and the resulting negative environmental impacts highlight the need to develop alternative renewable energy sources. The Sun is a massive source and organic solar cells are a growing field of study. As new materials are synthesized, the efficiencies of organic solar cells continue to grow, but without an...
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a powerful analytical technique that can detect single molecules and simultaneously obtain structural information. When an analyte molecule binds to a nanostructured noble metal surface, the otherwise weak normal Raman signal is enhanced by as much as a factor of 108. This makes SERS the...