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,...