Individuals within a species vary in complex phenotypes, such as responses to toxins. This drug-response variation causes patients who are treated with the same medicine to experience a range of side effects, ultimately decreasing the efficacy of some drugs. Particular genetic variants among individuals might contribute to differential drug responses,...
“Speculative Justice” asks how U.S. terrorism cases with numerous indicators of entrapment prevail in federal court despite case law designed to prevent these very policing practices. Drawing on a combination of two case studies, an original archive of digital court filings from over 250 defendants, and a collection of over...
The advent of next-generation sequencing technologies has greatly promoted the devel- opment of metagenomics, and the analysis of compositional dataset has a wide range of application in this area. Because of the constraint that the sum of species relative abun- dance being 1, many traditional and classical statistical methods cannot...
Annual age-adjusted breast cancer incidence rates in the United States have been static for decades. More recently, the development of massively parallel, high throughput DNA sequencing has enabled the cataloging of somatic mutations in cancer. Mutations are non-random and occur within sequence motifs. These motifs provide us with evidence to...
Currently, platelet transfusions, possessing profound clinical importance in the clotting of blood and healing of wounds, are entirely derived from human volunteer donors. This approach is limited by a 5-day shelf life, the potential risk of contamination, and differences in donor/recipient immunology. In vivo, platelets are formed when bone marrow...
Human activities have significantly increased riverine fluxes of carbon and nutrients. River-groundwater interactions facilitate retention and transformation of carbon and nutrients, and therefore profoundly impact carbon and nutrient cycles. From water column to the streambed, there is extensive variations in hydrodynamic transport and biogeochemical reaction over space and time. However,...
Biped robots utilize varying contact conditions and collision between their hands and feet and the walking and climbing surfaces in their environment to navigate their surroundings. This thesis presents a method for generating a continuum of gaits in a unified and extensible framework for physically-symmetric bipeds (bipeds with left and...
My dissertation is entitled “Post-civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South.” Post-civil rights discourse as a specific object of investigation has been under theorized, it has primarily been understood as a fundamental marker of racial progress in the United States...
In the near future, self-driving or driverless vehicles will operate without human control, enabling passengers to use their time in new ways. This opens up avenues for designing new interactions and experiences for individuals or groups traveling in an automobile. For that scenario, automobile manufacturers propose developing bigger and better...
This dissertation is a theoretically informed project that blends ethnographic and archival research methods to examine how queer and transgender performance artists deploy monstrosity as a tactic to question the terms by which LGBTQ people are granted or denied humanity in twenty-first century United States. While there is an abundance...