Cancer is a top leading cause of deaths worldwide, among which pancreatic cancer and liver cancer are top leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Despite recent developments in cancer treatment, pancreatic and liver cancers still have a high mortality and low life expectancy, especially when diagnosed at advanced stages. Earlier cancer...
This dissertation studies three aspects of healthcare market regulation.
Chapter 1 studies the optimal design of quality scores for health insurance plans. Regulators often generate quality scores to help consumers with limited information about product quality, as in schooling, healthcare, and financial markets. When designing scores, regulators must not only...
With the ever-increasing demand for more complex functionalities and miniaturization of photonic devices, the design of such devices requires a whole new different approach, deviating from classical photonic design approaches. Conventionally, the design of a typical photonic device starts with a prior knowledge, intuition, and practical experience of specific behavior...
This paper studies the joint importance of dissemination and the structure of firms’ information networks in the pricing of value relevant financial information. I first document that disruptions to the dissemination of information on Twitter.com cause the market to react less to earnings news. Using ten staggered Twitter outages, which...
In the adult hippocampus of many mammalian species, populations of newborn dentate granule cells (DGCs) are continuously generated and undergo subsequent activity-dependent neuronal maturation and incorporation into the preexisting hippocampal circuitry. Increasing evidence has demonstrated that these young adult-born DGCs (abDGCs) participate in numerous cognitive and affective processes such as...
My research at northwestern with Dr. Christina Zelano focused on the human amygdala subnucleithat receive monosynaptic input from the olfactory bulb. Surprisingly little is known
about these brain regions, including their potential roles in olfactory and nonolfactory
processing. During my PhD, I completed three projects aimed at furthering our understanding...
This dissertation develops a causal theory of the relevant alternatives in a situation and applies this theory to the semantics and epistemology of conditionals, the theory of knowledge, and the epistemology of stereotyping. The first chapter presents the theory of causal models and causal alternatives. The second chapter applies this...
Missing data are often described as an annoyance in research and generally presented as a source of error or bias during analysis. To this end, methods that center on planned missingness are an underappreciated and powerful tool that can actually be used to improve data collection and the validity of...
For stochastic simulation optimization in a modern computing era, we introduce a new parallel framework for solving very large-scale problems using a ranking & selection (R&S) approach that simulates all systems or feasible solutions to provide a global statistical guarantee. We propose a parallel adaptive survivor selection (PASS) framework that...
Myoelectric pattern recognition-based upper limb prostheses measure electromyographic (EMG) signals from the residual limb and learn to identify muscle activity patterns that correspond to intended gestures. To train an accurate pattern recognition controller, it is essential that the training signals typify signals measured in real-world scenarios. When these conditions are...