This thesis presents methods to improve the manipulation capabilities of robots. People and animals can effectively handle objects of many shapes, sizes, weights, and materials using a variety of manipulation primitives such as grasping, pushing, sliding, tipping, rolling, and throwing. In contrast, most robots manipulate objects by pick-and-place. Restricting robots...
Sequential batches of time-evolving data for a set of persistent identifiable entities (e.g. online shopping behavior by month for a customer ID, or economic figures by year for a collection of countries) can exhibit temporal shifts in their underlying clustering structure. Methods for recovering this evolutionary clustering structure exploit natural...
The protein homeostasis (proteostasis) network, a critical cytoprotective system that restores homeostasis in response to molecular stress, comprises distinct pathways, including the heat-shock response, unfolded protein response, oxidative stress response, and autophagy. These distinct pathways are all co-opted by tumor cells to cope with cancer-associated stress, and their activation in...
Over the past 15 years, there have been significant developments in expanding the singlet fission (SF) library and understanding the SF mechanism. SF has been a topic of interest in recent years due to its potential applications in organic photovoltaics. During SF, a singlet exciton energetically down-converts into two triplet...
Part I: Design of Photo-Responsive Molecules towards Biomedical ApplicationsThe use of light to control systems provides numerous advantages such as spatiotemporal precision, non-invasive penetration, and precise energy input. Specifically, molecules that undergo photoinduced cleavage, photoremovable protecting groups (PPGs) have emerged as an active area of research due to their broad...
The pp → W + W − process is important as it allows the test of electroweak theory. Mea-surements of this processes have lead to reduced uncertainties on many other processes one
of which being the Higgs. There have been discrepancies between predicted and measured
cross-section values for pp →...
ABSTRACT Genome Mining in Actinobacteria via a Hybrid-Omics Discovery Platform James Hudson Tryon Natural products isolated from Actinobacteria are a vital source of medicines, agrochemicals, and commodity chemicals. The traditional, activity-driven fractionation pipelines that provided access to many of these natural products have delivered diminishing returns in recent decades. However,...
This thesis studies inter vivos transfers in twenty European countries during the years 2004 to 2017. Inter vivos transfers are transfers made during the lifetime of the donor and the donee. They participate in the intergenerational transmission of inequality and they are an expression of familial values of solidarity and...
The hippocampus has a well-established role in episodic memory and serves as a hub in a network of distributed brain regions (i.e., hippocampal-cortical network; HCN). Theta-band (4-8 Hz) neural activity recorded in the hippocampus have been associated with memory processing, and synchronized theta oscillations among the hippocampus and HCN regions...
Plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) is an essential mediator of senescence and a potential therapeutic target for preventing aging-related pathologies. Cellular Senescence is associated with organismal aging and related pathologies. In our study, we investigate the efficacies of PAI-1 inhibitors in both in vitro and in vivo models of homocysteine...