Over the last 35 years, discourse on "diversity" has become commonplace in many U.S. institutions. My research interrogates diversity as a racialized political project, focusing on the organizational uses of diversity discourse. I base my analysis on case studies of a public university, a Fortune 500 company, and a city...
Funding risky Research and Development (R&D) and New Product Development (NPD) projects is crucial for the long term health of any large company. Such funding decisions are multiobjective and are undertaken with sparse data. Therefore prescriptive or algorithmic solutions are not adopted by practitioners. Descriptive solutions that provide managerial insights...
The biological antagonism between copper and molybdenum, first observed when cattle developed copper deficiencies after ingesting high levels of plant-born molybdenum, is currently being used in humans to treat two conditions: Wilson's Disease as well as several forms of metastatic cancer. There is surprisingly little known about the interaction of...
As scientists use the tools of computational and complex systems theory to broaden science perspectives (e.g., Bar-Yam, 1997; Holland, 1995; Wolfram, 2002), so can middle-school students broaden their perspectives using appropriate tools. The goals of this dissertation project are to build, study, evaluate, and compare activities designed to foster both...
Understanding how contexts shape child development is a primary goal of human development research and theory. Child effects, or the influence of children on their own environment, may be a key process by which contexts and children interact to shape subsequent development. Yet, child effects have been under-studied in social...
This dissertation examines the ways in which performance forms articulate with urban identities in the context of transnational economic and cultural exchange. In this multisited historical ethnography, I explore the links between late 19th-century Ottoman and contemporary Turkish public spheres fractured by morality battles and political transformation. Both periods are...
Autism was originally described as involving an apparent lack of motivation for social interaction. Social motivation has not figured prominently in subsequent theorizing regarding this disorder. Instead, theory of mind deficits have taken center stage as a theory of autism. This is surprising because evidence of social motivation deficits appear...
The need for low-cost robust meso-scale "smart" robots (manipulators) that have no discrete parts (monolithic), no sensors ("self-sensing") and can be used in space-constrained systems, e.g., in microfactories, biomedical applications, etc., was the motivation for the current research. This study describes the design, fabrication and analysis of such a smart...
Ethicity, race and gender play an important role in labor markets; labor market outcomes such as hiring and compensation are very different across different social groups. These differentials are partly the result of differences in productivity and preferences and partly the result of discrimination. Chapter two uses an audit study...
The need for readily synthesized scaffold architectures to build monodisperse, high molar mass mobility modifiers or "drag-tags" in end-labeled free solution electrophoresis (ELFSE) led to the development of a novel class of multivalent molecular tools. Poly-N-substituted glycines (peptoids) were created with evenly spaced amino groups as branching points along the...