Metaphor is an important and pervasive phenomenon in language and cognition. The vast majority of psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on noun metaphors (e.g., That surgeon is a butcher; That lawyer is a shark), while relatively little has investigated the processing of verb metaphors (e.g., The car limped down...
Since Infrared radiation was discovered in 1800s, the research and applications on the infrared regime have been continually developed. The infrared detectors are the key technology in these applications and have been successfully used for medical imaging, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), free-space optical communication, target tracking and object identification...
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, causing devastating disabilities in both motor and non-motor domains following the degeneration of dopamine (DA) producing neurons of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc). Current treatments are highly limited in efficacy, and no established treatments currently exist to alter disease...
With the advancement of high-throughput sequencing technology, it has become much easier to extract gene expression data and to discover gene-disease associations more efficiently. Longitudinal gene expression data offer more insight into expression patterns for distinct patient groups compared to cross-sectional data. For instance, patients diagnosed with subclinical acute rejections...
This dissertation comprises three distinct essays in mechanism design and economic theory. The first chapter studies the welfare implications of consumer data ownership and voluntary disclosure. I formalize this setting within a model of mechanism design with evidence and construct the seller's optimal mechanism. Perhaps surprisingly, I find that allowing...
As our world is increasingly filled with data visualizations, having the skills to leverage data visualizations is essential for participation in society. Confident engagement with data visualizations is critical for being an educated member of society; however, research has shown that it is difficult for individuals to digest and gain...
Motivated by rhythms in the brain, we investigate the synchronization of noisy and all-to-all pulse-coupled oscillators. We consider a case where the oscillatory excursions are of varying amplitude and where only sufficiently large excursions result in the output pulses that drive the interactions between the oscillators. In the regime of...
This dissertation aims to understand the contribution of schools to reducing bullying behaviors and, in turn, to examine the benefits for students of attending a school that effectively reduces bullying. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to the literature on bullying by a) locating the school as a key environment...
Understanding the characteristics of interfaces between materials and solvent media such as structure, chemistry, and charge remains crucial to determining the properties and performance of numerous systems and technologies. This thesis focuses specifically on characterizing the interactions of water at oxide interfaces. A large collection of questions remains unanswered about...
In the Western Common Law tradition, legal decisions constrain and guide future cases involving the same legal issues. Although the legal academy disagrees about the specific nature of such precedential reasoning, including about the role of analogy in legal reasoning, there is ample evidence from cognitive science that analogical learning...