“The Vicarious Middle Ages” investigates the religious and cultural history of proxy penance where medieval Christians believed that it was possible to suffer on behalf of another person. In proxy penance, one person completed a penitential work for another, who received the spiritual benefit. From the third until the sixteenth...
Ross (2015) proposed a recovery theorem which uses prices of contingent claims to recover market’s expectations about underlying asset returns. His work relies on two assumptions. He assumes all uncertainty of the economy follows a finite state irreducible Markov chain and that the pricing kernel is transition independent. We first...
A failure to effectively regulate emotions elicited by a stressful life event contributes to symptoms of psychopathology. This regulatory failure may result from a deficit in executive control. For some individuals, executive control is impaired following stress exposure. Thus, for some individuals, when executive control is needed to regulate emotions...
SIRT3 is a mitochondrial-localized, NAD+-dependent deacetylase, tumor suppressor protein that functions to direct mitochondrial energy sensing and antioxidant proteins, increasing the efficiency of energy utilization, providing a redox balanced environment, and preventing aging-related diseases. One SIRT3 deacetylation target is NADP+-dependent isocitrate dehydrogenase 2 (IDH2), a key Krebs Cycle enzyme that...
Topoisomerases are ubiquitous enzymes involved in maintaining the supercoiled state of DNA in the cell. Structural, biophysical, and biochemical studies have provided an overall view of the mechanisms of DNA transformation by these enzymes, but many aspects, particularly their dynamic characteristics, remain poorly understood. Type IA topoisomerases change the topology...
This dissertation casts an aesthetic light on a selection of polyphonic novels from the Francophone contemporary canon. From the forms of feminism around the prophet of islam in Far from Madina by Assia Djebar, to the multiple voices of Créolité in Solibo Magnificent by Patrick Chamoiseau, to the forms of...
Simulation analytics treats stochastic simulation as data analytics for systems that do not yet exist, and extends traditional performance estimation and system optimization to uncovering underlying patterns and the key drivers and dynamics of system behavior by retaining the sample paths generated throughout simulation runs. My dissertation addresses two research...
This dissertation examines the situated and interactional nature of cultural experiences. Drawing on the literature on materiality, place, and space, the study analyzes how the physical and spatial characteristics of art galleries and art museums in Accra, Ghana, and Johannesburg, South Africa, lead people to engage with culture, and derive...
This dissertation focuses on exploring novel light steering and spectral engineering functionalities by flat optics, which includes photonic architectures of flat plasmonic metasurfaces, nanoparticle arrays, and thin film coatings. We have designed, fabricated and characterized different plasmonic metasurfaces (trapezoid-shaped antennas, nanorings/nanowires, etc.), nanoparticle arrays (single-layered or multilayered nanocubes and nanodisks),...
This dissertation develops a theory of rebel-state engagement during armed conflict that links these varied interactions to processes of institutional change in the state in which they unfold. Conventional wisdom portrays conflict zones as lacking institutions or pitting armed groups and states as competitors. Yet, this dissertation finds that rebels...