Currently, platelet transfusions, possessing profound clinical importance in the clotting of blood and healing of wounds, are entirely derived from human volunteer donors. This approach is limited by a 5-day shelf life, the potential risk of contamination, and differences in donor/recipient immunology. In vivo, platelets are formed when bone marrow...
Human activities have significantly increased riverine fluxes of carbon and nutrients. River-groundwater interactions facilitate retention and transformation of carbon and nutrients, and therefore profoundly impact carbon and nutrient cycles. From water column to the streambed, there is extensive variations in hydrodynamic transport and biogeochemical reaction over space and time. However,...
Biped robots utilize varying contact conditions and collision between their hands and feet and the walking and climbing surfaces in their environment to navigate their surroundings. This thesis presents a method for generating a continuum of gaits in a unified and extensible framework for physically-symmetric bipeds (bipeds with left and...
My dissertation is entitled “Post-civil Rights in the Hold: Neoliberalism, Race and the Politics of Historical Memory in the Deep South.” Post-civil rights discourse as a specific object of investigation has been under theorized, it has primarily been understood as a fundamental marker of racial progress in the United States...
In the near future, self-driving or driverless vehicles will operate without human control, enabling passengers to use their time in new ways. This opens up avenues for designing new interactions and experiences for individuals or groups traveling in an automobile. For that scenario, automobile manufacturers propose developing bigger and better...
This dissertation is a theoretically informed project that blends ethnographic and archival research methods to examine how queer and transgender performance artists deploy monstrosity as a tactic to question the terms by which LGBTQ people are granted or denied humanity in twenty-first century United States. While there is an abundance...
In this thesis, the optical gain mechanism in low-light conditions of phototransistor detectors (PTDs) is explored. An analytical formula is derived for the physical limit on the minimum number of detectable photons for PTDs. This formulation shows that the sensitivity of the PTD, regardless of its material composition, is related...
Though cognitive behavioral techniques are generally effective in the treatment of anxiety disorders, some people fail to benefit from exposure therapy or experience a return of fear after terminating exposure therapy. The burgeoning field of non-invasive brain stimulation provides a potential method of augmenting exposure therapy so that it is...
Metal nanoparticles supported on oxides are versatile systems. Ordered arrays of multimetallic nanoparticles of different sizes and surface densities can be synthesized using block copolymer-mediated nanolithography techniques. Metal nanoparticles on planar supports like silica can be utilized for catalyst discovery. Under reaction conditions and at high temperatures, the changing surface...
One of the most fascinating observations in the brain is that the neural connections change with experience and this phenomenon is called synaptic plasticity. Patterns of activity or neuromodulators can acutely induce changes in the synaptic strength in the brain. My thesis is focused on understanding the mechanisms of plasticity...