Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have gained more and more attention from researchers, manufacturers, and transportation experts. When AVs become available to the public, they are expected to dramatically alter the transportation system as we know it, posing critical questions such as: How will the road network react to this change? How...
Transport along and across the grain boundaries of solid-state electrolytes has implications for a broad range of materials and in an equally broad range of technologies. Over the past 2-3 decades, a substantial body of literature has been developed to explain grain boundary transport properties within the context of space...
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous disorder defined by core deficits in social communication as well as the presence of restricted interests and repetitive behaviors, including sensory processing atypicalities. Individuals with ASD also have atypicalities in integration of multiple sensory modalities (i.e., sensory integration), which are hypothesized to underlie...
Drawing from the data I collected through nine months (between 2014 to 2017) of participant observations, 120 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, and archival work, the project explores the tactics that Chechen and Dagestani journalists utilize to resist state pressure and circumvent state-imposed censorship. Specifically, I explicate how these regional journalists in...
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the dance makerspace, a learning environment designed to support STEM engagement through making and embodied experience for a group of African American youth dancers. It looks at how participants in a 4-week summer camp program at an urban creative arts center-turned-makerspace, constructed embodied...
Drawing on archival research and a new attention to literary form, Sion’s Muse argues that the religious poetry of the English Reformation decisively constituted new modes of devotional affect for laypeople. At the beginning of the English Reformation, the psalm translator Miles Coverdale wrote, “Would God that our minstrels had...
Economic inequality has reached historically high levels in both the United States and in the world. The research literature in sociology and political science has long shown that individuals tend to be very persistent in their views on the determinants of economic success, although these views may be formed on...
Neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) commonly involve the accumulation and aggregation of neurotoxic proteins that impair and ultimately destroy specific neurons. Considerable evidence from human and animal studies indicates that many NDs show disrupted circadian and sleep as symptoms. Yet little is known about the molecular mechanisms by which genes cause NDs...
Dystonia is a movement disorder characterized by involuntary and repetitive co-contractions of the agonist and antagonist muscles. Dystonia 6 (DYT6) is an autosomal dominant dystonia caused by loss of function mutations in the zinc finger transcription factor THAP1. I have generated Thap1 knock-out mice with a view to understanding its...
The Brink-Schwarz superparticle is a one-dimensional analogue of the Green-Schwarz superstring. In this thesis, we use the Batalin-Vilkovisky formalism to study the superparticle. After proving a vanishing result for its Batalin-Vilkovisky cohomology, we explain the sense in which the superparticle exhibits general covariance in the world-line. Using techniques from rational...