In the past few decades, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research has shown that nouns and verbs are processed differently in cognitively healthy individuals, and can be selectively impaired in aphasic individuals. However, this noun-verb dichotomy is poorly understood. This dissertation investigated cognitive and neural distinctions between nouns and verbs by studying...
How do households confront insecurity? This dissertation is a study of how households navigate insecurity as observed through struggles with homeownership and foreclosure. I discuss insecurity as a multi-dimensional experience that puts important resources at risk of loss and reaches into many areas of family life, including health, wealth, food,...
When we speak, we communicate not only with the words we choose, but also with the patterns of sound we create. As auditory experts, musicians are especially adept at making sense of sound, and accumulating research reveals that this extends to their processing of speech and other communication signals. Much...
I present research in systems of biomedical relevance consisting of agents near or com- prising surfaces using computational approaches. The research topics include formation of bacterial biofilms, behavior of charged species near stacked, like-charged lamellae, and the the conformational behavior of lamellae with strong self-attraction.
In chapter 2, I present...
This dissertation presents some development of the single molecular ion precision spectroscopy experiment including construction of the project, spectroscopy state readout, and production of ultracold molecules. Such molecular ion spectroscopy aims at testing fundamental physics such as probing the time variation of electron-proton mass ratio.
The theories and characterization of...
The properties of crystalline materials are controlled by their composition and by their structure, however, the structure of a crystal is only partly controlled by its composition. Development of specifically directed inorganic syntheses will require an understanding of the dynamics of crystal phase forming processes, especially those processes involved in...
Lattice models of fermions, bosons, and spins have long served to elucidate the essential physics of quantum phase transitions in a variety of systems. Generalizing such models to incorporate driving and dissipation has opened new vistas to investigate nonequilibrium phenomena and dissipative phase transitions in interacting many-body systems. Circuit- QED...
We argue that a country’s level of wealth inequality can be viewed as a reflection of the quality of its housing rental market. Using the ECB’s Household Finance and Consump- tion Survey (HFCS), we document that the aggregate homeownership rate and various measures of wealth inequality are negatively correlated across...
Mixing of granular materials is an important engineering process, and a very complex problem. In this thesis, I use granular mixing in a half-full biaxial spherical tumbler (BST), a spherical container that rotates sequentially about two orthogonal axes, to motivate the study of mixing with piecewise isometries (PWIs), a rich...
Amorphous In-Ga-Zn-O (a-IGZO) and other amorphous oxide semiconductors are attracting increasing attention from the display industry for their high electron mobility, ease of large-area manufacture, and potential for future flexible electronics. However, such amorphous materials often show instability under gate voltage bias, temperature, and illumination stress, with extremely slow relaxation...
The behavior of ions in liquids confined between macromolecules determines the outcome of many nanoscale assembly processes in synthetic and biological materials such as colloidal dispersions, emulsions, hydrogels, DNA, cell membranes, and proteins. Theoretically, the macromolecule-liquid boundary is often modeled as a dielectric interface and an important quantity of interest...
Tribological behaviors of lubricated interfaces are strongly affected by the interactions between mating surfaces and the rheological properties of the lubricant between them. This research aims to improve lubrication through two approaches: 1) designing surface textures for lubrication enhancement and adhesion reduction, and 2) developing lubricants of desired rheology.
Molecular...
Broadband networks are one of the most economically significant and fastest growing sectors of the Internet. Recent studies have shown that providing broadband Internet access is instrumental for social and economic development. Several governments, as well as the UN, have gone so far as to label broadband access a basic...
Even though renal blood flow accounts for nearly a quarter of cardiac output, the renal medulla operates in an environment with a scant supply of oxygen. The reason for this apparent discrepancy is thought to be threefold. Blood flow to the outer medulla is less than 50% of that received...
Glaucoma is a neurodegenerative blinding disease associated with increased intraocular pressure, which is caused by an increased resistance to the outflow of aqueous humor. Although the cause for increased resistance remains unknown, it has been associated with a decreased density of pores in the cells of the inner wall endothelium...
This dissertation develops and applies coupled marine sulfur and strontium cycle modeling to the highly dynamic Early Cretaceous demonstrating the value of increased model constraint from linkage of biogeochemical cycles with shared forcing factors. A foundation for this work is first provided by review of relevant geochemical, sedimentological, and paleontological...
Chronic pain is a prevalent and under-treated condition that remains a mystery to the medical system and a major social and economic problem. Unfortunately, there is no single treatment superior to others for relieving chronic pain. While recent scientific discoveries have provided us with functional and anatomical brain biomarkers of...
The FDA approvals of afatinib and ibrutinib in 2013 led to a heightened interest in cysteine-reactive covalent inhibitors. However, there are few methods to discover new cysteine-reactive inhibitors for enzymes for which reversible binding scaffolds are not known. To this end, we rationally designed a chemical system to attach a...
The striatum is a subcortical nucleus that regulates a number of complex activities ranging from voluntary action selection to the subconscious formation of habit. The coordination of these operations is mediated by the principle cells of the striatum, spiny projection neurons (SPNs). SPN activity is dictated by a confluence of...
E2F-2 is a Retinoblastoma (Rb)-regulated transcription factor induced during terminal erythroid maturation. Cyclin E-mediated Rb hyper-phosphorylation induces E2F transcriptional activator functions. E2F-2-loss causes reduced peripheral red blood cell (RBC) counts, without altering relative abundances of erythroblast subpopulations. To determine how E2F-2 regulates RBC production, we comprehensively studied erythropoiesis using knockout...
Spherical Nucleic Acids (SNAs) are nanoparticle bioconjugates that have found use in a wide-range of diagnostic and therapeutic applications. These nanomaterials are composed from inorganic or organic core nanoparticle scaffolds that are functionalized with a dense surface layer of nucleic acids (typically DNA or RNA) that are oriented in a...
Metalloporphyrins fulfill incredibly diverse chemical roles in biology and photocatalysis, where they act as photosensitizers, redox sites, substrate binding sites, and facilitators of long range electron transfer. Metalloporphyrin chemistry is uniquely tuneable through conformation and functionalization of the porphyrin ring, choice of metal, and interaction with the environment as these...
Gene expression is tightly regulated at the level of transcription through cooperation between cis-regulatory elements and trans-factors that bind to the regulatory elements. Together, these factors regulate the higher order chromatin structure which establishes domains that organize the genome and coordinate gene expression. However, the molecular mechanisms controlling transcription of...
The Introduction and Appendix i-A outline briefly the history of Titan exploration since its discovery by Christiaan Huygens in 1675 through the recent International Mission of Cassini- Huygens. It discusses the roles of some of the ten most abundant elements in the Universe (H, He, C, N, O, Ne, Mg,...
Worldwide, governments are beginning to take action to reduce anthropogenic CO2 emissions in order to mitigate the extent of global climate change. The largest fraction of global CO2 emission comes from electrical power generation, which is rapidly being converted to wind and solar installations. The intermittent nature of renewable resources...
In this dissertation, we present three empirical studies investigating the role of linguistic experience in the processing of probabilistic information during speech production, speech perception, and across modalities. In all studies, we focus on a particular type of probabilistic information related to the probability of a word in a discourse...
Science at the nanoscale poses several recurring difficulties. How can we control the assembly of objects too small for direct manipulation to be practical? How can we extend that control to extit{in vivo} systems so we can make use of nanotechnology in medicine? And how can we recreate the extraordinary...
By 2020, there will be more than 200 billion sensor enabled objects world-wide in the Internet of Things (IoT). The biggest challenge of future IoT is to provide ultra scalable wireless access for a massive number of devices. The goal of this thesis is to build up a model for...
Patients with the Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) clinical syndrome have diverse forms of neuropathology, one of which is the cellular and molecular abnormalities of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), at post mortem autopsy. Structural anatomical differences might aid in ante mortem differential diagnosis of neuropathology. The studies in this dissertation investigated one...
Despite major advances in the past half-century, significant issues such as educational inequality persist in American education. Accountability policy has become a central, resilient approach for addressing such issues. We see this in the ongoing enactment of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the recent adoption of...
Organic photovoltaic (OPV) solar cells aim to provide efficient, flexible and lightweight photovoltaics (PV) with simple processing and low-cost. Advances in device optimization, structural and molecular design, as well as mechanistic understanding have helped increase device efficiency and performance. Within the framework of active layer optimization, systematically improving bulk heterojunction...
Planets and planetary systems change in brightness as a function of time. These "light curves" can have several features, including transits where a planet blocks some starlight, eclipses where a star obscures a planet's flux, and rotational variations where a planet reflects light differently as it spins. One can measure...
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a powerful technique for characterizing molecular systems. It combines the chemical selectivity of vibrational spectroscopy with plasmonic signal enhancement to achieve the ultimate limit of detection--a single molecule. By overcoming the effects of ensemble averaging, single molecule SERS (SMSERS) probes distributions in molecular interactions and...
In 2012 the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) collected 19.7 fb-1of data at a center of mass energy of 8 TeV. This thesis presents two analyses focusing on the Z boson. The first is a search for the never before seen decay of a...
Consider the role of waiting rooms as informal learning environments. In this thesis, I examine a pediatric hematology and oncology clinic to evaluate the patient learning experience. Through staff interviews, waiting room observations, and a review of educational materials I argue that this process is in need of redirection. Most...
This project examines the uneven adoption of therapeutic initiatives within the organizational field of American museums to ask: How do people frame museum-going as “good” for visitors’ health? Existing research on legitimation processes would predict cultural institutions respond similarly to pressures for greater accountability from their external environments, or resist...
How mental representations are constructed and how they evolve are central problems for cognitive science. Representation decisions help determine what computations are hard or easy. Structured, relational representations are a hallmark of human cognition. Developmental studies show that children do not perform as well as adults in tasks that require...
Substance use and substance use disorder (SUD) may be variables that influence the course of HIV/AIDS risk behaviors as youth age. To our knowledge, no prospective longitudinal study has examined the association between categories of substance use disorders including alcohol use disorder alone, marijuana use disorder alone, comorbid drug use...
CD1 molecules represent a class of antigen presenting molecules that present lipid antigens to cognate T cells. These molecules have been identified in all mammals examined so far. Unlike MHC molecules, which are highly polymorphic, CD1 molecules exhibit limited polymorphism and are divided in to two groups – 1 and...
A disconnect exists between the behavior of transcriptional and genetic regulation in bacterial systems when comparing phenotypic patterns and dynamics of a population to those observed at the single cell level. In this thesis, we developed a number of tools and assays to better understand, overcome, and predict the challenges...
While infrequent, clay slope failures caused by earthquakes result in loss of life and substantial property damage. In strong seismicity areas, it is sometimes assumed that the stability of clay deposits can be evaluated through the residual undrained strength that is applicable at large deformations. A crucial factor missing in...
The airway epithelium forms an active barrier between the internal and external environments and has multiple roles critical to normal function of the lung. Its development and function are controlled by a network of transcription factors that regulate gene expression in response to varying stimuli. Dysfunction of this tissue plays...
Short-wave infrared (SWIR) photon detection has become an essential technology in the modern world. Sensitive SWIR detectors with low noise levels, and high signal-to-noise-ratios are highly desirable for a variety of applications including light detection and ranging, optical tomography, and astronomical imaging. As such many efforts in infrared detector research...
The ability to track labeled cancer cells in vivo would allow researchers to study their distribution, growth and metastatic potential within the intact organism. Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging is invaluable for tracking cancer cells in vivo as it benefits from high spatial resolution and absence of ionizing radiation. However, many...
The circadian clock is a biological oscillator present in all terrestrial life forms that aligns organismal functions with the daily rising and setting of the sun. In mammals clocks are expressed both in pacemaker cells in the brain that are directly entrained by light as well as in all peripheral...
This dissertation draws on a field-level, qualitative study of business analytics to explore the legitimation and design of knowledge practices. In the last few decades, both the power and the acceptance of business analytics have advanced dramatically; nonetheless, end-users and clients can still be deeply sceptical of particular analytics practices...
Fungi have an immense untapped store of natural products, small molecules that can often be repurposed as pharmaceuticals. The genes that encode secondary metabolic machinery are often genomically co-localized into biosynthetic gene clusters. Because of the immense energetic costs that goes into producing the biosynthetic pathway and its products, strict...
The progressive women’s movement in the United States during the mid-twentieth century enjoyed increased support and success until national politics were dominated by conservatives during the 1980s. This dissertation analyzes the discourse around women’s issues created by two of the largest conservative women’s organizations, Eagle Forum and Concerned Women for...
Growing energy and climate concerns in the United States and across the world demand improvements in energy efficiency, conservation, and renewability. Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) are highly efficient devices that electrochemically convert the chemical energy of a fuel to electricity. These devices can operate on natural gas as a...
An accurate knowledge of the engineering properties of rocks is crucial for a variety of geomechanical problems, ranging from wellbore stability to failure in rock slopes, underground excavations, and crustal faults. While strength and deformation properties are usually obtained from a limited number of in situ and/or laboratory tests, their...
Recent advances in optical switching have yielded an all-fiber, all-optical, device capable of routing single-photon quantum signals at high rates (≈25 GHz), with almost immeasurably small degradation of the quantum state[1, 2, 3]. These switches can facilitate complex quantum networking and quantum information processing schemes. However, the complexity of these...
This dissertation studies a variety of consumer behaviors and their strategic implications for firm profit maximization. The first chapter discusses how bundle pricing (via shipping policies) allows firms to achieve higher profits than component pricing when consumers's tastes for products are correlated. The second chapter illustrates how durable good producers...
Client-server architectures have been used for years, and many modern applications rely on this approach to be able to present rich and complex information to users without needlessly encumbering their local device with computation, and also to be able to keep all data in a (more-or-less) centrally available location, as...
A stroke can occur at any point throughout the lifespan, including in utero. The timing of the injury relative to neural development can have implications on the type of lesion, plasticity, and motor deficits. However, associated reactions, which refer to involuntary movement in one limb in response to voluntary activity...
Herpes stromal keratitis (HSK) is a potentially blinding inflammatory condition initiated by corneal infection with herpes simplex virus (HSV). As its name suggests, the host receptor herpes virus entry mediator (HVEM) facilitates HSV entry through interactions with a viral envelope glycoprotein. HVEM also bridges several signaling networks, binding ligands from...
An atom interferometric gyroscope (AIG) made with an uncorrelated ensemble of N two-level atoms, rotating at a rate ΩG about an axis normal to the area Θ accrues a phase ϕ = 2ωCΘΩG/c2 due to the Sagnac effect. Here ωC is the Compton frequency of the atoms used, and c...
Interprotein electron transfer (ET) occupies a central role in both chemistry and biology, as it is important in a variety of functions including cellular respiration, metabolism, and energy transduction during photosynthesis. Consequently, understanding the protein-protein recognition and docking that controls interprotein ET is an important field of scientific research.
One...
This dissertation reports on novel theoretical concepts as well as experimental efforts toward laser cooling of semiconductors. The use of quantum well system brings the opportunity to engineer bandstructure, effective masses and the spatial distribution of electrons and holes. This permits the incorporation of novel quantum mechanical phenomena to manipulate...
The purpose of this research is to apply a sociocultural lens to examine students’ perceptions of usefulness in mathematics. It is important to explore perceptions of usefulness, as teachers are increasingly being encouraged to help their students view mathematics as useful. However, we know little about how students – and...
This work argues that Latina/o immigrant Charismatic Catholicism does not encourage passive hope for heavenly rewards but rather emphasizes active strategies for transforming the self and the world. This study responds to two major concerns in the field of religious studies: the concern that Pentecostal forms of Christianity emphasize an...
We introduce and advocate a new paradigm in simulation experiment design and analysis, called ``green simulation,'' for the setting in which experiments are performed repeatedly with the same simulation model but different input parameters. In this dissertation three classes of green simulation estimators are proposed: the likelihood-ratio-based estimators, the metamodeling-based...
This dissertations consists of three chapters. The first chapter is on the topic of environmental economics and studies the question of the effects of air pollution on students’ school absences, finding significant and positive effects for air pollution, and PM10 in particular, on school absences. The second chapter is on...
Raman spectroscopy is an established and versatile molecular sensing technique, but it is limited by its modest chemical sensitivity. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) can amplify otherwise weak normal Raman signals up to nine to ten orders of magnitude, giving rise to its application in many molecular sensing problems, including those...
This thesis discusses the application of advanced digital signal and image processing techniques, particularly the technique known as super-resolution (SR), to enhance the imagery produced by cameras mounted on an airborne platform such as an unmanned aircraft system (UAS). SR is an image processing technology applicable to any digital, pixilated...
While equal political participation is a fundamental democratic ideal, it is an ideal unrealized in the United States. Those with more—more education, more money, more time, more skills—participate more. Those who have less—especially the poor and minorities—participate less and may be absent from the process altogether. A similar statement could...
This dissertation aims to address a gap in the literature regarding the effect of the achievement-focused student identity on prosocial values and behaviors, specifically among students who predominantly value prosociality. Largely, research on identity and motivation addresses academic outcomes and psychological well-being outcomes (Settles, Sellers, & Damas, 2002; Jaret &...
In this thesis I present the theoretical work on Fermionic surface states, and bulk Bosonic collective excitations in topological superfluids and superconductors. Broken symmetries in topological condensed matter systems have implications for the spectrum of Fermionic excitations confined on surfaces or topological defects.
For the B-phase of superfluid 3He, which...
Semiconducting nanoelectronic materials, including single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) and transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) possess interesting optoelectronic properties that could enable next-generation electronics, sensing technologies, and biomedicine. In this thesis, biomolecule-assisted dispersion and assembly of these nanomaterials are explored for human toxicity, environmental hazard potential, and applications in supramolecular hydrogels.
Liquid-based...
This dissertation considers how best to define the imagined “life” of the puppet, and how that “life” offers new meaning to narrative puppet productions. In my first chapter, begin with the observation that puppeteers, scholars, and audiences often describe the puppet as an object that appears to “have life,” and...
In yeast, inducible genes such as INO1, PRM1 and HIS4 reposition from the nucleoplasm to nuclear periphery upon activation. This leads to a physical interaction with nuclear pore complex (NPC), interchromosomal clustering, and stronger transcription. Repositioning to the nuclear periphery is controlled by cis-acting transcription factor (TF) binding sites located...
This dissertation explores the extent to which Portuguese theologian, papal penitentiary, bishop, and abbot Andreas de Escobar, O.S.B. (1348-1448) benefited from contemporary trends in manuscript culture and thereby functioned as a late-medieval public intellectual. Recent research suggests that early-fifteenth-century university-trained theology masters used their expertise and authority to intervene into...
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is characterized by progressive motoneuron loss. Autopsy from thoracic spinal tissues of sALS patients revealed a significant loss of large motoneurons while medium and small motoneurons were relatively unaffected. Using two-photon microscopy, we observed a soma hypertrophy of neonatal motoneurons in mice overexpressing mutant human G93A-superoxide...
Supported metal oxides are an important class of catalysts for chemical synthesis and manufacturing, particularly for selective oxidation reactions. This dissertation seeks to understand broad relationships among families of silica-supported Group 4 and 5 metal oxide catalysts for the synthesis of epoxides with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and to further extend...
Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are an attractive solar energy technology for low-current applications. Herein is described the supramolecular design and methodology to manipulate intermolecular interactions in order to create an active layer in OPVs devices composed of crystalline and amorphous donor-acceptor domains, which has been proposed as the ideal morphology for...
Regeneration is a complex biological phenomenon. Organisms that regenerate must possess robust mechanisms that direct new tissue production of the appropriate size and pattern to allow for correct and functional integration with preexisting tissue structures. Planarians are flatworms capable of regenerating from nearly any injury, making them a powerful system...
Polyurethane (PU) is an important commodity polymer with a broad range of applications. Increasing regulations on isocyanates have prompted investigations into alternative routes to PU. Cyclic carbonate aminolysis leading to polyhydroxyurethane (PHU) is a promising alternative. This dissertation describes the first fundamental investigation of the synthesis and properties of segmented,...
This dissertation provides the first in-depth comparative study in any language of the female figurations made, viewed, and interpreted in the realm of refashioning modern Chinese painting during the war period of Republican China (1930s-1940s) in the Nationalist government-controlled southwestern inner frontier, with projects by Pang Xunqin (1906–85) and Fu...
Perhaps better suited for the mosh pit than the orchestra pit, David Lang’s 1991 tour-de-force for solo bass clarinet, Press Release, is a minimalist marvel. Comprised of seven “groove sections” that evolve in seemingly unpredictable ways, Lang cleverly employs monophony to tell a robust story of motivic and harmonic development....
A Dialogue on Nation-Building took place in Bishoftu, Ethiopia, on January 14-16, 2018. I was one of a dozen individuals invited to serve as resource persons for this meeting of over a hundred representatives from the government, civil society, political and faith-based organizations. The aim of the gathering was to...
X-ray reflectivity (XRR) versatile technique that characterize the surface structures. However, due to the lack of phase information of X-ray data, the reconstruction of electron density profile (EDP) from XRR data is an ill-posed inverse problem that requires extra attention. In Chapter 1, several key concepts in XRR data analysis...
In December 1928, Ernst Jünger wrote to his brother Friedrich Georg: “Wir müssen uns […] bemühen, die literarische Tätigkeit als Kriegsmittel zu betrachten.” This project analyzes the result of said activity: viz. text understood as a means of war. That is to say, it does not aim at answering questions...
Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most prevalent primary central nervous system malignancy. Due to the aggressive nature of these tumors and our inability to adequately treat them, only 3-5% of patients survive longer than 3 years post-diagnosis. The standard of care for newly diagnosed GBM is surgical resection followed by...
Classic mechanism design studies the implementation of optimal systems or processes in the presence of multiple selfish and fully rational agents. The theory of mechanism design has been one of the most celebrated advances in the economics discipline, especially with regards to auctions Myerson (1981),Vickrey (1961), Clarke (1971), Groves (1973)....
Musicians have a responsibility to assess and perform new or extant music in order to present a larger body of repertoire to audiences. The purpose of this study is to introduce the euphonium music of the contemporary Belgian composer Frangois Glorieux to the tubaeuphonium community. With numerous works written for...
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), the result of fetal alcohol exposure (FAE), affects 2-11% of children worldwide with no treatments in sight. In my thesis work, I aimed to identify underlying biological mechanisms of the FAE-induced hippocampus-based cognitive deficits that would lead to identify potential treatment targets to reverse the...
Nano-structured mixed ionic and electronic conducting (MIEC) materials have garnered intense interest in electrode development for solid oxide fuel cells due to their high surface areas which allow for effective catalytic activity and low polarization resistances. In particular, composite solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) cathodes consisting of ionic conducting scaffolds...
Kainate receptors (KARs) are expressed throughout the central and peripheral nervous systems. One of three subfamilies of ionotropic glutamate receptors, KARs are localized both pre- and post-synaptically and exert important modulatory control over neural circuits. This modulatory role in circuit function makes them a potential actor in wide variety of...
Radiation is a ubiquitous health risk. Contemporary populations are exposed to several hundred milliSieverts per person over their lifetimes from both natural and human made sources such as radon, cosmic rays, CT-scans, etc. Risk estimates based on studies of atomic bomb survivors suggest that these exposures induce excess cancer mortality...
Patients born with severe heart defects need regular monitoring of the complex hemodynamics in their heart and vasculature. 4D flow MRI has emerged as the state-of-the-art technique for comprehensively evaluating cardiovascular hemodynamics. This imaging technique allows for the dynamic visualization of 3D blood through the cardiac cycle and the quantification...
With the dual challenges of meeting global energy demand and mitigating anthropogenic climate change, significant effort is being applied to generating power from renewable sources. The dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) is a photovoltaic technology capable of generating electricity from sunlight, but suffers losses in efficiency due to deleterious electron transfer...
Algebras and their bimodules form a 2-category in which 2-morphisms are certain zero-th Hochschild cohomology groups. When we derive this structure (i.e., use Hochschild cochains instead of HH^0 for 2-morphisms), we find that algebras form a category in dg cocategories. The Hochschild-Kostant-Rosenberg theorem and non-commutative calculus give a rich algebraic...
We studied the nonlocal effects of intraspecific prey competition on the stability of the critical points of the Rosenzweig-MacArthur model and the Holling-Tanner model, respectively, using linear stability analysis. In particular we focused on the study of the stability of the coexistence state influenced by the nonlocality for both models....
Advancements in nanotechnology have led to the production of devices with components with sub-100 nm size scales. Studies have investigated how properties of polymers change when confined to nanoscale dimensions. However, stiffness-confinement studies have reported increases, decreases, and invariance with confinement for different polymer/substrate pairs, making it difficult to obtain...
Scholars have noted that food marketing significantly impacts the lives of children, influencing what foods they request and consume. However, the impact of food marketing on low-income children has only been explored minimally. This project explores both media-based and in-store food marketing to low-income families, along with potential outcomes of...
The development of metal-based probes has provided major benefits to understanding basic biological process and clinical outcomes. Metals offer access to geometries that carbon alone cannot attain, along with valuable magnetic, optical, and binding properties. Metals have proven to be particularly useful in advancing molecular imaging, a field that seeks...
As the title suggests, this dissertation is composed of three major topics. The first two are optimization problems focusing on developing effective solution methodologies, while for the last topic we present a large-scale information retrieval system in the domain of sports. With the algorithms and frameworks developed in this dissertation,...
The genetic code, a set of rules by which mRNA codons are translated into the twenty standard amino acids used in protein synthesis, was once thought to be immutable. As we expanded our understanding of molecular biology more variations in this genetic code have been found across the animal kingdom....
Natural products provide a renewable resource of novel chemical structures with relevance to the pharmaceutical, agricultural and materials industries. Genome sequencing has revealed that these industries currently rely on only a fraction of the number of natural products that exist in nature. Based on the impact that known natural products...