Chapter 1. Undergraduate Gender Diversity and Direction of Scientific Research (with Ashley Wong) Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Diverse researchers can bring new questions and perspectives, but exposure to diversity may also inspire scientists, regardless of demographic identity, to pursue new topics. This...
Many industrial fluid flow problems involve the interaction between heavy, rigid objects and one or more fluid phases. For several decades, there has been a vested interest in simulating these fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problems in order to improve engineering design processes. However, numerical simulations of these problems can be challenging...
Biological systems comprise diverse collections of cellular and non-cellular components with intricate relationships and dynamic interactions. To gain system-level understanding, we must be able to accurately model these systems, both experimentally and computationally. Agent-based models (ABMs) in particular are a uniquely intuitive, modular, and flexible framework capable of supporting multi-scale,...
Staphylococcus aureus (SA) is a leading cause of healthcare-associated and community-acquired infection in the United States. Despite the canonical thinking that antibodies and B cells are the main drivers of protection against extracellular pathogens, T cells are now recognized as critical players in protection against SA in multiple routes of...
The importance of understanding indoor microbial exposure is increasingly recognized, particularly concerning the emergence of pathogens and antimicrobial resistance. With the advancements of sequencing technologies, our capability of exploring indoor microbial communities has dramatically increased. However, huge challenges remain to translate sequence-based knowledge to actionable interpretations to support human health...
Transfer of information across membranes is fundamental to the function of all organisms and is primarily initiated by transmembrane receptors. This is an allosteric process and involves conformational coupling between ligand-binding domain and signaling domain of a receptor. This allosteric mechanism of activation is unclear for many receptors. Moreover, for...
Political leaders often engage in open fights for recognition, announcing that some crucial element of their state’s identity, status, or history, has not been properly acknowledged and respected in the conduct of diplomacy. Among international relations scholars, these instances are usually ascribed to the fact that states, like individuals, need...
In today’s climate of rising economic inequality, drone warfare, xenophobic politics, and Big Brother technology, understanding how we might best design learning environments to provide opportunities for expanding the purpose and potentialities of STEM education for minoritized communities grows in importance daily. This dissertation is a 3-part study that examines...
Slow-wave sleep (SWS) is important for overall health since it affects many physiological pathways from cardio-metabolic health to cognitive function. Sleep and autonomic nervous system (ANS) functioning are closely coupled at anatomical and physiological levels. Sleep-related changes in ANS function are likely the main pathway through which SWS affects many...
“Entertaining Strangers” reveals how theories and practices of hospitality shaped and were shaped by the early modern print and theater industries. Whereas earlier studies of hospitality and literature have focused on aristocratic patronage, in this dissertation I reveal the vital importance of commercial hospitality as a framework for ethical and...
The on-going demand for miniaturized optical and on-chip photonic systems of the future has led to a few potential solutions in the literature. Recent advances in van der Waals and 2-dimensional materials signal a bright future for the next generation, compact electronic and photonic devices. With reduced dimensionality and material...
Tailoring the design of surfaces and interfaces with nanoscale features has the ability to significantly impact biological functions for a swath of applications including drug delivery, structure assembly, and biomedicine. For example, creating spatially defined nanoscale patterns has been known to contribute to changes in cellular architecture and mechanical properties,...
MYC regulates multiple gene programs, raising questions about the potential selectivity and downstream transcriptional consequences of MYC inhibitors as cancer therapeutics. MYC func-tions to either globally amplify RNA production or selectively regulates genes by repression or ac-tivation. In models of MYC inhibition by small molecules the functionality of MYC is...
In this dissertation I examine issues related to uncertainty and robustness in game theory. In Chapter 1 a strategic setting is analyzed where players face Knightian uncertainty about the strategic choices of their opponents. That is, in contrast to the usual Bayesian framework and in line with experimental evidence, players...
Ankle sprains are the most common musculoskeletal injury. After an ankle sprain, about 40% of individuals develop Chronic Ankle Instability (CAI), resulting in recurrent sprains, the ankle giving way, or feelings of instability. Most sprains occur due to excess inversion of the ankle. Frontal-plane ankle stiffness quantifies the ankle’s ability...
The ever growing desire for accurate estimation and efficient learning necessitates the efforts to quantitatively characterize uncertainties for models. In this thesis, four problems pertaining to uncertainty quantification are discussed: A sequential stopping framework of constructing fixed-precision confidence regions is proposed for a class of multivariate simulation problems where variance...
Power and energy are becoming the limiting factors for computer designs and systems, and energy efficient functional units are getting more popular in such systems. Some of the design methodologies that are getting more common include voltage overscaling and employing imprecise instructions. These functional units need to be characterized correctly...
With the ability to rapidly screen and manipulate genomes, the in depth study of the functional actors of biology—metabolites and proteins—is necessary to understand complex biochemistry in developmental and disease states. The analytical processes by which biological information is gained from metabolomics and proteomics experiments must also evolve with our...
Proprioception, or the sense of one’s body in space, provides critical feedback that the brain usesto generate controlled movements. When proprioceptive feedback is lost, people find it difficult
to perform even basic motor tasks. Despite its importance, proprioceptive coding of single
neurons in the cuneate nucleus (CN), the most peripheral...
More than a quarter century of research finds that teams often fail to make high-quality decisions. This literature is based on observing team decisions in one-off decision making episodes, when in reality, most teams work together for an extended period of time, making repeated decisions together. Do teams improve or...
Phononic crystals and acoustic metamaterials exhibit unique wave propagation properties rising from periodicity and the heterogeneity in material/structure design. One important property is tailoring the propagation of elastic waves from band gaps in such systems – frequency ranges of strong wave attenuation. This thesis first explores the idea of gaining...
Policymakers and public entities work to make decisions that benefit society. Their choices, though, do not go into effect in a vacuum. Instead, the benefit they provide relies on the underlying consumer behavior that drives responses to those choices. This dissertation studies three different settings in which either policy is...
“National Acts: Performance, Commemoration, and the Construction of American Public Memory” explores how sites of public commemoration created during and after the American Civil War crafted conceptions of American public memory and identities through performative processes. This dissertation looks at three commemorative efforts: the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln,...
What explains the difference in the timing of female enfranchisement in Latin America? Despite constituting an essential process of inclusion for democratization, no comparative analysis of the region has sought to explain the differences observed in the timing of reform. Common explanations – developed for other regions – concerning the...
In memory overgeneralization, details from negatively-valenced episodic memories become excessively generalized to unrelated neutral situations. This is a key cognitive distortion associated with major depressive disorder (MDD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Stress promotes memory generalization, and this process likely relies on stress-induced changes in dorsal...
Granular materials are ubiquitous elements of our daily life, representing some of the most manipulated materials on Earth and playing a key role in disparate fields of science and engineering. Considerable research has been performed to explore the factors that impact the mechanical behavior of granular materials. Within this context,...
Ordered arrays of metallic nanoparticles (NPs) are a promising platform for technological applications and fundamental investigations due to their ability to excite surface lattice resonances (SLRs). SLRs can support extremely high local electric fields that have been used to realize exotic physical phenomena. The open cavity architecture lends itself to...
Oil paintings are complex works of art, even on the molecular level. Drying oils cure into a solid film through autoxidation and polymerization reactions and then degrade, leading to changes in material properties and film stability. This chemistry can be captured in a computational model and used by researchers in...
This dissertation studies three topics in 19th and early 20th century economic history. Chapter 1 studies the causes behind low inter-regional migration from the American North to the South prior to the Civil War. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on topics in the economic history of Egyptian agriculture. Chapter 2...
Anthropogenic consumption of fossil fuels releases carbon into the Earth-atmosphere-ocean system at rates unmatched by geologic processes. Yet, some geologic time periods also show evidence of climate forcing related to rapid natural greenhouse gas emissions and can serve as tools to help understand the future trajectory of climate. Geologic events...
The Ohio River Valley was the site of an intense rivalry between Protestants and Catholics in the nineteenth century, as members of each group vied to extend their control through the development of churches, schools, orphanages, and other institutions. This dissertation explores the process and analyzes the effects of Catholic...
Animals must establish the correct form during development. Regeneration is a process by which some animals reestablish their form following injury. This process requires both the generation of new missing cells after injury, and information to pattern new cells to reestablish the correct form. Planarian flatworms have an almost unlimited...
This dissertation assesses the relationship between inequality and the longevity of urban communities. It does so through an examination of low-status households, a population segment I term Urban Commoners, at the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize. Aventura was a socioeconomically diverse urban center that grew to its peak in...
The insulin/Insulin-Like Growth Factor (IGF) pathway is essential for linking nutritional status to growth and metabolism. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short RNAs that are players in the regulation of this process. The miRNA miR-7 shows highly conserved expression in insulin-producing cells across the animal kingdom. However, its conserved functions in regulation...
Breakthroughs in large-scale biological data collection have resulted in a wealth of -omics (genomics, metabolomics, etc.) datasets in the literature. However, the development of appropriate computational techniques for their analysis is lacking, yet crucial for fully extracting the rich information contained in these datasets. The work in this dissertation describes...
Guided by under-studied archival documents, including public-health and pharmaceutical advertisements, as well as contemporaneous visual art and performance pieces by queer artists of color, this dissertation analyses the critical and evolving role that aesthetics have played in combatting HIV/AIDS since the early days of the pandemic. Drawing on methods and...
This dissertation explores ways to utilize physical parameters at the nanoscale interface to control the properties of mixed-dimensional heterojunctions (MDHJs). MDHJs combine the desirable properties of different classes of low-dimensional nanomaterials (materials that are quantum confined in at least one dimension). While MDHJs have achieved superlative performance for a variety...
Popular histories of United States mass incarceration often focus on federal wars on crime, law and order policing, and the passage of harsh sentencing laws to explain how the United States transformed into the world’s leader in incarceration. My dissertation on the crisis of state prison overcrowding and prisoner resistance...
In this thesis, we discuss classical and recent results around the damped wave equation on compact and noncompact manifolds. We firstly show that on asymptotically cylindrical and conic manifolds, the geometric control condition and the network control condition give exponential and logarithmic decay rates respectively. We then show that a...
The theory of how humans and machines control and communicate with each other is at the core of the scientific field known as Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Researchers in this sub-discipline of robotics are therefore particularly interested in developing methods to chuppahreduce the inherent friction in this communication and control channel....
The last decade has witnessed a rapid transformation in our understanding of the structure of chromatin, the nuclear complex of DNA and its structural proteins. While, barring mutations, the DNA sequence in each cell of the human body is the same, it is the structure of the chromatin complex that...
Optical microscopy is one of the most ubiquitous tools for functional imaging of biological phenomena. While relatively non-destructive to living organisms, light microscopy’s spatial resolution is diffraction limited, restricting the minimum resolvable features. On the other hand, high resolution techniques such as electron microscopy or STORM, have several orders of...
Stimulation of the cGAS-STING (cycle GMP-AMP synthase-Stimulator of Interferon Genes) pathway increases T cell activation and tracking into the tumor and reverses the immunosuppressive phenotype of myeloid cells. Direct targeting of the STING receptor using synthetic cyclic dinucleotide (CDN) ligands represents an attractive immunotherapeutic strategy for the treatment of lymphocyte-depleted...
This thesis describes fundamental photophysical studies of quantum dot (QD)-molecule complexes, aimed at discovering strategies for enhancing the efficiency of QD-photocatalyzed and QD-sensitized multi-electron catalytic reactions, for the purpose of solar fuels production. Photosensitization of molecular catalysts that are active for reactions such as the reduction of carbon dioxide or...
As conventional electronic materials approach the device scaling limits, new types of materials and structures have been examined for potential use in future electronic and optoelectronic applications including transistors, light emitting diodes, and solar cells. In recent years, atomically thin or two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) materials have emerged...
Store-operated Ca2+ entry (SOCE) is a principal mechanism for generating cellular Ca2+ signals. Store-operated Ca2+ release-activated Ca2+ (CRAC) channels serve an essential role in generating Ca2+ elevations needed for transcriptional, enzymatic, and secretory effector cascades in many cell types. CRAC channels, comprised of the ER Ca2+ sensor STIM and the...
In monolayer materials with a honeycomb-like lattice an emergent degree of freedom arises for charge carriers corresponding to their valley index. Due to spatial inversion asymmetry and the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling, this valley degree of freedom strongly affects the optoelectronic properties of carriers in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides...
Periodic exposure to light and dark as a result of rotation of the Earth have served as a major evolutionary pressure to partition divergent biological processes to different phases of the day. Mammals display periods of activity/inactivity, wake/sleep, and feeding/fasting during distinct portions of the day. In mammals, these activities...
Technological innovation is a key determinant of economic growth, and my dissertation is to understand the links between the investment of technological innovation and financial markets, with a focus on how the macroeconomic environment interacts with and is influenced by the financial constraints facing firms. Chapter one investigates the links...
Shoulder (glenohumeral joint) osteoarthritis causes pain, limits daily activities, and frequently requires joint replacement surgery. In shoulder osteoarthritis, the glenoid bone surface erodes in one of two ways: symmetrically (concentric deformity) or asymmetrically (eccentric deformity). Shoulder replacements in patients with eccentric deformities fail and require additional, revision surgery more often...