Soil-Machine Interaction (SMI) is ubiquitous on Earth and other planets. Over decades, ground-engaging equipment has been developed and widely used in various engineering applications, including civil construction, agriculture, terrestrial mobility, and even space exploration. However, systematic studies of SMI processes and the corresponding soil behavior are inadequate, which obstructs further...
Spin-orbit coupling (SOC) underlies myriad phenomena in chemistry and physics. Arbitrary manipulation of spin-orbit coupling would enable precise control over such parameters as magnetic anisotropy, the sensitivity of quantum sensors, and even the selectivity of certain catalytic processes. Herein, I describe my efforts directed towards utilizing SOC as a handle...
Deep learning is a new area of machine learning in artificial intelligence that consists of networks to learn representations from data in a supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised manner. Deep learning has a relatively long history, but it does not gain great attention until big data and fast computational resources are...
The effect of interfaces in solids on the overall charge transport properties has become a topic of growing importance for energy materials such as thermoelectrics. In some polycrystalline thermoelectric materials, the performance near room temperature is significantly limited due to thermally-activated electrical conductivity near room-temperature, which can be attributed to...
A central question in biology is how the flow of genetic information—from DNA to RNA to protein—is regulated. Regulatory mechanisms exerted at the level of DNA and protein have been described in detail but by contrast, little is known regarding the regulation of RNA. Methylation on N6-adenosine (m6A) is the...
This dissertation seeks to explain the discursive origin, development, and transformation of “Republican anticommunism,” and how and why this state-originated ideology continues to shape Vietnamese exile communities today. The dissertation focuses on examining mechanisms that allows certain narratives produced by the Republic of Vietnam to persist, despite the regime changes,...
Over the past two decades, the field of N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) organocatalysis has distinctively enabled the construction of enantioenriched heterocycles, and the power of cascade and one-pot processes has led to an ever-increasing level of synthetic efficiency in the assembly of complex architectures. Here these tools are employed in concise,...
A one-time, unilateral injury to the developing brain can interrupt the typical process of development and result in motor impairments that evolve over the course of the whole life-span. The timing of injury relative to neural development has implications for the continued refinement of the nervous system and the descending...
The policies of secular governments in constitutionally secular countries are at times marked by the influence of religious politics. Religious politics is specifically defined here as a politics of extending the norms of religion into the public sphere through religious legislation. Thus, some governments lend the state’s coercive capacity to...
Non-planar and curved architectures of otherwise flat 2D materials present an important paradigm for nanoscale analysis and design of emergent material properties. Atomically-thin transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have emerged at the forefront of the 2D materials field in recent years largely due to their attractive and tunable chemical, optical, and...