This dissertation seeks to investigate how social policy is made and implemented where established scripts and institutionalized schemas do not align with complex subjects and cases: how do policymakers classify subjects and cases when they cannot default to established categories, what are the implications of engagement in forms of evaluation...
Like the majority of media studies, research on Latinx media is characterized by a focus on a single medium. As an alternative, this dissertation provides a media ecology of the city's Latinx mediascape between the years 1953 and 2012. This dissertation investigates four case studies: (1) Univision's former television affiliate,...
The dissertation illuminates the centrality of communication to the way environmental policies and practices arise and unfold, and it shows how the living materiality of ecological phenomena are entangled with the social dynamics of communication. The work innovatively bridges insights from the field of political ecology with theory and method...
This work presents a cognitive model of argument structure construction acquisition and application based on analogy. The claims of this model are that (1) constructions, pairings of form and meaning, are a productive unit of linguistic analysis that account for a broader range of phenomena than traditional approaches; (2) human...
Carbon-based materials, such as graphene and carbon fibers, have good prospects for applications in reinforcements of polymers as advanced structural composites. Hence, the study of the mechanical properties of the constituents and the composites is becoming increasingly popular in both academia and industry.', 'Graphene has been shown to have a...
This dissertation develops computational models to study the optical coupling between plasmonic nanoparticles and quantum emitters. A large number of nanophotonic applications function by using either plasmon enhanced fields to enhance optical processes within quantum emitters or the sensitivity of plasmon resonances to their environment. Developing computational methods to fully...
Currently, the only treatment for end stage liver disease is transplantation, of which there is a critical shortage of available donor tissue. Recent developments in 3D printing have greatly accelerated progress in the field of liver tissue engineering. A variety of 3D printing and additive manufacturing techniques show great promise...
Perovskite oxide materials for the wide array of properties that make them candidate materials for application ranging from catalysis, to electronics, to beyond-Moore computation. As many of these oxides share similar structures they can be combined in a seemingly-endless number of ways to produce the desired properties for a given...
Synthetic organic chemistry continues to be a driver in the discovery and development of new molecules for applications in biology, medicine, crop science, polymer science, and materials science. Central to the continued development of this field is the pursuit of new strategies and methods for the efficient construction of molecules...
When constructing buildings with basements in urban areas, the deformation levels during the excavation process must be carefully evaluated to prevent or minimize damage to adjacent structures. Because of uncertainties in predicting ground deformations during the design phase for a project, a robust monitoring program should be included in significant...