Reproduction requires a complex orchestration of processes from the formation of the reproductive system through the successful development of the fetus, and nutrients are necessary to fuel these processes during many aspects of reproduction. Zinc is an essential metal that is fundamental in gamete maturation, gonadogenesis, and fertilization. Disruption in...
Muscle strength assessment is a standard part of any clinical evaluation. Due to the kinematic and muscular redundancy in the human musculoskeletal system, muscle strength can not be measured directly in vivo. Clinicians utilize specific postures and forces to bias the muscles of interest, then infer the muscle strength from...
Anthropologists engaging with biopolitical theory have commonly assumed that biomedicine is a tool for enacting state-based policies to manage population health. Recent insights in medical anthropology have troubled this assumption, calling into question the role of physicians as “handmaidens” of state-based health policy. I use my position as a physician-anthropologist...
Electrical spinal cord stimulation is an emerging treatment for spinal cord injury that can improve walking and bladder control, among many other functions. While the anatomical location of the motor pools for muscles involved in locomotion in the lumbosacral cord has been identified, the map of the functional output of...
This dissertation examines three empirical questions related to human capital in developing countries. Chapter 1 studies the educational and labor market impacts of the telesecundarias, Mexican secondary schools that use televisions to deliver instruction. In areas where there is an insufficient supply of qualified teachers, delivering instruction through technology may...
Complex fluids are ubiquitous, from natural materials to manufactured products. Understanding their behavior under flow is vital for engineering these materials. Extensional flow, despite being industrially relevant and often producing dominant impacts upon complex fluids, is an underserved topic compared to shear flow due to a lack of reliable apparatuses...
Thermoelectric materials are of particular interest in a variety of fields because of their ability to directly convert heat to electricity (and vice versa), however, they struggle to gain widespread adoption because of their low efficiency. A common strategy in the field of thermoelectricity is to introduce material defects into...
We consider the statistical study of partially observed queueing systems arising in application areas such as hospital networks, data centers and cloud computing systems. Since these services operate under strict performance requirements, a statistical understanding of their performance is of great practical interest. A key challenge in these settings is...
Molecules and materials featuring unpaired electrons are fundamental elements of modern energy, device, and imaging technologies. The high sensitivity of electronic spins to their surroundings renders these compounds further attractive as environmental sensors. In order to successfully realize these applications, the electronic spins must be precisely controlled. One promising strategy...
Understanding the characteristics of interfaces between materials and solvent media such as structure, chemistry, and charge remains crucial to determining the properties and performance of numerous systems and technologies. This thesis focuses specifically on characterizing the interactions of water at oxide interfaces. A large collection of questions remains unanswered about...
To better prepare for earthquakes, we need to know how large they will be, how strong the shaking will be, and how often they will occur. To answer these questions, seismologists look to past earthquakes to better understand future hazards. Earthquakes, however, are complex physical phenomena that occur on timescales...
This dissertation is about designing learning environments that foreground students’ epistemic agency as they do science in a science classroom. I build on the prior work that combines two important strands in learning sciences - agent-based modeling of complex systems and constructionism to design learning environments. I call such learning...
Since the mid-20th century, urbanization has altered the physical landscape and brought social, economic and lifestyle changes to populations worldwide. In the Global South, this has dramatically affected environmental conditions of settlements, communities, and households, with both positive and negative consequences for population health. The objective of this dissertation is...
This dissertation develops a new framework and algorithms for statistical process control of stochastic textured surface data that have no distinct features other than stochastic characteristics that vary randomly (e.g., image data of textiles or material microstructures and surface metrology data of metal parts). All methods are general and nonparametric...
No two cells in a population are identical to each other. Cell populations are almost universally heterogeneous, with their heterogeneity or variability often underlying complex emergent behavior and phenotypes. Heterogeneity presents a challenge to the discovery, characterization, and control of multicellular systems. Heterogeneity exists across multiple scales, ranging from the...
The first chapter of the dissertation analyzes a moral hazard problem where a firm incentivizes a team of complementary workers in the presence of trust concerns. As we show, when concerned about team members not trusting each other, the firm typically sacrifices statistically-relevant information, compensating some workers based solely on...
The microtubule (MT) network and associated regulatory proteins play a critical role during viral infection from facilitating viral particle transport towards the nucleus upon entry to later mediating virion assembly and egress. Many of the precise mechanisms by which viruses commandeer the host MT network to propagate infection remain poorly...
This dissertation offers a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s notion of teaching (didaskalia). In Part I, I defend my claim that we can find in Aristotle’s works a conception of teaching, which is a crucial yet under-explored part of his theory of education. In Part II, I use this interpretation to...
In the Western Common Law tradition, legal decisions constrain and guide future cases involving the same legal issues. Although the legal academy disagrees about the specific nature of such precedential reasoning, including about the role of analogy in legal reasoning, there is ample evidence from cognitive science that analogical learning...
As humans have evolved over time, so have the materials that they rely on. From the Stone Age through the Iron Age, entire eras have been defined by specific materials, their corresponding properties, and the applications they have enabled. This is still true to this day, as the Silicon Age...
In most markets, consumers of goods and services have vastly more options available to them than they will consider closely. At the point of making a decision, consumers are choosing between only a small subset (i.e., a consideration set) of all possible alternatives. The preceding process that forms these consideration...
Polymer nanocomposites are a class of advanced materials comprised of soft polymer matrix and nano-filler inclusions. While it has been found qualitatively that enhancements of material properties could be achieved by dispersing inorganic nano-particles into organic polymer matrix, the intrinsic governing principles of such composite has not been thoroughly studied...
Solvent-rich polyelectrolyte complexes display a wide range of rheological properties, when different environmental parameters are applied. Due to the low energy barrier of the complexation (~10 kT), these materials possess tunable properties, with the states of these materials varying from Newtonian liquids to very tough hydrogels. This thesis aims to...
The role of providing care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease can expose friends and family caregivers to significant stress over an extended period of time, resulting in a host of negative outcomes like increased depression and anxiety, and diminished quality of life. However, previous studies have found that...
NSD2, a histone methyltransferase specific for methylation of histone 3 lysine 36 (H3K36), exhibits a glutamic acid to lysine mutation at residue 1099 (E1099K) in childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL). Cells harboring this mutation can become the predominant clone in relapsing disease. We studied the effects of this mutant enzyme...
Light trapping with standing waves has been achieved using photonic bandgap crystals, metal-dielectric waveguides and periodic metal nanocavity arrays. Compared with photonic materials, plasmonic metal nanocavities can provide light confinement at the sub-wavelength scale with strong near-field electric enhancement. The localized surface plasmons of individual metal nanoparticles can collectively couple...
Dysfunction in mitochondrial dynamics is believed to contribute to a host of neurological disorders and has recently been implicated in cancer metastasis. The outer mitochondrial membrane adapter proteins Miro1 and Miro2 play a role in the regulation of mitochondria. Each paralog comprises two GTPase domains flanking two centrally located calcium/magnesium-binding...
This thesis document is comprised of three research projects. The first investigates the active vibrational modes involved in twisted intramolecular charge transfer in a Julolidine-BODIPY dyad using two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy along with DFT calculations. We identified two types of vibrations, compression and torsional motion, as playing an important role in...
The advancement of nanotechnology is at least partially dependent on the ability to synthesize and arrange complex nanostructures on a substrate. Nanolithography, or the patterning of materials at the sub-micrometer length-scale, has been traditionally performed using a number of methods such as conventional photolithography, ion-beam etching, and electron-beam lithography. While...
High-throughput methods enable rapid experimentation and/or screening of thousands of samples simultaneously. Mass-spectrometry based methods are of particular interest since they provide a label-free way to detect all species present in a given reaction mixture. To circumvent sample preparation and purification—which is typically a slow process—the Mrksich group developed a...
The social groups to which individuals belong, as well as the identities that result from these group memberships, exert powerful influences on their political attitudes. Additionally, political elites offer cues that shape these same preferences—often by targeting and interacting with identities. However, there remain underexplored pathways by which elites can...
Some of the oldest drugs targeting metabolism are the antifolates such as aminopterin and methotrexate (MTX). MTX started being used in the 1950s to treat rheumatoid arthritis. Aminopterin and MTX both target one carbon metabolism and inhibit proliferation of cells. MTX was a potent inhibitor of inflammation, because it prevented...
Connecting structure and function in nanoscale engineered materials and devices relies on the analysis of the fundamental arrangement of matter, frequently under dynamic conditions. The demand to image structures at fundamental length scales has touched inorganic materials, biology, and frequently hybrid hard/soft materials with unique phenomena driven by heterogeneous components....
Soft functional materials are fundamentally interesting from a chemistry standpoint and have exciting applications in robotics, chemical and biomolecule sensing, and biomedical engineering. In addition, soft materials are also useful in lithography, particularly cantilever-free scanning probe lithography (CFSPL). Because of their low modulus, biocompatibility, stimuli responsiveness, malleability, and other characteristics,...
In the first two decades of the 21st century, metal organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted much attention in both fundamental-research and-industrial application areas. Derived from a vast library of both inorganic metal nodes and organic linker bridges, MOFs are crystalline materials whose structures and chemical environments can both be tuned...
In a new analysis of Renaissance pastoral that draws on ecocriticism, queer theory, and a historicist approach, this dissertation finds a green and inhuman world that opposes the modern view that humans differ significantly from, and enjoy a right of dominion over, nonhuman species and the environment. Through readings of...
Dynamic decision-making is a complex process that relies on our ability to generate, evaluate and implement a variety of strategies. Understanding how people navigate this process is a difficult problem that requires a wide range of methodologies. This study details a combination of behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging that...
We broaden the scope of existing dark matter searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) by considering phenomena such as bound state formation and by utilizing simple extensions of well-studied models in the literature. First, we consider the Mono-X studies at the LHC, where the production of dark matter occurs...
“Musical Networks in Bergamo and the Borders of the Venetian Republic, 1580–1630,” examines the mediation and circulation of northern Italian music through social and professional networks with an emphasis on Bergamo, a thriving musical center during this period. In so doing, I challenge established narratives of early modern history that...
This dissertation argues that the convergence of industrialized wage-labor, increased economic precariousness, close and partisan elections, and weak ballot laws dramatically increased the incidence of economic voter intimidation between 1873 and 1896. When this form of coercion primarily affected African American voters, as it did in the 1860s, politicians did...
This dissertation is a collection of three studies on topics in economic history and labor economics, in Italy and the United States. The chapters are ordered chronologically, based on the period of interest. In the first chapter, I investigate the causes and consequences of public spending on primary education in...
The term compaction band identifies a rich variety of structural features of the Earth's crust that affect formations of sedimentary rocks. The most common definition for compaction band often found in the literature describes them as narrow planar zones of concentrated porosity reduction, which may involve limited to none shear...
DNA is extremely versatile and powerful, both as a construct in biological applications and as a ligand in materials design due to the fact that its recognition properties can be programmed through sequence and length. Spherical nucleic acids (SNAs), nanoparticles surrounded by a dense shell of DNA or RNA, are...
Genetic studies have found variants in the protein-degrading autophagy-lysosomal pathway (ALP) to be among the most common risk factors for developing Parkinson’s disease (PD). Macroautophagy (MA) is the arm of this pathway which delivers cytosolic components to lysosomes for degradation and is essential for neuronal health. The defining pathological protein...
Cancer radiation therapy relies on optimized treatment plans whose quality assessment is judged by dosimetric planning aims. It is computationally prohibitive to incorporate the planning aims into the optimization models. Therefore, there exists a disconnect between the two steps of (1) optimizing a plan and (2) evaluating the optimized plan,...
Like many diseases, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease is driven by the activity of inflammatory cells. Using molecular imaging to target and analyze populations of inflammatory cells is one promising strategy to non-invasively assess atherosclerosis progression. However, current molecular imaging contrast agents are not suited for such targeted imaging applications. Nanomaterial-based strategies...
Over 10 billion tons of concrete are produced for the construction industry every year, making concrete the second most used substance on Earth, only surpassed by water. With such high importance as a building material, there is significant need for the ability to accurately model concrete behavior. As a quasi-brittle...
When demand is volatile and uncertain, prices often cannot adequately respond to demand shifts because these shifts are not known when prices are set. In this dissertation, I use the hotel industry--- an industry with a high degree of demand uncertainty and capacity constraints, which amplify the cost of setting...
Everyday tasks, such as putting on a jacket or reaching up to a shelf, often become more challenging for older adults. These tasks rely on the ability to generate three-dimensional torques about the shoulder and to adapt these torques across activities. Shoulder strength and muscle coordination impact shoulder torque production,...
The active participation of external entities in the design and manufacturing flow has produced numerous hardware security issues. Among all the hardware security problems, piracy and overproduction are likely to be the most ubiquitous and expensive ones. Most leading-edge design houses have outsourced their fabrication to the offshore foundries for...