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...