Relative to individual level exposures (such as childhood trauma, life events, and bullying exposure), contextual or systems level environmental factors have received relatively less attention in the psychology literature. While landmark epidemiological and sociological studies have uncovered key insights with regards to systems, this knowledge has not often been translated...
We often criticize people for having beliefs that are not sufficiently supported by the total available evidence. We do this even if those beliefs are instrumental to satisfying their desires. This leads to a question: why should people care about following the evidence, especially when doing so is not instrumental...
Mineral inclusions in diamond, brought to the surface through kimberlitic eruptions, provide a unique glimpse into the geochemical inner workings of Earth’s deep interior. Diamonds source a wide range of depths in the mantle. While most diamonds originate from the upper 200 km of the Earth’s mantle, aptly called super-deep...
Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption ranks as one of the most original and innovative works of the modern period. Thinkers as diverse as Buber, Benjamin, Levinas, Strauss and Derrida have all acknowledged its influence. Yet, there has not been any consensus on the book’s main objective or agenda. Some...
Polymers permeate almost all facets of modern life. For end use applications, these materials are typically processed into products at elevated temperatures under which molten polymers are subjected to flow. Particular interest lies in the flow-induced crystallization behavior of polymer melts under extensional flow, which is a flow type dominant...
This dissertation is an in-depth exploration of Clarke Distributions (for 10), an original musical composition based on the use of text to establish interrelational listening and performance patterns between performers, in place of any fixed musical material. Inspired by research into improvisation, cognition, aesthetics, and linguistics, these patterns manifest as...
Understanding structure-property relationships for polymer nanocomposites is one of the primary challenges in discovering new, light weight, multifunctional advanced materials. 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...
Across the United States, public school districts are facing critical budget crises. To keep cuts away from the classroom, bus transportation is a common area to look for cost reductions. This thesis studies two fundamental problems that arise in public school transportation: the bus route design problem and the school...
Aristotle says that true assertions in practical philosophy are true “for the most part.” I argue an assertion is true “for the most part” if it refers to the hypothetical realization of a substance’s essential capacities under some set of impediments. The removal of impediments to the full realization of...
Broadly speaking, this dissertation project seeks to address the following question: how do religious people think about the cultural authority of science, and to what extent does this vary across different contexts? Despite the predictions of classical modernization theorists, religious institutions continue to significantly shape public discourse—and rule-making—in the vast...
The construction of new C–C bonds remains a central facet of organic chemistry due to its critical role in the synthesis of pharmaceutical compounds and organic materials. Mild and selective methodologies are often required for efficient formation of these bonds in natural product total synthesis, medicinal chemistry campaigns, and more....
This critical/theoretical history of performance art investigates the relationship between the body of the artist and the infrastructure of the city in Los Angeles and New York City between 1970 and 1985, with specific attention to how performance art resists, renegotiates, and responds to architectural functionalism. Using performance studies as...
Since their discovery, polymeric and protein-based materials are key to technological innovation and are indispensable in our lives. However, these natural and man-made soft materials usually have complex and hierarchical structures, with basic functional units in submicron scale. Therefore, a major challenge in understanding and designing these materials lies...
This thesis consists of three projects, centered around the aim to better model real-world systems under uncertainty, specifically, under stochastic disruptions, using optimization. A stochastic disruption is a type of infrequent event in which the timing and the magnitude are random. We introduce the concept of stochastic disruptions and a...
The world is awash in data and much of artificial intelligence focuses on learning models of the underlying structure in this data or the mechanisms governing its evolution. Both neural and symbolic models have weaknesses that make these models sub-optimal from a use perspective. Much of this data is in...
Contactin associated protein like 2 (CNTNAP2) has emerged as a prominent susceptibility gene implicated in multiple complex neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorders (ASD), intellectual disability (ID), and schizophrenia (SCZ). The presence of seizure comorbidity in many of these cases, as well as inhibitory neuron dysfunction in Cntnap2 knockout (KO)...
Understanding how spin waves propagate through ferromagnets is an important component of a wider international effort to create spintronic devices. In this thesis, we develop a propagating spin wave spectroscopy to make a variety of measurements on thin films of Yttrium Iron Garnet (YIG), a material known for having long...
Topology optimization is a powerful tool for maximizing structural performance, enabling multifunctionality of the structure, and reducing the materials waste and cost for sustainable manufacturing. However, current topology optimization tools are limited to a few scales, and the potential of nested topology optimization in engineering design has yet to be...
This dissertation explores lasting familial relationships and friendships among southern African Americans from the antebellum years to the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on southern Maryland, the dissertation shows how free and enslaved African Americans cultivated familial and non-familial relationships in towns and rural neighborhoods. Over the course of...
People need to feel authentic at work, but authenticity is not always a priority in organizations. This dissertation shows feeling authentic is essential to feeling human. Chapter 1 provides an overview of research on authenticity and self-dehumanization, describing why feeling inauthentic leads to self-dehumanization. Chapter 1 empirically supports the association...
In this dissertation, I cover three different topics in macroeconomics. In Chapter 1, I explore the macroeconomic implications of an increase in business competition and its micro transmission channels. In Chapter 2, I document a rise in savings and cash holdings by non-financial corporations across advanced economies and show that...
Epigenetics, the study of heritable changes in organisms not caused by mutations to DNA,holds tremendous promise for future medical applications. Although still in its infancy, feature selection in statistics plays an important role in correlating epigenetic changes with
diseases and various health issues. Feature selection may also be used in...
This study aims to explain variations in student movement successes and failures during regime transitions. Examining the 1998–99 Indonesian student movement that helped ending the Suharto regime, this study argues that the degree of state repression influences the degree of coordination and assistance from opposition groups and actors to students,...
The concealed information test (CIT) has garnered more empirical support than other methods of recognition detection and has a firm theoretical foundation. Because it occurs involuntarily, even when recognition is denied, P300 amplitude is a robust indictor of concealed information. Although the P300-based CIT shows great promise for field use,...
Recent estimates indicate that 21 million US adults live with Type II Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM). The management of the condition often requires patients to take multiple prescription medications to prevent disease progression; yet prescribed regimens themselves can become burdensome. Studies have shown that for patients with T2DM, the average regimen...
The societies of the former Yugoslavia are only a quarter-century removed from extensive warfare, yet collectively represent one of the fastest-growing tourism destinations in the world. This dissertation employs a global and relational lens to examine how contested narratives of recent conflict history are marketed, performed, and narrativized in settings...
The tension-spoke bicycle wheel owes its stiffness and strength to a cooperative relationship between the rim and the spokes: the rim holds the spokes in tension to prevent them from buckling under external loads, while the spokes channel external forces to the hub and prevent the rim from becoming severely...
Over the course of disease progression, half of adults with type II diabetes also develop diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN), peripheral nerve damage precipitated by the downstream metabolic effects of hyperglycemia, insulin resistance, and dyslipidemia. This multifactorial pathogenesis of DPN leads to various structural and physiological changes within the nerve, ultimately...
The structure of the North American crust and mantle was investigated using P wave teleseismic tomography and the links between seismic tomographic models, locations of volcanism, sediment isopachs, and continental scale crustal structures via plate reconstruction modeling. Nearly 50,000 teleseismic P wave delay times were measured from seismograms recorded by...
Understanding the mechanisms associated with chemical catalysis is vital for not only the rational improvement of their capabilities, but also for the advancement of the fundamental knowledge affiliated with the systems in question. These new insights can help predict new reactivities towards more challenging substrates which will allow for easier...
Semiconductor nanocrystals possess unique photophysical properties that make them desirable for many optoelectronic applications such as photovoltaics, LEDs, and quantum computing. When the size of a semiconductor is reduced to below the excitonic Bohr radius of the material, its carriers becomes quantum confined resulting in drastic changes to optical, electronic,...
Early-stage oxidation and corrosion mechanisms of CoCrMo and NiCrMo alloys can be analyzed on the nanoscale by transmission electron microscopy. Both alloys are attractive for a broad array of applications such gas turbines and aircraft engine components as they are known for their excellent corrosion resistance and mechanical properties at...
Dynamical modeling aims to capture the essential mechanics at work in real-world systems while remaining tractable enough to yield mathematical insights for predictions and interventions. The work presented here first takes this approach to the system of political ideology and influence, establishing a model for the continuous-time evolution of individual...
This dissertation is a review of three projects I worked on during my time in the Computational Photography Lab at Northwestern University. First, a source separation problem for the X-Ray Fluorescence images of painted works of art is addressed through the incorporation of Hyperspectral Reflectance data. Following this, a discussion...
Infidel(itie)s of Colour: Unruly Black Bodies, Modernity and Performance in Post-Apartheid South Africa focusses on the ways that queer and feminist artists of colour draw upon their traditional black cultural heritage and spiritual practises as a means of laying claim to cultural citizenship and belonging in post-apartheid South Africa. I...
In my dissertation, I unveil a concept of the dramatic protagonist in Soviet drama that I propose to call a modern superfluous man. To note, this is not an attempt to trace the entirety of the superfluous man tradition from its origins to the present but rather a selective consideration,...
Early transition metal organometallics chemisorbed on extremely Brønsted acidic sulfated metal oxides such as sulfated alumina (AlS) and sulfated zirconia (ZrS) produce highly active single-site catalysts for olefin polymerization, alkene and arene hydrogenation, and alkane hydrogenolysis, typically with a large percentage of catalytically significant sites. The low support conjugate basicity...
Singlet Fission (SF) is a down-conversion process in organic chromophores where one high-energy singlet exciton is converted into two low-energy triplet excitons. Such carrier multiplication aspects of SF are promising in increasing the solar cell efficiency. The generation of two bound spin triplet states from the same singlet exciton also...
Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and their associated Cas proteins provide an immune-like response in many prokaryotes against extraneous nucleic acids. CRISPR-Cas systems are classified into different classes and types that vary widely in composition, target recognition, and overall mechanism. The main division of CRISPR-Cas systems occurs between...
The engineering of human reproduction is one of the defining scientific advances of the past century. Methods to specifically engineer the testis have an equally long and rich history, and have experienced significant progress over the past two decades, leading to current-day breakthroughs which are shifting the paradigms by which...
Constrained optimization problems are prevalent in all areas of science and engineering, and many well-known numerical methods have been developed to solve these problems. Yet, when there exists random quantities in the model under consideration, most of the deterministic methods are no longer effective. In this dissertation, we address parameter...
Deduplication, also referred to as "entity resolution", is a common and crucial pre-processing step in the construction of social networks. Traditional deduplication methods compare the attributes (such as name and age) of potential matching pairs to estimate a match probability for a pair. Recently research has used clustering techniques for...
Chapter 1: If patients can be persuaded to switch between licensed providers on the basis of authoritative opinions, policy-makers can harness such reporting as a tool to implement incentives for high-quality care. I employ the landmark Flexner Report (1910) medical school evaluations to show that existing consumer beliefs and market-specific...
Perturbations to the physiology or impairments in the formation of synapses within the cochlea, specifically the ribbon synapses, result in decreased sensitivity to auditory stimuli. In example, prolonged exposure to moderately intense auditory stimuli, like power tools, can result in the swelling of nerve terminals, retraction of the postsynaptic membrane,...
The focus of this thesis is on evaluating, designing, and applying statistical methods that elucidate molecular mechanisms by seeking to understand the pathways that contribute to disease. Chapter 1 introduces the field and motivates the work in this thesis. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 describe original work. Chapter 5 recapitulates...
Photochemistry allows chemists to harness the energy in specific wavelengths of light and use it to achieve new chemical transformations. These chemical transformations are often impossible or energetically demanding under traditional thermal conditions. My dissertation focuses broadly on different strategies to apply visible-light photochemistry and photocatalysis to the development of...
Policies supporting families with young children provide an important context for human development. The two primary public policies available to caregivers around and after childbirth are parental leave and early care and education (ECE). A substantial body of research evaluates the effects of parental leave and ECE policies on various...
Economic development is a complex and multi-faceted process. Among its many causes, two are particularly consequential: government and technology. By shaping the landscape of economic incentives, they impact how agents interact, invest, and innovate, which in turn affects the creation of wealth. In this dissertation I explore how this interaction...
This dissertation observes interaction to explore the influence of group argument in decision-making in mock juries. The goals of this investigation were to observe two-sided deliberations of a task-oriented decision-making group, map the dichotomous arguments and provide insight into what influences were at play in the final decision. The study...
The groups that we identify with help to make us who we are. This dissertation investigates the impact of the way that each of us understands those identities, through the newly introduced construct of collective self-concept clarity (Gardner & Garr-Schultz, 2017). Two aspects of collective self-concept clarity are introduced and...
The halide perovskites AMX3 (A = large cation, B = Sn or Pb, and X = halide) have been the subject of intense investigation due to their outstanding optical and electronic properties, which have enabled high solar cell efficiencies thanks to a beneficial electronic structure and long charge carrier lifetimes....
Motor planning is fundamental to the performance of everyday reaching movements. The influence of planning is not limited to voluntary movements but extends to involuntary movements initiated in response to sensory stimuli, such as postural perturbations applied to the arm. Stroke alters voluntary reaching and the involuntary response to perturbations,...
How molecular chirality manifests at the nano- to macroscale has been a scientific puzzle since Louis Pasteur discovered biochirality. In general, amphiphilic molecules can organize into a variety of assembly shapes including micelles, spherical vesicles, cylindrical micelles, and planar bilayers. However, when such amphiphilic molecules are chiral, helical ribbons, helicoidal...
This project addresses the uses of coalition in US political imaginaries throughout the 1930s and 1960s. Throughout this period, public familiarity with “coalition” undergoes a marked transformation: whether deployed as argument, performance, or organizational form. Analysis focuses on three case studies: accounts in the national and Black press of a...
This dissertation concerns the probabilistic aspects of diffusion processes generated by a family of differential operators, which is similar to the family of hypoelliptic Laplacian operators, acting on the tangent bundle of a compact Riemannian manifold. By lifting the processes to the product of the frame bundle and the euclidean...
Originally motivated by the emergence of networked systems lacking central coordination such as multiprocessors, wireless sensor networks and smart grids, the study of distributed optimization algorithms has been an active field of research spanning multiple decades. More recently, the rapid growth in the availability of high-dimensional datasets has posed the...
This dissertation explores the experience of violence and precarity among Central American youth as they travel through Mexico to the United States. Based on a multi-sited ethnographic study conducted across Mexico from 2015 to 2019, I illustrate how the journey of these youth migrants is, in its basic expression, an...
Despite improvements to diagnostics and treatment methods, colorectal cancer remains the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Colonoscopies, the gold standard for colorectal cancer screening, can significantly increase the patient’s chance of survival through early detection. However, colonoscopy cost, surgical complications, and patient bowel preparations limit...
Nanomaterials offer unique properties not seen in their macroscopic kin. They can be used in printed electronics, as catalysts, and so much more. However, their diminutive size complicates materials processing techniques. They can easily aggregate become no longer useful. A solution to this is to use a polymeric surfactant such...
This thesis explores the potential of two-dimensional (2D) or van der Waals (vdW) materials for printed optoelectronic devices. The research focuses on the development of processing, imaging, and modeling of materials and thin-film devices to optimize performance and introduce novel properties. A gate-dependent resistor network model is presented that establishes...
This dissertation is a wide-ranging study on real estate and the effect of financial constraints on economic activity. In the first chapter, I use granular data on home builder housing developments to provide new evidence that firms spread negative revenue shocks across projects via their internal capital markets. I analyze...
This dissertation explores the interrelationship between time, labor, and literature during the rise of British industrial capitalism. By tracing a tradition of social criticism from Percy Shelley to William Morris that runs through the Chartist movement, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens, it isolates and explicates a distinctive existential mood, or...
In the U.S., approximately 840,000 Americans die from cardiovascular disease (CVD) each year, and it is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. The prevalence of CVD is on the rise and widespread disparities in CVD exist across economic, racial, and ethnic groups. In order to address the rising...
“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” is the name for one of French artist Paul Gauguin’s most influential paintings. Unsurprisingly, these very questions have occupied the minds of countless philosophers, artists, and scholars since the beginning of human civilization. These questions become especially salient...
Much of our understanding of human becoming and the process by which possible futures are developed has been based on narrow samples of human experience, which are usually more privileged and provide a narrow view of variability in human life and development. The developmental and educational pathways of minoritized young...
The physical boundary layer, or interface, between two different phases of matter is the site of chemical and physical processes that are critical to many research fields. Many of these interfaces contain electric charge, which influences the structure and composition of the interfacial region and the interactions between the interface...
Commercial agriculture and industrial manufacturing have contaminated freshwater sources with persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals, and radioactive species. Effective mitigation of this pollution is paramount to safeguarding human health, animal and aquatic life, and the environment. Conventional adsorbents such as activated carbon, metal oxides, resins, and polymers attain moderate to...
Supported vanadium oxide materials have been extensively studied for alkane oxidative dehydrogenation (ODH) reactions due to their high activity and selectivity. The catalytic activity of supported VOx materials is influenced by the surface coverage of VOx sites and hence the distribution of V=O, V-O-V, and V-O-S (S, support) bonds. The...
The question of how native species diversity affects a community’s ability to resist invasive species has inspired decades of research. One of the oldest invasion biology hypotheses is that more species rich ecosystems are less invaded. While there has been strong support for this hypothesis, there is also strong evidence...
Current prediction instruments for violent recidivism lack accuracy as recidivism rates for violent offenses remain high (Fazel & Wolf, 2015). Part of the issue may be the conceptualization of violent offenders as a homogenous group as opposed to heterogeneous subgroups. Additionally, various studies suggest that cognitive abilities in violent offenders...
The role of nuclei nanoenvironment in cellular function has been a challenging problem in biology due to the lack of chromatin 3-dimension (3D) structure imaging/capturing techniques and theory connecting physical structure of chromatin to transcription. Recent studies on optical properties measurement on biological sample techniques, nanoscale imaging techniques and chromatin...
This dissertation is a case study of one midwestern city and its Latinx inhabitants. It explores the intertwined pursuit by ethnic Mexicans and Puerto Ricans of inclusion in union and electoral politics. The world of machine politics offered ethnic Mexicans and Puerto Ricans an avenue for inclusion. Central to this...
X-ray imaging at nano and micro-scale is of great importance for the material science and defense industry. Large penetration depth and low wavelength of x-rays offer an important potential to image objects at high resolution and in a non-invasive process. While the ever-growing community is pursuing novel applications and looking...
Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are important abstractions of the complex regulatory interplays between genes, proteins, metabolites, and other molecular-level entities. Comprehensive GRNs provide high-level overviews of the topology of gene-gene interactions and their purposes, thereby enabling a comprehensive understanding of their role in phenotypic variation, disease mechanisms, and other biological...
This dissertation is a collection of three papers on synthesizing and translating statistical evidence in education research. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction and executive summary, and Chapters 2 - 4 contain the three substantive papers respectively. Chapter 2 presents methods for pooling sample variances across studies to improve properties...
This dissertation examines the language of force in Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (MoE) as a site of literary self-reflection. It investigates how the text employs a constellation of “force” terms – including not only the words Kraft, Energie, and Leistung, but also images of physical and chemical forces...
Heart failure is a growing clinical problem, and inherited cardiomyopathies contribute significantly to heart failure. Among the many genes associated with inherited cardiomyopathies, mutations in FLNC, the gene encoding the cytoskeletal protein filamin C, associate with a range of cardiomyopathy and increased risk for arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death in...
In recent years, motivated by the approaching of quantum limit for classic information science, the development of quantum information science (QIS) has drawn considerable interest from chemists and physicians. Different from classical bits which can only be localized on two different states, quantum bit, which can be simplified as qubit,...
Oligonucleotides can be used to modulate the regulation of pathological genes that are associated with various diseases. However, due to biological barriers, efficient delivery of oligonucleotides, especially to extrahepatic tissues, remains a challenge. To overcome these barriers, multiple delivery strategies have been developed, ranging from medicinal chemistry to nanotechnology. Nanoparticle-based...
In this thesis we present methods for estimating network metrics via random walk sampling. More specifically, we generalize the Hansen-Hurwitz estimator and the Horvitz-Thompson estimator to estimate the shortest path length distribution (SPLD), closeness centrality ranking, and clustering coefficients of a network. Those are important metrics to a network, but...
The three-dimensional (3D) nanoscale structure of III-As nanowires is correlated with optical and electronic property measurements to deconvolve the contributions of strain, composition, and crystal structure to characteristics of interest for future electronic and optoelectronic devices. Multiple advanced two-dimensional (2D) and 3D characterization techniques are employed such as atom probe...
Sentence comprehension requires both syntactic prediction and working memory processes. Evidence suggests that both are impaired in agrammatic aphasia, and can independently contribute to comprehension breakdowns, but the relationship between them, especially during real-time sentence comprehension remains unclear. Two EEG studies investigated on-line processing of sentences with non-local long-distance dependencies...
Existing scholarship documents the low levels of political power held by the American poor, and concomitant economic elite domination of Congress. Since the poor seldom elect lawmakers that share their descriptive traits, they necessarily rely on non-poor lawmakers virtually representing their interests. A key part of this virtual representation is...
Circuit-level Dynamic Timing Slack (DTS) has emerged as a compelling opportunity for eliminating inefficiency in modern low-power systems. This slack arises when all the signals have propagated through logic paths well in advance of the clock signal. When it is properly identified, the system can exploit this unused cycle time...
This dissertation is a performance ethnography that chronicles the experiences of Black and Latinx transgender women in the ballroom scenes of Chicago, Illinois and London, England. The dissertation engages 65 Black and Latinx transwomen and offers a theory of embodied knowledge—that is, the harnessing of lived experiences of racial, gender,...
Although electrostatics interactions in fluids have been studied for many decades, new results in this field are still challenging our classical understanding of electrolytes. The combination of electrostatics and self-assembly yields many interesting yet challenging problems that are of fundamental scientific interest and show promise for industrial applications. In this...
This dissertation introduces several novel computational imaging techniques that capture and analyze the 3D surface shapes and internal layered materials. The research proposes user-friendly and non-invasive imaging systems, constructed using only commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, which provide accurate measurement of 3D information that was previously inaccessible. The dissertation focuses on...
This dissertation studies the pricing of jump risk in the cross-section, which builds on understanding the cross-sectional structure of jumps at market jump times, develops nonparametric measures of idiosyncratic jump risk, and investigates its asset pricing implications. Chapter 1 is joint work with Professor Viktor Todorov, in which we study...
This dissertation explores the poetry and culture of the late-Soviet era of Stagnation (1964-1985) through a broadly conceived cultural metaphor of stagnation. The five Russian poets and one American poet in this study- Viktor Krivulin, Alexei Parshchikov, Aleksandr Eremenko, Ivan Zhdanov, Elena Shvarts, and Lyn Hejinian- each engage with a...
In nature, materials with complex architectures are formed through hierarchical self-assembly. Therefore, the study and design of hierarchically assembling materials is important in producing materials that mimic biological structures and is a key challenge in biomaterials science and engineering. In articular cartilage, hierarchical assembly of extracellular matrix (ECM) components provides...
Soft materials are inherently fluxional, with morphologies and behaviors that are dictated by their solvation state. Thus, many organic systems cannot be reliably imaged by static dry state or cryogenic-transmission electron microscopy (TEM). This motivated us to pursue liquid cell (LC) TEM method development to study our own materials and...
Stress, trauma exposure, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are associated with chronic health conditions. In the U.S., women of color face trauma at up to four times the national rate. They also contend with chronic stress from the intersectional hardships of racism, discrimination, sexism, and economic hardship that is the...
This dissertation is about three of Cicero’s notable projects in ideal theory in his middle and late periods (between roughly 54-43 BCE). It comes during a resurgence in interest in Cicero’s contributions as a philosopher. First, I discuss Cicero’s philosophical account of vera gloria (true glory) in contradistinction to mere...
Economic activity is mostly performed by groups of agents that form organizations and collectives. In this dissertation I explore the effects of two frictions, namely conflicting preferences and contracting with externalities, on the characteristics of agents that jointly constitute a given organization or collective. First, in many professional environments workers...
Androgen receptor pathway inhibitors are the mainstay treatment for advanced prostate cancer, but resistance is common. Here, we used a CRISPR activation screen to identify genes that promote enzalutamide resistance in the metastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer cell line LNCaP. We found that activation of the TGF-β target gene, PRRX2, promoted...
This dissertation consists of three chapters on contract theory. In Chapter 1, ``Agency in Hierarchies: Middle Managers and Performance Evaluations'', I study the optimal joint design of incentives and performance rating scales in a principal-manager-worker hierarchy. The principal wants to motivate the manager and the worker to exert unobservable effort....
Advancements in the understanding and synthesis of transition metal compounds have allowed materials engineers to design functional materials with a range of properties, such as ferroelectricity, non-linear optical activity, colossal magnetoresistance, and superconductivity. Conventional routes to tune and design functional materials includes chemical cation substitution and heterostructuring of oxide thin...
Individuals experience a wide variety of emotions in their everyday lives. Some experience more variety, or complexity, than others, called emotional complexity. There is a body of research that suggests that emotional complexity is beneficial for mental and physical health; yet more recent work has called these associations into...
This dissertation proposes an oracle efficient estimator in the context of a sparse linear model. Chapter 1 introduces the penalty and the estimator that optimizes a penalized least squares objective. Unlike existing methods, the penalty is differentiable – once, and hence the estimator does not engage in model selection. This...
Global energy demands are expected to increase by about one-third between 2014 and 2040 and will surely be met from a combination of wind, solar, and among other renewable sources. The shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energies will ensure a clean and sustainable future. The main issue...