This dissertation presents research on the game theory of political power, both between and within nations. It first revisits a classical distinction between three different types of power or influence: information, rewards and threats. By presenting a binary-action Principal-Agent problem which incorporates the essential ingredients of all three types of...
The advent of sequencing technologies has generated a large amount of biological and medical data. These data such as genetic sequencing data and lab experimental evidence data can help understand critical biomedical problems. This dissertation makes contribution in three different but related applications in biomedical research. In Chapter 2, we...
Natural products from fungi have had an immeasurable societal impact as both friends and foes to human health. This includes numerous therapeutics that have had widespread clinical success, mycotoxins that are implicated in fungal pathogenicity, and various agrochemicals. Recent genome sequencing efforts have revealed that fungal genomes contain the capacity...
This dissertation explores the interaction of debt covenants and firms’ investment behaviors, especially the association between debt covenants and project-level operations. Although previous research has examined the association between contractual terms or gross measures of investment and covenants, there is little known about the ways that covenants influence the choice...
Interactions between working memory and long term memory systems are still not well understood, as the systems have long been thought to be mostly separate. An interesting intersection of these memory systems is domain-specific expertise, whereby individuals are able to show supra-span memory for information related to the area of...
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia, and associated with increased risk for ischemic stroke and mortality. While the risk of stroke has been shown to be reduced with the use of oral anticoagulants like Warfarin, these medications are predictably linked with an increased risk of bleeding, and...
In machine learning, classification that assigns a label to a sample is a fundamental problem and serves a building block for various applications of artificial intelligence such as speech recognition, sentimental analysis, and image recognition. During the last years, deep learning rejuvenates artificial intelligence; in particular, it leads to tremendous...
This dissertation investigates the relationship between melancholy and the development of American and Iranian literary discourses as responses to the crisis of postwar sovereignty. While situating itself against the complicated backdrop of US/Iran relations since the Second World War, it explores the impact of religion on the formation of political...
I present the body of work I have pursued over the course of my doctoral study at Northwestern University. First, I conduct an analysis of the measurement abilities of distinctive LISA detector designs, examining the influence of LISA's low-frequency performance on the detection and characterization of massive black hole binaries....
Automobile transportation is among the leading sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, and reducing vehicle miles traveled must be part of our climate change mitigation efforts. One recent trend that, if accelerated, could aid in this effort is the increase in bicycling for transportation in large US...