Biological therapeutics have revolutionized the way we treat cancer due to their ability to target tumors discriminately, leaving healthy cells unaffected. However, our inability to tailor the structure of biologics may hamper their optimization for efficacy. This lack of programmability contributes to factors such as immunogenic responses, inability to penetrate...
Proprioception, or the sense of one’s body in space, provides critical feedback that the brain usesto generate controlled movements. When proprioceptive feedback is lost, people find it difficult
to perform even basic motor tasks. Despite its importance, proprioceptive coding of single
neurons in the cuneate nucleus (CN), the most peripheral...
In memory overgeneralization, details from negatively-valenced episodic memories become excessively generalized to unrelated neutral situations. This is a key cognitive distortion associated with major depressive disorder (MDD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Stress promotes memory generalization, and this process likely relies on stress-induced changes in dorsal...
Anthropogenic consumption of fossil fuels releases carbon into the Earth-atmosphere-ocean system at rates unmatched by geologic processes. Yet, some geologic time periods also show evidence of climate forcing related to rapid natural greenhouse gas emissions and can serve as tools to help understand the future trajectory of climate. Geologic events...
This thesis focuses on identifying structure-property-performance relationships in supported nanoparticle catalysts, where an active catalyst material is supported on a high surface area substrate. Identifying these relationships in supported nanoparticle catalysts can be quite challenging, as the complex structure of these catalysts results in numerous potential sources for changes to...
In modern electronics, thermal management becomes one of the most crucial factors in the determination of the performance, quality and lifetime of devices. Especially with the development of internet of things and the digitization of worldwide information, the need for storage of giant amount of data and processing with fast...
Next generation cellular networks are expected to support a massive data traffic volume and satisfy a vast number of users that have latency-critical quality-of-service expectations. Towards serving this demand, it is envisaged that the interference management problem will be the main bottleneck due to the likeliness of a heavily interfering...
Engineering design is a systematic process of identifying needs and their translation into functional systems. This is a cyclic process that alternates between the acquisition of data and the synthesis of said data to inform design decisions. Conventionally, data from physical experiments are used to explore the efficacy of alternative...
The gender imbalance in computer science is getting worse, with computer science being the only Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) field in which women’s representation has steadily declined throughout the past few decades. Rectifying this gender imbalance is an urgent need, both because of fundamental issues of equity and...
This dissertation starts with the question of what the global resurgence of authoritarianism means for the welfare states affected by it. The inadequacies of the dominant partisan and institutionalist paradigms within the welfare state literature suggest, however, that a new paradigm for understanding welfare state development is necessary to answer...