The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the adoption of active mobility through the lens of three fundamental concepts: scale, segment, and neighborhood. Scale refers to both the aggregation of geospatial data and the measurement of latent constructs through behavioral survey instruments. Segment refers to the various clustering approaches...
The work in this thesis focuses on computational methods for the identification of novel enzymatic pathways. In particular this work focuses on the utilization of the Biological Network Integrated Computational Explorer (BNICE) software suite to predict de novo enzymatic pathways for the production of commercially relevant compounds and on improvements...
Musical meter is often described as an objective grid-like system of time-points that is created by musical sounds. I define meter instead as any pattern of felt beats an individual listener chooses to hear, a physical and cognitive interpretation of the music that is (re-) created in the moment of...
Biomaterials have immense potential for studying fundamental biological processes and developing therapies to help regenerate or replace the structure and function of injured tissues. In order to accomplish this, they need to be designed to mimic the structure and function of Nature’s most important material, the extracellular matrix (ECM) surrounding...
Nanoelectromechanical (NEMS) systems fabricated using atomically-thin materials have low mass and high stiffness and are thus ideal candidates for force and mass sensing applications. Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) offer certain unique properties in their few-layered form – such as piezoelectricity and a direct band gap in some cases – and...
The dissertation systematically delineates the mechanically-guided deterministic assembly of three-dimensional (3D) mesostructures by compressive buckling, covering topics from mechanics concepts, design and analysis, fabrication techniques, to application opportunities. The development of approaches to form complex 3D functional mesostructures in advanced materials is a topic of broad interest, thanks to the...
Plato's readers struggle to reconcile his combination of conceptual argument and mimetic fiction. In this dissertation, I suggest we can understand this discomfiting combination if we understand the dialogues as "the mimesis of people in speech." Because speech is both referential and performative, speech is a hybrid of thought and...
The development and use of organic anionic chromophores that absorb the entire visible spectrum & into the near-infrared region while providing highly reducing equivalents is pinnacle for artificial photosynthesis. This dissertation investigates the rational design of new donor-acceptor systems for artificial photosynthesis that couple naphthalene diimide (NDI)/perylene diimide (PDI) radical...
Abstract The relationship between truth and politics is an ancient and venerable problem in political philosophy. But just as the traditional subordination of politics to philosophy has obscured central categories and experiences of politics (like action and freedom), it has also obscured the distinctive problem of truth in politics, or...
I. The distribution of tsunami amplitudes in the open ocean is controlled by source mechanism and bathymetry geometry. Although detailed studies have considered heterogeneity effects in earthquake tsunami sources, little or no attention has been paid to the effects of physical resolution of detailed bathymetry on tsunami waveforms in the...