The political history of late twentieth-century Southern Africa was dominated by violent liberation struggles against settler-colonial domination in Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. All five countries experienced prolonged settler colonialism, followed by conflicts in which revolutionary national liberation movements (NLMs) sought to both end settler-colonial domination and build...
Recent experiments in participatory democracy, such as Iceland’s 2013 Constitutional Reform process to Chicago’s annual participatory budgeting process, have empowered members of the public to directly make policy decisions. These new participatory democratic institutions depend on citizens having capacity to organize new institutions and the capacity to participate in them....
Derivative-free optimization (DFO) has received growing attention due to important problems arising in practice. Various research communities, ranging from machine learning to engineering design, have adopted distinct DFO methods. In this thesis, we present extensive studies as a meaningful step towards a comprehensive understanding of DFO methods. We study the...
In this work, I try to understand how the movements, attitudes, styles, and positions of the body in representational artworks can be understood as gestures—that is, as moments that interrupt the unfolding of narrative time and produce an interval. The interval is not merely a space that opens up between...
This dissertation theorizes the relation between blackface minstrelsy and contemporary Black performance. The project analyzes the use of nineteenth-century blackface minstrel conventions in Black theatrical performances during later eras where its usage seems counter-intuitive: during the Black freedom struggles of the 1960s; within Black feminist and queer performance of the...
In recent years, the understanding and identification of quantum materials supporting non-trivial band topology has progressed rapidly. This progress has been motivated in part by the potential application of topological quantum materials in quantum computers, sensors, and other next-generation devices. Despite this progress, the computation of bulk topological invariants in...
This dissertation focuses on quantifying protein folding stability determinants and presenting initial experiments that can guide the development of a novel assay that identifies cell-penetrating miniproteins. First, despite over a century of scholarship on protein folding stability, applying this knowledge to design proteins computationally remains limited. Usually, protein designers generate...
This project explores how the variation in language experiences and attitudes that Mexican American Spanish heritage speaker bilinguals in the United States have affects their speech perception in both their languages. Heritage language bilinguals speak as a first language a minority language that they have cultural ties to (e.g., Spanish...
This dissertation investigates how scope relations are constructed and evaluated during real-time human sentence processing. Theoretical approaches to processing scope relations exist in a multi-dimensional space where trade-offs are made around how quickly scope relations can be computed, how many mistakes are made in computing scope relations, and how many...
The field of distributed optimization algorithms is wide and growing, and new techniques for categorizing and analyzing existing algorithms are continually being developed. In this Thesis, we leverage control theoretic analysis and block diagram interpretations for existing algorithms to synthesize entirely new families of algorithms. These new algorithm families have...
Transitioning energy systems from a reliance on fossil fuels to low carbon energy sources is an essential solution for climate change mitigation. However, the industrial sector, which is directly responsible for more than a quarter of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, continues to use fossil fuels for energy and feedstocks....
Necessity is the mother of innovation. In the wake of the pandemic, with no flow of samples and limited fabrication techniques available, necessity demanded a new material platform and adaptable methods to make complex oxide samples worth measuring. The material platform was KTaO3 , the younger successor to the mainstay...
This manuscript describes and contextualizes the research I performed as a PhD student in Northwestern University. The first three chapters, on Markov chains, stochastic thermodynamics, and large deviation theory, describe three interrelated topics that serve as the background for subsequent research detailed in the next three chapters, on understanding the...
This dissertation aims to develop innovative analytical methods that integrate engineering, marketing, and social science disciplines to incorporate heterogeneous consumer preferences into product design using network-based customer preference modeling. Both companies and designers frequently face difficulties in understanding and addressing customer preferences, which can result in product failure and loss...
Machine learning and deep learning have been proven successful across various scientific fields, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and recommendation systems. As models become more complex, with more parameters and intricate architectures, they can achieve higher prediction accuracy when trained on larger datasets. However, despite the great prediction...
The action of the automorphisms of a formal group on its deformation space is crucial to understanding periodic families in the homotopy groups of spheres and the unsolved Hecke orbit conjecture for unitary Shimura varieties. This action is called the Lubin-Tate action. We first show sufficient conditions for geometrically modelling...
Despite the increasing interest in biogenic secondary organic aerosols (SOAs), their role in the climate system remains the greatest source of uncertainty in global models. Cloud formation, critical for the net cooling effect provided by cloud cover, is dependent on the abundance of SOA particles and their ability to activate...
Although elevated stress and dietary change have each been associated with metabolic health decline for resettled populations in the Global North, considerably less attention is paid to the links between these two biosocial pathways. Addressing these linkages can elucidate interrelated diet and stress mechanisms that affect population health disparities over...
Submodularity is a well-known concept in integer programming and combinatorial optimization. Submodular set functions capture the diminishing returns phenomenon, which has wide-ranging applications in various domains. Typically, a submodular set function models the utility of homogenous items selected from a single ground set. Selecting an item or not is naturally...
Controlled delivery of foreign cargo into cells is a critical step in many biological studies and in cell engineering and analysis workflows. Recent advances in micro and nanotechnology, specifically in microfluidics and microfabrication have added significantly to the precision, accuracy, resolution and throughput of cell manipulation and analysis pipelines. These...