In this dissertation, I argue that the locus of Tsvetaevaseemingly conflicted views about art and the criteria for its evaluation is the tension between the rational, ethical, and distinctively human in us, and the irrational spontaneous impulse. Tsvetaevaterm for the irrational impulse is stikhiia, a force of nature that is...
Over the past decade significant advancements have been made across the field of cancer biology resulting in transformative new therapies. Despite these advancements, treatments for metastatic cancer remain relatively ineffective. Metastasis is coordinated by various types of “healthy†stromal cells in addition to the tumor cells themselves. This requires a...
Let X,Y be algebraic varieties defined over the reals. Assume Y is smooth and X is Gorenstein. Suppose f:X -> Y is a flat R-morphism such that all the fibers have rational singularities. We show that the pushforward of any smooth, compactly supported measure on X has a continuous density...
Ubiquitous in the environment are bacteria that have evolved to adapt to the environmental niches they colonize. To this end, bacteria sensory and signaling molecules are required for processing these extracellular changes within their environment into changes in gene expression. The plague-causing pathogen, Yersinia pestis, contains a repertoire of two-component...
Nano-scale materials possess many unique physical and chemical properties which are not found in bulk materials. The ability to synthesize these materials by design is one of the greatest challenges in materials science. Advances towards meeting this challenge will lead to discoveries in fields such as plasmonics, photonics, catalysis, and...
Ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi are a group of cosmopolitan symbiotic soil fungi that colonize the fine roots of tree species and play an essential role in plant nutrition and ecosystem function. In worldwide afforestation projects, the establishment of introduced trees in novel habitats has been shown to require ECM fungal associations....
I study three topics in applied microeconomics. My first chapter concerns the effect of daily school start times on academic achievement in Florida. Exploiting the sharp discontinuity in school start time relative to sunrise, I track children who move between schools on either side of the time zone boundary in...
Journalism professionals and researchers have recently argued that newsrooms adopt audience engagement as one of their chief pursuits. This term has many interpretations that stem from one underlying belief: journalists better serve their audiences when they explicitly focus on how their audiences interact with and respond to the news in...
Supported metal oxides are an important class of heterogeneous catalysts active for many selective oxidation reactions including alkane oxidative dehydrogenation. Attempts to develop fundamental structure-function relationships for supported metal oxide catalysts for alkane oxidative dehydrogenation have been challenging, with many conflicting reports in literature. This has been in part due...
Convent education was financially accessible to many girls whose families could not afford a private tutor and nuns were the largest group of educated, culturally-active women in pre-modern Europe. Convent education mirrored the general contours of humanist education by associating learning with morality, serving the purposes of the Venetian republic,...