There is no group of materials as diverse, complex, and ubiquitous as polymers. From plastic bags, to rubber tires, electronics, food packaging, water filtration and even aerospace applications, the penetration of polymer materials into all aspects of life make them very important materials throughout all engineering fields. However, this breadth...
Protein-protein interactions are ubiquitous in living systems, and mediate important cellular processes from decision making to immunity against pathogens. Furthermore, protein-protein interactions are key to many protein therapeutics, pathogen diagnostics, and numerous synthetic biology applications. As a result, there has been significant effort to develop methods to express potential protein...
Desmosomal cadherins are a recent evolutionary innovation that make up the adhesive core of highly specialized intercellular junctions called desmosomes. Desmosomal cadherins, desmogleins and desmocollins, are related to the classical cadherins but their cytoplasmic domains are tailored for anchoring intermediate filaments instead of actin to sites of cell-cell adhesion. The...
This dissertation contains three chapters. In Chapter 1, I study the effects of bank leverage ratio restrictions in a general equilibrium model of the macroeconomy where lenders can anticipate bank runs. This framework allows the analysis of the tradeoffs associated with bank capital requirements - while unlimited leverage allows capital...
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common aggressive primary malignant brain tumorin adults with a median age of onset of 65 years of age. Although advanced age is often associated with worse GBM patient survival, the predominant source(s) of maladaptive aging
effects remains to be established. Here we studied intra-tumoral and...
Low-dimensional materials have emerged as a promising platform for ultrathin electronic and optoelectronic devices. The span of electronic properties covers the spectrum from metallic through small and medium bandgap semiconductors to large bandgap insulators, providing all the necessary components to fabricate a variety of devices. Compared to bulk-semiconductor based devices,...
Cyber-physical systems (CPS), as a multidisciplinary area, have been widely adopted in our daily life and attract experts from various fields. CPS aims to achieve real-time and resilient connection with physical world through integration of computation, communication and control technologies. Many CPS systems, such as automotive, avionics, and industrial system,...
Employees’ social class backgrounds remain a critical but often overlooked source of inequality in white-collar workplaces: employees from working-class backgrounds are less likely to be hired, less likely to advance to leadership positions, and earn less on average than their counterparts from middle- and upper-class backgrounds, even with the same...
Metal–Organic Frameworks (MOFs) is a class of material comprising organic linkers and inorganic, metal-ion-containing nodes, with diverse functionalities and wide-range of applications. Because of their porous nature and functional nodes and linkers, they are competent candidates for gas storage, separation, catalysis, and so on. Most MOFs, however, are intrinsically insulating,...
Myoelectric pattern recognition-based upper limb prostheses measure electromyographic (EMG) signals from the residual limb and learn to identify muscle activity patterns that correspond to intended gestures. To train an accurate pattern recognition controller, it is essential that the training signals typify signals measured in real-world scenarios. When these conditions are...
Individual responses are an important determinant of public policy effectiveness. Development policies often try to remove barriers that limit the ability to make the preferred choices, hoping that this will lead to prosperity at the individual and aggregate levels. However, removing some, but not all, barriers can lead to undesirable...
Massive amounts of data with a large number of predictors routinely arrive in data systems as a result of recent developments in data collection technology. In this data-intensive world, predictive models are more important than ever to extract information and make decisions, and are widely applied in many different fields....
In recent years, we have seen the embryo of Industry 4.0 which has been promoting manufacturing processes towards the future with better efficiency, higher accuracy and better reliability. However, manufacturing precision has been restricted by the precision of metrology and material characterization. In other words, one can only manufacture parts...
This dissertation is about people living with the ruins of an old city. It demonstrates that ruined cities can provide sources of cultural identity and community life, conditions that contribute to social revitalization in times of crisis. The case study for this dissertation examines the ancient Maya city of Ake,...
Conventional cross-linked polymers are widely used owing to their outstanding stability and performance. However, permanent cross-links in these polymer networks prevent them from being recycled or reprocessed at the end of life, leading to major sustainability and economic losses. The recycling issue associated with polyurethane (PU) thermoset wastes exemplifies such...
This dissertation centers gay and lesbian activists, their lawyers, and public interest litigation organizations in a genealogical understanding of the evolution of human rights law in the LGBTIQ+ issue space. I ask why sexual minorities turned to the courts in pursuit of the decriminalization of homosexual sex. Empirically, I examine...
Etching flourished as a printmaking medium in Paris during the Second Empire and early Third Republic, the precise timeframe of the city’s drastic transformation due to the state-authorized phase of urban renewal implemented under the reign of Napoléon III by his prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This study...
In this document, I demonstrate that: 1) Linear basis functions cannot outperform nonlinear ones to represent hand kinematics 2) Nonlinear autoencoders outperform PCA on the dimensionality reduction of hand kinematics, 3) Nonlinear autoencoders outperform PCA in human gait representation and recurrent nonlinear autoencoders can seamlessly express the temporal dynamics, 4)...
We address the problem of efficient maintenance of the answer to a new type of query: Continuous Maximizing Range-Sum (Co-MaxRS) for moving objects trajectories. The traditional static/spatial MaxRS problem finds a location for placing the centroid of a given (axes-parallel) rectangle $R$ so that the sum of the weights of...
In three empirical chapters, this dissertation examines the field of sustainability over time, specifically uncovering the processes by which contentious interactions between movements and organizations can shift to the development of shared meaning and the creation of new organizational positions. The dissertation utilizes the analyses strategies of text analysis, field...
Ensuring adequate water quality is essential for human health and for effective allocation of resources in agriculture, energy, and manufacturing. However, the current state-of-the-art for water quality testing requires expensive equipment and technical expertise to analyze samples and takes days to obtain results from off-site labs, making it inaccessible to...
Quantum dots (QDs) are promising photocatalysts due to their large extinction coefficient, large surface area-to-volume ratio, and stability upon irradiation. QDs have been studied in photocatalytic hydrogen production, CO2 reduction, and reduction of small organic molecules such as nitrobenzene. This dissertation describes the application of QDs in two photocatalytic cross-coupling...
Secondary organic aerosol (SOA) particles are a class of highly abundant atmospheric constituents that represent a substantial fraction of carbon within the climate system. A subset of naturally-occurring SOA particles are formed through atmospheric oxidation of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs), forming oxygenated products of lower volatility that can partition...
Genetic factors such as loss of genetic diversity, mutations, and inbreeding depression can increase a populations chances of extinction, therefore it is important to understand how these factors can contribute to populations decline. Among the genetic factors that can contribute to populations extinction, inbreeding depression is the only one that...
This dissertation uses the lens of sociomateriality to examine two cases of innovative, technology-mediated civic learning programs, a U.S. Government class in a suburban high school that engages students in a simulation of the legislative process, and an English Language Arts unit in an urban public school in which students...
Celebrity, reputation, and identity were complex issues for nineteenth-century British actresses. This dissertation examines how actresses responded to, integrated, and defied gender norms and social structures as they performed “authentic” identities for consuming publics. I investigate how actresses participated in charity events and bazaars, autobiographical writing, and advertising campaigns in...
Mixed-dimensional heterojunctions between two-dimensional (2D) materials and organic semiconductors is a rapidly growing field. This is motivated by the promise of leveraging the extraordinary properties of 2D materials with the synthetic tunability and reconfigurability of organic electronics, allowing the realization of new physics or devices that are not possible in...
With the advancement of high-throughput sequencing technology, it has become much easier to extract gene expression data and to discover gene-disease associations more efficiently. Longitudinal gene expression data offer more insight into expression patterns for distinct patient groups compared to cross-sectional data. For instance, patients diagnosed with subclinical acute rejections...
Regulations often impose quality restrictions on firms, which in turn can influence prices and welfare in a theoretically ambiguous manner. To study such quality restrictions, my coauthor and I examine the Wright Amendment by analyzing its full repeal in 2014 as a natural experiment, and the analysis is documented in...
Many computing technologies are primarily useful because of the existence of some set of data created by people, intentionally in some cases and unintentionally in others. For instance, technologies like search engines, recommender systems, classifiers, and language models are all dependent on digital records of things people have said, done,...
Cognitive impairment is a significant public health concern as the United States (US) population continues to age at unprecedented rates. It is well established that older adults are more likely to have higher rates of morbidity and mortality, in addition to greater healthcare utilization and costs. A parallel concern is...
Stroke is the leading cause of permanent adult disability. Subcortical unilateral (hemiparetic) stroke affecting the internal capsule or basal ganglia is the most common of all strokes and usually results in hemiparesis of the contralateral arm and leg. About 80% of the individuals with a moderate to severe hemiparetic stroke...
Polymer nanocomposites have attracted great interest in recent years because of their potential as tailored materials with enhanced properties. Recent experiments have shown that polymer nanocomposites are able to achieve significant improvement in dielectrical, thermal, mechanical and other physical properties compared with their parent polymer systems. More importantly, these outstanding...
This dissertation comprises three distinct essays in mechanism design and economic theory. The first chapter studies the welfare implications of consumer data ownership and voluntary disclosure. I formalize this setting within a model of mechanism design with evidence and construct the seller's optimal mechanism. Perhaps surprisingly, I find that allowing...
Wearable-based human activity recognition is well-studied in the machine learning and pervasive computing community. A large corpus of studies focused on using wearable sensors to recognize health-related behaviors that involve high periodicity in the sensed signal, such as sitting, walking, and running. Other activities that occur less frequently throughout the...
“Pornographic Bodies: Constructing Corporeality in Adult Film” explores how the body is theorized within pornography through issues of materiality, spacing, form, libidinal organization, and subject/object relations. This dissertation challenges the way existing porn studies scholarship has taken body to be a self-evident vessel containing the psychosexual dynamics of the performers...
Stairs and curbs often present as an exhausting environmental barrier for individuals with bilateral cerebral palsy (CP) due to their lower limb motor impairments. Indeed, performance in stair-climbing in this population has a higher correlation with disruption of mobility than walking. Community members affected by CP consider impaired mobility a...
SAMDI-MS, which stands for self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) for matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization (MALDI) mass spectrometry (MS), is a powerful tool that has enabled the development of novel high-throughput screening and experimentation methods for decades. SAMDI-MS works by immobilizing analytes to functionalized SAMs prior to MS analysis and is capable of...
Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels are non-selective cation channels expressed in the brain and heart where they exert control over many diverse physiological properties. In the hippocampus, HCN channels are enriched in a dendritic gradient within CA1 pyramidal cells where they reduce dendritic integration and dampen neuronal excitability. HCN channels...
The vaudeville remains an oft-overlooked genre of French song that was popularized by Paris’s fairground theaters and street singers on the Pont Neuf. Many histories of French music point to the middle of the eighteenth century as the period when the vaudeville began its rapid disappearance from the city’s musical...
As our world is increasingly filled with data visualizations, having the skills to leverage data visualizations is essential for participation in society. Confident engagement with data visualizations is critical for being an educated member of society; however, research has shown that it is difficult for individuals to digest and gain...
Prior studies about restatements generally examine outcomes under assumed auditor responsibility. Surprisingly, however, about 20% of the restatements obtained from Audit Analytics correspond to cases where the current auditor was not engaged during the misstatement period. I refer to these cases as uninvolved. The first chapter examines current literature findings...
Decision making is an essential and indispensable element in everyday life. It is posited that parallel, distinct systems subserving deliberative, goal-directed control and automatic, habitual control underlie decision making. Computational accounts suggest that model-based and model-free learning strategies give rise to these two systems respectively. The model-based system is a...
This dissertation investigates two ways in which personality psychology should move beyond the traditional approach of measuring personality with broad domains composed of trait descriptors, as exemplified by the Big Five taxonomy. The first study (Chapter 2) suggests an alternative to the traditional approach of aggregating personality items into domains....
Motivated by rhythms in the brain, we investigate the synchronization of noisy and all-to-all pulse-coupled oscillators. We consider a case where the oscillatory excursions are of varying amplitude and where only sufficiently large excursions result in the output pulses that drive the interactions between the oscillators. In the regime of...
For years, neuroscientists have strived to understand memory consolidation, where salient memories are sorted and organized into distributed cortical networks for long-term storage. A large body of sleep research suggests that slow-wave sleep is an optimal opportunity for memory consolidation, and that consolidation is driven, at least in part, by...
Leptin, a peptide mainly secreted in proportion to adipose tissue mass, increases energy expenditure with a parallel increase in breathing. The existence of a leptin-mediated neural circuit linking breathing to metabolism has been speculated, yet the precise central mechanisms were unknown. In my thesis, I show that optogenetic activation of...
Every day, we communicate through computers on projects ranging from a group lunch order to booking a flight to learning critical medical information. And every day, we also miscommunicate through computers: We don’t pick up on an intentionally humorous response, or we miss the criticality of a request. This is...
This dissertation aims to understand the contribution of schools to reducing bullying behaviors and, in turn, to examine the benefits for students of attending a school that effectively reduces bullying. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to the literature on bullying by a) locating the school as a key environment...
This thesis deals with modeling long-term deformation and failure of concrete and shale structures. First concrete structures are studied. For concrete structures, design lifetime of over a hundred years is required. Shrinkage, swelling, creep and Alkali-silica reaction are significant parts of the long-term deformation of concrete and are studied here....