This dissertation concerns the probabilistic aspects of diffusion processes generated by a family of differential operators, which is similar to the family of hypoelliptic Laplacian operators, acting on the tangent bundle of a compact Riemannian manifold. By lifting the processes to the product of the frame bundle and the euclidean...
Despite improvements to diagnostics and treatment methods, colorectal cancer remains the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Colonoscopies, the gold standard for colorectal cancer screening, can significantly increase the patient’s chance of survival through early detection. However, colonoscopy cost, surgical complications, and patient bowel preparations limit...
This dissertation is a wide-ranging study on real estate and the effect of financial constraints on economic activity. In the first chapter, I use granular data on home builder housing developments to provide new evidence that firms spread negative revenue shocks across projects via their internal capital markets. I analyze...
This dissertation explores the interrelationship between time, labor, and literature during the rise of British industrial capitalism. By tracing a tradition of social criticism from Percy Shelley to William Morris that runs through the Chartist movement, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens, it isolates and explicates a distinctive existential mood, or...
The physical boundary layer, or interface, between two different phases of matter is the site of chemical and physical processes that are critical to many research fields. Many of these interfaces contain electric charge, which influences the structure and composition of the interfacial region and the interactions between the interface...
Supported vanadium oxide materials have been extensively studied for alkane oxidative dehydrogenation (ODH) reactions due to their high activity and selectivity. The catalytic activity of supported VOx materials is influenced by the surface coverage of VOx sites and hence the distribution of V=O, V-O-V, and V-O-S (S, support) bonds. The...
The role of nuclei nanoenvironment in cellular function has been a challenging problem in biology due to the lack of chromatin 3-dimension (3D) structure imaging/capturing techniques and theory connecting physical structure of chromatin to transcription. Recent studies on optical properties measurement on biological sample techniques, nanoscale imaging techniques and chromatin...
Gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are important abstractions of the complex regulatory interplays between genes, proteins, metabolites, and other molecular-level entities. Comprehensive GRNs provide high-level overviews of the topology of gene-gene interactions and their purposes, thereby enabling a comprehensive understanding of their role in phenotypic variation, disease mechanisms, and other biological...
This dissertation examines the language of force in Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (MoE) as a site of literary self-reflection. It investigates how the text employs a constellation of “force” terms – including not only the words Kraft, Energie, and Leistung, but also images of physical and chemical forces...
In this thesis we present methods for estimating network metrics via random walk sampling. More specifically, we generalize the Hansen-Hurwitz estimator and the Horvitz-Thompson estimator to estimate the shortest path length distribution (SPLD), closeness centrality ranking, and clustering coefficients of a network. Those are important metrics to a network, but...