The first chapter of the dissertation analyzes a moral hazard problem where a firm incentivizes a team of complementary workers in the presence of trust concerns. As we show, when concerned about team members not trusting each other, the firm typically sacrifices statistically-relevant information, compensating some workers based solely on...
In most markets, consumers of goods and services have vastly more options available to them than they will consider closely. At the point of making a decision, consumers are choosing between only a small subset (i.e., a consideration set) of all possible alternatives. The preceding process that forms these consideration...
Over 10 billion tons of concrete are produced for the construction industry every year, making concrete the second most used substance on Earth, only surpassed by water. With such high importance as a building material, there is significant need for the ability to accurately model concrete behavior. As a quasi-brittle...
Anxiety and depression are highly prevalent, recurrent, and major public health problems. Decades of research has uncovered associations between symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression and abnormal neural activation across executive control-, threat-, and reward-related networks. Recent studies have developed a hierarchical symptom structure of anxiety and depression termed the...
The development of functional materials with rationally designed hierarchical structure is an interdisciplinary challenge. Looking to nature for inspiration, we use small molecules that
engage in directed self-assembly through carefully tuned intermolecular interactions to construct
materials that have structure at multiple length scales. In this work, supramolecular structures
formed using...
From energy to materials, hydrocarbon chemistry drives our world. Stemming from the petrochemical industry, our understanding of CxHy combinations has allowed society to flourish, and hydrocarbons will likely remain valuable species in our future even as we transition to greener carbon and hydrogen sources. Currently, one of the most efficient...
Engineering responses of soft materials at hierarchical time and length scales is of great interest to both fundamental science and technological applications. In recent years, the hybridization between emerging soft condense matters and conventional hard condense matters keeps enriching the materials library of humankind and opens another largely-uncharted venue for...
Bioelectronic devices at the biotic/abiotic interface face a number of key challenges that include device degradation when exposed to biological fluid, their elicited immune response due to mechanical mismatch, and poor signal transduction. Organic electronic materials and their devices, such as organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) address these shortcomings. They can...
Predicting pediatric spinal deformity (PSD) from X-ray images collected on the patient's initial visit is a challenging task. This research provides a bio-informed framework based on a mechanistic machine learning technique with dynamic patient-specific (PS) parameters to predict PSD. We provide a geometry-based bone growth model that can be utilized...
“(Being a) Feminist (is a) Struggle: Intersectional Feminist Politics in the Era of the Women’s March” argues that contemporary feminist politics are characterized by debates and contestations concerning the political demands of intersectionality. Contemporary feminist theory and politics are particularly and peculiarly preoccupied with making these judgements about the political...