Aging is the greatest known risk factor for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD); however, the molecular mechanisms underlying aging and how it can initiate and or exacerbate AD, is still unknown. Epigenetic regulation has been widely accepted to play an essential role in aging or AD-related processes; however, whether dysregulations of histone...
This dissertation argues that black women’s literature on black-white multiraciality critiques public debates that celebrate the racially ambiguous multiracial child as the solution to racial conflict. Under this framework, this project investigates the popularization of multiracial identity in late 20th and 21st century United States, United Kingdom, and Jamaica, and...
Desmosomes, complex structures found at intercellular junctions, are important for the development, structural integrity, and immune barrier of the skin. Extracellular components of the desmosome connect neighboring cells and intracellular interactions amongst cadherin, armadillo, and plakin proteins anchor the desmosome to intermediate filaments. Beyond their canonical role as “spot welds”...
With the growing size of networks and datasets and the lack of centralized access to information, distributed control and optimization become inevitable. In the first part of this thesis, we develop an asynchronous Newton-based distributed optimization algorithm and analyze its convergence properties. Our algorithm benefits from the fast convergence properties...
Thermoelectric devices convert between temperature gradients and electricity, implying numerous applications, such as powering exploratory space vehicles, industrial waste-heat recovery, and solid- state refrigeration. Thermoelectric devices consist of doped p-type and n-type semiconductor legs, and the overall device efficiency depends on the transport properties of these semiconductor materials. High-performing thermoelectric...
The dissertation’s topic is the creation of quotidian judgements and practices related to food, amid the enduring social and spatial stratification of everyday life. The sites are two large and diverse cities: Paris and Chicago. The method is ethnographic and contextual.Chapter 1 documents the dietary tastes and culinary practices of...
Through analysis of visual and literary texts, “Relating Sideways: Visual Culture and Women’s Bonds, 1970-2020” constructs a historical narrative that challenges the assumption that women’s lives and relationships naturally bend toward romance and procreation, a normative lifespan that follows the function capitalism has needed women to perform in consumption and...
Object Detection is a core computer vision problem and can facilitate many image understanding problems. Object Detection has witnessed significant progress in the past decade especially after deep learning is successfully applied to this field. Most of the detection models focus on generalizing the trained model to unseen samples of...
Dilute Al-Sc-Zr-Si-based aluminum alloys retain their strength for long periods of time at elevated temperatures due to a dispersion of nanometric, coherent, and coarsening-resistant Al3(Sc,Zr) (L12 structure) nanoprecipitates that are formed upon aging. These alloys are attractive for replacement of dense steels and costly Ti alloys in the 250–400 °C...
In the early part of the 20th Century, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union implemented a program of rapid industrialization under the slogan, “the conquest of nature by man.” Ambitious engineering projects such as the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Northern river reversal sought to restructure...
Recent encouraging advances in computer vision and natural language understanding shed light on a very interesting yet challenging task: asking and answering questions about a given image (VQA). The study of this research problem is still in its infancy. Most existing VQA methods are neural network-based (NN-based) solutions that pursue...
In this dissertation, I provide insight into different aspects of the law and politics of trade secrecy at four levels of analysis. Part I examines trade secrecy from an international and comparative perspective. It encompasses Chapters 2 and 3 and focuses on (#1) international law and (#2) comparative national policy....
The first chapter of this dissertation, coauthored with Martin Eichenbaum and Riccardo Bianchi-Vimercati, addresses the question: how sensitive is the power of fiscal policy at the ZLB to the assumption of rational expectations? We do so through the lens of a standard NK model in which people are level-k thinkers....
Oxide/aqueous and metal/metal oxide interfaces are essential for environmental remediation, catalysis, and corrosion inhibition, in addition to their potential implementation as energy transducers, consumer electronics, and coating products. While these interfaces are critically important, they are difficult to access experimentally under aqueous flow conditions. This thesis describes results obtained with...
This dissertation is a social and cultural history of the body and the beauty industry in the Japanese Empire from 1868 to 1945. The emphasis is on the thoughts and actions of state and private actors such as doctors and the first generation of Japanese cosmetic product developers. When these...
The main topic of this thesis is generation in derived categories of coherent sheaves on smooth projective varieties. We develop a new approach that allows us to give a new proof of a recent result by Olander that powers of an ample line bundle generate the bounded derived category of...
This dissertation examines the birth and rise of orthorexia nervosa, a proposed psychiatric diagnosis described as a pathological fixation with healthy eating. Orthorexia made its first public appearance in the pages of a popular magazine for yoga practitioners in 1997, and later in a self-help book on the subject. Despite...
Rhythmic fluctuations of electrical activity in the brain provide insights into the proposed mechanism by which we encode experiences and then maintain, forget, modify, and retrieve them. Yet there is still much to learn about how neural oscillations relate to memory function. The purpose of this research is to discover...
ABSTRACT On the Other Side of Babylon: Black Women and Epistemologies of Resistance in the Third World Women’s Alliance Assata Sankofa Kokayi This cultural and intellectual history analyzes the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), its relationship with decolonization struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and positionality as an anti-imperialist...
In the current state of robotics, the systems we create are heavily reliant on our consistent guidance, programming of tasks, and oracle information that allow them to operate in the world that we inhabit. What happens to our robotic systems when we are unable to perform as an oracle, creating...
The fields of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology have emerged in recent years with the heavily overlapping goals of sustainable bioproduction of chemical goods and predictable and precise engineering of biological function.1 However, efforts to reach commercially relevant titers have stalled.2 Many challenges arise during optimization of each production platform,...
“‘The Indians Say’: Settler Colonialism and the Scientific Study of North America, 1722 to 1848” examines the issue of evidence and credibility within natural history by following the circulation of Indigenous testimony through Anglophone networks of scientific knowledge production. By merging the history of science with Native American and Indigenous...
In susceptible individuals, episodic memories of overwhelmingly stressful experiences can give rise to debilitating socio-affective symptoms, including social dysfunction. This occurs even when such memories are not easily accessed for retrieval. In this case, it is generally accepted that the restricted retrieval of such memories is due to their having...
Colloidal crystals are promising candidates for nanophotonic applications due to their strong interactions with light and the capability to tailor such interactions through crystal design and engineering. DNA-programmable assembly, in particular, allows for precise structural control down to the sub-nanometer length scale. In this thesis, ways of designing, synthesizing, and...
With more jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields available than people to fill them, the United States is extremely focused on increasing STEM education to address this gap in the future workforce. This focus is not exclusive to higher education and secondary schooling, but rather, it has...
RNA viruses cause a wide range of diseases that range from mild respiratory illness to fatal hemorrhagic fevers. To combat these pathogens, most cells in the human body scan the cell for viruses and activate a potent cell-intrinsic immune response by producing interferon (IFN), a cytokine that amplifies the innate...
Equilibrium models of star formation successfully derive the globally-averaged Kennicutt-Schmidt (KS) relation, positing that star formation rates (SFRs) are self- regulated by the turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM) generated by stellar feedback. However, these models make assumptions that may not be achieved in realistic galaxy systems. Cosmological zoom-in simulations,...
Data Science and related fields like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Statistics provide indispensable research methods for understanding a wide variety of phenomena from large datasets. However, as methodical and empirical as these methods aim to be, there are many subjective and discretionary choices that the data scientist must make...
Engineering heat transport in materials is essential for thermal management in a wide range of technologies, from batteries to thermoelectrics. Materials host a wide spectrum of heat-carrying phonons, which vary in their frequency, spatial extent, and degree of plane-wave character. This diversity in phonon properties leads to complex behavior, especially...
Peer review is a commonly used tool to manage large classes. It allows students to grade and provide feedback to each other based on rubrics provided by instructors. Peer review has been proved to be effective in improving students' learning outcomes by many research. During providing peer review, students are...
This thesis proposes a robust multi-pronged approach to study the effect of nanoparticles on cells. In the first place, this work is focused on investigation of the protein corona that accumulates on the surface of nanoparticles internalized by the cells and their poly-pathway effects on protein availability and messenger RNA...
This dissertation examines anti-Black race-based ideologies prevalent in early American musical theatre through a multi-faceted case study concerning Morgan Benson, a child actor of the early musical theatre stage, Target Parades of the long nineteenth-century, and The Black Joke. This is an excavation project, seeking to unearth conceptual underpinnings for...
In recent decades, metal additive manufacturing has seen rapid advancements, offering promising applications across various industries. However, addressing existing challenges in metal AM, such as process stability, defect avoidance, and quality control, is essential for fully exploiting its potential in fabricating parts with a desired geometry, as well as tailored...
An important tenet in memory research is the dissociation between explicit and implicit memory systems in the brain. Whereas a robust literature exists on the consolidation of memories in the explicit domain, research on implicit memory consolidation is relatively understudied, particularly questions about what is being consolidated and the mechanisms...
Computer simulation experiments are commonly used as an inexpensive alternative to real-world experiments to form a metamodel that approximates the input-output relationship of the real-world experiment. The metamodel can be useful for decision making and making predictions for inputs that have not been evaluated yet since it can be evaluated...
We start from a set of users communicating over a Gaussian multiple access wire-tap channel with confidential messages, where users attempt to transmit private messages to a legitimate receiver in the presence of an eavesdropper. While prior work focused on the case where the users were cooperative, we assume that...
ABSTRACT In the past two decades, the number of African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants arriving in the U.S. has been increasing. Black immigrants (36% of whom migrated from Africa and 50% from the Caribbean since 2000) now account for nearly 10% of the Black population in the U.S. This growing demographic...
On March 11, 1966, Indonesian President Soekarno suddenly transferred executive power to the Army, which has played a role in the Indonesian state and society since the late 1950s. This act replaced Soekarno’s own government with a military dictatorship dubbed the New Order, which lasted for nearly 32 years. Why...
The planarian flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea is capable of recovery from nearly any injury, including regenerating an entire brain after decapitation, made possible by a pool of pluripotent stem cells which maintain all of the worm’s tissues into adulthood. However, the signals that control the production of new neurons in these...
Organic solar cells (OSC) are a next generation solar energy technology that offers the advantages of scalable fabrication, light weight, flexibility, and earth-abundant starting materials. Despite tremendous advances in OSC power conversion efficiency (PCE) over the last decade, active layer material selection and optimization is still largely empirical. In order...
Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (SOFCs) are a low-emission, efficient and fuel flexible energy conversion devices, which have been extensively applied in electricity generation systems. Moreover, it can also be operated in electrolysis mode as Solid Oxide Electrolysis Cell (SOEC) or Reversible Solid Oxide Cell (ReSOC) for intermittent renewable energy storage....
This dissertation consists of three essays in microeconomic theory. In the first two chapters, I study a class of partnerships where partners can exit and continue to free-ride on the remaining partners' efforts. The crucial force to deter players from strategic exiting is the ripple effect that it may trigger...
Manufacturing processes are known for their intricacies in changing material shapes and properties. New generations of manufacturing technologies, known as flexible manufacturing, are moving toward design freedom, which allows producing parts with optimized geometries and high customizations at an affordable cost even for low-volume productions. Two prominent flexible manufacturing processes...
Self-assembly of colloidal particles at the nano- and microscale has been a powerful tool for producing structures with emergent properties in applications ranging from electro-mechanical systems to photonics and biomedical devices. Great success has been achieved in experiments, where a variety of exotic phases have been discovered and even reconfigurable...
This dissertation analyzes how suburban school districts made sense of and planned to reduce inequality between 2019–2021. Previous literature has found that suburban schools, despite their reputation as the best in the country, are deeply unequal (Lewis and Diamond 2015; Lewis-McCoy 2014). Building on this previous scholarship, I ask: How...
The hippocampus has been identified as a critical structure for supporting spatial memory processes in both humans and animals alike. Many of these processes such as the ability to self-localize in a given environment as well as engage in goal-directed navigation are thought to depend on the location-specific firing of...
The field of materials discovery is undergoing an unprecedented transition from laboratory tocomputer. Behind this transition is the new ability to accurately compute material properties, especially
energetic stability, from first principles with density functional theory (DFT). However,
DFT remains computationally expensive, and DFT-based materials discovery is intractable, especially
in high...
One method of cancer treatment is to thermally ablate (destroy) tumor masses using heat caused by electric current, or Joule heating. This particular modality is called radiofrequency ablation (RFA), due to the use of electric currents in the 100 kHz to 800 kHz frequency range. Computationally, RFA is simulated as...
This dissertation examines how nineteenth century German literature constructed and experimented with an entangled concept of “the environment” based not in (Romantic) philosophical and literary conceptions of nature, but in the theory and science of color perception. As the visual point of interaction between an observer and their surrounding world,...
As sound changes advance across large geographic areas, they progress unevenly across populations. The speakers who lead these changes often share macro-social identities, like place or social class affiliations (e.g. Nesbitt 2018; Wagner et al. 2016). But the features undergoing these macro-level sound changes also hold social meanings related to...
When attached to another species (e.g. a nanoparticle), the sequence specificity of DNA can be repurposed to program interactions between such entities and to direct their formation into ordered structures. The research presented in this thesis aims to push the boundaries of structures that can be made via this approach....
We consider general utility models and information structures of the agents and illustrate when economic conclusions for designing simple mechanisms in classical settings extends for general environments. We show that whether economic conclusions can be generalized depends on the details of the generalizations. For example, in single-item auction, competition and...
Rapid changes in global climate are pushing nations to reduce CO2 emissions and adopt clean energy technologies for renewable energy generation and storage. As wind and solar are implemented worldwide, a commensurate response in energy storage will need to be installed to meet fluctuations in peak energy demands and generation...
This thesis focuses on the application of neural networks to three types of classification tasks, each work with its own chapter. The objective of the first work is to take advantage of deep neural networks in order to make next day crime count predictions in a fine-grain city partition. We...
In this dissertation, we aim to develop efficient algorithms with theoretical guarantees for several data-driven decision making problems. Specifically, we study the data-driven deci- sion making from three different perspectives: statistical learning, nonconvex optimization, and control of stochastic system. This dissertation contains three parts. In the first part, we study...
Understanding associative memory is fundamental for a variety of neurological and neurodegenerative diseases, however, a large proportion of this research has excluded female subjects due to unsubstantiated bias. By including intact females, ovariectomized females and males in the study of associative memory, clear sex differences in acquisition emerged. Female mice...
We study modular forms, Jacobi forms, and hermitian formal Fourier-Jacobi series over imaginary quadratic fields. In the first section, we prove that the ring of classical Jacobi forms of a fixed genus g, varying index m and weight k is generated by theta functions. From this result we show that...
Since Infrared radiation was discovered in 1800s, the research and applications on the infrared regime have been continually developed. The infrared detectors are the key technology in these applications and have been successfully used for medical imaging, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), free-space optical communication, target tracking and object identification...
Nanocarriers as structures with at least one dimension in the nanometer scale are capable of loading small molecule therapeutics that would otherwise have poor bioavailability, non- specific uptake, and off target effects. Polymeric nanocarriers can be modified to tune their chemical and biological behavior to better suit the intended application....
The negative early and late health consequences from exposure to artificial sources of radiation are particularly apparent in victims of radiological emergencies who were diagnosed with cancer, radiation pneumonitis, among other conditions. The renaissance of nuclear energy, increased use of ionizing radiation in the medical field, and nuclear threats from...
Harnessing the metabolic potential of methanotrophic bacteria is a compelling strategy for the bioremediation of environmentally harmful methane gas. Methanotrophs can activate a 105 kcal/mol C-H bond in methane at ambient conditions using metalloenzymes called methane monooxygenases (MMOs). Particulate methane monooxygenase (pMMO) is a copper-dependent, membrane-bound enzyme that is the...
In this thesis, we consider the spherical spin glass models at zero temperature. We first determine the structureof the Parisi measure at zero temperature for the spherical p+s spin glass model. We then
consider the spherical mixed p-spin model and show that for the spherical spin models with
n components,...
Economic growth in contexts of state weakness presents a puzzle. If the state’s provision of property rights is necessary for financial investment and related pro-growth behaviors, then why do we observe private investment and commercial transactions in settings where state institutions are far from reliable property guarantors? This study addresses...
Water vapor condenses into liquid water when it encounters a cold surface. If the surface temperature is sufficiently low, freezing follows the condensation step, and the process is holistically referred to as condensation frosting. Both phase change processes are fundamental to many industries ranging from water harvesting, thermal management, solar...
Directed energy deposition (DED) has pushed the frontiers of manufacturability by enabling the creation of multi-material, functionally graded components, the repair or modification of existing components, and the addition of wear resistant coatings. This additive manufacturing method creates a 3D object by depositing powder directly into a small molten pool...
As social media are intricately woven into the fabric of everyday life, people are increasingly expressing their emotions, feelings, and thoughts on these platforms. Particularly, social media have become an outlet for sharing negative emotions and stressful experiences. This dissertation examines factors that influence how and why people share negative...
Recent advances in high-performance computing have resulted in massive databases of materials properties calculated with techniques such as ab initio density functional theory. In fact, some of the largest of such databases have calculations of nearly all distinct, ordered, experimentally-reported compounds. This thesis discusses the application of data in one...
Selective attention enables people to focus on a small number of objects, features, or events with good resolution. Sometimes attention may also be less selective and distributed across numerous items, which allows more information to be processed at a lower resolution. The degree to which attention is more or less...
Polymers occupied nearly every facet of our daily lives, and enhancing their mechanical and fracture properties has long been an important topic in the field of polymer science. Based on the various need in applications, polymers are designed to have a range of characteristics such as tackiness, optical properties, mechanical...
The dissertation builds on my current research to demonstrate the connection between affect and learning through machine learning and qualitative analysis of interactions where players use a complex systems game. The project is threefold: First, I developed a thinking and learning intervention, the agent-based modeling simulation Ant Adaptation. I showed...
Central nervous system (CNS) regeneration is one of the most challenging regenerative medicine targets in mammals due to the natural inhibitory mechanisms that occur in response to injury. In the case of spinal cord injury (SCI), the initial inflammatory response protects damaged tissue, but over time creates a hostile microenvironment...
Abstract This dissertation aims to understand how the domestic high courts in Latin America rely on the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The “relationship between courts” is a phenomenon that happens in domestic and international politics when domestic high courts start to resist or follow international jurisprudence....
Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TDMCs) are one of many families of two-dimensional (2D) beyond graphene, that started to gain more attention due to the need for miniaturization and their unique electrical, mechanical, and optical properties. Some members of TMDCs, such as MoS2, has direct band gap in its monolayer form, making...
The reprogramming of somatic cells to a spontaneously contracting cardiomyocyte-like state using defined transcription factors has proven successful in mouse fibroblasts. However, this process has been less successful in human cells, thus limiting the potential clinical applicability of this technology in regenerative medicine. We hypothesized that this issue is due...
The spatial autoregressive model has been widely applied in science, in areas such as economics, public finance, political science, agricultural economics, environmental studies and transportation analyses. The classical spatial autoregressive model is a linear model for describing spatial correlation. In this work, we expand the classical model to include time...
The DOCS is a collection of articles, administration manuals and clinical scoring form. This collection is available for clinicians and researchers to use with patients who are recovering consciousness. This collection includes the manual and rating forms(s) from the DOCS-23 and the updated version, the DOCS-25.
Nanoscape: The Journal for Undergraduate Research in Nanoscience is an annual publication of original research conducted by undergraduates from around the county. The journal was launched in 2004 and was the first of its kind in the country. The journal disseminates the results of undergraduate research in the broad fields...
Politica Northwestern is the academic journal of Politics & Policy (P&P), a non-partisan undergraduate student publication seeking to encourage informed political conversation on college campuses around the country. Edited by students of Northwestern University, P&P represents a community of individuals interested in why world shaping events occur and what impact...
This collection of full-text searchable digitized publications primarily documents Black student life at Northwestern from 1967-2011. It includes newsletters, handbooks, and literary magazines created by organizations affiliated with Northwestern’s Black Student Alliance, For Members Only (FMO), the Department of African American Student Affairs (AASA), and Northwestern University Black Alumni Association...
The Master of Science in Data Science program requires the successful completion of 12 courses to obtain a degree. These requirements cover six core courses, a leadership or project management course, two required courses corresponding to a declared specialization, two electives, and a capstone project or thesis. This collection contains...
This electronic textbook is a student-contributed open-source text covering the materials used in our chemical engineering capstone design courses at Northwestern. The goal of this project is to provide the greater chemical engineering community with a useful and relevant resource on chemical process design methods and case studies. This project...