With the dual challenges of meeting global energy demand and mitigating anthropogenic climate change, significant effort is being applied to generating power from renewable sources. The dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) is a photovoltaic technology capable of generating electricity from sunlight, but suffers losses in efficiency due to deleterious electron transfer...
Patients born with severe heart defects need regular monitoring of the complex hemodynamics in their heart and vasculature. 4D flow MRI has emerged as the state-of-the-art technique for comprehensively evaluating cardiovascular hemodynamics. This imaging technique allows for the dynamic visualization of 3D blood through the cardiac cycle and the quantification...
Radiation is a ubiquitous health risk. Contemporary populations are exposed to several hundred milliSieverts per person over their lifetimes from both natural and human made sources such as radon, cosmic rays, CT-scans, etc. Risk estimates based on studies of atomic bomb survivors suggest that these exposures induce excess cancer mortality...
Kainate receptors (KARs) are expressed throughout the central and peripheral nervous systems. One of three subfamilies of ionotropic glutamate receptors, KARs are localized both pre- and post-synaptically and exert important modulatory control over neural circuits. This modulatory role in circuit function makes them a potential actor in wide variety of...
Nano-structured mixed ionic and electronic conducting (MIEC) materials have garnered intense interest in electrode development for solid oxide fuel cells due to their high surface areas which allow for effective catalytic activity and low polarization resistances. In particular, composite solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) cathodes consisting of ionic conducting scaffolds...
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), the result of fetal alcohol exposure (FAE), affects 2-11% of children worldwide with no treatments in sight. In my thesis work, I aimed to identify underlying biological mechanisms of the FAE-induced hippocampus-based cognitive deficits that would lead to identify potential treatment targets to reverse the...
Musicians have a responsibility to assess and perform new or extant music in order to present a larger body of repertoire to audiences. The purpose of this study is to introduce the euphonium music of the contemporary Belgian composer Frangois Glorieux to the tubaeuphonium community. With numerous works written for...
Classic mechanism design studies the implementation of optimal systems or processes in the presence of multiple selfish and fully rational agents. The theory of mechanism design has been one of the most celebrated advances in the economics discipline, especially with regards to auctions Myerson (1981),Vickrey (1961), Clarke (1971), Groves (1973)....
Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most prevalent primary central nervous system malignancy. Due to the aggressive nature of these tumors and our inability to adequately treat them, only 3-5% of patients survive longer than 3 years post-diagnosis. The standard of care for newly diagnosed GBM is surgical resection followed by...
In December 1928, Ernst Jünger wrote to his brother Friedrich Georg: “Wir müssen uns […] bemühen, die literarische Tätigkeit als Kriegsmittel zu betrachten.” This project analyzes the result of said activity: viz. text understood as a means of war. That is to say, it does not aim at answering questions...