Of the half million new cases of invasive cervical cancer (ICC) reported globally each year, over 80% occur in Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs)1. Nigeria is one of these countries with a huge burden of ICC incidence and mortality.2 As reported in the Global Burden of Cancer 2013, cervical cancer is...
Raising California Together, an ethnography of licensed family childcare homes, contributes significant theoretical and empirical knowledge to our understanding of workfare, immigration and education institutions that shape the lives of the youngest subject-citizens and of those who care for them. I draw from more than three years of participant observation...
The thermodynamics and kinetics of electron transfer reactions in catalysis, energy conversion and storage, and plasmon-driven chemistry depend strongly on nanoscale electrode surface structure. To elucidate the structure-function relationships that determine nanoscale electrochemical reactivity, it is necessary to observe electron transfer reactions one molecule at a time. Over the past...
Mounting evidence indicates that known schizophrenia susceptibility genes regulate dendritic spines supports the model that perturbations in the molecular network underlying spine plasticity are crucially involved in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia. The Rac1- and RhoA-guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF) kalirin is critical for spine morphogenesis on cortical pyramidal neurons, and...
Biopolymers are polymers synthesized by living organisms. Depending on the monomeric units, biopolymers can be classified as polynucleotides (e.g., DNA and RNA), polypeptides (e.g., protein), polysaccharides (e.g., cellulose) and so on. Biopolymers not only play an essential role in nature, but also have wide applications in various fields of industry...
RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) is a powerful high-throughput tool to profile transcriptional activities in cells. The observed read counts can be biased by various factors such that they do not accurately represent the true relative abundance of mRNA transcript abundance. Normalization is a critical step to ensure unbiased comparison of gene expression...
This dissertation presents research on solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) cathodes. It specifically covers two main topics: the electrochemical performance of porous two-phase composite cathodes, and the degradation mechanisms of porous single-phase mixed conducting cathodes. Current-voltage measurement and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy were used extensively to evaluate the cell performance. The...
Self-assembly is an important process in biological system to build various bioactive structures from small amphiphilic molecules. The structural versatility of amphiphile self- assembly also provides a unique platform for the design of functional soft materials with controllable structural features. However, little is known about the correlation between external stimuli,...
Ultrafast, multi-dimensional coherent spectroscopy (MD-CS) has enabled scientists to probe fundamental aspects of chemical and photo-physical reactions on the nanosecond to femtosecond timescales. Using MD-CS, scientific contributions ranging from increased understanding of energy transfer in photosynthetic biological proteins to correlating the motion of electrons in semiconductors have been achieved. Concurrent...
One of the main drivers of complexity in a service system is the dependence between different random variables describing the system. For example, the queue lengths at different time points and the waiting times of different items (jobs, customers) in queue are strongly dependent. To reduce dependence-related complexities, it is...