Automated driving has become a very popular topic in the recent years and is becoming more and more of a reality. In this new trend, High Definition (HD) maps play an important role in many ways that will provide a safer and more efficient driving experience, especially in terms of...
The retina does not act as a simple camera, rather visual information goes through multiple layers of processing before it reaches the brain. Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) are the output neurons of the retina and process visual information in the retina and then project into the brain. There are over...
Mechanosensation is an essential behavior for cellular health that depends on the interactions between the plasma membrane and stretch-activated ion channels. To date, a few studies have measured the effect of membrane composition on protein behaviors from folding to function. However, the relationship between membrane mechanical properties and these behaviors...
With the increasing demand for customized products, rapid prototyping, and small-batch production, incremental sheet forming (ISF) is gaining ever-growing attention. The potential of ISF to produce parts without the use of geometry-specific dies has revolutionized the sheet forming processes. Despite its promising characteristics, ISF thus far has not been extensively...
Membrane contact sites (MCSs) facilitate communication and organization of organelles that contribute to fundamental cellular processes. It has become increasingly appreciated how extensive and essential MCSs are for cellular health, and this field is rapidly growing. We use budding yeast as a model system to study the mechanisms of how...
This dissertation consists of three chapters on empirical industrial organization. The first chapter explores how a seller uses a public reserve price to signal her private info about the object’s value to the bidder. The second chapter studies how a behavioral consumer preference called “price reference effect” could overturn the...
Chapter 1. Undergraduate Gender Diversity and Direction of Scientific Research (with Francesca Truffa) Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Diverse researchers can bring new questions and perspectives, but exposure to diversity may also inspire scientists, regardless of demographic identity, to pursue new topics. This...
Does race matter globally, beyond national and regional contexts? If yes, then how exactly? I argue that race matters globally and develop an account for understanding that significance. I call the account “global racial capitalism.” In chapter 1, I offer background to motivate and defend the thesis that race matters...
CD99-Like 2 (CD99L2) is a 52 kDa type I glycoprotein expressed on leukocytes and endothelial cells as well as other cell types in mice. It is related to CD99, although it shows only 32% sequence identity. CD99L2 has been shown to play a role in leukocyte extravasation in mice under...
In this dissertation, we study the birational geometry of log pairs over the field of complex numbers, with an emphasis on the positivity properties of log pairs and their applications. First, we study the nonvanishing conjecture in the minimal model program. We prove the nonvanishing conjecture for uniruled log canonical...