Dysfunction in mitochondrial dynamics is believed to contribute to a host of neurological disorders and has recently been implicated in cancer metastasis. The outer mitochondrial membrane adapter proteins Miro1 and Miro2 play a role in the regulation of mitochondria. Each paralog comprises two GTPase domains flanking two centrally located calcium/magnesium-binding...
In the first two decades of the 21st century, metal organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted much attention in both fundamental-research and-industrial application areas. Derived from a vast library of both inorganic metal nodes and organic linker bridges, MOFs are crystalline materials whose structures and chemical environments can both be tuned...
Chapter 1: Despite the rapid growth of passive ownership over the past 30 years, there is no consensus on how or why passive ownership affects stock price informativeness. This paper provides a new answer to this question by examining how passive ownership changes investors' incentives to acquire information. I develop...
Recent development on optogenetic methods offers reliable path to modulate cell activities with high level spatiotemporal precision. Application of this technology in behavior studies significantly improves our understanding in the neural principle that underpin animal behaviors, including ourselves. Full exploitation of optogenetic method in neuroscience behavior studies relies on...
This dissertation present a Compound Poisson Mixture Regression model of the distribution of transaction frequency and monetary value, and apply it to study donations at a private university in the Midwestern United States. The model captures the joint effect of covariates, recognizing that both response variables emanate from one statistical...
How do ever-changing international systems and rapidly emerging technology shape counter-systemic revolutionary insurgent (CSRI) behavior and outcomes? The purpose of this publication is to identify causes and develop a conceptual typology of CSRI survival and behavior in a Post-9/11 era. I argue three global shocks acted as junctures for new...
We present a biophysical model of GCaMP6f calcium fluorescence in CA1 pyramidal neuron dendrites based upon results from imaging and electrophysiology experiments. This work was completed using experimental results from the laboratory of Professor Daniel Dombeck, Department of Neurobiology. Constraining the model to reproduce different objectives --- from in-vitro and...
Active lateral force feedback is essential for haptic applications in which forces on the fingertip is perpendicular to or in the same direction of finger movement, such as virtual shape rendering and button click rendering. In this thesis, I first present a novel device, the UltraShiver, that can provide large...
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of politics of youth culturing in contemporary Turkey. More specifically, it analyzes the politics of temporality that characterized the youth culturing program of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/AKP) over the decade of 2010s. On the one hand, it focuses...
Policymakers and public entities work to make decisions that benefit society. Their choices, though, do not go into effect in a vacuum. Instead, the benefit they provide relies on the underlying consumer behavior that drives responses to those choices. This dissertation studies three different settings in which either policy is...