Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common primary malignant liver tumor, with the highest incidence in Asia. Developed countries, including the United States, have had an 80% increase in HCC incidence over the last 15-20 years.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a promising imaging modality with superior soft tissue...
While self-consolidating concrete (SCC) may no longer be considered a "new concrete", there are still significant challenges to overcome before there is broader acceptance of SCC. One of these challenges concerns the formwork pressure exerted by SCC. A major advantage of SCC is the accelerated casting process due to the...
Legitimation is a fundamental social process that describes the solidification of disparate practices, meanings, and material structures into a coherent, stable institution.
In this dissertation, I study the legitimation of casino gambling as it expanded from 1976 to 2006. While scholars have tended to approach the legitimation process from one...
Evidence suggests both that teacher quality matters for students' outcomes and that principals might not hire the "best" teachers. However, relatively little is known about what characteristics principals value in teachers or how they make hiring decisions. In my dissertation, I use a diverse array of data sources to examine...
Early Growth Response genes (Egr1-4) are transcriptional mediators of signals governing growth and differentiation. In sympathetic neuron-derived cell lines, Egr1 is induced by NGF signaling, which is required for sympathetic neuron survival, differentiation and target organ innervation. In the absence of identifiable sympathetic defects in Egr1-deficient mice, we investigated the...
Risk measurement involves estimating some functional of a loss distribution. This calls for nested simulation, in which risk factors are sampled at an outer level of simulation, while the inner level of simulation provides estimates of loss given each realization of the risk factors. Assessing the statistical uncertainty of estimates...
This dissertation traces the influence of Botatwe farmers' hunting, fishing, and foraging activities on economic, political, and social life over the course of three millennia by weaving together evidence from historical linguistics, archaeology, and palaeoclimatology. While the spread and intensification of farming and trade are often used to explain political...
This dissertation examines growth of platinum nanoparticles from vapor deposition on SrTiO3 using a characterization approach that combines imaging techniques and X-ray methods. The primary suite of characterization probes includes atomic force microscopy (AFM), grazing-incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and X-ray absorption spectroscopy...
Beginning in the 1960s, U.S. federal law required ongoing and systematic planning as a condition of federal transportation funding. An ad-hoc system for forecasting future travel, which has come to be referred to as the "four-step" procedure, quickly became established as the ubiquitous analytic tool for transportation planning. The four-step...
In a 1980 campaign speech to veterans, Ronald Reagan declared that the United States suffered from a "Vietnam syndrome." The war in Vietnam, Reagan said, had harmed American political life and made the public wary of the aggressive foreign policies Reagan believed were necessary to win the Cold War. I...