In my dissertation, I investigate how formal and informal structures within the board can affect key board outcomes. While each chapter introduces a relatively under-recognized player in the governance space—compensation consultants (Chapter 1), multi-committee directors (Chapter 2), and executive chairmen (Chapter 3)—the main theme connecting all three centers on the...
This dissertation presents a comprehensive study of thin-film LiMn2O4 (LMO) cathodes applied in lithium ion batteries (LIBs). The primary aim was to establish fundamental understanding of the relationship between interfacial LMO chemistry/electrochemistry and its detrimental drawback, i.e. fast capacity fade over long term cycling, and then develop effective mitigation methods....
The goal of this thesis is to design practical algorithms for nonlinear optimization in the case where the objective function is deterministic or stochastic. Problems of this nature arise in many applications including machine learning and image processing. The thesis is divided into four main chapters. Chapters \ref{chap:Inexact}, \ref{chap:Adasample} and...
For much of the twentieth-century, English-language music scholars were reticent to speculate about the origins of music. In recent years, however, the study of music’s evolutionary origins has been revitalized. Resonating Subjects brings a critical-historical perspective to this renewed convergence of music studies and evolutionary science. Through close examinations of...
My research at northwestern with Dr. Christina Zelano focused on the human amygdala subnucleithat receive monosynaptic input from the olfactory bulb. Surprisingly little is known
about these brain regions, including their potential roles in olfactory and nonolfactory
processing. During my PhD, I completed three projects aimed at furthering our understanding...
While the entire silicon industry has been blooming under Moore’s Law for decades, conventional digital implementation is approaching the “stall” of Moore’s Law due to many physical design limitations. Technology innovation now is going to take a different direction. Given the increasing demand for emerging applications' computational capacity, it is...
Extensive study of nanomaterial chemical and optical properties has enabled their integration into a variety of applications. However, less thoroughly investigated are the heat generation and dissipation processes of nanomaterials following optical excitation. These phenomena are of immense importance as thermal energy can distort a material’s structure, which has profound...
My dissertation, Geographies of Memory, Trauma, and Pleasure in African American and Caribbean-American Literature examines the geographies of the cane fields, bodies of water, and the back porch to illustrate the speculative ways anti-black violence, intergenerational trauma, pleasure and Black memory co-exist in Black literature. Examining the aforementioned geographies as...
This dissertation consists of three studies related to parental employment, maternity leave policy, and early care and education. In study 1, my coauthor and I evaluate the impact of parenthood on men and women’s job performance and career advancement using detailed data from the U.S. Marines. For parents who remain...
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common non-cutaneous cancer among U.S. men. Lack of effective treatments for advanced disease make it a significant public health concern. However, PCa’s long natural history makes it an excellent target for prevention approaches that reduce overtreatment of indolent disease, treatment related morbidity, and mortality....
Understanding organization of soft materials on mesoscopic and nanoscopic scales is importantfor materials design. In this regard, non-van der Waals interactions such as hydrogen
bonding and electrostatic interactions offer great opportunities due to the richness and diversity
in morphological structures they produce. The primary reason for this is that these...
This dissertation studies the integration of analytical modeling and optimization, machine learning, and Bayesian learning to optimize cost, access, and quality of healthcare delivery. Chapter 1 models computer-aided triage (patient prioritization) as feature-based priority queuing where types (diseases) are not perfectly observed but are inferred from observed features using a...
This dissertation develops a causal theory of the relevant alternatives in a situation and applies this theory to the semantics and epistemology of conditionals, the theory of knowledge, and the epistemology of stereotyping. The first chapter presents the theory of causal models and causal alternatives. The second chapter applies this...
Biogenic secondary organic aerosol (SOA) particles, produced by forest ecosystems across the globe, are principal, yet poorly understood constituents in the climate system. These atmospheric particles form when biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) react with atmospheric oxidants, leading to increasingly lower volatility oxidation products that partition into the condensed phase...
Protein-based biomaterials are widely used in biomedical applications and mechanical support because of their novel structural flexibility, biocompatibility and mechanical properties. Protein-based biomaterials outperform traditional synthetic materials in various environments as traditional materials lack the diverse chemical functionalities that proteins offer. Novel bioinspired techniques such as directed evolution offer the...
Coherent diffractive imaging (CDI) methods are techniques that image a sample by illuminating it with a coherent beam and recording the intensity diffraction pattern produced by the wavefront outgoing from the sample. These are lensless methods that are not limited in resolution by the physical characteristics of an objective lens,...
Social engagement, or shared attention between a child and caregiver, is a critical process for language and social development. Although previous EEG studies have investigated child social processing in closely controlled, experimental studies, no study has examined the interactive, reciprocal process of naturalistic social engagement. In my first paper, we...
The explosion of data in the digital age has provided new possibilities for policy creation,the development of knowledge, and societal innovations. In this way, data becomes an essential
tool in personal decision-making, legal change, and policy creation as we leverage new forms of
data to understand social phenomena. But along...
Hollow biopsy needles are widely adopted medical devices for the removal of biological tissue to better identify a lesion or an abnormality observed through a physical exam or a radiology scan. These procedures can provide significantly more information than most medical tests, and they are usually performed on dermis layers,...
This dissertation considers a periodically-forced 1-D Langevin equation that possesses two stable periodic solutions in the absence of noise. We aim at answering the question: is there a most likely noise-induced transition path between these periodic solutions that allows one to identify a preferred phase of the forcing when the...