Zinc, an essential trace element that serves as an enzyme cofactor and can also be stored as a divalent ion in cellular vesicles, is emerging as an important mediator of signaling pathways required for biological functions such as growth, development, and reproduction. Zinc mediates cell signaling by acting both as...
As the global population grows, consumption of water, energy, and food will also increase, placing stresses on these sectors, raising the importance of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus (WEFN). However, operation of WEFN systems are currently not sustainable. It is thus crucial to design WEFN systems to be sustainable from local to...
Meiosis is a specialized form of cell division that occurs to generate sperm and eggs with unique sets of paternal or maternal DNA; this process shuffles genetic information to promote the amazing variation that we observe in living organisms. In order to carry out two rounds of DNA separation with...
Eukaryotic genomes are organized into chromatin, which acts to regulate access to the organism’s genetic material. A large and diverse class of proteins, known as chromatin modifiers and remodelers, are responsible for regulating the composition and structure of chromatin by monitoring nucleosomes. Chromatin remodelers are involved in multiple cellular processes,...
The rise and racial gap in maternal mortality and morbidity in the US growing public health crisis. The US maternal mortality rate is double that of peer countries such as the UK and Canada. Even more striking, Black women are 243% more likely to die from childbirth-related causes. According to...
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in the past decade on tasks that were out of reach prior to the era of deep learning. Amongst the myriad reasons for these successes are powerful computational resources, large datasets, new optimization algorithms, and modern architecture designs. Most of the reasons are...
Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) display unique characteristics compared to their macro-counterparts that are dependent on shape, size, and attached surface molecules. Methods have been developed to precisely control both size and shape of AuNPs for specific applications. The biocompatibility, plasmonic properties, and ease of functionalization with thiolated molecules, make gold nanoparticles...
We consider data-driven approaches for universal texture modeling via generative adversarial networks and inversion methods. We investigate the properties of the learned representation spaces and demonstrate that a strong link between texture analysis and synthesis is the key to successful texture modeling. First, we visit the problem of texture synthesis...
The product of hexokinase (HK) enzymes, glucose-6-phosphate, can be metabolized through glycolysis or directed to alternative pathways, such as the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) to generate anabolic intermediates. HK1 contains an N-terminal domain that permits mitochondrial binding, but its physiologic significance remains unclear. We generated mice lacking the HK1 mitochondrial-binding...
In recent years, the social sciences have been ensnared in a crisis in which many research findings cannot be replicated (Ioannidis, 2005; Open Science Collaboration, 2015; Camerer et al., 2016; Makel & Plucker, 2014). This crisis has been attributed to a variety of problems including lack of transparency about research...
Convolutional neural networks have become a staple in computer vision and image processing tasks. The capacity for these networks to perform visual pattern recognition in a data-driven fashion has prompted explosive growth in a myriad of applications. That said, despite their popularity, there are still facets of these networks that...
The language Esterel has found success in many safety-critical applications, from aircraft landing gear to digital signal processors. Its unique combination of powerful control operations, deterministic concurrency, and real time execution bounds are indispensable to programmer in these kinds of safety-critical domains. However these features lead to an interesting facet...
From colonial practices designed to civilize indigenous communities, to counter-terrorism initiatives aimed at de-radicalizing dissidents in the wake of the War on Terror, to controversies over blasphemy and religious harm cases in international law, religious passions have been cast as a specter of unreason, treason, and radicalization. These assumptions sustain...
This dissertation consists of three essays on corporate governance. In the first essay of the dissertation (“The Effects of Succession Planning on CEO Succession Events: Implications for Both Focal and Competing Firms”), I examine whether and how both focal and competing firms are affected by sudden CEO deaths. By using...
This dissertation provides evidence that reading is best explained as rational gathering of visual information to identify words efficiently. Although empirical evidence from human reading research suggests a close link between eye movements and cognitive process, it is not clear how readers decide when and where to move their eyes...
This thesis presents a new self-assembling robotic system that diverges from traditional approaches by enabling robots to build structures not constrained to a lattice and formed based on environmental conditions, rather than on a priori blueprints. Robot self-assembly is a class of behavior in swarm robotics in which many robots...
This dissertation examines how the maintenance and adaptation of heritage monuments and ritual traditions have contributed to the sustainability of communities on the islands of Inishark and Inishbofin along the west coast of Ireland. My analysis combines archaeological investigation of a pilgrimage tradition on Inishark, from its origins in the...
For women, age is one of the best predictors of fertility. Younger women are typically more fertile, and ability to conceive declines until a woman reaches menopause. However, the age at which an individual woman becomes less fertile varies depending on many factors unique to her individual body, including genetic...
I present concepts and methods for evaluating infrared camera systems. The individual components of camera systems are fairly well understood, but the system is more than the sum of its parts. Many of the usual techniques for measuring individual photodetectors are inapplicable to pixels which are permanently bonded to a...
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have exceptional properties and are mass-producible at the ton scale as aggregated powders, but their difficulty in processing is a significant barrier to widespread use. Even after decades of research, there still isn’t a solvent for CNTs that is massively available, easily removable, and non-damaging. The need...