Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is characterized by progressive motoneuron loss. Autopsy from thoracic spinal tissues of sALS patients revealed a significant loss of large motoneurons while medium and small motoneurons were relatively unaffected. Using two-photon microscopy, we observed a soma hypertrophy of neonatal motoneurons in mice overexpressing mutant human G93A-superoxide...
Supported metal oxides are an important class of catalysts for chemical synthesis and manufacturing, particularly for selective oxidation reactions. This dissertation seeks to understand broad relationships among families of silica-supported Group 4 and 5 metal oxide catalysts for the synthesis of epoxides with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and to further extend...
Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are an attractive solar energy technology for low-current applications. Herein is described the supramolecular design and methodology to manipulate intermolecular interactions in order to create an active layer in OPVs devices composed of crystalline and amorphous donor-acceptor domains, which has been proposed as the ideal morphology for...
Regeneration is a complex biological phenomenon. Organisms that regenerate must possess robust mechanisms that direct new tissue production of the appropriate size and pattern to allow for correct and functional integration with preexisting tissue structures. Planarians are flatworms capable of regenerating from nearly any injury, making them a powerful system...
Polyurethane (PU) is an important commodity polymer with a broad range of applications. Increasing regulations on isocyanates have prompted investigations into alternative routes to PU. Cyclic carbonate aminolysis leading to polyhydroxyurethane (PHU) is a promising alternative. This dissertation describes the first fundamental investigation of the synthesis and properties of segmented,...
This dissertation provides the first in-depth comparative study in any language of the female figurations made, viewed, and interpreted in the realm of refashioning modern Chinese painting during the war period of Republican China (1930s-1940s) in the Nationalist government-controlled southwestern inner frontier, with projects by Pang Xunqin (1906–85) and Fu...
X-ray reflectivity (XRR) versatile technique that characterize the surface structures. However, due to the lack of phase information of X-ray data, the reconstruction of electron density profile (EDP) from XRR data is an ill-posed inverse problem that requires extra attention. In Chapter 1, several key concepts in XRR data analysis...
In December 1928, Ernst Jünger wrote to his brother Friedrich Georg: “Wir müssen uns […] bemühen, die literarische Tätigkeit als Kriegsmittel zu betrachten.” This project analyzes the result of said activity: viz. text understood as a means of war. That is to say, it does not aim at answering questions...
Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most prevalent primary central nervous system malignancy. Due to the aggressive nature of these tumors and our inability to adequately treat them, only 3-5% of patients survive longer than 3 years post-diagnosis. The standard of care for newly diagnosed GBM is surgical resection followed by...
Classic mechanism design studies the implementation of optimal systems or processes in the presence of multiple selfish and fully rational agents. The theory of mechanism design has been one of the most celebrated advances in the economics discipline, especially with regards to auctions Myerson (1981),Vickrey (1961), Clarke (1971), Groves (1973)....
Musicians have a responsibility to assess and perform new or extant music in order to present a larger body of repertoire to audiences. The purpose of this study is to introduce the euphonium music of the contemporary Belgian composer Frangois Glorieux to the tubaeuphonium community. With numerous works written for...
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), the result of fetal alcohol exposure (FAE), affects 2-11% of children worldwide with no treatments in sight. In my thesis work, I aimed to identify underlying biological mechanisms of the FAE-induced hippocampus-based cognitive deficits that would lead to identify potential treatment targets to reverse the...
Nano-structured mixed ionic and electronic conducting (MIEC) materials have garnered intense interest in electrode development for solid oxide fuel cells due to their high surface areas which allow for effective catalytic activity and low polarization resistances. In particular, composite solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) cathodes consisting of ionic conducting scaffolds...
Kainate receptors (KARs) are expressed throughout the central and peripheral nervous systems. One of three subfamilies of ionotropic glutamate receptors, KARs are localized both pre- and post-synaptically and exert important modulatory control over neural circuits. This modulatory role in circuit function makes them a potential actor in wide variety of...
Radiation is a ubiquitous health risk. Contemporary populations are exposed to several hundred milliSieverts per person over their lifetimes from both natural and human made sources such as radon, cosmic rays, CT-scans, etc. Risk estimates based on studies of atomic bomb survivors suggest that these exposures induce excess cancer mortality...
Patients born with severe heart defects need regular monitoring of the complex hemodynamics in their heart and vasculature. 4D flow MRI has emerged as the state-of-the-art technique for comprehensively evaluating cardiovascular hemodynamics. This imaging technique allows for the dynamic visualization of 3D blood through the cardiac cycle and the quantification...
With the dual challenges of meeting global energy demand and mitigating anthropogenic climate change, significant effort is being applied to generating power from renewable sources. The dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) is a photovoltaic technology capable of generating electricity from sunlight, but suffers losses in efficiency due to deleterious electron transfer...
Algebras and their bimodules form a 2-category in which 2-morphisms are certain zero-th Hochschild cohomology groups. When we derive this structure (i.e., use Hochschild cochains instead of HH^0 for 2-morphisms), we find that algebras form a category in dg cocategories. The Hochschild-Kostant-Rosenberg theorem and non-commutative calculus give a rich algebraic...
We studied the nonlocal effects of intraspecific prey competition on the stability of the critical points of the Rosenzweig-MacArthur model and the Holling-Tanner model, respectively, using linear stability analysis. In particular we focused on the study of the stability of the coexistence state influenced by the nonlocality for both models....
Advancements in nanotechnology have led to the production of devices with components with sub-100 nm size scales. Studies have investigated how properties of polymers change when confined to nanoscale dimensions. However, stiffness-confinement studies have reported increases, decreases, and invariance with confinement for different polymer/substrate pairs, making it difficult to obtain...
Scholars have noted that food marketing significantly impacts the lives of children, influencing what foods they request and consume. However, the impact of food marketing on low-income children has only been explored minimally. This project explores both media-based and in-store food marketing to low-income families, along with potential outcomes of...
The development of metal-based probes has provided major benefits to understanding basic biological process and clinical outcomes. Metals offer access to geometries that carbon alone cannot attain, along with valuable magnetic, optical, and binding properties. Metals have proven to be particularly useful in advancing molecular imaging, a field that seeks...
As the title suggests, this dissertation is composed of three major topics. The first two are optimization problems focusing on developing effective solution methodologies, while for the last topic we present a large-scale information retrieval system in the domain of sports. With the algorithms and frameworks developed in this dissertation,...
The genetic code, a set of rules by which mRNA codons are translated into the twenty standard amino acids used in protein synthesis, was once thought to be immutable. As we expanded our understanding of molecular biology more variations in this genetic code have been found across the animal kingdom....
Natural products provide a renewable resource of novel chemical structures with relevance to the pharmaceutical, agricultural and materials industries. Genome sequencing has revealed that these industries currently rely on only a fraction of the number of natural products that exist in nature. Based on the impact that known natural products...
The polypeptide hormone prolactin (PRL) is increasingly recognized as contributing to the development and progression of human breast cancer. This is supported by epidemiologic studies that found women with high levels of serum PRL are at an increased risk for developing breast cancer. Activation of the prolactin receptor (PRLR) by...
Loss of inhibitory control from descending serotonergic (5-HT) fibers deregulates the excitability of spinal motoneurons and interneurons following spinal cord injury (SCI). Exaggerated synaptic activity triggers long-lasting excitatory postsynaptic potentials (long EPSPs) in hyperexcitable motoneurons to ultimately drive muscle spasms at the chronic stage of SCI. Deep dorsal horn (DDH)...
The impacts of many important technologies are limited by the availability of better-performing materials. One factor limiting the ability of engineers to develop better materials is the speed at which they can search through possible formulations and processing schemes. Recently, machine learning algorithms have emerged as a possible route to...
Age-related cognitive deficits are observed in both humans and animals. Yet, the molecular mechanisms underlying these deficits are not yet fully elucidated. In aged animals, a decrease in intrinsic excitability of pyramidal neurons from the CA1 sub-region of hippocampus is believed to contribute to age-related cognitive impairments, but the molecular...
Increasing energy demand due to rapid growth in population and industrialization along with environmental crisis has led to the search for cheap, environmentally friendly, and nontoxic methods for generation of energy. However, most alternative energy sources such as photovoltaic, biofuels, hydraulic power, wind power, and geothermal energy, are characterized by...
This dissertation presents a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) study of a novel anisotropic superconductor, HgBa$_{2}$CuO$_{4+\delta}$ (Hg1201) and unconventional strain dependence of the mean free path of silica aerogel. Hg1201 is one of the most structurally simple cuprates known. Therefore, it is an ideal compound in investigation of various phases in...
Dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta are richly innervated by GABAergic neurons. The postsynaptic effects of GABA on SNc DA neurons are mediated by a mixture of GABAA and GABAB receptors. Although activation of GABAA receptors inhibits spike generation, the consequences of GABAB receptor activation are less well...
How can gatekeeping theory in the circulation of cultural objects, including knowledge production, inform the way cultural sociology investigates the role of the producer and the cultural object as “gated” entities? Using the case of producers working under the rubric of “Contemporary African art” to investigate opportunities and restrictions to...
This dissertation explores the renewed historical significance of the (geo)political demand to redraft national constitutions in the Americas. Building on previous work, my dissertation constructs a transnational lens to underline the intersectionality of the social struggles that catalyzed the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly process begun in 1999 and the Ecuadorian experience...
Analytic jurisprudence is the field organized around the “What is law?” question. When most scholars approach the “What is law?” question, they suppose that the goal of such inquiry is to discover, or to accurately represent, the true nature of law. Consequently, these scholars reject the notion that the goal...
FOXA1 is a FKHD family protein that plays pioneering roles in lineage-specific enhancer activation and gene transcription. Through genome-wide location analyses, here we show that FOXA1 expression and occupancy are, in turn, required for the maintenance of these epigenetic signatures, namely DNA hypomethylation and histone 3 lysine 4 methylation. Mechanistically,...
We define multi-indexed Deligne extensions and multi-indexed log-variations of Hodge structures in the category of (filtered) logarithmic D-modules, via the idea of Bernstein– Sato polynomials and Kashiwara–Malgrange filtrations, generalizing the Deligne canonical extensions of flat vector bundles. We also obtain many comparison results with perverse sheaves via the logarithmic de...
The scope of this thesis extends to the study of surface structures and electronic properties in a number of complex oxides. The c(6x2) surface reconstruction on SrTiO3 (001) was solved using a combination of plan view transmission electron microscopy imaging, atomic resolution secondary electron imaging, and density functional theory calculations....
This dissertation explores the relationship between institutions of political participation and environmental protection. What is the relationship and how is it constituted? How are participatory institutions put into motion, and how do they operate? What are the effects of these institutions? Are participatory institutions desirable from an environmental perspective and...
We often criticize others for beliefs that are dogmatic, biased, or wishful. What, exactly, are we criticizing? Many epistemologists accept that such believing is problematic because it is not appropriately responsive to epistemic reasons. But why care about that? Or, to put it another way, why are epistemic norms authoritative...
This work is concerned with the Laudau-Ginzburg $A$-model, or the Fukaya-Seidel category, associated with a Laurent polynomial $f: (\C^*)^n \ o \C$. We use constructible sheaves on a real $n$-dimensional torus to describe the Lagrangian thimbles associated to $f$. Then we discuss the application to Homological Mirror Symmetry for smooth...
Freeze casting is a technique for processing porous materials that has drawn significant attention for its effectiveness in producing a variety of tailorable pore structures for ceramics, metals, and polymers. With freeze casting, pores are generated based on a solidification process where ice crystals act as a sacrificial template which...
This dissertation contains two studies. In Chapter 1, I implement a randomized intervention to measure the effect of reminders for timely payment of credit cards. While I find an 13% reduction in the cost of late payment fees paid, 31% of the users that avoid credit card late payments, incur...
Changing economic activities bring significant cultural, epidemiological, and nutritional transitions. These transitions have important and lifelong effects on the health of populations experiencing them. Infancy represents a critical period when rapid growth and metabolic programming occur, making infants particularly vulnerable to long-lasting biological changes due to such transitions. The objective...
After 9/11 there was a shift in the rhetoric surrounding counter-terrorism. Suddenly, the language of risk, security and prevention was being utilized to justify a new set of global financial regulations headed up by international organizations such as the United Nations, The Financial Action Task Force, and the IMF/World Bank....
Achievement gaps between students from different SES and racial/ethnic backgrounds stubbornly persist despite decades of policy interventions. My dissertation focuses on several unexpected sources of stress and disruption that may be related to the achievement gap: sunlight exposure, a sister’s teen childbearing, and nearby violent crime. I demonstrate that these...
The concept of deportation has become increasingly important in recent years, as states more and more turn to removal as a technique of control over population and territory. But within the field of political theory the concept of deportation has not yet received the attention it deserves. This dissertation helps...
Mobile traffic is expected to grow tenfold by 2019, topping 24 exabytes of monthly traffic and accounting for nearly half of all Internet traffic. This growth is driven by the increasing number of smart phones and tablets, and the data demands of high bandwidth services enabled by next-generation cellular networks...
An important question in religious and theological ethics concerns the human capacity for moral action, but contemporary Christian theological anthropologies largely theorize the human person in terms of the imago Dei, not moral subjectivity. The following study contributes to this challenge an investigation of human moral agency in the theological...
Both chapters of this dissertation relate to the aggregate value of corporations in an economy. In particular, they relate to the ratio of the aggregate total market value of corporations over the replacement cost of their recorded capital. The first chapter introduces a model that can explain why this ratio...