Early life adversity predicts greater health risk in later life across multiple outcomes, including cardiovascular disease (CVD) and all-cause mortality. While biological pathways are incompletely understood, evidence is increasingly highlighting immune function, specifically chronic inflammation, which is implicated in cardiometabolic diseases, certain cancers, and all-cause mortality. Links between early adversity...
Despite the increasing interest in biogenic secondary organic aerosols (SOAs), their role in the climate system remains the greatest source of uncertainty in global models. Cloud formation, critical for the net cooling effect provided by cloud cover, is dependent on the abundance of SOA particles and their ability to activate...
The purpose of this multiple-case study was to examine the lived experiences of current collegiate music education majors, both students from under-represented minorities and their well-represented peers, with attention to racial/ethnic identity and social class. Dyads of current music education students at 8 separate colleges/universities—a student from an under-represented racial...
Macrophages are innate immune cells that are traditionally thought to be specialists in phagocytosis. More recent evidence suggest that macrophages reside in nearly every organ and readily adapt to local microenvironmental signals, leading to highly plastic phenotypes across and within tissues. Therefore, rather than treating it as a homogenous cell...
Unrestrained urban growth combined with the increase in the intensity and frequency of precipitation events, due to climate change, has become a major challenge for urban green spaces. Urban sprawl increases ecosystem degradation and the vulnerability of cities to floods as a result of excess stormwater runoff and non-point source...
One of the fundamental questions in developmental biology is how a single cell gives rise to a complex organism. More specifically, how a totipotent egg divides into cells that become increasingly restricted in their potential. Development is a process of increasingly restricted cellular potential, and here I home in on...
This project centers set design as the primary aesthetic, economic, and sociopolitical driver of the sitcom genre’s emergence and development during the first half of the twentieth century. My work treats sitcom set design as a category of historical architecture that can be (and has been) mapped, toured, built, and...
Van der Waals, or layered, materials offer a flexible platform to tune properties via exfoliation down to the single- or few-layer limit; they are at the forefront of cutting-edge materials science and engineering research because of the innumerable ways to tune materials as a function of thickness or composition. Due...
Children acquire linguistic competence via social interactions with adults and learn to converse in accordance with the norms of their communities. The present dissertation examined the communicative patterns of Thai-English bilingual mothers and children in their two languages, as well as compared the bilinguals’ conversations to each of their monolingual...
The development of new catalytic methodologies for the precision synthesis of carbon-carbon bonds is central to the advancement of synthetic organic chemistry. Significant focuses of these efforts are made on the enantio- and diastereoselective synthesis of carbon frameworks, especially as chemists and biologists become more aware of the impact of...
In this dissertation, I conducted 2 studies that resulted in 3 manuscripts. This dissertation consists of 6 chapters that include the 3 manuscripts. The overarching research question is How does context affect the work of quality improvement (QI) practitioners? To answer this larger research question, which is central to the...
Although elevated stress and dietary change have each been associated with metabolic health decline for resettled populations in the Global North, considerably less attention is paid to the links between these two biosocial pathways. Addressing these linkages can elucidate interrelated diet and stress mechanisms that affect population health disparities over...
Two-dimensional (2D) materials are a promising class of electronic materials that have generated great interest to improve and create new and existing technologies. The promise of this family of materials relies on their high surface-to-volume ratio and atomic thickness in addition to their unique (opto)electric properties. However, these morphological properties...
Submodularity is a well-known concept in integer programming and combinatorial optimization. Submodular set functions capture the diminishing returns phenomenon, which has wide-ranging applications in various domains. Typically, a submodular set function models the utility of homogenous items selected from a single ground set. Selecting an item or not is naturally...
This dissertation provides an introduction to the diffraction and scattering theory for the Aharonov--Bohm Hamiltonian with one or multiple poles on $\mathbf{R}^2$. It shows the propagation of diffractive singularities of the wave equation with the magnetic Hamiltonians with singular vector potential, which is related to the so-called Aharonov--Bohm effect. Based...
Synthesis opens the pathway to examine a plethora of complex structures. Whether the target is a naturally occurring compound or a proposed molecule never observed before, synthetic routes can be developed to help understand a variety of properties that the molecule can contain. Synthetic efforts have helped elucidate the absolute...
Nanocarriers, structures with at least one dimension on the nanoscale (1-1000 nm), have been engineered for delivery of various cargoes. The shape and flexibility of nanocarriers are important parameters that influence their biological performance. Self-assembling polymeric filamentous nanocarriers, known as filomicelles (FM), are of great interest to nanomedicine due to...
The production and spread of digital news involves a wide range of actors: journalists and the organizations that employ them, social media platforms, audiences, and myriad commentators, citizen journalists, bloggers, and other actors who contribute to the news ecosystem without inhabiting an official role. These actors interact in flexible, often...
Using the Connected Learning framework as a lens to frame my research inquiry, this dissertation explores the potential of Hip-Hop songwriting and recording practices as a new form of music education in elementary schools. Using data from three years of ethnographic study I have collected while working as a youth...
Much prior research on memory systems has focused on establishing dissociations between different types of memory based on behavior, subjective experience, and the brain: explicit memory depends on the medial temporal lobe and is thought to operate consciously through a relatively slower processing bottleneck, while implicit memory is a term...
Very few studies have examined school racial climate in racially diverse school contexts. School racial climate refers to “perceptions of interracial interactions and the socialization around race and culture in a school” (Byrd, 2017, p. 700). The association between interracial peer interactions, psychological well-being, and academic outcomes is well documented,...
As the interest in rational synthesis for solid-state materials accelerates, there is an urgent need to understand the design principles concealed within these reactions. In situ material synthesis provides such an avenue to not only uncover these assembling rules, but also for finding new materials even in seemingly familiar phase...
This thesis contains two research projects. The first research project examined the coherent nature of electron transfer in two donor-acceptor dyads – one single acceptor control compound and one dual acceptor molecule of interest. Using transient absorption spectroscopy in the ultraviolet/visible/near-infrared and mid-infrared regions, magnetic field effect experiments, and theoretical...
If I mistakenly hear you ask for directions to the “shore” when instead you asked for directions to the “store,” the miscommunication is probably an innocent mistake. If, on the other hand, a man misunderstands a woman’s refusal of his sexual advances as consent, the mistake seems like it might...
Metal-organic frameworks are crystalline, nanoporous materials formed by metal nodes connected by organic ligands. MOFs represent an exciting approach to materials design where a material with desired properties can be made by choosing the compatible nodes, linkers and topologies independently. MOFs are highly porous and have high surface areas...
This dissertation is motivated by the decision process of the supply chain team of a major furniture retailer that delivers its products at the customer's home. In retail supply chains for companies offering home delivery services, demand surges are observed at the store level, which translate to a high volume...
This dissertation contains three essays. In the first essay, "The Role of Connections in Congressional Lawmaking", I investigate the role of connections in congressional lawmaking by studying how legislators' deaths impact their peers' capacity to sponsor and advance bills in the U.S. House of Representatives. I focus on legislators who...
This dissertation explores an intellectual and political tradition that questioned the use of natural resources and the socioeconomic structures of rural Brazil in the early 20th century. “Organicist agrarianism” postulated an orderly transformation of the Brazil under the guidance of the state in the name of a natural and eternal...
Health literacy has been shown to be a key component of patient understanding of medical diagnoses, adherence, and self-efficacy. Limited health literacy has been associated with a number of negative outcomes— including more severe illness, increased use of emergency services, and mortality. The concept of mental health literacy has arisen...
After spending most of her flight back to Ghana writing a letter to her estranged lover, Sissie, Ama Ata Aidoo’s protagonist in Our Sister Killjoy, observes the actions of her fellow passengers and reads the atmosphere onboard the airplane as that of “another human market-place.” Sissie’s statement transports into her...
The exchange of information in the brain is accomplished through sequences of action potentials that result from the integration of local microcircuits. Unraveling the connectivity of the neurons that constitute these microcircuits and how they contribute to network activity is vital for understanding how information is relayed through the brain...
Recent advances in combinatorial chemistry, synthetic biology, and ‘omics’ research require high-throughput methods for performing and analyzing thousands to millions of reactions in one day. However, it is a challenge to engineer high-throughput systems that can autonomously conduct and analyze such a large number of reactions in a generalizable and...
Ovulation is the process by which an ovulatory follicle releases a mature egg and is essential for fertility and maintaining female reproductive cycle. Understanding the mechanisms of ovulation have implications for the development of non-hormonal contraceptives and treatments of anovulatory diseases. We developed a 3D alginate encapsulated in vitro follicle...
We study the symmetry groups with respect to various equivalence relations defined on subshifts, and more generally, on Cantor systems. Two basic notions of equivalence for dynamical systems are conjugacy and flow equivalence. In this dissertation, we focus on the well-studied automorphism group, which is the group of self-conjugacies, and...
Controlled delivery of foreign cargo into cells is a critical step in many biological studies and in cell engineering and analysis workflows. Recent advances in micro and nanotechnology, specifically in microfluidics and microfabrication have added significantly to the precision, accuracy, resolution and throughput of cell manipulation and analysis pipelines. These...
We perform many movements every day without much deliberation. However, moving can be seen as a form of decision-making since one of many possible movements must be selected and executed. The decision-making processes that underlie movements are influenced by various factors, including sensory perception, energetics, time, perceived rates of failure...
The use of light to understand detailed electronic structure and chemical properties of a molecule through light-matter interaction is fundamentally essential to design and analyze any chemical system. Over the past decades, rapid developments on optics and laser techniques improved the detection efficiency of multiphoton processes with more detailed chemical...
Metalloenzymes catalyze remarkable reactions in Nature using transition metal ions. Common earth-abundant metals like copper, iron, zinc, and magnesium catalyze reactions that are the basis of life. These metal sites lend their chemistries to facilitate these reactions, making studying the structure and properties important in understanding the enzymes' abilities and...
Receptor for activated C kinase 1 (RACK1) is a core small (40S) ribosomal subunit protein whose structure is highly conserved among eukaryotes apart from a C-terminal extended loop. We previously showed that a poxvirus kinase phosphorylates this flexible loop in human RACK1, mimicking endogenous negative charge in plant RACK1 to...
For many years silicon tethers have been used to increase yields and control the stereochemical and regiochemical outcomes of coupling reactions. Silicon tethers may be incorporated into a wide range of reaction types including alkene metathesis, cycloadditions, and glycosylations. This thesis focuses on the development of the use of silicon...
The three essays composing this dissertation are unified by their focus on the macroeconomic aspects of economic development. In Chapter one titled "Land Property Rights, Financial Frictions, and Resource Allocation in Developing Countries'', I study the effects of weak land property rights and limited access to finance on aggregate productivity...
Stories and fantasy represent an important aspect of consumer life and comprise a huge marketing enterprise within consumer entertainment. Each year, upwards of $82 billion is spent on books, games, and other fantasy industries in the United States alone. Likewise, fantasy has important implications for consumers’ sense of identity. In...
This thesis presents results on photophysics and spin dynamics of photoactive organic molecules that possess one unpaired electron spin in the ground state and two or three unpaired spins upon photoexcitation. The excited state dynamics of the systems were studied using transient optical absorption spectroscopies and non-Boltzmann population on the...
This dissertation seeks to explore how physical forces, notably through the use of magnetic nanoparticles and applied fields, can influence the structural outcomes of colloidal crystals engineered with DNA. Chapter 1 describes how both DNA and magnetic fields can direct the assembly of nanoparticles into periodic and sometimes crystalline materials....
Dopamine (DA) neurons are involved in many brain functions, and their dysfunction is associated with several neurodegenerative diseases. In recent years, our lab and others have found that DA neurons are molecularly diverse through single-cell gene expression profiling. An outstanding question in the field is whether this heterogeneity is encoded...
This dissertation presents an affect-centered approach to the analysis and interpretation of the experience of music and its attendant meaning in selected works of literature and cinema. Music’s interpretative mutability often charges it with meaning, though in infinite gradations of singularity rather than any universal sense. Rather than undertake a...
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Russian Orthodox Church established a dense network of social and material aid for thousands of migrants who travelled from the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires to find work in the United States. The church’s growth followed the path of Progressive Era industrialization, with...
We present two ways in which measures of information can be used for the design and analysis of neural networks in both the brain and the computer. In the brain, stimulus is often represented as a distributed pattern of activity in a network of neurons. The quality of such population...
In the United States and around the world, the growing energy demands and climate concerns necessitate renewable and efficient energy production. Thermoelectric materials could be one small part of this larger picture movement, but their high cost and low efficiency must be improved to realize commercial use. To decrease the...
The US yogurt market has been volatile in the last decade, marked by striking sales increases and dramatic market structure changes. According to an industry report, dollar sales of yogurt in 2017 reached $8.8 billion---a more than 80% increase from 2007. Such remarkable sales growth can be attributed to the...