Several surface wave tomographic studies of the upper mantle structure beneath North America are presented, which take advantage of high quality seismic data, primarily recorded in the last decade, to create better resolved S-wave tomographic models. The first study presents a regional 3D model, IL05, of the upper mantle beneath...
The formation of a primary endocytic vesicle bud is a dynamic process involving the transient organization of adaptor and scaffold proteins at the plasma membrane. The proteins involved in early endocytosis have modular protein interaction motifs and domains that are predicted to contribute to scaffold formation. These motifs are found...
To maintain polarity, epithelial cells continuously sort transmembrane proteins to the apical or basolateral membrane domains during biosynthetic delivery or after internalization. This thesis was designed to elucidate the molecular mechanism underlying protein trafficking. Our studies identified Rab13 as a critical GTPase regulator of biosynthetic cargos that are transported from...
This thesis contributes in two ways. First it describes a new framework for the systematic design of collective behaviors and solves a key stability issue under this design framework. In this thesis we apply this framework to solve three tasks in the swarm robotics field: connectivity maintenance, formation control and...
Although chronic stress has been shown to be significantly associated with depression, this relationship has not received adequate attention, particularly in adolescent samples. One gap lies in the examination of whether particular domains of chronic interpersonal stress are uniquely related to risk for depression. Furthermore, the degree to which chronic...
The majority of research on voluntary visual attention has focused primarily on specific attentional processes. While we know much about individual attentional abilities such as shifting attention among spatial locations, tracking multiple objects and maintaining attention for specific targets, we know little about how these attentional processes relate to one...
A critical challenge in improving the quality of life for spinal cord injury survivors is to restore the capacity to grasp and manipulate objects. While progress has been made to restore hand function by using functional electrical stimulation (FES) to activate muscles, providing the means to control the multiple degrees...
This thesis is organized into three essays, each with particular insights involving public policy and family formation:
In the first essay, I address the well-documented correlation between the prestige of the university and the labor market income of its graduates by investigating whether a possible medium for this effect is...
Forest Politics in Colonial and Postcolonial Kenya, 1940-1990s Alphonse Omondi Otieno In the period 1940-1990s, the Kenyan forestry policy evolved from an emphasis on preservation to a combination of programs which embodied both rural Africans' interests and practices and state interests in environmental issues. Using four cases from the western...
Herpes simplex virus (HSV) infection of host cells requires virus attachment to the cell surface and subsequent membrane fusion between the virus envelope and host cell membrane to deliver the nucleocapsid containing the viral genome into the host cell. A proposed mechanism for HSV glycoprotein-induced membrane fusion is gD binding...