In this dissertation, I examine a near-century old popular theatre genre in Ghana known as the concert party to explore how contemporary political and economic circumstances shape its relationship to the spider-man trickster of Ghanaian (specifically Akan) folklore. Since the early 18th century various writers have attempted to define Ananse's...
A comprehension of the complex dynamics of gaseous combustion requires an understanding of the underlying fundamentals. In this dissertation, I examine planar diffusion flames from both an experimental and numerical perspective.
In the first part of this thesis, I study the extinction of unstrained, planar counter-diffusion flames. The theoretical model...
Since its discovery, RNA interference (RNAi) has become a powerful tool used in laboratories to understand developmental processes, and it is now commonly used to investigate gene function. Using RNAi, scientists can routinely knock out specific genes to prevent their expression, observe its phenotypes, and then help determine the function...
This project explores historical questions of televisual form and cultural production, centering on the proliferation of media texts that mobilize real-life misfortune as a form of entertainment in U.S. television and culture. Specifically, it examines how a variety of "reality" formats in contemporary television stage and exploit spectacles of failure,...
Liquid metal melt-lubrication of high-power and high-speed sliding electrical contacts improves electrical current collection and reduces friction. However, armature material loss may cause transition to arcing or plasma contact. Boundary lubrication of the sliding contact with low melting-point alloys can provide comparable improvement in current collection at reduced temperatures. Bismuth,...
When considering his pioneering and innovative role in broadening the tonal palette of the piano, as well as his tireless efforts to promote his own and other composers’ music, it is not surprising that a large percentage of Franz Liszt’s compositional output for that instrument is made up of transcriptions....
Articular cartilage is a type of connective tissue that protects the underlying bone from the compressive forces of daily activities. When cartilage is damaged via a traumatic event, chondral defects are formed and require medical intervention. However, current treatments are of inconsistent efficacy and only benefit a subset of patients....
Over the past decade and a half, there has been considerable interest in the effect confinement and interfaces have on the properties of glass forming materials. With the emergence of nanotechnology, some glass formers, in particular polymeric glass formers, will be used at increasingly smaller length scales. An understanding of...
The orderly process of hematopoietic differentiation is governed in large part by the coordinated transcription of specific genes. Deregulation of normal differentiation processes can lead to disease states including immunodeficiency, autoimmune disease, and leukemia. This research focuses on the family of transcription factors known as the early growth response (Egr)...
The recent observation of nonzero neutrino mass is the first concrete indication of physics beyond the Standard Model. Their properties, unique among the other fermions, leads naturally to the idea of a Majorana neutrino mass term. Despite the strong theoretical prejudice toward this concept, it must be tested experimentally. This...
The central analytic concern of this dissertation is the problem of privileging one, true, unified, singular self as the essential focus or goal with respect to contemporary French- and English-language novels by women authors from Africa and the Caribbean. In the past, feminist critics, in particular, have read these texts...
Virtual machine based distributed computing greatly simplifies and enhances adaptive/autonomic computing by lowering the level of abstraction, benefiting both resource providers and users. We are developing Virtuoso, a middleware system for virtual machine shared-resource computing (e.g. grids) that provides numerous advantages and overcomes many obstacles a user faces in using...
The need for readily synthesized scaffold architectures to build monodisperse, high molar mass mobility modifiers or "drag-tags" in end-labeled free solution electrophoresis (ELFSE) led to the development of a novel class of multivalent molecular tools. Poly-N-substituted glycines (peptoids) were created with evenly spaced amino groups as branching points along the...
Ethicity, race and gender play an important role in labor markets; labor market outcomes such as hiring and compensation are very different across different social groups. These differentials are partly the result of differences in productivity and preferences and partly the result of discrimination. Chapter two uses an audit study...
The need for low-cost robust meso-scale "smart" robots (manipulators) that have no discrete parts (monolithic), no sensors ("self-sensing") and can be used in space-constrained systems, e.g., in microfactories, biomedical applications, etc., was the motivation for the current research. This study describes the design, fabrication and analysis of such a smart...
Autism was originally described as involving an apparent lack of motivation for social interaction. Social motivation has not figured prominently in subsequent theorizing regarding this disorder. Instead, theory of mind deficits have taken center stage as a theory of autism. This is surprising because evidence of social motivation deficits appear...
This dissertation examines the ways in which performance forms articulate with urban identities in the context of transnational economic and cultural exchange. In this multisited historical ethnography, I explore the links between late 19th-century Ottoman and contemporary Turkish public spheres fractured by morality battles and political transformation. Both periods are...
Understanding how contexts shape child development is a primary goal of human development research and theory. Child effects, or the influence of children on their own environment, may be a key process by which contexts and children interact to shape subsequent development. Yet, child effects have been under-studied in social...
As scientists use the tools of computational and complex systems theory to broaden science perspectives (e.g., Bar-Yam, 1997; Holland, 1995; Wolfram, 2002), so can middle-school students broaden their perspectives using appropriate tools. The goals of this dissertation project are to build, study, evaluate, and compare activities designed to foster both...
The biological antagonism between copper and molybdenum, first observed when cattle developed copper deficiencies after ingesting high levels of plant-born molybdenum, is currently being used in humans to treat two conditions: Wilson's Disease as well as several forms of metastatic cancer. There is surprisingly little known about the interaction of...
Funding risky Research and Development (R&D) and New Product Development (NPD) projects is crucial for the long term health of any large company. Such funding decisions are multiobjective and are undertaken with sparse data. Therefore prescriptive or algorithmic solutions are not adopted by practitioners. Descriptive solutions that provide managerial insights...
Over the last 35 years, discourse on "diversity" has become commonplace in many U.S. institutions. My research interrogates diversity as a racialized political project, focusing on the organizational uses of diversity discourse. I base my analysis on case studies of a public university, a Fortune 500 company, and a city...
In recent years, research has expanded the uses of triblock copolymer gels to a wide variety of applications including everything from ceramics processing to regenerative medicine and drug delivery. The research presented in this dissertation focuses on a physically crosslinked, block copolymers gel system in a selective solvent. This system...
Motivated by performance requirements of future medical stent applications, experimental research addresses the design of novel TiNi-based, superelastic shape-memory alloys employing nanoscale precipitation strengthening to minimize accommodation slip for cyclic stability and to increase output stress capability for smaller devices. Using a thermodynamic database describing the B2 and L21 phases...
Peripheral neuropathic pain is a debilitating affliction for which there is little effective treatment. Patients suffer from symptoms ranging from loss of sensation to hyperalgesia and allodynia. The neuroinflammatory process in chronic pain conditions has become a main focus of study because of the release of proinflammatory cytokines, which can...
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...
Increasing interest in long-life bone implants with reduced mechanical properties reducing the stress-shielding effect and a structure mimicking bone porous architecture has encouraged study and development of fabrication methods for porous NiTi. The main objective of this work was to advance these goals by developing new processing procedures for porous...
This dissertation is composed of three chapters, each contributing to different aspects of the literature of partially identified econometric models.
In the first chapter, I introduce a bootstrap procedure to perform inference in the class of partially identified econometric models defined by finitely many moment equalities and inequalities. I provide...
In this work, electron beam induced current (EBIC) and scanning photocurrent microscopy (SPCM) were used to quantitatively investigate the electronic properties of silicon nanowire devices. For the first time, it was shown that minority carrier diffusion lengths in phosphorous-doped silicon nanowires are significantly reduced from their bulk values because of...
>"Surprising Metamorphoses: Transformations of Race in Early American Literatures," analyzes early American literary representations of race within the context of contemporaneous belief systems. Contrasting sharply with subsequent periods, much late eighteenth-century thought conceptualized race as an external, mutable bodily condition that could change over time. Identifying how this thinking informs...
The present thesis presents a new application of dynamic constructivism (Hong, Morris, Chui, & Benet-Martinez, 2000; Morris & Fu, 2001) to teamwork process in creativity in multicultural teams. With its roots in cognitive psychology, dynamic constructivist theory posits that varying values, social structures, and norms within cultures create different knowledge...
This dissertation contains three essays that investigate various factors affecting firms' choice of quality in the context of nursing homes.
The first essay examines how strategic interactions with competitors affect quality levels selected by nursing homes. I explore nursing homes' responses to minimum nurse staffing standards imposed in two large...
The overall objective of this thesis is to develop a package of high-resolution, non-invasive experimental and numerical approaches to observe in situ pore-scale geometry modification due to colloid deposition, and quantitatively predict its effects on the large-scale transport properties of the porous medium. High-energy synchrotron-based X-ray difference micro-tomography (XDMT) was...
Stochastic programming models static or dynamic optimal decision making under uncertainty. In contrast to deterministic mathematical programming, stochastic programming generally uses expectation functionals in objective or constraints over known or partially known distributions of the problem data. Its features many decision variables under complicated constraints over discrete time periods. Its...
Motivated by the rich variety of complex patterns observed on the surface of fluid layers that are vibrated at multiple frequencies, we investigate the effect of such resonant forcing on systems undergoing a Hopf bifurcation to spatially homogeneous oscillations. We use an extension of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (CGLE) that...
One of the central features of the now half-century old theory of the microscopic origins of superconductivity in elemental materials is the correlations between pairs of electrons with opposite spin and momentum. The constituent electrons of these Cooper pairs have the unusual property that their mean spatial separation is much...
Recent work points out the importance of the solid-solid interface in explaining the high photoactivity of mixed phase TiO2 catalysts. The goal of this research was to probe the synthesis-structure-function relationships of the solid-solid interfaces created by the reactive direct current (DC) magnetron sputtering of titanium dioxide. I hypothesize that...
The growing worldwide threat of antibiotic-resistant pathogens has necessitated a constant search for new classes of antibiotics. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are integral components of innate immunity in virtually every living organism, and, due to their proven efficacy over millions of years of evolution, are considered promising leads for new antibiotic...
The goal of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of the driving forces behind short-term movements in important aggregate variables such as exports, imports, the trade balance, output, investment, and employment. The first chapter contrasts the cyclical behavior of the trade balance and trade flows in a group of...
Loneliness, Stress, and Depression over the Transition to Adulthood: Interpersonal and Physiological Pathways Leah Darrah Doane During the transition into adulthood, youth experience substantial stressful changes as they navigate shifts in their interpersonal, familial, educational and economic domains of life. This dissertation aims to understand how the unique experiences of...
This dissertation traces the meaning and scope of early modern complaint poetry. I argue that what I understand as a secular "poetics of dissatisfaction" arose to fill the void left when religious auricular confession was no longer an institutionalized practice, and that this mode of literary expression was itself shaped...
The de novo design of bio-inspired materials with precisely controlled properties is challenging, but has potential applications in nano-biotechnology. Applications range from nanometer scaled assemblies to three-dimensional scaffolds for tissue engineering. Genetic engineering of protein-based polymers offers distinct advantages over traditionally synthesized polymers, de novo proteins can be produced with...
The recent years have witnessed a large number of emerging applications in location based services, thanks to the wide spread use of GPS devices, cellular phones, RFID tags and mobile sensor nodes. A fundamental technology that enables such services is the efficient management of the vast volume of spatio-temporal information...
A tetramer model for HIV-1 Integrase (IN) with DNA representing the LTR termini was previously assembled which predicted amino acid residues on the enzyme surface that interact with the LTR termini (Chen et al, 2006). A separate structural alignment of HIV-1, SIV, and ASV INs predicted which of these residues...
Kinesin-1 is a motor protein that transports cargo along microtubules. Inside cells, the majority of kinesin-1 is regulated to conserve ATP and ensure its proper intracellular distribution and coordination with other motors. Regulated kinesin-1 is folded in half, and interactions between coiled-coil regions near the N-terminal enzymatically active heads and...
In this thesis we study protein folding with external force. In Part I we simulate the folding or unfolding procedure based on the two-state model. For constant-velocity experiments, the simulation results fit the experimental results. For constant-force experiments, we introduce cooperativity between domains to explain the different behavior between single...
Cells are regulated by a combination of soluble stimuli and adhesive interactions with other cells and the extracellular matrix (ECM). We are developing systems to present ECM and cytokine receptor ligands in a defined manner for applications in hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell (HSPC) culture. We hypothesize that the controlled,...
The semiconductor-based Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) offers several key advantages over gas lasers, solid-state lasers, and other semiconductor-based mid-infrared lasers. While the QCL has historically operated best in the λ ~ 7-9 μm range using InP-based materials, a major challenge has been to achieve a high-power, room-temperature continuous-wave (CW) operation...
Gonadotropins LH and FSH are secreted by the pituitary in response to hypothalamic GnRH and act to stimulate ovarian follicle development, steroid production and ovulation. Gonadal steroids, including estrogen, enter the circulation and provide neuroendocrine feedback at the hypothalamus and/or pituitary. Estrogen provides negative feedback to suppress gonadotropin release throughout...
The Witten Laplacian corresponding to a Morse function on the circle is studied using methods of complex WKB and resurgent analysis. It is shown that under certain assumptions the low-lying eigenvalues of the Witten Laplacian are resurgent.