Organic photovoltaics offer an opportunity to make solar cells more affordable and widely accessible using cheap, solution-processable light-absorbing layers. In order to realize new technologies, a fundamental understanding of organic chromophore photophysics is required to overcome efficiency limitations. Throughout this doctoral work, I investigated the kinetic and physical characteristics of...
Motivated by rhythms in the brain, we investigate the synchronization of noisy and all-to-all pulse-coupled oscillators. We consider a case where the oscillatory excursions are of varying amplitude and where only sufficiently large excursions result in the output pulses that drive the interactions between the oscillators. In the regime of...
In this dissertation, I assert that a contradictory aesthetic has remained and been reborn in the U.S. daytime soap opera through time and technology; I call this the “everyday implausible.” Using textual analysis and archival research, I follow this genre from its beginnings on radio, through its move to television...
In this dissertation I examine how the government should respond to sovereign risk and show that it has implications on the optimal behavior of the government. In Chapter 1, I look into international reserve management. In Chapter 2, I analyze the effects of sovereign risk on the size of fiscal...
This dissertation investigates the relationship between melancholy and the development of American and Iranian literary discourses as responses to the crisis of postwar sovereignty. While situating itself against the complicated backdrop of US/Iran relations since the Second World War, it explores the impact of religion on the formation of political...
Valence-to-core (vtc) x-ray emission spectra (XES) provides direct information on occupied valence orbitals and is sensitive to chemical environment. Combining with element specificity and high penetration of hard x-rays, it is emerging as an information-rich technique and its applications have been demonstrated in research fields, such as catalysis and metalloenzymes....
ABSTRACTUnderstanding Micro-macroscopic Phenomena of Tribological Fluids and Surfaces
Mechanical power and motion are transmitted through interfaces under contact and relative motion. Friction is inevitable, which can lead to higher operating and energy costs, and severe frictional rubbing can result in material damage and cessation of motion. A deep understanding of...
A prominent cause of premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) is gonadotoxic cancer therapies, which deplete the ovarian reserve of follicles, oocytes, and hormone-producing cells. Current fertility preservation methods include the removal and cryopreservation of ovarian tissue prior to gonadotoxic treatment. This cryopreserved tissue can be transplanted back and has been found...
The work presented in this thesis is aimed at developing surface coatings for two specific applications: 1) the self-cleaning surfaces and 2) fouling control in water filtration membranes. Since all materials interact with their environment through their surfaces, tailoring surface properties by implementing surface coatings can greatly affect their performances...
Metal Additive manufacturing (AM) processes build 3D objects by heating and consolidating material in a point-by-point manner. Unlike traditional manufacturing methods, AM allows the material properties of each point in the build to vary by controlling process conditions locally. The process parameters can be considered as inputs to the AM...
This project uses the political and environmental history of maquiladoras—duty-free assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border—to offer new insights into two pivotal moments in the history of the U.S political economy: the poverty eradication plans of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the neoliberal growth models of the late twentieth century....
Creating sustainable and clean sources of energy is an outstanding problem of importance for the current generation of scientists to solve. Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are a promising renewable energy source but require improvements to their architectures and better fundamental understanding of the effects of organic chromophore morphology on the resulting...
In this work, I try to understand how the movements, attitudes, styles, and positions of the body in representational artworks can be understood as gestures—that is, as moments that interrupt the unfolding of narrative time and produce an interval. The interval is not merely a space that opens up between...
Chapter 1 proposes and tests a model where a country aligns with a foreign power to obtain its support and reduce its geopolitical risks, which also depend on the country's exposure to the other foreign powers. We show that the country's alignment with a given foreign power is increasing in...
Sea urchins are virtuosi of biomineralization, the process by which organisms build mineralized tissues. The embryonic animal exemplifies this with the formation of its endoskeletal spicule. The primary mesenchyme cells (PMCs) undertake spicule synthesis, which involves deposition of the initial granule, elongation of the spicule, and several choreographed changes...
In the wake of environmental catastrophe, active intervention is needed to heal trauma, resist erasure, and navigate changing communities. Focusing on New Orleans after the federal levee failures following Hurricane Katrina, this dissertation looks across a diverse mix of case studies to theorize how communities utilize performance to navigate mass...
Between the 1880s and the 1980s, typography mutated from an entirely manual, craft-based practice to a comprehensively mechanized, then a fully digitized one. With the arrival of Apple’s Macintosh computer in 1984, the graphic design profession found itself in the midst of a deep transformation of its tools, techniques, and...
Superconducting circuits are electrical circuits fabricated from superconducting materials. Due to the engineered strong interactions and suppressed sensitivity to environmental noise, such systems hold substantial promise as quantum bits, in which quantum information can be stored and manipulated with high fidelity. Over the decades, great efforts have been devoted to...
A series of theories and models are developed and used to investigate the growth of protective oxide films on metal and alloy surfaces for cases in which Wagner's classical model of oxidation does not hold. First, irreversible thermodynamics is applied to formulate a model for the outward growth of rocksalt...
Recovering three-dimensional (3D) structural information of a specimen from a single two-dimensional (2D) measurement remains an important but challenging task in microscopic imaging. A conventional 2D microscopic image has a shallow depth-of-focus (DoF). Thus, recovering 3D information usually requires sequentially z-scanning the focal planes. This process is time consuming and...
Nucleic acids not only are the building blocks of life but also a class of attractive macromolecular therapeutics. However, the delivery of therapeutic oligonucleotides into cells has been a major challenge due to their large size and highly negatively charged backbone. Spherical nucleic acids (SNAs) are a class of emerging...
When a cell divides, it must assemble a microtubule-based structure called a spindle, which provides the forces that physically segregate the chromosomes. In most cell types the microtubules that comprise the spindle are nucleated and organized by centriole-containing centrosomes. In many species, however, oocyte meiosis is carried out in the...
In this paper, I analyze a piece of music that I wrote called The Health, a 90-minute musical ceremony that comprises speech, action, video projections, costumes, lights, chant, song, recomposed hold music, diagnostic exams, and renaissance magic. I wrote the piece for Mocrep and myself to perform, the initial run...
In this dissertation, advances are made in understanding both the way hyporheic exchange impacts riverbed morphodynamics and the physical processes that lead to turbulent momentum transfer in the first few grains of riverbed sediments. In terms of physical advances in understanding the interplay between bedform movement and hyporheic exchange, we...
This dissertation theorizes the relation between blackface minstrelsy and contemporary Black performance. The project analyzes the use of nineteenth-century blackface minstrel conventions in Black theatrical performances during later eras where its usage seems counter-intuitive: during the Black freedom struggles of the 1960s; within Black feminist and queer performance of the...
Unmournable Void: Tending-Toward the Dead and Dying in Contemporary Black Performance and Visual Art, explores critical artistic practices that tend to the historical conditions of anti-black violence resulting from transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and apartheid. This triad of regimes produced the Black condition as the unmournable void lived in close proximity...
The Quincke effect is an electrohydrodynamic instability which gives rise to a torque on a dielectric particle in a uniform DC electric field. Previous studies reported that a sphere initially resting on the electrode rolls with steady velocity. In this thesis I report the experimental discovery of another regime, where...
Automated sketch collaborators might help us create more dynamic intelligent tutoring systems, work out designs, reduce bias in solving spatial social problems, and organize our ideas. Here, we examine some properties of sketch recognition methods designed to help serve that goal. Structure Mapping techniques are applied to symbolic structural descriptions...
This dissertation reconstructs North and South Carolina Lowcountry plantation waterfronts as a means of better understanding mobility, inequality, and human-environment interactions in the antebellum Lowcountry. Using a theoretical framework of hydrosociality, the author undertook archaeological and archival research to investigate the question: how did the built environment of navigable waterways...
Part I - Experimental Studies of Spin Waves in a Micrometer-Thick Yttrium Iron Garnet filmAn investigation of spin wave dispersion in a micrometer-thick ferrimagnetic yttrium iron garnet (YIG) film has been conducted in various regimes. In the linear excitation regime, the dispersion of spin waves was characterized in an yttrium...
Mammalian transcriptional regulation is well-known to be complex and highly context dependent. Different genetic and epigenetic features, including single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that function as cis- or trans-expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs), transcription factor (TF) interaction profile with cis-regulatory elements (CREs), methylation of CpG dinucleotide sequences, and histone modification that...
Molecular-oriented single-site heterogeneous catalysis is a powerful approach to address the long-lasting challenge of the structure-activity relationship in catalysis, as it allows molecular level control of the catalytic centers and thus the elucidation of reaction mechanisms. In this dissertation, single-site molybdenum-dioxo species have been immobilized on carbon supports, i.e. activated...
I present the body of work I have pursued over the course of my doctoral study at Northwestern University. First, I conduct an analysis of the measurement abilities of distinctive LISA detector designs, examining the influence of LISA's low-frequency performance on the detection and characterization of massive black hole binaries....
In nearly all Eukaryotes, the membrane-enclosed nucleus contains the vast majority of the cellular genome. Within this sub-cellular compartment, the nuclear architecture facilitates genomic chromatin organization. Controlling chromosomal loci’s spatial positioning relative to subnuclear structures and each other can have local and global effects on gene expression. Moreover, chromatin organization...
Competitive gaming, or esports, is a high-skill endeavor embedded in a highly gendered social context. Using multiple methodological approaches, this dissertation argues that gender-gaming inequality is a result of changeable stereotypes that impact women throughout their lives. Specifically, gender-gaming stereotypes limit women’s initial access to gaming, discourage their continued interest...
We use Goerss-Hopkins theory to show that if E is a p-local Landweber exact homology theory of height n and p > n^2 + n + 1, then there exists an equivalence hSpE ≃ hD(E∗E) between homotopy categories of E-local spectra and differential E∗E-comodules, generalizing Bousfield’s and Franke’s results to...
This dissertation contains two topics. The first topic focuses on how to use information design to minimize costs of implementing a policy that guarantees 100% passing rate of all participants by providing enough compensation for the their effort. The second topic explores an auction setting which involves financially distressed business...
The answer to the question “Why do we sleep?” lies in understanding the biological underpinnings of homeostatic drive to sleep. Wakefulness is correlated with numerous changes in brain activity, structure and gene/protein expression that re-normalize following sleep however which of these elements is sufficient to cause sleep drive and how...
Skeletal muscle is a highly sexually dimorphic tissue, with males and females exhibiting differences in muscle size, gene transcription, and metabolism. This thesis describes two models wherein males and females responded to an intervention with the same physiological adaptation but through two distinct mechanisms. In the first model, mice of...
Unlike other products or services, electricity cannot be easily stored, and its delivery cannot be delayed by keeping customers in queues. The electricity supply has to be instantly available to serve a continuously varying demand. Traditionally, electric utilities would match their supply to the demand by adjusting the production output...
Fluorescence microscopy has become a widely used tool in many research areas. However, its spatial resolution, limited to 250 nm by the diffraction limit of light, has restricted direct observation of details of ultrastructural biology. In recent years, spectroscopic single-molecule localization microscopy (sSMLM), one of super-resolution imaging techniques, has been...
Rising social inequality across economic, gender, and racial lines is a pressing issue of our time. Despite widespread agreement that inequality exists, there are stark ideological disagreements about its extent, its victims, and about what – if anything – should be done to address it. Prior work demonstrates that the...
Robots can be capable partners when interacting with humans, but their value is largely dependent on how information is communicated in that partnership. In physical human-robot interaction, information is communicated via motion---configurations, velocities, forces, and torques. The autonomy interprets these implicit signals using metrics, which ultimately drive the the autonomy....
Seasonal malaria chemoprevention (SMC) was first recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2012 to prevent uncomplicated malaria in children and began implementation in Burkina Faso in 2014 under programmatic campaigns. Systematic assessment of the impact of national SMC campaigns requires data with weekly or monthly temporal resolution over...
The need to rapidly develop and produce life-saving vaccines and therapeutics is critical for overcoming pandemics in a global economy. Recent advances in automation and cell-free systems have opened new avenues for expediting optimization and production of biologic vaccines and therapeutics. A key consideration for the development of protein biologics...
Over the past decade, wearables have become pervasive in our lives. Healthcare wearables like a smartwatch continuously monitor personal health status and provide personalized feedback to motivate progress towards medically recommended goals. While present set of on-body electronics empowers users to visualize health status outside of clinic spaces, its traditionally...
In the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, I find that Aristotle endorses two distinct forms of political activity. The first form, which I term statesman activity, is intrinsically valuable. Aristotle thinks that we should value this kind of political activity because it is constitutive of human well-being. The second form, which...
Integrating the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined future, narrative identity is a person’s internalized and evolving story of the self, functioning to provide life with some degree of meaning, purpose, and temporal coherence (McAdams & McLean, 2013). Moreover, narrative identity has been found to be associated with...
ABSTRACT This dissertation moves work on school discipline into the digital era by filling a gap in the literature which has largely ignored how data from digital student ecosystems are mined and processed by school authority. My dissertation interrogates the role youth of youth online behavior in school discipline decision-making....
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an important gram-negative opportunistic pathogen whose large genome allows it to thrive in diverse environments. There is a wide range of phenotypic variation within the species, which can be attributed both to variation in sequences present in most isolates (the core genome) or the presence or absence...