In the face of a changing climate caused by anthropomorphic release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, major governments have committed to the reduction of CO2 and other emissions over time, requiring increased reliance on forms of carbon-free renewable energy. The inherent intermittency of renewable electricity sources creates a...
Solid oxide fuel and electrolysis cells (SOFCs and SOECs) must be engineered with the entire lifetime of their performance in mind. Electrochemical activity will decrease as degradative processes take effect, leading to higher overpotentials and decreased power outputs. Materials science and engineering can stave off these inefficiencies through an understanding...
Failed continental rifts provide unique opportunities to study aspects of plate tectonic evolution frozen in time. North America contains three major failed rifts: The Midcontinent Rift (MCR), Southern Oklahoma Aulacogen (SOA), and the Reelfoot Rift (RR). To understand why some rifts fail and why others might succeed to seafloor spreading,...
Heat shock factor 1 (HSF1) is well known for its role in the heat shock response (HSR), where it drives a transcriptional program comprising heat shock protein (HSP) genes, and in tumorigenesis, where it drives a program comprising HSPs and many noncanonical target genes that support malignancy. Here, we find...
Additive manufacturing (AM), also known as three-dimensional (3D) printing, has received considerable interests in recent years. It enables fabrication of complex, customizable parts that would otherwise be too expensive or impossible for traditional manufacturing methods. 3D printing encompasses a wide variety of processes, including photopolymerization, material extrusion, selective laser sintering,...
Digital behavior change interventions (e.g., mHealth, websites, behavior change apps) can be an effective way to engage groups who experience disadvantages in terms of social and economic attainment, with tailored health content and have potential to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities. Given the importance and pervasiveness of behavior...
Chapter 1. Undergraduate Gender Diversity and Direction of Scientific Research (with Ashley Wong) Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Diverse researchers can bring new questions and perspectives, but exposure to diversity may also inspire scientists, regardless of demographic identity, to pursue new topics. This...
MYC regulates multiple gene programs, raising questions about the potential selectivity and downstream transcriptional consequences of MYC inhibitors as cancer therapeutics. MYC func-tions to either globally amplify RNA production or selectively regulates genes by repression or ac-tivation. In models of MYC inhibition by small molecules the functionality of MYC is...
Oil paintings are complex works of art, even on the molecular level. Drying oils cure into a solid film through autoxidation and polymerization reactions and then degrade, leading to changes in material properties and film stability. This chemistry can be captured in a computational model and used by researchers in...
Infection with the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, results in pneumonia and other respiratory symptoms as well as pathologies at diverse anatomical sites. An outstanding question is whether these diverse pathologies are due to replication of the virus in these anatomical compartments and how and when the virus reaches those sites. To...
With the rapid growth of demand for data center services, the energy and water use of data centers has become a critical concern in the contexts of energy use, climate change, and freshwater conservation. Therefore, understanding, quantifying, and optimizing the use of energy and water resources in data centers has...
Asymmetric relationships between creators and consumers in peer-produced knowledge repositories produce inequitable knowledge representation--or knowledge gaps. These gaps result in unequal access to information, and downstream technologies that leverage peer-produced data perpetuate these inequities. Effective knowledge gap identification represents a necessary first step towards equitable knowledge representation. However, while prior...
This dissertation studies the limitations of incentive design in organizations and how they lead to inefficient outcomes. Chapter 1 studies how a coalition coordinates its members when they freely join and leave. It characterizes the conditions under which such coordination prevents the coalition from forming in the first place. In...
This dissertation contains three essays that study the operational challenges in healthcare-related fields. We strive to integrate analytical modeling and empirical methods to study decision-making under uncertainty for practice- and data-driven problems. We use large-scale datasets (millions) gathered from years of data collection. To gain access to these proprietary data,...
Enzyme substrate promiscuity has significant implications for metabolic engineering. The ability to predict the space of possible enzymatic side reactions is crucial for elucidating underground metabolic networks in microorganisms, as well as harnessing novel biosynthetic capabilities of enzymes to produce desired chemicals. Reaction rule-based cheminformatics platforms have been implemented to...
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies marry advances in cellular engineering with personalized medicine to provide patient-specific, targeted cancer treatments. Though current CAR T-cell therapies successfully target blood cell cancers, treating solid tumors has proven to be more challenging. Solid-tumor CAR designs must overcome several challenges, including tumor microenvironment barriers...
Political stability is fundamental for economic development. Understanding the determinants and consequences of political stability is thus an important topic in development economics and political economy. This dissertation studies how political or economic instability influences economic development and, in turn, how economic factors influence political stability. In Chapter 1, I...
This thesis describes an exploratory project to develop a highly non-traditional approach to devise novel test methods for characterizing the properties of materials that are essential to the design of sustainable and resilient infrastructure, particularly naturally occurring materials such as soils and rocks. The central idea is that the material...
Regardless of where refugees are hosted, they require political knowledge of rights, restrictions, responsibilities, and the governance actors and processes who decide and uphold these. This knowledge enables refugees to comply with national laws, benefit from rights and protections, avoid rights-based exploitations and harms, and pursue life with dignity in...
Emotional processing deficits are characteristic of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. However, impairments as such are not well understood prior to the onset of psychosis among individuals at clinical high-risk (CHR). This dissertation draws from prominent theories of emotion in schizophrenia and seeks to investigate the experience and expression of...
This dissertation comprises three essays that study dynamic decisions under uncertainty--in particular, ambiguity. The first two chapters develop new decision models that emphasize the role of making statistical inferences in decisions. The third chapter highlights, in the context of persuasion, how different decision models can lead to distinct conclusions in...
The NLRP3 inflammasome is a multi-protein complex that drives sterile and pathogen-dependent inflammation. Activation of the NLRP3 inflammasome occurs in two steps: priming and activation. Priming occurs in response to an inflammatory stimulus, such as LPS. LPS-primed macrophages are subsequently activated by a second stimuli, most of which require K+...
In environments ranging from natural ecosystems to living organisms, small molecule signals and nanoscale forces communicate important information regarding chemical contamination and pollution, pathogenesis, and physical stressors. As these stimuli are often well below detection limits for our own senses, we depend on biosensing technologies to monitorthem. Many biosensors operate...
Mixing by cutting-and-shuffling (like that for a deck of cards or a Rubik's cube) is a paradigm that has not been studied in detail even though it can be applied in a variety of situations including the mixing of granular materials. Mathematically, cutting- and-shuffling is described by piecewise isometries (PWIs),...
Urban Air Taxi (UAT) is the use case of passenger-carrying Urban Air Mobility (UAM) at its mature state, and it offers a ubiquitous on-demand (or nearly on-demand) per-seat service that moves passengers in urban or suburban areas using groundbreaking aircraft. However, the absence of a dominant electric vertical take-off and...
In a wide range of political systems, political parties and politicians deliver special favors and material benefits to their constituents as a means of mobilizing their support during elections. This phenomenon, called patronage politics, is the focus of this dissertation. Although existing research has uncovered important variations in the patterns...
Background: The way in which one perceives their visual world (i.e., bottom-up visual perception) and what one pays attention to in their surroundings (i.e., top-down attention), are critical to uncovering underlying thoughts and cognitions, and impact how one operates in the social world. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a...
The first chapter of this dissertation looks at strategic complementarities among investors inpooled investment vehicles where fund managers and investors have different objectives. Could
lessening strategic complementarities among the investors of a fund make investing in the fund
less appealing? Exploiting the 2014 Reform of the money market mutual fund...
This dissertation consists of three essays on housing and macroeconomics. The first chapter explores the impact of demographic change on housing price using a heterogeneous agent overlapping generations model. The second chapter examines the relationship between the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) and the housing choice. The third chapter presents...
Even though a number of techniques have been developed for motion generation and perception, few of them focus on the computational efficiency and theoretical guarantees at the same time. Typically, improved guarantees come with increased complexity, making theoretically guaranteed methods challenging use in real-time applications. Thus, existing methods usually have...
This dissertation explores how a nonprofit network orchestrator went through revolutionary change in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout data collection, the nonprofit sector grappled with uncertainties about the funding landscape (Batsell, 2020), how to deliver programming when in-person interactions were impossible (Warren, 2020), substantial job losses (Newhouse 2021a; Newhouse...
Racial and economic disparities in education, employment, and wealth continue to pervade modern U.S. society—and American workplaces reflect and reinforce these vast inequalities. In response, organizations spend an estimated $8 billion annually on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Despite these efforts, many DEI initiatives have limited success. My dissertation...
Sequential change-point detection for time series enables us to sequentially check the hypothesisthat the model still holds as more and more data are observed. It’s widely used in data monitoring
in practice. In this work, we propose two models: Binomial AR(1) model and Generalized
Beta AR(p) model, for modeling binomial...
Dendritic microstructures form during the solidification of a variety of metal parts, from traditionally cast engine blocks to 3D-printed specialty tooling. These dendrites can evolve through growth, coarsening, fragmentation, and the formation of a Columnar-to-Equiaxed Transition (CET), which all can greatly affect material properties. However, the basic science behind these...
In this paper we begin the study of the (dual) Steenrod algebra of the motivic Witt cohomology spectrum H_Wℤ by determining the algebra structure of H_Wℤ∗∗H_Wℤ over fields k of characteristic not 2 which are extensions of fields F with K^M_2(F)/2=0. For example, this includes all fields of odd characteristic,...
Learning to read is a complex process that requires integration across sensory, cognitive, and linguistic processes. Accordingly, there are numerous process that may lead to early reading difficulties. The earlier these difficulties are found, the more effective interventions can be, and the deleterious effects of falling behind in reading cannot...
This dissertation contributes to the theory of segregation and methodologies to measure it. The first two chapters focus on the traditional problem of quantifying segregation in traditional survey data through segregation indices. Segregation indices describe the segregation of an environment with one number – usually from 0 to 1. The...
DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) are caused by either endogenous agents or exogenous ionizing radiation and chemicals. Incorrect DSB repair can lead to undesired genome rearrangements. Homologous recombination (HR) and non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) pathways are two major DNA repair pathways that repair DSBs and maintain genome integrity. When homologous DNA is...
Biological experiments involving the manipulation and analysis of cells have always strived towards greater precision and resolution. Recent advances in micro and nanotechnology have improved the precision of manipulation and the resolution of analysis down to a single cell, thus opening new avenues of investigation. These advances have added a...
This dissertation is the culmination of a four-year project on local governments and local economic activity during the Great Depression in the United States (1929 - 1937). Chapter 1 investigates how U.S. municipal governments coped during the Depression and studies whether debt-induced financial constraints affected local public good provision. Local...
Herpes simplex virus (HSV) encephalitis (HSE) is the most common cause of sporadic fatal encephalitis, and despite targeted antiviral therapy, outcomes remain poor. While rare in adults, neonates are significantly more susceptible to severe HSV disease. Understanding both the host and viral factors that contribute to pathogenesis is critical to...
The goal of this dissertation is to develop models, algorithms, and interaction protocols to improve the efficacy and quality of Human-Autonomy Interaction (HAI) in the domain of assistive robotics. In this domain, the most common control paradigm is that of manual teleoperation using control interfaces such as joysticks, switch-based head...
Emergent phenomena are phenomena that only arise from the bulk collective, not from individual pieces of that collective. The design of materials which host emergent phenomena can be achieved by controlling the interactions between constituent atoms, ions, or electronic spins in a material, and include materials such as permanent magnets...
Tissue-infiltrating neutrophils (polymorphonuclear neutrophils [PMNs]) are a prominent feature of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and colorectal cancer (CRC), where these immune cells can promote cytotoxicity or exacerbate disease outcomes. We recently showed that in acute colon injury, PMNs can increase DNA double-strand break (DSB) burden and promote genomic instability via...
This paper discusses the role of the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer in Catherine Lamb’s composition Prisma Interius IX. This instrument is a MIDI keyboard that controls a computer program consisting of a bank of resonant band-pass filters, which are tuned to specific frequencies and can be opened or closed to varying...
Circadian rhythms — physiological, behavioral, and metabolic oscillations with an approximate 24-h period — are controlled by an evolutionarily conserved set of core clock genes operating at the transcriptional and protein level. Entrainable by Zeitgebers (external environmental stimuli such as light, temperature, and food) that modulate time-of-day specific functions, the...
Interfacial science brings together diverse areas of interest such as electronic materials, quantum materials, bio-membranes and catalysts. In-situ X-ray characterization techniques can be used to understand the assembly of atoms, molecules and supported nanoparticles at interfaces in complex environments. This thesis work focuses on the use of various X-ray characterization...
Having an Experience: Media Franchises, Events, & Participatory Culture explores, like its title suggests, what we mean when we talk about “having an experience” in today’s media culture. Traveling to an expanded network of sites where media fans are actively called to go out and “have an experience” in the...
While the proportion of students from lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds enrolled in higher education continues to increase, rates of upward SES mobility among people from the
lower end of the socioeconomic distribution remain extremely low and socioeconomic inequality
in the United States continues to rise. The current manuscript examines...
The airway epithelial cells (AECs) lining the conducting passageways of the lung secrete a variety of immunomodulatory factors. One interesting pair of molecules produces by AECs is IL-6 and prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). PGE2 limits lung inflammation and promotes bronchodilation. By contrast, IL-6 drives intense airway inflammation, remodeling, and fibrosis. The...
While the scholarship on policing and surveillance suggests that police departments have and use a wide array of sophisticated tools, the literature has largely focused on only a handful of the largest departments. Moreover, these studies tend to be qualitative, so it is difficult to pinpoint what factors might be...
Triplet excited state chemistry has enabled a range of important organic transformations by accessing reaction pathways inaccessible to photoredox chemistry. Such photoreactions are triggered by triplet photosensitizers, which absorb visible-light photons and transfer the energy to the substrate or to a co-catalyst through triplet-triplet energy transfer (TT EnT). The most...
Graphene oxide (GO) is a heavily oxidized version of graphene, which is often made by oxidative chemical exfoliation from graphite powders. The reaction decorates the graphene sheets with oxygen-containing functional groups including hydroxyl and epoxide groups on the basal plane, as well as carboxyl groups on the edge, rendering the...
This dissertation studies the real effects of firms’ financing decisions as well as the economics consequences of bias in fair value prices of corporate bonds. The first chapter examines the impact of compliance with changes in mandated financial reporting on corporate financing and investment decisions. I employ the recent implementation...
The commitment of resources to coaching almost always occurs in interaction with other district-wide efforts to improve instruction. Given this probable situation, it’s concerning that the field lacks the ability to provide guidance regarding how coaches might reasonably be integrated within overall plans for the coordination and improvement of instruction....
In the United States, allergic disease affects approximately 60 million people and impacts more people every year. While prevalence of allergic disease has steadily increased, there has concurrently been an increase in rates of metabolic syndrome—characterized by increased abdominal girth, decreased sensitivity to insulin, and higher levels of circulating blood...
The past decade has seen the rapid progress of deep learning, which becomes a game-changing technique in different data-intensive domains, with the availability of large scale data, cost-effective computing hardware and more advanced learning theory and algorithms. Despite of the rapid progress of deep learning methods in daily-life applications, such...
The goal of this thesis is to develop an experimental setup to evaluate and analyze the effect of crack-parallel stress on the fracture response of materials. In standard fracture test configurations, the crack-parallel normal stress is negligible. However, a new type of experiment, briefly named the gap test, revealed that...
Automated driving has become a very popular topic in the recent years and is becoming more and more of a reality. In this new trend, High Definition (HD) maps play an important role in many ways that will provide a safer and more efficient driving experience, especially in terms of...
The retina does not act as a simple camera, rather visual information goes through multiple layers of processing before it reaches the brain. Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) are the output neurons of the retina and process visual information in the retina and then project into the brain. There are over...
Mechanosensation is an essential behavior for cellular health that depends on the interactions between the plasma membrane and stretch-activated ion channels. To date, a few studies have measured the effect of membrane composition on protein behaviors from folding to function. However, the relationship between membrane mechanical properties and these behaviors...
With the increasing demand for customized products, rapid prototyping, and small-batch production, incremental sheet forming (ISF) is gaining ever-growing attention. The potential of ISF to produce parts without the use of geometry-specific dies has revolutionized the sheet forming processes. Despite its promising characteristics, ISF thus far has not been extensively...
Membrane contact sites (MCSs) facilitate communication and organization of organelles that contribute to fundamental cellular processes. It has become increasingly appreciated how extensive and essential MCSs are for cellular health, and this field is rapidly growing. We use budding yeast as a model system to study the mechanisms of how...
This dissertation consists of three chapters on empirical industrial organization. The first chapter explores how a seller uses a public reserve price to signal her private info about the object’s value to the bidder. The second chapter studies how a behavioral consumer preference called “price reference effect” could overturn the...
Chapter 1. Undergraduate Gender Diversity and Direction of Scientific Research (with Francesca Truffa) Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Diverse researchers can bring new questions and perspectives, but exposure to diversity may also inspire scientists, regardless of demographic identity, to pursue new topics. This...
Does race matter globally, beyond national and regional contexts? If yes, then how exactly? I argue that race matters globally and develop an account for understanding that significance. I call the account “global racial capitalism.” In chapter 1, I offer background to motivate and defend the thesis that race matters...
CD99-Like 2 (CD99L2) is a 52 kDa type I glycoprotein expressed on leukocytes and endothelial cells as well as other cell types in mice. It is related to CD99, although it shows only 32% sequence identity. CD99L2 has been shown to play a role in leukocyte extravasation in mice under...
In this dissertation, we study the birational geometry of log pairs over the field of complex numbers, with an emphasis on the positivity properties of log pairs and their applications. First, we study the nonvanishing conjecture in the minimal model program. We prove the nonvanishing conjecture for uniruled log canonical...
In the first Chapter of this Dissertation, I develop an integrated reasoning model of expectations formation to describe how people learn the effects of novel macroeconomic policies. My model of expectations has two key elements. First, people have a limited ability to understand the general-equilibrium effects of a new policy....
Modern data sets are increasingly vast, not only in the number of samples, but also in the number of measurements, or features, that they contain. This high-dimensionality poses a unique set of problems for data analysis due to a set of phenomena known as ``the curse of dimensionality.'' This thesis...
The successful isolation of graphene marked the advent of two-dimensional (2D) materials. Their atomically thin structures enable unprecedented electrical, optical, and mechanical properties, which have triggered significant research interests in the past decade. For instance, they are promising candidates for the fabrication of flexible electronics, biological sensors, battery electrodes, and...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
Yugoslav wartime television news often conformed to the demands of the political regimes. Informed by this knowledge, scholars have argued that TV as a medium incited and legitimized the wars by fostering ethnonationalist ideologies. Using archival and textual analysis, this project examines how television reacted to the political constraints imposed...
RAS is one of the most frequently mutated oncogenes in cancer with ~30% of all human tumors harboring a mutation in either HRAS, NRAS, or KRAS isoforms. Despite countless efforts for the development of small molecule inhibitors for RAS, it remains an elusive target in the clinic. Here I demonstrate...
Over the past decade, concepts and expressions derived from Black feminist theory, a line of intellectual thought historically produced from Black women’s unique lived experiences that asks us to consider how one’s material realities are co-constituted by multiple, interlocking systems of the oppressed, have traveled into the public sphere through...
Market growth is an important goal for consumer businesses, often leading to lower marginal cost, higher operational efficiency, and larger assortment size - all of which help achieve dominance over competition. Yet, retailers and manufacturers alike should carefully manage their supply chains to sustain growth in customer base and extract...
Rocky exoplanets are indicated to be common in the galaxy. Future instruments including the {\it James Webb Space Telescope} (JWST), high resolution ground-based spectrographs, and direct imaging missions for under consideration by the 2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics are poised to unlock the atmospheres of habitable zone planets...
Art has been tied to scientific and technological advancements throughout history, providing methods and mediums for communication, expression, and exploration. Art is a dialogic domain that evolves with the technological advances in society–incorporating technology and computational tools to create new genres of art. We live in an increasingly computational and...
Using the context of the oil and natural gas boom of North Dakota and Montana brought on by advances in hydraulic fracturing technology, this dissertation studies how changing economic conditions affect basic social well-being in a rural setting. Using methods of causal inference, specifically difference-in-differences regressions and comparative interrupted time-series...
Otoacoustic emissions are currently used for various clinical purposes; however, stimulus frequency otoacoustic emissions (SFOAEs) evoked using a single one are not utilized clinically due to uncertainties regarding their generation mechanism, their spatial source(s) in the cochlea, and their susceptibility to various cochlear insults, particularly in humans. Over the years,...
Thermoelectric devices utilize semiconducting n-type and p-type thermoelectric materials to convert heat into electricity. Despite their promise for deep space power generation or waste heat recovery, most high-performing thermoelectric materials reported in literature are absent in practical applications - partially due to inconsistent synthesis and poor mechanical performance. This work...
Facts are not enough! The more recent wave of science communication practices have been advocating for the death of the deficit model of science communication. This model notes that by possessing sufficient information, individuals will change their attitude and behavior to align with scientific facts. However, recent research has shown...
All animals purposefully navigate feature-rich environments: while exploring, in search of vital resources of food and water, finding mates, and patrolling and marking habitats. During these complex behaviors, continuous analogue input information from peripheral sensory organs guides discrete and digital sequential motor output; accordingly, each action is informed, modulated, or...
This thesis revisits classic optimal tax theory, recognizing that most people live in multi-person households. We derive optimal tax schedules for married agents, seriously taking the distinction between interpersonal and interhousehold inequality. After showing how individual-oriented utilitarianism typically leads to a misalignment between the households’ and the government’s objectives, which...
I set up a disagreement model where traders not only have different interpretations of a public signal that conveys information of a stock, but are also uncertain about the information quality of others' interpretations. The model along with traders being ambiguity-averse predicts a positive relation between investor disagreement (ID) and...
This dissertation is a culmination of work spanning several modes of travel, multiple datasets, and different contexts. Because the proliferation of new mobility services disrupted the transportation ecosystem, I aim to understand travel behavior and investigate how new and traditional modes intermingle. I focus my attention on Mobility-on-Demand which encompasses...
The cerebellar cortical system is an extensively studied circuit which is critical for motor learning. While multiple monoamines, such as norepinephrine and serotonin, modulate cerebellar cortical output, the mechanistic details of dopaminergic signaling in the cerebellum remain poorly understood. Additionally, neuronal cell types residing within the cerebellum remain relatively under-characterized....
This dissertation consists of three chapters that each study the interaction between government policy and real estate markets. All three chapters are connected by a broad interest in renters, landlords, and rental markets. Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between place-based policies and real estate and rental markets empirically by studying...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...