Neisseria gonorrhoeae (Ng), a strict human pathogen, is the sole causative agent of gonorrhea. Gc possess a complex gene conversion system, the pilin antigenic variation system, (pilin Av), which alters the DNA sequence of the major pilin, PilE. Pilin Av results in the constant alteration of the surface exposed appendage,...
In everyday conversations, listeners need to rapidly perceive and parse speech input as they receive it. While listeners with normal hearing may do this with relative ease, this is a multi-step process that requires listeners to recognize individual speech sounds as meaningful then integrate them to understand and respond almost...
Classical conditioning is a form of associative learning and can be used as a behavioral paradigm to model and investigate the neural mechanisms underlying associative learning. In this work, classical conditioning paradigms are used to test the effectiveness of a disease model on the impact of learning and emotional regulation...
Chapter 1: Despite the rapid growth of passive ownership over the past 30 years, there is no consensus on how or why passive ownership affects stock price informativeness. This paper provides a new answer to this question by examining how passive ownership changes investors' incentives to acquire information. I develop...
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...
The rise in children’s media use (Rideout & Robb, 2020) and the prioritization of STEM learning (Fayer et al., 2017) has led to the development of new STEM-related apps, TV shows, and other media for young children. One topic in this area gaining popularity is computational thinking (CT). Researchers refer...
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heritable, neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social impairments and restricted and repetitive behaviors (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Tick, Bolton, Happe, Rutter, & Rijsdijk, 2016), with a subset of first-degree relatives demonstrating a constellation of subclinical traits that are qualitatively similar to the defining features of...
Recent experiments in participatory democracy, such as Iceland’s 2013 Constitutional Reform process to Chicago’s annual participatory budgeting process, have empowered members of the public to directly make policy decisions. These new participatory democratic institutions depend on citizens having capacity to organize new institutions and the capacity to participate in them....
Numerous insights into the sensorimotor systems that guide the control of voice have been garnered by observing how the system responds to manipulations of its auditory feedback. However, current approaches may be limited in the exploration of more complex parameters of volitional and adaptive voice control due to their limited...
This dissertation studies three aspects of health insurance market regulation and design. Chapter 1 (which is joint work with Steve Cicala and Ethan Leiber) studies a regulatory mechanism used to constrain insurer market power. The mechanism targets health insurers' Medical Loss Ratio, which is the share of premiums spent on...