NiTi shape memory alloy (SMA) has drawn a great deal of attention for its various applications in the medical field (orthodontics, cardiovascular stents technology, etc.) and in other engineering fields (aerospace, aircraft, automotive, etc.) as it shows shape memory effect, superelasticity and biocompatibility. The fatigue-related issues, however, are pronounced in...
Bitcoin is a decentralized payment system proposed in 2008 by Nakamoto, who remains anonymous to date. It offers an effective alternative to fiat money or centralized payment systems with advantages on privacy, anonymity, and low international remittance fees. The transactions in Bitcoin payment system are sent through a peer-to-peer network,...
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...
Periodic exposure to light and dark as a result of rotation of the Earth have served as a major evolutionary pressure to partition divergent biological processes to different phases of the day. Mammals display periods of activity/inactivity, wake/sleep, and feeding/fasting during distinct portions of the day. In mammals, these activities...
This dissertation aims to: 1) characterize the range of beliefs museum practitioners have about racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity; 2) their understanding of the role of race, culture, and ethnicity in minoritized learners’ sensemaking; and 3) the areas of tension and symmetry between practitioners’ values and their perception of their...
Protein-protein interactions are ubiquitous in living systems, and mediate important cellular processes from decision making to immunity against pathogens. Furthermore, protein-protein interactions are key to many protein therapeutics, pathogen diagnostics, and numerous synthetic biology applications. As a result, there has been significant effort to develop methods to express potential protein...
Social engagement, or shared attention between a child and caregiver, is a critical process for language and social development. Although previous EEG studies have investigated child social processing in closely controlled, experimental studies, no study has examined the interactive, reciprocal process of naturalistic social engagement. In my first paper, we...
Chapter 1 investigates asks the question how do financial frictions affect the type of human capital investments that students make in college? To study this question, I build a novel dataset covering more than 700,000 U.S. students, merging commencement records with address histories, credit bureau records, and professional resumes. I...
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...
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...