On-shell formulations of scattering amplitudes for quantum field theories, without utilizating the local descriptions of Lagrangian and Feynman diagrams, have become increasingly useful and important in recent years for both formal and practical reasons. The nonlinear sigma model (NLSM), which describes the interactions between Nambu-Goldstone bosons, is an ideal testing...
Owing to policy action as well as continued cost declines, solar and wind resources are projected to play a central role in many future electricity systems. Since the technological characteristics and cost structures of these resources differ significantly from traditional thermal technologies, many have questioned how market designs will need...
This dissertation addresses problems in the source properties of major earthquakes. It is composed of four largely independent studies. In chapter 2, we explore the possible theoretical origin of the distance-depth correction q(, h) introduced 75 years ago by B. Gutenberg for the computation of the body wave magnitude mb,...
The treatment of AML remains to be a challenge due to the high rates of resistance and relapse experienced by patients after initial therapy. The MAPK-interacting kinases 1 and 2 (MNK1/2) have generated increasing interest as therapeutic targets for AML due to their critical role in malignant hematopoietic transformation via...
The goal of the work reported here was to answer two important questions with regards to LTVV use for patients with ARDS: 1) How do we measure adoption? and 2) What are the drivers of provider adoption? To this end, I have demonstrated the influence of patient height, hypoxemia severity,...
Understanding the complex genome-phenome associations behind human complex traits will be a primary focus for the practice of precision medicine in the future. Identifying the genetic variants that contribute to the inter- and intra- phenotypic variations of individuals, elucidating pleiotropic architecture of common complex traits, and demonstrating how personal biomedical...
Blockchains are an exciting new type of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) distributed systems, which enable parties to transact directly, and maintain the record of said interactions in a distributed manner. A unique feature of blockchains is their ability to maintain a consensus without requiring knowledge on the number of participants, nor their...
In multiatomic systems, high applied pressures reduce interatomic contact distances. At pressures comparable to those inside planets, this relatively simple principle completely changes the guiding principles of chemistry and physics established at near-ambient conditions. High-pressure investigations of precisely how the laws of nature evolve in the gigapascal and megabar regime...
Kaposi’ sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) causes primary effusion lymphoma (PEL). PEL cell lines require expression of the cellular FLICE inhibitory protein (cFLIP) for survival, although KSHV encodes a viral homolog of this protein (vFLIP). Cellular and viral FLIP proteins have several functions, including, most importantly, the inhibition of pro-apoptotic caspase 8...
This dissertation explores two topics in macroeconomics related to aggregation assumptions and microfoundations. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the representative agent aggregation assumption in the context of open economies, using both an empirical as well as a theoretical approach. Chapter 3 on the other hand, deals with the microfoundations...
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...
This dissertation examines how racially, ethnically, and sexually minoritized women embodied and contested competing images of national identity between World War II and the Cold War. I challenge dominant narratives of modern dance, which overlook gender politics as women left the art form and white men gained prominence in it...
Researchers and educators have argued that productive learning may occur when young people have freedom to organize their activity based on their own interests and concerns. Schools increasingly provide “makerspaces” that allow students to design and build objects and technical devices of their choosing, and researchers have developed in-school programs...
Among the most valuable applications of organometallic chemistry is its implementation in the field of catalysis. Many industrial processes rely heavily on catalysis, employing organometallic complexes in the production of commodity chemicals, fine chemicals, materials, and even in the discovery and development of pharmaceuticals. Through decades of intense study, homogeneous...
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,...
Plasmonic metasurfaces are leading the development of next-generation optical devices with unprecedented compactness and functionality. In contrast to bulk refractive optics, these planar surfaces manipulate light with rationally designed subwavelength building blocks. This thesis focus on how emerging materials and design methods advance the eld of metasurfaces. Chapter 1 reviews...
Chromatin, a complex nuclear structure comprised of DNA, histones, RNA, and other nuclear proteins, is one of the most critical components within the cell because it houses the genetic information and its organization regulates important cellular functions, such as transcription, replication, and repair. Its structural organization is well understood at...
Cultural appropriation is a topic well-discussed in public discourse and theorized in the philosophical literature, however, it remains vastly understudied in psychology. Existing conversations center on whether cultural appropriation even exists, how it is defined, and if there are psychological and social impacts of being appropriated. No research to date...
Memory management and address translation need significant optimizations in order to not behindrances in the near future. Currently, plenty of work has started to address issues within the
current abstraction of the hardware-software codesign of paging. I argue that a new abstraction
is needed in order to properly address this...
Vimentin intermediate filaments (VIFs) provide mechanical integrity to cells and serve as markers of tissue origin and cell differentiation. Several non-mechanical roles for vimentin have recently been reported, including regulation of key pathways that control cell growth, cell signaling, and cell motility. Here, I present the role of vimentin in...
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used widely and frequently in the clinical setting to image and diagnose patients. In addition to the anatomical scans that can be acquired using MRI, different kinds of physiological parameters, such as blood flow, can be obtained by utilizing pulse sequence, scan protocol and post-processing....
As the technology enabling touch-sense rendering of virtual textures grows in efficacy and prevalence, so too grows the need for a standardized means of storing, transferring, and reconstituting textural signals. Furthermore, to achieve the ultra-low-latency requirements of the next generation of global communications networks, this digital texture representation must be...
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...
Conventionally cross-linked polymers, which comprise the vast majority of commercial thermosets, cannot be decross-linked after curing or flow upon heating. Therefore, they cannot be effectively recycled into high-value products at end-of-life. Their lack of recyclability is due to the permanent cross-links, which restrict the flow of the chains in the...
The development of heavy metal semiconductors is a growing field of interest for their application in photovoltaics, light emission, and radiation detection. This is due to their robust ability to convert incident photons of visible wavelength and high energy into charge current while remaining stable, optimizable, and readily synthesizable. As...
Tumor-initiating cells with reprogramming plasticity are thought to be essential for cancer development and metastatic regeneration in many cancers; however, the molecular mechanisms are not fully understood. We have previously identified that CD44, a breast tumor-initiating cell marker, drives mammosphere self-renewal and multicellular aggregation of circulating tumor cell (CTC) clusters,...
Polymer nanocomposites are a designer class of materials where nanoscale particles, functional chemistry and polymer matrix combine to yield unprecedented combinations of superior physical properties. While well-defined data representation and quantitative models have been developed in material science domains such as metallic alloys, polymer nanocomposites have remained a largely untouched...
This dissertation is a review of three projects I worked on during my time in the Computational Photography Lab at Northwestern University. First, a source separation problem for the X-Ray Fluorescence images of painted works of art is addressed through the incorporation of Hyperspectral Reflectance data. Following this, a discussion...
The brain is known to shrink in normal aging or neurodegenerative disease and yet the neurobiological underpinnings of the cortical atrophy remain elusive. The structural changes that represent cortical atrophy can be measured during life using the reliable and quantitative method known as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Primary progressive aphasia...
The Gram-negative Stenotrophomonas maltophilia is naturally found in water, soil and the plant rhizosphere, and is increasingly recognized as an important opportunistic and nosocomial infection. Despite its rising prevalence and drug resistance, there is little known about S. maltophilia pathogenesis. In this dissertation, I explored two aspects of S. maltophilia...
Active lateral force feedback is essential for haptic applications in which forces on the fingertip is perpendicular to or in the same direction of finger movement, such as virtual shape rendering and button click rendering. In this thesis, I first present a novel device, the UltraShiver, that can provide large...
Electrochemical reactions on the nanoscale play a pivotal role in a variety of areas, including electrocatalysis, energy conversion and storage, corrosion prevention, plasmon driven chemistry, and so forth. An in-depth knowledge of how site-specific compositions and morphologies locally affect the electron transfer kinetics will greatly benefit the design of catalysts,...
“Embodying Race, Performing Citizenship” investigates racial and ethnic impersonationsin American popular entertainment, especially vaudeville, between the 1870s and the 1920s. I
focus my analyses on first-generation Irish, Chinese, and Jewish Eastern European artists and
their American-born children during a time when the United States had absorbed the highest
number of...
People are exposed to inaccurate claims and ideas every day, from sources intended to inform, entertain, or do both. A large body of research has demonstrated that exposure to inaccurate statements, even when conveying obviously false ideas, can affect people’s subsequent judgments. Contemporary accounts suggest that these effects may be...
Phenotypic variation is the functional unit that evolution acts upon and is the main contributor to the diversity of species. The phenotype of an individual is shaped by genetic and environmental factors. These genetic and environmental factors contribute to biomedically relevant traits such as an individual’s susceptibility to disease and...
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,...
Visual localization is a critical capability for autonomous systems, enabling them to accuratelyestimate their position and orientation within an environment using visual data. This thesis focuses
on achieving a robust and reliable visual localization on both local and global level to enhance
localization performance in a wide range of environments....
Voltage-gated potassium (KV) currents play a crucial role in shaping and controlling the firing patterns that serve as the fundamental basis for the differential signal processing from the ear to the auditory cortex, with distinct firing patterns observed with high- and low-frequency phenotypes. This is an interesting phenomenon, in the...
The relationship between the structure and function of proteins is a fundamental problem in biology with implications for the future of biotechnology and global health. For example, changes to the structure of a coronavirus spike protein led to a global pandemic where our best defenses were vaccines that could only...
We prove the uniqueness of equilibrium states for certain potentials satisfying the Bowen property for two flows related to geodesic flows on surfaces with sufficient hyperbolicity. Our first result is the uniqueness of equilibrium states for Hölder continuous potentials and the geometric potential for products of geodesic flows of rank...
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...
Women living with human immunodeficiency virus (WLWH) have unique health challenges. Understanding psychological strengths that help WLWH manage their disease and improve health outcomes could reduce disease burden. Although spirituality, a multidimensional construct that includes a search for meaning and purpose, connection with a higher dimension, and experiences and feelings...
I investigate the spillover effects of disclosure requirements imposed by state governments on oil and gas companies operating in the state. Recently, several state governments have begun requiring companies to publicly disclose information about chemicals used in their fracking operations. The chemicals can result in land and water contamination, thereby...
The Picard group is an important invariant of the $K(n)$-local category. If the prime $p$ is relatively large compared to the height $n$, the Picard group of the $K(n)$-local category is purely algebraic. In \cref{chapter:finitetype}, we describe the necessary and sufficient numerical condition when an element $X$ in the Picard...
Contest theory is an area of game theory that studies environments in which agents make sunk investments in order to get a prize. These investments could be money, effort, time, etc. Contest theory is used to study a wide range of applications, like political contests, research and development, advertisement campaigns,...
The effect of Alkali-Silica Reaction (ASR) on concrete mechanical behavior and the multi-physics considerations that come along are highly complex. Hydration and other chemical reactions occur at the micrometer scale. Hygro-thermal phenomena and concrete cracks due to ASR are typically studied at the meso-scale, i.e. at the aggregate level. At...
This dissertation is an ethnographic study of politics of youth culturing in contemporary Turkey. More specifically, it analyzes the politics of temporality that characterized the youth culturing program of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/AKP) over the decade of 2010s. On the one hand, it focuses...
Light provides a high-speed and coherent medium for controlling quantum states. In semiconductors, coherent optical effects have been used extensively to lift spin degeneracy on ultrafast timescales and demonstrate high-fidelity control of quantum spin states. Extending this approach to novel pseudospins in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), in this thesis...
Biological therapeutics have revolutionized the way we treat cancer due to their ability to target tumors discriminately, leaving healthy cells unaffected. However, our inability to tailor the structure of biologics may hamper their optimization for efficacy. This lack of programmability contributes to factors such as immunogenic responses, inability to penetrate...
Lackluster BA completion rates have made it clear that improving postsecondary outcomes in the U.S. is not simply a matter of raising college enrollment rates. In addition to increasing the number of people who attend college, it is also important to increase the number of people who graduate. Over the...