Understanding the chemical complexity of the extracellular matrix (ECM) and how chemical, biological, and physical cues bring changes to the behavior of cells has remained a grand challenge. Addressing these questions requires not only achieving systematic control over the interactions between cells and the ECM but also utilizing suitable analytical...
This dissertation demonstrates how related initiatives to reform narcotics laws and protect consumers from dangerous medicines – taking hold in the 1950s and institutionalized in the mid-1960s – created the foundation for a massive expansion of federal policing of illicit drugs. Centered on the history of the Food and Drug...
I show that the speed of price adjustment to aggregate technology shocks is substantially larger than to monetary policy shocks. In the context of large Bayesian Vector Autoregression models, I establish that aggregate and disaggregate prices adjust very quickly to technology shocks, while they only respond sluggishly to monetary policy...
This thesis is organized into three essays, each with particular insights involving public policy and family formation:
In the first essay, I address the well-documented correlation between the prestige of the university and the labor market income of its graduates by investigating whether a possible medium for this effect is...
Several surface wave tomographic studies of the upper mantle structure beneath North America are presented, which take advantage of high quality seismic data, primarily recorded in the last decade, to create better resolved S-wave tomographic models. The first study presents a regional 3D model, IL05, of the upper mantle beneath...
The formation of a primary endocytic vesicle bud is a dynamic process involving the transient organization of adaptor and scaffold proteins at the plasma membrane. The proteins involved in early endocytosis have modular protein interaction motifs and domains that are predicted to contribute to scaffold formation. These motifs are found...
To maintain polarity, epithelial cells continuously sort transmembrane proteins to the apical or basolateral membrane domains during biosynthetic delivery or after internalization. This thesis was designed to elucidate the molecular mechanism underlying protein trafficking. Our studies identified Rab13 as a critical GTPase regulator of biosynthetic cargos that are transported from...
This thesis contributes in two ways. First it describes a new framework for the systematic design of collective behaviors and solves a key stability issue under this design framework. In this thesis we apply this framework to solve three tasks in the swarm robotics field: connectivity maintenance, formation control and...
Although chronic stress has been shown to be significantly associated with depression, this relationship has not received adequate attention, particularly in adolescent samples. One gap lies in the examination of whether particular domains of chronic interpersonal stress are uniquely related to risk for depression. Furthermore, the degree to which chronic...
The majority of research on voluntary visual attention has focused primarily on specific attentional processes. While we know much about individual attentional abilities such as shifting attention among spatial locations, tracking multiple objects and maintaining attention for specific targets, we know little about how these attentional processes relate to one...