Animals must establish the correct form during development. Regeneration is a process by which some animals reestablish their form following injury. This process requires both the generation of new missing cells after injury, and information to pattern new cells to reestablish the correct form. Planarian flatworms have an almost unlimited...
Techniques for achieving complete quantum control over atoms have been developed and perfected over the past four decades with great success. This work has led to multiple Nobel prizes and has been the catalyst for rapid advances in a broad array of research fields. A natural progression forward is to...
The ribosome, the cell’s machine for synthesizing proteins, can be thought of as the chef of the cell. Just as a chef reads a recipe and combines ingredients to create a dish, the ribosome reads cellular instructions and connects building block molecules (amino acids) to construct proteins. Like the final...
Chapter 1: Telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein enzyme that counteracts the shortening of telomeres by catalyzing the addition of nucleotides to the 3’ ends of chromosomes, resulting in telomerase inhibition attracting interest as a strategy for cancer. Telomerase has also been implicated in other tumorigenic pathways such as DNA damage repair,...
Foreign currency debt has led to many crises in emerging markets. In the past decade, firms in emerging economies have drastically increased their foreign currency borrowing, making them significantly exposed to depreciation shocks. To reduce their exposure to external shocks, central banks have increased their use of regulation, such as...
Superalloys strengthened by γ′(L12)-precipitates in γ(f.c.c.)-matrix exhibit superior high temperature mechanical properties and environmental resistance over long periods of operation, making them ideal candidates for aerospace and energy conversion applications. The emerging class of superalloys based on Co-Al-W ternary system was identified with a melting temperature 50-100 ˚C higher than...
Self-Assembled Monolayers for MALDI-TOF Mass Spectrometry (SAMDI-MS) is a technique that combines self-assembling molecules of alkane disulfides on gold and MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. By using well-defined monolayers with functionalizations that both prevent non-specific adsorption onto the surface and presents immobilization handles, it is possible to pull out analytes of interest,...
During influenza A virus (IAV) infection, severe lung injury and death result from an exuberant host inflammatory response, or “cytokine storm”, orchestrated by pulmonary epithelial cells. The linear ubiquitin assembly complex (LUBAC), composed of SHARPIN, HOIL-1L and HOIP, is a critical regulator of NF-κB-dependent inflammation. To determine the impact of...
The importance of concern for others in the lives of emerging adults has been underestimated by emerging adult theory. In this set of studies, I explore emerging adults’ concern for others in the higher education context. I use three different samples, a group of 10 Latino emerging adults working to...
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common arrhythmia in adults in the United States. Despite its prevalence, the etiology of AF and its adverse effects are not completely understood, which has made treatment of AF difficult. However, left atrial (LA) fibrosis is associated with worsening and propagating AF. Additionally, research...
The histone methyltransferase DOT1L methylates lysine 79 (K79) on histone H3 and is implicated in active transcription. Here we show that DOT1L is overexpressed in Prostate cancer (PCa) and is associated with poor clinical outcome. Genetic and chemical inhibition of DOT1L selectively impaired viability of androgen receptor (AR)-signaling competent PCa...
This work is composed of two separate projects that contribute to the field’s understanding of Neisseria gonorrhoeae genetics and physiology. First, I showed that N. gonorrhoeae mounts a substantial transcriptional program in response to hydrogen peroxide (HP), a prominent reactive oxygen species (ROS) encountered during infection. We measured which strain...
The continued existence and use of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) have necessitated the development of materials which can safely and efficiently decontaminate these toxic chemicals in an environmentally benign fashion. Among the most prevalent CWAs, nerve agents (sarin, VX) and blistering agents (sulfur mustard [HD]) are considered the most toxic...
The viscoelastic properties of microbial biofilms have attracted great interests in recent years due to the ubiquity of biofilms and their wide range of industrial and municipal applications causing tremendous societal impacts. Biofilms are predominantly architected by extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) matrices composed of bacterial cells and biopolymers secreted by...
In this dissertation, we study models and methods to address uncertainties that can vary in optimization problems. Robust optimization is a popular approach for optimization under uncertainty, especially if limited information is available about the distribution of the uncertainty. It models the uncertainty through sets and finds a robust optimal...
Nucleic acid drugs promise to revolutionize the development of therapeutics. They offer a platform for digital medicine, where systematic changes to the nucleic acid sequence can be utilized to target the entire human genome. However, nucleic acids suffer from a number of drawbacks, such as negligible cellular uptake and rapid...
Mineral inclusions in diamond, brought to the surface through kimberlitic eruptions, provide a unique glimpse into the geochemical inner workings of Earth’s deep interior. Diamonds source a wide range of depths in the mantle. While most diamonds originate from the upper 200 km of the Earth’s mantle, aptly called super-deep...
Episodic memory provides a means by which we reflect on the past, make decisions about the future, and form a learned identity. Episodic memory depends on the hippocampus as well as on the distributed set of regions that form a hippocampal-cortical network (HCN), including medial prefrontal, posterior cingulate, and medial...
Skeletal muscle is one of the most abundant tissues in the body and makes up over 40% of the total body mass. It is important for mobility and posture maintenance as well as plays a central role in whole body metabolism. Skeletal muscle is made up of bundles of muscle...
Dilute Al-Sc-Zr-Si-based aluminum alloys retain their strength for long periods of time at elevated temperatures due to a dispersion of nanometric, coherent, and coarsening-resistant Al3(Sc,Zr) (L12 structure) nanoprecipitates that are formed upon aging. These alloys are attractive for replacement of dense steels and costly Ti alloys in the 250–400 °C...
This dissertation examines the birth and rise of orthorexia nervosa, a proposed psychiatric diagnosis described as a pathological fixation with healthy eating. Orthorexia made its first public appearance in the pages of a popular magazine for yoga practitioners in 1997, and later in a self-help book on the subject. Despite...
In susceptible individuals, episodic memories of overwhelmingly stressful experiences can give rise to debilitating socio-affective symptoms, including social dysfunction. This occurs even when such memories are not easily accessed for retrieval. In this case, it is generally accepted that the restricted retrieval of such memories is due to their having...
The hippocampus has been identified as a critical structure for supporting spatial memory processes in both humans and animals alike. Many of these processes such as the ability to self-localize in a given environment as well as engage in goal-directed navigation are thought to depend on the location-specific firing of...
Water vapor condenses into liquid water when it encounters a cold surface. If the surface temperature is sufficiently low, freezing follows the condensation step, and the process is holistically referred to as condensation frosting. Both phase change processes are fundamental to many industries ranging from water harvesting, thermal management, solar...
Biogenic secondary organic aerosol (SOA) particles, produced by forest ecosystems across the globe, are principal, yet poorly understood constituents in the climate system. These atmospheric particles form when biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) react with atmospheric oxidants, leading to increasingly lower volatility oxidation products that partition into the condensed phase...
Molecules and materials featuring unpaired electrons are fundamental elements of modern energy, device, and imaging technologies. The high sensitivity of electronic spins to their surroundings renders these compounds further attractive as environmental sensors. In order to successfully realize these applications, the electronic spins must be precisely controlled. One promising strategy...
Demand Response (DR) is an approach that allows electricity users to actively participate in keeping supply-demand balance in power systems, or its future version, smart grid, in order to increase the system efficiency, lower consumers' electricity bills, and thus improve social welfare. To encourage users' participation in DR, a time-varying...
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...
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...
With the ability to rapidly screen and manipulate genomes, the in depth study of the functional actors of biology—metabolites and proteins—is necessary to understand complex biochemistry in developmental and disease states. The analytical processes by which biological information is gained from metabolomics and proteomics experiments must also evolve with our...
Burkitt lymphoma (BL) is a B cell cancer that develops primarily in children and is associated with Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). The EBV latent membrane protein 2A (LMP2A) drives BL in part by providing constitutively active pro-survival signaling. A double transgenic mouse model of BL expressing LMP2A and the oncogene MYC...
In this thesis I focus on two topics: planet-disk interaction and solar convection. These two seemingly separate topics are connected via a similar separation of timescales. Planets excite spiral waves in their disks on fast timescales compared to the time for the disk to viscously adjust to the angular momentum...
By showing how the heteroglot and tentative nature of medieval normative worlds furnishes a salutary alternative to contemporary epistemologies of the globe, this dissertation contributes to critical theory that deconstructs the globe as a modern concept defined as a transparent space of circulation and exchange. While studies of the global...
To survive, animals, including human beings, have developed an amazing ability to learn the constantly changing environment. Specifically, detecting specific odorants in a noisy, variable background is crucial for finding food and water, mating, and avoiding potential dangers. For this purpose, rodents have developed an olfactory system that is powerful...
This dissertation aims to redefine the concept of pain as it appears in literary studies and demonstrate how the new definition garners insight into the interwovenness of literature and physiology in the mid-eighteenth century. It challenges the claim that pain is opposed to language by adopting a new materialist concept...
Modeling the mechanical performance of metal produced with additive manufacturing (AM) has proven to be a challenging task. In the as-built state, these materials have been shown to exhibit strong heterogeneity and anisotropy. Even after post-processing, such as heat treatment or hot isostatic pressing and depending on the alloy, some...
Molecules are highly social: they recognize one another and form bonds with those they are attracted to and repel those they are not. Some molecules establish strong bonds, while others form weak, transient associations. These interactions are ubiquitous in Nature and are integral to life. For at the basis of...
The application of formal multilayer networks (MLNs)—networks which contain multiple types of relationships, data types, or other additional features of complexity and connectivity—has recently become popular in many fields. Areas of study ranging from social science to biology have utilized MLNs to explore, describe, and analyze interconnected complex systems. MLNs...
Metal Additive manufacturing (AM) processes build 3D objects by heating and consolidating material in a point-by-point manner. Unlike traditional manufacturing methods, AM allows the material properties of each point in the build to vary by controlling process conditions locally. The process parameters can be considered as inputs to the AM...
This dissertation describes modifications to the surface of colloidal semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) to improve their use as photocatalysts for charge transfer reactions. The surface atoms and ligands of these nanoparticles can interfere with direct charge transfer to a reagent by inhibiting binding, forming trap states, or acting as competitive...
Understanding the outcomes of interactions from assessing shoot traits has practical applications and has elucidated major ecological patterns. Roots and shoots differ in their functions and can differ in responses to abiotic and biotic stimuli. And while roots are more difficult to characterize because they tangle and are embedded in...
Label-free assays, and particularly those based on the combination of mass spectroscopy with surface chemistries, enable high-throughput experiments of a broad range of reactions. However, these methods can still require the incorporation of functional groups that allow immobilization of reactants and products to surfaces prior to analysis. In this thesis,...
In this dissertation I leverage new data from the global music recording industry to study the social foundations of creativity and the relationship between product novelty, gender, and commercial success. In Chapter 1, I investigate how different kinds of social connection influence the creation of novel cultural products. Using data...
This thesis explains the works that have been completed towards the Ph.D. thesis of the author and discusses the conclusions derived from the results, as well as what future holds for stress-related mobile health research. Main focus of the thesis is use of wearable sensors to understand physiological manifestation of...
Understanding structure-property relationships for polymer nanocomposites is one of the primary challenges in discovering new, light weight, multifunctional advanced materials. Polymer nanocomposites are a class of advanced materials comprised of soft polymer matrix and nano-filler inclusions. While it has been found qualitatively that enhancements of material properties could be achieved...
A growing body of research analyzes how corporate social responsibility programs are used to absorb and neutralize the social criticisms coming from social and environmental movements and to superficially respond to the ensuing new regulations. If companies have powerful tools to resist changes and blunt the meaning of the law,...
Maneuvering your limbs requires both accurate commands for how to move, and accurate feedback of their true movements. Conventional prosthetic arms currently lack this sense of proprioceptive feedback, which can make daily tasks difficult without close visual monitoring. Although studies have successfully provided artificial proprioceptive feedback to improve control, this...
Deep learning is a new area of machine learning research that allows deep neural networks composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction. Deep learning has helped in achieving the objective of pushing machine learning closer to one of its original goals of...
Neurons are sensitive to the mechanical properties of their environment and show better growth, survival and differentiation when they are cultured in soft environments with mechanical properties similar to those of the brain compared to other tissues. Within the central nervous system (CNS), there is also a range of mechanical...
Desmosomes, complex structures found at intercellular junctions, are important for the development, structural integrity, and immune barrier of the skin. Extracellular components of the desmosome connect neighboring cells and intracellular interactions amongst cadherin, armadillo, and plakin proteins anchor the desmosome to intermediate filaments. Beyond their canonical role as “spot welds”...
With the growing size of networks and datasets and the lack of centralized access to information, distributed control and optimization become inevitable. In the first part of this thesis, we develop an asynchronous Newton-based distributed optimization algorithm and analyze its convergence properties. Our algorithm benefits from the fast convergence properties...
Organic solar cells (OSC) are a next generation solar energy technology that offers the advantages of scalable fabrication, light weight, flexibility, and earth-abundant starting materials. Despite tremendous advances in OSC power conversion efficiency (PCE) over the last decade, active layer material selection and optimization is still largely empirical. In order...
The authors of the article “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation” created this workshop as a space for participants to discuss issues of environmental sustainability in digital preservation, identify and enact change toward sustainable practices in their organizational contexts, and identify and plan further research. The workshop was run for the...
There is growing evidence that growth with invasive species influences the traits of co-occurring native plants over multiple generations. Some studies indicate that these experienced populations perform better in the presence of the invasive species that led to the trait changes. These experienced populations could serve as source material for...
Soil texture has important ramifications on the shape and size of roots as well as impacting how much water is taken up and the distribution of nutrients in the soil. These factors lead to differences in growth characteristics and plant performance. However, what traits and how the plant responds to...
Understanding how root traits vary within a species and how traits respond to heterogeneous environments, can provide important insight into functional plant attributes that influence plant survival in competitive environments. Selecting plant material with root traits that will support its survival in heterogenous environments may help improve the outcomes of...
Restoration practitioners have many seed material choices when restoring plant communities, and for some species, cultivars may be the most affordable and accessible material available. However, the process of plant selection and commercial seed production can limit trait variability critical to survival and persistence in heterogeneous environments. Several studies have...
This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website,... and The Bilingual Muse analyzes the work of seven Russian poets who translated their own poems into English, French, German, or Italian. Investigating the parallel versions of self-translated poetic texts by Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Andrey Gritsman, Katia Kapovich, Marina Tsvetaeva, Wassily Kandinsky, and Elizaveta Kul’man, Adrian Wanner considers how verbal...
This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website,... and This book investigates what change is, according to Aristotle, and how it affects his conception of being. Mark Sentesy argues that change leads Aristotle to develop first-order metaphysical concepts such as matter, potency, actuality, sources of being, and the teleology of emerging things. He shows that Aristotle’s distinctive ontological claim—that...
Every object emits radiation depending of their temperature. Objects between 300K to 100K emit radiation in the infrared range (1-12µm). These radiations cannot be seen by the human eyes. Infrared detectors find applications in many aspects of life, from night vision and target tracking for homeland security and defense, to...
Episodic memory provides a means by which we are able to reflect on the past, make decisions about the future, and form a learned identity. Even subtle changes to our memory can have a detrimental impact on our daily lives. Memory declines as we age, and clinically salient impairment is...
Two-dimensional (2D) materials and heterostructures have attracted significant attention for a variety of nanoelectronic and optoelectronic applications. At the atomically thin limit, the material characteristics and functionalities are dominated by surface chemistry and interface coupling. Therefore, methods for comprehensively characterizing and precisely controlling surfaces and interfaces are required to realize...
The dissertation consists of three self-contained papers. In Chapter 1, we study the inventory management problem in a dual sourcing system, where there are two supply sources or modes with different sourcing costs and lead times. We provide closed-form solutions to a robust optimization model for inventory management in a...
This dissertation explores the reciprocal relationship between international politics and digital computation since the 1960s by examining the first attempts to use computer simulation to credibly forecast our planet’s economic and environmental future on a global scale. In particular, this project offers the first sustained historical analysis of the origins...
A core problem in many computer vision applications is visual recognition (including object classification, detection and localization). Recent advances in artificial neural networks (aka ”deep learning”) have significantly pushed forward the state-of-the-art visual recognition performances. However, due to the lack of semantic structure modeling, most current deep learning approaches do...
The fact that informational asymmetries impose a significant barrier in path of smooth functioning of markets has been well known in Economics since the 1970s. Communication and information exchange allow to mitigate these barriers to a certain extent. The existing Economic literature allows to get a good grasp of static...
Nature and Civilization is a focused interpretation of Kant’s politics insofar as it bears on the distinction between nature and civilization. It seeks to answer the question, How is Kant’s distinction between nature and civilization informing his global political thought? Kant thinks that in moving from the state of nature...
This dissertation examines the legal, economic, and social transformations experienced by American widowed women from the Salem Witchcraft Trials to the Civil War to expand how scholars of literature, the law, and American history define women’s citizenship prior to suffrage. Emphasizing literature’s importance to nineteenth-century nation-building during the era of...
Since their introduction nearly a century ago, protein vaccines and therapeutics have revolutionized our ability to prevent and treat human disease. However, existing production processes for biopharmaceuticals are technically complex and rely on living cells, which necessitates highly centralized manufacturing in large-scale production facilities, specialized equipment, and cold-chain distribution. With...
Use of bio-renewable polysaccharides to produce materials with a high technological impact has gained a lot of attention recently. Efforts have been made, for example to produce triboelectric generators from cotton, as well as, nanostructures of chitosan gels for drug delivery. Another well-known example is the use of β-Cyclodextrin (β...
T cells and cancer cells have many common features, including their need to proliferate and their metabolic requirements. In particular, glucose metabolism is highly upregulated in both cancer cells and T cells to support proliferation and other cellular functions. The first step of glycolysis is catalyzed by Hexokinase, which exists...
Deformation in materials with a hierarchical microstructure is expected to be complex because of the interaction between the units that form such a microstructure. The complexity of deformation would be even higher when additional inelastic deformation modes are active in such materials, apart from traditional elastic and plastic deformation modes....
This dissertation presents a comprehensive study of thin-film LiMn2O4 (LMO) cathodes applied in lithium ion batteries (LIBs). The primary aim was to establish fundamental understanding of the relationship between interfacial LMO chemistry/electrochemistry and its detrimental drawback, i.e. fast capacity fade over long term cycling, and then develop effective mitigation methods....
The goal of this thesis is to design practical algorithms for nonlinear optimization in the case where the objective function is deterministic or stochastic. Problems of this nature arise in many applications including machine learning and image processing. The thesis is divided into four main chapters. Chapters \ref{chap:Inexact}, \ref{chap:Adasample} and...
For much of the twentieth-century, English-language music scholars were reticent to speculate about the origins of music. In recent years, however, the study of music’s evolutionary origins has been revitalized. Resonating Subjects brings a critical-historical perspective to this renewed convergence of music studies and evolutionary science. Through close examinations of...
Lubrication is the most means for sliding interface failure prevention because it helps separate two interacting surfaces, reduce asperity contacts and thus extend the working life of the parts. Improving the tribological performance of lubricated interfaces is a challenging work, as several influence factors are involved, such as coating, plasticity,...
Extensive study of nanomaterial chemical and optical properties has enabled their integration into a variety of applications. However, less thoroughly investigated are the heat generation and dissipation processes of nanomaterials following optical excitation. These phenomena are of immense importance as thermal energy can distort a material’s structure, which has profound...
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common non-cutaneous cancer among U.S. men. Lack of effective treatments for advanced disease make it a significant public health concern. However, PCa’s long natural history makes it an excellent target for prevention approaches that reduce overtreatment of indolent disease, treatment related morbidity, and mortality....
This dissertation considers a periodically-forced 1-D Langevin equation that possesses two stable periodic solutions in the absence of noise. We aim at answering the question: is there a most likely noise-induced transition path between these periodic solutions that allows one to identify a preferred phase of the forcing when the...
Global energy demand is increasingly rapidly in today’s modern world with increasing living standards all around the world. As global energy demand rises, energy efficiency has never been more crucial and that the improvement of tribological systems is critical to the progress of the global future. A large part of...
Modeling human language is at the very frontier of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Statistical language models are probabilistic models that assign probabilities to sequences of words. For example, topic models are frequently used text-mining tools to organize a vast set of unstructured documents by exploring their theme structure. More...
This thesis describes a novel demonstration of quantum teleportation, a protocol within the broader field of quantum information science, carried out by an electron transfer reaction within a molecular system. As described in Chapter 1, quantum information science has potential impacts in computation, communication, and cryptography. This field relies on...
Design problems are highly ill-structured, having “ambiguous specifications of goals, no determined solution path, and the need to integrate multiple knowledge domains” (Jonassen, 2000, p. 80). Design problems are generated by stakeholders to meet needs that exist outside of the classroom (Simon, 1973; Jonassen, 2000)—this is in contrast to most...
Semiconductor nanowires, such as group IV and III-V nanowires, shows distinct electrical, optical and mechanical properties from their bulk counterparts due to their nanoscale size and 1-D morphology. For example, the quantum confinement effect modulates the band gap of a semiconductor nanowire when its diameter approaches or below the exciton...
Theoretical investigation of photochemical processes in molecules is a nontrivial task. Ab initio calculations that completely describe such processes are often intractable to perform given today’s hardware. Thus, to gain insight into common areas of interest, such as in transition metal photochemistry and organic photovoltaics, less accurate but more feasible...
Etching flourished as a printmaking medium in Paris during the Second Empire and early Third Republic, the precise timeframe of the city’s drastic transformation due to the state-authorized phase of urban renewal implemented under the reign of Napoléon III by his prefect of the Seine, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. This study...
We address the problem of efficient maintenance of the answer to a new type of query: Continuous Maximizing Range-Sum (Co-MaxRS) for moving objects trajectories. The traditional static/spatial MaxRS problem finds a location for placing the centroid of a given (axes-parallel) rectangle $R$ so that the sum of the weights of...
In three empirical chapters, this dissertation examines the field of sustainability over time, specifically uncovering the processes by which contentious interactions between movements and organizations can shift to the development of shared meaning and the creation of new organizational positions. The dissertation utilizes the analyses strategies of text analysis, field...
This dissertation uses the lens of sociomateriality to examine two cases of innovative, technology-mediated civic learning programs, a U.S. Government class in a suburban high school that engages students in a simulation of the legislative process, and an English Language Arts unit in an urban public school in which students...
Celebrity, reputation, and identity were complex issues for nineteenth-century British actresses. This dissertation examines how actresses responded to, integrated, and defied gender norms and social structures as they performed “authentic” identities for consuming publics. I investigate how actresses participated in charity events and bazaars, autobiographical writing, and advertising campaigns in...
Regulations often impose quality restrictions on firms, which in turn can influence prices and welfare in a theoretically ambiguous manner. To study such quality restrictions, my coauthor and I examine the Wright Amendment by analyzing its full repeal in 2014 as a natural experiment, and the analysis is documented in...
Cognitive impairment is a significant public health concern as the United States (US) population continues to age at unprecedented rates. It is well established that older adults are more likely to have higher rates of morbidity and mortality, in addition to greater healthcare utilization and costs. A parallel concern is...
Polymer nanocomposites have attracted great interest in recent years because of their potential as tailored materials with enhanced properties. Recent experiments have shown that polymer nanocomposites are able to achieve significant improvement in dielectrical, thermal, mechanical and other physical properties compared with their parent polymer systems. More importantly, these outstanding...
Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels are non-selective cation channels expressed in the brain and heart where they exert control over many diverse physiological properties. In the hippocampus, HCN channels are enriched in a dendritic gradient within CA1 pyramidal cells where they reduce dendritic integration and dampen neuronal excitability. HCN channels...
The vaudeville remains an oft-overlooked genre of French song that was popularized by Paris’s fairground theaters and street singers on the Pont Neuf. Many histories of French music point to the middle of the eighteenth century as the period when the vaudeville began its rapid disappearance from the city’s musical...
Prior studies about restatements generally examine outcomes under assumed auditor responsibility. Surprisingly, however, about 20% of the restatements obtained from Audit Analytics correspond to cases where the current auditor was not engaged during the misstatement period. I refer to these cases as uninvolved. The first chapter examines current literature findings...
Decision making is an essential and indispensable element in everyday life. It is posited that parallel, distinct systems subserving deliberative, goal-directed control and automatic, habitual control underlie decision making. Computational accounts suggest that model-based and model-free learning strategies give rise to these two systems respectively. The model-based system is a...
For years, neuroscientists have strived to understand memory consolidation, where salient memories are sorted and organized into distributed cortical networks for long-term storage. A large body of sleep research suggests that slow-wave sleep is an optimal opportunity for memory consolidation, and that consolidation is driven, at least in part, by...
This thesis deals with modeling long-term deformation and failure of concrete and shale structures. First concrete structures are studied. For concrete structures, design lifetime of over a hundred years is required. Shrinkage, swelling, creep and Alkali-silica reaction are significant parts of the long-term deformation of concrete and are studied here....