Drawing on over 400 legal decisions and other documentary materials, 40 semi-structured interviews with legal and scientific actors, and hundreds of hours of multi-sited ethnographic observation, I offer a fine-grained analysis of how expert evaluative practices become institutionalized in legal settings and result in divergent understandings of sexuality within the...
This dissertation explores topics in information economics. A particular focus in this dissertation is how competition affects incentives for information acquisition and information sharing between competitors. The first chapter studies a principal-agent setting where two principals compete for the services of one agent. The second chapter studies how competition in...
Advances in biosensor engineering have enabled the design of programmable molecular systems to detect a range of pathogens, nucleic acids, and chemicals. Here, we engineer and field-test a biosensor for fluoride, a major groundwater contaminant of global concern. The sensor consists of a cell-free system containing a DNA template that...
Hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels are expressed in the heart and central nervous system where they regulate membrane excitability. Recently, inhibiting HCN channels in the hippocampus has been identified as a possible therapeutic intervention for the treatment of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). However, based on the high expression level of...
Distance learning has increased its presence in academia, and there is a growing trend among higher education music schools to utilize distance learning in tandem with a traditional curriculum. Many instrumental pedagogues do not understand the benefits even though distance learning has been used for close to twenty years in...
On college campuses, one in five women will experience sexual assault in some capacity over the course of their undergraduate experience. College men in fraternities are three times more likely to commit sexually assaultive acts than non-Greek students. Despite pervasive knowledge that fraternity members are often involved in rape on...
The theorists who developed Social Justice Education (SJE) claim that its goals are: to critically analyze how oppression operates on an individual, cultural, and institutional level, to harness empathy and respect for others, and, ultimately, to commit to working for lasting change. However, the literature lacks research on how to...