Tailoring the design of surfaces and interfaces with nanoscale features has the ability to significantly impact biological functions for a swath of applications including drug delivery, structure assembly, and biomedicine. For example, creating spatially defined nanoscale patterns has been known to contribute to changes in cellular architecture and mechanical properties,...
MYC regulates multiple gene programs, raising questions about the potential selectivity and downstream transcriptional consequences of MYC inhibitors as cancer therapeutics. MYC func-tions to either globally amplify RNA production or selectively regulates genes by repression or ac-tivation. In models of MYC inhibition by small molecules the functionality of MYC is...
In this dissertation I examine issues related to uncertainty and robustness in game theory. In Chapter 1 a strategic setting is analyzed where players face Knightian uncertainty about the strategic choices of their opponents. That is, in contrast to the usual Bayesian framework and in line with experimental evidence, players...
Ankle sprains are the most common musculoskeletal injury. After an ankle sprain, about 40% of individuals develop Chronic Ankle Instability (CAI), resulting in recurrent sprains, the ankle giving way, or feelings of instability. Most sprains occur due to excess inversion of the ankle. Frontal-plane ankle stiffness quantifies the ankle’s ability...
The ever growing desire for accurate estimation and efficient learning necessitates the efforts to quantitatively characterize uncertainties for models. In this thesis, four problems pertaining to uncertainty quantification are discussed: A sequential stopping framework of constructing fixed-precision confidence regions is proposed for a class of multivariate simulation problems where variance...
Power and energy are becoming the limiting factors for computer designs and systems, and energy efficient functional units are getting more popular in such systems. Some of the design methodologies that are getting more common include voltage overscaling and employing imprecise instructions. These functional units need to be characterized correctly...
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...
Proprioception, or the sense of one’s body in space, provides critical feedback that the brain usesto generate controlled movements. When proprioceptive feedback is lost, people find it difficult
to perform even basic motor tasks. Despite its importance, proprioceptive coding of single
neurons in the cuneate nucleus (CN), the most peripheral...
More than a quarter century of research finds that teams often fail to make high-quality decisions. This literature is based on observing team decisions in one-off decision making episodes, when in reality, most teams work together for an extended period of time, making repeated decisions together. Do teams improve or...
Phononic crystals and acoustic metamaterials exhibit unique wave propagation properties rising from periodicity and the heterogeneity in material/structure design. One important property is tailoring the propagation of elastic waves from band gaps in such systems – frequency ranges of strong wave attenuation. This thesis first explores the idea of gaining...