The ready-mix concrete industry is a fascinating laboratory for the study of industry dynamics. Concrete plants produce a single homogeneous product with technology and equipment that has changed little over the last 50 years. Building a plant entails substantial sunk costs since the machinery used to produce ready-mix cannot easily...
This thesis concerns the development of robust algorithms for large-scale nonlinear programming. Despite recent advancements in high-performance computing power, classes of problems exist that continue to challenge the practical limits of contemporary optimization methods. The focus of this dissertation is the design and analysis of algorithms intended to achieve economy...
This dissertation studies two long-standing asset pricing anomalies: "Value and Growth Effects" and "Momentum Effects" via the channel of market imperfections. These market imperfections stem from basic information asymmetry problem, and take forms of contracting problems and less than perfectly competitive information intermediaries.
The first essay (joint with Zhi Da)...
This dissertation addresses the process-pathways running between immigrant adolescents' life experiences and their engagement in school by providing an ecocultural perspective on self-regulation. While the role of social context, such as stress and resources, has been identified as critical in its influence on different dimensions of adolescent development, research on...
Hypoxia is a reduction in the normal level of oxygen tension and occurs during acute and chronic vascular disease, pulmonary disease, and cancer. The key transcription factor that regulates the cellular responses to hypoxia is hypoxia-inducible-factor-1 (HIF-1). Understanding how HIF-1 is regulated is fundamental for understanding the biology of tumor...
The emergence of antimicrobial resistance and the growing concern to produce new drugs have influenced an increase in the amount of research directed towards the engineering of novel polyketides. The polyketide carbon backbone is synthesized by a set of enzymes known as polyketide synthases (PKSs). These catalyze the formation of...
Downsizings are now so pervasive that millions of Americans are laid off each year with the stated purpose of improving their organizations' financial outcomes. However, one of the unforeseen negative consequences of downsizings is high attrition by employees who "survive" the layoffs. This dissertation seeks to extend our understanding of...
Frictionless Information Systems (FIS) are a class of software systems that automatically bring users information and services related to what they are doing. These systems bridge the gap between the information a user wants and the repositories that contain the information - making the user more effective and informed. By...
The detection of bio-molecules (e.g. nucleic acids and proteins) is the bedrock upon which research in the life sciences and diagnostic medicine rests. For nucleic acids, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is the ultimate in terms of target detection sensitivity (10s - 100s of copies/sample). For proteins, the enzyme-linked immunosorbent...
The study of granular matter is both scientifically intriguing and industrially important, yet it presents several unique characteristics and challenges. The discrete nature of granular materials often precludes the use of the continuum descriptions that are so commonly used for fluids, so alternative methods must be developed. Particles interact via...
Spontaneous regeneration in the adult mammalian central nervous system is rare, minimal, and generally does not lead to substantial functional recovery. Tissue engineering strategies to promote nerve regeneration aim to provide an environment that is physically and chemically engineered to enhance tissue formation. Strategic design of this environment is crucial...
The variable effects of self-awareness may be a result of multiple states of awareness being condensed under the umbrella term, "self-awareness". We posit that the cognitive and behavioral effects of self-awareness are largely dependent on another variable, level of abstraction, which modulates self-awareness on a continuum between conceptual and perceptual...
The porphyrazines (pzs), a class of porphyrin derivatives, have shown potential as therapeutic and imaging agents due to a combination of their near-IR absorbance/fluorescence and their enhanced chemical flexibility. Cell viability/proliferation assays and fluorescence microscopy were carried out in both tumor and normal cells to characterize the biological activity of...
In the Western classical art music tradition, a high level of music performance is achieved at the intersection of a musician's emotional, cognitive, and physical processes. Expert classical musicians have both an aural imagining of the sound they intend to produce and the physical associations of what it feels like...
There are few concerns greater than those of a parent with an adult with an intellectual or developmental disability (I/DD). How is she or he going to be taken care of as she or he ages? The government provides services and support in the pursuit of care and services, but...
When navigating through space, the brain must integrate sensory information with past experiences to choose behaviors that are most likely to produce a positive outcome. Striatal medium spiny neurons (MSNs) expressing dopamine receptor 1 (D1) and dopamine receptor 2 (D2) receive sensory and motor information from cortical and midbrain regions...
It has been hypothesized that mindfulness-based programs with a primary focus on teaching self-compassion or empathy will have greater effects on self-compassion and empathy than will mindfulness-based exposure programs, which focus primarily on enhancing present moment awareness and reducing distress. However, because research on mindfulness-based exposure programs has centered on...
Over the last decades, there have been many changes in the business world that are associated with 52 percent of Fortune 500 companies either going bankrupt, being acquired by other companies, or ceasing to exist. One critical change is the transformation of the economy into a knowledge-based economy, where information...
In the Marvel Comics series Moon Knight, a mercenary believes an ancient Egyptian deity has brought him back from the dead so he can become the eponymous superhero. However, the mercenary’s symptoms of schizophrenia suggest he is instead simply suffering from a psychological break. From 1975-1999, Moon Knight stories used...
The goal of this research paper is to analyze concepts of armed conflict and peacebuilding from a gender perspective using a feminist epistemology approach.
I examine the impact of armed conflict on women, and the implications of women’s roles in armed conflict and in peacebuilding processes post-conflict. In doing so,...
Negative emotional behaviors, such as criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling, that spouses may show during conflict are key predictors of marital dissatisfaction. Existing research has focused on middle-class couples, but little is known about how these negative emotional behaviors predict marital satisfaction among couples from socioeconomically diverse backgrounds. The present...
Standard narratives on the relationship between art and urban development detail art networks as complicit agents in processes of upscaling and gentrification connected to the political and economic elite. My thesis challenges the conventional narrative by investigating the relationship between grassroots art spaces, tied to local, community- based interests, and...
Patients with psychosis experience deficits in multisensory integration (MSI), or the communication between different sensory modalities, such as sound and sight. One way to assess multisensory integrations is by utilizing voice-pitch tasks in which participants hear the pitch of their own voice artificially altered by a computer. When healthy individuals...
Previous research has shown that bodily gesture aids in learning words and is useful for musical expression. However, no studies to date have examined the use of gesture in learning words and music together. The original impetus for the present study was observing students with cognitive disabilities learn musical songs,...
With a large sphere of activity and ability to transfer data through wireless communication system, drones have proven to be more and more useful in both research and manufacturing. Whether by allowing researchers to collect measurements or filmmakers to attain aerial shots, the use of drone has allowed collection of...
In indoor environments, bacteria face selective pressure to carry antibiotic resistant genes (ARGs) from antimicrobial substances used in furniture, building materials, and personal care products. Humans rely on antibiotics to clear bacterial infections, so understanding the way in which these genes are transferred, i.e., on mobile genetic elements, is critical....
This study aims to advance our basic understanding of how we perceive objects in our environment. It’s unclear whether we understand object structure based on only how we perceive or on how it truly exists in the world. Examining eye-movements provides insight into how our visual system represents and understands...
Due to their ability to be engineered for specific cellular targeting, nanoparticles (NPs) have emerged as promising drug delivery vessels for immunotherapeutic and vaccination treatments. However, a major unsolved obstacle for cell-specific nanoparticle delivery is non-specific circulatory clearance by the mononuclear-phagocytic system(MPS). Comprised of various phagocytic cells, the MPS removes...
The bacterial CRISPR/Cas9 system shows promise as a genome-editing tool to treat human disease. It is integral to understand the binding and unbinding kinetics of Cas9 to its target DNA to study specificity of the Cas9 protein. Standard practices involve the use of negatively charged polymer Heparin to reduce unspecific...
Given any polyhedron in R3, we can cut it open along its edges, flatten it out, and obtain a polygon in the plane R2. In this project, we explored the opposite process, an open question that was first posed about 70 years ago: given a polygon in R2, what is...
Anxiety disorders are the most common group of mental illnesses in the United States and affect over 15% of the population. Prior work utilizing electroencephalogram (EEG) to investigate event-related potentials (ERPs) from the scalp has shown success in isolating certain neural correlates related to increased risk for developing anxiety disorders....
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by flashbacks of the traumatic event and high comorbidity with major depressive disorder (MDD). Prior stress is known to increase the likelihood of developing PTSD after experiencing a traumatic event. Currently, PTSD is diagnosed clinically, its biological etiology is not known...
Expanding on research done on the mental health and happiness benefits associated with romantic relationships, this study investigates whether identity denial, the experience of being socially denied one’s chosen identity by having others refuse to acknowledge that identity, presents a challenge for bisexual people within committed romantic relationships. For straight,...
Physiological linkage (i.e., the covariation of moment-to-moment physiology between individuals) is thought to play an important role in relationship functioning. The present study examined physiological linkage across interbeat interval (IBI) and skin conductance levels (SCL) in a sample of married spouses (N=106) during both a pleasant and a conflict conversation...
Skeletal sexual dimorphism presents itself in humans primarily through the anatomical shape of the cranium and pelvis. However, some physical anthropologists maintain that climate could have an effect on human sexual dimorphism. Despite ongoing research pertaining to climatic effects on soft tissue or size dimorphism, little to no research has...
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the idea of building a Latin American musical discourse has returned to the artistic discussion, taking into account the peculiarities of cultural syncretism that manifest in the different countries of the region. From the most diverse aesthetics and through different musical media, a...
A comprehensive understanding of human memory requires both cognitive and neural descriptions of memory processes along with a conception of how memory processing drives behavioral responses and subjective experiences. Noninvasive neuroimaging techniques have greatly extended our understanding of the functional characteristics of human memory, and how neural events give rise...
This dissertation describes the development and use of novel chemical affinity templates to direct the assembly and preserve the activity of biological molecules in surface- and solution-based biomolecular assays. The majority of work described herein focuses on advancing biological nanoarray technology to enable the study of fundamentally important biological processes...
It has commonly been observed that a person's performance on a self-regulation activity is often impaired when he or she has already performed a prior task that requires substantial self-regulation, a phenomenon termed as the regulatory depletion effect. The prevailing explanation for this effect, as reported in the literature, is...
A spokesman for the American Revolution, John Adams, famously claimed that a third of colonists supported independence, a third supported Britain, and a third remained neutral. Since then historians have struggled to understand the mixed loyalties of the Revolutionary generation.
"The Popular Politics of Loyalism During the American Revolution, 1774-1790,"...
Assets are ubiquitous, required for consumer behaviors and meaningful in American society. Though assets have a central role in society, they have been considered primarily for what they can buy. This continual focus on assets as an instrument for exchange masks the fact that assets also may serve as a...
UV Raman spectroscopy is a powerful tool to investigate hydrocarbons-zeolite systems, including the coke formation mechanism during MTH reactions, the sorbet-framework interactions and the quantitative analysis of catalytic reactions.
First, methanol, dimethyl ether and ethylene reactions were carried out on H-MFI with different Si/Al atomic ratios to study the coke...
The work described here includes both fundamental and application based studies centered around the use of plasmonic sensors. Fundamental studies focus on probing the optical properties of nanosphere lithography (NSL) fabricated Ag nanoparticles, while surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) sensors are applied to identify and characterize artists' red dye and red...
The ubiquitin-proteasome system degrades regulatory proteins and thereby controls a broad range of cellular processes such as the cell cycle, DNA-repair, gene transcription and signal transduction. The proteasome typically degrades its substrates completely into small peptides. However, biological exceptions do occur. For example, the activity of a handful of transcriptional...
The [(salen)CrCl + LB] catalyst system was found to be a highly active catalyst system for the [aziridine + CO<sub>2</sub>] coupling reaction, and exhibited a marked preference for the formation of 5-substituted oxazolidinone product, especially in the absence of cocatalyst. The activity of this catalyst system is optimized by modifying...
This dissertation examines the impact of product returns on effective supply chain management. Within this area of research, known as Closed-Loop Supply Chain Management, we consider both strategic and tactical level reverse logistics and inventory management problems from the perspective of a firm which must efficiently process returned items. More...
The stratigraphic record of the Phanerozoic provides key evidence of temporal changes in the global carbon cycle over the past 560 myr of Earth history. Measurements of carbon concentrations in ancient marine sediment, in conjunction with a chronological framework, provide a means to reconstruct burial flux history and, thus, evaluate...
The representation and communication of spatial information is important to the functioning of children and adults in the physical world. Yet little research has included both areas in the same studies. This research program was designed to investigate both the communication and representation of spatial information within a developmental context....
This dissertation expands on the existing disclosure theory by considering the monitoring role of a firm's disclosure as well as recognizing how a firm's disclosure is influenced by the firm's monitoring mechanisms. The first chapter of the dissertation examines the effect of corporate governance on a firm's earnings reporting process....
This dissertation is composed of readings of four novellas: two by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller and two by the English novelist George Eliot. It focuses on the motif and concept of treasure (Schatz). Beginning with the figurative and rhetorical employment of "treasure" in the stories, each reading proceeds to...
Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is a human gamma-herpesvirus that primarily infects B cells and epithelial cells. While the glycoproteins required for entry into these two cell types differ, the gH/gL glycoprotein complex is essential for entry into both epithelial and B cells. Analysis of gH protein sequences from three gamma-herpesviruses: EBV,...
This thesis comprises three essays addressing theory and evidence on the household response to tax-favored saving incentive schemes, with a particular emphasis on household risk taking. The US tax code and related regulatory institutions offer a variety of incentives to encourage US households to save and participate in risky investment...
RNA interference (RNAi) is a newly discovered gene control pathway that silences gene expression in response to double-stranded RNA. This sequence-specific downregulation occurs at the level of mRNA stability, and is directed by the double-stranded RNA trigger itself. RNAi can be separated into two distinct steps; during the initiation phase,...
Self-assembly is the process by which objects autonomously assemble into complexes. It is believed that self-assembly technology will ultimately permit the precise fabrication of complex nanostructures. Of particular interest are self-assembly systems that are highly programmable. That is, we can view a self-assembly system as analogous to a program, the...
This dissertation investigates whether residents of Windhoek's squatter settlements are changing urban space through their efforts to secure housing and to conduct remunerative work from their dwellings. Studies about the informal economy have moved from analysis of it as a distinct sector to the social and political processes that create...
Measurements of the ratios of charged kaon decay rates for Ke3/K2pi, Kmu3/K2pi and Kmu3/Ke3 are presented. These measurements are based on charged kaon decays collected in a dedicated run in 2003 by the NA48/2 experiment at CERN. The results obtained are Ke3/K2pi = 0.2470 +- 0.0009 (stat) +- 0.0004 (syst)...
This dissertation examines the nature and development of Protestant ideology in Tudor England. Historians have traditionally seen Tudor Protestants as classic "magisterial" reformers. Unlike "radical reformers," who formed separated sects and rejected the union of church and state, English Protestants are seen as deeply committed to royal authority and the...
This is a visualization of an event reconstructed in CMS HGCal. This event is consist of 10 pions with a transverse momentum of 35 GeV. The reconstruction algorithm groups all valid energy deposits (hits) into clusters, each incoming particle having one or a few corresponding clusters, so that the energy...
Three-dimensional imaging techniques have been widely used in both industry and academia. Time-of-flight (ToF) sensors offer a promising method of 3D imaging due to compact size and low complexity. However, state-of-the-art ToF sensors only have depth resolutions of centimeters due to limitations in the modulation frequencies that can be used....
This is a movie of three galaxy formation simulations I ran as part of my research.
The color of each pixel represents the temperature of the gas (blue for cold and green for hot) and the brightness of each pixel represents the density (dim for low density bright for high...
Portrait of the Galaxy is a snapshot from a 3d rendering of a galaxy that displays the complex structure of the gas component of the simulation. This gas component is difficult to observe in real telescopes but with visualizations and simulations like these we can begin to understand how to...
Mixing due to cutting-and-shuffling is studied at a fundamental level using 2D mappings known as Piecewise Isometries (PWI) which can create beautiful mixing patterns. The PWI studied here splits a hemispherical shell (HS) into four curved triangular pieces that are rearranged to make a shuffled HS. Applying the PWI repeatedly...
This visualization shows two-photon imaging of GCamp6f in hippocampal pyramidal neurons as a mouse navigates a virtual reality maze. These techniques give us an indirect measure of activity in neurons or small compartments of neurons in an awake, behaving animal. The hippocampus has been well characterized as playing an essential...
These images show how the Facebook networks of 121 LGBTQ youth (Mage = 24.13 years) differ depending on how “out” these young people are about their identities. Using cluster analysis of survey data, we found LGBTQ youth managed outness in one of four ways: high overall outness (63.82%), low overall...
This work introduces a novel optical 3D sensor principle and its implementation: the ‘single-shot 3D movie camera’. The camera is designed for the 3D measurement of macroscopic objects with scattering surfaces, e.g. human faces. It combines the acquisition of a dense point cloud displaying physically limited lateral resolution and depth...
Massive Black Holes, millions to billions of times more massive than our sun, exist in the centers of most galaxies. However, the formation and evolution of these objects through accretion of gas and mergers with other black holes is still a great mystery. LISA, a future space-based gravitational wave detector,...
A fractal is created by a Piecewise Isometry (PWI) which cuts a 2D object into pieces and rearranges those pieces to recreate the original object in a scrambled form. The PWI studied here splits a hemispherical shell into four pieces along cutting lines and rearranges them into a shuffled hemisphere....
Levitation—the rising or hovering of an object in apparent defiance of gravity—is a captivating phenomenon with a wide range of applications. In this visualization, we demonstrate our newly discovered form of fluid dynamical levitation of small particles that may be 10, 100, or even 1000 times as dense as the...
Firefly is an interactive tool that allows users to fly through any 3 dimensional dataset by rendering it on-the-fly. Here we present simulation data created as part of the FIRE galaxy formation collaboration. Interactively exploring data generates powerful intuition and helps one isolate regions of interest in the data using...
Our research group is currently working to develop the first cross-culturally validated household water insecurity scale. In order to do this, we have partnered with numerous collaborators to implement the survey in diverse ecological settings. As part of the survey, participants are asked to recall how long it takes to...
Psychometric analyses can help illuminate how people approach clinical tests. To understand how health literacy (i.e., literacy for health information) might lead to biased assessment of emotional distress, we examined the psychometric properties of anxiety and depression questionnaires, using differential item functioning (DIF) analysis. Items were flagged for DIF if...
Using ab initio calculations, we discovered a quasi two-dimensional copper–bismuth nano sheet, which we call cubine. According to our predictions, single layers of cubine can be isolated from the recently reported high-pressure CuBi bulk material at an extremely low energetic cost, comparable to values to separate single layers of graphene...
The ideology scores of US Congress members over time, quantified from how similarly they voted on bills. I present an interactive visualization for the US Congress members’ ideology. The data used are ideology scores of US Congress members 1789-2015. The ideology scores are quantified from the Congress members’ voting records...
Objectives: Poor infant health is associated with lower wellbeing later in life. Food insecurity has been associated with higher rates of some morbidities in young children. However, this relationship has not been well studied in infants younger than six months or in Kenya. Thus, we sought to determine the relationship...
Numerical simulations have shown that black holes (BHs) have significant influence on the evolution of globular clusters (GCs), and therefore shape their observational features. Recently, a BH-main sequence star (MS) binary system has been observed in the Milky Way GC NGC 3201. Our group uses Cluster Monte Carlo (CMC) code...
A number of new satiric forms -- or emergent genres -- have exploded in popularity almost simultaneously in recent years, all markedly political, all incorporating the real into the mimetic in striking ways, and all straddling the line between satire and serious political dialogue. This dissertation focuses on three of...
New telecommunication techniques utilizing distinctive quantum properties, e.g., measurement uncertainties and entanglement, extend the capabilities of existing systems. Quantum cryptography, as an example, provides physical layer security enforced by fundamental physical laws, while modern cryptographic techniques rely on assumptions of intractability of certain mathematical problems with limited computational power.
Rapid...
A catalytic, multi-component coupling reaction for the synthesis of nitrogen-containing heterocycles has been developed, via the reaction of an imine, &#945;-diazoester and unsaturated coupling partner in the presence of a copper(I) or rhodium(II) transition metal catalyst with excellent diastereo-selectivities and high yields. The transition metal-catalyzed decomposition of a diazo compound...
The use of processes based on microorganisms to produce fuels, monomers, and pharmaceuticals from renewable feedstocks is increasing today due to their environmental and economic advantages over petrochemical-based processes. In order to unlock the full potential of microorganisms to produce a sustainable industry centered on biosynthesis, an improved understanding of...
It is critical to genomic integrity that DNA is replicated completely and faithfully during each cell cycle. The essential replication factor Cdt1 is a critical protein in preventing reinitiation of replication. Overexpression of Cdt1 causes re-replication in p53 null cells and transforms NIH3T3 cells, causing them to form tumors in...
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many images of dwarves, hirsutes, and castrati depict them in the guise of the monstrous, either as jokes of nature or indices of courtly wit. However, there are some Renaissance portraits of physically deformed individuals that transcend these categories. These portraits point to the...
As technology moves into deep submicron and nanoscale era, undesirable trends such as increasing power density, leakage power, and temperature variation within chips have made thermal effects emerge as a major bottleneck in further technology scaling. Thermal effects are no longer considered as just a reliability issue, but it also...
In the first chapter, I study how political institutions can affect policymaking when the economy is in transition. I develop a framework where a transition process gradually restructures economic institutions so that the population's long-term preference may differ from its short-term preference. A democracy may fail to implement the optimal...
Next generation of high performance nano-optoelectronic integrated circuits will require an integral combination of highly efficient all-optical nanophotonic devices and electrically-pumped nanophotonic devices, which will enable the chip to process optical information all optically with ultrafast speed and electro-optically to interface with the electronic control plane. The realizations of such...
At the heart of nonlinear optimization methods lies the solution of linear systems of equations. As the size of the problem increases, it is imperative to use iterative methods, such as the conjugate gradient algorithm, to solve these linear systems. In the context of constrained optimization, it has proved to...
Entangled photons serve as an important tool in the field of quantum information processing. Traditionally, spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in second-order nonlinear crystals has been the workhorse source for generating entangled photons. However, those SPDC-generated photons are notoriously difficult to couple into single-mode optical fibers due to mode mismatch, thus...
In "Optimal Delegation" I analyze the design of decision rules by a principal who faces an informed but biased agent and who is unable to commit to contingent transfers. The contracting problem reduces to a delegation problem in which the principal commits to a set of decisions from which the...
This dissertation examines topical humor produced by "Late Night with David Letterman," "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno," "Saturday Night Live," and The Onion for the period of one year after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Three phases emerge: the purgation of extreme emotions like anger, acceptance or...
This thesis is devoted to the study of A-branes on symplectic tori and to the Mirror Symmetry conjecture. Using a method called Seidel's mirror map, we are able to reconstruct the homogeneous coordinate ring of a complex abelian variety using Lagrangian intersection theory on the mirror symplectic torus. Moreover, we...
In composite manufacturing, Vacuum Assisted Resin Transfer Molding (VARTM) is becoming increasingly important as a cost effective manufacturing method of structural composites. In this process the dry preform (reinforcement) is placed on a rigid tool and covered by a flexible film to form an airtight vacuum bag. Liquid resin is...
This dissertation presents a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) study of anisotropic superconductors, MgB$_2$ and Bi$_2$Sr$_2$CaCu$_2$O$_{8+\delta}$ (Bi2212), and diffusion in glass-forming aqueous solutions of glycerol. In glycerol and deuterated water mixtures, the diffusion of glycerol is measured selectively by the $^1$H NMR stimulated echo technique in the gradient field of a...
The primary function of the human urinary bladder is to store urine, while maintaining a permeability barrier that protects underlying tissues from noxious urinary components. Inflammatory diseases of the bladder, including urinary tract infection (UTI) and interstitial cystitis (IC), afflict millions of patients in the US annually and cause significant...
High relaxivity contrast agents are of great importance in the advancement of magnetic resonance imaging diagnostics for use in biomaterials. Biomaterials that are implanted into the body, with the goal of repairing or regenerating lost or damaged tissue, need to be tracked noninvasively, over time. I have completed work using...
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allows for the selective visualization of blood vessels via the intravascular injection of a paramagnetic contrast agent and the suppression of background signal. Called magnetic resonance angiography (MRA), this technique can produce three-dimensional images and is useful clinically for the noninvasive diagnosis of vascular disorders. In...