Pollution-intensive industrial manufacturing processes threaten the health of ecosystems and societies through toxic waste streams and energy intensive processes that lead to greenhouse gas emissions. Biological systems present more sustainable routes to many useful industrial chemicals by using enzymes at low temperatures, but the time and effort required to optimized...
This dissertation presents novel advancements in the field of continuous nonlinear optimization, focusing on the development of efficient second-order methods for second-order conic programs (SOCPs) and continuous nonlinear two-stage optimization problems. The primary focus is on the theory and computations of Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) methods, which are widely used...
Bacterial infections (BI) are a frequent, expensive, and life-threatening condition for critically ill patients. For patients with serious BI, minimizing the time between admission to the
intensive care unit (ICU) and administration of appropriate antibiotic therapy is crucial to
improve prognosis. However, the current gold-standard for identifying the appropriate
antimicrobials...
The literature on racial/ethnic diversity in schools largely shows evidence of positive academic outcomes for students in diverse schools relative to segregated schools. At the same time, there is ample research demonstrating the discrimination and marginalization that students of color experience in desegregated schools. In this dissertation, I seek to...
Historians have long argued that humanitarianism—what Thomas Haskell once described as “alleviating the suffering of distant strangers”—first emerged in eighteenth-century Europe as part of a complex set of perceptual changes involving capitalist growth, Enlightenment ideas, and Christian values. Given these claims, it is no coincidence that humanitarianism has often been...
Photochemistry allows chemists to harness the energy in specific wavelengths of light and use it to achieve new chemical transformations. These chemical transformations are often impossible or energetically demanding under traditional thermal conditions. My dissertation focuses broadly on different strategies to apply visible-light photochemistry and photocatalysis to the development of...
In recent years, motivated by the approaching of quantum limit for classic information science, the development of quantum information science (QIS) has drawn considerable interest from chemists and physicians. Different from classical bits which can only be localized on two different states, quantum bit, which can be simplified as qubit,...
Air pollution is a pervasive environmental issue that has significant impacts on human health. Urban areas are particularly susceptible to high levels of air pollution due to concentrated emissions and populations. Urban air pollution has been linked to a range of adverse health effects, including respiratory diseases, cardiovascular diseases,...
On March 11, 1966, Indonesian President Soekarno suddenly transferred executive power to the Army, which has played a role in the Indonesian state and society since the late 1950s. This act replaced Soekarno’s own government with a military dictatorship dubbed the New Order, which lasted for nearly 32 years. Why...
As sound changes advance across large geographic areas, they progress unevenly across populations. The speakers who lead these changes often share macro-social identities, like place or social class affiliations (e.g. Nesbitt 2018; Wagner et al. 2016). But the features undergoing these macro-level sound changes also hold social meanings related to...