The overall goal of this dissertation, comprised of three empirical studies, was to examine the role of social support as a source of resilience in the face of two chronic stressors: low socioeconomic status and first-generation college student status. Study 1 of this dissertation sought to examine neighborhood support from...
This dissertation considers how 21 trans and queer teenagers learned to create livable lives in unlivable worlds through routine participation on social media. Through a multi-year partnership with an interdisciplinary gender program in Chicago, I employed a humanizing qualitative design anchored by interview and participatory visual methods over three nested...
Nuclear receptors (NRs) are an important family of transcription factors that often regulate genes in response to ligands and by way of direct interactions with coactivator proteins. Many NR-coactivator pairs have been identified that cooperate to regulate transcription but fully understanding how NRs recruit specific coactivators involves learning which of...
We introduce empirical measures to study the $L^2$ norms of restrictions of quantum integrable eigenfunctions to the unique rotationally invariant geodesic $H$ on a convex surface of revolution. The weak* limit of these measures describes the dependence of their size on $H$ in terms of the angular momentum. The limit...
Three in ten people worldwide lack access to a safely managed source of drinking water, with one in ten lacking access to a drinking water service altogether. This is projected to worsen in the coming years as climate change, infrastructure degradation, and poor governance work to further increase global water...
Understanding the regulatory programs enabling cancer stem cells (CSCs) to self-renew and drive tumorigenicity could identify new treatments. Through comparative chromatin state and gene expression analyses in CSCs vs. non-CSCs, we identified FOXK2 as a highly expressed stemness-specific transcription factor (TF). Its genetic depletion diminished stemness features and reduced tumor...
Cholinergic modulation of the brain cortex is critical for cognitive processes, and altered cholinergic modulation of the prefrontal cortex is emerging as an important mechanism of neuropathic pain. Despite the known sex differences in pain prevalence and perception, the precise nature of the mechanisms responsible for sexual dimorphism in chronic...
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are man-made compounds containing multiple carbon–fluorine bonds. The unique properties of this strong bond simultaneously make PFAS useful for a number of industrial and consumer applications, toxic to living organisms, and difficult to remediate. Because the pervasive pollution of water sources with PFAS occurs at...
While deep reinforcement learning achieves tremendous successes in practice, its efficiencies are rarely understood in theory. The dissertation contains three parts, with each part corresponding to the study of an independent theoretical reinforcement learning problem. The three parts in all discuss the mechanism of how (deep) reinforcement learning efficiently solves...
Quantum mechanical phenomena are playing tremendous roles in many areas of chemistry and materials science research. In recent years, the potential role of coupling between electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom in photochemical processes has been widely researched. Despite its potential to improve molecular technologies, the lack of studies focusing...