In environments ranging from natural ecosystems to living organisms, small molecule signals and nanoscale forces communicate important information regarding chemical contamination and pollution, pathogenesis, and physical stressors. As these stimuli are often well below detection limits for our own senses, we depend on biosensing technologies to monitorthem. Many biosensors operate...
Mixing by cutting-and-shuffling (like that for a deck of cards or a Rubik's cube) is a paradigm that has not been studied in detail even though it can be applied in a variety of situations including the mixing of granular materials. Mathematically, cutting- and-shuffling is described by piecewise isometries (PWIs),...
Urban Air Taxi (UAT) is the use case of passenger-carrying Urban Air Mobility (UAM) at its mature state, and it offers a ubiquitous on-demand (or nearly on-demand) per-seat service that moves passengers in urban or suburban areas using groundbreaking aircraft. However, the absence of a dominant electric vertical take-off and...
In a wide range of political systems, political parties and politicians deliver special favors and material benefits to their constituents as a means of mobilizing their support during elections. This phenomenon, called patronage politics, is the focus of this dissertation. Although existing research has uncovered important variations in the patterns...
Background: The way in which one perceives their visual world (i.e., bottom-up visual perception) and what one pays attention to in their surroundings (i.e., top-down attention), are critical to uncovering underlying thoughts and cognitions, and impact how one operates in the social world. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a...
The first chapter of this dissertation looks at strategic complementarities among investors inpooled investment vehicles where fund managers and investors have different objectives. Could
lessening strategic complementarities among the investors of a fund make investing in the fund
less appealing? Exploiting the 2014 Reform of the money market mutual fund...
This dissertation consists of three essays on housing and macroeconomics. The first chapter explores the impact of demographic change on housing price using a heterogeneous agent overlapping generations model. The second chapter examines the relationship between the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) and the housing choice. The third chapter presents...
Even though a number of techniques have been developed for motion generation and perception, few of them focus on the computational efficiency and theoretical guarantees at the same time. Typically, improved guarantees come with increased complexity, making theoretically guaranteed methods challenging use in real-time applications. Thus, existing methods usually have...
This dissertation explores how a nonprofit network orchestrator went through revolutionary change in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout data collection, the nonprofit sector grappled with uncertainties about the funding landscape (Batsell, 2020), how to deliver programming when in-person interactions were impossible (Warren, 2020), substantial job losses (Newhouse 2021a; Newhouse...
Racial and economic disparities in education, employment, and wealth continue to pervade modern U.S. society—and American workplaces reflect and reinforce these vast inequalities. In response, organizations spend an estimated $8 billion annually on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Despite these efforts, many DEI initiatives have limited success. My dissertation...