Membrane contact sites (MCSs) facilitate communication and organization of organelles that contribute to fundamental cellular processes. It has become increasingly appreciated how extensive and essential MCSs are for cellular health, and this field is rapidly growing. We use budding yeast as a model system to study the mechanisms of how...
This dissertation consists of three chapters on empirical industrial organization. The first chapter explores how a seller uses a public reserve price to signal her private info about the object’s value to the bidder. The second chapter studies how a behavioral consumer preference called “price reference effect” could overturn the...
Chapter 1. Undergraduate Gender Diversity and Direction of Scientific Research (with Francesca Truffa) Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Diverse researchers can bring new questions and perspectives, but exposure to diversity may also inspire scientists, regardless of demographic identity, to pursue new topics. This...
Does race matter globally, beyond national and regional contexts? If yes, then how exactly? I argue that race matters globally and develop an account for understanding that significance. I call the account “global racial capitalism.” In chapter 1, I offer background to motivate and defend the thesis that race matters...
CD99-Like 2 (CD99L2) is a 52 kDa type I glycoprotein expressed on leukocytes and endothelial cells as well as other cell types in mice. It is related to CD99, although it shows only 32% sequence identity. CD99L2 has been shown to play a role in leukocyte extravasation in mice under...
In this dissertation, we study the birational geometry of log pairs over the field of complex numbers, with an emphasis on the positivity properties of log pairs and their applications. First, we study the nonvanishing conjecture in the minimal model program. We prove the nonvanishing conjecture for uniruled log canonical...
In the first Chapter of this Dissertation, I develop an integrated reasoning model of expectations formation to describe how people learn the effects of novel macroeconomic policies. My model of expectations has two key elements. First, people have a limited ability to understand the general-equilibrium effects of a new policy....
Modern data sets are increasingly vast, not only in the number of samples, but also in the number of measurements, or features, that they contain. This high-dimensionality poses a unique set of problems for data analysis due to a set of phenomena known as ``the curse of dimensionality.'' This thesis...
The successful isolation of graphene marked the advent of two-dimensional (2D) materials. Their atomically thin structures enable unprecedented electrical, optical, and mechanical properties, which have triggered significant research interests in the past decade. For instance, they are promising candidates for the fabrication of flexible electronics, biological sensors, battery electrodes, and...
In this dissertation, I assert that a contradictory aesthetic has remained and been reborn in the U.S. daytime soap opera through time and technology; I call this the “everyday implausible.” Using textual analysis and archival research, I follow this genre from its beginnings on radio, through its move to television...