Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes (technically 11,842 > 10 acres)! This bold proclamation can be seen everywhere from license plates to tourism pamphlets; it reveals how much water matters to the state on not only a commercial level, but as the very identity of the community. At the...
This dissertation is an ethnography that investigates how Chicago-based artists and organizations use hip-hop performance as a tool for grassroots education and communal dissent. By exploring these local artistic approaches, this research reveals the salience of hip-hop performance in cultivating social movements, embodied politics, and choreographic repertoires that respond to...
Erythropoietin-producing human hepatocellular (Eph) receptors and their corresponding ephrin ligands are asymmetrically expressed at cell-cell contacts allowing for bidirectional signaling with forward signaling through the receptor expressing cell and reverse signaling through the ligand expressing cell. Eph receptors are the largest family of receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) in mammals, which...
Memory systems research has established the importance of two distinct types of memory systems in the brain: explicit and implicit. While a robust literature exists on individual differences in the explicit domain (Chapter 3), research on individual differences in implicit learning remains relatively limited. The key question guiding the investigation...
Individual plasmonic nanoparticles have the potential to revolutionize all areas of energy science, catalysis, organic electronics, and solar technology. Owing to their light trapping and focusing ability, single nanoparticles can be utilized to efficiently drive chemical reactions at the sub-nanometer scale. Much of the fundamental science regarding how plasmons can...
This dissertation endogenizes information acquisition in two-player games across three different settings. The first chapter explores when moral hazard in a principal-agent contract can lead to pareto improvements when it is preceeded by information gathering. The second chapter studies how product differentiation affects the amount of market research done by...
This thesis studies the in-hand manipulation problem of repositioning finger contacts on an object by controlled sliding. In this thesis we investigate two versions of the problem. First for a multifingered hand with circle patch contacts, we present a framework for planning the motion of the hand to create an...
The work of this dissertation seeks to enhance the understanding of DNA-driven nanoparticle assembly and introduce kinetic routes to control mesoscale crystal habit and size. Chapter 1 describes the state of the art in the field of nanoparticle assembly and, specifically, DNA- mediated nanoparticle assembly, where the concept of a...
Over the past decade significant advancements have been made across the field of cancer biology resulting in transformative new therapies. Despite these advancements, treatments for metastatic cancer remain relatively ineffective. Metastasis is coordinated by various types of “healthy†stromal cells in addition to the tumor cells themselves. This requires a...
Let X,Y be algebraic varieties defined over the reals. Assume Y is smooth and X is Gorenstein. Suppose f:X -> Y is a flat R-morphism such that all the fibers have rational singularities. We show that the pushforward of any smooth, compactly supported measure on X has a continuous density...
Ubiquitous in the environment are bacteria that have evolved to adapt to the environmental niches they colonize. To this end, bacteria sensory and signaling molecules are required for processing these extracellular changes within their environment into changes in gene expression. The plague-causing pathogen, Yersinia pestis, contains a repertoire of two-component...
Nano-scale materials possess many unique physical and chemical properties which are not found in bulk materials. The ability to synthesize these materials by design is one of the greatest challenges in materials science. Advances towards meeting this challenge will lead to discoveries in fields such as plasmonics, photonics, catalysis, and...
Ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi are a group of cosmopolitan symbiotic soil fungi that colonize the fine roots of tree species and play an essential role in plant nutrition and ecosystem function. In worldwide afforestation projects, the establishment of introduced trees in novel habitats has been shown to require ECM fungal associations....
I study three topics in applied microeconomics. My first chapter concerns the effect of daily school start times on academic achievement in Florida. Exploiting the sharp discontinuity in school start time relative to sunrise, I track children who move between schools on either side of the time zone boundary in...
Journalism professionals and researchers have recently argued that newsrooms adopt audience engagement as one of their chief pursuits. This term has many interpretations that stem from one underlying belief: journalists better serve their audiences when they explicitly focus on how their audiences interact with and respond to the news in...
Supported metal oxides are an important class of heterogeneous catalysts active for many selective oxidation reactions including alkane oxidative dehydrogenation. Attempts to develop fundamental structure-function relationships for supported metal oxide catalysts for alkane oxidative dehydrogenation have been challenging, with many conflicting reports in literature. This has been in part due...
Convent education was financially accessible to many girls whose families could not afford a private tutor and nuns were the largest group of educated, culturally-active women in pre-modern Europe. Convent education mirrored the general contours of humanist education by associating learning with morality, serving the purposes of the Venetian republic,...
Through an engagement with the work of American postmodern choreographers Anna Halprin, Yvonne Rainer, and Laura Dean, I expose choreographic legacy as an ongoing process of continually rewriting dance history. Halprin, Rainer, and Dean’s models for choreographic transmission draw from the legacy methods of repertoire, reconstruction, and reperformance, while simultaneously...
We compare two different methods to compute the mod 2 homology of an infinite loop space. One method is to approximate the infinite loop functor using functor calculus. The other is to approximate the spectrum using an Adams resolution. We show that these two ways lead to isomorphic spectral sequences....
With a glut of competing priorities, the financial industry faces major challenges in extracting timely, relevant, and specifically-focused information from text. Without clear-cut business cases, making the investment in text analysis methods does not justify the return on investment. Furthermore, the business landscape continues to become increasingly complex, and at...
Techniques in atomic physics have delivered some of the most precise measurements ever made, with frequency measurements reaching fractional precisions of 10^18 . High precision measurements can be used to test fundamental physics, such as pursuing a variation in fundamental constants. A finite drift in measurable constants such as the...
This thesis focuses on the role of upcoming neutrino oscillation experiments for the search for beyond-the-Standard-Model physics in the neutrino sector. Specically, I focus on the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment and Hyper-Kamiokande neutrino experiment, and the experimental sensitivity to non-standard neutrino interactions, sterile neutrinos, incorrect signals of CP-violation, differences between...
Desmoplakin (DP) is a component of desmosomes, critical adhesive complexes found in cardiac intercalated discs. DP is often mutated in arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy (AC), an inherited disorder that is a frequent cause of sudden cardiac death. The disease progression of AC is characterized by cardiomyocyte cell death and replacement of the...
In the wake of Hurricane Katrinas dramatic demographic changes, scholars, journalists, and politicians have discussed Mexican migration to New Orleans as a new phenomenon and an unwelcome threat to the citys social order, rich culture, and tourist economy. This dissertation challenges these ideas and demonstrates some of the myriad ways...
Active traffic management systems aim to relieve recurring and non-recurring congestion by using estimated and predicted traffic conditions to guide trip makers before and after entering the network as well as to design control strategies to improve system performance. With external disruptions and interventions (e.g., weather, special events, and incidents),...
There has long been an interest in the idea of generativity the concern for and commitment towards promoting the well-being of future generations. In Western societies, generativity can be characterized through societal contributions and acts dedicated towards others. Since the early 1960s, when Erikson proposed generativity as the major developmental...
In 2015, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 1 in 6 Americans fall ill with a foodborne infection annually, resulting in more than 3000 fatalities and an estimated $15 billion in economic burden due to combined medical costs, productivity loss, and death. On a per-case basis, infections...
In this work we explore a connection between some high dimensional asymptotic problems and random matrix theory. In the first part, we establish a link between the Wishart ensemble and random critical points of holomorphic sections over complex projective space and use this to establish asymptotics on the average number...
As monolinguals and bilinguals hear words unfold over time, they experience competition from words that share sounds within the same language (e.g., st- activates strict and stamp). Unique to bilinguals is that they are also prone to competition from similar sounding-words between their two languages. In the present dissertation, we...
The moduli stack of bundles on a smooth complete curve over a field, is an immensely rich geometric object and is of central importance to the Geometric Langlands program. This thesis represents a contribution towards a motivic, in the sense of Voevodsky and Morel-Voevodsky, understanding of this stack. Following the...
Stars, planets and massive black holes are ubiquitous in binary and multiple configurations. In stellar systems the binary components interact through various type of mass loss and mass transfer. Mass transfer interactions in eccentric systems are inprinciple phase-dependent and can occur in different ways. We formulate the understanding of mass...
Each movement we make represents the final output of complex processes in the nervous system. Studies of motor control often attempt to minimize further complication by using controlled environments to generate repeated movements. However, in natural situations, the motor system faces the much more complicated task of interacting with an...
Households in emerging markets hold significant amounts of dollar deposits while firms have significant amounts of dollar debt. Motivated by the perceived dangers, policymakers often develop regulations to limit dollarization. In this paper, I draw attention to an important benefit of dollarization, which should be taken into account when crafting...
Understanding the role of heterogeneity across agents is crucial in predicting how the macroeconomic outcomes are affected by these differences. This dissertation presents three papers in which I study labor market outcomes of different segments of the population according to their choice of education and how labor market characteristics affect...
Caenorhabditis elegans has been a highly productive model organism. However, most of the knowledge gained from the species has come a single strain isolated in Bristol, England in 1951. However, there exists significant potential in the natural variation present in the species to make discoveries. In this dissertation, I describe...
This dissertation aims to understand the ways that the social, specifically race, ethnicity, and neighborhood, intersects with the religious identity, beliefs, and practices of early-generation Americans in Chicago. This dissertation asks at the most general level: What is the relationship of race, ethnicity, and religion for early-generation Americans? More specifically,...
Hannah Arendt claimed that aœtotalitarianisma emerged as a new word to designate a new form of evil in politics. However, she added, the use of a new word does not imply that we understand what this novelty consists in. This dissertation is an attempt to understand the novelty of totalitarian...
In 1964 the Second Vatican Council encouraged a switch from Latin Mass, celebrated by Roman Catholics across the globe in standardized form since the 16th century, to Mass in the languages spoken by the local people and with some adaptation to local circumstances. This event is familiar to scholars of...
In support of a scientific foundation for the predictive design of composition and processing of quench and partition (Q&P) martensite/austenite TRIP steels, theory of coupled diffusional/displacive transformation is experimentally calibrated to control austenite carbon content and its associated mechanical stability. Under paraequilibrium constraint, the calibration quantifies an effective BCC stored...
The brains of humans and animals have the amazing capability of extracting abstract relationships between external stimuli efficiently. Knowing such regularities helps us compute and react to novel information flexibly without prior experience. The olfactory system is no exception. Animals need to infer commonalities across different odors sharing similar meaning,...
This thesis focuses on ecological models of population dynamics and the traveling, migratory waves that can result when a stable state either displaces an unstable state, or displaces another stable state. We consider the effect of nonlocal interactions, where members of the species interact over a distance. This gives rise...
Nanostructured semiconductors exhibit promising optoelectronic properties, such as high photoluminescence quantum yield and efficient charge separation, making them attractive materials for applications including photovoltaics, LEDs, and lasers. These superior properties are often due to improved crystallinity and reduced charge separation distance compared to bulk semiconductors. As a result, it is...
Herpesvirus virions consist of three layers: nucleocapsid, tegument, and envelope. The innermost layer, the nucleocapsid, initially assembles as an immature procapsid precursor built around viral scaffold proteins. The event that initiates procapsid maturation is unknown but it is dependent upon activation of the internal protease. Scaffold cleavage triggers angularization, or...
Chip-based photonic devices are doing for optics what integrated circuits have done for electronics. By directly combining many individual components in a compact, scalable and robust way, photonic chips open the possibility for creating optical and electro-optical devices that could not be practical with discrete components. The applications for this...
Recently, much public attention has been focused on racial inequalities in who is subjected to exclusionary school disciplinary policies, and consequently, forced to miss hours of instruction. Over the past two decades, researchers have documented the disparate impacts that zero-tolerance policies have had on students of color, low-income students, and...
Recently, there has been increasing interest in exploring nano-materials used as an additive to existing concrete materials. With respect to fiber-shaped nanomaterials such as carbon nanofibers (CNF), many studies have shown that mechanical strength properties of cementitious materials can be improved significantly. In this dissertation, the research has focused on...
Heterogeneous materials have been emerging and playing essential roles in various engineering and scientific fields. They usually include multiple phases of materials to create unique properties that are not accessible to their homogeneous counterparts. The traditional design approach in the material science community is to use trial-and-error iteratively, which is...
