Atmospheric aerosols are solid and liquid particles suspended in the air. Primary sources emit particles directly to the atmosphere, while secondary aerosol forms in the atmosphere. Secondary organic aerosols (SOA) from aromatic precursors are poorly constrained and their magnitude is highly...

Ionic liquids (ILs) are salts which are liquid at room temperature. Their unique properties make them excellent candidates for applications in electrochemistry, lubrication and catalysis. ILs are in contact with solid surfaces in most of their applications and the properties of liquids in an...

The radiative transfer equation (RTE) provides a mathematical description of the transport of radiation through a participating medium. It has a broad range of applications, ranging from biomedical imaging to astrophysics. However, solving the RTE is notoriously difficult. In our work, we develop an...

Physical Affection: Philosophies of Lovability in Early Modern English Manuscript Poetry" My dissertation considers manuscript poetry both as a site of meditation on the meaning of lovability and as a material recognition of lovability in a specific addressee or intended reader. Bringing together...

The matter we see today is made up of quarks. Quarks and anti-quarks fit together to make other particles such as mesons which are made up of a quark and an anti-quark pair and baryons that are made from three quarks. Recent studies show that there are other particles that are not mesons or baryons...

Endometrial cancer (EC) is considered one of the most common gynecological malignancies in USA. Treatment of advanced stages of EC is associated with poor outcomes, and begs the need for more effective therapies. In our work, we developed and characterized a nanoparticulate delivery system capable...

Bacterial biofilms colonize lungs of people with cystic fibrosis and cause chronic, persistent infections that lead to airway damage and subsequently, death. Biofilm bacteria display elevated antibiotic tolerance, resulting in the failure of current antibiotic strategies against such infections...

My dissertation examines discourses surrounding women’s religious dress in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Analyzing the rhetoric employed by women who wore distinctive garb as well as outsiders writing about religious dress in various mediums, I show that...

Transgender visibility has exploded in the last decade, but most Americans have not met a transgender person, and trans people suffer from discrimination and violence at a vastly disproportionate level compared to the average American. In response to this context, my dissertation project seeks to...

My focus is on polymerization, which is the formation or curing of a polymer. A polymer is simply a large molecule made up of many repeating units. My research looks at a very specific aspect of radiation-cured polymers: a cationic reaction mechanism where there is no definite end to the reaction...

Environmental factors can significantly impact the symptoms of neurological disorders caused by genetic mutations. My dissertation focuses on the gut bacteria and its effect on seizure severity in a fruit fly model of epilepsy. I found that a seizure-causing mutation alters bacterial composition in...

Randomized clinical trials are considered as the gold standard to demonstrate causal relationships between a treatment and an outcome. However, if the analysis adjust for an intermediate variable that occurs between the treatment and the outcome, then randomization will break down. We apply and...

Establishing proper neural circuits is the foundation upon which cognition, behavior, sensation, and learning rests; failure of which is associated with many neuropsychiatric disorders. My dissertation focuses on gamma-protocadherins (γ-Pcdhs), a family of cell adhesion molecules, and its role in...

My dissertation concerns the processing of self-produced movements in several brain structures, critically important for motor behavior, in developing rats. Using a variety of techniques, it focuses on the neural pathways, underlying mechanisms, and implications of sensorimotor processing in those...

Fluid-solid interfaces play a role in many everyday applications. Because molecules behave differently at these confined interfaces, it is important to understand the chemical and physical interactions taking place there. This research studies the interactions that influence the slip, flow, and film...

To experience the world, we depend on the ability of our neurons to encode information in a meaningful way. Failure of homeostatic systems that help neurons control their activity may contribute to conditions like migraine and epilepsy. In my dissertation, I use the fruit fly neuromuscular junction...

Integrated writing assessments reflect real-life academic writing tasks and are used in various second language testing contexts. This dissertation focuses on assessments that combine listening and writing, which are administered to high school English language learners (ELLs). This research...

This research proposes a theory about what determines the international use of a currency. I test this theory using statistical analyses and case studies. Given the findings, I apply the theory to examine how the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to survive are conducive to the rise of the renminbi...

We have fabricated nanofiber mats as sorbent materials for passive sampling devices for monitoring organic pollutants in water and sediment. Equilibrium partition coefficients with 4 log units were achieved for most hydrophobic and hydrophilic pollutants with our mats. To model sorption, a strong...

Melanoma is the deadliest form of skin cancer and is known for acquiring resistance to targeted therapies. My dissertation work focuses on understanding the gene regulatory network that governs differentiation of melanocytes during development and how disruptions in this network contribute to...

My study examines how incentives to take advantage of U.S. accounting rules affect the profitability of U.S. firms and foreign investments. Prior studies find that the U.S. tax on foreign earnings motivates firms to accumulate earnings abroad and undertake more, potentially value-destroying, foreign...

Organisms readily acquire fear, and this response tends to generalize to stimuli that are related to those present during a fearful event, but are not themselves inherently fearful (e.g. fear of fireworks following exposure to gunfire). When excessive, overgeneralization serves as a core feature of...

Recent scholarship in English education highlights the pervasive nature of dominant discourses of adolescence (those that reduce teenagers to impulsive, hormonal, and incomplete) in the pedagogy and content of English language arts (ELA) classrooms. In this study, I investigate how these discourses...

Prior research has emphasized that the average age of puberty is declining for both adolescent males and females, such that earlier pubertal timing is associated with a range of negative mental health outcomes. While direct effects of pubertal timing on psychopathology are well established, this...

Equating plays an important role in test scoring when alternate forms of a test exist. Compared to the large amount of literature on traditional and IRT equating methods, very few studies address the application of beta equating methods. This dissertation offers an extensive investigation of beta...

We contribute to develop a new and systematic approach to valuing barrier options of different types. In particular, we handle a fairly general case of two-sided exponential boundaries and arbitrary payoffs. The approach utilizes exponential stopping of Brownian motion, and yields simple...

Light-emission efficiency of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) is severely limited by the magnetic state of the light-emission process. In my dissertation, we work on processes using external magnetic fields that can overcome these magnetic limitations. Our work provides a flexible and...

This dissertation is a cultural history of computer-driven climate science in America after the Second World War. It examines the creation of the General Circulation Model (GCM) — a scientific software platform developed by meteorologists in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the role that it...

The lasso-type models have been widely used for model selection in data mining, machine learning, and high-dimensional statistics. However, due to the ultrahigh-dimensional, large-scale data sets collected in many real-world applications, it remains challenging to solve the lasso-type problems even...

Bladder antimuscarinics are commonly used among nursing home residents to treat urinary incontinence. However, some bladder antimuscarinics cause harms in human cognition. Therefore, these medications may cause mental health problems (e.g., delirium) or lead to the use of antipsychotics. My...