This dissertation explores the ways that Chinese popular media, including film, television, and magazines, reconstruct the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a traumatic historical event which tremendously affected Chinese people and society. Employing a combination of methods, including visual and narrative analysis of media and cultural forms, institutional analysis of...
Biological fouling of surfaces is problematic for many medical applications because proteins, cells and bacteria can impair the function of devices and lead to catastrophic complications. Numerous strategies exist for reducing fouling in physiological environments; the strategy described in this thesis focuses on the modification of substrates with poly-N-substituted glycine...
My primary interest is in markets as aggregators of information. To study this I create a benchmark market-microstructure model of sequential trading on posted prices. I have a competitive market maker and rational profit-maximizing traders with different tastes over a single asset and heterogeneous information over its value. The differences...
This dissertation analyzes how individuals choose college majors. The choice of college major is treated as one made under uncertainty. Understanding any decision under uncertainty requires one to study how expectations and preferences are used to make the choice. However, since observed choices may be consistent with many combinations of...
The primary purpose of this study was to describe what comprises an undergraduate compositional identity. Building upon recent research investigating musical identities with a social psychological framework (Macdonald, Hargreaves, & Miell, 2002), I examined the confluence of socially based experiences that shaped four undergraduate composers' lives. Specifically, this study investigated...
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a technique widely used in both clinical and experimental settings to produce high-resolution images of opaque living organisms without utilizing ionizing radiation. Currently, MR imaging is augmented by contrast agents; however, these small molecule Gd(III) chelates are confined to extracellular and vascular regions of the...
This dissertation aims to: 1) characterize the range of beliefs museum practitioners have about racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity; 2) their understanding of the role of race, culture, and ethnicity in minoritized learners’ sensemaking; and 3) the areas of tension and symmetry between practitioners’ values and their perception of their...
The leptonic and inclusive hadronic decay branching fractions of the W boson are studied using 35.9 $fb^{-1}$ of proton-proton collision data collected at $\sqrt{s}=13~TeV$ during the 2016 run of the CMS experiment. Events characterized by the production of pairs of W bosons from \ttbar and \tW processes are selected. Multiple...
The dissertation aims to explore the intersection between the artistic performance of blackness in contemporary Italian theater and the country's social stigmatization of black immigrants as a problem or national emergency. I argue that Italians live in a state of "historic forgetfulness" since they have not been able to absorb...
Many metal ions are of critical importance in many cellular functions. The very properties of these metal ions that make them useful also make them toxic to the cell. In the course of evolution, many metal ion homeostasis systems have developed to provide balance between the necessity and toxicity of...