Developing materials with comparable structural complexity and programmed hierarchy as those found in nature is a grand challenge in materials science. One way to synthesize soft materials with these complex architectures is to use bottom-up self-assembly of nanoscale building blocks, mimicking how organisms grow tissues with specific functions from peptides,...
Pragmatic language, or the use of language in social contexts, is critical to developing meaningful social relationships and is a significant contributor to mental health. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), fragile X syndrome (FXS) and Down syndrome (DS) are all genetically based neurodevelopmental disabilities characterized by deficits in pragmatic language, although...
Prenatal alcohol exposure is a global health concern. Despite guidelines advising against it, many women continue to drink throughout their pregnancies. Exposure to alcohol can have lifelong medical, social, emotional, and intellectual consequences on a developing fetus. Women in Uruguay have demonstrated consistently high self-reported alcohol consumption during pregnancy, but...
The three studies in this project investigate a selected number of youth protective factors and caregiver parenting skills with reducing the risk of justice involvement for youth involved in the child welfare system without a prior history of justice involvement. All three studies used child welfare administrative data, and the...
Additive manufacturing is a promising process that has the capability to build components with complex geometries for structural and biomedical applications. Due to the rapid and localized directional solidification of molten metallic alloys, unique phase transformations occur at the melt pool that can provide for components with greater strength and...
This thesis describes a series of fundamental studies that address the role of electrostatic interactions in modulating i) the permeability of the ligand shell of a colloidal quantum dot (QD) to an anionic redox probe; ii) the resulting yield of photoinduced electron exchange within the QD ‒ redox probe complex;...
This dissertation is a social and cultural history of the body and the beauty industry in the Japanese Empire from 1868 to 1945. The emphasis is on the thoughts and actions of state and private actors such as doctors and the first generation of Japanese cosmetic product developers. When these...
Rhythmic fluctuations of electrical activity in the brain provide insights into the proposed mechanism by which we encode experiences and then maintain, forget, modify, and retrieve them. Yet there is still much to learn about how neural oscillations relate to memory function. The purpose of this research is to discover...
The fields of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology have emerged in recent years with the heavily overlapping goals of sustainable bioproduction of chemical goods and predictable and precise engineering of biological function.1 However, efforts to reach commercially relevant titers have stalled.2 Many challenges arise during optimization of each production platform,...
When attached to another species (e.g. a nanoparticle), the sequence specificity of DNA can be repurposed to program interactions between such entities and to direct their formation into ordered structures. The research presented in this thesis aims to push the boundaries of structures that can be made via this approach....