Recent development on optogenetic methods offers reliable path to modulate cell activities with high level spatiotemporal precision. Application of this technology in behavior studies significantly improves our understanding in the neural principle that underpin animal behaviors, including ourselves. Full exploitation of optogenetic method in neuroscience behavior studies relies on...
Since their discovery, polymeric and protein-based materials are key to technological innovation and are indispensable in our lives. However, these natural and man-made soft materials usually have complex and hierarchical structures, with basic functional units in submicron scale. Therefore, a major challenge in understanding and designing these materials lies...
In this dissertation I explore the applications and test the limitations of surface haptics technology in producing tactile experiences akin to those encountered in the real world. The goal of this work is to build intuition around physical aspects of touch that contribute to perception of tactile textures in...
Movement and sensing fundamentally works in a synergistic manner. Animal's sensory organs --- be they independently movable like eyes or requiring whole body movement as in the case of electroreceptors --- are actively manipulated throughout stimulus-driven active sensing behaviors. Though these sensing-related motions have been individually reported and analyzed across...
Following the discovery of n-type Mg3Sb2−Mg3Bi2 alloys, attempts have been undertaken to optimize their thermoelectric performance because understanding of the properties of this system had been limited due to its novelty. In this thesis, the thermoelectric performance of n-type Mg3Sb2−Mg3Bi2 alloys was systematically investigated and significantly improved. Thorough experimental characterization...
While the entire silicon industry has been blooming under Moore’s Law for decades, conventional digital implementation is approaching the “stall” of Moore’s Law due to many physical design limitations. Technology innovation now is going to take a different direction. Given the increasing demand for emerging applications' computational capacity, it is...
Bitcoin is a decentralized payment system proposed in 2008 by Nakamoto, who remains anonymous to date. It offers an effective alternative to fiat money or centralized payment systems with advantages on privacy, anonymity, and low international remittance fees. The transactions in Bitcoin payment system are sent through a peer-to-peer network,...
Central nervous system (CNS) regeneration is one of the most challenging regenerative medicine targets in mammals due to the natural inhibitory mechanisms that occur in response to injury. In the case of spinal cord injury (SCI), the initial inflammatory response protects damaged tissue, but over time creates a hostile microenvironment...
Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TDMCs) are one of many families of two-dimensional (2D) beyond graphene, that started to gain more attention due to the need for miniaturization and their unique electrical, mechanical, and optical properties. Some members of TMDCs, such as MoS2, has direct band gap in its monolayer form, making...
Natural gas is likely to become one of the main sources of carbon-based chemicals in the next century due to rapidly increasing natural gas production levels. This has created new incentives to find materials that are active and selective towards alkane partial oxidation reactions that are relevant for natural gas...