Serious games that are designed for educational purposes promote acquisition of knowledge and skills that are valued in the both the virtual realm and the real world. The challenge is to design serious games that leverage meaningful play to produce positive learning outcomes in the real world. I argue that...
Recent assessment of material property requirements for blast resistant applications, especially for the naval ship hulls, has defined the need to design steels with high stretch ductility and fragment penetration resistance, along with high strength and adequate toughness. Using a system based computational materials design approach, two series of austenitic...
Motivated by the rich variety of complex patterns observed on the surface of fluid layers that are vibrated at multiple frequencies, we investigate the effect of such resonant forcing on systems undergoing a Hopf bifurcation to spatially homogeneous oscillations. We use an extension of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (CGLE) that...
Peripheral neuropathic pain is a debilitating affliction for which there is little effective treatment. Patients suffer from symptoms ranging from loss of sensation to hyperalgesia and allodynia. The neuroinflammatory process in chronic pain conditions has become a main focus of study because of the release of proinflammatory cytokines, which can...
A very active area of materials research is to devise methods that use machine learning to automatically extract predictive models from existing materials data. While prior examples have demonstrated successful models for some applications, many more applications exist where machine learning can make a strong impact. To enable faster development...
My submission is a data dashboard that depicts global trends for new and total COVID-19 cases between Jan 01, 2020 and March 08, 2021. It contains two tabs (new and total cases) with three interactive visualizations. Two maps, an original and a log-scale-filled, show the number of new COVID-19 cases...
This thesis is a description of the measurement of the W boson mass using the D0 Run II detector with 770 pb^-1 of proton-antiproton collision data. These collisions were produced by the Tevatron at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV between 2002 and 2006. We use a sample of W -> e...
The overarching goal of this work is to understand nanometer scale junctions and electron transport through molecules in these junctions. Calculations detailing quantum interference in the electron transport through molecules, and the control of these features, show great potential for use as discrete electronic elements. Concurrent work on the fabrication...
We first introduce the concept of copulas and advocate its use for multivariate option pricing. We focus on four types of bivariate options: basket, rainbow-max, rainbow-min, and spread options. We derive expressions for these options as a function of the copula. We then construct pricing bounds for these bivariate options...
The T-box transcription factor, Tbx5, is involved in heart development and congenital disease. For example mutations in human TBX5 lead to Holt-Oram syndrome, a disease characterized by a range of heart and arm malformations. Tbx5 gene activity has been perturbed in several animal models including the chicken, mouse, and zebrafish....
