Kinship provides the major framework for social organization, but when do infants and children develop understanding of these social relationships and how they affect social behaviors? This dissertation proposes that ...

First-row transition metals find growing applications in organic transformations due to their abundance and low cost. In addition, the difference in redox states of first-row metals to those of second or third row metals ...

Nanopores can be used as extremely sensitive instruments to directly measure properties of individual molecules. Progress in the nanopore field has been motivated largely by a desire to sequence DNA quickly and accurately. ...

The PI3K-AKT-mTOR axis is a central signaling pathway that controls cell growth and proliferation, and exerts much of its phenotypic effects as a master regulator of RNA translation. Pharmacological inhibition of this ...

Calcium is a ubiquitous signaling molecule that coordinates biological processes over a wide range of length and timescales. For decades, it has been known that respiring mitochondria can take up large amounts of calcium ...

Advances in genetic screening technology have expanded the toolkit for systematic perturbation of gene function. While the CRISPR-Cas9 system robustly probes genetic loss-of-function in mammalian cells, a barcoded ORFeome ...

This dissertation includes two applied studies on health insurance coverage for pregnant women in the United States and one methodological contribution to the field of health services research. Chapter one describes patterns ...

The War on Drugs and subsequent growth of the U.S. prison system has disproportionately affected low-income individuals living in inner-cities. Since the 1980’s, men of color without a high school degree have been ...

Advances in chemical biology provide immense benefits to human health through the discovery of new medicines and new scientific tools to study disease. I have contributed to the advancement of this field by developing a ...

Over the course of billions of years, nature has evolved materials, structures, and morphologies that exhibit a wide range of unique functionalities. Some of these traits are of particular interest to scientists and ...