This dissertation focuses on the behavior of security returns around certain events that occurred in the Saudi stock market. In the first study, we measure and analyze the reaction of security returns around a major horizontal merger that occurred in the banking industry in Saudi Arabia. The objective of this...
Cyanobacteria are rich in biologically active secondary metabolites, many of which have potential application as anticancer or antimicrobial drugs or as useful probes in cell biology studies. A Jamaican isolate of the marine cyanobacterium, Lyngbya majuscula was the source of a novel antifungal and cytotoxic secondary metabolite, hectochlorin. The structure...
The objective of this thesis is to provide a predictive model for the archaeological investigation of the first farmsteads in the Pacific Northwest, established in the early- and mid-nineteenth century by Canadien and Métis families retiring from their service in the fur trade. Past studies of this population have either...
The recent advent of large-scale microbiome studies enabled by high-throughput sequencing calls for innovative statistical methodologies that are capable of tackling a myriad of challenges presented by microbiome data. Compelled by this need, we focus on the development of statistical tools for two types of problems that arise in microbiome...
The optical response of metallic structures is dominated by the dynamics of their free electron plasma. Plasmonics, the area of optics specializing in the electromagnetic behavior of heterogeneous structures with metallic inclusions, is undergoing rapid development, fueled in part by recent progress in experimental fabrication techniques and novel
theoretical approaches....
Animals aggregate and interact in nonuniform and nonrandom patterns, which lead to group level characteristics that have important evolutionary and ecological consequences. Network analysis provides a useful conceptual framework for linking animal interactions at all scales from dyads to communities, to populations and ecosystems. Despite exciting theoretical and applied advances...