Hydrogen is the green fuel that can be produced from water through electrolysis and used via hydrogen fuel cells to generate electricity with zero carbon dioxide emission. The commercialization of electrolyzers and fuel cells is the critical step to achieving global carbon neutrality. However, it is severely hampered by the...
Oxides are a versatile class of materials with a wide range of electronic, optical, and magnetic properties. This makes them ideal for use in a multitude of functional devices for oxide electronics, electrochemical conversion, and storage. The overall performance of these devices is governed by atomic scale charge and mass...
In this dissertation, I describe the experimental investigation in electron diffraction of molecules in superfluid helium droplets. The project is part of an overall scheme called ‘single molecule serial electron diffraction imaging’ (SS-EDI), with the ultimate goal of building an apparatus to determine atomic structures from oriented macromolecules. In SS-EDI,...
RNAs play important roles in the central dogma of molecular biology, and are involved in multiple biology processes such as chromatin modification, transcriptional interference and translation initiation. The functions of RNAs, especially non-coding RNAs, are highly related to its secondary structures, therefore computational methods for RNA structure prediction are of...
The continuum theory provides a framework in which the growth
of a plant root as a dynamic process involving interactions among
transport of water and solute, cell division, and the subsequent cell
elongation can be described. A plant root is modeled as a one-dimensional,
multi-phase, mathematical continuum. The network of...
This thesis consists of three papers which investigate marginal models, nonparametric approaches, generalized mixed effects models and variance components estimation in longitudinal data analysis. In the first paper, a new marginal approach is introduced for high-dimensional cell-cycle microarray data with no replicates. There are two kinds of correlation for cell-cycle...
This dissertation contains three essays on nonprametric and semiparametric regression mod-
In the first essay, we propose an estimation procedure for value at risk (VaR) and expected
shortfall (TailVaR.) for conditional distributions of a time series of returns on a financial asset.
Our approach combines a local polynomial estimator of...
High vegetative growth of Pinot Noir vine is a common problem in most vineyards of Oregon's Willamette Valley, where sunlight exposure and heat accumulation are limited. Consequently, growers in this region commonly use vineyard management strategies to regulate vine vigor and improve grape and wine quality. Wine quality is greatly...
Cell division, arguably the most important event during the life cycle of the eukaryotic cell, is achieved through a complicated yet beautiful machinery. The mitotic spindle — a microtubule-based bipolar structure—is the cellular machinery responsible for the correct segregation of the genetic material, chromosomes. The protein-based nanomachines termed molecular motors...