This dissertation examined the association between HAP and respiratory health, both using simple proxy metrics, such as cooking fuel types, and actual measurements, such as household and personal measures of PM2.5 and BC. We found that simple proxy metrics can predict a portion of HAP levels, and associations with respiratory...
Transportation systems are facing safety and operational challenges with a cost of billions of dollars annually in lost production time and wasted fuel. Infrastructure expansion, previously held as a panacea to most transportation challenges has lost its appeal due to financial, land-use and environmental constraints. Interest is surging in intelligent...
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems have recently been considered as one of the most significant technology breakthroughs for modern wireless communications, due to the higher spectral efficiency and improved link reliability. The sphere decoding algorithm (SDA) has been widely used for maximum likelihood (ML) detection in MIMO systems. It is...
The first goal of this study was to understand the role of u-calpain in skeletal muscle protein degradation in cultured muscle cells. Several strategies were developed to down-regulate endogenous u-calpain activity and m-calpain activity in rat myotubes. These included over-expression of antisense u-calpain (AnsL), dominant negative u-calpain (DN-u-CL), antisense 30K...
This thesis details my investigation of some pharmaceuticals and natural products on the transport of drugs which are substrates of P-glycoprotein (P-gp), such as cyclosporin A (CSA) and digoxin by using Caco-2 and MDCKII-MDR1 drug transport models. Three objectives were performed to address this goal. The first objective was to...
This dissertation focuses on extending the application scope of surface enhanced infrared absorption spectroscopy to gas sensing. The method we propose is incorporating plasmonic nanostructures with nano-composite material, metalorganic framework, which can selectively preconcentrate certain gas molecules into the nanopores. The preconcentrating property is first demonstrated by applying metal-organic framework...
Silicon photonics has become the most promising platform for future large-scale optical interconnect and optical computing systems due to its inherent CMOS compatibility, which brings exclusive advantages in bandwidth density, energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness. Parallel optical interconnects based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have the capacity to meet the...
This thesis proposes a novel fully digital technique for the estimation and correction of the DAC error in multi-bit delta sigma ADCs. The structure of the DAC error is indicated through a simple model for unit-element based DACs. The impact of the DAC error on the performance of ADC is...
Digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with wide dynamic range and high
linearity are required for high-end audio applications. A multi-bit delta sigma
audio DAC, using a novel gain-correction technique, is described in this thesis. For
widely varying on-chip RC time constant, the DAC gain can be accurately
controlled by the correction circuitry....