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...
RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) has rapidly become the de facto technique in transcriptome studies. However, established statistical methods for analyzing experimental and observational microarray studies need to be revised or completely re-invented to accommodate RNA-Seq data's unique characteristics. In this dissertation, we focus on statistical analyses performed at two particular stages in...
The Laplace-Beltrami operator of a smooth Riemannian manifold is determined by the Riemannian metric. Conversely, the heat kernel constructed from the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami operator determines the Riemannian metric. This work proves the analogy on Euclidean polyhedral surfaces (triangle meshes), that the discrete heat kernel and the...
Ricci flow deforms the Riemannian metric proportionally to the curvature, such that the curvature evolves according to a heat diffusion process and eventually becomes constant everywhere. Ricci flow has demonstrated its great potential by solving various problems in many fields, which can be hardly handled by alternative methods so far....
RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) has been widely adopted for quantifying gene expression changes in comparative transcriptome analysis. For detecting differentially expressed genes, a variety of statistical methods based on the negative binomial (NB) distribution have been proposed. These methods differ in the ways they handle the NB nuisance parameters (i.e., the dispersion...
Metallic glasses are attracting tremendous attention because of their fundamental significance and great potential to be used as structural or functional materials in engineering applications. Significant efforts have been devoted to studying their unique properties as well as their disordered nature. Metallic glasses possess much higher strength and elastic strain...
This study demonstrated at the pilot-scale (50 kg) use of Douglas-fir forest harvest residue, an underutilized
forest biomass, for the production of high titer and high yield bioethanol using sulfite chemistry
without solid–liquor separation and detoxification. Sulfite Pretreatment to Overcome the Recalcitrance
of Lignocelluloses (SPORL) was directly applied to the...
Modification of microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) by altering the sizes of the anode and the cathode, or their interaction with the liquid stream affects the performance of the MEC, but it remains difficult to quantify how much each change will contribute to the overall performance. Through this study, a method...
We explored an optofluidic sensing mechanism from inkjet-printed droplets on diatom biosilica using surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Our study revealed a new biosensing strategy that combines the microscopic fluidic flow induced by the droplet evaporation and the photonic crystal effects of diatom frustules, which can provide an ultra-sensitive, cost-effective biosensing...