This dissertation, based on roughly eighteen months of fieldwork in two laboratories at Princeton University, examines how practitioners of synthetic biology orient themselves vis-à-vis organic systems, by both engaging with and displacing biological knowledge. It also explores experimental methods in…

Academic-industry partnerships in biomedical research come in many forms, but
those that occur around clinical research are the most prominent. Researchers at academic
medical centers have historically conducted a large proportion of industry-sponsored
clinical trials, as they alone had the…

Despite earlier evidence to the contrary, recent inquiries appear to reach a consensus that the poor
pay more for food. However, these studies utilize samples drawn on the basis of prior
knowledge of unfair pricing strategies, proximity of volunteer surveyors,…

This dissertation investigates the relation between Mies van der Rohe and cinema. Its purpose is to elucidate, both historically and theoretically, the association between the architect Mies and the pioneers of abstract film Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling during the…

Similarity search systems are designed to help









people to organize multimedia non-text data and find valuable









information. The multimedia data intrinsically has…

To investigate the influence of input from fellow group members in a constrained decision-making context, we develop four 2-armed bandit tasks in which subjects freely select one of two options (A or B) and are informed of the resulting reward…

This dissertation concerns itself with the effects of education and wealth on health in Africa. The first two chapters focus on the impact of adult education levels on the HIV epidemic in four sub-Saharan countries. The last chapter turns to…

The limitations common to linear imaging techniques were formalized succinctly by Ernst Abbe in 1873. In his theory, each Fourier component of a signal propagates independently from the source to the detector, and the corresponding feature can be detected only…

This dissertation maps the ethnographic and archaeological work of the Dutch architects Aldo van Eyck and Herman Haan between 1947 and 1967, including van Eyck's writings, editorial work, and encounter with the sub-Saharan Dogon people, and Haan's expeditions and ethnographic…

This paper empirically examines the role of social networks in welfare participation. Social theorists from across the political spectrum have argued that network effects have given rise to a culture of poverty. Empirical work, however, has found it difficult to…