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The Production of Democracy
No full textOur economic cooperation is marked by hierarchical relationships. Most people work under the authority of unaccountable managers, while a minority of wealthy investors shape the future of productive enterprises. Yet, economic hierarchy is rarely considered as problematic as political hierarchy such as oligarchy or restrictions on voting rights. Democracy is thought to impose demanding requirements on state political institutions, but at best overridable recommendations on economic institutions. Behind this view lies the idea that the democratic state controls and regulates the economy from a higher standpoint of equality. However powerful economic superiors may be, they are ultimately subject to a political system that treats everyone as equals. Thus, democratizing the economy is unnecessary; political democracy can justify economic hierarchy. I call this line of thought the State-above-the-Economy Argument. My dissertation argues against it, in favor of what I call a dual-core theory of democracy.
My argument proceeds in three steps. First, I clarify the political nature of the modern economy and the kind of justification it demands. Our economic cooperation is structured through asymmetrical subjection to power and authority, effected through society’s overarching institutional framework. These institutionalized relations of subjection constitute an informal political system, which must therefore be evaluated according to the principles of democracy, not just efficiency.
Second, while economic institutions are often thought to be exempt from the requirements of democracy by virtue of being governed by a democratic state, I argue that this view is mistaken. The democratic state is itself constrained in its power, legitimacy, and knowledge by the very economic structure it is supposed to govern. Democracy’s demands on the economy cannot be outsourced to the state; economic institutions themselves must be brought within the scope of democratic justification.
Finally, how are we to recover the democratic ideal in light of the economy’s profound constraint on politics? A common response demands moral discipline: economic actors must subordinate themselves to the sovereign democratic state’s will. I reject this view. Contestation in and through the economy, when properly structured, can be a force for democracy. Thus, the question is not whether but how economic rights constrain political decision-making. Rather than seeking to insulate politics from economic power, we must theorize democracy as a justifiable form of interdependence between the state and the economy.Philosoph
Towards the Equitable and Sustainable Transformation of Agrifood Systems: Evidence at the Intersection of Agroecology and Public Health
No full textFood systems — the interconnected ways through which humanity produces, distributes, and consumes food — are culpable for a substantial share of today’s ecological crises, yet they also fail to deliver healthy, affordable food for all or secure decent livelihoods for those who produce it. While numerous solutions have been proposed to mitigate food systems’ disproportionate environmental impacts, most are incremental and neglect intertwined public health and social justice challenges, including persistent food inequities, rising rates of diet-related chronic disease, and mounting economic and climate stress for farmers and food system workers. Agroecology, by contrast, advances the premise that durable reform must be transformative, addressing the underlying social and structural drivers, such as power imbalances and consolidation, that perpetuate environmental degradation, inequities, and human health burdens. This dissertation offers novel insights at the intersection of agroecology and public health, examining how structural forces in U.S. food systems entrench unsustainability and identifying leverage points for transformation that could accelerate agroecological change, with benefits for environmental, social, economic, and public health.
The first study (Chapter 1) examines how structural forces have shaped unsustainable agricultural practices in the U.S. by analyzing the relationship between county-level cropland consolidation and pesticide intensification. Despite the development of higher potency formulations, overall use has remained persistently high, raising planetary health concerns given pesticides’ significant human health and environmental impacts. However, little evidence has addressed how structural factors, such as the substantial consolidation of U.S. farmland and the expansion of average farm size, influence these patterns. Employing longitudinal data from 1,466 non-metro counties (1992–2012), we found that greater cropland consolidation was significantly associated with increased pesticide intensity, with an estimated 37% of this association explained by shifts toward high-pesticide-intensity crops. Stratified models revealed notable regional heterogeneity; positive associations emerged in the Southeast and Corn Belt, while a negative association appeared in Appalachia. Efforts to transition toward agroecological food systems and reduce agricultural inputs may need to address systems-level factors like consolidation through regionally tailored approaches.
The second study (Chapter 2) examines how increasing supply chain opacity, driven in part by structural shifts such as consolidation in the retail food sector, may enable greenwashing — misleading consumers about the true environmental benefits of products. Greenwashing represents a structural barrier to food systems transformation by undermining consumer trust and preventing market signals from effectively supporting agroecological transitions. After developing and psychometrically testing a novel coding instrument, we applied it to more than 23,000 food and non-alcoholic beverage products across two major U.S. online retail platforms. Over 10% of products carried front-of-package environmental claims; of these, nearly two-thirds at the conventional supermarket and one-third at the natural food store were determined to be greenwashed, primarily due to inadequate claim substantiation. Most environmentally marketed products were ultra-processed, the vast majority of claims were executional in nature (i.e., relying on implicit design or visual cues rather than explicit statements), and greenwashing prevalence was highest in the meat and meat alternative categories. Regulating environmental claims in the food sector should be urgently considered as a strategy to both protect consumers and prevent greenwashing from impeding agroecological transitions.
The third study (Chapter 3) explores how farmers’ relational values shape motivation and engagement in agroecological practices. While transforming food systems will require widespread adoption of ecologically and socially sustainable practices, limited U.S. research has examined how farmers' value systems influence both their adoption of on-farm sustainable practices and their participation in broader agroecological change. Interviews with 32 small- and mid-sized Oregon farmers revealed strong relational values — rooted in care for land, animals, and community — that motivated both ecological stewardship and social action, including efforts to improve community food security and well-being. However, farmers’ ability to act on these values was constrained by structural barriers, including economic precarity, policy exclusion, and sociocultural devaluation. Centering farmers’ values in policy and designing strategic supports that enable them to act in alignment with their existing relational values may be critical to accelerating the widespread adoption of agroecological practices and advancing a just, equitable transformation of U.S. food systems.
Together, these three studies illuminate how structural forces have shaped and continue to reinforce unsustainable food systems, while identifying potential levers for advancing agroecological transitions in the U.S. Our findings underscore the importance of addressing social and structural determinants of sustainability and point to actionable pathways for change, including regulating environmental claims, scrutinizing ongoing farmland consolidation, and fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration between public health, environmental health, and agricultural stakeholders. Strengthening inquiry and practice in this area could accelerate the transformation toward food systems that restore ecological balance, promote human health, and foster social equity.Population Health Science
Real–time Wireless Sensing at the Edge for In Situ Multi-Robot Deployment
No full textAutonomous robots are increasingly being deployed in complex, unstructured, and often GPS-denied environments to support critical tasks such as search and rescue, wildlife monitoring, and exploration. In these domains, coordination among multiple robots is essential for improving task efficiency, spatial coverage, and resilience. Achieving effective multi-robot coordination, however, hinges on access to global state information such as relative positions, which is often difficult to obtain when robots operate under communication constraints and must rely on local onboard sensing alone. Visual sensors such as LiDAR and cameras offer a means of local observation, but their utility degrades significantly in the presence of occlusions or poor visibility. To overcome these limitations, wireless signals have emerged as a complementary sensing modality. By leveraging signal phase variations during a robot’s motion, it is possible to emulate a virtual antenna array and estimate bearing directions to signal sources. However, integrating this capability into mobile robotic systems, and extending it to multi-robot coordination tasks, presents several key challenges related to sensing accuracy, algorithmic scalability, platform constraints, and real-world deployment. The central objective of this thesis is to establish wireless signal-based directionality sensing as a robust and scalable onboard modality for coordination in in situ multi-robot tasks, particularly under constrained communication and sensing conditions. To realize this, the thesis makes contributions at the intersection of algorithm design, systems development, and real-world validation. In the first part, we develop a decentralized and distributed coordination algorithms for multi-robot exploration and mapping, relying on bearing estimates derived from signal-phase measurements using commercial off-the-shelf Wi-Fi cards. This approach eliminates the need for a shared map or a global coordinate frame, enabling coordination in GPS-denied and infrastructure-sparse environments. The system is validated under strict communication constraints where robots share only minimal information. In the second part, we extend this capability beyond traditional 2D planar or linear motion to unconstrained 3D free-space motion, allowing aerial robots to perform coordination. We introduce algorithmic and systems-level advances that generalize the bearing estimation process to three-dimensional trajectories and integrate them into a software toolbox deployable on mobile robots with onboard sensing and computation. Finally, we broaden the applicability of this sensing modality by demonstrating compatibility with low-power, off-the-shelf fish tracking tags operating in the very high frequency (VHF) band. These tags are widely used in marine wildlife research to enable remote sensing at long distances. We integrate this capability into a lightweight drone platform and demonstrate real world deployment in challenging marine environments while accounting for stringent size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints. Overall, this thesis takes a significant step toward making wireless sensing a core primitive for mo- bile robotic systems. It presents novel algorithmic frameworks, open-source system implementations, and extensive empirical validation—both in simulation and in field deployments—that collectively establish wireless-based directionality as a powerful and general-purpose tool for multi-robot coordination in communication-constrained and unstructured environments.Engineering and Applied Sciences - Computer Scienc
Precision Measurements in Quantum Chromodynamics
Get PDFIn this thesis, I present a series of theoretical developments and precision calculations in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) and collider physics, with a focus on collider observables sensitive to jet substructure. In particular, I propose a new family of observables called multi-point energy correlators and perform precision calculations of them using both fixed-order and effective field theory techniques. On the fixed-order side, I finish the analytic calculations of three-point correlator in super Yang-Mills theory, QCD and Higgs boson decays and extract the asymptotic behaviors in various kinematic limits. Along the way, I also develop analytic techniques to compute physical observables in quantum field theory.
The large logarithms arising from infrared divergences in the collinear limit and coplanar limits are resummed to all orders in perturbation theory through soft-collinear effective theory, improving its convergence and allowing for phenomenological applications. The collinear limit result for proton-proton collisions has been used to extract the value of strong coupling constant at the Large Hadron Collider.
In addition, I also study another collider observable called heavy jet mass at electron-positron collider and apply the effective field theory technique to resum the remaining logarithms in the trijet region, which are referred to as Sudakov Shoulders. Integrating with the existing resummation in the dijet limit, and a renormalon-based model for non-perturbative power corrections, I also perform a global fit with experimental data to extract the strong coupling constant.
To further improve the precision measurements at colliders, I derive a new factorization theorem for small-radius jet production, correcting the missing logarithms in the literature. To validate the factorization, I also develop a Monte Carlo program for calculating jet functions with a jet algorithm at two-loops.
Using this formula, I push the precision of inclusive jet production spectrum at hadron colliders further and significantly improve its agreement with experimental data.Physic
Elevated ALDH Expression Impairs Dendritic Cell Function and Contributes to Immunotherapy Resistance in Bladder Cancer
Get PDFImmunotherapy has significantly improved cancer treatment, but a significant proportion of patients do not respond to therapy. This study investigates the role of aldehyde dehydrogenase 1A1 (Aldh1A1) and its metabolite retinoic acid (RA) in shaping the tumor microenvironment and influencing immunotherapy response in bladder cancer. Analysis of two murine bladder cancer cell lines, BBNF2 and BBNF9, revealed that BBNF9 tumors, which are resistant to anti-PD-1 therapy, express higher levels of Aldh1A1 compared to immunotherapy responsive BBNF2 tumors. In vitro studies demonstrated that RA impairs dendritic cell maturation, IL-12 production, and capacity to stimulate T cells, a process mediated by the retinoic acid receptor RXRα. To further elucidate the role of Aldh1A1 in immunotherapy resistance, Aldh1A1 was knocked out in BBNF9 cells using CRISPR-Cas9. Aldh1A1-deficient BBNF9 tumors exhibited increased dendritic cell infiltration, enhanced trafficking of cross-presenting cDC1s to tumor-draining lymph nodes, and reduced recruitment of immunosuppressive neutrophil subsets. Importantly, Aldh1A1 knockout sensitized BBNF9 tumors to anti-PD-1 therapy, characterized by increased T cell infiltration and exhaustion phenotypes. These findings provide mechanistic insights into how the Aldh1a1-RA axis modulates dendritic cell function and contributes to immunotherapy resistance in bladder cancer.Graduate Educatio
Negotiating Regions, Ordering Sustainability: Planning, Infrastructure Transition, and Socio-legal Agency in the Mexican Anthropocene
No full textThis three-study dissertation explores policy and practice logics of trying to exert multilevel governing influence over transboundary infrastructural and territorial systems, and the ecological underpinnings on which they depend, in contexts of emerging market territories of production, agro-industry, and trade. Across the three studies, in different registers and modes, the project centers the active search for alternative institutional and infrastructural configurations that more frontally grapple with the multi-scale and multi-level entanglements of such regional industrial development projects. To this end, it variously engages with ideas of regionalism and negotiation as motors for cross-scale "creative institutional thinking" as part of broader climate and resource transition planning efforts, themselves taking shape amidst debates about changing industry-society-environment relations. Collectively, the studies are concerned with two broad questions: 1) how are diverse ideas about environmental crisis conditioning the ways in which dilemmas of regional climate transitions are understood and structured in territories of production, agro-industry, and trade; and 2) how do/how should fluid and multi-level ideas of scale, boundary, and subjectivity shape what we think is possible regarding physical/infrastructural interventions, professional practice, policy actions, and the inclusion of relevant stakeholders and affected/responsible parties in response to such transitions? The dissertation pursues these questions via engagement with two regional cases in Mexico, the first concerning policy, planning, and design responses to regional water scarcity and ecosystem degradation in an agro-industrial territory on the very far outskirts of the Mexico City urban agglomeration in Hidalgo state, and the second focused on the nationally-led development of a global trade transshipment and industrial manufacturing corridor project on the Tehuantepec Isthmus in southern Mexico, spanning the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz. Critical socio-legal analysis, integrated with territorial systems governance analysis, is an important component of the broader dissertation frame, specifically in its role as a combined hinge lens for variously broaching structure/agency dilemmas across local-to-global institutional and infrastructural reformulation imperatives amidst cascading climate crises.Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Plannin
Integrating Mobile Health Technology into Sleep Research and Environmental Epidemiology
No full textSleep is fundamental to human health. In aspects of both duration and quality, the majority of adults in the United States suffer from suboptimal sleep. During sleep and during wake, through the simultaneous presence of sensory stimuli, neighborhood-level contextual factors, and structural forces that inform our movement through a city, our environments affect our sleep. Sleep is an outcome that individuals experience on a daily basis and environmental exposures are ubiquitous; therefore, interrogations of the relationship between sleep and environment can be highly impactful for advancing public health. Using sleep data collected in the prospective cohort of the Nurses’ Health Study 3, this dissertation explores how mobile health technologies like consumer wearable sleep trackers and smartphone global positioning systems (GPS), as well as exposome-based approaches that aim to capture an individual’s environmental exposures more comprehensively, can increase the depth of insights from sleep research and environmental epidemiology.
In Chapter 2, we quantified differences in sleep measurement between a consumer wearable and a research-grade accelerometer in free-living adults. We observed modest differences in measurement of total sleep time, time in bed, and sleep efficiency between the consumer wearable (Fitbit) and research-standard actigraphy. In Chapter 3, we examined the association between daily GPS-derived walkability exposure and consumer wearable-measured sleep. We did not observe an association between walkability and sleep duration or sleep efficiency. In Chapter 4, we investigated the associations of multiple environmental exposures assessed at the residential address, including greenness, light at night, noise, neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES), and walkability, with self-reported sleep duration and quality. We observed consistent associations between higher neighborhood SES and reduced odds of adverse sleep health outcomes. We also observed protective associations for light at night, and harmful associations for noise and greenness.
With these three dissertation aims, we examined how measurement tools, study design, and exposure assessment approaches can be improved to advance studies of sleep and the environment. We first demonstrated viability for consumer wearables in epidemiologic studies. Then, we illustrated how they can be embedded into a population-level study alongside smartphone GPS to study an environmental exposure, walkability. Finally, we expanded the range of exposures studied with sleep and identified neighborhood SES as a key environmental contextual factor impacting sleep health in the US. Together, this body of work contributes to our understanding of how modifiable environmental exposures can be leveraged to improve sleep on a population-level.Population Health Science
"Keeping It Real": Authenticity, Mediation, and the Dynamics of the Hiphop Game
Get PDFThis dissertation is an exploration of the slogan “Keep[ing] it Real” within the context of Hiphop culture and rap music. The slogan relates to social and cultural conceptions of authenticity, mediation, vitality, and their dynamic interconnectedness in discourse, interaction, and artistry. While committed to a semiotic anthropological analysis, I stretch the perspective to integrate, ideas, and frameworks drawn from several academic disciplines across the humanities, social, and natural sciences to argue for the centrality of games and play to elucidate the meanings of “keep[ing],” “it,” and “real.” The approach is meant to track, but also to speculate on the future of Hiphop cultural form, health, decline and death more broadly. My evidence comes, primarily, but not exclusively, from Hiphop and African American culture in the United States from the 1980’s to the present day.
The 3 general chapters follow an introductory argument for the relevance of Hiphop, and they precede a synthetic conclusion organized around my three key terms. Chapter 1 attends to the “real” and considers the intellectual history of authenticity and media(ti(zati)on) to propose a new theorization of Hiphop studies, and to recast cultural life in terms of finite and infinite games. Chapter 2 focuses on the “it” to give concrete examples of cultural games. At stake are interpretations of historical episodes and enduring epics of (ant)agonistic competition and critique (“beef”) between rappers and their crews. Of particular interest are the attributes and values that make up existential concerns for Hiphop cultural agents on the foreground of postmodernity. Chapter 3 asks what “keep[ing]” means by ethnographically interrogating the case of female Hiphop artists who have strived for their own immortality by way of battling for respect and power through their artistry.African and African American Studie
Modeling Human Axial Patterning and Segmentation
Get PDFDuring embryonic development, the body plan is established through the precise coordination of cell signaling, fate specification, and morphogenesis across space and time. In vertebrates, this is exemplified by somitogenesis—the sequential formation of somites during axial development—which segments the body and relies on tightly regulated differentiation and morphogenesis. While the molecular players and signaling mechanisms of somitogenesis vary across model organisms, our understanding of human axial morphogenesis has been limited by the inaccessibility of early human embryos. Here, we overcome these challenges by generating axially elongating organoids through the induction of anteroposterior symmetry breaking in spatially coupled epithelial cysts derived from human pluripotent stem cells. These organoids reproducibly recapitulate the formation of a neural tube flanked by presomitic mesoderm that is sequentially and periodically segmented into anteroposteriorly polarized somites. Using a combination of chemical and genetic perturbations, single-cell transcriptomics, and live fluorescent microscopy, we investigate the principles linking the spatiotemporal dynamics of signaling, patterning, and morphogenesis during human axial development. By generating and perturbing organoids that robustly recapitulate the architecture of multiple axial tissues found in human embryos, this work provides a platform to dissect the mechanisms driving human development.Engineering and Applied Sciences - Applied Physic
Disrupting Bipartite Trading Networks: Matching for Revenue Maximization
Get PDFOnline platforms and marketplaces have revolutionized everyday commerce, breaking down many of the physical and geographic barriers that previously prevented trade. Today, these online marketplaces facilitate trillions of dollars of trade and have disrupted a wide variety of markets like retail commerce (Amazon, eBay), transportation (Uber, Lyft), food delivery (Instacart, UberEats), and many others. However, the growing power of these platforms also comes at a cost, with regulatory bodies taking an increasing interest in the competitive practices of these platforms in the past years.
Motivated by the interest in these competitive practices, we study the incentives facing platforms when choosing how to match their users together – e.g., buyers and sellers on Amazon. We model the role of an online platform disrupting a network of n unit-demand buyers and m unit-supply sellers. Each seller can transact with a subset of the buyers whom she already knows outside of the platform, as well as with any additional buyers to whom she is introduced or matched by the platform. Given these constraints on trade, we model prices and transactions as being induced by a competitive equilibrium. The platform's revenue is proportional to the total price of all trades between platform-introduced buyers and sellers. We consider a revenue-maximizing platform and study the effect of the platform on social welfare (the sum of transacting buyers' values for the items they receive).
We show that even when the platform optimizes for revenue, the social welfare is at least an O(log(min{n,m}))-approximation to the ideal welfare, giving non-trivial guarantees for social welfare even in the presence of platform behavior. When the platform can significantly increase social welfare, i.e. when the existing market is inefficient, we give a polynomial-time algorithm that guarantees a logarithmic approximation of the optimal welfare as revenue, also attaining a logarithmic fraction of optimal social welfare in the process. In general, we show that the platform's revenue-maximization problem is computationally intractable, but we provide structural results for revenue-optimal matchings and isolate special cases in which the platform can efficiently compute them.
Finally, we prove significantly stronger bounds for revenue and social welfare in homogeneous-goods markets, where each seller is selling an identical item. We prove that revenue maximization aligns perfectly with welfare maximization in these markets; any revenue-optimal platform matching also maximizes overall social welfare. In inefficient homogeneous-goods markets, we give a constant-factor poly-time approximation algorithm for revenue that also maximizes social welfare.Applied Mathematic