This thesis is compiled from the various projects I completed as a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University Physics Department. The first project studied threshold effects in excited charmed baryon decays. The ...

The yeast knockout collections provide opportunities to perform massively parallel phenotyping of deletion mutants for almost every yeast open reading frame. I used the knockout collection to screen for synthetic lethal ...

Organohalide compounds are one of major pollutants on Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) contaminants candidate list (www.epa.gov.safewater). Chapter 1 represents the overview of environmental detoxification of ...

The sequencing of the human genome ushered in the era of high-throughput biology. Rapid, whole cell analysis is replacing the molecular reductionist approach of the last century. Microarrays are one of the main high-throughput ...

For over fifty years, the unfolded state of proteins had been thought to be featureless and random. Experiments by Tanford and Flory confirmed that unfolded proteins possessed the same dimensions as those predicted of a ...

Dizziness is a complex neurologic symptom reflecting a perturbation of normal balance perception and spatial orientation. It is one of the most common symptoms encountered in general medical practice. Considering the ...

The lungs are constantly exposed to microbial pathogens and environmental stimuli that can trigger time-limited defense responses, generalized persistent inflammatory response or no response at all. Exposure history has ...

In the ¯rst of the essays, I reassess the relationship between premarital cohab- itation and marital instability both theoretically and empirically. It has become a stylized fact that premarital cohabitation is positively ...

We develop a new set of random graph models. The motivation for these mod- els comes from social networks and is based on the idea of common interest. We represent a social network as a graph, in which vertices correspond ...