The rapid integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into clinical practice has driven advances in disease classification, segmentation, and clinical decision support. However, the complexities of medical data pose a challenge to widespread adoption. The rarity of medical conditions, ethical considerations, and varying acquisition protocols leads to limited and noisy data. The time-intensive process […]

Digital technologies have made large-scale online interaction a central part of how people communicate, connect, and work together. Yet scaling often comes at the cost of depth, and interactions can become superficial and chaotic, drifting away from the richer interactional contexts of small-scale or in-person settings that support trust and meaningful exchange, and that make […]

Live-cell fluorescence microscopy enables high-resolution, non-invasive imaging and optical stimulation of biological processes, yet existing systems are often prohibitively expensive, mechanically complex, and poorly suited for wide field-of-view, high-speed, multi-channel experiments—particularly those involving optogenetics. To address these limitations, I developed a low-cost, modular fluorescence microscope constructed from 3D-printed mechanical components and off-the-shelf optics. I also […]

Open-domain question answering (ODQA) systems come with diverse challenges — ranging from resolving conflicting information to interpreting figurative expressions and representing meaning in a human-understandable form. This dissertation presents three complementary contributions toward building more robust and interpretable QA systems. First, we investigate QA model performance on figurative language. Introducing FigurativeQA, a benchmark of yes/no […]

Transfer RNA (tRNA) modifications are essential for structural integrity, decoding fidelity, and stress adaptation, yet their dynamics across phylogenetically distinct archaeal species and their functional roles during stress remain incompletely understood. This dissertation aims to address some of these gaps through a multi-scale investigation that spans the evolutionary dynamics, stress-responsive functions, and direct detection of […]

Local ancestry methods classify the segments of DNA inherited from a specific ancestry (e.g., African, East Asian, European), improving analyses of admixed populations. Aim 1 applies ancestry-specific analysis to more than 1000 whole genome sequences across Polynesia, revealing strong bottlenecks in the voyagers who settled both Hawaiʻi and Rapa Nui, and confirming frequencies of Mendelian […]