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To my mother iii Acknowledgements I thank my advisor Svetlana Shinkareva, for your great mentoring, for the attention, guidance, caring, for the encouragement and enthusiasm you have dedicated during and beyond the course of the dissertation work. I thank all my committee members for your support and encouragement that helped me greatly towards completing my dissertation. Doug, I thank you for your attention and instructions for both my written comps and this dissertation. Rutvik, your admirable work in this field inspires me, and I thank you for your generous help and guidance on this work, particularly Chapter 5. Dirk, I have always valued our discussions. Your insightful comments make this dissertation more complete. I thank Dr. Amit Almor for the encouragement and guidance on the literature review. I thank Usha Tadimeti for providing the preprocessed data from her thesis. I thank my peers and friends, Laura Baucom, Matthew Facciani, and Julie Conder, for thei