Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, Mass Communication (Communication)

Although peace journalism is growing as a field of study, there is only a limited number of empirical studies that have systematically tested its effects. This study attempts to fill this lack by testing the effects of peace journalism interventions. The context for this study comes from Sri Lanka, where the ethnic cleavage between the Sinhala and Tamil people are sustained even after the end of the almost 30-year-long civil war. Media, a political propaganda machine during conflicts continue to hold influence in post-conflict societies with its power to disseminate and sustain narratives. Therefore, this study set out to find whether peace journalism values can help reduce the identity gap, which is operationalized as the distance between in-group and out-group attitudes. This research approaches the question innovatively through a role-playing experiment design. This 2 x 3 (Sinhala and Tamil primes x War, Peace, and Control Treatments) completely between-subjects study primed U.S. participants to take on the role of Sri Lankan ethnic identities. The results show that peace interventions are effective in reducing the identity gap among Tamil-primed participants. Findings suggest that the effectiveness of peace journalism interventions rely on minority-majority relations in ethnic asymmetries with power imbalances. This experiment also advances role-playing experiments as a methodology that opens avenues to explore questions among inaccessible populations and/or volatile environments.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Industrial and Systems Engineering

Deep Learning Neural Networks (DLNNs) are flexible modeling methods, capable of generating prediction of both continuous and discrete outputs. These methods continue to make large contributions to people's lives. Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are efficient in handling everyday problems, especially big-data ones. DLNNs have a variety of applications, such as recovering disrupted audio files, self-driving cars, YouTube tumblers, and the list goes on. Nonetheless, the performance of DLNNs and ML algorithms, in general, depends upon a collection of choices made by their users. These decisions can be described using factors called “hyperparameters” or “generalized hyperparameters” and further categorized into three groups. We say “generalized” because some of the groups might not conventionally be optimized over. One group defines the structure of a DLNN, for instance, the number of layers, activation functions, and the layer type. The second group relates to the parameters governing the optimization algorithms to derive the weights which minimize the loss function. Some might argue that optimizing over these hyperparameters endangers convergence on training sets for the weight optimization. Yet, here we consider these hyperparameters to be fully adjustable because we argue that fostering test set (unseen data) prediction accuracy is more important than the surrogate goal of achieving convergence on training sets. The third group of hyperparameters relates to controlling data preparation including feature generation and the sampling of training sets. The problem of optimally designing these generalized hyperparameter settings has received relatively little attention. In addition, DLNNs have large numbers of hyperparameters due to their structure. Here, we focus on optimization examples involving eight generalized hyperparameters. The large number of options makes the associate decision problem for DLNN design difficult. The common approaches for this problem include (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2016, EMC - Mechanical Engineering

Flame spread over solid fuel presents distinctive characteristics in reduced gravity, especially when the forced flow velocity is low. The lack of buoyancy allows a blue, dim flame to sustain where the induced velocity would otherwise blow it off. At such low velocities, a quenching limit exists where the soot content is low and the effect of radiative heat loss becomes important. The objective of this study is to establish a high fidelity numerical model to simulate the growth and extinction of flame on solid fuels in a reduced gravity environment. The great importance of the spectral dependency of the gas phase absorption and emission were discovered through the model development and therefore, Statistical Narrow-Band Correlated-k (SNB-CK) spectral model was implemented. The model is applied to an experimental configuration from the recent space experiment, Burning And Suppression of Solids (BASS) project conducted aboard the International Space Station. A poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) sphere (initial diameter of 2cm) was placed in a small wind tunnel (7.6cm x 7.6cm x 17cm) within the Microgravity Science Glovebox where flow speed and oxygen concentration were varied. Data analysis of the BASS experiment is also an important aspect of this research, especially because this is the first space experiment that used thermally thick spherical samples. In addition to the parameters influencing the flammability of thin solids, the degree of interior heat-up becomes an important parameter for thick solids. For spherical samples, not only is the degree of internal heating constantly changing, but also the existence of stagnation point, shoulder, and wake regions resulting in a different local flow pattern, hence a different flame-solid interaction. Parametric studies using the numerical model were performed against (1) chemical reaction parameters, (2) forced flow velocity, (3) oxygen concentration and (4) amount of preheating (bulk temperature of the solid (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Statistics

The first part of this dissertation is on A-optimal designs for stated choice experiments. Stated choice experiments are widely used in areas such as marketing, planning, transportation, medical care, etc. In such studies, a set of $n$ choice sets is presented to the subjects. Each choice set consists of two or more profiles. Subjects are asked to choose their favorite profile from each choice set. Therefore the outcomes of such studies are discrete and nonlinear models are usually used. The multinomial logit model (MNL) is one of the most frequently used models for stated choice experiments. There are discussions in literature about how to generate optimal designs with the MNL model but primarily with the assumption that all profiles are equally attractive. In this dissertation, a new approach is proposed to generate A-optimal designs by the local linearization of the MNL model. Under the assumption that all options are equally attractive, this approach gives the same A-optimal designs as in the literature under the same setting but in a wider class of designs. This approach is also extendable to more general settings when profiles are unequally attractive. The second part of this dissertation deals with sensitivity analysis for computer experiments. Sensitivity analysis is widely used for identifying influential input variables. Two approaches to evaluating sensitivity statistically are (1) estimating global sensitivity indices based on Sobol' variance decomposition, and (2) evaluating local sensitivity indices based on a gradient measure using a one-at-a-time sampling design. Although both approaches have been studied for (hyper-) rectangular input regions, they have not been considered carefully for the non-rectangular input region setting. In this dissertation, a more flexible gradient-based method is proposed to evaluate sensitivity indices for non-rectangular regions. In addition, the use of variable-length gradients is introduced and the importance of the st (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2013, Philosophy, Applied

My dissertation aims to solve a puzzle, a paradox, and a problem. The puzzle is to explain why people act in uncharacteristic (i.e., seemingly cruel) ways in a number of social psychological experiments, such as Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment, in which 65% of the participants complied with the experimenter's demands to issue a series of increasingly powerful "shocks" to an unwilling recipient. I argue that owing to features of the experimental design participants were made to feel: out of their element, confused, disoriented, pressured, intimidated, and acutely distressed, and that the "experimenter" (actually a confederate) exploited these factors, which is the central reason why the majority of participants complied with his demands despite being reluctant to do so. The paradox is that, although ordinary people seem to be good, bad, or somewhere in between, evidence (again from social psychology) seems to suggest that most people would behave deplorably on many occasions and heroically on many others. This, in turn, suggests the paradoxical conclusion that most people are indeterminate—i.e., no particular character evaluation appears to apply to them. I argue to the contrary that the social psychological evidence fails to support the claim that people would behave deplorably on many occasions. Milgram's participants, for example, faced extenuating circumstances that should mitigate the degree to which they were blameworthy for their actions, and this, in turn, challenges the claim that they behaved deplorably. The problem is that no existing theory has been able to adequately account for the connection between possessing certain character traits and performing certain actions. Commonsense suggests that there is a connection between, for instance, being a truthful person and telling the truth, but it has been challenging for philosophers to capture precisely what the connection is in an empirically defensible way. I argue that there is a strong (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2024, Molecular Medicine

Glomerular podocytes are integral to the filtration barrier needed for kidney function. Their dysfunction is a major contributor to chronic kidney disease, affecting 14% of adults in the U.S. There are no treatment options, and those who have progressed into end-stage kidney (ESKD) disease must resort to dialysis or undergo a kidney transplant to survive. Individuals with recent African ancestry have a 3.5-fold increased risk for ESKD compared with European ancestry. This discrepancy is partly due to two variants (G1 and G2) in the apolipoprotein L1 (APOL1) gene. One high-risk allele provides resistance to African Sleeping Sickness, but two significantly increase the risk of kidney disease in an undetermined manner. We generated induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines containing low (G0) or high-risk (G1, G2) APOL1 variants. APOL1 podocyte (G0, G1, G2) populations were generated using our directed differentiation protocol and had comparable interferon-gamma-stimulated APOL1 and podocyte marker expression. Cytotoxicity assays and transcriptome analysis demonstrated no variant-dependent cell death or differential gene signatures, regardless of genotype. Further analysis revealed that interferon-gamma treatment alone drove the most significant transcriptome shift. A Design of Experiment (DoE) approach was employed based on developmental and kidney biology to identify factors that induce APOL1 expression without IFN-γ stimulation. A synergistic combination of four signaling pathways was identified, providing a novel framework for studying podocyte and APOL1 biology in a human-based model.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology

The landscape of Ohio lakes is a set of spatially distinct human-created habitats (i.e. reservoirs). These lakes, and thus the populations within them, are far younger (average Ohio reservoir age 60-65, range 30 to over 100 years) than the more commonly studied natural lake landscapes formed during the last glacial retreat (9000-14,000 years ago). Isolation and limited migration among these recently created reservoirs and environmental differences among them may set up conditions for population differentiation of life-history traits. Observed life-history differences among reservoir populations may result from consistent differences in environment, i.e. consistent differences in reservoir characteristics and local environmental influences. At the extremes, this could arise from 1) genetically similar populations responding to different environments (i.e. phenotypic plasticity), 2) different environments selecting for different traits, producing genetically different populations, or 3) differences unrelated to the environment, reflecting historical connectivity or stocking. In this study, I aimed to understand how largemouth bass (Micropterus nigricans) populations differ across the young reservoir landscape of Ohio, whether environmental characteristics are influencing this variation, and what mechanisms underlie this variation (e.g., phenotypic plasticity and natural selection). Largemouth bass are ecologically important and have a broad native distribution in North America and a broad naturalized distribution across five continents and across habitat types, making it an ideal species to study phenotypic and genetic spatial variation among populations. To address this, I used historical data from reservoirs across the state to describe patterns in largemouth bass life history traits, test for environmental correlates with those patterns, and group reservoirs based on these characteristics (Chapter 2); estimated the genetic relationships among Ohio populations o (open full item for complete abstract)

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1917, Graduate School

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Media and Communication

This study utilizes an experimental design to explore how different frames impact individuals' perceptions of Muslim women when portrayed in news coverage of protests from the Middle East and North Africa region. Specifically, this research investigates the influence of news media frames on U.S. public perceptions of Muslim women activists, focusing on the impact of the hijab to test various perspectives related to minorities, gender, and stereotypical representations. In addition to examining the effect of text (positive and negative frames) and visuals (no visuals, visuals featuring veiled Muslim women, and visuals of unveiled Muslim women) on perceptions, this study also analyzes the influence of the interaction effect of the text and visual frames. This dissertation employed a factorial design, utilizing Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to conduct an online experiment. Participants were exposed to different news frames describing protests to assess their perceptions of Muslim women activists. One of the key findings of this study highlights the influence of Western-centric notions on perceptions of Muslims. Results demonstrated that positive text frames accompanied by visuals featuring unveiled women facilitated more positive implicit perceptions compared to negative frames. However, exposure to visuals featuring veiled women fostered more support toward Muslim women's protests compared to those exposed to unveiled visuals, regardless of whether the text frame is positive or negative. Additionally, results exhibited that preexisting stereotypes of oppression and victimization, along with interactions with Muslims, emerged as the most influential predictors in shaping perceptions. iv Based on the results, the author urges editors and journalists to carefully consider the goal of their coverage of protest news from the Middle East to ensure accurate and balanced portrayals that contribute to greater social inclusion, diversity, and equity in media discourse. The (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2024, Higher Education (Education)

Quantitative data was collected from 926 traditional-aged postsecondary students, of which most (69%) respondents were upperclassmen in their junior or senior year of college. The findings from this overall research indicate that there has been a shift in how today's Generation Z learners view online and hybrid learning and their ideal way to take college classes. Over half (61%) of the research participants reported hybrid course format as their most ideal way of taking college courses. In addition, the results confirmed that students who engage in positivity practices are generally happier individuals, and there was a positive relationship identified between the status of happiness in students who preferred the hybrid learning method. Finally, when comparing the status of sense of belonging in college students, the research results uncovered a strong association between students' campus involvement and sense of belonging levels. Developing flexible learning cultures, as well as promoting consistent practices of positivity methods and encouraging active campus involvement, are factors associated with higher levels of overall well-being (subjective happiness and sense of belonging) that can lead to healthier student populations, greater academic success, increased retention, and higher graduation rates.

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2024, Philosophy (Arts and Sciences)

Should one be an antirealist about quantum mechanics? This was the fundamental philosophical disagreement between the two giants of twentieth-century physics: Niels Bohr the antirealist and Albert Einstein the realist. The prevailing orthodoxy in the physics community still favors Bohr and antirealism, but a fierce minority (including such figures as David Bohm, John Bell, and Tim Maudlin) champion Einstein and realism. The controversy continues today. This paper weighs in on the issue, by offering a critique of antirealism, in the context of an important quantum phenomenon: single-photon interference.

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2024, Psychology-Industrial/Organizational

Feedback orientation is a person's general receptivity to feedback; although early theorizing about the construct described how it should change over time in the context of ongoing performance management experiences, the extant literature has largely neglected to study whether changes to feedback orientation do in fact occur. This study involves an experiment that was designed to improve participant feedback orientation, and evaluated how that change might be influenced by feedback environment, leader-member exchange, and perceived organizational support. A longitudinal study of feedback orientation was conducted to assess the construct weekly for four weeks, and discontinuous growth curve modeling was used to evaluate whether the experimental intervention induced an increase to feedback orientation that was greater than what would be expected from the normal weekly fluctuations of the construct. Results from an online study of working adults conducted on Prolific revealed that the intervention successfully produced an increase in participants' feedback orientation, relative to both pre-intervention fluctuations and to the impact of a control intervention. Furthermore, initial feedback orientation and leader-member exchange were found to moderate the size of the feedback orientation boost that was produced by the experimental intervention, such that the boost was larger for those with lower initial feedback orientations and for those with higher initial leader-member exchanges. Feedback environment, meanwhile, moderated feedback orientation dynamics such that participants who perceived higher levels of feedback environment maintained higher levels of feedback orientation post-intervention for two weeks after the intervention. These results offer clear insights into feedback orientation dynamics and how they are impacted by critical feedback events, feedback environments, and leader-member exchange.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Business Administration

This dissertation centers on exploring social sustainability, the human and societal elements of sustainability, in operations management. In the first essay, I particularly focus on the health and safety dimension in the context of warehouse operations. I study how managers can jointly promote safety and completion time through managerial implementations such as performance feedback and best practice sharing. I adopt a time and motion laboratory experiment, where safety is measured as a reduction of musculoskeletal disorder risk, captured through markerless motion capture technology. My findings suggest that the tradeoff between safety and completion time can be mitigated even in the presence of time-specific priorities. In the second essay, I expand my research scope to various dimensions of social misconduct, such as forced labor, child labor, discrimination, harassment, violations of health and safety, and wage working hour conditions. I empirically explore whether news articles on each social misconduct dimension negatively impact the firm market value. Text mining is applied to classify the articles published from 1990 to 2019 on social misconduct within publicly traded firms and their supply chains. I find that the magnitude and the significance of the impact of social misconduct differ across dimensions and whether it occurs at the focal firm or the supply chain. While the effect is overall short-lived, my findings hint that policies geared toward specific social misconduct may mitigate its loss of penalization. Finally, in the third essay, I conduct a literature review on corporate social responsibility and sustainability, to distinguish social sustainability as an independent domain. This work is motivated by studies often mixing social sustainability with other close concepts such as corporate social responsibility. I suggest that recognizing the unique domain of social sustainability would facilitate future scholars' contributions to this research in ope (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Evolution, Ecology and Organismal Biology

Great and Lesser Prairie-Chickens are part of the genus Tympanuchus, who are known for their rapid foot-stomping behavior that creates a non-vocal drumming noise and their bright bare-part ornaments with ultraviolet reflectance. Both of these non-vocal components are prominent during their courtship displays along with other morphology and vocal traits. Females and other males may use multiple male signals from their display to assess multiple components of the male quality for mate choice and competition purposes. The central theme of this work is to investigate two non-vocal signals under the mechanisms of sexual selection intersexual mate choice and intrasexual competition. Signals are usually only considered under one of the mechanisms, typically intersexual mate choice or their impacts on social behavior has not been considered under any context. In Chapter 2, we investigated if foot-stomping could be integral in the communication of both the Greater and Lesser Prairie-Chicken, by using high-speed video cameras and recorders. We found that foot-stomping rate and duration increased with females' presences and only foot-stomping rate differ between the two species with Greater Prairie-Chickens having a higher rate than Lesser Prairie-Chickens. Since we used high-speed videos, we were able to collect simple kinematic measurements and found that both species are lifting their feet up higher when stomping when females are present. Since there was a difference in foot-stomping features when females were present/absent, in chapter 3 we investigated whether foot-stomping would increase the likelihood of a male to successfully mate, by using discrete choice modeling in Lesser Prairie-Chickens only. We added foot-stomping traits (rate and duration) with other behavioral, morphological, territorial, and color variables to run the discrete choice model. We found males increased their likelihood of successfully mating if they had a larger comb, increased aggressive behavior (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, Physics

Directed flow ($v_1$) describes the collective sideward motion of produced particles and nuclear fragments in heavy-ion collisions.It carries information on the very early stage of the collision, especially at large pseudorapidity (in the fragmentation region), where it is believed to be generated during the nuclear passage time. Directed flow therefore probes the onset of bulk collective dynamics during thermalization, providing valuable experimental guidance to models of the pre-equilibrium stage. Model studies have indicated that directed flow is sensitive to the shear viscosity of the hot QCD matter. Furthermore, directed flow has demonstrated strong constraining power on the initial baryon stopping and can serve as a probe for the equation of state in heavy-ion collisions. Past measurements have indicated that the directed flow signal is most pronounced at the forward(backward) (pseudo)rapidity. Therefore, any sensitivity to the initial state, hydrodynamic evolution, or the equation of state may be more evident at large (pseudo)rapidities. In 2018, the Event Plane Detector (EPD, $2.1 <|\eta|< 5.1$) was installed in STAR and used for the Beam Energy Scan phase-II (BES-II) data taking. The combination of EPD and high-statistics BES-II data enables us to extend the $v_{1}$ measurement to the forward and backward $\eta$ regions. In this work, we present the measurement of $v_{1}$ over six units of $\eta$ in Au+Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=$19.6 and 27 GeV using the STAR EPD. EPD is a pre-shower scintillator detector mainly designed for reconstructing the event plane angle. In order to use it as the particles of interest region rather than the reference, an entire new method was developed to ensure the accuracy of this analysis. The results of the analysis at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=$19.6 GeV exhibit excellent consistency with the previous PHOBOS measurement, while elevating the precision of the overall measurement to a new level. The increased precision of the measureme (open full item for complete abstract)

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2023, College-Conservatory of Music: Flute

This study will examine the guidance on shaping a proper embouchure and aperture, as well as the suggested exercises provided by flute pedagogies. Next, the perioral muscles, which are involved in forming an embouchure, will be studied. Furthermore, muscle fatigue and embouchure dystonia, which may occur during embouchure formation, will be reviewed. Subsequently, the study will investigate how the shapes of the embouchure and aperture vary based on dynamic levels and pitches through empirical studies. It will analyze available resources and highlight the lack of science-based studies in this area. Finally, the study will discuss suggestions for further research.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Public Health

Background: Social belonging is critical for health and well-being. Threatened belonging or feeling “othered” can impair coping, reduce academic achievement, and increase anxiety. Structurally-disadvantaged students are at greater risk for experiencing chronic threats to their belonging, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Current interventions to promote belonging tend to be burdensome for participants. Games may be an effective and less burdensome alternative to promote belonging, but little is known about the application of games as a viable public health intervention strategy. Objectives: Study objectives are twofold. First, to assess the feasibility and acceptability of developing a game-based intervention to promote belonging among structurally-disadvantaged students. Second, to test whether obfuscating, or embedding, pro-social messages in the game will improve uptake of the messages by reducing message reactance. Methods: In focus groups, 16 structurally-disadvantaged students shared their experiences of social belonging in college. Participants were also shown a prototype of the game-based intervention. Comments and suggestions for improving the game were collected. These experiences and suggestions were then analyzed for themes and translated into updated content for the game. The updated game was then tested with a second sample of 113 students who were randomized to receive one of two versions of the game; one of which had the embedded messages, and the other version with more overt messages. Social belonging was measured pre- and post-activity. Satisfaction and message reactance were also measured. Results: Participants reported experiencing threats to their belonging in the classroom, in the dorm, and around campus, perpetrated most frequently by faculty members and peers. Access to mentors from shared demographic backgrounds and membership in residential learning communities appeared to mitigate negative belonging experiences. When fe (open full item for complete abstract)

PHD, Kent State University, 2023, College of Education, Health and Human Services / School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies

This formative experiment aimed to examine how teachers can enhance the quality of first-draft writing in the content and discourse of third-grade writers across narrative, informational, and opinion writing using an oral language intervention termed verbal rehearsal. The verbal rehearsal intervention allowed students to experiment with their writing orally by “saying” their intended message aloud several times before committing words to the page. This study was grounded in theoretical approaches to writing synthesized from cognitive, sociocultural, and critical humanizing perspectives. A case study was embedded within the formative experiment and included nine third-grade focal student participants from one writing workshop classroom. Data was collected from multiple sources: 1) video and audiotaped verbal rehearsal conferences, 2) student video reflections, 3) video and audiotaped follow-up teacher-student interviews, 4) completed student pieces, and 5) reflective teacher journal. Information from these data sources was used to determine the intervention's effectiveness and efficiency in meeting the pedagogical goal of enhanced first-draft writing. Findings revealed that progress could be made toward the goal by making several modifications to the intervention based on enhancing and inhibiting factors. One of the most considerable progressions of the intervention were the writers' ability to elaborate and revise their oral composition by transforming their initial content for writing through a recursive cycle of oral revision until their ideas were ready for a commitment to the page. Additionally, the intervention allowed the writers to focus on and repeat key details throughout the rehearsal process, bringing cohesiveness to their writing.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Communication

Perceived character depth is a concept relevant for understanding and predicting audience responses to narrative media, yet it has been largely unexplored in the field of media psychology. Through a careful review of diverse literatures, the current work offers a formal conceptualization of character depth as the extent to which a character's textual exposition evokes a detailed and multi-faceted mental conception of a character's psyche, behavior, and experience. After devising a series of items to measure character depth, this work then presents a series of experimental studies designed to test various aspects of validity of the proposed measurement scale and to test a causal path model of the relationship between character depth and processes specified by affective disposition theory (see Zillmann, 2000). Study 1 uses a known-groups approach and confirmatory factor analysis to test the predictive validity and measurement model of a 20-item proposed perceived character depth scale. Selective item retention results in a 6-item scale with excellent model fit. Studies 2 and 3 lend additional support to the validity of this 6-item scale's measurement model through tests of the scale in two different narrative contexts, both of which result in excellent model fit. Across Studies 1-3, evidence emerges of the convergent and discriminant validity of the scale in relation to other character perception variables. Study 4 applies this new measure in a 2 X 3 between-subjects experimental design that manipulates both character depth and character moral behavior independently. Results show that character depth impacts disposition formation and anticipatory responses above and beyond audience reactions to moral behavior. This finding has important theoretical implications for affective disposition theory (Zillmann, 2000), indicating that perceived character depth may serve as an additional predictor of disposition formation not specified in the original theory. Future research d (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Physics

Micromachines open new and exciting avenues for experimentation by providing the tools to directly examine and manipulate microscopic environments. This work presents two projects that utilize magnetically actuated DNA origami constructs as micromachines. A third project focuses on development of a system for simultaneous control and translation of multiple individual magnetic microbeads to predetermined positions on a plane. The work presented here demonstrates the power and utility of magnetically controlled micromachinery. DNA origami is a powerful tool for the construction of micromachines thanks to its modifiability, stability, and ability to polymerize into larger structures. A lever arm, formed via polymerization of individual DNA origami bricks and attached to a surface on one end, is one such micromachine. This DNA origami lever is a basic tool that is here used for measuring the magnetic properties of a single superparamagnetic microbead. The lever is actuated by a superparamagnetic microbead attached to the opposite end which enables controlled movement of the lever about the surface attachment point through external magnetic fields. Two potential methods utilizing such DNA levers for determining the magnetic moment of a single discrete microbead, each with their own merits and drawbacks, were developed. The resulting magnetic moments were consistent with magnetic moment values expected from previous experiments. Additionally, these levers offer a potential method for examining the interactions between neighboring superparamagnetic microbeads. In the second DNA construct, a magnetically actuated DNA origami hinge was adapted as a device towards measuring individual molecular bond strengths. The hinge was customized to allow for attachment of specific interacting molecules to the top and bottom arms of the hinge. By closing the hinge with a molecule or molecules that attach to the upper and lower arm, the bond strength holding the hinge closed could (open full item for complete abstract)