and the late Guoliang Yang, all of whom have helped mold me into the
scientist and person I am today. Prof.~Yang deserves extra credit,
and his ability to shift topics from force spectroscopy to geopolitics
-and back in a minute helped keep things fresh. Thanks to Louis Cruz
+and back in a minute helped keep things fresh. Thanks to Luis Cruz
Cruz for shepherding me through the final stages of my thesis. My lab
partners Marisa Roman and Runcong Liu provided lively discussions and
a (mostly) willing audience for smoke testing my software.