To Bozenna Pasik-Duncan, whose example, encouragement, and friendship inspires me to continue along this academic path. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As with any work of this nature, this could not have been done alone. I'd like to thank all of the members of the Zochowski lab, especially Rhonda Dzakpasu for teaching me the cell culture protocol, Jane Wang and Eva Olariu for their work on the structural ...

Most neocortical neurons formed during embryonic brain development arise from radial glial cells which communicate, in part, via ATP mediated calcium signals. Although the intercellular signalling mechanisms that regulate radial glia proliferation are not well understood, it has recently been demonstrated that ATP dependent intracellular calcium release leads to an increase of nearly 100% in ov...

Numerical differentiation formulas that yield consistent least squares parameter estimates from sampled observations of linear, time invariant higher order systems have been introduced previously by Duncan et al. The formulas given by Duncan et al. have the same limiting system of equations as in the continuous time case. The formula presented in this note can be characterized as preserving asy...