First and foremost, I would like to express my sincerest thanks and gratitude to Dr. Kivanc Ekici for his encouragement and belief during my tenure as an undergraduate, his unwavering support as my graduate advisor, and the infectious passion which he has always brought to his work. I am similarly indebted to Dr. Jim Freels of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for his constant guidance and mentorship throughout this project. Special thanks as well to Dave Renfro of ORNL for agreeing to fund my work. All thesis-related work was funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Further information can be obtained at http://nnsa.energy.gov/ Additional thanks to Dr. Rao Arimilli and Dr. Jay Frankel both for acting as members of my committee and for contributing to the invaluable lessons, both curriculum-related and not, that I have learned at the University of Tennessee. I wish to express gratitude to those peers who have become close officemates and even closer friends. Thanks to Franklin Curtis for showing me my way around a Linux terminal, to Emily Clark for agreeing with whatever I had to complain about on any given day, and to Kelsey Turley whose unrelenting work ethic kept me in the library on many occasions much later than I would have stayed on my own. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents Mike and Leigh and my siblings Chloe and Henry for their steadfast support and loving encouragement in every endeavor I set myself to.