I first and foremost need to express my appreciation and gratitude to my advisor Gregg Franklin, without whom this thesis would not have been possible. I could not have hoped for a more supportive and understanding advisor to help me achieve this goal, especially under the unusual circumstance of finishing this degree out of state. Gregg spared no time nor effort (even while on his retirement RV trips) to help improve this document, and me as a physicist. I am lucky to have had the opportunity to work with Gregg.Second, I need to express my love and thanks to my family. I experienced what was the biggest personal difficulty in my life while in the middle of this degree, and without the support and love from my parents, sisters, uncles, aunts, and cousins, this thesis may not have been possible.Next, I would like to thank the DVCS collaboration. Julie Roche and Carlos Munoz Camacho were extremely helpful in helping me understand DVCS and the analysis needed to produce this thesis. Maxime Defurne especially fielded many of my emails, and also spared no effort in responding with helpful advice and knowledge. I have also greatly enjoyed working with my fellow PhD students in the collaboration, Frederic Georges, Bishnu Karki, Salina Ali, Mongi Dlamini, and Hashir Rashad. I'd like to thank especially Bishnu for being so helpful with the troubling DIS analysis, and Hashir for being such a help with debugging problems with my DVCS fitting scripts.I would like to thank all of my colleagues and friends from Carnegie Mellon. I am especially grateful to Larisa Thorne, with whom I shared the adventure of living in Newport News, VA and taking shifts at Jefferson Lab (before she abandoned us all for Germany ). It was a pleasure sharing an office with her and Juan Carlos Cornejo, and spending time with the rest of the medium energy grad students and post-docs.I made some of my greatest friends while in graduate school, with some of the brightest and kindest people I have ever met. I enjoyed(?) sharing the dungeon office with Tori Merten and Evan Tucker, and I will never forget our desperate struggles to finish our E&M homework. I am also grateful to Jake Fallica, and the five miserable days we spent trying to figure out what Quantum Optomechanics was, and how we would ever pull off the successful pronunciation of micro-toroidal oscillator. I will never forget the countless nights of playing board games and watching Games of Thrones with these three people and their partners, and their friendship was invaluable during this time in my life. Without their support and friendship, finishing this degree would not have been nearly as happy of a time in my life.