A complex projective variety is called rational if there is a Zariski-open subset on which it is isomorphic to a Zariski-open subset of projective space. There has been a huge amount of progress and activity in determining when varieties are rational. One the other hand, one can ask: given a projective variety whose nonrationality is known, can we measure how far it is from being rational?
Measures of irrationality provide an answer to the question above; they are birational invariants that offer an orthogonal viewpoint to questions concerning rationality. They have recently gained interest, in part due to work of Bastianelli, De Poi, Ein, Lazarsfeld, and Ullery [BDELU] on hypersurfaces of large degree. In this dissertation, we make advances in the study of measures of irrationality on abelian surfaces and codimension two complete intersections, which answer a few questions posed in [BDELU].

