Night is an extraordinary resource. Unlike air, water, or soil, nighttime is a spatio-temporal phenomenon, which leads to many crucial roles. It provides refuge to wildlife species, triggers hormonal and behavioral responses among a wide variety of organisms, and serves as an essential migratory backdrop for species that navigate by...
Dietary nitrate (NO3-), consumed primarily from leafy green and root vegetables, lowers blood pressure, improves vascular function and aerobic exercise performance. This performance-enhancing effect of nitrate supplementation is largely attributed to the increased bioavailability of the signaling molecule, nitric oxide (NO). Nitric oxide is a ubiquitous free radical signaling molecule...
Social scientists have studied people's responses to disasters for many decades, and behavioral commonalities and variations are summarized in different mental schemes/models in disaster studies. Integrating those findings from social science into evacuation simulation can improve simulation accuracy and eventually better support decision-making and disaster preparedness. However, this kind of...
Gene regulation is a complex mechanism that controls the spatial and temporal expression of genes in a living cell. My dissertation studies focus on two problems. First, tissue-specific gene expression prediction from DNA sequence and chromatin state, and second, the accurate discovery of small over-represented regulatory circuits in gene regulatory...
Pasture legumes that persist under challenging agro-ecological conditions are crucial to ensure high lamb growth rates in dryland pastures. Pasture and lamb production from white clover (TF-Whc), birdsfoot trefoil (TF-Bft), balansa clover (TF-Bc) and subterranean clover (TF-Sc) planted with tall fescue either as binary mixtures or as a diverse combination...
Drought events have been shown to impact species distributions and are predicted to increase in frequency as the climate changes. As this occurs, ecologists predict species distributions will shift dependent upon species ability to track climate. These shifts in species distribution are expected to be particularly acute in arid and...
Gender has been the subject of study in engineering education and science social research for decades. However, little attention has been given to transgender and gender nonconforming (TGNC) experiences or perspectives. The role of cisgender or gender conforming status has not been investigated nor considered in prevailing frameworks of gender...
The interface between a biofilm and the underlying substrate to which it is attached is challenging to study. Currently, available methods of studying this microenvironment have not been able to record data in real-time over a time period in the range of days. To address this challenge, we report the...
Managers of U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Bald Knob National Wildlife Refuge (Refuge) in central Arkansas want to provide sufficient habitat resources to meet its population objectives for wintering waterfowl. Nutrient reserves acquired during the wintering period appear to support spring migration and subsequent reproductive success for some species,...
Ph.D. candidate Qi Wei's thesis consists of two projects: Chemotherapy Project: a study based on the research paper "Predicting chemotherapy response of various cancer types using a variational auto-encoder approach" submitted to the bioRxiv preprint archive and accepted by the BMC bioinformatics; and Wound Monitor Project: implementing and assessing analytics...