Silicone wristbands are easy-to-wear passive samplers that have been readily adapted into environmental health studies since first reported in 2014. Wristbands can be worn during normal daily activities and sequester a wide range of bioavailable organic chemicals. This dissertation includes a thorough review of silicone wristband technology, as well as...
Mathematical modeling plays a pivotal role in understanding the mechanism of radiation-induced cellular effects, and also in quantifying the radiation risk to the cell. However, there are still compelling challenges facing the conventional modeling in radiobiology, such as lacking a generalized theory structure of quantifying target effect and non-target effect...
Childhood cancers are rare diseases that affect 188 children in Texas for every million born. Leukemia is the most common childhood cancer and accounts for roughly one third of childhood cancer cases. However, it is estimated that only 10% of childhood cancer cases can be explained by known risk factors....
Several solar energy models exist, but all models must balance: computational runtime, light complexity, and model output volume. These models span the spectrum of simplistic global solar energy equation sets to complex light ray-tracing models. Spatiotemporally inaccurate representations of solar energy may cause compounding simulation effects and introduce unknown modeling...
The rapid decline of marine ecosystems worldwide and the failure of traditional single species management pushed for the development of ecosystem-based conservation measures such as marine protected areas (MPA) to slow the loss of marine biodiversity. One approach to MPA creation advocates targeting marine megafauna (e.g., marine mammals, seabirds, sharks,...
The specific geography of individual wine growing regions has long been understood to be a significant factor in predicting both a region’s success in producing high quality grapes, and the resulting demand for wines produced from that region's fruit. In the American wine industry, American Viticultural Areas (AVAs) are increasingly...
In the last decade regulatory bodies have begun to implement standards to protect populations of non-human biota (NHB) from the consequences of radiation exposure. This is a departure from previous regulatory frameworks which were concerned only with protecting man. The implementation of these new standards has started an ongoing discussion...
West Nile Virus (WNV), a vector-borne disease continues to be a serious threat to public health in the United States, particularly in the Southwest region. While all the states in the U.S. experienced a decreasing trend of WNV disease in 2010, the state of Arizona experienced a sharp increase from...
The Safe Drinking Water Act ensures that public systems provide water that meets health standards. However, no such protection exists for millions of Americans who obtain water from private wells. Concern for safety is warranted as most wells draw from underground aquifers, and studies demonstrate that groundwater is affected by...
Current state-of-the-art environmental, clinical, and in-vivo radiation sensing systems utilizing various inorganic and tissue-equivalent plastic scintillators are not user friendly, suffer from electron-beam-generated noise, and are difficult to deploy successfully for real-time dosimetry. A robust, real-time detection system using different scintillating materials coupled to solid-state detectors by optical fibers is...