Enzymatic hydrolysis is a critical process in the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass into biofuels and biochemicals. Achieving high efficiencies and productivity during the enzymatic hydrolysis of biomass is the key for the commercially viable process. Downstream processing challenges require high product titers which in turn require the use of high...
Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) is one of the latest engineered wood products to show promising structural features for a variety of structural purposes including resisting lateral loads. For CLT to be widely adopted, its modal behavior needs to be fully evaluated through experimental and numerical methods. It is important to the...
The story of Leo Szilard has not been told in its full complexity. This is especially so of the role imagination played in Szilard’s worldview. Szilard, like many other scientists in the mid-twentieth century, worked on the Manhattan Project. Like these other wartime participants, the work and relationships formed during...
This research focuses on receiver architectures which enable better spectral eciency
by handling blockers in the same spectral range as the signal. The presence of
such blockers, without the use of blocker cancelling/ltering techniques leads to gain
compression and hence, consequent performance degradation of receivers leading to
reduced spectrum...
The topics in this dissertation center on the snow processes that dominate mountain environments in the Western U.S. and Alaska, particularly in locations lacking long-term observational datasets or locales that are difficult to access in-person. Some are currently glacierized or have been glaciated in the recent past. Each of the...
Small molecule drugs have been instrumental in our fight against diseases, beginning when some of the earliest ancient cultures used plant remedies to treat illnesses. More recently, the skill of isolating and characterizing the active ingredients within bioactive plants and microbial extracts has led to the isolation and design of...
Surface characterization of materials is widely utilized over a range of disciplines and essential to the development of new materials, technology, or processes. Metal oxide nanoclusters have shown promise as potential new generation photoresist materials for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) nanolithography. Organotin clusters have been proposed as potential candidates for resist...
As obligate intracellular parasites, viruses rely on host machinery for their own reproduction. Viruses are therefore required to interact with a wide variety of host proteins, despite limitations in viral genome size. The most parsimonious method of success is to hijack central and essential proteins, known as hub proteins. LC8...
Topology optimization (TO) is a mathematical method to find the optimal size, shape and connectivity of a domain under specified conditions, and has had many applications in engineering design. However, challenges remain in realizing TO as an effective design tool for many design situations. Uncertainty is ubiquitous in nature and...
Information Foraging Theory (IFT) has successfully explained how people seek information in various domains, in turn, informing the design of several tools and information-intensive environments. However, prior research has not explored foraging in the presence of several, very similar variants of the same artifact. Such variants are commonplace in several...
Part I of this dissertation includes the chronological synthetic background of mandelalide A as well as the synthesis of the C1-C14 glycosylated southern subunit of mandelalide. A key aspect of the synthesis includes a novel silver-catalyzed cyclization (AgCC) of a propargylic benzoate to construct the substituted cis-pyran ring system present...
On social media platforms and on blog sites, disordered behavior as a lifestyle choice is a growing trend that supports and promotes behaviors related to self-harm and anorexia. Web content advocating self-harm and anorexia can be found easily through search engines or can be concealed in the social media sphere...
Building software systems that adapt to the changing environment is challenging. Developers cannot anticipate all the changes in advance, and even if they could, the effort required to handle such situations is too onerous for practical purposes. Self Adaptive Software (SAS) adapts itself as per changing environment. The area of...
While robotic systems may have once been relegated to structured environments and automation style tasks, in recent years these boundaries have begun to erode. As robots begin to operate in largely unstructured environments, it becomes more difficult for them to effectively interpret their surroundings. As sensor technology improves, the amount...
Situated cognition theory emphasizes the role that social and material contexts have on learning and knowledge application. Several studies of engineering workplace environments have noted differences between the social and material contexts of the workplace and those of undergraduate engineering education. No existing research has studied the social and material...
The orb web is a multipurpose structure---serving as a home for its inhabitant spider, as a prey capture device, and as a physical extension of the spider’s sensing abilities. Biologists are particularly interested in the spider’s ability to locate prey trapped in its web by sensing the vibrations induced from...
In this dissertation, we attempt to overcome the "curse of dimensionality" inherent to radiation diffusion kinetics problems by employing a novel reduced order modeling technique known as proper generalized decomposition (PGD). After verifying a proposed PGD algorithm and associated solvers through various tests, we explore its performance for computing reduced-order...
Over the last decades, CMOS-integrated sensors have made impressive progress in performance, form-factor, and energy-efficiency for various applications such as imaging, physical/chemical sensing, bio/health monitoring. In the era of the artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet-of-things (IoT), such CMOS-integrated sensors are essential for massive and comprehensive data acquisition, where sensing...
Student engagement has been the focus of much engineering education research, in large part due to its ties to student learning. Widely considered to be a meta-construct, student engagement is often broken down into behavioral, emotional, and cognitive components. Reasons for ongoing research on student cognitive engagement are twofold: educators...
Dental plaque is one of the well-characterized biofilms in the human body. Oral bacterial species play vital roles in maintaining healthy bacterial homeostasis as well as causing oral infections. Many of the oral diseases are caused by opportunistic pathogens, and therefore, the bacterial metabolic activities become important in dictating their...
Harvesting energy from ambient sources can provide power autonomy to energy efficient electronics and sensors. The last decade has seen a multitude of ways to scavenge energy from various sources like solar, thermal, electromagnetic, electrostatic, piezo-electric and many more. Thermal energy from human body heat is ubiquitous and can be...
The corrosion resistance of steels and nickel based alloys was investigated in supercritical CO2 (sCO2). Two types of experiments were conducted. The first set of experiments were conducted in a low temperature aqueous environment to simulate conditions that would exist in direct sCO2 power cycle low temperature heat exchangers. The...
The modeling and analysis of laboratory-generated nonlinear intermediate- to deep-water wave fields, using existing wavemaker theories and analysis tools, is one of the most challenging tasks in ocean science and engineering. On one hand, harmonics function (sine and cosine) -based wavemaker theories result in an inherent (linear) instability of the...
Ring amplifiers (ringamps) have shown excellent power efficiency in the latest state-of-the-art analog to digital converters (ADCs). This thesis describes circuit techniques to ensure robust operation of ringamps using standard analog techniques and proportional-integral-derivative(PID) controller analogy. Large-signal and small-signal analysis of a ringamp are performed using simple RC settling and...
Soil instability from tsunami hazards causes substantial damage to coastal infrastructure (e.g., the damage caused by the 2011 Great East Japan Tsunami, or the Heisei Tsunami). Tsunamis are unpredictable, so it is difficult to obtain field-scale measurements. Simulating tsunamis in a laboratory setting is therefore important to further understanding of...
This dissertation seeks to contribute to a growing body of research on student outcomes by way of a public health perspective examining the intersection of education policy and adolescent mental health and well-being. The conceptual approach underpinning this project rests on the key theoretical assumption that education policy, shaped at...
Humans are remarkably efficient in learning by interacting with other people and observing their behavior. Children learn by watching their parents’ actions and mimic their behavior. When they are not sure about their parents demonstration, they communicate with them, ask questions, and learn from their feedback. On the other hand,...
The prevalence of sexual violence among the college student population has become a significant public health issue. The real magnitude of the problem is unknown since most students do not report incidents of sexual violence. However, some studies have estimated that 1 in 5 students experience sexual violence while in...
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are an emerging chemical class of concern. Recently in the United States, Health Advisory Limits for two PFAS in drinking water were established for perfluorooctane sulfonate and perfluorooctanoate in drinking water (set to 70 ng/L combine concentration) by the EPA. Because of PFAS mobility, persistence,...
Plant pathogens in the genus Phytophthora are known to cause disease on field crops, nursery plants, and forest trees. The best known example probably is Phytophthora infestans, which triggered the infamous Irish potato famine. Other important Phytophthora species include: P. ramorum (sudden oak death pathogen), P. sojae (soybean root rot...
Improving the methods used for the detection and estimation of fissile material mass content is essential to nuclear security and safeguards to ensure special nuclear material (SNM) accountability, control, safety and security. With the continued expansion of the nuclear industry and the need for safe management of spent fuel, improving...
Learning Analytics and other branches of Educational Research such as Computing Education Research (CER) implicitly assume that students, especially college students, have no barriers to access learning platforms or software packages. This assumption may be attributed to such pervasive beliefs such as "everyone has a device", or "everyone can access...
With the increasing international focus on transboundary cooperation as a part of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Framework, there is global recognition of transboundary water cooperation as a tool for improved governance and management of transboundary surface and groundwaters. Yet, there is not an agreed upon definition of transboundary water...
Despite numerous techniques for measuring and estimating water depth, bathymetry in the nearshore zone is notoriously difficult to map. Dangerous sea states, noisy environmental conditions, and expensive survey operations, particularly in remote areas, contribute to the difficulties of obtaining data along the coast. Global datasets, derived mainly from satellite altimetry...
Metal-oxo clusters are discrete molecular metal-oxides. Most metals form numerous cluster compounds that can be ligated, unligated, charged or neutral, controlling their solubility in water and/or organic solvents. They are important species to study reaction pathways from the monomeric building units to the bulk metal oxides, and have many application...
Resilient water, food, and energy management strategies for an ever-growing population and changing environment depends on our understanding of water and carbon cycles from local to global scales. Fluxes of water and carbon are coupled by photosynthesis and plant transpiration cycles the largest fraction of terrestrial water from the land...
Roadway departure crashes accounted for 18,275 fatal crashes in 2017 across the United States (Jones et al. 2017). Rumble strips (RS) provide audible and haptic interior alert when a vehicle is departing the roadway reducing run-off-the road crashes. Although inexpensive to install, and easy to maintain, RS are not installed...
Existing strategies and policies have emphasized the need for cross-sector collaboration as a means for the forest sector to be more competitive. Cross-sector collaboration initiatives of forest sector companies with neighboring industries such as energy, chemicals, plastics, textiles, and packaging are gaining increasing attention as a necessary element for a...
Successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters are popular for medium accuracy, medium speed and low power applications, such as in biomedical applications. They have low latency and simple architecture compared with ΔΣ ADCs. This is because of SAR ADCs’ binary searching scheme. Furthermore, SAR ADCs can apply oversampling and noise shaping schemes...
The purpose of this dissertation is to convey research on counselors’ experience of administrative supervision. While research in counseling has given much attention to clinical supervision and the relationship between clinical supervisor and supervisee, it has not adequately attended to the important and influential role of administrative supervision and its...
The following dissertation consists of six sections: a general introduction, three manuscripts, a general conclusion, and an overall bibliography. The three manuscripts report on: (1) identifying genetic interactions in diverse germplasm developed during introgression of a major gene conferring resistance to stem rust (Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici), (2) mapping...
This dissertation presents two qualitative studies investigating expert trauma counselors’ experiences of clinical decision-making and countertransference. Chapter 2, Acutely Alert: A Grounded Theory of Clinical Decision-Making Processes of Expert Trauma Counselors addresses the research question, what are the clinical decision-making experiences and processes of expert trauma counselors? Chapter 3, Exploring...
Radiation therapy is a sophisticated complex process. Systematic methods are needed to quantitatively evaluate the quality of a complex process and hence radiation therapy treatments. An ideal result for a complex process must be established to determine if the complex process is completed acceptably. For radiation therapy, this can be...
Western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis) encroachment has been associated with negative ecological and hydrological consequences including reductions in herbaceous production and diversity, deterioration for wildlife habitat, and higher erosion and runoff potentials. As a result, western juniper removal is a common and accepted rangeland management practice. Although studies evaluating the ecological...
We present a deterministic spectral method to predict equilibrium temperature distributions, heat flux, and thermal conductivity in homogeneous and heterogeneous media. We solve the Boltzmann transport equation in a second order spatial, self-adjoint angular flux formulation. We implemented this method into the radiation transport code Rattlesnake, built using the MOOSE...
The atmospheric detection of four radioxenon isotopes (131mXe, 133mXe, 133Xe, and 135Xe) released during a nuclear detonation is a key tool utilized by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) to identify clandestine nuclear weapon testing activity. These radioxenon isotopes all decay via the near-simultaneous release of an electron and a...
Biogeochemical mechanisms employed by key organisms, or symbiotic associations of organisms, transform the function and structure of their environment through processes recognized as ecosystem engineering. This dissertation seeks to investigate organism-ecosystem interactions that serve globally significant ecological functions in marine systems and impact how systems respond to environmental change. Using...
Many database users are not familiar with formal query languages, the concept of schema, or the exact content of their database. Thus, it is challenging for these users to formulate their information needs over semi-structured and structured databases. To address this problem, researchers have proposed usable query interfaces over which...
Somatic growth variation manifests from the cumulative effects of a suite of biological, ecological, and environmental processes and can have profound effects on individual fitness and species population dynamics. As ectotherms whose growth dynamics are greatly influenced by environmental factors, sea turtles display considerable variation in somatic growth within and...
Exploring bioactive natural products has contributed largely to clinically approved drugs we have been using over the last 100 years. Especially among the anti-infective drugs, around 70% of currently used antibiotics were discovered or derived from microbial secondary metabolites, among them compounds like vancomycin, chloramphenicol, and erythromycin. Facing the unavoidable...