Every year, hundreds of low-income families on the Oregon Coast are forced to choose between putting food on the table and paying the bills. A local, non-profit agency on the Oregon Coast is working to alleviate the level of crisis that many families face, by offering a holistic approach to...
This study is a preassessment of the ecological status of habitats and species potentially affected by wave energy device installation, focusing on five flatfish species. Butter sole (Isopsetta isolepis), English sole (Parophrys vetulus), Sand sole (Psettichthys melanostictus), Pacific sanddab (Citharichthys sordidus), and Speckled sanddab (Citharichthys stigmaeus) were collected bimonthly from...
Though empathy has proven to be a vital component of the physician-patient relationship, recent studies have shown that medical students tend to lose empathy during their third year of medical school as they start interacting with patients for the first time. The main objective of this project was to find...
Participation in school garden programs improves health outcomes in K-12
student and is an effective tool for experiential learning. Although most schools in the Corvallis School District have a school garden, none are currently integrated into the curriculum. Using a cross-sectional,online survey, I learned that the majority of parents of...
During the first surgery I witnessed, I was struck by an immense sense of wonder at the human body. This research effort determines if this awe is shared by physicians currently practicing medicine, if this wonder will fade as part of an everyday landscape, and delves into the different forms...
Behavioral studies have observed facial recognition bypass attentional limitations when performed with non-facial recognition tasks (e.g., a digit task). Awh et al. (2004) proposed this was due to multi-channel processing, where non-facial objects utilize a feature-based channel leaving the configural-based channel available for facial processing. We tested this hypothesis using...
Oregon high schools are required to provide comprehensive sex education to students, but there is anecdotal evidence that this is not consistently being carried out across all schools. Despite the significant amount of literature that exists on the topic of sex education, there is a gap in regards to what...
Sepsis is a blood infection caused by circulating pathogens and cell wall fragments that affects over 1 million patients per year in the United States. When bacterial cell membranes are lysed by antibiotics, cell wall fragments containing lipopolysaccharides (LPS) are released. As a result, the capture of LPS is critical...
Natural products from plants, bacteria, and fungi play an important role in society. Over the last 35 years, natural products and their derivatives have inspired over 60% of all FDA approved small-molecule drugs, and are among the top prescribed therapeutics.1-2 Fleming’s discovery of the fungal antibiotic penicillin started the “Golden...
This study will use a COSMED K5 portable metabolic unit to expand on the limited knowledge of the energy demands of top rope rock climbing. Participants will be experienced, consistent rock climbers. Two route difficulties (5.8 and 5.10) will be analyzed using a repeated measures randomized design to determine differences...
Lignocellulosic biomass represents a vast and renewable source of fermentable sugar for
production of biofuels. However, native lignocellulose—comprised of cellulose,
hemicellulose and lignin—is refractory to degradation because the crystalline cellulose is
not easily hydrolyzed by cellulases. Standard chemical treatments of lignocellulose to
reduce the crystallinity of cellulose prior to enzymatic...
This project describes the investigation of marine cyanobacteria collected from the Red Sea with an emphasis on the identification and prioritization of biologically active fractions for future purification and molecular structure elucidation of medicinally relevant secondary metabolites.
Five crude extracts of taxonomically unidentified Red Sea cyanobacteria supplied by Egyptian collaborators...
Yes-associated protein (YAP) in mammals and Yorkie (Yki) in Drosophila are functionally homologous proteins that partner with transcription factors to promote cell proliferation. The Drosophila protein Mask and its mammalian homolog MASK1 are examples of transcription factors that are essential for Yki/ YAP to drive transcription of target genes. Increased...
The OSU-Benton County Green Stormwater Infrastructure Research (OGSIR) Facility was created to test various methods of stormwater treatment. At this facility, runoff from the Benton County Development Department property is captured and pumped into a bioswale. This bioswale is comprised of layers of rock, gravel, sand, and soil, and is...
Bird and bat collisions with wind turbine blades are an occurrence which are extremely variable in
frequency. With the expansion of wind farms, determining the true quantity of collisions and the
species involved is imperative for preventing ecological damage. Explored in this thesis is a blade
mounted camera for wirelessly...
Thermodynamic properties of systems are often investigated computationally. Traditionally, thermal physics simulations are limited by their very small energy ranges and slow convergence. Broad histogram algorithms are a class of Monte Carlo algorithms that can explore an entire energy (and temperature) range in one thermal physics simulation: potentially saving months...
Urban stormwater runoff contains pollutants that have a detrimental effect on pond water quality and watershed water quality. Stormwater best management practices (BMPs), such as a constructed wetland, can treat these pollutants through processes like infiltration, adsorption, and plant uptake. It is hypothesized that the surface-runoff fed pond at Bruce...
Learning about periodic and oscillatory systems is a huge step in an undergraduate's
comprehensive understanding of physics and complex systems such as solids. However,
understanding how specific changes to such a system affect aspects of the entire system can
be difficult. The goal of this study is to create a...
In conversations about social change, community-based coalitions can be identified
as one of the driving factors in multi-level changes. Coalitions can be defined as
groups of people, organizations, countries, etc. united for a common goal. Coalitions
initially form to complete a common purpose, but also to build lasting connections for...
This study examines the relationships between player salaries and performance in the
National Basketball Association, by analyzing team salaries and statistics for the five seasons between 2008 and 2013. We find that the teams are able to achieve more wins by
outspending their competitors, even if that means incurring a...
Particleboard is a commodity composite panel made from the residual materials of other wood products manufacturing companies. The industry operates on low profit margins and thus produces high volumes of differing panel grades. Slight inefficiencies over the course of a year can mean a significant loss in profit. Previous calculations...
Glioblastoma is a malignant brain tumor that has extremely poor prognoses with a 5 year survival rate of less than 5%. The low survival rates of glioblastoma patients is attributed to glioblastoma cells being extremely resistant to radiotherapy and chemotherapy as well as being very invasive. We previously identified calpain...
Since the Altman Z-score was published in 1968, the Z-score has been a common way that investors predict bankruptcy and value risk. However, corporate structure has evolved since 1968 due to changes in economic factors and financial reporting standards. In 1976, the FASB created the first bright-line rules to distinguish...
The advancement of the US energy grid is a necessary task to undertake as renewable energies like wind and solar power become more and more prevalent in our energy sector. However, due to uncontrollable factors such as wind speed and cloud cover, the intermittence of these energy sources continues to...
OSU’s Global Formula Racing (GFR) team creates two carbon fiber chassis each year, one for combustion engine powered the other electric. These two vehicles compete in SAE sanctioned competitions teams and in order to enter they both have to provide design and testing information to prove the vehicle is safe...
Carbonation of Carbon is of concern for reinforced concrete bridges. While long-term environmental deterioration of structures is unavoidable, protective design allows a structure to fulfill its service life without any significant serviceability or strength loss due to deterioration. Understanding the process of concrete carbonation and the effect it has on...
The purpose of this study is two-fold. First, to investigate the occurrence of displacement, adult word count (AWC), and child vocalization (CV), for two brothers, one with Down syndrome and one who is typically developing, on a minute level basis, in an inclusive play setting, over the course of two...
A Cell Phone Audio Controlled Point of Sale system was designed and built for an undergraduate electrical and computer engineering senior design project. The system was designed to enable a user to transfer data from any cell phone to a point of sale device using audio tones. The project involved...
The purpose of this project is to examine the effect of the slot gap spacing on a multi element rear
wing. A three element rear wing is used in order to produce maximum downforce at the relatively
low speed of Formula SAE competitions. These high lift configurations serve to increase...
This project examines the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model used by Global Formula Racing (GFR) to simulate external aerodynamics for a Formula SAE racecar. It seeks to improve the accuracy of the existing model by changing mesh and physics model parameters. Accuracy of the model is quantified through comparison to...
Copper antimony sulfide (CAS) is a ternary material that is of research interest for thin film photovoltaic applications due to its high absorption coefficient and tunable bandgap. The material is also ideal for sustainable manufacturing due the constituent elements being earth-abundant and less toxic than solar cell absorbers like gallium...
Swelling soils cause millions of dollars of damage to buildings every year in the Unites States alone. One essential piece to understanding these soils is to understand how water moves through them. Hydraulic conductivity is a measure of how easily water flows through a soil. Currently, the most common method...
The project aims to engage and educate the OSU Undergraduate Student on 2020 changes to the food label as proposed by the Food and Drug Administration. The goal of the project was the production of a collaborative and meaningful piece of work that engages with effective educational practices such as...
The action of pendant, polyethylene oxide (PEO) brush layers as nonfouling coatings for
biomedical materials is well understood. However progress toward clinical application of stable, high density PEO coatings has historically been impeded by the lack of cost effective, noninvasive methods for their preparation. Triblock polymers featuring a hydrophobic, polypropylene...
Water samples from the Arctic Ocean were analyzed in order to assess the present nature of particulate organic matter and investigate the effect of climate-driven changes on the ecology of the region. 661 individual surface water samples and 216 samples from CTD casts were collected from the Bering, Chukchi, and...
Vibrio cholerae, a Gram-negative bacterium, is the etiological agent of cholera. V.
cholerae shuttles between the human host and the aquatic reservoir, where it associates
with marine organisms such as copepods and vertebrate fish. The bacteria use the Type II
Secretion System (T2SS) to release proteins that facilitate V. cholerae...
Cytochrome P450 1B1 (Cyp1B1) is a xenobiotic metabolizing enzyme, responsible for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) oxidative metabolism. CYP1B1 metabolically activates several species of environmentally relevant procarcinogenic PAHs to reactive carcinogens. PAHs are aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) agonists, leading to CYP1B1 upregulation. Though CYP1B1 is highly conserved across species, wild type...
Recent studies have discovered that salmon, specifically juvenile Coho Salmon, have their olfactory senses inhibited by the presence of low concentrations of copper concentrations at very low concentrations. Much of this copper is deposited on roadways by car brake pads during their use. The copper is carried with stormwater into...
The BRAF proto-oncogene is a member of the Raf protein family that encodes serine/threonine protein kinases, which activate the MEK/ERK signaling transduction pathway. The V600E mutation of BRAF, found in 70% of melanoma cases, causes an upregulation of MEK/ERK signaling which leads to many hallmarks of cancer, including apoptosis evasion,...
Fer1L6 is an uncharacterized member of the ferlin family of proteins, a group of large, calcium sensitive proteins with emerging roles in vesicle trafficking and various disease states. The presence of Fer1L6 has been identified within the C2C12 cell line of mouse skeletal muscle. To determine the protein’s subcellular location...
Ferlins are a family of calcium-sensitive proteins involved in fusion and fission membrane trafficking events. There are six ferlin members: dysferlin, otoferlin, myoferlin, Fer1L4, Fer1L5, and Fer1L6. Previous research shows the first three ferlins play a pathophysiological role in humans, while the other three remain uncharacterized. Fer1L6 is one of...
The prevalence of obesity is increasing worldwide, causing a subsequent increase in insulin resistance (IR), metabolic disorders, and cardiovascular diseases. Although these conditions significantly impact both the individual and society, their etiologies have not been discovered, inhibiting potential prevention and treatment. Alterations to mitochondrial metabolism are implicated in the development...
While the quorum-sensing (QS) diversity of the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa has been well established in cystic fibrosis (CF) lung infections and in vitro experiments, little is known about its QS-diversity in natural environments. One significant QS-deficient behavior is social cheating. Social cheaters contain mutations that prevent them from producing...
Type-2 diabetes (T2D) has become a pandemic. The main impairment in T2D is skeletal muscle insulin resistance (IR) and is often associated with obesity. Despite decades of study, the mechanisms of IR have not been fully resolved. Evidence has implicated mitochondrial dysfunction as a potential cause and/or consequence of IR....
Erwinia amylovora is a plant pathogenic bacterium that causes the destructive disease fire blight of apple and pear. We examined the plasmid content of a collection of 305 isolates of E. amylovora from Washington and Oregon with PCR assays and RFLP. Nearly all isolates of E. amylovora carried plasmid pEA29,...
Vibrio cholerae is the causative agent of cholera, a serious diarrheal disease in developing countries. V. cholerae has a unique redox driven respiration-linked sodium pump, Na⁺ translocating NADH:quinone oxidoreductase (NQR). Several reports previously showed that NQR plays an important role in virulence, metabolism, and sodium homeostasis of V. cholerae. This...
SAR11 is a clade of marine bacteria that are the most abundant heterotrophs in ocean surface water. They play a significant role in marine carbon cycling. Although many culturing experiments have been done on SAR11, there was no research that focused on verifying the observations about inhibition of SAR11 growth...
Ubiquitous fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposures significantly impact global public health, yet little is known about the mechanisms causing these known adverse health effects. Oxidative stress due to PM2.5 associated chemical constituents, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), is a proposed possible mechanism for PM2.5 mediated health effects. Variations in...
Mammals exhibit circadian rhythms in several physiological processes
controlled by a core set of circadian genes that make up the so-called molecular
clock. Disruptions in these rhythms, and variations in circadian genes, are associated
with the development of psychiatric disorders, including addiction. However, the
effect of chronic binge-like alcohol drinking...
Immature T cells, known as thymocytes, undergo development through successive stages in the thymus and the periphery to become functional mature T cells. These stages are regulated by sequence specific transcription factors (SSTFs). Two such SSTFs, BCL11B and TCF-1, are both known master regulators of thymopoiesis, which is also known...