Anthropogenic activities have posed many threats to the oceans and marine life. Understanding how individuals are affected and physiologically respond to these threats is crucial and allows for management and conservation applications. I evaluated the overall health condition of a subpopulation of gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus) along the Oregon coast,...
Soil is the largest terrestrial store of carbon (C) making it a critical component of the global C cycle. To model global carbon budgets more accurately we need to understand dynamics and turnover of the many different functional soil C pools that exist in soil. Many different methods are used...
Solute transport models in karst groundwater must consider variable and complex flow regimes. Within fissures less than 2 mm in aperture, during unsaturated flow events, seeping flow may flow as films or under capillary tension as a capillary rivulet. This project focuses on exploring the mass transport characteristics of seeping...
Developers spend a considerable amount of time comprehending code and building accurate mental models of the code. Understanding the relationships between software features within IDEs is difficult, with information split across different visual hierarchies making navigation cumbersome. Canvas-based IDEs mitigate some of the navigation costs by allowing relevant information to...
The influence of increasing temperatures on human health has been widely established across multiple health disciplines. Short-term temperature changes are associated with an increased risk of hospitalization and death overall and in a variety of health conditions, such as cardiovascular disease. Even as humans can self-regulate heat stresses, the elderly,...
An accurate state estimation plays an essential role in power system operation and planning in energy management systems. However, existing multi-area state estimation researches have not focused on the importance of system clustering. The clustering mechanism divides or partitions a system according to user-defined criteria. Few published research works have...
We describe spatio-temporal random processes using linear mixed models and discuss estimation, inference, and prediction under this formulation. We show how many commonly used covariances are special cases of this more general framework and pay special attention to the separable and product-sum covariances. The linear mixed model formulation facilitates straightforward...
Butter has long been the premium choice for producing pastries such as Danish and croissants. Its inclusion has consistently delivered characteristically light and airy crumbs with beautifully flaky crust. Once considered a delicacy, pastries have now become innocuous in our everyday lives. Once requiring a skillful hand to sculpt and...
Private matching (PM) is a key cryptographic primitive in secure computation that allows several parties to jointly compute some functions depending on their private inputs. Indeed, this primitive has many practical applications. For instance, in online advertising, two companies may wish to find their common customers for a joint marketing...
Practical combustion devices frequently rely upon forced ignition of turbulent fuel/oxidizer mixtures that also contain the product species of combustion. Examples of this include engines that use exhaust gas recirculation (EGR), inter-turbine burners in aircraft engines, and other systems the utilize staged combustion. In this work, the effects of major...
In the last two decades, there has been an increase in substantial body of work on the inclusion of women in the water management and governance field. However, these scholarly inquiries have mostly focused on cases from the Global South, where women are still underrepresented in decision-making positions in the...
The flow of multiple immiscible fluids within a porous medium controls many natural and engineered systems in the environment including: geologic CO2 sequestration, enhanced oil recovery from underground reservoirs, and contaminant remediation of groundwater. The need to understand how fluids are transported and distributed in these processes is important for...
Simultaneous translation, which translates concurrently with the source language speech, is widely used in many scenarios including multilateral organizations. However, it is well known to be one of the most challenging tasks for humans due to the simultaneous perception and production in two languages. On the other hand, simultaneous translation...
Wildfires across the Western United States, specifically in California have increased in size and intensity in recent decades. These fires are encroaching on California’s Wildland Urban-Interface (WUI), often with devastating results. Most recently, these destructive results were displayed in the 2018 fire season in the Camp and Carr Fires and...
Advances in sensor technology are greatly expanding the range of quantities that can be measured while simultaneously reducing the cost. However, deployed sensors drift out of calibration and fail, so every sensor network requires quality control procedures to promptly detect these failures. To address these problems, we propose a two-level...
Gas turbine engines for propulsion applications can use fuel as a coolant, exposing the fuel to high temperatures well within the ranges associated with thermal decomposition. Species produced as a result of these processes have been shown to correlate with changes in the combustion performance of the fuels. In this...
Bacterial soft rot of potato (Solanum tuberosum), caused by Pectobacterium and Dickeya species, is among the most common and destructive potato diseases in the United States. These pathogens cause a variety of vascular wilts, and in potato cause a disease complex that includes tuber soft rot, blackleg, aerial stem rot,...
Many jobs in the United States have shifted to requiring education beyond high school credentials. Many potential workers are enrolled in pre-postsecondary education, or basic skills. A small percentage of students transition from basic skills to postsecondary education. Research identifies key institutional practices and supports have shown to increase transitions,...
Diversity and inclusion represent central challenges and opportunities in the transnational field of higher education, as the number of students enrolled in higher education has expanded exponentially over the past century and universal access to tertiary education has emerged as a development imperative. Within this context, diversity has emerged as...
In the western United States, bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) have suffered major die-offs in every state since the mid-1800s, and disease from domestic sheep (Ovis aries) has been a primary factor in these events. Beginning in the early 1900s, poly-factorial, poly-microbial pneumonia was identified as a major disease affecting bighorn...
Tree nuts have been implicated in a number of foodborne outbreaks and recalls in recent years linked to enteric pathogens, particularly Salmonella. Therefore, prior to distribution and marketing, it is necessary to understand the biological risks associated with the consumption of tree nuts and to find effective methods to inactivate...
Environmental modeling as a result of the Fukushima accident has been at the forefront for present day health physics. The accident released radionuclides in the environment and the fate and transport of these radionuclides are of interest when considering doses to non-human biota. The Pale Grass Blue Butterfly was studied...
The purpose of this work is to build a foundation of understanding and methodologies as the steps toward automating functional modeling. We have achieved significant progress in the automatic generation of functional representations, which can be connected at the interface of components to create a functional model. This work highlights...
Accurately modeling the chemistry of conventional and alternative liquid transportation fuels in combustion technology is vital to predicting important quantities such as the burning rate, heat release, and pollutant emissions. However, incorporating detailed chemical kinetic models into reactive-flow simulations poses a significant challenge due to the associated high computational expense...
Physics sensemaking is a growing topic of study within the physics education community. Many lenses have been used to study sensemaking but few have considered how time and instruction can impact student sensemaking practices and ideas. In this dissertation, I present four studies that address four major questions: What sensemaking...
The wetting of a surface by a liquid is a crucial part of many natural and industrial processes. Despite numerous existing studies, some elements of wetting-dewetting such as contact angle variation are still poorly understood. Knowledge of contact angle behavior during the flow is necessary for modeling fluid displacements in...
Passenger security screening is a continuously evolving process and not much is known about how passengers perceive its effectiveness in keeping air travel safe. The provided thesis consists of two manuscripts that expand the literature on passenger perception of safety through the application of advanced econometric techniques. This thesis aims...
In 2016, the Oregon Community Foundation reported that twelve percent of Latinx folks graduated with their bachelor’s and/or master’s degree compared to the 31 percent of White counterparts (Latinos in Oregon Report, 2016). While Latinx students continue to be the largest minority in the United States, Latinx students enroll in...
This thesis analyzes the relationship between whiteness, womanhood, and the profession of student affairs using the method of autoethnography and the guiding question: How does my personal understanding of white womanhood affect my work and role as a student affairs practitioner? The researcher identifies three goals at the beginning of...
Extensive research has been published on a large-scale Cascadia subduction zone (CSZ) rupture off the Oregon coast, including the requirements of evacuation, shelter, and mass care of a diverse coastal population due to earthquake and tsunami related hazards. Adequate preparedness centers around the understanding of a hazards characteristics, and the...
The purpose of this study was to understand the lived experience of students to discern the impact of their interaction with the food pantry. This knowledge may, in turn, influence future food pantry methods and wider policy, both at PNW College and more broadly. Not only does student hunger have...
The standard interpretation of quantum mechanics (known as the Copenhagen interpretation) divides the world into quantum phenomena and classical observers that perform measurements upon the phenomena. This provides a quite functional framework for calculating probabilities of measurement outcomes, but it lacks the generality necessary for such things as retrodiction, and...
The purpose of this study was to unfold positions of migrating SBAE teachers to understand support and challenge to retain teachers in migratory contexts. Previous literature discusses problems related to teacher mobility as functions of teacher-student matching, teacher skill and effort, school environments, and advancing student learning. In an effort...
Advances in mobile autonomous vehicles for oceanographic sensing provide new opportunities for passive acoustic monitoring of marine mammals. Acoustically equipped mobile autonomous platforms, including gliders, deep-water profiling floats, and drifting surface buoys can survey for a variety of marine mammal species over intermediate spatiotemporal scales. Additionally, such mobile platforms may...
This study investigated three questions: how, what kind of, and why were cross-border partnerships with non-US educational institutions developed at two public four-year US universities; how, what kind of, and why will cross-border partnerships with non-US educational institutions develop and/or change at US universities if nationalistic geo-political trends reflective of...
International students are a growing population at many institutions of higher education in the United States, and they face unique challenges in navigating both higher education and the United States as a whole. Though there is significant research about international students, few studies have examined how international students perceive student...
Grapevine red blotch disease (GRBD) is caused by Grapevine Red Blotch Virus, a virus in the Geminiviridae family. Observable symptoms can manifest in red cultivars, such as leaf blades that are partially to fully red, red veins, and different combinations of the two. Previous research has shown evidence of reduced...
Glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) alters the amplitude and timing of ‘glacioeustatic’ sea level maxima and minima around the globe. No study has examined the intrinsic distance that one can correlate marine stratigraphic records of glacial–interglacial sedimentation across continental shelves subject to varying amounts of GIA. Here, we seek to model...
We are witness to an ever tighter coupling between natural hazard-related disasters ("disasters") and violent social conflict ("conflict"). Previous research has established that disaster has the propensity to lead to conflict, and conflict, in turn, has been found to contribute to disaster vulnerabilities. The field of disaster diplomacy, by contrast,...
The purpose of this narrative inquiry study was to describe the lived experiences of librarians and how they provided support and innovation for community college OER programs. Examining the experiences of librarians as innovators sought to understanding how best practices developed for OER programs. It further sought to examine how...
The electrical grid is a key component of the Nation's critical infrastructure. Its continuous and reliable operation is of vital importance; any system-wide disruption would have a debilitating impact on crucial services, public health and safety, the economy, and the national security of the United States.
High-impact low-frequency events pose...
Reservoir drawdown is a management technique increasingly used in maintenance of aging infrastructure, decommissioning dams, and to promote the flushing of fish and sediment to downstream reaches. Erosional processes in the reservoir may result in excessive delivery of sediment to downstream habitats and infrastructure, a critical long-term consideration. Typically, numerical...
In the area that is now Saguaro National Park East, grazing began in the 1880's. Because of the impact to the iconic saguaro cactus as well as all palatable plant species in the area, ecological damage in the park were determined to be so great that anti-grazing conservationists challenged the...
Coniferous trees are a major North American crop that has been intensively managed for its commercial value, while also serving as critical habitat for abundant wildlife and as carbon sinks. Having diverse functions, North American temperate coniferous forests have become a research hotspot for numerous scientific studies aiming to integrate...
Metal-oxo clusters are discrete, soluble pieces of bulk metal oxide. Cluster size, monodispersity, and chemical properties allow for potential use as solution-based precursors for functional metal oxide films. Classical monoalkyltin-oxo clusters are either charge neutral or stabilized by anions. The structure of Cs₄.₅H₂.₅[(BuSn)₃(α-SiW₉O₃₇)]*2H₂O enables its use in established ion exchange...
Increasing interest in hydrogen as a clean and efficient energy carrier has driven the need to improve its production and distribution methods. Of particular interest is the natural gas reforming process which currently accounts for 48% of hydrogen production in the United States. Existing natural gas delivery infrastructure and challenges...
Advances in additive manufacturing technologies allow for the rapid, inexpensive manufacturing of microwave circuits. Circuits made using additive manufacturing are comparable in performance to circuits produced circuits produced using conventional methods such as printed circuit board fabrication, thin film deposition, machining, and milling. Very little work has been done in...
A present abundance of biomass and a decreasing supply of petroleum signal the need for efficient pathways from renewable feedstocks to high value chemicals. One such class of chemicals is oleofurans, molecules comprised of a furan ring and carbon chain which can be used to make powerful hard water surfactants....
Background: Calls by presidents and legislators to raise the U.S. college graduation rate to 60% by 2025 have required educational institutions to find ways to increase accessibility and quality while simultaneously reducing costs (Bautsch, 2018; Smith, 2017). Private foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are getting involved...
Rural communities face acute challenges in providing education. Attachment to place plays a significant role in rural communities but little research exists on how it influences policy. One policy response to financial, physical, and cultural factors in rural Oregon is the four-day school week (FDSW). Through health survey responses of...