Oregon State laboratories are responsible for a significant portion of the university’s overall resource and energy consumption, and therefore minimizing waste in a sustainable way should be a top priority for the university while aiming for carbon neutrality by 2025. This study addresses major factors that should be considered when...
Learning assistant (LA) programs are gaining increasing popularity as a means to shift instructional practice in STEM classrooms. In these programs, trained undergraduate students join the instructional team and support student-centered active learning pedagogies. Their professional development is typically supported through a seminar. In facilitating small group collaborative learning, LAs...
Detecting gravitational waves is a topic at the forefront of physics. The first gravitational wave was detected by LIGO in 2015. This wave had a frequency in the 10s of Hz. This project is focused on detecting gravitational waves on the nanohertz spectrum using a pulsar timing array. This array...
Although U.S. Latin@s are more affected by major depressive disorder than non-Latin@ whites, they are less likely to utilize mental health services. The purpose of this project is to create a children’s book that promotes the utilization of mental health services among U.S. Latin@s with major depressive disorder. This book...
The last two years of the Covid-19 pandemic have brought significant changes to global and American societies, as well as to our healthcare system. Millions of Americans were laid off and left without insurance, some areas of medicine suffered financial catastrophe with a fall in patient volumes, others were victims...
The total manufacturing cost for a part is determined by its process plan, and the total cost includes both processing and material handling costs. This research examines the cost impact of assuming an arbitrary layout when evaluating alternative process plans for production in a new facility. A designed experiment was...
The heroine of this fantasy novel is Alina who lives in a medieval-like time and place. The day before her 20th birthday, in an impetuous moment, she breaks a local superstition by standing in a sunbeam. This allows a fairy to kidnap her and take her to the fairy castle...
Chain rules are critical to the process of solving many thermodynamics-related partial derivatives. This study evaluates the solution method and error evolution of students’ responses to a pair of chain rule problems in an upper-level undergraduate thermodynamics course. Students’ responses were categorized by solution method. Students’ solution methods included implicit...
Studying human’s ability to estimate temporal durations could lead to a greater
understanding of our cognitive abilities as well as the processes that underlie temporal
estimation. It has been shown through previous research that time and number may be
interconnected cognitively and that the magnitude of one may alter the...
Knowledge of Drosophila suzukii's preference for an attractive trap design and bait can be used to improve detection and management of this new invasive fruit pest. Desired trap and bait attributes include: high D. suzukii capture and species specificity; early-season detection prior to significant crop damage; higher capture of females...
The idea of college needs to shift from being about going to a “good school” for any
degree to "getting the right education” for what you want to do. I want to
investigate why we should be giving access to career assessment and preferred
learning tests at the middle school...
Marine environments provide services for ecosystems and humans, but face many threats, including sea star wasting disease (SSWD) and ocean acidification (OA). Biological research on these threats is abundant, but there has been limited research examining the human dimensions of these threats. This thesis contains two standalone articles that explore...
The majority of power system cascading models assume that system operators will
react perfectly and timely to an electrical event. However, as evidenced by several
blackouts in the last decades, the inadequate system operators’ situation awareness
and response can contribute significantly to the severity of an electrical disturbance.
Under these...
One of the principal drivers of climate change is the concentration of greenhouse gases such as CO2 in the atmosphere. A large portion of this CO2 ends up in the waters off the continental coasts where it transforms into biomass. The major sink for this matter is the ocean sediments...
Variability in the terrigenous (land-derived) fraction of marine sediments,
including pollen and rock fragments, reflects the effects of regional climate change on
continentally derived runoff, ice extent, vegetation and ocean circulation. The transport of
this continental material to the seafloor must be understood in order to interpret the
terrigenous sediment...
Ocean deoxygenation is predicted to increase in severity over the next few decades, posing a threat to marine life and fishing economies. Improved predictions of ocean deoxygenation depend on a better understanding of the biogeochemical mechanisms that underly this process. Within the realm of biogeochemical mechanisms, this project specifically investigated...
A disproportionate amount of HIV/AIDS cases each year occur among African Americans. The purpose of this study was to review the numerous studies on HIV/AIDS conspiracy beliefs and their effects into one document. This research was done using research databases to indentify peer-reviewed journal articles on HIV/AIDS conspiracy beliefs, and...
This paper details the development and pre-testing of a questionnaire designed for assessing the user experience of a View-Master virtual reality headset, and discusses the theory in the field of user experience used to carry out that effort. A group of eight researchers drafted the questionnaire collectively, with the intent...
This paper details the development and pre-testing of a questionnaire designed for assessing the user experience of a View-Master virtual reality headset, and discusses the theory in the field of user experience used to carry out that effort. A group of eight researchers drafted the questionnaire collectively, with the intent...
By studying gravitational waves, we can gain new insights into the merging events between massive objects such as black holes as well as neutron stars. Moreover, studying low-frequency waves allows us to observe merging events between supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, which in turn allows us to...
The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) purports to assess emotional intelligence, which includes the ability to successfully identify and manage emotions. To test the validity of this claim, 21 students took the MSCIET along with a several other performance measures and personality scales, and their scores were correlated. The MSCEIT...
Asians are a minority group that are scarcely represented throughout Hollywood and the film industry. Even when there is some type of inclusion, they are often subjected to stereotypes that have been perpetuated for decades. This contributes to shaping how Asian and Asian Americans are perceived, as well as the...
Aggregate piers are a method of ground improvement used to increase the strength and bearing capacity of the native geological soils for the support of new civil infrastructure. The understanding of the bearing failure mechanism of aggregate piers remains largely unstudied. The effects of design variables in the failure mechanisms...
The Supreme Court Bar-the lawyers who argue before the US Supreme Court-has historically been an elite and exclusive group. This investigation examines the demographic make-up of the Supreme Court Bar in the Roberts Court and compares it to previous iterations of the Supreme Court Bar, as well as the national...
Information about social and economic attributes of fisheries, fishing communities, and fishery participants is important for marine resource management because the focuses of agency efforts are on managing society's impacts to the marine environment. This thesis addresses two questions. First, what are the perspectives of managers, scientists, and commercial and...
In communities impacted by climate disasters, institutions largely determine the distribution of outcomes within a population. This research aims to examine the role of institutions in differential outcomes for displaced communities impacted by the 2020 Labor Day Wildfires in the Santiam Canyon and the Rogue Valley. Using semi-structured interviews of...
Epidemiological research on HIV/AIDS seeks to determine at-risk populations not reached by current care. In the forty years since the AIDS epidemic began, transgender people were only recently deemed “at-risk” by the CDC and more action was taken to study them. Most current research centers on transgender women, with transgender...