Onsite wastewater treatment systems (OWTS; septic systems, compost toilets, etc.) used to treat wastewater in rural areas have the potential to contaminate groundwater (that is used as a water source) with nitrate. There have been decades of scientific and political conflicts concerning the issue of nitrate from OWTS (NOWTS, pronounced...
Considerable controversy exists about how fish assemblages are
organized. I explicitly took fish movement into account while I
studied the effects of disturbance, habitat complexity, and predation
at different times of the summer to understand the major factors
influencing assemblage structure in a high desert Oregon stream. The
effects of...
An important improvement in the area of reactor core neutronic modeling is the development and use of the methods based on "quasi-diffusion" (QD) low-order equations. This family of methods takes into account the transport exactly using "functionals" computed by solving transport equations, and is amenable to solution with a variety...
Transcriptomics and gene expression profiling enables the elucidation of the genetic response of an organism to various environmental cues. Transcriptomics enables the deciphering of differences between two closely related organisms to the same environment and in contrast, enables the elucidation of genetic responses of the same organism to different environmental...
We investigate several aspects of the numerical solution of the radiative transfer
equation in the context of coal combustion: the parallel efficiency of two commonly used
opacity models, the sensitivity of turbulent radiation interaction (TRI) effects
to the presence of coal particulate, and an improvement of the order of temporal...
Antineutrino detectors could provide a valuable addition to current safeguards
regimes. Antineutrinos are an attractive emission to monitor due to their low
interaction cross-section that prevents them from being shielded and the dependence
of their spectrum on the power level and isotopic content of a reactor core. While
there are...
The most widely used and versatile medical radioisotope today is technetium-99m. Roughly 30 million people depend on this radioisotope for diagnostic procedures each year, and this demand is expected to grow. Although there are numerous ways of procuring this isotope, the most common and most practical, for reasons to be...
My objectives were to: 1) develop a point count technique for estimating relative
abundance of band-tailed pigeons (Columbafasciata monilis), 2) determine the
availability, distribution, and interspersion of mineral sites, and nesting and foraging cover in relation to abundance of band-tailed pigeons in west-central Oregon, and 3) test the hypothesis that...
Within the past several years the technology of high-throughput sequencing has transformed the study of biology by offering unprecedented access to life's fundamental building block, DNA. With this transformation's potential a host of brand-new challenges have emerged, many of which lend themselves to being solved through computational methods. From de...
DSA (Diffusion Synthetic Acceleration) has been developed to accelerate the SN transport iteration. We have developed solution techniques for the diffusion equations of FLBLD (Fully Lumped Bilinear Discontinuous), SCB (Simple Corner Balance) and UCB (Upstream Corner Balance) modified 4-step DSA in x-y geometry. Our first multi-level method includes a block...