China’s global influence in the realm of science and technology (S&T) has increased dramatically in recent times. China and the United States are now each other’s main partner in scientific collaboration. As a major research university, OSU is one of the institutions with a large stake in this international collaboration....
The use of in-vehicle technologies, such as mobile phones, while driving has proliferated in recent years. Most notably, drivers are using mobile phones to send and receive text messages while operating a vehicle with increasing frequency. The act of texting while driving poses a significant threat not only to the...
The NKUA1 is a Small Fission Surface Power (SFSP) space reactor intended for use in upcoming missions to Mars and the moon between the years 2020-2030. The concept of the reactor was created by Dr. Lee Mason and his research team in a joint effort between the Department of Energy...
Two policies for allocating individual assets from a pool of assets to incoming requests were contrasted within the context of replacement analysis. Assets within a pool are considered similar in the service they provide, but may differ in age and cumulative usage. The two policies considered for allocating assets to...
Technology is constantly co-evolving with science to produce simple and effective tools that address the needs of researchers. Cost and time effective point-of-care devices are valuable for sample collection and analysis, particularly in medicine and environmental health and safety. Digital microfluidic (DMF) technology provides a possible solution. This study explores...
Free energy is a fundamental property of a thermodynamic system, from which pressure, entropy, and other interesting properties can be derived. It is useful, then, to be able to accurately compute the free energy at various densities and temperatures in a way that can serve as the basis for further...
Academic performance of student athletes is an of interest topic in the current climate of rising university athletics expenses. This project academic population of Oregon State University student athletes with that of the general undergraduate population using grade point averages (GPA). Samples were compared using team, gender, college, and sport...
Silicon based quantum computing is an attractive approach to large-scale quantum computation due to the significant success of the modern semiconductor fabrication industry. Despite many advances in silicon quantum computing since its inception in 1998, there remains no software for efficiently designing candidate silicon quantum computing devices. Such a development...
Vox comm is a digital wireless, voice-operated personal communicator developed as an electrical engineering Senior Design project. It is designed to provide a method for hassle-free, short-range communication. The product platform boasts of low power and small size for a host of usage models. This thesis details the product design...
Through the use of daily online surveys, this study investigated the weekly trends associated with college binge drinking. It also investigated the relationship between personality risk factors and binge drinking. Personality risk factors were assessed using the TCI measures of novelty seeking and harm avoidance, and the ATQ measure of...
This project calculates the value of β for ice particles based on wavelength dependent values of their refractive and absorptive indices. β is the ratio of the force due to radiation to the force due to gravity acting on a particle in the solar system. This parameter can later be...
Landfill leachate is a complex wastewater that contains high levels of ammonium (often over 250 ppm) and trace heavy metals (usually under 0.2 ppm). Microalgae have been shown to inexpensively and effectively treat wastewaters containing high loads of organics and nutrients, as well as adsorb metal ions. This thesis focuses...
The National Pesticide Information Center (NPIC) is a cooperative agreement between Oregon State University and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that offers science-based information about pesticides and related topics to the general public, medical personnel, applicators, researchers, and regulators. The Herbicide Properties Tool project is the creation of an updated...
Each year thousands of college graduates enter the business world armed with skills accumulated as student leaders, but how applicable are these skills to the business world? While there are many studies on learnable behaviors associated with effective student leadership and many studies on behaviors associated with effective business leadership,...
This thesis analyzes different aspects of the Oregon foster care system. It does this first by looking at racial/ethnic disparities across counties. Then it analyzes the relationship between foster care rates and child poverty rates, childhood food insecurity rates, free and reduced lunch eligibility rates, and unemployment rates for Oregon’s...
Base-pairing interaction are the fundamental blocks of an RNA structure. With increased ability to determine the structure of RNA molecules, an accurate and informative way of classifying these interactions would help to study RNA structure at many levels. Apart from the well-known complementary base pairs and wobble pairs, other interactions...
We identify and develop efficient Monte Carlo methods for determining thermodynamic properties of the square-well fluid in order to test square-well density functional theories near the critical point. Previous works have developed generic so-called histogram methods for collecting statistics on low energy system states, but little or no literature exists...
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...
Background. Flourishing is negatively related with depression, but has been proposed as a separate axis and an independent aspect of overall mental health. One factor that has been shown to affect both depression and flourishing is racial discrimination. This study hypothesizes that, in young undergraduate women of color, discrimination experiences...
The ribosomal cistron (rDNA cistron) is a tandemly repeated region in the genome that encodes for the necessary subunits to form ribosomes, complex molecules responsible for the assembly of amino acids into proteins. They are found within all cellular organisms, and evolve at relatively constant rates, making them ideal for...