Production of fresh produce takes place outdoors, and therefore, is exposed to many routes of contamination (e.g., soil, contaminated water, manure, etc.) by human pathogens. Although precautions are taken to reduce this risk, pathogens can be regularly introduced to produce handling facilities. To manage the risk of cross-contamination from potentially...
Human cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide (CAMP/LL-37) is a cationic antimicrobial peptide that is widely expressed by myeloid and epithelial cells at the human-environment interface. It possesses broad spectrum antimicrobial capacity against bacteria, fungi and viruses. In addition to its direct antimicrobial activity, CAMP/LL-37 also attracts and recruits monocytes, neutrophils and other...
Apologia is a rhetorical genre of self-defense. As such, apologetic discourse
involves a response to an attack upon an individual's character or worth as a human being.
Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman encountered such a attack during the 0.J.
Simpson murder trial. The purpose of this analysis is to...
On January 8th, 2011 tragedy struck in Tucson, Arizona. A gunman opened fire on Representative Gabrielle Giffords' "Congress on Your Corner" event, wounding thirteen and killing six ("Arizona Shooting"). Four days later, President Obama spoke to a grieving crowd at the University of Arizona's McKale Memorial Center. This study seeks...
For more than 30 years, researchers have investigated the effects of whole body vibration (WBV) platforms on athletic performance. WBV is a modality in which an individual stands on a vibrating platform to obtain performance effects. Frequency and amplitude of the vibration are the commonly adjusted parameters. The use of...
My thesis, entitled “The Clerk’s Tale: Literal Monstrosities and Allegorical Problems,” argues that Chaucer’s Clerk is engaging both sides of a binary system. The Clerk has situated himself in a precarious position between two major schools of thought in the medieval culture, Franciscan and Dominican; the former promotes the will...
Forests face health threats from pests and diseases (e.g., mountain pine beetle, emerald ash borer, chestnut blight [CB], Swiss needle cast), and other issues such as climate change. Interventions such as genetic engineering (GE) have shown promise for mitigating some of these threats. CB, for example, has impacted most American...
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MarkD. Needham
Forests face health threats from pests and diseases (e.g., mountain pine
The number of people traveling to other countries to volunteer for conservation or humanitarian projects has increased dramatically in the past three decades. Despite substantial interest in volunteer tourism, few researchers have examined: (a) the role of promotional material (e.g., brochures, internet websites) in motivating volunteers; (b) factors that attract...
Vibriosis caused by the bacterial pathogen Vibrio tubiashii is one of several factors contributing to mass larval mortalities of the Pacific oyster (Crassostrea gigas) in Pacific Northwest shellfish hatcheries in recent years. Genetically improved strains of the Pacific oyster resistant to V. tubiashii would be highly desirable. This study investigates...
As recreation and tourism visitation increases and government budgets decrease, public
land management agencies are using private commercial operators as an alternative
source of offering products and services. Changes and trends in commercial outdoor
recreation and tourism such as a large scale increase in the number of visitors can affect...
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MarkD. Needham
As recreation and tourism visitation increases and government budgets
Connecting with nature is associated with social, physical, and emotional benefits such as stress relief, improved physical health, and lower crime. Parks and other natural areas offer spaces in which to connect with nature and reap these and other benefits (e.g., family bonding, social events, learning). Despite increasing populations of...
Protected area creation, including creation of marine reserves (MRs), is increasingly molded by ecosystem based management (EBM) that integrates biological and social information in the pre and post establishment phases. Collecting social data from large and representative samples of the public (as opposed to other stakeholder groups) before establishing a...
With the baby boomer cohort retiring and arguably having more time for outdoor recreation, coupled with population increases and government agencies encouraging people to recreate outdoors, areas such as state and national parks will likely continue seeing high visitation. It is imperative, therefore, for outdoor recreation managers and researchers to...
Voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) have been created to encourage companies to engage in behaviors that mitigate environmental impacts (e.g., recycling, emissions reduction). Many ski areas participate in the Sustainable Slopes Program, an initiative that promotes VEPs in the ski area industry. Past research has addressed the performance of VEPs in...
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MarkD. Needham
Voluntary environmental programs (VEPs) have been created to encourage
Designation of areas as marine wilderness has been proposed as a strategy for managing the increasing threats facing the world’s oceans. Although social factors influence marine protected area success, the human dimensions of marine wilderness remain minimally explored. This thesis examines views of marine wilderness expressed by a representative sample...
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MarkD. Needham
Designation of areas as marine wilderness has been proposed as a
African rhinoceros, once abundant across Africa, face threats to their long-term survival primarily due to the syndicated poaching of their horns for Traditional Asian Medicine and as status symbols in Asia. Most studies focusing on the human dimensions of rhinoceros poaching have been limited to examining a few aspects of...
The purpose of this manuscript style dissertation was to increase understanding of the experiences of counselor's with compassion fatigue as they participated in a yoga intervention. Compassion fatigue is a condition that creates both physical and psychological impairment as a result of working in the helping role. Yoga is an...
Changes in climate caused by increased concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the Earth’s atmosphere have led land and ocean surface temperatures to increase by 0.85°C and sea level to increase by 19 cm relative to preindustrial times. Global climate change will lead to further alterations in mean temperature and...
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Mark E. Harmon
Changes in climate caused by increased concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2
Visitor behavior research has become an essential
component to many museum programs. Since its opening to the
public in 1965, Oregon State University's Mark O. Hatfield
Marine Science Center Aquarium in Newport, it has been
visited by millions of people. A clear understanding of who
this audience was and what...
Alfalfa sprouts have been implicated in several salmonellosis outbreaks in recent years. Electrolysis of a NaCl solution generates, in the anode side of a two-chamber electrolyzer, acidic electrolyzed oxidizing (EO) water which contains Cl₂, HOC1, dissolved oxygen, and it is characterized by a low pH and a high oxidation reduction...
Invasive species are a growing global economic and ecological problem. Invasive Indo-Pacific lionfish (Pterois spp.) are known to have extreme negative effects on coral-reef communities in the Bahamas, so understating their distribution within and among reefs, what limits their local movements, and the effects they have on native prey species...
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...
This thesis examines the Schultz Fire as a case study to explain the complex history of fire suppression management in America’s forests, and to gain further understanding of how management practices have affected the increase in fire severity levels and how forests respond to such a disturbance. The thesis objectives...
Forest managers of public lands in western Oregon and Washington have become increasingly interested in creating additional conifer cohorts in young, even-aged, second-growth Douglas-fir stands. The purpose of our research was to assess the establishment, survival, and growth of naturally-regenerated and underplanted conifers 10-13 years after overstory thinning and understory...
Molecular genetic and enzymological techniques have been employed to study antibiotic biosynthesis. The nonproteinogenic amino acid capreomycidine is the signature residue found in the tuberactinomycin family of antitubercular peptide antibiotics and an important element of the pharmacophore. Recombinant VioG, a single module peptide synthetase from the viomycin gene cluster cloned...
Understanding the dynamics of open marine populations is difficult. Ecological processes may vary with the spatial structure of the habitat, and this variation may subsequently affect demographic rates. In a series of observational and experimental studies in the Bahamas, I examined the roles of emigration, mortality, and predation in the...
There is substantial interest in the application of mindfulness in counseling and psychotherapy. The appeal of mindfulness training and mindfulness-based interventions has increased as research continues to demonstrate benefits. Mindfulness practice has not only been effective in clinical applications with clients, but has also been conceptualized as beneficial for counselors...
An inventor seeks to leverage his unique means in order to create and commercially exploit new technologies. Until new technologies are sufficiently developed, they have the theoretical potential for commercial exploitation in a wide range of markets. Those opportunities are limited by physical bounds that are often only discovered through...
How the direct and indirect effects of species interactions cascade to affect community structure, functioning, and stability is a fundamental question in ecology. In temperate kelp forests, species interactions, in conjunction with environmental processes, produce rich spatiotemporal dynamics.
Arguably the most dramatic of these are abrupt shifts in community state,...
BCL11B is a transcriptional regulatory protein that plays essential roles during mouse embryonic development. BCL11B is expressed and functions in the immune and nervous systems as well as within ectodermal organs. Multiple studies have characterized the roles of BCL11B in T cells, brain, and skin. However, very little is known...
Studies using the pluripotent embryonic carcinoma cell line, P19, as a retinoic acid (RA)-responsive model system have been instrumental towards our understanding of the RA-dependent signaling pathways in development and homeostasis. Grp1-associated scaffold protein (GRASP; also known as Tamalin) was first identified by our group, as a gene robustly induced...
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Mark Leid
Studies using the pluripotent embryonic carcinoma cell line, P19, as a
PURPOSE: The purpose of this research was to quantify the effects of a warm-up with static or dynamic stretching on countermovement jump height, reaction time, muscle onsets for tibialis anterior (TA) and vastus lateralis (VL), and low back/ hamstring flexibility.
METHODS: Twenty one recreationally-active males (24.4 ± 4.5 yrs), recruited...
Tropical coastal and marine areas are popular for recreation, leisure, and tourism activities, but these activities can cause social (e.g., crowding), ecological (e.g., coral trampling), and managerial impacts (e.g., pressure on facilities). The concept of norms is one approach for examining user acceptance or tolerance of these impacts. This dissertation...
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MarkD. Needham
Tropical coastal and marine areas are popular for recreation, leisure
Extending the flight time of an autonomous unmanned air vehicle by soaring is
considered. A suboptimal controller is developed and successful static soaring is
demonstrated with a 6 degree of freedom glider model. Altitude gain rates of between
¼ and ½ m/s are achieved with this simple implementation.
A hybrid...
Diet variation among individuals within populations is widespread. Often diet differences among individuals are attributable to obvious differences among individuals such as age, sex, or morphology. However, growing evidence suggests that individual diet variation is also common among seemingly identical individuals within populations. This phenomenon has been termed individual diet...
COUP-TFI, an orphan nuclear receptor of the steroid/thyroid hormone receptor superfamily, plays important roles in homeostasis and the CNS development, including differentiation, patterning, axonal projection, cell migration, cortical arealization and the temporal specification of neural stem cells. A number of COUP-interacting proteins have been described previously, and the majority of...
CTIP2 is a C2H2 zinc finger transcription factor that plays important yet poorly understood roles in mouse development. CTIP2 is known to be highly expressed in the central nervous system, skin and T lymphocytes during embryogenesis. CTIP2-null mice die perinatally of unknown causes and exhibit defects in multiple organ systems...
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Mark Leid
CTIP2 is a C2H2 zinc finger transcription factor that plays important yet poorly
Because many coral-reef fishes are observable in situ, are amenable to transplantation, have small home ranges and short generation times, they provide a excellent system to investigate many topics within general ecology, fisheries biology, and conservation biology. The primary goal of this dissertation was to use the coral-reef fishes system...
A central challenge for ecology is to understand the dynamic nature of species interactions. A classic approach to community ecology assumes that individuals within a species are functionally identical and that consumer-resource dynamics can be predicted solely by using species abundances. However, one species can consist of multiple functional groups,...
Over the past few decades, tourism and recreation activities have increased in tropical marine settings, and studies have examined social and ecological impacts of these activities. Some studies have examined social impacts such as encounters, crowding, and encounter norms or standards that individuals use to evaluate encounters with others as...
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MarkD. Needham
Over the past few decades, tourism and recreation activities have
Wine is known to have been enjoyed since ancient times. Although early civilizations where unaware of scientific mechanisms of the properties of wine, empirical methods allowed them knowledge of its intoxicating effects as well as its healthful properties. These properties lead the ancients to use wine for many purposes including...
The child welfare system was established in the 1935 Social Security Act to help families and their children. Children have been the inspiration for protection and assistance among families especially those living in poverty. Previous research aims to analyze the associations between a child’s living arrangements and several child outcomes....
Using Richard Matland’s ambiguity/conflict model of policy implementation, this research examines the connections that agencies and organizations in one rural county, Klamath, and one urban county, Multnomah, in Oregon utilize to implement a particular state policy. The policy being examined is ORS 418.746-800, which mandates the use of Multidisciplinary Teams...
Increasingly popular methods for managing impacts of tourism in nature-based settings include collaborative and voluntary codes of conduct. In southeast Alaska, for example, the Tourism Best Management Practices (TBMP) in Juneau and Wilderness Best Management Practices (WBMP) in Tracy Arm-Fords Terror Wilderness have been created to address shore and marine...
Fluctuations and spatial heterogeneity of habitat and resources is thought to underlie niche variation in animal populations, with intraspecific differences serving to produce or maintain population-, community-, or ecosystem-level patterns. Individual diet variation, defined as individual variation in food resource use within a population that is consistent over time, is...
Estimates of potential carbon (C) storage can be used to constrain predictions of future carbon sequestration and to understand the degree to which disturbances, both natural aid anthropogenic, affect C storage. An upper bound on C storage in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the United States was estimated using field...
he Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is widely known as one of the best-managed marine protected areas in the world. The park is divided into different management zones, the most prevalent of which are marine national park zones, which are designated as no-take, and conservation zones in which some regulated...
At the start of the public’s use of the internet in 1983, whatever news made it online was expected to be open and free of charge. However, the idea that news should always be accessible online changed as newspapers moved most of their content online and needed online subscriptions to...
Youth who are at-risk of homelessness are placed into jeopardizing situations because
they are often pushed toward the outer edges of society, disconnected from healthy support
networks, involved in illegal activities, and their chances of having successful futures are, in turn, diminished. The goals of this project were to: review...
Pesticides can often be toxic and for this reason their methods and quantities of application are extremely regulated. Pesticide applicators are at risk of permanently damaging their health from exposure to pesticides. In order to ensure that these employees have the proper information to protect themselves, they are required to...
Marine reserves are known to directly replenish overfished species. However, the
community-wide effects of reserves are less clear. I examined the community of coralreef
fishes in a large, fully protected marine reserve in The Bahamas: the Exuma Cays
Land and Sea Park. Visual-transect surveys provided estimates and comparisons of the...
Definitions of child poverty and measurement approaches are directly linked to poverty reduction strategies. The definition determines the measure and the measure, in turn, informs policies, which can subsequently reshape measurement approaches. Applying human rights approach and using method of document analysis, this research explores how the conceptualization and measurement...
Due to past hiring practices U.S. federal agencies have workforces that do not match the diversity of the populations they serve. In 2011, the Partnership for Public Service found that the United States Forest Service (USFS) ranked number 149 out of 206 agencies in the category of ‘Support for Diversity,’...
The work deals with the subject of designing for Native Americans. The first part of the project broadly examines the field of graphic design as it relates to Native Americans, discussing the lack of Native voices in graphic design, what designing for Native Americans can entail, the role of Native...
In recent decades, local governments have desired to increase community engagement in collaborative governance processes, such as community visioning and strategic planning, in an effort to develop policies that are inclusive and supportive of those who live in the community. A key component of the community visioning process is the...
Current human – ocean relationships are dominated by unsustainable extraction of marine resources having both ecological and socio-economic consequences. Sustainable fishery management utilizing stakeholder collaboration must become a proactive strategy to prevent or reduce further long-lasting impacts. In Oregon, USA, a newly developing fishery for gooseneck barnacle (Pollicipes polymerus) presents...
Most studies suggest that LGBTQ+ young adults make up between 20 and 40 percent of the houseless young adult population (Edidin, Ganim, Hunter, and Karnik 2011; Nolan 2006). However, LGBTQ+ young adults compose only 1.3–3.8% of the general young adult population (Rosario, Schrimshaw, and Hunter 2012). Thus LGBTQ+ young adults...
In 2011, Governor John Kitzhaber, along with the Oregon legislature, affirmed a clear and ambitious goal for the State. The 40-40-20 goal states that by 2025, 40% of adult Oregonians will have an Associates degree or a meaningful postsecondary certificate, 40% will hold a Bachelors degree or advance degree and...
There are moral, ethical, and economic reasons supported by empirical research as to why governments and institutions need to take a greater stance on housing the homeless. The Finnish government with the collaboration of various institutions such as the NGO Y-Foundation, has made tremendous strides in reducing the homeless population...
This MPP essay examines how states expand access to nutritious food for low-income families, focusing specifically on policies related to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and farmers’ markets. Coalitions made up of nonprofits focused on hunger, farmers, and health collaborate to impact relevant policies in their respective states. The...
On any given night across the United States there are over half a million individuals that are experiencing homelessness. Much of the growth in homelessness has been concentrated on the West Coast, with states like California, Oregon, and Hawaii having the highest percentages of people experiencing homelessness that are unsheltered....
Because global warming is predicted to increase the severity of El Niño events in the future, understanding how warmer temperatures affect seaweed growth and the animals associated with seaweeds is important for predicting how marine ecosystems will change. The Galapagos Islands of Ecuador are considered a living laboratory for studying...
This thesis is a rhetorical analysis of American newspaper coverage of Hồ Chí Minh from 1954-1969. My method is the Pragmatic Attitude, created by Elizabeth and Jay Mechling. My foci of study are the polls and letters to the editor from this same period. These foci of study are used...
In response to the events on September the Eleventh, various media attempted to make sense of the seemingly radical altered political landscape. Comic books, though traditionally framed as low brow pulp, were no exception. This thesis is a work of rhetorical criticism. It applies Walter Fisher's Narrative Paradigm to a...
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Mark J. Porrovecchio
In response to the events on September the Eleventh, various media
Females more commonly injure their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in
athletics than do males. Despite many studies researching anatomical, neuromuscular,
and hormonal causes, the predisposing risk factors behind this occurrence are currently
unknown. This study compared 5 females who had injured their ACL to 15 healthy
females concentrating on three...
This essay examines the low-income weatherization program in rural Oregon, shedding light on difficulties in increasing weatherization services to low-income rural households. This essay also identifies policy limitations. There are strict rules in place for utilizing Department of Energy weatherization funding and some of these rules
are likely to make...
There is increasing awareness that human activities are altering the ways that natural systems operate and that local shifts in species composition and abundance can lead to abrupt and irreversible global change. Therefore, understanding the processes that buffer biological communities from critical shifts and how our actions affect natural stabilizing...
This thesis examines depictions of medievalism in three central texts: Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Each of these texts provides an entry point for exploring the ways in which English and American writers have...
China's Minqin Oasis once welcomed traders along the ancient Silk Road with rivers, lakes, and lush forests, yet today the region's farmland and grassland are increasingly being engulfed by the sands of the Gobi Desert. The severity of this incremental catastrophe for a declining population of 300,000 residents has brought...
The United States Pacific Northwest is well known for its shellfish farming. Historically, commercial harvests were dominated by the native Olympia oyster, Ostrea lurida, but over-exploitation, habitat degradation, and competition and predation by non-native species has drastically depleted their densities and extirpated many local populations. As a result, shellfish aquaculture...
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Christopher J. Langdon MarkD. Camara
The United States Pacific Northwest is
The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the rates of nitrate removal for a nitrate containing, low organic carbon wastewater interacting with four different carbon-containing solid substrates (alder woodchips, corn silage, manure and woodchip biochar). Batch systems were tested for nitrate removal, and systems with a combination of...
Red tree voles (Arborimus longicaudus) are a unique species of Arvicoline rodent found in western Oregon and northwest California. Their preferred habitat is mature and old-growth coniferous forest dominated by Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii). Tree voles are an important prey item for northern spotted owls and many other predators, but are...
The Wetland Reserve Program (WRP) is one conservation tool that mitigates national wetland loss and a primary goal for the program includes optimizing wildlife habitat by restoring wetland functions and values. Few studies have evaluated the WRP, which limits our understanding of its impact on wildlife populations. I assessed the...
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Bruce D. Dugger
Abstract
The Wetland Reserve Program (WRP) is one conservation tool that
Although electronic medical records systems (EMR) present promising benefits, they have not yet been widely adopted. A problem facing many EMR are that they are disruptive technologies; their complex hardware and software are not designed to account for the clinicians' characteristics and needs, thus, demanding a steep learning curve and...
Great Salt Lake (GSL), Utah, is surrounded by 191,884 hectares of wetlands. These wetlands provide critical habitat for hundreds of thousands of breeding, migrating and wintering waterfowl each year. As the human population around GSL increases, government officials have proposed to divert more water from the Jordan, Ogden, and Bear...
My thesis explores the later work of author J.D. Salinger, including two narratives featured in Nine Stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," and "Teddy," and Franny and Zooey, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters," and "Seymour: an Introduction." Through my analysis I argue that the religious nature of Salinger's fiction...
Female athletes exhibit three- to six-fold greater incidence of noncontact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury relative to their male counterparts. The increased risk appears to stem from interactions between several risk factors, that can roughly be categorized as anatomic, biomechanical, hormonal, and neuromuscular. Neuromuscular risk factors have recently gained a...
Litter nutrient dynamics contribute significantly to biogeochemical cycling in
forest ecosystems. These dynamics may be influenced by site attributes, litter nutrient concentrations, and soil nutrient availability either independently or synergistically. Litter nutrient dynamics were examined in two decomposition studies in temperate coniferous forests of Oregon. I used ¹⁵N-labelled litter of...
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Mark E. Harmon Steven S. Perakis
Litter nutrient dynamics contribute significantly to
Continuous liquid-liquid two-phase separation is needed in microfluidic devices. Due to the small characteristic lengths of microreactors, phenomena such as mass transport via molecular diffusion occur within seconds. Typically, discrete slugs of an extract are created within microchannels for high specific interfacial area to achieve intensified mass transfer. A challenge...
The conventional advection-dispersion equation cannot adequately describe all processes driving
solute transport in heterogeneous systems. This dissertation focuses on the individual influences
of both chemical (Chapter 2) and physical processes (Chapters 3 and 4) which affect
solute transport. In Chapter 2 we analyzed uranium transport in natural sediment using the...
L-pipecolic acid (L-PA) is the higher homolog of proline. It occurs naturally in
many organisms, including primates, as an intermediate in lysine degradation. The
pathway by which lysine is converted into L-pipecolic acid employs the enzyme Lpipecolate
oxidase (L-PO), and appears to be tissue specific to the central nervous system...
Many marine fish populations are severely declining due to over-fishing, loss of both juvenile and adult habitats, and accelerating environmental degradation. Fisheries management and the implementation of marine protected areas (MPAs) and other conservation tools are currently hindered by large gaps in knowledge about larval dispersal and its subsequent effects...
Molecular genetic and enzymological techniques have been employed to study antibiotic biosynthesis. In this thesis, we studied the formation and modification of the nonproteinogenic amino acid enduracididine (End), which exists in two important antibiotics, mannopeptimycins (MPPs) and enduracidin.
Sequence analysis of the MPP gene cluster revealed that the product of...
CTIP2, a novel C2H2 zinc finger protein, is a transcriptional repressor that functions by at least two mechanisms. CTIP2 interacts with and stimulates transcriptional repression mediated by COUP-TF family members. CTIP2 also represses transcription independently of COUP-TF proteins by direct, sequence-specific DNA binding activity. CTIP2 has been implicated in lymphoid...
In Oregon, property tax revolts and school equalization measures have led to increasingly unstable and more non-discretionary public funding for schools. As a result, public schools are turning to private donations to provide both basic and supplemental educational opportunities. Some schools and districts are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars,...
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Mark E. Edwards
In Oregon, property tax revolts and school equalization measures have
The continued propagation of antibiotic resistance requires the development of new therapeutics. The lipopeptide antibiotic enduracidin has demonstrated high activity against Gram-positive pathogens including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. In addition to a lack of cross-resistance with existing antibiotic classes, enduracidin has no known transferrable resistance mechanism. The development of enduracidin as...
Many communities emphasize participatory involvement in local development or reinvention efforts. Recognizing barriers among specific groups could help community leaders identify what may be constraining underrepresented groups from joining in. Utilizing data from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey, this research examined identified “barriers” to community involvement among individuals in rural...
Understanding the processes that influence the composition of animal communities is a central goal in ecology. Interactions between established residents and colonizing juveniles that affect the subsequent survival of juveniles may influence community composition. In a series of experiments on coral reef fish communities in the Bahamas and Australia, I...
Predators are fundamentally important for regulating and driving prey population dynamics as well as structuring ecological communities. Over-exploitation of marine resources has caused dramatic depletions of predatory fish species and shifts in marine community composition, with attendant declines in productivity and diversity of marine ecosystems. Despite the important ramifications of...
Dental disease is a very prevalent and costly disease in which the symptoms, not the disease, are currently being treated. The disease is caused by pathogenic oral bacteria, many of which are a part of the Mutans Streptococci. The objective of this thesis was to find a natural substance that...
Although only a minority of introduced species become established and have noticeable consequences in their new communities, some can displace native species, alter food webs, and cause local extinctions. Studying these invasive species can provide new insights into basic ecological questions as well as inform management strategies. Pacific lionfish (Pterois...
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Mark A. Hixon
Although only a minority of introduced species become established and
Ecosystems are highly heterogeneous systems subjected to important levels of environmental variability; however, it is common in terrestrial biogeochemical models to assume homogeneous properties of the elements of the system or constant environmental conditions. For some processes, heterogeneity in these models is treated very simplistically, but there is not much...
Many species have complex life cycles in which a dispersive larval stage is
followed by a relatively sedentary adult stage. For such species, reproductive output
is often high and large variation in survivorship throughout early life-history phases
(eggs and larvae) can lead to dramatic fluctuations in recruitment which may in...
Despite the importance of tropical forest ecosystems in the global carbon cycle, there have been few studies of carbon dynamics in this biome. The magnitude of carbon stocks in the tropics and their changes over time are poorly known since ground-based observations are lacking. In this study, total carbon stocks...
The first part of the dissertation is to evaluate the use of proposed and established equations for area under the plasma concentration versus time (AUC) for molecules undergoing nonlinear Michaelis–Menten pharmacokinetic elimination. The effects of varying Michaelis-Menten parameters, rate of drug absorption, or bioavailability on the predictability of drug exposure...
This dissertation describes two different projects. The first is the development of an oral DNA vaccine delivery system for fish. A novel oral DNA vaccine delivery system was developed for Rainbow Trout by combining non-viral vectors (polycationic liposomes or polycationic polymer) to facilitate the DNA vaccine's uptake by cell membranes...
This research investigates the physiological and transcriptional responses of Nitrosomonas europaea when exposed to chlorinated aromatic compounds and heavy metals under varying environmental conditions. It was found that transcriptional responses of identified sentinel genes correlate well with nitrification inhibition. Sorption of metals to biomass was also investigated and found not...
Nitrosomonas europaea carries out the first step in the biological nitrogen removal process in wastewater treatment by oxidizing ammonia to nitrite. It has been shown to be sensitive to a wide range of contaminants. The antibiotic oxytetracycline and the heavy metals chromium and silver have been found in wastewater influent....
1,4-Dioxane (dioxane) is a probable human carcinogen and is often found comingled with chlorinated aliphatic hydrocarbon (CAH) contamination since dioxane is used as a stabilizer in CAH solutions. Dioxane is miscible in water, has a low K[subscript ow], low H[subscript cc], and is highly recalcitrant in the environment. The presence...
Bcl11b (B-cell lymphoma/leukemia 11b), also known as Ctip2 (Chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter transcription factor (COUP-TF)-interacting protein 2), is a C2H2 zinc finger transcriptional regulatory protein, which is an essential protein for post-natal life in the mouse and plays crucial roles in the development, and presumably function, of several organ systems,...