In this thesis, we first examine the principle hypotheses behind the improved exotic growth of select timber species, and the evidence for each, with special focus on studies which examine growth between several ranges of a species. We find that literature suggests environmental factors directly tied to net primary production...
Profile Hidden Markov Models utilize the information stored in a multiple sequence alignment such as its residues and conserved regions to assign probabilities at each column. This indicates areas in the sequences where similar functionality is observed. These probability weights are then combined to assign a sequence score, which is...
Let H be a cyclically-presented group on n generators with a single defining relator. Attempts have been made to classify such groups by their order, their status as a 3-manifold group, and the asphericity status of their presentations. For groups with a defining relator of length 3 these classifications are...
This thesis primarily investigates nonhumans in the writings of 12th century historians. Where these writings may typically be seen as having little room for nonhuman agency, this thesis investigates how divinity, as an important part of medieval life, creates a space for nonhuman agency that is otherwise overlooked. In chapter...
Tracking footwear wear patterns is vital to the footwear industry. In the game of tennis, there are several court surfaces that produce unique wear patterns on footwear that are constantly changing according to the following factors: level of competition, level of experience, coordination, age, height, weight, and more. By tracking...
The WWC family consists of three proteins‐ KIBRA/WWC1, WWC2, and WWC3. The three proteins share a similar primary structure and interact with a common set of proteins. Each paralog contains two WW domains which recognize proline‐rich sequences of the type PPxY (P is proline, Y is tyrosine, x is any...
Hydrophobic titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles (NPs) are prevalent in industry and manufacturing. They are known for their white pigmentation, are found in sunscreens, paints, cosmetics, and are frequently used in wastewater treatment. Understanding the physicochemical properties of TiO2 P-25 NPs, such as hydrophobicity, are essential when determining their fate, transport,...
The western United States has experienced large-scale degradation due to land use and land cover changes, invasion of annual grasses, and expansion of woody plants into grass and shrublands and the resultant altered fire regimes. These landscape-scale changes have coincided with declining mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) populations, making habitat loss...
A feature of large continental magmatic systems is voluminous dacite ignimbrites erupted from upper crustal magma reservoirs. In the Altiplano Puna Volcanic Complex (APVC) of the Central Andes, a major ignimbrite and caldera plateau, magma systems are found to be long-lived and remarkably homogeneous requiring that they be maintained by...
On June 20, 2019, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced it would conduct a 5-year status review of the Spruce-Fir Moss Spider as part of the process mandated by the Endangered Species Act. Although the Spruce-Fir Moss Spider has been listed as endangered since 1994, minimal research has...
Pre-med attrition is the loss of students participating in academic pre-medical programs over time. Attrition in medical school has been the subject of many studies, but pre-med attrition is less researched, despite its relevance to the emergence and performance of future medical professionals. Interviewing former pre-med students who chose other...
Pollination is an essential ecosystem service that sustains functioning ecosystems and aids in food production. In response to recent, widespread declines of managed and native bee populations, many land managers have shown interest in developing conservation and restoration plans for enhancing native bee habitat. However, there is a lack of...
Discussions of ecopoetics often seek to investigate how poetics as a form can be rendered more ecological, often in contrast to nature poetry. These conversations tend to concentrate on this generic contrast and the formal qualities of an ecological poetics. Ecopoetics as a field emerged largely as a response to...
Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common primary bone tumor in both humans and dogs, occurring approximately 10 times more frequently in dogs. OS is a highly aggressive neoplasm with evidence of metastasis often found at the time of diagnosis. Long-term survival in afflicted dogs continues to remain low despite aggressive...
A stochastic process is given by a family of random variables indexed by elements of a set. We have considered stochastic processes of three different types, each involving an associated martingale structure. Martingale is a sequence of random variables for which the conditional expectation at a certain time point given...
Debris generated after a disaster event must be disposed efficiently for community recovery. This is a significant operation that accounts for up to 27% of the total recovery costs. Generally, debris removal takes place in two phases: the short-term relief phase, which involves debris removal immediately after a disaster to...
The objective of this research is to examine capital market determinants and implications associated with voluntary sustainability disclosures and the extent to which the informativeness of disclosure innovations differs based on given attributes of the financial disclosure and overall information environment.
In determining the quantity of financial information to disclose,...
Intersections pose unique transportation challenges regarding safety and operational efficiency. When pedestrians currently want to cross at intersection, they need to use a push button to issue a call for service. The call is static and cannot be altered or changed. But by implementing dynamic passive pedestrian detection sensors, intersections...
Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), a member of the receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) family, is frequently dysregulated in a variety of cancers. Overexpression of the receptor leads to increased cell proliferation and resistance to cell death due to downstream signaling effects. Proteasomal degradation of HER2 results in the...
To design engineering systems that have improved reliability, it is important to understand what kind of system faults they will be susceptible to. Mitigation strategies are important to ensuring the performance of these engineering systems. Understanding how the modularity of complex engineering systems affects the risk of devastating failures such...
User studies in human-robot interaction and social robotics in general involve human participants and their reactions, observations and expectations of robots. This thesis presents two innovative experimental methods aimed at gaining access to high-stakes social data not typically collectable with traditional user studies. The Actor Method provides access to data...
Energy issues are becoming one of the most pressing topics in today's political and cultural landscape, particularly in the midst of the climate crisis. Globally, a variety of renewable energy projects are under development to meet energy demand without continuing to overburden the natural environment of our planet, with profound...
The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to explore the lived experience of alternatively certified agriculture teachers, acquire the practices of agriculture teachers, and participate in the agriculture teacher community of practice. The study was grounded in an interpretivist approach, which provided an alterantive perspective to the positistic-like research...
Clostridium perfringens is an anaerobic, gram-positive, rod-shaped, spore-forming bacterium that leads to a broad range of diseases in humans and animals [23, 27, 50]. Among seven C. perfringens types (type A-G), type F is known to be the most common bacteria that is responsible for causing human food-borne disease outbreaks...
This thesis is an offering, request, testimonio, refusal, and compliance to the discipline of anthropology and higher education. In this thesis, I engage with different forms of storytelling to highlight the relationships of mixed-status families in the United States. To accomplish this, I draw on the experiences of my mother...
Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is so common that about 80% of those in the United States will acquire it during their lifetime. In more serious cases, HPV can develop into cancer: each year in the U.S., there are around 32,000 HPV related cancer diagnoses. The HPV vaccine series can prevent the...
Housing affordability is a salient topic among policymakers and the general public today, especially in Oregon. As housing costs continue to rise, there are concerns that urban planning policies such as urban renewal via tax-increment financing (TIF) are exacerbating the problem and pushing more households into a state of housing...
Since 1960 sheep have been used to reduce fuel accumulation on Fort Ord National Monument (FONM) grasslands. From 1997-2019 BLM’s monitoring projects were employed to determine livestock grazing impacts on Coyote Brush, bunchgrasses, and other native and non-native herbaceous vegetation. In 2014, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) determined that...
Transparent conductive oxides (TCOs), combining the optical transparency and electrical conducting properties, have attracted escalating research interests in recent years due to their potential for various photonic applications. The electrical and optical properties, such as carrier concentration, mobility, will strongly affect the performance of TCO-based photonic devices. In this dissertation,...
As mass-timber building construction rises around the globe, there exists the need to verify the long-term, in-situ behavior and performance of these structural systems. Structural health monitoring (SHM), generally defined as a damage detection strategy consisting of a network of sensors, a data acquisition system, and algorithms for data analysis,...
Ophthalmic plaque brachytherapy is a form of internal radiation treatment for uveal melanoma, the most common eye cancer in adults. During treatment, a plaque containing radioactive seeds is surgically attached to the sclera, directly adjacent to the ocular tumor site. Plaque Simulator™ is an eye plaque brachytherapy planning software that...
This work investigates the relationship between the local structure and physical properties of a set of classical (MgTiO3, CaTiO3, SrTiO3, and BaTiO3) and complex ((1-x)Ba(Zr0.2Ti0.8)O3-x(Ba0.7Ca0.3)TiO3[BZT-BCT], Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3 [NBT]) perovskite electroceramics. The materials in this work were synthesized via standard solid state ceramic synthesis, the structure was investigated through a number of...
Electroanalytical techniques allow scientists and engineers to characterize bulk solutions as well as interfaces. Potentiostats are commonly used by researchers in a variety of disciplines to analyze the chemistry which occurs at a working electrode surface. Advancements in microelectronics and the proliferation of open-source designs have allowed researchers to construct...
The Critical Power - W’ model has many advantages compared to the traditional VO2max test, including tracking fitness changes over time in well trained athletes, predicting performances due to its discrete aerobic and high intensity tolerance variables, and prescribing exercise intensities with increased accuracy. However, a major disadvantage of this...
This work introduces the novel flat-histogram Monte Carlo (MC) method stochastic approximation with a dynamic update factor (SAD) and explores the convergence properties of a variety of related weight-based MC methods. The new method is applied to a number of physical `test’ systems including the 2D Ising model, a square-well...
All mammals host communities of commensal microbes in and on their bodies. Recent technological advances, combined with experimental studies in laboratory animals, are beginning to reveal the ubiquitous links between the gut microbiome and host disease, metabolism, immunity, and numerous other host functions. A new challenge of microbiome research is...
Silicon photonics has rapidly become one of the most promising photonic integration platforms. Especially, microring resonator (MRR) plays a pivotal role in silicon photonics and has been widely used for electro-optic (E-O) modulators and wavelength filters due to its small footprint, low energy consumption, and high quality factor (Q-factor). Recently,...
This dissertation incorporates coalition formation and probabilistic planning towards a domain-independent automated planning solution scalable to multiple heterogeneous robots in complex domains. The first research direction investigates the effectiveness of Task Fusion and introduces heuristics that improve task allocation and result in better quality plans, while requiring lower computational cost...
The portability and reduced price of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in recent years has led to a broad range of new UAS-enabled scientific inquiries, including for forestry. Small, consumer-grade UAS are advantageous for forest measurements due to their portability, ease and safety of deployment, and notably, they are currently the...
Top predators play important roles in regulating communities and ecosystem processes in freshwater ecosystems. In the headwater stream network, it is crucial to understand the interspecific interaction between multiple predators. In Oregon forested ecosystems, Coastal Giant Salamander (Dicamptodon tenebrosus) and cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii) are the top predators in many...
The electrical grid of the Western Interconnection is vulnerable to earthquake damage, especially large-magnitude megathrust events, due to the unique seismic profile of the region. However, the size of the Western Interconnection makes it difficult to model seismic failure in electrical substations to the level of detail necessary to improve...
Cephalopod-inspired soft robot arms have been studied as a new type of manipulator. These arms have been proposed for reach and grab tasks, underwater locomotion via swimming and walking, and robotic surgery. However, the capabilities of existing soft arms are limited to simple motions and light loads. Arm design has...
Paper-based assays for HIV diagnosis are cheap, portable, and require little to no skilled training, electricity, or expensive equipment to perform successfully. However, there is a need for tests with lower limits of detection (LOD) for diagnosing infection at the earliest stages. Effective labeling to increase signal-to-noise ratio is critical...
In the era of #MeToo, we have learned more about the plight of women in Hollywood as they seek employment as actors. While the recent public conversation about gender and sexualization in Hollywood is robust, few peer-reviewed academic articles examine the actor’s personal experiences of gaining meaningful employment in television...
A physical model study was performed to examine the forces and response of 1:6 scale wood-frame coastal residential structures subjected to storm surge and waves. An on-grade and an elevated specimen were tested and exposed to regular waves with varying water depths and wave heights to simulate Hurricane Sandy’s conditions....
Biological hydrogen production from renewable feedstocks was reckoned as a promising method for sustainable energy production. Bioelectrochemical hydrogen production using microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) demonstrated superiorities over the conventional methods for hydrogen production. The introduction of the membrane-less single chamber design further improved the feasibility of MECs for practical application,...
Ixodes scapularis (e.g. blacklegged tick) is a hard-bodied tick considered endemic to certain regions within the United States. This species is considered a primary vector of Lyme disease (Borrelia burgdorferi), anaplasmosis (Anaplasma phagocytophilum) and babesiosis (Babesia microti). Each of these tick-borne diseases represent a growing health concern within the nation...
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...
Climate change is increasing the severity of pest and pathogen infestations affecting forests. Resulting shifts in disturbance patterns can have substantial ecological, social, and economic impacts on forested ecosystems and their dependent communities. Researchers are actively investigating methods to improve tree resistance to specific pests and pathogens and enhance forest...
The purpose of this research is to describe the secondary traumatic stress (STS) levels of early career school based agriculture (SBAE) teachers. Using the professional quality of life (ProQOL) scale (Stamm, 2010) as a theoretical framework, secondary traumatic stress, burnout (BO) and compassion satisfaction (CS) levels were measured among (n...