Coniferous trees are a major North American crop that has been intensively managed for its commercial value, while also serving as critical habitat for abundant wildlife and as carbon sinks. Having diverse functions, North American temperate coniferous forests have become a research hotspot for numerous scientific studies aiming to integrate...
The dataset contains three loblolly pines (Pinus taeda Lindl.) stems reconstructed with terrestrial photogrammetric techniques. The trees were growing in west-central Louisiana, Vernon parish. The reconstructed models reached over 50% of the relative height, the proportion of the stem, on which the majority of the merchantable volume is located. After...
Gender relations as well as the social situation of Manchu women have long been ignored in studies of the cultural evolution of the Manchu. By setting the discussion of Manchu women in the context of cultural adaptation, this study reintroduces gender and women's problems into the research on the Manchu...
This thesis examines the influence of Christian missions on Yung Wing (1828-1912) during the nineteenth century, when China was beginning to encounter the West. Yung was the first Chinese graduate student to enter an American institution of higher education (Yale College, 1854). As a Westernized Christian intellectual, he strove to...
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...
The increase in the demand for energy is estimated to be 28 TW by a year of 2050, which is twice of the energy produced in 2010, in response to the unprecedented growth of the global population. Current energy market is heavily relying on the fossil fuel, which brings the...
Xanthohumol [XN, (E)-6´-methoxy-3´-(3-methylbuten-2-yl)-2´,4´,4´´-trihydroxychalcone], the principal prenylated chalcone from hops, and its 2,3-dihydro- (DXN) and O6-desmethyl-2,3-dihydro- (DDXN) congeners, are of potential utility for the amelioration of metabolic syndrome; however, their complex bioactivity profiles cannot be properly studied and understood without access to appropriately produced synthetic materials.
In the first part of...
Gadusol is a UV-B-absorbent compound found in fish and other marine organisms where it is presumed to play a role as a sunscreen and antioxidant. In light of commercial potential as a replacement for problematic synthetic sunscreens, a process to produce recombinant gadusol in the yeast Saccharomcyces cerevisiae was investigated....
Compactness in deep learning can be critical to a model’s viability in low-resource applications, and a common approach to extreme model compression is quantization. We consider Iterative Product Quantization (iPQ) with Quant-Noise [Fan et al., 2020] to be state-of-the-art in this area, but this quantization framework suffers from preventable inference...
Remote sensing techniques have been applied extensively in geospatial investigations, but their use in measuring soil physical attributes has been far less explored. Soil particle size distributions (PSD) are indispensable in modeling pedological and hydrological processes as well as biodiversity. However, estimation of PSD via gravimetric measurement methods, the standard...
This work presents improvements to a multi-core performance/power simulator. The improvements which include updated power models, voltage scaling aware models, and an application specific benchmark, are done to increase the accuracy of power models under voltage and frequency scaling. Improvements to the simulator enable more accurate design space exploration for...
This thesis explores the changes in mother-daughter relations in Northeast Thailand over the last three generations in relation to migration out of this region. Qualitative interviews were done with ten families in two villages; the interviews focused on representatives of three generations of women in each family. In recent decades,...
In the field of machine learning, clustering and classification are two fundamental tasks. Traditionally, clustering is an unsupervised method, where no supervision about the data is available for learning; classification is a supervised task, where fully-labeled data are collected for training a classifier. In some scenarios, however, we may not...
In this dissertation, the primary objective is to discover more sustainable electrode materials and study new reaction mechanisms using aqueous electrolytes. The first study conducted reveals a reversible conversion reaction from copper to Cu2CO3(OH)2. The reaction mechanism uses OH- and CO32- as charge carriers at the cathode. The results open...
In Dual-ion Batteries, anions as charge carriers might be a potential technique of energy storage. While fluoride anion has been selected as a promising charge carrier for energy storage due to its high charge/mass ratio and small ionic radius, carbonate anion has never been reported as a charge carrier for...
The disposition of four therapeutically important antimicrobial agents was studied in llamas following intravenous bolus administration. Six llamas were each given ampicillin, tobramycin, trimethoprim and enrofloxacin at a dose of 12 mg/kg, 1 mg/kg, 3 mg/kg and 5 mg/kg of body weight with a wash out period of 3 days...
Radiation exposure to the brain can occur from a variety of events, including space missions, nuclear accidents, and clinical treatments. The effects of high dose radiation are well studied, but those of lower dosage are more elusive. Decline of memory and cognition is observed in patients exposed to low dose...
The development of micro total analysis systems (µTAS), also called “lab-on-a-chip”, or microfluidic analysis systems, is presented in this dissertation. Various research areas, covering subjects from magnetic particles synthesis to novel microchip fabrication techniques, are explored to develop a lab-on-a-chip system capable of performing magnetic bead-based bioassays. These devices are...
This compilation of theses and dissertations (a part of the OSU Bibliographic Series) for the period 1970-1977 reflects this university's emphasis on research and graduate study. It may be viewed as an indicator of the contributions made to the state of Oregon through graduate study and research at Oregon State...
Swiss needle cast (SNC) is a foliage disease of Douglas-fir caused by Nothophaeocryptopus gaeumannii, an Ascomycete fungus (Mycosphaerellaceae) that causes growth reductions in Douglas-fir plantations across the Pacific Northwest. Epidemiology of the fungus is generally well known in plantation trees, but the relationship between disease expression and foliage nutrition and...
Maintaining the sustainability of the earth’s ecosystems has attracted much attention as these ecosystems are facing more and more pressure from human activities. Machine learning can play an important role in promoting sustainability as a large amount of data is being collected from ecosystems. There are at least three important...
The integration of low-pressure membrane filtration and aerobic granular sludge (AGS) reactor leads to a novel environmental biotechnological process with strong potential to overcome membrane fouling and demonstrate excellent wastewater treatment performance. However, membrane fouling mechanisms in the AGS based membrane bioreactor (MBR) are lack of systematic elaboration. In the...
The need for less toxic quantum dots (QDs) has led to a significant number of investigations related to copper indium sulfide (CIS) QDs. Lower toxicity and broad band absorbance width makes CIS QDs appealing for light emitting diodes (LEDs), lasers, sensors, bio-imaging, solar cells, and computing. The optical and electronic...
The human cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide (CAMP) is a broad spectrum microbicidal agent and modulator of both the innate and adaptive immune system. It is induced by 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D (1,25(OH)₂D₃) through activation of the vitamin D receptor (VDR) and primary bile salts through activation of the xenobiotic nuclear receptor farnesoid X...
In weak supervision learning, label information can be provided at different levels of granularity. For example, in multi-instance multi-label learning, samples are organized into bags and labels for each class are provided at the bag level. For small datasets, this approach offers means of reducing the labeling efforts. However, in...
In the 21st century, environmental deterioration is now an indisputable fact. Reliable and economically viable electricity systems based on renewable sources are urgently needed to replace the environmentally detrimental fossil fuels. The feasibility of incorporating renewable-but-intermittent solar and wind energy heavily depends on the development of cost-effective and safe technologies,...
Oxides are a versatile class of materials with a wide range of electronic, optical, and magnetic properties. This makes them ideal for use in a multitude of functional devices for oxide electronics, electrochemical conversion, and storage. The overall performance of these devices is governed by atomic scale charge and mass...
There has been a tremendous growth in interest in carbon nanodots (C-dots) in the past several years. As a nascent nanomaterial, C-dots have shown great promise in applications that benefit from their superior water dispersibility, low toxicity, non-blinking fluorescent output, chemical and biological compatibility, ease of functionalization and resistance to...
As the power system grows larger and more complex, real-time monitoring and control become very significant in order to achieve reliable operation of the power system. Before any security assessment can be made or control actions are taken, the reliable estimate of the existing state of the system must be...
Hop (Humulus lupulus L. var. lupulus) is a diploid, dioecious plant with an extensive history of cultivation and use in brewing, as a textile, and for its therapeutic properties. Hop is prized for its ability to produce a variety of aromatic and flavor compounds, as well as compounds with anti-microbial...
Obesity and metabolic syndrome (MetS) affect over 1.9 billion adults and 12.7 million youth in the US. If all of today’s obese American youth become obese adults, the total societal costs over their lifetime may exceed $1.1 trillion. We show that feeding rodents a high-fat diet supplemented with xanthohumol (XN)...
Grid-scale energy storage systems are urgently needed to increase the flexibility and rigidity of the grid for modern society and take full advantage of the renewable green energy resources such as solar energy and wind energy. Na-ion batteries (NIBs) and K-ion batteries (KIBs) have been emerged as one of the...
Cementitious materials are often characterized through the use of advanced analytical techniques to understand the macro-, micro-, and nano-scale properties, including phase formation during hydration, and subsequent potential deterioration mechanisms which can affect service life. A major limitation with using such analytical techniques to quantify solid phases in cementitious systems...
Unlike other biosensing, electrochemical biosensor has the advantages of robustness, easy miniaturization, excellent detection limits, and capability in handling small analyte volumes. The detection selectivity of the electrochemical biosensors is mainly supported by bioreceptors. However, these receptors always suffer from the performance variation caused by the environment and the thermal-...
Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women as it accounts for about 25% of all female cancer cases. Studies have shown that early detection of breast cancer increases the chances of a positive prognosis amongst patients therefore it is crucial to provide accurate diagnosis tools in routine exams....
The advent of deep learning models leads to a substantial improvement in a wide range of NLP tasks, achieving state-of-art performances without any hand-crafted features. However, training deep models requires a massive amount of labeled data. Labeling new data as a new task or domain emerges consumes time and efforts...
This dissertation focuses on defining underlying mechanisms to enable the bio-inspired design of aerodynamic and/or hydrodynamic vehicles that operate within complex environments. This dissertation introduces four overarching research gaps found in current bio-inspired design research and four corresponding approach questions that guide the framework of the presented research. This research...
Jalapeño peppers are usually consumed raw and fresh with minimal processing. They
contain antioxidants and bioactive compounds which are of human health benefits.
There have been an increasing number of reports of foodborne outbreaks attributed to
inaccessibility of sanitizers to Salmonella , E.coli and Listeria monocytogenes when
embedded in fruit...
Vitamin E (VitE) is necessary for vertebrate embryonic development. VitE prevents lipid peroxidation (LPO), which requires detoxification by cellular antioxidant systems subsequently involving reducing power derived from energy metabolism. Thus, VitE protects metabolic networks in the developing embryo and the integrated gene expression networks compensating for and impaired by LPO-induced...
Bacterial blight (Xanthomonas arboricola pv. corylina) (Xac) of hazelnut (Corylus avellana L.) was described first in Oregon in 1915 and is now recognized as a damaging disease of young hazelnut trees worldwide. Stressed hazelnut trees in conditions such as planting on marginal sites, and trees between 1 and 4-years-old are...
A primary goal of population genetics is to identify the role of
microevolutionary forces in producing observed patterns of molecular and phenotypic
variation. I conducted four studies in the northern leopard frog, Rana pipiens, to
determine just how mutation, migration, genetic drift, and selection influenced,
genetic structure of mitochondrial DNA...
The scarcity of wireless spectrum resources and the overwhelming demand for wireless broadband resources have prompted industry, government agencies and academia within the wireless communities to develop and come up with effective solutions that can make additional spectrum available for broadband data. As part of these ongoing efforts, cognitive radio...
The aim of this research is to develop a fundamental understanding of the dominant defect species and the relevant defect equilibrium conditions for bismuth-containing perovskites to help guide the development of these materials for emerging applications. This is of paramount importance for many demanding applications, because ultimately the defect equilibria...
Animals aggregate and interact in nonuniform and nonrandom patterns, which lead to group level characteristics that have important evolutionary and ecological consequences. Network analysis provides a useful conceptual framework for linking animal interactions at all scales from dyads to communities, to populations and ecosystems. Despite exciting theoretical and applied advances...
My work has focused on using density functional theory to elucidate mechanisms of organocatalytic and transition metal catalyzed reactions by considering competing mechanisms. In each of the three presented studies computational investigation complemented experimental work by predicting stereoselectivity or revealing origins of stereo, regio, or chemoselectivity.
A study on the...
Transportation systems need to get better by moving ever more people while consuming ever fewer resources. To build better transportation systems, planners need an accurate understanding of how people exercise mobility and tools to apply that understanding to the transportation system. Such an understanding can come through the development of...
Utilization of solar energy or wind energy for electricity production is inherently challenging due to the diurnal and seasonal variations and normal intermittency. Effective, high efficiency storage methods need to be developed for further advancing renewable energy utilization. Endothermic chemical processing and thermochemical energy storage can be both employed as...
Many database users are not familiar with formal query languages, the concept of schema, or the exact content of their database. Thus, it is challenging for these users to formulate their information needs over semi-structured and structured databases. To address this problem, researchers have proposed usable query interfaces over which...
Memory is essential to everyday life. As we age, deficits in memory become apparent. The toll of age-related cognitive impairment can be devastating to families and costly to society. The NMDA receptor is a molecule in the brain that is instrumental in the formation of memories. The receptor is particularly...
This ethnographic research examines socioeconomic vulnerabilities to resettlement from a large hydropower dam and agricultural commodification in a Tibetan village in Yunnan Province, Southwest China. After providing an initial background on the dynamics of the research region and hydrodevelopment on its rivers, the research framework of examining vulnerability through a...
Sulfoxide-ligand exchange (SLE) and asymmetric halogen-metal exchange (AHME) processes were separately examined for the enantioselective synthesis of functionalized alpha-haloalkylmetal (carbenoid) reagents. Carbenoids derived from SLE were used to effect stereospecific reagent-controlled homologation (StReCH) of boronic esters and those generated via AHME were engaged in Darzens-type chemistry with aldehydes.
Abstract for...
Messenger RNA (mRNA) therapy has massive potential to treat various genetic disorders by providing effective proteins to the diseased cells and tissues. Its therapeutic applications include protein replacement, genome editing, and immunotherapy. For successful mRNA treatment, mRNA must be delivered to the cytosol of target cells. One of the leading...
Ecological domains seeking to understand the environment and the behavior of species have received little attention in machine learning (ML), despite the fact that environmental changes have a significant impact on humans as well as ecosystems. Some ecological problems can be formulated similarly to other common ML applications, but there...
Silicon photonics has become the most promising platform for future large-scale optical interconnect and optical computing systems due to its inherent CMOS compatibility, which brings exclusive advantages in bandwidth density, energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness. Parallel optical interconnects based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) have the capacity to meet the...
Widespread installation of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, has been delayed by the lack of suitable stationary energy storage solutions. Current large-scale technologies, such as pumped hydro and compressed air, are geographically restricted. This is where electrochemical energy storage - batteries or hybrid capacitors can play a...
Nonthermal plasmas generate high concentrations of excited species that can simultaneously exist at high energy and far from thermodynamic equilibrium, making them useful tools in chemistry and engineering. Microplasmas, roughly defined as plasmas that are generated within sub-millimeter dimensions, provide enhanced stability, improved excited species density, increased nonequilibrium properties, higher...
Advances in low-power digital integration and microelectro-mechanical systems (MEMS) have paved the way for micro-sensors. These sensors are equipped with data processing capabilities along with sensory circuits. Sensor data are processed on these individual sensors and transmitted to the target (sink). Lowcost integration and small sizes of these sensors have...
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...
Reliability-based geotechnical foundation design focusses on soil and structure analysis that meets necessary safety, performance and/or serviceability criteria, calibrated based on probabilistic analyses and an accepted level of risk. As the civil engineering community seeks to better harmonize geotechnical and structural design methodologies, reliability-based design is being incorporated more into...
This dissertation has two objectives. The first objective is to determine where best to situate the study of mentoring (i.e. the 'making of scientists') on the landscape of the history of science and science studies. This task is accomplished by establishing mentoring studies as a link between the robust body...
An open area of research in complex systems is to move reliability and failure assessments earlier in the engineering design process. When compared to later design, early decisions are cost effective and have a large impact on the system. Standard methods are limited by the availability of data and often...