Ph.D. candidate Qi Wei's thesis consists of two projects: Chemotherapy Project: a study based on the research paper "Predicting chemotherapy response of various cancer types using a variational auto-encoder approach" submitted to the bioRxiv preprint archive and accepted by the BMC bioinformatics; and Wound Monitor Project: implementing and assessing analytics...
Gene regulation is a complex mechanism that controls the spatial and temporal expression of genes in a living cell. My dissertation studies focus on two problems. First, tissue-specific gene expression prediction from DNA sequence and chromatin state, and second, the accurate discovery of small over-represented regulatory circuits in gene regulatory...
Social scientists have studied people's responses to disasters for many decades, and behavioral commonalities and variations are summarized in different mental schemes/models in disaster studies. Integrating those findings from social science into evacuation simulation can improve simulation accuracy and eventually better support decision-making and disaster preparedness. However, this kind of...
This study is an ethnographic investigation of residential turnover, organizational memory, and the persistence of Lost Valley, an Oregon ecovillage founded in 1989. Literature on organizational turnover, memory, and persistence is reviewed and integrated with scholarship on intentional communities and ecovillages, generating a theoretical framework for data collection and analysis....
Null networks are a type of random graph that is favored for the analysis of a wide variety of real-world networks, including gene-regulatory networks, food webs, and species co-occurrence matrices. As a hypothesis-generating tool, null networks are invaluable because they can reveal network motifs and unusual large-scale properties of networks...
Drone strikes have become a defining strategy in the US War on Terror. Since the first combat drone strike in 2001, the executive branch has intentionally increased the deployment of drones for counterterrorism operations throughout the Middle East and North Africa. This thesis explores the moral and legal justifications for...
4-H advancement programs consist of a series of steps that provide a framework for progressive learning within a specific project area. Advancement programs encourage 4-H members to learn at their own speed based on their interests and abilities. Advancement programs are self-paced, and age- and skill-level appropriate. Advancement programs can...
The counseling field is infused with multiculturalism and social justice competencies from the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs accreditation standards of the academic institutions to the American Counseling Association Code of Ethics. Counselors are tasked with understanding multiculturalism from self-awareness to clients’ worldviews to larger implications...
Drought events have been shown to impact species distributions and are predicted to increase in frequency as the climate changes. As this occurs, ecologists predict species distributions will shift dependent upon species ability to track climate. These shifts in species distribution are expected to be particularly acute in arid and...
Cultivated plants are often living artifacts that can aid in evaluation of historic or cultural landscapes. However, a working definition for “culturally significant plant” is currently lacking in the guidance literature for the cultural resource management practitioners. Based on a review of the literature on cultivated plants as indicators of...