Rhizopogon is a large genus of ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi that grows in association with host trees of the family Pinaceae. We have conducted a series of studies investigating the ecology and evolutionary biology of the EM symbiosis shared between R. subgenus Villosuli and trees of the genus Pseudotsuga. Two members...
The focus of this thesis is to design, characterize, and apply novel computational methods and molecular systems to interrogate heterogeneous human gut microbiome-related phenomena. In Chapter 2, I design, implement, and characterize a method for embedding co-occurrence patterns derived from massive 16s amplicon datasets. I use this method to 1....
The potential for nanomedicine to reduce toxicity and improve therapeutic response to radiation is vast. Clinically, this potential has thus far only begun to be realized with the recent success of the radioenhancing nanoparticle, NBTXR3 by Nanobiotix. Radioenhancing nanoparticles, however, represent only a small class of nanomaterials that may be...
The purposes of this study were: to collect information relative
to the content of the sex education information adolescents have received
from selected sources, to ascertain their appraisal of the
value of this information and to test hypotheses concerning communication
and dissemination of information on sexual topics between
adults and...
Multiagent learning offers a rich framework to address challenging real-world problems such as remote exploration and healthcare coordination, which require autonomous agents to express elaborate interactions. To be effective in such systems, agents must collectively reason about and pursue high-level, long-term, and possibly nebulous objectives while adapting their strategy to...
Polyoxometalates (POMs) are anions consisting of three or more early transition metals ™ (Gr V and VI) oxoanions (in their highest oxidation state) linked together by a shared oxygen bond to form a 3D framework. Polyoxometalates (POMs) are a rapidly growing class of metal oxo clusters with a wide range...
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...
Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models impact our daily lives with applications in natural language modeling, image analysis, healthcare, genomics, and bioinformatics. The exponential growth of biological sequence data necessitates accompanying advances in computational methods. Although deep learning is highly effective for detecting and classifying biological sequences, challenges...
Marine natural products possess an abundance of diverse chemical scaffolds with unique biological activities. By targeting unusual or unique microbial environments within varying marine ecologies we can continue to discover novel chemistry with potentially new molecular targets. The research presented here is focused on exploring unusual chemical ecologies and the...