Oomycete and fungal pathogens threaten food, fiber, and forests around the world. With climate change, these pathogens are expected to emerge more frequently. Evolution can facilitate their emergence through mechanisms such as mutations that change or expand host range. Characterizing evolutionary mechanisms in plant pathogens will contribute to our ability...
The body of work aims to contribute to the area of Quantitative analysis in Environmental Sciences, and is focused on the microbiome. The underlying theme for the dissertation is methods and workflow. The unique bioinformatics workflow used for the analysis of genomic data was used to answer distinct and pressing...
Oxidative dysfunction can affect dairy animals during periods of heightened stress, particularly during the transition from pregnancy to lactation and during diseases, such as intramammary infection (IMI), and can contribute to increased inflammation, immune dysfunction, and cell death. As such, methods for ameliorating oxidative stress and restoring redox regulation may...
Authentication is a means of developing an electronic signature that works like a written signature. It assumes that your data is publicly known but nevertheless ensures that the message is not tampered with and that you have an audit trail.
This project discusses the techniques and concepts used to design...
There has been serious interest in hydrogen as a source of energy in the United States due to its capability of delivering a sustainable, carbon-free energy future. Currently, most hydrogen in the United States is produced via the steam methane reforming of natural gas, which converts methane to hydrogen through...
The European hazelnut (Corylus avellana L.) is a tree nut crop that is important in Oregon, which produces 99% of the United States’ hazelnuts but only 5% of the world’s supply. In order to maintain this market share, farmers in Oregon need cultivars that produce high quality nuts, mature early,...
Radio frequency (RF) sensing arises as a promising option for enabling the internet of things (IoT) applications that transform our life into a world of smart homes, smart cities, and smart industries. The innovation of IoT reveals the benefits of RF sensing across cost, pervasiveness, unobtrusiveness, and privacy. However, challenges...
At a time when environmental conditions are rapidly changing, understanding how thermal extremes impact wildlife is imperative to fully understanding the consequences of climate change in natural ecosystems. While many organisms are currently impacted by rapidly warming and more erratic environmental conditions, identifying and investigating model species whose life histories...
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....