Low-income women in an Oregon city of approximately 35,000 inhabitants have limited access to prenatal care services during their pregnancies. The purpose of this study was to uncover the impacts of several factors on the experiences of twenty-seven health department clients with public health department prenatal care practitioners and with...
Phenolic compounds are known to have biological activity with beneficial effects on human health. Fruit of cultivated tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum L.) are a major source of phenolics in the U.S. diet because this crop is the second most consumed vegetable per capita, but actual levels are low compared to other...
The California Current Ecosystem (CCE) is a dynamic marine ecosystem from which many socioeconomically important fisheries species are harvested. In this thesis, a genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) approach was used to examine genomic variation in an early life stage of the Dungeness crab (Cancer magister), which constitutes the most valuable single-species commercial...
Fusarium proliferatum is a fungus found in soils which produces the mycotoxin group known as fumonisins. Of human concern due to hepato-, nephro- and neurotoxicity, the threat of fumonisins lies within several food items, including corn, wheat sorghum, asparagus and, more recently, garlic. Manifesting as ““garlic rot”,” F. proliferatum infection...
Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide. Recently it has been shown that microbiota play a role in some types of cancer. Therefore, to understand whether microbes contribute in any way to the development and progress of cervical cancer, we investigated the cervical microbiome via analysis...
At a time when the biodiversity on Earth is being rapidly lost, new technologies and methods in genomic analysis are fortunately allowing scientists to catalog and explore the diversity that remains more efficiently and precisely. The studies in this dissertation investigate genomic diversity within the milkweed genus, Asclepias, at multiple...
School counselors have potential to make significant gains in closing the achievement gap for all students as advocated for by the American School Counseling Association. School counseling is moving away from the no-model model of services delivery that places counselors at the whim of principals, parents and teachers who traditionally...