Connectivity of fish populations is a crucial question for fisheries conservation and the development of spatial management plans. Both adult and larval movement define the extent and direction of ecological and evolutionary overlap between geographic regions and, therefore, how we define stocks for management purposes. Within that context, my work...
Daily cyclical changes of light are brought on by the axial rotation of the Earth while seasonal changes in light are caused by Earth’s tilt as it revolves around the sun. Major life history traits, such as development, which are tied to metabolic processes, have a strong link to the...
Meditation research in recent decades has disproportionately focused on the Buddhist derived practice of “mindfulness” meditation while leaving most other Buddhist meditation practices unstudied. The current study seeks to remedy this homogeneity through the adaptation of a novel meditation practice used in Tibetan Buddhism to affect motivation. We explored traditional...
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...
Human-animal relationships, emerging as an aftermath of human-animal interactions, have been increasingly investigated in recent years. It is possible to see the results of the effects of these relationships on both human and animal welfare. This study predicted that caretakers with hands-on contact with their zoo animals would have significantly...
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....
Most of the concrete in the world is produced using hydraulic cement (ordinary portland cement, OPC) and siliceous or alumino-siliceous supplementary cementitious materials (SCM). Due to the shift in focus toward environmental sustainability within the construction industry, alkali-activated cementitious systems (AAC) have gained significant attention to reduce the carbon footprint...
Characterization of uranium isotope compositions is of great interest in many nuclear sub-areas for safeguards purposes. Reprocessing facilities utilizing pyroprocessing raised an issue of uranium isotope monitoring due to the difficulty to apply traditional approaches under extreme environments. An rapid and remote method to characterize uranium isotope compositions for such...
The rates of biological introductions and invasions are increasing, driving up the associated harms to ecosystems and economies. The spread and effects of invasive organisms depend on the specifics of the introduction, the character of the invaded ecosystem, and multiple traits of the invasive organism itself. One mechanism by which...
Metallic glasses (MGs), also called amorphous metals, are metals or metallic alloys trapped in a disordered glassy state. Their amorphous nature and absence of features such as crystal lattices and defects (dislocations, grain boundaries etc.) endows them with a host of properties that far surpass those of common crystalline materials....