Individuals who are parents and students on TANF experience challenges accessing and persisting in higher education. This study explored the experiences of TANF recipients who are navigating a return to higher education and the impact of college on how they construct a future self. Two theoretical frameworks were used to...
Coral reefs, found in tropical regions, are renowned for their rich biodiversity and their contributions to ecological, cultural, and economic aspects worldwide. The success of coral reefs hinges on the symbiotic partnership between corals and their dinoflagellate algae, from the family Symbiodiniaceae. The algae reside within the coral host’s gastrodermal...
Oregon's estuaries are important ecosystems for scientific study. Consequently, knowledge of what research has been conducted helps us identify benchmarks and plan new projects. A comprehensive bibliography of published research, technical reports, local documents, and data sets is one means of recording this knowledge. For these reasons, the Guin Library...
Autonomous robotic agents are on their way to becoming in-home personal assistants, construction assistants, and warehouse workers. The degree of autonomy of such systems is reflected by the manner in which we specify goals to them; the abstraction of low-level commands to high-level goals goes hand-in-hand with increased autonomy. In...
We report the use of MIL-120 as a water-stable and cost-effective metal-organic framework (MOF) for selectively capturing CO₂ from wet flue gas. Synthesized using inexpensive and environmentally benign reagents in water, MIL-120 possesses one-dimensional pores decorated with hydroxyl-bridged Al(III) ions and benzene rings with an interstitial spacing of 4.78 Å....
Naked (hull-less) barley has historically been grown for food, but interest in, and breeding efforts for, its use in malting and brewing have increased due to the potential benefits: reduced off-flavors, reduced spent grain, and higher malt extract. These benefits are offset by limiting factors such as high b-glucan and...
Emerging research shows that individual differences in how people use technology sometimes cluster by socioeconomic status (SES) and that when technology is not socioeconomically inclusive, low-SES individuals may abandon it. To understand how to improve technology’s SES-inclusivity, we present a multi-phase case study on SocioEconomicMag (SESMag), an emerging inspection method...
Natural products have long been an important source of resources for humans. Many of these compounds possess unique chemical structures and potent biological properties. By targeting natural products with specific chemical properties, we can gain a better understanding of the roles these compounds play in the environment and their interactions...
Oregon has one of the five highest homeless occupancy rates in the U.S., according to the Annual Homeless Assessment Report (2021). Using the current governor of Oregon’s (Tina Kotek) plan to decrease homelessness, which focuses primarily on housing developments and strategies, this study will first examine the merits of permanent...
This thesis examines the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on farms in the Willamette Valley. Using semi-structured interviews, this study analyzes the economic and social challenges created by the pandemic and the adaptation strategies farmers employed to build resilience within the food system. This study found that the farmers experienced...
The objective of this dissertation is to enhance the monitoring of forest ecosystems through the utilization of remotely sensed data to address the exigencies posed by the Anthropocene. On a global scale, rising temperatures and fluctuating precipitation patterns have strained forests and produced shifts in natural disturbance regimes. Additionally, the...
As global atmospheric carbon emissions continue to rise, scientists and land managers are increasingly looking to natural ecosystems to sequester and store carbon to buffer the impacts of climate change. Despite their small geographic size, many coastal ecosystems such as salt marshes, seagrass meadows, and mangroves sequester large amounts of...
Toxin production by cyanobacterial harmful algal blooms (cyanoHABs) in freshwater systems has lasting ecological and human impacts. Nutrients, light availability, hydrology, and microbial community composition impact the frequency and intensity of toxic cyanoHABs. Climate change will exacerbate toxic cyanoHABs, making real time and predictive monitoring a vital tool for managing...
Cannabis sativa L. is emerging as an economically important crop, particularly for its high levels of cannabinoid production. One of these cannabinoids, cannabigerolic acid (CBGA), is the precursor to many well-researched cannabinoids such as the psychotropic delta-9-trans-tetrahydrocannabinolic acid (Δ9-THCA i.e., THCA) and the medically relevant cannabidiolic acid (CBDA). CBGA has...
The concept of reducing laboratory operations into microfluidic devices has been an attractive area of research for several decades. Due to several advantages of porous-media microfluidic devices including low mass, portability, power-free fluid transport, and the ability to store dried reagents in the porous structures, these devices show great promise...
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...
Chloroplast DNA (cpDNA) and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) are often used for the study of plant genetics and evolution. Plastid and mitochondrial genome sequences have allowed us to investigate plant evolution on a genetic level to infer molecular evolutionary rates, population-genetic processes, co-evolutionary phenomena, and numerous evolutionary questions and hypotheses. Ficus...
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...
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 scale of pest and disease dispersal is often larger than the scale of individual farms. Therefore, an individual grower’s response to pests and diseases can affect and is affected by their surrounding growing region. Individual growers are also not isolated, and engage in various forms of information gathering, sharing,...
People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) engage in lesser physical activity (PA) and more time in sedentary activities as compared to those without disabilities. A subset of people with IDD who are most vulnerable to develop habits detrimental to health is the emerging adults who are transitioning from adolescence...
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 conventional way of debugging is to examine the program's state at various points during execution. With the addition of message passing as a means of communication and synchronization in message passing programs, the state of pending message operations also needs to be examined. Current parallel debuggers or analysis tools...
The diverse community of bacteria living within and on host organisms, known as the microbiome, has an important role in maintaining host health. Dysbiosis, known as a change in the healthy community of the microbiome, has been associated with a number of diseases across host organisms and body sites including...
Interactions between proteins are essential to life, driving and regulating a majority of processes within all living cells. Study of protein-protein interactions reveals that some proteins act as hubs within networks of interactions, binding to many partner proteins. These hubs therefore are of particular importance to understanding protein function, interwoven...
Electrodeposition is a versatile polymer deposition technique to create nano-microscale materials using an electrical field generated from a charged droplet of solution and a grounded collector. Electrospinning or electrospraying can occur during electrodeposition, leading to the creation of nanofibers or bead-like materials depending on the process parameters. Photopolymerization of the...
Back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide, entailing a significant socioeconomic impact. A primary source of back pain can be attributed to intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration allowing nerve ingrowth, facet joint arthritis, disc bulging, and osteophyte formations that press on nearby nerve roots or the spinal cord. While...
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), protein regions (IDRs), and protein complexes continue to emerge at the forefront of protein science. Proteins and protein regions lacking specific structure are found in all organisms, and often have vital roles in numerous biological processes. Breaking the well-known structure-function paradigm, the understanding of disorder-based functionality...
Climate change will impact the location of suitable habitat for tree species in the Pacific Northwest. Locations that become unsuitable will experience increased levels of tree mortality and diminished levels of tree growth. Understanding how these impacts will spatially manifest is vital for efficient management of natural resources. An invaluable...
Animals aggregate and interact in nonuniform and nonrandom patterns, which lead to group level characteristics that have important evolutionary and ecological consequences. Network analysis provides a useful conceptual framework for linking animal interactions at all scales from dyads to communities, to populations and ecosystems. Despite exciting theoretical and applied advances...
Pseudoloma neurophilia is the most common pathogen reported in zebrafish (Danio rerio) research facilities and is an important threat to the zebrafish model. This microsporidian parasite can cause clinical disease, but more importantly is a causative agent of non-protocol induced variation in research. Studies utilizing infected zebrafish, could potentially confound...
Phytoplankton initiate the marine carbon cycle by fixing carbon dioxide into biologically available compounds. These abundant single celled organisms mediate carbon flux from the atmosphere to the deep ocean and are the base of the marine food web, supplying new carbon to higher trophic levels. Phytoplankton are highly diverse and...
How the direct and indirect effects of species interactions cascade to affect community structure, functioning, and stability is a fundamental question in ecology. In temperate kelp forests, species interactions, in conjunction with environmental processes, produce rich spatiotemporal dynamics.
Arguably the most dramatic of these are abrupt shifts in community state,...
Coral reef ecosystems continue to be significantly altered by disease epizootics, but why some host populations remain resistant while others succumb to outbreaks remains unknown. Research across diverse animal and plant host systems has revealed that disease severity is strongly influenced by host genetics and by environmental influences on both...
The pozzolanic reactivity test (PRT) is used to quantify the pozzolanic reactivity of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs). The PRT computes reactivity by measuring heat release (Q) and calcium hydroxide (CH) consumption, as interpreted using thermodynamic modeling. The robustness of PRT is examined by experimentally varying CH-to-SCM ratio, solution-to-solid ratio, sulfate...
The climate of the Pacific Northwest is in flux, and existing forest ecosystems are stressed and poised to shift in fundamental ways, with or without human intervention. This dissertation probes the nature of forest responses to environmental change through investigations of morphology and genetics of three species of alder co-occurring...
The past decade of research has potentiated a revolution in our understanding of mammalian health and evolution by revealing that the gut microbiome plays a central role in mammalian physiology. Our ability to unlock this potential hinges upon the identification of specific groups of gut microbes that elicit effects on...
On coral reefs, disturbances rarely occur in isolation. Global stressors such as increasing seawater temperature often coincide with local stressors like nutrient pollution. In the face of increasing anthropogenic stress, corals can function as environmental sentinels, although little is known about how multiple stressors interact to disrupt their associated bacterial...
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4.1. Three sampling sites included in the Tara expedition around the
island of Mo’orea in
This dissertation addresses few-shot object segmentation in images. The goal of segmentation is to label every image pixel with a class of the object occupying that pixel, where the class may represent a semantic object category or instance. In few-shot segmentation, training and test datasets have different classes. Every new...
Whey protein is a functional food comprised of numerous bioactive peptides and proteins, including glycomacropeptide (GMP), a hydrophilic casein peptide that separates with the whey fraction during cheesemaking. GMP has a unique amino acid composition, making it a viable nutritional therapy in disorders where certain amino acids are implicated, while...
In this dissertation, we propose Ideal Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption (Ideal TPE), as a special case of format-preserving encryption, to balance image privacy and usability concerns in a cloud environment. We first introduce a concrete construction for Ideal TPE, that provably leaks nothing about the plaintext (unencrypted) image beyond its thumbnail. We...
Generally presented as a preferred social norm based on both ethical considerations and legislative demands, gender equality has been highly encouraged in recent years. For instance, The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 call out achieving gender equality and empowerment of women. However, although there are multiple efforts to...
Climate change and other anthropogenic impacts are threatening the existence of millions of species around the globe. On western continental boundaries, the large-scale secondary process of upwelling, which brings low pH, deoxygenated, high nutrient seawater to the surface, is compounded by climate change, that together could drive some species to...
Recent advancements in unmanned aerial vehicle (drone*) technology, sensors, and software applications have increased efficiency in data collection, reduced human error, and increased safety while managing a wide range of projects. No longer relegated solely to military use, drones have become synonymous with picturesque views of natural wonders and resources...
Composition scholars who have written about trauma have typically focused on creating classrooms that are conducive to healing and learning. In doing this work, however, they have considered neither how PTSD nor other people’s responses to it can impact one’s perceived rhetoricity in the college classroom. In other words, they...
The Messenger magazine is published twice annually by Oregon State University Libraries and Press. This issue is devoted to the history of OSU Libraries and Press.
Household food availability is comprised of both food purchases and foods obtained from alternative sources, like social networks, community services, and household food production. While the food available at home is associated with eating behaviors, diet quality, and health outcomes of children and adults, the literature on food acquisition of...
The interactions between microbial taxa have been under great research interest in the sci- ence community given the microbiome data deluge. Several methods have been proposed to model and estimate the conditional dependency between microbial taxa for their interac- tions, in order to eliminate spurious correlation detections. However, these methods...