Background: Against global health disparities and a shortfall of medical personnel, community health workers (CHWs) promise a solution based in lived experience and connection to the health system. To address global and upstream health determinants, CHW programs engage the perspectives of both the workers they employ and the communities they...
Background: According to the National Mental Health Survey (NMHS), the treatment gap of any mental disorder in India among the general population was reported to be as high as 83% (R. S. Murthy, 2017). There is insufficient evidence currently describing the treatment gap among the child and adolescent population. Given...
As part of the 2019 Botswana Global Health Internship Program, a qualitative study was conducted to identify the components key to the development of a comprehensive sexual and reproductive health education program to be implemented at the Junior Secondary School in Maunatlala, Botswana. The study was based on the principles...
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JonathanGarcia, Committee Member, representing School of Biological and Population Health
The Women’s Development Army (WDA), an all-female workforce of unpaid Community Health Workers (CHW), is Ethiopia’s answer to improving rural health. Through the WDA, Ethiopia’s government says it is empowering women to spark change in their community by disseminating healthy behaviors and by advocating on their own behalf to health...
Headwater streams in the Oregon Coastal Range are subject to drastic fluctuations in flow and temperature because of the changing seasonality of a Mediterranean climate. In response to these changes, stream fishes exhibit a variety of movement patterns. Coastal Cutthroat Trout (Oncorhynchus clarkii clarkii) have evolved an assortment of life...
This is a report on the Workforce Development: Youth Training and Work Experience program provided by Casa Latinos Unidos (CLU) in Linn County. The program is best described in three phases. Phase one consisted of the outreach, recruitment, and retainment aspects of the program. The second phase of the program...
Practical bipedal robots need to be simultaneously efficient, robust, and versatile machines, but designing robots dynamically capable of these demands has been a significant bottleneck. We designed ATRIAS to be a highly dynamic biped capable of both walking and running untethered in real environments. To meet these goals, ATRIAS is...
Bipedal locomotion is a complex phenomenon to understand and control, making it difficult for legged robots to achieve the speed, agility, efficiency, and robustness of their animal counterparts. This thesis argues for the use of numerical optimization to investigate and implement bipedal control as it applies to biology, dynamical models,...
The objective of this study is to propose control strategies for legged robots to walk and run naturally like humans and animals. To achieve this goal, we use the spring-mass model for the legged robots to be able to create the same dynamics in the leg as humans and animals....
We present a novel control strategy for running which is robust to disturbances, and makes excellent use of passive dynamics for energy economy. The motivation for our control strategy is based on observations of animals, which are able to economically walk and run over varying terrain and ground dynamics. It...
For the last 30 years, the population of Mexico has grappled with overweight, obesity, and associated chronic diseases, such as type-2 diabetes and hypertension. To standardize care among healthcare providers and dietitians, an official nutritional guideline was published in the early 2000s, which included a non-modifiable food-based dietary guideline in...
LGBTQ+ young people experience oppression daily and these experiences
negatively impact their wellbeing (Hafeez et al., 2017; Kattari et al., 2016; Kulik et al., 2017; Movement Advancement Project, 2020a; Woodford et al., 2014; Young, 2014). How young people respond to oppression can have far-reaching implications for not only their own...
Latinos are the largest and most rapidly growing ethnic minority in the United States, and they have the highest dropout rates of any major ethnic group in the country (U.S. Department of Labor, 2003). Latinos' educational attainment is consistently lower than that of other students (Gandara, 2008). The majority of...
Suicide is a leading cause of death amongst adolescents, and transgender and gender diverse youth are at especially high risk for suicidal ideation and attempt compared with cisgender peers. Using established ideation-to-action models of suicide and the Minority Stress Model, this project used the 2019 results of the Oregon Healthy...
Sexual and gender minority (SGM) samples report elevated rates of substance use and substance use disorder compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts across a wide variety of substances (Connolly & Gilchrist, 2020; Krueger et al., 2020; Rice et al., 2019), in part due to the experience of minority stress....
Farmers and migrant and seasonal farmworkers (F/MSFW) dedicate their livelihoods to the production of food for consumers, yet they may struggle to access food to feed themselves. Rural residents, immigrants, and Hispanic/Latinx individuals all have higher risk for food insecurity, yet little is known about the unique contexts through which...
Translation of efficacious programs into real-world settings is an important step in ensuring improved public health outcomes. Yet, the process of translating evidence-based interventions (EBIs) according to fidelity is fraught with challenges. Organizational factors, specifically organizational communication, have been shown to influence translation processes.
To date, there is limited research...
Intimate partner violence (IPV) against American Indian/Alaska Native (AIAN) women is a significant public health issue, requiring deeper understanding on how to better support Native women survivors. This mixed-methods project utilizes both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine factors associated with support-seeking behaviors and explore how women seek support and...
Improving access to and uptake of antenatal care remains a persistent challenge for India. It is a far greater challenge for an underdeveloped, poorer and mostly rural state like Bihar. The 2015-16 National Family Health Survey (NFHS-IV) of India reported that only 3% pregnant women in rural Bihar utilized full...
Mercury (Hg) contamination is a global conservation threat to freshwater ecosystems, detected in even the protected lakes of Olympic National Park (Washington, USA). Although considered some of the most remote and pristine US ecosystems, these lakes are currently subject to multiple environmental stressors, including climate change and fish introductions; adding...
A compound series capable of reversing the antiviral effect of Ribavirin (RBV) against H1N1 was
identified from a high throughput screen designed to discover compounds capable of increasing the
fidelity of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RDRP) n ribovirus quasispecies. Two lead compounds,
RIC-1 (EC50 of 78.4 nM) and RIC-2 (EC50...
Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUASs) equipped with optical sensors are capableof remotely sensing landscapes and wildlife at spatial and temporal resolutions that werepreviously inaccessible due to technical and budgetary limitations. Conventional remotesensing and photogrammetric workflows can be applied to the resulting high resolution imageryto facilitate new types of scientific inquiry....
Some authors defending the "hereditarian" hypothesis with respect to differences in average IQ scores between populations have argued that the sorts of environmental variation hypothesized by some researchers rejecting the hereditarian position should leave discoverable statistical traces, namely changes in the overall variance of scores or in variance-covariance relating scores...
Religious histories have always appropriated pre-existing symbol systems of religion into newer forms, often with the goal in mind to acculturate a population into a new cultural setting to reach a desired status quo of society. The problem with acculturation theory is that it is filled with teleological and quantitative...
The results of an investigation into carrier dynamics in several novel functionalized and solution-processable pentacene and anthradithiophene derivatives are reported. Measurements were made of real-time photoresponse of polycrystalline thin films of these materials to ultrafast laser pulses, on picosecond to microsecond time-scales, as well as measurements of dark current and...
Natural resources play a crucial role in human society by providing both market value and non-market value. Effective management of these resources is necessary to achieve a balance between economic value and other non-market benefits. Econometric studies focusing on natural resource management help us understand the costs and benefits of...
Researchers and practitioners often assume that positive and negative outcomes are inversely correlated. Youth development can be more complex than a simple linear association, however. This complexity is poorly understood, with more research needed to inform how such associations manifest among specific populations and how sociodemographic factors may drive variation...
In this project, we have investigated three different techniques for plagiarism detection and have compared its effectiveness against that of an unaided human grader. The techniques investigated were word frequency analysis, sentence inclusion analysis and sub string inclusion analysis. We found that a combination of word frequency analysis and sub...
Robotic limbs have been shown to enable mobility in unstructured, real-world terrain; they allow robots to step around cluttered environments, scramble up hills, carry heavy loads, and even perform acrobatics. However, mechanical limbs cannot operate as a means for such dynamic locomotion if they are simply treated as general articulated...
Developing accurate predictive distribution models requires adequately representing relevant spatial and temporal scales, as these scales are ultimately reflective of the relationships between distributions and influential environmental conditions. In this research, we considered both spatial and temporal scale and the influence each has on predicting broad-scale distributions of two disparate...
Neotropical characiform fishes form one of the most diverse freshwater ichthyofauna in the world. Knowledge of evolutionary processes that generated and maintain the immense characiform lineage and morphological diversity is still poorly understood. When did characiform lineages diversify? How have major geological and environmental changes affected diversification? Why are some...
Black men who have sex with men (BMSM) experience among the highest rates of HIV infection in the United States. We conducted a community-based ethnography in New York City to identify the structural and environmental factors that influence BMSMs vulnerability to HIV and their engagement with HIV prevention services. Methods...
Research relying on remotely sensed data on land use and deforestation has exploded in recent years. While satellite-based measures have clear advantages in terms of coverage, the presence of measurement error within these products is often overlooked. Here, we detail the econometric implications of these errors when analyzing the determinants...
Understanding and predicting how regional to global scale processes affect macroalgal populations and communities requires elucidating the mechanisms underlying observed patterns. This dissertation identifies some of the underlying mechanisms that produce complex multi-scale responses of macroalgae across space and time by delineating the role of key local environmental drivers and...
Characiform fishes form one of the most diverse freshwater fish clades in the world. Comprising more than 2000 species and distributed primarily in South America and Africa, characiforms vary dramatically in their ecomorphology. However, the evolutionary processes responsible for the immense ecomorphological diversity remains unknown. Recently, a study postulated that...
Hazards threaten coastal communities and ecosystems over a wide range of spatiotemporal scales. One of the most pressing concerns for coastal property owners, decision makers, and researchers is the uncertain role that a changing climate will have on the intensity and frequency of these hazards. The significant uncertainties associated with...
Organic semiconducting materials have emerged in the last few decades as viable alternatives to inorganics in broad applications from field effect transistors to LEDs to solar cells. Organics provide many benefits over inorganics such as flexibility, sustainability, and reduced cost. However, these materials are more susceptible to degradation in the...
The Goose Lake Basin, situated on the border of Oregon and California, USA, faces significant challenges from drought, wildfire, and other environmental stressors. This region hosts numerous endemic fish species such as the Goose Lake redband trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss newberri), Goose Lake lamprey (Entosphenus sp.), Goose Lake tui chub (Siphateles...
A vital aspect of concrete construction is quality assurance and control (QA/QC). Engineered structures must meet pre-determined and agreed-upon strength and durability requirements. Concrete falls into a specific category of infrastructure material because in most cases, these strength and durability requirements cannot be found until the material has at least...
Rotating disc electrodes (RDEs) exploit the induced flushing of a radially spun electrode to increase the overall rate of analyte flux to an electrode sensing surface and its resulting signal current (i). Here initial efforts to evaluate a rotating platinum (Pt) microelectrode for efficacy as a rapid in situ dissolved...
Land managers, scientists, and the interested public are confronted with uncertainty about the impacts of salvage logging on soil productivity. In recent years, stand-replacing wildfires in the western United States have increased in frequency, prompting the need to evaluate the effect of post-fire treatments on forest ecosystem recovery. This study...
Soft robots are designed to utilize their compliance and contortionistic abilities to both interact safely with their environment and move through it in ways a rigid robot cannot. To more completely achieve this, the robot should be made of as many soft components as possible. Here we present a completely...
An actuated, bipedal model is developed to investigate lateral plane locomotion dynamics and stability on inclines. Both the point mass case and rigid body case are considered. Variations in the force-free leg length are determined via inverse dynamics to explicitly and implicitly match prescribed lateral and fore-aft force profiles, respectively....
Energy flux is a fundamental quantity for understanding internal wave generation, propagation, and dissipation. In this paper, the estimation of internal wave energy fluxes <u′p′> from ocean observations that may be sparse in either time or depth are considered. Sampling must be sufficient in depth to allow for the estimation...
Genomic libraries derived from environmental DNA (metagenomic libraries) are useful for characterizing
uncultured microorganisms. However, conventional library-screening techniques permit characterization of
relatively few environmental clones. Here we describe a novel approach for characterization of a metagenomic
library by hybridizing the library with DNA from a set of groundwater isolates, reference...
Ocean fronts represent productive regions of the ocean, but predator-prey interactions within these features are
poorly understood partially due to the coarse-scale and biases of net-based sampling methods. We used the In
Situ Ichthyoplankton Imaging System (ISIIS) to sample across a front near the Georges Bank shelf edge on two...
Time-series observations are critical to understand the structure, function, and dynamics of marine ecosystems. The Hawaii Ocean Time-series program has maintained near-monthly sampling at Station ALOHA (22°45′N, 158°00′W) in the oligotrophic North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG) since 1988 and has identified ecosystem variability over seasonal to interannual timescales. To further...
A Geyser in a stormwater (SW) and combined sewer system (CSS) is an oscillatory and violent release of a mixture of air and water through vertical shafts. Violent geysers are highly destructive. In the case of combined sewer systems, many municipalities operate their systems at a fraction of their maximum...
Innovation is critical for firm growth and survival. Thus, how much value firms create and capture from their innovative activities has been an interest of scholars. This dissertation explores three important questions on this topic to which extant literature has paid little attention. First, I examine how the external threat...
Climate change increases weather unpredictability, threatens communities whose livelihoods depend on natural resources, such as rural communities. Utilizing a Community Capital Framework (Flora and Flora, 2013) and Governance of Complex Adaptive Systems (Duit and Galaz, 2008), this study concentrated on the role of cultural and political capital in supporting rural...