This thesis aims to explore the effects of organizational and management principles within the context of a student club – an international Formula Student team. Research on the effects of organizational structuring on student club performance tends to be qualitative in nature. While considering the inherent complexity of the human...
Geospatial data analysis is a multifaceted discipline encompassing the collection, processing, and visualization of diverse datasets. It models and delineates the interactions of people, objects, and phenomena within geographical spaces and predicts patterns based on the relationships between different locations. Despite significant advancements in geospatial data engineering and analytics over...
Low-level nuclear power plant outages in the United States can lead to unanticipated costs, potentially compromising the expected operation lifetime of the plant. Nuclear power plants are complex systems of interfacing components and highly regulated processes. This inherent complexity makes predicting outages from system dependencies very challenging. When outages do...
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...
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...
Aqueous, two-phase systems (ATPSs) may form upon mixing two solutions of independently water-soluble compounds. Many separation, purification, and extraction processes rely on ATPSs. Predicting the miscibility of solutions can accelerate and reduce the cost of the discovery of new ATPSs for these applications. Whereas previous machine learning approaches to ATPS...
This work investigates the acoustic velocity of gas-liquid mixtures in vertical, co-current flow in a concentric annulus. Acoustic velocity shows promise as a detection parameter for the presence and amount of gas in a liquid flow because of its high sensitivity to gas void fraction in a gas-liquid mixture. However,...
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...
Oregon State University campus grounds have long been admired for their beauty and the diversity of over 65,000 individual woody plants that grace the 570 acres of campus. The woody plant collection has provided a living learning laboratory for the university and surrounding community for decades. The campus grounds include...
Combinatorics is a field of mathematics that concerns enumeration and existence, and its most notable applications are in computer science and statistics. Most students are introduced to combinatorics through counting problems, where they are tasked with determining the cardinality of a set of outcomes. Such problems are well-known for being...
Studies of Hawaiian volcanoes contribute valuable insights about Earth processes and mantle evolution, and are fundamental for understanding the construction of the largest volcanoes on terrestrial planets. The pre-shield stage exists in every Hawaiian volcano, but is usually blanketed by high volume tholeiitic lava flows during the main shield stage....
Physicists solve problems and communicate their work using many external representations, such as equations, words, diagrams, graphs, sketches, pictures, and more. To learn physics, then, students must learn to use external representations. In this dissertation, I present three manuscripts. Each manuscript discusses how upper-division Paradigms in Physics students use multiple...
In an increasingly computation-driven world, algorithms and mathematical models significantly impact decision making across various fields. To foster trust and understanding, it is crucial to provide users with clear and concise explanations of the reasoning behind the results produced by computational tools, especially when recommendations appear counterintuitive. Legal frameworks in...
This study is an ethnographic investigation of residential turnover, organizational memory, and the persistence of Lost Valley, an Oregon ecovillage founded in 1989. Literature on organizational turnover, memory, and persistence is reviewed and integrated with scholarship on intentional communities and ecovillages, generating a theoretical framework for data collection and analysis....
As a targeted attack is unfolding against LGBTQ+ people across the U.S. right now, the unique experiences of queer and trans people deserve more attention. Transgender people are subjected to unique forms of discrimination and marginalization through cisnormativity (i.e., the assumption that everyone is and should be cisgender) and transnormativity...
Natural resources are essential to humanity. With the increase in global development in recent decades, people must monitor the state of the environment, whose disturbance has a more significant impact on society than before. However, conventional environmental monitoring is challenged in highly dynamic ecosystems and large areas. As a solution,...
Nuclear fusion reactors comprise a significant field of study due to their potential to provide a limitless, clean, and sustainable source of energy. The inertial electrostatic confinement fusor is a type of fusion-generating device that accelerates deuterium gas to the conditions required for fusion. The goal of this research was...
This dissertation develops a framework for Curandera feminism, informed by familial healing practices, women of color feminisms, and institutional critique. My research centers my family’s generational Curandera practices. As I honor the call to be critical of the master’s tools, I seek possibilities for institutional change through Curandera feminism. Institutions...
Investigation on barley genotype contribution to beer flavor is a relatively new area of research but has interest from members of the malting barley supply chain. This body of work builds upon previous studies by approaching it from new angles that further supports the malting and brewing industries’ interests around...
The shortage of physicians serving rural communities is well documented. To address the rural shortage, medical schools have developed extracurricular programs, called rural health tracks, with an intent to foster medical students’ interest in serving rural communities. While there has been some research about the effects of these tracks, almost...
Coastal landslides and erosion are major natural hazards resulting in unstable slopes, constituting immense challenges to modern infrastructure. Developing, maintaining, and performing risk assessments of infrastructure on, or close to, these hazards require a detailed understanding of the geophysical processes destabilizing the slope. These efforts start with the collection of...
Proceedings of the 81st Annual Pacific Northwest Insect Management Conference, held virtually January 10-11, 2022. These are research reports only, not management recommendations.
Organically certified Northern Highbush Blueberry (NHB; Vaccinium corymbosum L.) production in the Columbia Basin region of Oregon and Washington is expanding. Soils in the region are typically calcareous and highly alkaline, often requiring pH adjustment to an ideal range of 4.5–5.5 to support the establishment of the acid-loving, ericaceous crop....
Digital libraries are digitally accessible, organized collections of knowledge. Although under this broad definition any digitally accessible data set might be considered a digital library, the term is generally reserved for collections whose structures are carefully documented and made available in the form of so-called metadata. There is no specific...
This work explores contemporary human-nonhuman relations in the Columbia River Basin of the Pacific Northwest United States. Specifically, it draws from Columbia sea lions to illustrate how salmon-sea lion-human relations are entangled in the North American Wildlife Management model of nonhuman genocide. It follows a multispecies ethnographic design where over...
Soils contain the largest pool of carbon that is actively cycling on human timescales, leading many to view soils as a natural climate solution with multiple co-benefits. The field of soil science is rapidly evolving, but without a unified understanding of soil carbon dynamics. This dissertation leverages two distinct long-term...
Pillars in modern vehicles provide structural integrity by surrounding the windows and joining the roof with the frame. Although they protect the driver and passengers, A-pillars also create obstruction zones by limiting drivers' forward field of view leading to unforeseeable accidents or mishaps. We argue that providing a better pillar...
Personal health monitoring tools, a subset of point-of care-diagnostics, enable more frequent testing of chronic health conditions outside of a clinic setting and can inform personalized therapy or support telehealth diagnostic capabilities. While there is evidence that regular monitoring of chronic conditions can lead to better health outcomes and lower...
Iterative algorithms are simple yet efficient in solving large-scale optimization problems in practice. With a surge in the amount of data in past decades, these methods have become increasingly important in many application areas including matrix/tensor recovery, deep learning, data mining, and reinforcement learning. To optimize or improve iterative algorithms,...
Artificial collectives are useful for accomplishing tasks that require teamwork from multiple simple robots. Multiple robot and collective testbeds have been developed, yet none stay committed to leverage the local interactions, group size, and imperfect information assumptions that strengthen biological collectives. A review of the collective and multiple robot literature,...
In the face of environmental stressors, change is imperative for species to remain in place. The nature and degree of this change is of great interest, as it sheds light into the ways in which species respond to ecological and habitat change and may continue to respond during periods of...
Background: Studies indicate that problems utilized in traditional undergraduate engineering education do not adequately prepare students for the workforce. Calls to implement authentic, ill-structured problems into upper level engineering experiences may address this issue but adopting authentic engineering problems without considering barriers to adoption of faculty has not been fully...
Conflicts and disasters displace millions of populations worldwide. There is a need for rapid and affordable housing to cater to the needs of the displaced and unhoused population. Experience from previous post-disaster responses shows that temporary housing should be rapidly deployable, planned for months to years, and should be environmentally...
Understanding the interplay between energy and water is central to effective natural resource management. With enough energy it is possible to secure sufficient water, with enough water it is possible to produce nearly boundless energy. The sun is the engine which drives the availability of both these resources; nearly every...
Silene rectiramea (Grand Canyon campion) is a rare endemic plant species found only in Grand Canyon National Park. There is limited biological and ecological information available about this plant species and the extent of its distribution is unknown. Silene rectiramea is currently not included in a National Park Service monitoring...
We have sufficient evidence that our historical management of natural resources is not sustainable. Food production is stagnating or declining. Nonrenewable energy sources on which the energy sector has historically depended are being rapidly depleted. Water resources, for which the energy and food sectors compete, are being depleted and impaired....
Biological invasions threaten native biodiversity, alter ecosystem function, and are a major cause of economic losses across the planet. The most impactful invaders alter disturbance regimes and initiate state shifts to outside the historical range of variability of the ecosystem. Concern for ecological and economic losses has prompted a rapid...
This thesis builds on a modeling tool that has been developed to link thermodynamic modeling and concrete performance. This tool is intended to predict the performance for modern concrete mixtures made with ordinary portland cement (OPC), conventional and novel supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), and limestone (Ls). The first part of...
Dramatic declines of the native northeast Pacific mud shrimp, Upogebia pugettensis over the last three decades have occurred in response to intense infestations by the Asian bopyrid isopod parasite, Orthione griffenis, that was introduced in the 1980s. We report herein the arrival of the Asian mud shrimp, Upogebia major, in...
Across from the Memorial Union on Oregon State University’s campus sits Milam Hall, the former site of the Department of Home Economics. The building is named for Ava Milam Clark, the dean of home economics for thirty-three years, from 1917 to 1950. I aim to understand Ava Milam’s early career...
Boreal and temperate biomes host nearly half of the earth’s forested ecosystems. The temperate rainforests of the Pacific coast of North America constitute nearly half of all temperate rainforests on earth. Along the northern extent of this region, the perhumid and sub-polar rainforests of southeast and southcentral Alaska are among...
In the mountains of central and southern California, high elevation wilderness areas lack epiphytic lichens that can be used to inform us about atmospheric deposition in multiple ways. Epiphytic lichens are capable of accumulating elements proportionally to the local atmospheric concentration, establishing them as commonly used biomonitor of key elements....
Contemporary stream restoration efforts increasingly prioritize restoring natural stream processes to regain lost ecosystem functions. Stage 0 stream restoration resets disturbed, channelized streams to a theoretical pre-disturbance state (“stage zero”). It is assumed that this valley-scale restoration/disturbance will restore natural abiotic and biotic processes, leading to greater primary and secondary...
Modern sensors are complex systems comprising multiple sub-systems such as transducers, analog and mixed-signal interface circuits, digital processing circuits, and packaging. Over the last few decades, innovations in these sub-systems combined with their increased integration in complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processes have led to the rapid growth in sensors for...
Nowadays, wireless communication systems use high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) together with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) to increase the link capacity and robustness. These signals always have large peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and require power amplifiers (PAs) achieve both high efficiency and linearity simultaneously. For the efficiency, the complementary metal...
Anthropogenic climate change is threatening biodiversity as I currently understand it. There is now a large body of work highlighting species responses, globally, to this threat. Importantly, responses at the species level emerge from responses at lower levels of biological organization (individuals and populations) across a species’ geographic range. For...
Physical modelling is instrumental to the progression of coastal engineering research and our understanding of the offshore and nearshore environments. Scaled models are designed and built to be tested in coastal research laboratories, where a wave basin or flume generates the desired wave conditions for experimentation. The surrounding hydrodynamics of...