Microplastics (MPs) are plastic particles less than 5 mm in diameter. These contaminants are increasingly found in the environment due to increased plastic production, use, and improper disposal. Detecting and measuring these contaminants in the environment has proven difficult, requiring the use of fate and transport models to assess MP...
The counseling profession has historically adopted a one-size-fits-all approach toward addressing bereavement. However, there is an emerging paradigm-shift in grief therapy that has been enabled by recent research that differentiates, for example, between types of grief and styles of grieving. This research project contributes to this nuanced approach to grief...
We define an inner product on a vector space of adelic measures over a number field $K$. We find that the norm induced by this inner product governs weak convergence at each place of $K$. The canonical adelic measure associated to a rational map is in this vector space, and...
The literature on first-generation South Asian American (SAA) mental health is limited despite the increased focus of studies on help-seeking behaviors and subjective well-being over the past decade. Therefore, we designed a web-based survey seeking to address two research questions. Research Question 1 informed Study 1 of this dissertation project:...
Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a broad class of anthropogenic chemicals characterized by highly stable carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds. PFAS are widely used in industrial and consumer products for their surface-active and stain-resistant properties and are ubiquitously detected in environmental media, biota, and human biomatrices. Although some PFAS are known...
Health anxiety prevalence is increasing (Tyrer et al., 2019). Health anxiety is a preoccupation or overestimation of the serious physiological symptoms that cause significant distress (Salkovskis & Warwick, 2001). Those with health anxiety may endure significant suffering, intense misery, and for some health anxiety leads to suicide (Tyrer & Tyrer...
Oregon white oak, or Garry oak (Quercus garryana), has been adversely affected by land-use conversion, landscape fragmentation, and anthropogenic fire suppression. Its historical range has contracted significantly to the point where an estimated 1-5% remains intact. Natural regeneration is difficult due to a lack of seed sources and the physiological...
Coastal Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var menziesii) forests are extensive west of the crest of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon and Washington and are renowned for their productivity, biodiversity, and the ecosystem services they provide. Increasing wildfire activity in recent years including the extensive 2020 Labor Day fires, and a warming...
Causal inference is an important analytical tool to bridge the gap between prediction and decision-making. However, learning a causal network solely from data is a challenging task. In this work, various techniques have been explored for a better and improved causal network learning from data. Firstly, the problem of learning...
As more awareness of the global issue of sex trafficking comes to light, counselors must prepare to provide therapeutic services to this specific client population (Litam & Lam, 2021). Individuals who have survived sex trafficking are entering mental health counseling practices and community agencies regularly (Ide & Mather, 2019); yet,...