Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a ubiquitous bacterium that has an incredible ability to survive in various extreme environments and to persist despite bombardment by all types of antimicrobial agents. Its virulence and success within a broad range of hosts are largely thanks to the strength of its biofilms. The rheology of...
Soft matter encapsulates a large array of materials ranging from electronics, plastics, and cosmetics to the biofluids making up all organisms. One of the most important properties of these materials that dictate their functionality is their rheology, which is the flow and deformation behavior in response to stress. The focus...
Management and conservation of rangelands are increasingly concerned with maintaining productivity, species composition, and diversity of native plant communities. We estimated aboveground annual productivity, species composition, and diversity of a native bunchgrass type community across 1152, 0.5 m2 plots at The Nature Conservancy’s Zumwalt Prairie Preserve in northeastern Oregon. Standing...
The estimation of standing crop is important in the management of rangeland resources. Direct measurements by clipping, drying, and weighing of herbaceous vegetation are time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, non-destructive methods for efficiently and accurately estimating standing crop are needed in rangeland forage management. We assessed a visual obstruction (VO) technique...
This thesis outlines the development of new elastomeric materials and manufacturing processes for soft robotics. Specifically, this work describes the development of custom material formulations for use in additive manufacturing, additive manufacturing processing techniques for silicone elastomers, and multi-component additive manufacturing techniques. Material synthesis and processing is a gap in...
Soft robotics utilizes compliant materials (such as rubber) to make robots that are flexible and safe around humans, however these materials present many practical manufacturing challenges. Current fabrication methods use molding techniques which limits the soft robot designs which could be fabricated and impacts part consistency. This defense introduces a...
This project discuses the design of a novel apparatus for measuring the interfacial rheological properties of a complex interface while measuring the concentration of redox species within the sub-phase. Preliminary measurements made using the apparatus are also presented. The objective of the preliminary experimentation was to simultaneously measure the interfacial...
Organellar DNA sequences are widely used in evolutionary and population genetic studies, however, the conservative nature of chloroplast gene and genome evolution often limits phylogenetic resolution and statistical power. To gain maximal access to the historical record contained within chloroplast genomes, we have adapted multiplex sequencing-by-synthesis (MSBS) to simultaneously sequence...
This thesis summarizes work completed over the previous four years primarily focusing on chloroplast phylogenomic inquiry into the genus Pinus and related Pinaceae outgroups using next-generation sequencing on Illumina platforms. During the time of our work, Illumina sequence read lengths have essentially been limited to 25 to 100 base pairs,...
The Brownian motion of micron-scale particles reflects the viscoelastic response of the local environment of the medium. Tracking the thermal fluctuations of these particles is a measure of the rheology of the material at the microscopic scale. This technique is called passive microrheology. Microrheology has been developed to assess the...