Multimorbidity, or the concurrent presence of two or more chronic conditions, significantly increases the risk of adverse health outcomes, particularly for adults age 65 and older. Psychosocial, behavioral and social factors can further exacerbate the impact of multimorbidity, but are infrequently and inconsistently documented within electronic health records (EHRs). Research...
Chapter 2:
Aquatic macroinvertebrate communities have been shown to exhibit strong differences between erosional (riffle and run) and depositional (pool) macrohabitats of streams. A subset of these communities are aquatic insect taxa that are an important food source for riparian consumers like birds, bats, lizards, and spiders. Understanding the role...
I had to write again. My research lay in science, and it was a science of three parts. The first part made a careful, introductory chapter, begged for by things that were lacking. It summarizes the von Neumann measurement model, derived from the Stern-Gerlach experiment, and it explains how weak...
Systems biology is a powerful approach which considers and sheds light on all of the puzzle pieces which make up complex biological processes, and is an effective alternative to unraveling these processes using traditional molecular approaches alone. It is a natural companion approach for computational biology, which leverages the power...
In this thesis, we explore a general method for constructing path sums in a discrete spacetime using a jump amplitude matrix. This is accomplished by deriving a composition law that relates jump amplitudes to the propagator. Then properties of causal sets are used to average this relationship over sprinklings. This...
Non-coding ribonucleic acid (ncRNA) is of interest for its diverse roles in cell and viral biology. RNA molecules vary greatly in terms of size, structure, and function. In recent years, the modification of existing RNA structures has been used for biochemical methods of enormous impact including CRISPR and RNAi methods....
A central theme of ecology is determining factors that influence species distributions. Within aquatic ecology, species present in flowing waters are primarily influenced by the natural flow patterns of the stream (natural flow regime paradigm) while explanations of species present in standing waters are further divided by habitat type. To...
The United States of America and the world are faced with three massive intertwining challenges at this time: COVID-19, racial inequity, and climate change. As a species, humans must come together and collectively address these challenges to preserve our humanity and make our world a more just and livable place...
The standard interpretation of quantum mechanics (known as the Copenhagen interpretation) divides the world into quantum phenomena and classical observers that perform measurements upon the phenomena. This provides a quite functional framework for calculating probabilities of measurement outcomes, but it lacks the generality necessary for such things as retrodiction, and...
MicroRNAs are a highly conserved class of small endogenous RNA, about ~22nt in length, involved in post-transcriptional gene silencing and have prominent roles in disease and development. Though the process of microRNA discovery was once an arduous task, the advent of high throughput sequencing technology has resulted in novel microRNAs...