In this thesis, I conduct an analysis of paradigmatic background assumptions deployed in engineering decision-making processes, in order to understand how these assumptions, operating tacitly and in tension with each other, contribute to decisions that are ethically less effective and less substantial than they would otherwise be. I do so...
Environmental DNA (eDNA) is an emerging biological monitoring tool that can aid in assessing the effects of forestry and forest manufacturing activities on biota. Monitoring taxa across broad spatial and temporal scales is necessary to ensure forest management and forest manufacturing activities meet their environmental goals of maintaining biodiversity. Our...
Vertebrates communicate with one another and coordinate intraspecific reproduction by using a variety of sexually dimorphic signals, such as plumage, ornaments, sounds, and/or scents. These sexual dimorphisms are maintained by physiological factors, typically sex-specific hormones (though see Chapter 3 for an exception). The purpose of the research in this dissertation...
In this thesis, I conduct an analysis of blogs in order to understand their potential use in the composition classroom with the goals of students writing for a public audience and developing their rhetorical and civic agency. I do so by exploring the potential for the blogosphere as a public...
The focus of this thesis is to design, characterize, and apply novel computational methods and molecular systems to interrogate heterogeneous human gut microbiome-related phenomena. In Chapter 2, I design, implement, and characterize a method for embedding co-occurrence patterns derived from massive 16s amplicon datasets. I use this method to 1....
Put generally, the work I have conducted in my time at Oregon State University has been to answer two questions. The first of these is “Why do I get this particular product from this particular chemical reaction?” and the second is “How do the reagents in this chemical reaction lead...