Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Chromatographic Studies Of Some Hormone And Metabolic Modulators Used For Doping In Sports, Ruth Marie Speidel

Online Theses and Dissertations

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is an international agency that monitors the use of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) in sports; their mission is “to lead a collaborative worldwide movement for doping-free sport” (Who We Are, 2022). For this mission, the WADA needs quick, sensitive, reproducible, and accurate methods for analyzing athletes’ biological fluids for possible PEDs. This research focuses on developing and validating simple, sensitive, rapid, and reliable gas chromatography- mass spectrometry (GC-MS) methods for the analysis of two hormone and metabolic modulators, toremifene and trimetazidine. Previously, there has been limited GC-MS methods used to analyze toremifene and trimetazidine. Quantification …

Developing A New Treatment For Superficial Fungal Infection Using Antifungal Collagen-Hsaf Dressing, Jing Zhong, Xiayi Yan, Xin Zuo, Xuan Zhao, Jiahui Yang, Qin Dou, Lulu Peng, Yuxiang Zhu, Yichen Xiao, Zeran Bian, Dalian He, Qiushuang Xu, Stephen Wright, Yaoyao Li, Liangcheng Du, Yan Wang, Jin Yuan

Chemistry Department: Faculty Publications

Fungal pathogens are common causes of superficial clinical infection. Their increasing drug resistance gradually makes existing antifungal drugs ineffective. Heat stable antifungal factor (HSAF) is a novel antifungal natural product with a unique structure. However, the application of HSAF has been hampered by very low yield in the current microbial producers and from extremely poor solubility in water and common solvents. In this study, we developed an effective mode of treatment applying HSAF to superficial fungal infections. The marine-derived Lysobacter enzymogenes YC36 contains the HSAF biosynthetic gene cluster, which we activated by the interspecific signaling molecule indole. An efficient extraction …

Business Intelligence Trends: A Review Of Mobile Business Intelligence, Shanika Edirisinghe

Articles

The early stages of Decision Support Systems evolved with the technological improvements and availability of massive amounts of data. The concept of Business Intelligence became apparent along with this evolution which incorporates a range of fields and supports decision making in business organizations. Mobile business intelligence is a popular trend in the domain of business intelligence at present. Business organizations employ mobile business intelligence as an extension to the existing business intelligence systems. This study intends to present a review of mobile business intelligence while addressing its benefits, challenges, and limitations. Moreover, this study provides details of several use cases …

Shapley Idioms: Analysing Bert Sentence Embeddings For General Idiom Token Identification, Vasudevan Nedumpozhimana, Filip Klubicka, John Kelleher

Articles

This article examines the basis of Natural Language Understanding of transformer based language models, such as BERT. It does this through a case study on idiom token classification. We use idiom token identification as a basis for our analysis because of the variety of information types that have previously been explored in the literature for this task, including: topic, lexical, and syntactic features. This variety of relevant information types means that the task of idiom token identification enables us to explore the forms of linguistic information that a BERT language model captures and encodes in its representations. The core of …

The Meaning Of Dark, Light And Shadows: Inferences In Art, Materiality And Cultural Practices, Frank Prendergast

Book/Book Chapter

Our visual awareness relies on light acting on the eye to perceive materiality and colour. Medieval thought wrestled to articulate and comprehend its nature. The notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, for example, included his descriptions to define light and make comparisons so as to differentiate between light and shadow. His focus was on the illumination of surfaces from the perspective of a painter, seeing shadows as ‘the diminution of light by the intervention of an opaque body’ and ‘the counterpart of luminous rays’. In his mind, a shadow ‘stood between light and darkness’, with darkness being ‘the absence of light’. …

Normative Data On The Foveal Avascular Zone In A Young Healthy Irish Population Using Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography, Susan M. O'Shea, Veronica O'Dwyer, Grainne Scanlon

Articles

Purpose: To establish normative data on the size, shape and vascular profile of the foveal avascular zone (FAZ) in a young, healthy, Irish population, using the Cirrus 5000 HD-OCT. Certain diseases may alter FAZ appearance. Normative databases provide normal baseline values for comparison, thus improving diagnostic ability.

Methods: One hundred and fifty-four subjects aged 18–35 years old were recruited. Superficial FAZ area, diameter, circularity, ganglion cell layer, central macular thickness (CMT), vascular perfusion and density were measured using the Cirrus 5000. Axial length was measured with the IOL Master and blood pressure was measured using the Omron sphygmomanometer. …

Realistic Virtual Human Character Design Strategy And Experience For Supporting Serious Role-Playing Simulations On Mobile Devices, Sindhu Kumari

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Promoting awareness of social determinants of health (SDoH) among healthcare providers is important to improve the patient care experience and outcome as it helps providers understand their patients in a better way which can facilitate more efficient and effective communication about health conditions. Healthcare professionals are typically educated about SDoH through lectures, questionaries, or role-play-based approaches; but in today’s world, it is becoming increasingly possible to leverage modern technology to create more impactful and accessible tools for SDoH education. Wright LIFE (Lifelike Immersion for Equity) is a simulation-based training tool especially created for this purpose. It is a mobile app …

Detection And Identification Of Prevalent Cutting Agents In 'Street' Samples Utilizing Handheld And Benchtop Raman Spectroscopy And Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (Sers), Nicole Kenny

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Illicit and licit drugs continue to have a negative impact on the public’s health even with new regulations and laws. At local, state, and federal levels, crime laboratories analyze samples in a variety of mixtures and concentrations. Raman spectroscopy is a molecular fingerprinting, multiplex technique, which is considered a category A forensic characterization tool by the Scientific Working Group for the Analysis of Seized Drugs (SWGDRUG). The sensitivity of the Raman technique can be further enhanced down to the single-molecule detection level when analytes of interest are located at the interstitial sites of aggregated silver nanoparticles (i.e., the “hot spots” …

Mercury Methylation In Oxic Sub-Polar Marine Regions Linked With Nitrification, Marissa Collins Despins

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Methylmercury (MeHg) is a neurotoxin that bioaccumulates to potentially harmful concentrations in Arctic marine wildlife and in those that consume them. Monitoring and modeling MeHg bioaccumulation and biogeochemical cycling in the ocean requires understanding of the mechanisms behind net mercury (Hg) methylation. The key functional gene for Hg methylation, hgcAB, is widely distributed throughout ocean basins and spans multiple microbial phyla. While multiple microbially-mediated anaerobic pathways for Hg methylation are known, in the ocean, the majority of hgcA homologs have been found in oxic subsurface waters, in contrast to other ecosystems. In particular, microaerophilic Nitrospina, a genera of nitrite-oxidizing bacteria …

Semantics-Driven Abstractive Document Summarization, Amanuel Alambo

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The evolution of the Web over the last three decades has led to a deluge of scientific and news articles on the Internet. Harnessing these publications in different fields of study is critical to effective end user information consumption. Similarly, in the domain of healthcare, one of the key challenges with the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for clinical practice has been the tremendous amount of clinical notes generated that can be summarized without which clinical decision making and communication will be inefficient and costly. In spite of the rapid advances in information retrieval and deep learning techniques towards …

Data Analytics And Visualization For Virtual Simulation, Sri Lekha Koppaka

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Healthcare organizations attract a diversity of caregivers and patients by providing essential care. While interacting with people of various races, ethnicity, and economical background, caregivers need to be empathetic and compassionate. Proper training and exposure are needed to understand the patient’s background and handle different situations and provide the best care for the patient. With social determinants of health (SDOH) as the basis, the thesis focuses on providing exposure through “Wright LIFE (Lifelike Immersion for Equity) - A simulation-based training tool” to two such scenarios covering patients from the LGBTQIA+ community & autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This interactive tool helps …

Establishing A Machine Learning Framework For Discovering Novel Phononic Crystal Designs, Drew Feltner

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A phonon is a discrete unit of vibrational motion that occurs in a crystal lattice. Phonons and the frequency at which they propagate play a significant role in the thermal, optical, and electronic properties of a material. A phononic material/device is similar to a photonic material/device, except that it is fabricated to manipulate certain bands of acoustic waves instead of electromagnetic waves. Phononic materials and devices have been studied much less than their photonic analogues and as such current materials exhibit control over a smaller range of frequencies. This study aims to test the viability of machine learning, specifically neural …

Vertebrate Assemblages Of The Skelley Limestone (Conemaugh Group : Carboniferous, Gzhelian) In Noble And Muskingum Counties, Ohio, Daniel Austin Cline

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Three outcrops of the Gzhelian-aged Skelley Limestone (Casselman Formation, Conemaugh Group) were explored for vertebrate macrofossils and vertebrate microremains. The purpose of this exploration was to construct a better ecological history of the marine communities in the Late Pennsylvanian of eastern Ohio. Bulk limestone samples were collected, washed with acid, sieved and the resulting residues produced 21 distinct taxa of near-shore marine vertebrates. Osteichthyans were represented by an unknown palaeonisciform, an unknown platysomid, and an unknown palaeoniscoid. Holocephalians were represented by symmoriforms, helodontiforms, cochliodontiforms, and petalodontiforms. Elasmobranch groups included ctenacanthiforms and euselachians which contained representatives of hybodontiforms, protacrodontiforms, and neoselachians. …

A Cloud Computing-Based Dashboard For The Visualization Of Motivational Interviewing Metrics, E Jinq Heng

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Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based brief interventional technique that has been demonstrated to be effective in triggering behavior change in patients. To facilitate behavior change, healthcare practitioners adopt a nonconfrontational, empathetic dialogic style, a core component of MI. Despite its advantages, MI has been severely underutilized mainly due to the cognitive overload on the part of the MI dialogue evaluator, who has to assess MI dialogue in real-time and calculate MI characteristic metrics (number of open-ended questions, close-ended questions, reflection, and scale-based sentences) for immediate post-session evaluation both in MI training and clinical settings. To automate dialogue assessment and …

Mixed-Effects Regression Models For Analyzing Data With Excess Zeros, Guangyu Xu

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Data with excess zeros are common in many applications. Failure to account for the extra zeros may lead to biased estimates and misleading inference when analyzing this data type. To investigate the association between a set of predictor variables and an outcome variable with excess zeros, two kinds of regression models, the hurdle model and the zero-inflated model, are commonly used. In these models, the traditional tests, such as the likelihood-ratio test and the Wald test, can only be used to detect the fixed effects in association analysis. Recently, several random-effects or mixed-effects tests have been proposed for association analysis, …

Uncertainty Quantification Of Eruption Source Parameters Estimated From Tephra Fall Deposits, R. Constantinescu, J. T. White, C. B. Connor, A. Hopulele-Gligor, S. Charbonnier, J.-C. Thouret, J. M. Lindsay, D. Bertin

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in eruption source parameters, like tephra volume, plume height, and umbrella cloud radius, is a challenge for volcano scientists because tephra deposits are often sparsely sampled due to burial, erosion, and related factors. We find that UQ is improved by coupling an advection-diffusion model with two Bayesian inversion approaches: (a) a robust but computationally expensive Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation algorithm, and (b) a more approximate but inexpensive parameter estimation algorithm combined with first-order, second-moment uncertainty estimation. We apply the two inversion methods to one sparsely sampled tephra fall unit from the 2070 BP El Misti (Peru) eruption …

Whatcom Marine Resource Committee Intern, Stephen Hullin

College of the Environment Internship Reports

worked with Whatcom MRC on many different projects including public outings, events, beach cleanups, festivals, oyster surveys, and digital marketing. I generated digital media for volunteer recruitment for a beach cleanup on Lummi Island in July 2022. I was asked to create original works and send them to the committee for approval. I made 3 different flyers. The committee requested a photo be used, so the flyer with the photograph was used and published throughout the region.

Orca Conservancy, Alexandra Miller

College of the Environment Internship Reports

The organization I had the opportunity to intern for over the summer is called Orca Conservancy and the main goal they aim to achieve is to protect Southern Resident killer whales from extinction. Orca Conservancy is a Washington State 501c3 non-profit organization that started in 1996. Luckily for me, I got to work under chief scientist Dr. David Bain who has studied killer whales since 1978 and specializes in the effects of disturbance.

Kulshan Carbon Trust Regenerative Agriculture Business Intern, Jessica Espy

College of the Environment Internship Reports

The Kulshan Carbon Trust is a local Nonprofit organization. The KCT founders are Howard Sharfstein, Steve Hollenhorst, and Jessa Clark. KCTs mission “is to conserve and sequester carbon through collaborative natural climate solutions in Whatcom and Skagit Counties”. KCT plans to incorporate multiple Natural Climate Solutions to incentivize stakeholders to designate land for carbon sequestration. These Climate Solutions are “Forest Stewardship, Tree Planting & Growing, Biochar Supply, Regenerative Agriculture, and Blue Carbon (marine systems)”. The vision of KCT is “People working together to drawdown carbon in ways that regenerate the land and build prosperous communities”. Ultimately, KCT is interested in …

Padilla Bay Research Assistant, Lucas Lane

College of the Environment Internship Reports

Focuses on the characteristics of climate change on the two eelgrass species in the bay: Zostera Marina (Native eelgrass) and Zostera Japonica (non-native eelgrass). This was done by creating distribution models of the two species, with the data being created from multiple measurements. I assisted Jacqui with collecting these data and measurements for 2-3 days during low tide during each month. These data included imagery captured by Unoccupied Aerial Systems (UAS), otherwise known as drones, and in-situ elevation measurements of the sediment along with vegetative landcover surveys. The study area (an area already defined by Padilla Bay’s Research Reserve) was …

Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group - Gis Internship, Stephen Hullen

College of the Environment Internship Reports

I worked with SFEG staff to transition their projects from ArcGIS Desktop to ArcGIS Pro. I developed a simple guidance document on the basics of getting started using ArcGIS Pro and presented to SFEG staff a simple ‘Introduction to ArcGIS Pro 101’ presentation. I worked with Riparian Manager to mine past vegetation monitoring data and figure out a way to represent it spatially. I also worked with the Habitat Restoration Coordinator to update current culvert files with new data and created maps for volunteers performing salmon surveys. I was able to participate in fish-rescue projects along the South Fork Skagit …

Whatcom Humane Society Wildlife Rehabilitation, Sydney Poulin

College of the Environment Internship Reports

No abstract provided.

Examining Soil Microbial Diversity In Transition Zones Between Corn Fields And Restored Prairie In The Upper Midwest, Anna M. Burns

Scripps Senior Theses

Prairies were once the largest ecosystem in North America, but agriculture and settlement has destroyed up to 99% of their pre-colonization extent. Prairie restorations are a strategy to recover the biodiversity and carbon sequestration functions of these grasslands, but typically occur in isolated strips between agricultural fields. My thesis analyzes how effective prairie restorations in the Liberty Prairie (northeastern Illinois) are at recovering the diversity of the prairie soil microbiome, focusing on verrucomicrobia abundance, alpha diversity, and soil physical characteristics.

The Effects Of "Sticky Stuff" On The Spin Rate And Break Of A Baseball Pitch, Natalie Dale

Scripps Senior Theses

In June 2021, Major League Baseball cracked down on the use of foreign substances by pitchers on the ball (Castrovince, 2021a). It is believed the sticky substances give the pitchers an unfair advantage over batters since they increase spin rate, consequently, through the Magnus Effect, creating more movement or “break” in the pitch, making it harder to hit. There are existing gaps in empirical research on this topic, thus the goal of this project was to determine the effect the banned substances have on the spin rate and related break of the pitches. By using pitch tracking technology, two types …

Constraining The Star Formation Histories Of Galaxies In The Swift/Uvot + Manga (Swim) Value-Added Catalog, Nikhil Ajgaonkar

Theses and Dissertations--Physics and Astronomy

Although our understanding about galaxy evolution has improved in the past few
decades, we still do not understand how galaxies suddenly stop forming stars and move towards a quiescent phase. In order to do that, we must derive the Star Formation Histories (SFHs) of galaxies, that trace the change in Star Formation (SF) inside the galaxy over the cosmic timescale. This is achieved by using a set of spatially resolved near-ultraviolet (NUV) and optical spectroscopic images of the galaxies. We generate the Swift/UVOT + MaNGA value added catalog (SwiM VAC; Molina et al., 2020b) which comprises 150 galaxies having a …

On The Implementation And Further Validation Of A Time Domain Boundary Element Method Broadband Impedance Boundary Condition, Fang Q. Hu, Douglas M. Nark

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

A time domain boundary integral equation with Burton-Miller reformulation is presented for acoustic scattering by surfaces with liners in a uniform mean flow. The Ingard-Myers impedance boundary condition is implemented using a broadband multipole impedance model and converted into time domain differential equations to augment the boundary integral equation. The coupled integral-differential equations are solved numerically by a March-On-in-Time (MOT) scheme. While the Ingard-Myers condition is known to support Kelvin-Helmholtz instability due to its use of a vortex sheet interface between the flow and the liner surface, it is found that by neglecting a second derivative term in the current …

Tower Deployment: Yr151022 To Yr151103, Lisst, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Kelsey A. Fall, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

Dataset consists of data collected during a tower deployment of a Sequoia LISST 100-ST sensor in the surface waters to monitor suspended sediment concentrations and sizes.

Tower Deployment: Yr150821 To Yr150831, Lisst, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Kelsey A. Fall, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

Dataset consists of data collected during a tower deployment of a Sequoia LISST 100-ST sensor in the surface waters to monitor suspended sediment concentrations and sizes.

Tower Deployment: Yr170508 To Yr170524, Adv, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Kelsey A. Fall, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

Dataset consists of data collected during a tower deployment of four Nortek Vector ADV sensors which were mounted at different depths in the water column to monitor suspended sediment concentrations and sizes. Conductivity and temperature were also monitored at corresponding depths.

Tower Deployment: Yr160406 To Yr160421, Lisst, Clay Bank, York River Virginia, Grace M. Massey, Kelsey A. Fall, Carl T. Friedrichs

Data

Dataset consists of data collected during a tower deployment of a Sequoia LISST 100-ST sensor in the surface waters to monitor suspended sediment concentrations and sizes.