The growing collaboration between two or more industries in a specific region in which they work in a symbiotic relationship, providing benefits to each other and contributing in the overall development of the region, is what is popularly known as business clusters. Even though this concept is commonly known and implemented in the West, South Asian economies are unfamiliar with the advantages of this unique business strategy. There are, undeniably, many potential business clusters in...

Never Pull an Arrow Out of a Body is a poetry collection which explores themes of ecology, religion, myth, morality, queerness, identity, and technology. These issues and their intersections often frame and inform questions regarding nature, naturalness, and natural law, which have implications in all aspects of human life. Rather than accepting norms about nature, these poems interrogate how people represent both human and ecological nature and how, in turn, such representations shape experiences of...

Islands are not only great models for understanding the ways in which communities are linked by the dispersal of their members to form metacommunities, but are of particular interest to conservationists. One important aspect of metacommunity structure is the degree of nestedness—whether or not less speciose communities are perfect subsets of more speciose communities. Another important metric of metacommunity structure is modularity—the degree to which communities belong to modules composed of other communities that share...

pin polarized photocathodes are necessary to examine parity violations and other fundamental phenomena in the field of high energy physics. To create these devices, expensive and complicated growth processes are necessary. While integral to accelerator physics, spin polarized electrons could have other exciting applications in materials science and other fields of physics. In order to explore these other applications feasibly, the relative supply of spin polarized photocathodes with a high rate of both polarization and...

Recently the number, variety, and complexity of interconnected systems have been increasing while the resources available to increase resilience of those systems have been decreasing. Therefore, it has become increasingly important to quantify the effects of risks and the resulting disruptions over time as they ripple through networks of systems. This dissertation presents a novel modeling and simulation methodology which quantifies resilience, as impact on performance over time, and risk, as the impact of probabilistic...

The development of new therapeutic options against Clostridioides difficile (C. difficile) infection is a critical public health concern, as the causative bacterium is highly resistant to multiple classes of antibiotics. C. difficile, an anaerobic spore-forming Gram-positive pathogenic bacterium, is a major cause of hospital-acquired infections. C. difficile persists in the environment and spreads the infection to new hosts in the form of dormant spores and can persist within hosts as surface-attached biofilms. These studies investigate...

Statement of the problem: Hispanic/Latino farmworkers are at increased risk of adverse health and safety outcomes. Heightened levels of acculturative stress and the unique cultural characteristics and beliefs reported by this group increase workers’ vulnerability for adverse outcomes. Method: The first project consisted of a systematic review examining threats to the health and safety of Hispanic/Latino agricultural workers attributable to climate change, focusing specifically on their risk for heat-related illnesses (HRI) and cultural factors and...

Nanosecond pulsed electrical field (nsPEF) is a novel approach for neuron stimulation however, applicability is limited due to the required relatively high electric field that could result in neuron damage. We reached the stimulation threshold using lower pulse amplitudes by applying a burst of multiple pulses (up to 4 MHz). Action potential (AP) in rat neurons in vitro was registered using a fluorescent probe, FluoVolt. We determined neuron excitation thresholds modulating burst parameters: number of...

The growth of information and communication technology is constantly revolutionizing various domains, e.g., energy utility systems, healthcare, the internet of things, etc. This inception of widespread cyber technology enables reliability and first operability of the system, yet simultaneously imposed a risk of significant impact due to disruption of safe and secure operation. The attack surface is expanding, creating a cyber exposure gap which indicates a higher threat landscape and increased risk of compromise. Motivated by...

Twenty-two percent of United States undergraduate students are parents (Cruse, et al., 2020). Referred to as student-parents, they are most likely to have low-incomes and attend community colleges (Cruse, et al., 2019; Gault et al., 2014). They tend to reduce their course loads and drop out of college due to work-life balance challenges even though they typically have better grade point averages than their non-parent peers (Cruse et al., 2019; Manze, et al., 2021; Peterson,...

Pulsed electric field (PEF) ablation treatments utilize irreversible electroporation and are advantageous in their ability to target cellular components while leaving the vasculature and structural components intact. However, PEF therapies come with the known caveat of neuromuscular excitation outside of the ablation area, causing pain and involuntary muscle contraction. We performed a thorough examination of PEF ablation parameters, including pulse duration, pulse number, and frequency for both uni- and bipolar waveforms with the goal of...

A growing number of applications involving exposure to ultrashort electric pulses demand a better understanding of plasma membrane (PM) charging dynamics while subjected to nanosecond pulsed electric field (nsPEF) exposure. Accurate measurements of cell PM changes would verify fundamental hypotheses describing the degree of voltage change across a PM and cellular sensitivity to the applied electric field of ultrashort duration. We utilized a newly developed strobe fluorescence microscopy system and voltage-sensitive dye FluoVolt to measure...

Protein structure prediction produces atomic models from its amino acid sequence. Three-dimensional structures are important for understanding the function mechanism of proteins. Knowing the structure of a given protein is crucial in drug development design of novel enzymes. AlphaFold2 is a protein structure prediction tool with good performance in recent CASP competitions. Phenix is a tool for determination of a protein structure from a high-resolution 3D molecular image. Recent development of Phenix shows that it...

Parabolic interface problems have many applications in physics and biology, such as hyperthermia treatment of cancer, underground water flow, and food engineering. Here we present an algorithm for solving two-dimensional parabolic interface problems where the coefficient and the forcing term have a discontinuity across the interface. The Crank-Nicolson scheme is used for time discretization, and the direct immersed interface method is used for spatial discretization. The proposed method is second order in both space and...

Prior work within our lab has demonstrated the ability to print both murine and human mammary organoids and tumoroids in vitro that can also be reliably transplanted into a murine host for translational studies. Peripherally, this bioprinting system has also been used for 3D printing neurons, stem cells, cancer cells, and a primary cell line rich with fibroblasts, but each of these efforts were with cells of ectodermal lineage. Thus, the system's capacity for use...

Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), is a Gram-positive, facultative anaerobic, biofilm-forming bacterium. It is the leading cause of skin and soft tissue infections (SSTIs) in the United States. The public health impact of S. aureus has been increased by the emergence of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It has also shown intermediate resistance to Vancomycin, which suggests that full resistance may develop. It is known that hyperglycemia (high blood sugar) from diabetes reduces immune system function. Patients with...

Cancers remain in the top noncommunicable diseases responsible for premature mortality. The heterogeneity among cancers and within tumors makes treating them ever more challenging. Our misfortune for developing cures is mocked by cancer, with the lowest probability of success (PoS) through clinical trials and FDA approval. At the basic level, there are generally two broad gaps impeding cancer eradication: the unidentified shared mechanism(s) exploited by all cancers and the therapeutic approach to intervene. Nanosecond pulse...

How does structure shape behavior and outcomes in crisis bargaining? Formal bargaining models of war rely on expected utility theory to describe first-order effects, whereby the payoffs of war determine actors’ “resolve” to fight as a function of costs and benefits. Value preferences of risk and future discounting are routinely treated as predefined and subjective individual attributes, outside the strategic context of bargaining or independent from expected utility. However, such treatment fails to account for...

According to the International Energy Outlook 2019, released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, it is projected that the energy consumption will increase up to 50% between 2018 and 2050 worldwide. As fossil fuel being a finite source of energy with the risk of depletion, many countries are now facing an energy security crisis. Therefore, it is important to develop other renewable and sustainable energy sources that will allow countries to shift away from depending...

This study examines the effect of the implementation of 5S on employee attitudes and productivity in an Asian based facility of a global manufacturing company. Utilizing an assessment of the 5S implementation in various areas of the facility and organizational performance data for each of those areas, a non-experimental, causal comparative approach is used to analyze the impact. The study concluded that statistically significant improvements from the implementation of 5S were found both in quality...

Prior work has shown that our bioprinting system can reliably produce human mammary organoids and tumoroids with high precision. However, this was not previously applied to mouse models, which are also important with respect to translational research in cancer drug development. To address this, we have produced protocols for the development of in vitro structures from murine mammary epithelial and tumor cells. Additionally, we assessed the translatability of both human and murine bioprinted organoids into...

Recent advancements in high-throughput technologies have enabled simultaneous inference of thousands of genes. With the abundance of public databases, it is now possible to rapidly access the results of several genomic studies, each of which includes the significance testing results of a large number of genes. Researchers frequently aggregate genomic data from multiple studies in the form of a meta-analysis. Most traditional meta-analysis methods aim at combining summary results to find signals in at least...