Digital Commons Network^™

Fast Objective Coupled Planar Illumination Microscopy, Cody Jonathan Greer

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Among optical imaging techniques light sheet fluorescence microscopy stands out as one of the most attractive for capturing high-speed biological dynamics unfolding in three dimensions. The technique is potentially millions of times faster than point-scanning techniques such as two-photon microscopy. This potential is especially poignant for neuroscience applications due to the fact that interactions between neurons transpire over mere milliseconds within tissue volumes spanning hundreds of cubic microns. However current-generation light sheet microscopes are limited by volume scanning rate and/or camera frame rate. We begin by reviewing the optical principles underlying light sheet fluorescence microscopy and the origin of these …

A Tail Of Two Pancancer Projects: Somatic Variant Identification And Driver Gene Discovery Using Tcga, Matthew Hawkins Bailey

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The implementation of next-generation genomic sequencing has exploded over the past dozen years. Large consortia, such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA); the International Cancer Genetics Consortium (ICGC); and the Pediatric Cancer Genome Projects (PCGP), made great strides in democratizing big data for the scientific community. These data sets provide a rich resource to build tools for somatic variant discovery and exploratory analysis. Public repositories hold the answer to many novel biological and clinical revelations i.e., the discovery of complex indels, splice creating mutations, alternative super enhancer binding sites, machine learning models to predict mutation impact, and cancer subtype classification …

Neural Mechanisms Of Drosophila Circadian Rhythms, Xitong Liang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Animals show circadian rhythms in a variety of physiological functions and behaviors. In Drosophila melanogaster, behavioral rhythms are driven by circadian clock genes that are oscillating in ~150 circadian pacemaker neurons. To explain how circadian neurons encode time and regulate different behavioral rhythms, I performed 24-hour in vivo whole-brain calcium imaging using light-sheet microscopy. First, I found that different groups of circadian neurons show circadian rhythms in spontaneous neural activity with diverse phases. The neural activity phases of the M and E pacemaker groups, which are associated with the morning and evening locomotor activities respectively, occur ~4 hours before their …

Photophysical Characterization And Wavelength Tuning Of Natural And Synthetic Oxobacteriochlorins And Biohybrids, Don Hood

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATIONPhotophysical Characterization and Wavelength Tuning of Natural and Synthetic Oxobacteriochlorins and BiohybridsByDonald L. HoodDoctor of Philosophy in ChemistryWashington University in St. Louis, 2018Dr. Dewey Holten, ChairpersonHerein is discussed the theoretical and practical unpinnings of photophysical behaviors and kinetic constants for tetrapyrrole macrocycles, to wit, porphyrins, chlorins, and bacteriochlorins. Understanding the characteristic photophysical response of tetrapyrroles to changes in environment or substituents is important to designing synthetic chromophores with tunable absorption wavelengths and for preparing useful biohybrids of natural photosynthetic light antennas combined with unnatural chromophores attached to the light antenna oligomers. Synthetic oxobacteriochlorins provide simpler synthetic pathway …

Unsettling Geographies: Primitivist Utopias In Queer American Literature From Walt Whitman To Willa Cather, Benjamin Meiners

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

In “Unsettling Geographies: Primitivist Utopias in Queer American Literature from Walt Whitman to Willa Cather,” I argue that the colonial discourse of primitivism played a central role in the queer literary imaginaries of both canonical and non-canonical U.S. authors. Building on the work of historians of sexuality who trace the complex development of the twentieth-century homo-/hetero- binary, I show how literary works produced in this historical moment—roughly 1860 to 1925—explored and in some instances even advocated alternative queer modes of citizenship and erotic imagination and practice. Focusing on the works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Willa …

Nanopower Analog Frontends For Cyber-Physical Systems, Kenji Aono

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In a world that is increasingly dominated by advances made in digital systems, this work will explore the exploiting of naturally occurring physical phenomena to pave the way towards a self-powered sensor for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). In general, a sensor frontend can be broken up into a handful of basic stages: transduction, filtering, energy conversion, measurement, and interfacing. One analog artifact that was investigated for filtering was the physical phenomenon of hysteresis induced in current-mode biquads driven near or at their saturation limit. Known as jump resonance, this analog construct facilitates a higher quality factor to be brought about without …

Biosensing By “Growing” Antennas And Error-Correcting Codes, Mingquan Yuan

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Food-borne disease outbreaks not only cause numerous fatalities every year but also contribute to significant economic losses. While end-to-end supply chain monitoring can be one of the keys to preventing these outbreaks, screening every food product in the supply chain is not feasible considering the sheer volume and prohibitive test costs. Fortunately, two converging economic trends promise to make this end-to-end supply chain monitoring possible. The first trend is that passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and quick response (QR) codes are now widely accepted for food packaging. The second trend is that smartphones are now equipped with the capability to …

Associations Between Opioid-Related Hospitalizations And Intravenous Drug Users, Jacklynn De Leon

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The opioid epidemic has led to a chain reaction of public health concerns, including an increase in heroin usage, injection drug abuse, incidence of hepatitis C virus (HCV), and HIV transmission. There have been few population-based studies investigating the clinical and socio- demographic data associated with opioid use in Nevada (Feng et al., 2016; Frank, 2000) and few studies investigating the intravenous drug user (IDU) population in Clark County. On February 2017, Clark County’s first syringe exchange program (SEP) opened its doors to the IDU population. This study provides an updated analysis of opioid-related injuries within Nevada and provides a …

The Role Of Apolipoprotein E In Regulating Tau Pathogenesis And Neurodegeneration In A Tauopathy Mouse Model, Yang Shi

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

APOE4 is the strongest genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD). APOE4 increases brain amyloid-β (Aβ) pathology relative to other APOE isoforms. However, whether APOE independently influences tau pathology, the other pathological hallmark of AD and other tauopathies, or tau-mediated neurodegeneration, is not clear. By generating P301S tau transgenic mice on either a human APOE knock in (KI) or APOE knockout (KO) background, we show that the presence of human APOE, regardless of APOE isoforms, leads to various degrees of brain atrophy in 9-month old P301S mice, whereas APOE ablation strongly protects against neurodegeneration. In particular, P301S/E4 mice develop …

Why Musical Groove Makes Us Move: An Electroencephalographic Investigation, Samantha Reina O'Connell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Moving to the groove of the music is a phenomenal and universal human behavior. Common characteristics to most dance music include a salient beat, rhythmic complexity, and a dynamic musical structure. What is unknown, however, is why music has the power to promote physical movement. Musical rhythm and motor processing are tightly linked activating brain areas important for motor preparation and execution. While studies demonstrate that the motor system is active during beat processing, it is still unclear how musical groove, a beat-influenced quality to music that makes us want to move, can engage these motor areas. Here, I performed …

The Use Of Chemical Element Fingerprints To Investigate The Transformation Of Lake Sediments To Land Soils In Drying Lakes: A Case Study At Lake Mead, Nevada, Ji Hye Park

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Drying lakes are a worldwide catastrophe. The goals of this dissertation research were (1) to investigate whether chemical fingerprints of lake sediments, and nearby land soils, could be established by the analysis of 44 chemical elements, moisture content, Eh, pH, and leachable anions and if so, (2) whether the fingerprints could help explain the process of physical and chemical changes in the lake sediments as they became soils when the lake's water level fell and the anoxic sediments were exposed to the air and weather.

Lake Mead was chosen to model drying lakes because its water level has fallen over …

On The Development Of Computational Methods To Help In Performing Medical Physics Tasks Leveragin The Portal Dosimetry Application, Enea Rrokaj

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this project is to build software that can programmatically analyze dosimteric images and reduce the QA time when performing gamma analysis at varying test criteria and evaluating the results of the Winston-Lutz test. The application leverages the Eclipse Scripting API (ESAPI) within the Eclipse Treatment planning system of Varian Medical Systems. The Portal Dosimetry Application of Eclipse is used to collect the image pixels. The pixels are then displayed in a Windows Presentation Foundation using Microsoft Visual Studio and C#.

The purpose of the Gamma Index pass rates software is to benchmark the Portal Dosimetry Application by …

Prokaryotic Diversity And Aqueous Geochemistry Of Subsurface Environments Of The Death Valley Regional Flow System, Joshua David Sackett

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This dissertation summarizes over four years of effort towards the completion of a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences. The work presented in this document covers a broad range of topics, but a central unifying theme is prokaryotic life in the continental subsurface. The work presented in each chapter relied heavily on cultivation-independent methods for assessing prokaryotic communities, including prokaryotic community structure reconstruction from high-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA gene libraries and single-cell genome analysis of novel uncultivated bacteria.

Chapter 2 examines the aqueous geochemistry and prokaryotic diversity of Devils Hole, a cavernous limnocrene and sole natural habitat for the critically endangered …

Biodegradable And Biocompatible Silk Fibroin For Optical Applications, Corey Bryce Malinowski

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study presents nanopatterned silk fibroin films that were fabricated using soft lithography and nanoimprinting to replicate patterns from diffraction gratings. These film’s optics were analyzed based on their light scattering potential as well as their transmittance and transmission haze using a laser light, spectrometer, and UV-Vis spectrophotometer, respectively. The patterned fibroin films all displayed similar light scattering patterns to their master patterns with some transmission haze. When using the spectrometer to measure samples, those made without any nanostructure displayed transmission of 90% and over, while those with patterns depended on the structure used. The denser a structure, like the …

Cfd Modeling Of Smoke Movement In An Atrium, Robin Wu

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the behavior of smoke movement in an atrium. Thus gives first responders and civilians in and out of building a better understanding

With the advancements of modern technology, computers and softwares make simulation models possible such as fire models to simulate fire and smoke movements. In this paper, a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software Fire Dynamic Simulator (FDS) is used to conduct a series of atrium tests to investigate the effectiveness of smoke exhaust systems. FDS solves the Navier-Stokes equations appropriate for low speed flows (Ma < 0.3) with an emphasis on smoke, heat transport and CO2 concentrations from fires. The default turbulence model used in FDS simulation is the Large Eddy Simulation (LES), which is the solution of Navier-Stokes equations at low speed.

The compartment tested was 9 …

Air Pollution Related Asthma Inpatient Hospital Admission In The Las Vegas Valley, Joshua Allen Jensen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Asthma is a chronic respiratory condition characterized by inflammation in the lungs that causes airflow to be restricted. In Southern Nevada’s Las Vegas Valley, the natural basin geography causes air pollutants to accumulate. Research has linked air pollution with worsening asthma symptoms. The goal of this study was to determine the non-linear lagged relationship between Asthma Related Inpatient Hospital Admissions (ARIHA) and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) criteria air pollutants in the Las Vegas Valley using hospital and pollution monitoring station data. Overall, a statistically significant increased RR of ARIHA between 7 and 13 days after exposure to PM2.5 24-hour …

Fluid Structure Interaction Study Of The Obstructive Sleep Apnea And Surgical Treatment Using Suture-Patch Device On The Patient’S Tongue, Yang Liu

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Up to 14% of the U.S. population is estimated to have obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) related to obesity, and there is increased incidence occurring worldwide. While treatment with continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) resolves airway obstruction, patient compliance is relatively low. Alternative interventions are available to treat OSA patients; however, their outcomes have had variable results. For example, current technologies have demonstrated an inability to define and treat the specific anatomical site(s) causing the obstruction, resulting in suboptimal modifications of the airway and poor control of OSA.

In the current study, a three-dimensional (3-D) fluid-structure interaction (FSI) numerical simulation has …

Personality Patterns Of Students Who Make A Threat Of Targeted School Violence, Tawnya Michelle Ayim

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Although school shootings date back to the 1760’s (Dixon, 2005), recent attacks at schools in our country have raised awareness of school violence. This study investigates how students from one large school district responded to the personality pattern items on the Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory, Second Edition after having made a threat to harm another student or staff member. Personality patterns were investigated in the overall sample, as well as within groups designated to be at a Low/Moderate risk level and High/Imminent risk level following a threat assessment. The minimal Differences between the sample for the current study and the …

The Influence Of Opponent Strategy And Psychopathic Traits On Point Gains And Cooperation In The Iterated Prisoner’S Dilemma, Mary Baggio

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Prisoner’s Dilemma game is a paradigm used to model and measure social cooperation. Uncooperative behavior may be one manifestation of the unstable interpersonal functioning in psychopathy. I investigated the effect of opponent strategy as well as psychopathic traits of fearless dominance (FD) and impulsive antisociality (IA) on cooperation rates and total and competitive point gains in a sample of 177 undergraduates playing long, finitely iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma games against computerized opponents who varied in their interpersonal styles from very harsh to very lenient. I analyzed rates of cooperation during each game, participants’ total points gained, and the difference in …

Mob-Ndr Kinase Signaling Components Are Required For Epithelial Tube Formation In The Drosophila Follicular Epithelium, Juan Carlos Duhart

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A major goal of developmental biology is to understand how a single fertilized cell can give rise to the many functional tissues and organs, of specific sizes and shapes, that make up the adult body plan. Over the last 25 years, developmental geneticists have uncovered much concerning the cell-to-cell communication systems that are necessary to build complex tissues and organs. For example, throughout development, cells communicate with their neighbors using specialized signaling molecules. These signals are instructive and provide “signal-receiving” cells with information about space and time. That is, signal-receiving cells “learn” precisely where they are located, and, how far …

Comparison Of Cervical Angle During Different Equipment Removal Techniques Used In Ice Hockey For Suspected Cervical Injuries, Kendell Sarah Galor

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The purpose of the study was to compare cervical movement between two different methods of removal of the helmet and shoulder pads. Seven college age male subjects (height: 172.54 ± 7.98 cm; weight: 85.70 ± 15.75 kg) with hockey experience volunteered to participate in the study. Each subject agreed to and signed the institutional review board approved informed consent before articipation. Subjects used their own game fit hockey helmet and were fitted with a pair of shoulder pads (CCM Tacks 1052 Sr Shoulder Pads). Cervical spine motion was measured using 3D kinematics (Vicon Motion Systems Ltd., UK). Reflective markers affixed …

Tall Tales Of Danger And Security: How A Critical Human Security Approach Can Address Major Contradictions Revealed Through A Critical Narrative Analysis Of Dominant U.S. Security Strategies, Stephen Schneider

Master's Theses

Over many generations, humans have developed many perspectives and practices regarding the best ways to recognize and address what they perceive to be dangerous. Stories are used to help shape and narrate perceptions about the world, and they serve to pass on vital information that impacts how a society responds to threats and vulnerabilities. These narratives of danger and security are subjective to the experiences and political intentions of society, and therefore in many ways are partial and biased in their assessments and policies. This results in flawed security practices that may actually exacerbate threats or create new insecurities. What …

Examining Environmental Hazards In Rental Homes And Habitability Laws In Clark County, Nevada, Jorge Luis Bertran

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

It is well established that home conditions are linked to the health outcomes of occupants. There are over 880,000 housing units in Clark County, Nevada; nearly half of those are renter-occupied units (ROUs). Currently, there is limited research on the characteristics of environmental hazards found in Clark County ROUs and the strength of habitability statutes created to protect tenants from substandard housing. Understanding how renters in Clark County are affected by environmental hazards in ROUs and the processes by which landlords and tenants resolve grievances related to those hazards would benefit public health. It would enhance the ability to quickly …

Literature In The World: A Critical Discourse Study Of World Literature Pedagogy, Elisa Cogbill-Seiders

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

“Literature in the World” is a critical discourse analysis of world literature pedagogy in U.S. higher education. It investigates the ways discourse communities in higher education produce and shape the field of world literature. The dissertation begins by establishing and analyzing the generic conventions of university mission statements, finding they are primarily dominated by discourse on global learning. It follows with an analysis of world literature course descriptions from the same schools. World literature course descriptions alternatively replicate, resist, or subvert global learning discourses. The last chapter uses findings from the first two chapters to trace how university and instructor …

Effects Of Ambient Air Pollution On Asthma-Related Emergency Department Visits Within The Las Vegas Metropolitan Area, Loiren E. Monardes

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The objective of this research was to evaluate the risk for asthma-related Emergency Department visits and their association with ambient air pollution within the Las Vegas metropolitan area. All data were aggregated by date and ZIP Code. The association was analyzed by applying the distributed lag non-linear model in an attempt to identify elevated concentrations of specific air pollutants

as triggers and their delayed effects (lag days). Relative Risk (RR) and 95% confidence intervals were produced, while adjusting for socioeconomic status. This ecological population-based study analyzed daily asthma counts of Emergency Department visits from January 1st, 2009 to December 31st, …

George, Emma Patton

Children's Book and Media Review

George has a boy’s body so everyone thinks she must be a boy, but her dream is to one day live life as the girl she knows she is. Her class at school is doing a performance of Charlotte’s Web and, even though the role of Charlotte is a girl’s part, George knows that she is meant to have the part. It could be the perfect way to show her family and friends who she really is and that it’s not as strange as they might think. But even if she doesn’t get the part, George knows that she can’t …

Decolonizing Adoption Narratives For Transnational Reproductive Justice, Sung Hee Yook, Hosu Kim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article “Decolonizing Adoption Narratives for Transnational Reproductive Justice,” Sung Hee Yook and Hosu Kim examine narratives emerging from transnational adoption practices, focusing on how birth mothers’ narratives—in which a victim-mother makes choices to give a child for adoption in hopes of a better life for the child, and awaits that child’s return—develop alongside and deviate from the normative orders of motherhood. While birth mothers’ self-transformative narrative illuminates their subjectivities—apart from victimhood, simmering in the latent form of agency—Yook and Kim argue that a compelling narrative of self-mastery produces another discursive trap which renders the numerous less-masterful birth mothers …

Adopting The Unadoptable/Disabled Subject In The Posthuman Era, Fu-Jen Chen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article “Adopting the Unadoptable/Disabled Subject in the Posthuman Era,” Fu-Jen Chen first examines three memoirs that demonstrate prevalent features of today’s narratives by parents with adopted children of special needs and next offers a theoretical and ontological investigation of disability. He suggests that we have to change the way we relate to disability: to recognize it not as an external limitation but an internal as well as pre-existent division and to re-orient ourselves to the ontological truth that we are always already “disabled/otherized” especially in the posthuman era when the body is seen to exceed existing boundaries of …

‘I Am That Very Witch’: On The Witch, Feminism, And Not Surviving Patriarchy, Laurel Zwissler

Journal of Religion & Film

While contemporary discussions about witchcraft include reinterpretations and feminist reclamations, early modern accusations contained no such complexity. It is this historical witch as misogynist nightmare that the film, The Witch: A New England Folktale (2015), expresses so effectively. Within the film, the very patriarchal structures that decry witchcraft – the Puritan church from which the family exiles itself, the male headship to which the parents so desperately cling, the insistence, in the face of repeated failure, on the viability of the isolated nuclear family unit – are the same structures that inevitably foreclose the options of the lead character, Thomasin.

Ask The Beasts Of The Southern Wild: Exploring Human Identity As Beast, Being And Beholder In Ask The Beasts: Darwin And The God Of Love And Beasts Of The Southern Wild, Stephanie Cherpak Clary

Journal of Religion & Film

Anthropocentrism and hierarchical dualism together encourage a dangerous anthropology where human primacy among creation and the prioritization of certain humans leads to destruction for all. During a time when suffering caused by climate change continues to intensify, it is increasingly important to find compelling ways to share the stories of those who suffer most. I will explore how Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012) contextualizes the ecofeminist theology found in Johnson’s Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (2014), specifically the idea of humans identifying as beasts, beings and beholders. Furthermore, I will discuss how the representation …