Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Synthesis And Characterization Of Nanocomposite Sensing Films For Breath Sensors, Tara Mercer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Lung cancer is one of the most common and fatal cancers today, infecting 1 in 16 people, and killing well over a million patients per year. Currently, lung cancer is detected usually in stages three and four by quite costly and invasive methods, which shows only a survival rate of 10%. Breath sensors provide a low-cost and non-invasive technique for early screening of lung cancer. The breath sensors use assemblies of gold nanoparticles to identify lung cancer, specifically by identifying and quantifying specific volatile organic compound (VOC) concentrations found in the breath of lung cancer patients. This thesis describes a …

Synthesis And Evaluation Of 1-Substituted Imidazo[4,5-C] Quinoline Tlr7 Agonists With Improved Potency, Emma Grace Deyoung

Undergraduate Honors Theses

TLR7 agonists are small molecules that are useful within cancer immunotherapy due to their ability to stimulate the TLR7 pathway resulting in NFκB activation, and cytokine release.1 Due to the risk of toxicity when delivered systemically, our team has employed a particular type of drug-delivery technology, Antibody Drug Conjugates (ADCs) to deliver these payloads directly to tumor tissue. The initial focus of this work was on E104 (8a), an imidazoquinoline TLR7 agonist, which was synthesized by the Tumey lab.1 However, the agonist was not sufficiently potent for many of the proposed applications of this technology, prompting a need to develop …

Characterization Of Bimetallic Silver-Copper Nanoinks With Hydroxyethyl-Cellulose Additives, Daniel Brunick

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Coinage metal nanoparticles remain an intriguing subject for research due to their industrial versatility. Primary applications of coinage metal nanoparticles include printed electronics, solar panels, and sensors. Inks formulated with the nanoparticles are conductive and thus useful for fabricating sensors. Silver-copper nanoalloy inks are viable for the fabrication of flexible sensing devices for the detection of volatile organic compounds. One of the challenges is the ability to synthesize composition-controllable alloy nanoparticles at room temperature through wet chemical methods and achieve controllable sintering at room temperature. This work addresses the challenges by investigating the room-temperature synthesis of silver-copper alloy nanoparticles and …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Hydrazine Derivatives Of Coumarin For Bioorthogonal Chemistry Inside Cells, Akiva J. Grimaldi

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Protein carbonylation is one manifestation of oxidative stress, which is characteristic of many diseases. Our lab has developed several coumarin-hydrazine based fluorescent probes capable of detecting carbonylation in live cells via the formation of hydrazone conjugates. As an effort to expand and improve on these achievements, this work presents new data regarding the synthesis and characterization of three such probes. Two of the probes—julolidine coumarin hydrazide (JCH) and trifluoromethyl coumarin hydrazine (TFCH)—were previously synthesized by our lab. Here, JCH is studied in terms of its reaction speed and fluorescence enhancement in acylhydrazone formation with aldehydes under various conditions and catalytic …

Optimization Of Paper-Based Substrates For Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopic Biosensor Development, Kaylee M. Cappuccio

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Advancements in the field of analytical chemistry have greatly expanded the development of biosensors for the detection of a wide array of diseases. This study aims to optimize an affordable paper-based nanocomposite biosensor that utilizes surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). Specifically, it investigates the preparation parameters for a paper-based SERS substrate, including nanoparticle administration and drying procedures. A particular focus of this work is to assess how the wax-defined paper channels can effectively enhance SERS intensity. The results revealed that while the wax-printed wells can define the nanoparticle administration for SERS detection, wax backing may reduce the sensitivity of SERS by …

Computational Analysis Of A Mn-Based Electrocatalyst With Primary Amine Substituents In The Secondary Coordination Sphere For Co2 Reduction, Erin Urban

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this research was to report the mechanism for the two-electron, two-proton conversion of CO 2 to CO and H 2 O using a manganese(I) electrocatalyst, Mn(L)(CO) 3 Br (where L = bipyridyl ligand with aryl-amine moieties installed at the 6 position of 2,2’-bipyridine), synthesized by the Jurss group, including any other competing reactions, such as the hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). The “protonation- first” and “reduction-first” pathways were considered for CO 2 RR. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations were performed to determine the redox potentials and Gibb’s free energies for each step in the mechanism for CO 2 …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Ternary Pt Nanoally Catalysts For Fuel Cells, Ylith Peck

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A hydrogen fuel cell is an electrochemical device that converts oxygen and hydrogen into electrical energy while producing water as the only by-product, which has attracted growing interest, especially in the automotive industry. This technology is efficient and has zero pollution to the environment, in contrast to the direct use of fossil fuels in combustion engines which produce pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. One of the key components for hydrogen fuel cells is the catalyst that operates at the cathode, which currently use platinum. Due to the scarce amount of platinum in the world, the manufacturing cost for fuel cells …

Using Tattoo Inks To Develop Undergraduate General Chemistry And High School Level Chemistry Students’ Understanding Of Atomic Emission, Emma Horoszewski

Undergraduate Honors Theses

An effective way to promote student engagement in the laboratory is to substitute traditional reagents for recognizable, real-world products. In this work, two laboratory experiments are outlined – one geared toward undergraduate general chemistry students and one for high school introductory level chemistry students – which replace solutions of metal salts with tattoo inks in the classic flame test experiment. The main objective of both experiments is to familiarize students with the subatomic mechanism occurring during atomic emission. Additionally, the undergraduate level experiment features the use of spectroscopy to identify metals present within tattoo inks through analysis of atomic emission …

Characterizations Of Bimetallic Silver-Copper Nanoparticles, Omar Lezcano

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The goal of this study was to characterize alloy nanoparticles with different bimetallic ratios of silver (Ag) and copper (Cu) by determining the composition and alloy structures. One specific objective was to determine how the composition affects the electrical properties of the nanoparticles in terms of electrical resistance and nanoparticle sintering. The desire for this study stems from the need to make conductive pastes for low-cost solar panel manufacturing. We performed experiments to develop the aqueous synthesis of core-shell bimetallic nanoparticles.

We investigated the room temperature sintering properties with the nanoparticles of varying compositions. The nanoparticles were characterized with several …

Towards Mitigating Co-Incident Peak Power Consumption And Managing Energy Utilization In Heterogeneous Clusters, Renan Delvalle Rueda

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

As data centers continue to grow in scale, the resource management software needs to work closely with the hardware infrastructure to provide high utilization, performance, fault tolerance, and high availability. Apache Mesos has emerged as a leader in this space, providing an abstraction over the entire cluster, data center, or cloud to present a uniform view of all the resources. In addition, frameworks built on Mesos such as Apache Aurora, developed within Twitter and later contributed to the Apache Software Foundation, allow massive job submissions with heterogeneous resource requirements. The availability of such tools in the Open Source space, with …

Quantifying Factors That Influence Road Deicer Retention And Export In A Multi-Landuse Upstate New York Watershed, David Joseph Saba

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Chloride contamination of streams and groundwater has become a prevalent issue throughout urbanizing areas in the last half century, particularly in northern latitudes where deicing salts are applied to roadways. This study determined how deicer impacted runoff disperses through sub-urban and urban areas on seasonal and multi-year scales. Chloride concentration changes were then modelled under varying pollutant loading scenarios through an integrated catchment model (INCA-Cl).

Six in-stream conductivity/stage/temperature sondes, recording at 15-minute intervals, were installed within the small (~9.6 km2) Fuler Hollow Creek multi-landuse watershed in Broome County NY and monitored over a 1-year period. Weekly grab samples were taken …

Identification And Estimation In Panel Models With Overspecified Number Of Groups, Ruiqi Liu

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

In this thesis, we provide a simple approach to identify and estimate group structure in panel models by adapting the M-estimationmethod. We consider both linear and nonlinear panel models where the regression coefficients are heterogeneous across groups but homogeneous within a group and the group membership is unknown to researchers. The main result of the thesis is that under certain assumptions, our approach is able to provide uniformly consistent group parameter estimator as long as the number of groups used in estimation is not smaller than the true number of groups. We also show that, with probability approaching one, our …

Magnetic Phases Of Large-Spin Ultracold Bosons: Quantum Dimer Models And Spin Liquid Phases, Todd C. Rutkowski

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This thesis investigates the plausibility of producing a quantum spin liquid (QSL) with ultracold bosonic atoms optically confined to the Mott insulating state. QSLs have received a great deal of attention for being an antiferromagnetic groundstate with many exotic properties, including the absence of local order, long-range entanglement, and fractionalized excitations. However, the identification and characterization of these phases in solid state systems remains a great challenge. Here we outline an alternate route to uncovering the QSL phase, which from the nature of spin angular momentum for ultracold atoms encounters many properties unique to these systems along the way. This …

On A Generalization Of The Hanoi Towers Group, Rachel Skipper

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

In 2012, Bartholdi, Siegenthaler, and Zalesskii computed the rigid kernel for the only known group for which it is non-trivial, theHanoi towers group. There they determined the kernel was the Klein 4 group. We present a simpler proof of this theorem. In thecourse of the proof, we also compute the rigid stabilizers and present proofs that this group is a self-similar, self-replicating, regular branch group.

We then construct a family of groups which generalize the Hanoi towers group and study the congruence subgroup problem for the groups in this family. We show that unlike the Hanoi towers group, the groups …

On A Pseudodifferential Calculus With Modest Boundary Decay Condition, Binbin Huang

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

A boundary decay condition, called vanishing to infinite logarithmic order is introduced. A pseudodifferential calculus, extending the b-calculus of Melrose, is proposed based on this modest decay condition. The mapping properties, composition rule, and normal operators are studied. Instead of functional analytic methods, a geometric approach is invoked in pursuing the Fredholm criterion. As an application, a detailed proof of the Atiyah-Patodi-Singer index theorem, including a review of Dirac operators of product type and construction of the heat kernel, is presented.

Mapreduce And Heterogeneity: Power-Aware Bag-Of-Tasks, Framework Parameter Sensitivity, And Dynamic Cluster Aware Framework Configuration, Jessica L. Hartog

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation presents the techniques for adaptation of MapReduce frameworks to incorporate heterogeneity-aware scheduling algorithms, an inspection of cluster configurations and how they impact these scheduling algorithms, an analysis regarding how the cluster configuration and the heterogeneity-aware scheduling can work together to minimize turnaround time and/or power consumption of the cluster when executing MapReduce applications, and how these lessons can be applied more broadly to Big Data infrastructure outside of MapReduce that supports multiple Big Data frameworks simultaneously.

Heterogeneity exists in various capacities in any given cluster, from static (Physical and Platform) heterogeneity to dynamic heterogeneity (Transient Data, Transient Applications, …

A Spatio-Temporal Approach To Mitigate Automotive Radar Spoofing Attacks, Prateek Kapoor

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Cyber-physical system (CPS) has become an integral part of human life, ranging from aircraft to health care systems. The security of these critical components ensures its wider acceptability. Traditionally, many works to secure cyber-physical system (CPS) has been done in the cyber domain, like securing inter/intra CPS communication, securing the exposed software, rebuilding control input derived from sensor data post-digitization, using sensor fusion. All of this security software suffers from a basic attack wherein an attacker compromises the physical/analog sensing system. Researchers have made some progress in mitigating such attacks on physical/analog signals of CPS, the current state of the …

Design And Characterization Of Plasmonic Nanoprobes And Interparticle Interactions For Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering And Biomolecular Detection, Zakiya Skeete

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Functional nanoparticles serve as an intriguing class of probes in medical theranostics for enabling rapid, sensitive, multiplexing, and point-of-care treatment and diagnosis. One important aspect of these applications is the exploitation of the unique plasmonic properties of certain metal nanoparticles. A key challenge is the understanding of effective harnessing of the plasmonic coupling of the nanoparticles upon interacting with the targeted biomolecular species. This thesis work focuses on investigating the interparticle interactions of chemcially-labled and bioconjugated gold and silver based nanoparticles and their influences on the plasmonic coupling for specctroscopic detection of biomolecules. Examples of the interparticle interactions include dye-mediated …

A Thermally Stabilized Fluorescent Organic Chromophore, Brendan P. Hughes

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

A fluorescent chromophore, hereby designated as cyanine dye, has been bound to generated zinc oxide nanoparticles. It has been shown that the material not only retains the characteristic absorption peak of the native chromophore, but it also continues to fluoresce with comparable intensity. The binding occurs through a Zn – O₂C bridge, which allows for vibrational relaxation as the dye heats up, yet also preserves the optical properties of the dye. This bond linkage can be observed from the comparison of FT-IR spectra of the nanoparticles and the native dye, designated by a shift in one of the …

Harnessing Solar Energy: Vapor Phase Polymerized Poly(3,4-Ethylenedioxythiophene) For Solid State Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells And The Photodegradation Of Organic Toxicants, Steven M. Boyer

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Solar energy is the most abundant energy resource available and can be utilized for a variety of applications such as photovoltaics and promote chemical reactions. Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) are a class of photovoltaic cells that have been well studied for their low cost and environmentally friendly materials. Previous research focused on developing more efficient liquid phase solar cells, but little work has gone into solid state DSSCs. Moving towards the solid state would improve the lifetime of the cells, preventing leaking of electrolyte and corrosion of the electrode while potentially being a more scalable process for mass production, improving …

Interaction Graphs Derived From Activation Functions And Their Application To Gene Regulation, Simon Joyce

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Interaction graphs are graphic representations of complex networks of mutually interacting components. Their main application is in the field of gene regulatory networks, where they are used to visualize how the expression levels of genes activate or inhibit the expression levels of other genes.

First we develop a natural transformation of activation functions and their derived interaction graphs, called conjugation, that is related to a natural transformation of signed digraphs called switching isomorphism. This is a useful tool for the analysis of interaction graphs used throughout the rest of the dissertation.

We then discuss the question of what restrictions, if …

Lake Magadi And The Soda Lake Cycle: A Study Of The Modern Sodium Carbonates And Of Late Pleistocene And Holocene Lacustrine Core Sediments, Emma Mcnulty

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

The Magadi Basin, Kenya, within the East African Rift Valley, contains two closed-basin alkaline lakes, Lake Magadi and Nasikie Engida that now precipitate trona (Na2CO3.NaHCO3.2H2O) and nahcolite (NaHCO3). Observations of the conditions of modern trona and nahcolite deposition in the Magadi Basin form the basis of the “soda lake cycle”. This study aims to use the sedimentary structures of the modern sodium carbonates of Lake Magadi as an analogue for similar ancient deposits around the world, including the vast trona and nahcolite deposits of the Eocene Green River Formation. Lake Magadi has been evolving since 1.08 Ma within a well-known …

Fabrication Of Electrospun Tio2/Polymer Composite Nanofibers For Photocatalysis And Degradation Of Toxins, Danielle L. Mccarthy

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Our society has made significant advancements in technology as it continues to grow in size which in turn has led to an accumulating amount of toxic threats. Some types of harmful pollution our society is currently facing include industrial waste such as organic dyes, pharmaceutical pollution and chemical warfare agents (CWAs). To date the nerve agent, O-ethyl S-[2-(diisopropylamino)ethyl] methylphosphonothioate), also known as VX, is the world’s most lethal chemical substance. Some of these deadly nerve agents have been employed in various conflict and terrorist attacks. Currently available CWA degradation techniques include incineration and water hydrolysis followed by biotreatment …

Mind-Craft: Exploring The Relation Between "Digital" Visual Experience And Orientation In Visual Contour Perception, Daniel Hipp

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Visual perception depends fundamentally on statistical regularities in the environment to make sense of the world. One such regularity is the orientation anisotropy typical of natural scenes; most natural scenes contain slightly more horizontal and vertical information than oblique information. This property is likely a primary cause of the “oblique effect” in visual perception, in which subjects experience greater perceptual fluently with horizontally and vertically oriented content than oblique. However, recent changes in the visual environment, including the “carpentered” content in urban scenes and the framed, caricatured content in digital screen media presentations, may have altered the level of orientation …

Peroxyoxalate Chemiluminescence And Capillary Electrophoresis : New Methods For Bioanalytical Chemistry, Nian Wu

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

The general research objectives lie in the development of new approaches to improve chemical analysis in the area of bioanalytical chemistry. More specifically this thesis is focused on the development and application of new methodologies and instrumentation involving two potentially powerful techniques: 1) Chemiluminescence-a spectroscopic technique in which the generation of fluorescence from the electronically excited state of the molecule is provided by a chemical reaction and 2) Capillary electrophoresis-a separation technique in which small ions as well as large biomolecules can be separated with high efficiency within a narrow capillary under the influence of high voltage.

Glacial Geology Of The Western Catskills, James Totten Kirkland

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Ic0 flow directions on the glaciated Appalachian Plateau in central New York were from the Adirondack Hountains. This is demonstrated by both striae directions and erratic provena..-1ce studies. No evidence for more than one Wisconsin glaciation as suggested by Rich (1935) could be found. Theories for local glaciation during the decline and after the retreat of the Laurentide Ice Sheet were also unsubstantiated. The East and West Branches Delaware River had different styles of daglaciation. The West Branch is characterized by zones of stagnation. The length of a zone is controlled by relief of the valley and corresponds to that …

Nuclear Charge Distribution Of Tm¹⁶⁹, Eugene Clark Deci

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

The distribution of electrical charge in the nucleus of Tm¹⁶⁹ was determined by measurement of the energies of the X rays of muonic atoms of Tm¹⁶⁹.

The values of the energies of the K X rays and the L X rays were calculated from a model assuming an anisotropic Fermi distribution of charge, and compared to the treasured values. The assumed distribution is a function of three parameters; a half radius, a surface thickness, and a measure of the anisotropy.

The values of the parameters were varied to find the values that gave the best agreement with …

Extension Of Belyaev-Zelivinski Method Of Rotation As Intrinsic Nuclear Excitation, Jeffrey W. Gray

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

The method of Belyaev and Zelevinski for handling the rotational collective states of deformed nuclei has been extended. It is shown how a [J(J+1)]² term naturally occurs in the energy spectrum of a rotational band for even-even nuclei. This is accomplished by modifying the assumption that Belyaev and Zelevinski imposed on their |n> states. This leads to a definite relationship between the coefficient of the J(J+1) and [J(J+1)]² terms in the energy spectrum. This technique is applied to a single isolated j-level and to an arbitrary level scheme.

The Weakly Coupled Polaron, Kou-Ying Yang Moravan

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

The Green's Function technique has been used to investigate the properties of weakly coupled longitudinal optical polarons. By taking into consideration the contribution of the multi-phonon and the phonon-cross-exchange diagrams in the self-energy, a vertex correction has been made to the lowest order diagram. The real part and the imaginary part of the self-energy are obtained. The dispersion relationship obtained by this approximation gives the ground state energy which is lower than the upper bound obtained from the variational method. Also, the spectral weight function for several momentum values has been calculated. It shows that the quasi-particle description is good …

Synthesis And Chemistry Of Thione-Iron Carbonyl Complexes, Albert Shil-Kwan Chan

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

The first examples of sulfur-donor ligand ortho-metallated complexes were obtained in good to excellent yields by reaction of various thiobenzophenones and a thiobenzoate with diiron enneacarbonyl in benzene at room temperature. The known trinuclear complex S₂Fe₃(CO)₉ was a by-product of these reactions, and complexes of the type (Ar₂C)S₂Fe₂(CO)₆ were formed in several instances. The structures of these complexes were established on the basis of microanalytical and spectral data as well as by reductive cleavage experiments. Oxidative or photolytic cleavage of the ortho-metallated complexes provides a convenient …