Biostatistics Commons^™

Tropical Fish Study In Tahiti, French Polynesia, Miranda Brainard, Caitlyn Swango, Paityn Houglan, Richard Londraville

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In May of 2023, I embarked on an exciting research journey to Moorea, French Polynesia, alongside fellow students and faculty members from the University of Akron and Syracuse University. This expedition was part of the university-sponsored Tropical Vertebrate Biology course, where we delved into the exploration of various tropical species inhabiting the island, including sea urchins, geckos, and my primary focus, the blackspotted rockskipper.

My research team, composed of my co-authors and me, was particularly intrigued by the unique refuge-seeking behavior displayed by blackspotted rockskippers. These amphibious fish are renowned for their remarkable ability to inhabit tide pools and rocky …

Reducing Food Scarcity: The Benefits Of Urban Farming, S.A. Claudell, Emilio Mejia

Journal of Nonprofit Innovation

Urban farming can enhance the lives of communities and help reduce food scarcity. This paper presents a conceptual prototype of an efficient urban farming community that can be scaled for a single apartment building or an entire community across all global geoeconomics regions, including densely populated cities and rural, developing towns and communities. When deployed in coordination with smart crop choices, local farm support, and efficient transportation then the result isn’t just sustainability, but also increasing fresh produce accessibility, optimizing nutritional value, eliminating the use of ‘forever chemicals’, reducing transportation costs, and fostering global environmental benefits.

Imagine Doris, who is …

Interactions Between Sediment Mechanical Structure And Infaunal Community Structure Following Physical Disturbance, William Cyrus Roger Clemo

<strong> Theses and Dissertations </strong>

Shallow, river-influenced coastal sediments are important for global carbon storage and nutrient cycling and provide a habitat for diverse communities of invertebrates (infauna). Elevated bed shear stress from extreme storms can resuspend, transport, and deposit sediments, disrupting the cohesive structure of muds, and sorting and depositing sand eroded from beaches. These physical disruptions can also resuspend or smother infauna, decreasing abundances and changing community structure. Infaunal activities such as burrowing, tube construction, and feeding can impact sediment structure and stability. However, little is known about how physical disturbance impacts short and long-term sediment habitat suitability and whether disturbance-tolerant infauna influence …

Editorial: The Public Health Scholars As The Health Leaders, Al Asyary, Meita Veruswati, Putri Bungsu Machmud, Indri Hapsari Susilowati

Kesmas

No abstract provided.

From Formulas To Futures: Mathematical Insights Into Endosomal Escape, Fnu Nisha

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Estimating & Modeling The Growth Of Bromeliads, Erin N. Bodine, Helen O. Udeochu, Alana G. Wells

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Dental Hygiene Students Reported Physiological Symptoms Associated With Wearing An N95 Respirator Mask, Peyton Shea Butler

Dental Hygiene Theses & Dissertations

Purpose: Physiological symptoms and comfort levels while wearing an N95 respiratory mask has not been examined with dental hygienists. The purpose of this study was to investigate dental hygiene students reported physiological symptoms and comfort perception while wearing an N95 respirator mask during patient care appointments. Methods: After IRB approval (IRB #1987754-2), a 16-item questionnaire was distributed through email to a convenience sample of 65 dental hygiene students. Questions assessed respiratory, dermatologic, cardiac, mask mouth and general physiological symptoms, as well as comfort levels. Additionally, participants were asked to respond to demographic questions and one open ended question inquiring about …

All-Cause And Opioid-Related Mortality Compared Between Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury And The Us General Population, Jaden Whitehead, Beatrice Ugiliweneza

The Cardinal Edge

Individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) are susceptible to the misuse of opioids due to the introduction of these substances for pain management. There are very few studies examining the relationship between unintentional deaths caused by opioid usage following spinal cord injury. The objective of this study was to evaluate the trend of opioid-related mortality of individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) over the years and compare these findings to the mortality rates due to opioid misuse in the general population. In this study, we used data provided by the National Spinal Cord Injury Model Systems (NSCIMS) for SCI 1999-2016 …

Construction And Performance Optimization Of Bioconjugated Nanosensors For Early Detection Of Breast Cancer And Pro-Inflammatory Diseases, Pooja Gaikwad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, nanosensors have emerged as a tool with strong potential in medical diagnostics. Single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) based optical nanosensors have notably garnered interest due to the unique characteristics of their near-infrared fluorescence emission, including tissue transparency, photostability, and various chiralities with discrete absorption and fluorescence emission bands. Additionally, the optoelectronic properties of SWCNT are sensitive to the surrounding environment, which makes them suitable for in vitro and in vivo biosensing. Single-stranded (ss) DNA-wrapped SWCNTs have been reported as optical nanosensors for cancers and metabolic diseases. Breast cancer and cardiovascular diseases are the most common causes of death …

Modeling Biphasic, Non-Sigmoidal Dose-Response Relationships: Comparison Of Brain- Cousens And Cedergreen Models For A Biochemical Dataset, Venkat D. Abbaraju, Tamaraty L. Robinson, Brian P. Weiser

Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine Faculty Scholarship

Biphasic, non-sigmoidal dose-response relationships are frequently observed in biochemistry and pharmacology, but they are not always analyzed with appropriate statistical methods. Here, we examine curve fitting methods for “hormetic” dose-response relationships where low and high doses of an effector produce opposite responses. We provide the full dataset used for modeling, and we provide the code for analyzing the dataset in SAS using two established mathematical models of hormesis, the Brain-Cousens model and the Cedergreen model. We show how to obtain and interpret curve parameters such as the ED50 that arise from modeling, and we discuss how curve parameters might change …

Editorial, Al Asyary

Kesmas

No abstract provided.

A Novel Family Of Chain Binomial Models To Investigate Correlated Vaccination And Infection Rates In Sveirs Epidemic Dynamics, Divine Wanduku

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Drug Ideologies Of The United States, Macy Montgomery

Helm's School of Government Conference - American Revival: Citizenship & Virtue

The United States has been increasingly creating lenient drug policies. Seventeen states and Washington, the District of Columbia, legalized marijuana, and Oregon decriminalized certain drugs, including methamphetamine, heroin, and cocaine. The medical community has proven that drugs, including marijuana, have myriad adverse health side effects. This leads to two questions: Why does the United States government continue to create lenient drug policies, and what reasons do citizens give for legalizing drugs when the medical community has proven them harmful? The paper hypothesizes that the disadvantages of drug legalization outweigh its benefits because of the numerous harms it causes, such as …

Community Participation And Perspectives Of Ambondrolava Mangrove Restoration Project, Nadine Shannon

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Madagascar’s mangrove forests are intertidal ecosystems that provide numerous valuable ecosystem services but are nonetheless under pressure from large amounts of deforestation. On the southwestern coast of Madagascar, the village of Ambondrolava practices community led management of the mangrove and its resources. This research project studied the evolution of the mangrove area using GIS data, and investigated, through interviews, the relationship between the local community of Ambondrolava and the organizations that manage the mangrove ecosystem. From 2000 to 2018, the zone of the mangrove has experienced a net loss in area every year, despite reforestation efforts. Most community members interviewed …

Prevalence Of Sars-Cov-2 Antibodies In Liberty University Student Population, Emily Bonus

Senior Honors Theses

In 2020, the virus SARS-CoV-2 gained attention as it spread around the world. Its antibodies are poorly understood, and little research focuses on those with few COVID-19 complications yet large numbers of close contacts: university students. This longitudinal study recorded SARS-CoV-2 antibody presence in 107 undergraduate Liberty University students twice during early 2021. After extensive data cleaning and the application of various statistical tests and ANOVAs, the data seems to show that in the case of COVID-19 infections, SARS-CoV-2 IgM antibodies are immediately produced, and then IgG antibodies follow later. However, the COVID-19 vaccine causes the production of both IgM …

The Effects Of Demographics And Risk Factors On The Morphological Characteristics Of Human Femoropopliteal Arteries, Sayed Ahmadreza Razian, Majid Jadidi, Alexey Kamenskiy

UNO Student Research and Creative Activity Fair

Background: Disease of the lower extremity arteries (Peripheral Arterial Disease, PAD) is associated with high morbidity and mortality. During disease development, the arteries adapt by changing their diameter, wall thickness, and residual deformations, but the effects of demographics and risk factors on this process are not clear.

Methods: Superficial femoral arteries from 736 subjects (505 male, 231 female, 12 to 99 years old, average age 51±17.8 years) and the associated demographic and risk factor variables were used to construct machine learning (ML) regression models that predicted morphological characteristics (diameter, wall thickness, and longitudinal opening angle resulting from the …

Inverse Probability Weighting In Survival Analysis And Network Analysis, Yukun Lu

Doctoral Dissertations

Inverse probability weighting is a popular technique to accommodate selection bias due to non-random sampling and missing data. In the first chapter, we develop an inverse probability weighted estimator and an augmented inverse probability weighted estimator of regression coefficients for a linear model with randomly censored covariates, when the censoring mechanism may be dependent on the outcome. We investigate the asymptotic properties of both estimators and evaluate their finite sample performance through extensive simulation studies. We apply the proposed methods to an Alzheimer’s disease study. In the second chapter, we present an application of network analysis in a study of …

Deep Learning-Based Technique For The Perception Of The Cervical Cancer, Aya Haraz, Hossam El-Din Moustafa, Abeer Twakol Khaleel, Ahmed H. Eltanboly

Mansoura Engineering Journal

In third-world countries, cervical cancer is the most prevalent and leading cause of death. It is affected by a variety of factors, including smoking, poor nutritional status, immunological inadequacy, and prolonged use of contraception. The Pap smear test, which is intended to prevent cervical cancer, finds preneoplastic changes in cervical epithelial cells. This study framework classified cervical cancer cells from Pap smears into five specified cell types using machine learning-based classification algorithms. The SIPaKMeD database is used in this investigation. This public dataset, which was manually cropped from 966 cluster cell images taken from Pap smear slides, has 4045 isolated …

The Birds And The Trees: Quantifying The Drivers Of Whitebark Pine Decline And Clark's Nutcracker Habitat Use In Glacier National Park, Vladimir Kovalenko

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), recently listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, is in steep decline in Glacier National Park, Montana, USA due to the non-native pathogen Cronartium ribicola, causal agent of the fatal disease white pine blister rust. A sample of the park’s population suggests that approximately 70 percent of whitebark pines have died, while 65 percent of the remaining trees are infected. Using landscape and climate variables, we show how geographic location, elevation, aspect, solar radiation, relative humidity, and snowpack interact with tree diameter to affect mortality, disease incidence, cone production, and regeneration. We also examine how …

Statistical Methods For Gene Selection And Genetic Association Studies, Xuewei Cao

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This dissertation includes five Chapters. A brief description of each chapter is organized as follows.

In Chapter One, we propose a signed bipartite genotype and phenotype network (GPN) by linking phenotypes and genotypes based on the statistical associations. It provides a new insight to investigate the genetic architecture among multiple correlated phenotypes and explore where phenotypes might be related at a higher level of cellular and organismal organization. We show that multiple phenotypes association studies by considering the proposed network are improved by incorporating the genetic information into the phenotype clustering.

In Chapter Two, we first illustrate the proposed GPN …

Utilizing Markov Chains To Estimate Allele Progression Through Generations, Ronit Gandhi

Honors Theses

All populations display patterns in allele frequencies over time. Some alleles cease to exist, while some grow to become the norm. These frequencies can shift or stay constant based on the conditions the population lives in. If in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, the allele frequencies stay constant. Most populations, however, have bias from environmental factors, sexual preferences, other organisms, etc. We propose a stochastic Markov chain model to study allele progression across generations. In such a model, the allele frequencies in the next generation depend only on the frequencies in the current one.

We use this model to track a recessive allele …

Laboratory Practices And Antimicrobial Resistance In A Florida Hospital, Crispina Marie Sy-Trias

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Antibiotic resistance is a health threat affecting millions of Americans. Microorganisms develop resistance to antibiotics, rendering them useless for treating infections. The purpose of this quantitative study was to assess the associations between sample processing time and antibiotic resistance and is based on the health belief model. A retrospective specimen tracking activity of data from November 2019 to November 2020 was obtained by random sampling of 246 bacterial cultures. One hundred ninety-six (80%) samples were processed on time, and 50 (20%) were delayed; 167 (68%) samples were determined to have the presence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and 79 (32%) with …

Dynamics Of Redox-Driven Molecular Processes In Local And Systemic Plant Immunity, Philip Berg

Theses and Dissertations

The work here presents two main parts. In the first part, chapters 1 – 3 focus on dynamical systems modeling in plant immunity, whereas chapters 4 – 6 describe contributions to computational modeling and analysis of proteomics and genomics data. Chapter 1 investigates dynamical and biochemical patterns of reversibly oxidized cysteines (RevOxCys) during effector-triggered immunity (ETI) in Arabidopsis, examines the regulatory patterns associated with Arabidopsis thimet oligopeptidase 1 and 2’s (TOP1 and TOP2), roles in the RevOxCys events during ETI, and analyzes the redox phenotype of the top1top2 mutant. The second chapter investigates the peptidome dynamics during ETI …

Towards Structured Planning And Learning At The State Fisheries Agency Scale, Caleb A. Aldridge

Theses and Dissertations

Inland recreational fisheries has grown philosophically and scientifically to consider economic and sociopolitical aspects (non-biological) in addition to the biological. However, integrating biological and non-biological aspects of inland fisheries has been challenging. Thus, an opportunity exists to develop approaches and tools which operationalize planning and decision-making processes which include biological and non-biological aspects of a fishery. This dissertation expands the idea that a core set of goals and objectives is shared among and within inland fisheries agencies; that many routine operations of inland fisheries managers can be regimented or standardized; and the novel concept that current information and operations can …

Larval Ecology Of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus Thynnus): New Insights From Otolith Microstructure, Biotic, And Abiotic Analyses From The Gulf Of Mexico And Mediterranean Sea, Estrella Malca

All HCAS Student Capstones, Theses, and Dissertations

Atlantic bluefin tuna (ABT), Thunnus thynnus, spawn in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) and the Mediterranean Sea (MED). Spawning occurs within narrow temporal and environmental parameters. Efforts to characterize growth of ABT in wild conditions revealed a wide range of growth variability during the early life stages. This series of studies examined potential biotic and abiotic influences of larval growth from seven ABT cohorts, and identified several key drivers of growth for this commercially valuable species. A detailed investigation of larval dynamics using otolith microstructure was conducted as follows. First, companion growth curves and stable isotope analysis from the same …

Bayesian Methods For Graphical Models With Neighborhood Selection., Sagnik Bhadury

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Graphical models determine associations between variables through the notion of conditional independence. Gaussian graphical models are a widely used class of such models, where the relationships are formalized by non-null entries of the precision matrix. However, in high-dimensional cases, covariance estimates are typically unstable. Moreover, it is natural to expect only a few significant associations to be present in many realistic applications. This necessitates the injection of sparsity techniques into the estimation method. Classical frequentist methods, like GLASSO, use penalization techniques for this purpose. Fully Bayesian methods, on the contrary, are slow because they require iteratively sampling over a quadratic …

Evaluating The Health Impacts Of Fruit And Vegetable Intake At The Individual Level And Food Pantry Level Among Food Pantry Users, Jiacheng Chen

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Background: Chronic diseases impose heavy burdens on individuals and the healthcare system in the US. Many factors were found to be associated with chronic diseases, including demographics, family history, social environmental factors, and individual behavioral factors such as diet and physical activity. Among those factors, fruit and vegetable intake can have substantial health impacts via a variety of causal pathways. Fruit and vegetable (F&V) consumption is generally lower among individuals living in households experiencing food insecurity and rely on food assistance programs. Decreased F&V intake among food pantry users may negatively impact health. However, conducting quantitative analysis on this population …

Hiding In Plain Sight: Accounting For Rate Heterogeneity In Trait Evolution Models, James Boyko

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Within the last four decades, phylogenetic comparative methods have become the defacto method of analysis for comparative biologists. The availability of high-quality comparative datasets has been matched by an explosion of possible phylogenetic models. In large part, the efforts to increase the realism of phylogenetic comparative methods has been successful as evidenced by their widespread use. To this extensive literature, my contributions are modest. I have focused my dissertation work on two main themes. First, most phenotypic evolution is not independent of other phenotypes. Changes in a particular character may influence changes in another and modeling these characters in isolation …

Rewriting The Rules For Diagnostics: Implications Of Probability And Measure Theory For Sars-Cov-2 Testing, Paul Patrone, Anthony Kearsley

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Comparative Transcriptomic Study Between Cyanobacteria That Contain Chlorophyll D And Those That Lack Chlorophyll D, Fernanda Montoya

Honors Capstones

All cyanobacteria, which perform oxygenic photosynthesis on Earth, contain the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll a (Chl a) that absorbs light in the violet and red region of the visible spectrum. Cyanobacteria of the Acaryochloris species, however, contain the rare photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll d (Chl d) that absorbs light in the far-red region. Chl d’s ability to absorb light in this region allows it to avoid competing with other photosynthetic organisms for light. Creating a photosystem that uses Chl d in plants would be of great use for agricultural land optimization, but requires knowledge of the biosynthetic pathways of …