ScholarWolf
Welcome to ScholarWolf, the institutional repository for the University of Nevada, Reno. Managed by the University Libraries, ScholarWolf is an open access database and the home of scholarly works by University members, including the electronic theses and dissertations of our graduate students, journal articles, conference presentations, and more.
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Item Luminescent Lanthanide Complexes and Nanoparticles for Biological Applications(2026)This dissertation focuses on the design, synthesis, and photocharacterization of new water-soluble lanthanide-based complexes and nanoparticles for potential use in biological environments. Trivalent lanthanide (Ln(III)) are attractive for bioimaging and sensing applications because of their long emission lifetimes, sharp emission bands, color purity, resistance to photobleaching, and enhanced signal-to-noise ratios. Their practical use in aqueous and biological systems requires organic chromophores or other organic ligands that provide water solubility while minimizing quenching from high-energy vibrational oscillators. To address these challenges, several classes of Ln(III) materials were developed and investigated. Carbazole-based ligands were synthesized and coordinated to Eu(III) and Tb(III) to produce visible emitting complexes designed for viscosity and temperature sensing. These complexes were isolated to perform both one- and two-photon absorption experiments. This enables their potential use in biological imaging where deeper tissue penetration and reduced photodamage and scattering are desired. Additionally, these studies demonstrated that carbazole effectively sensitized Eu(III) and Tb(III) emission while also providing sensitivity to changes in viscosity and temperature. Triple-decker sandwich complexes were isolated and explored as up-conversion (UC) emitters. These systems were designed to enable efficient energy transfer and direct excitation processes that enable near-infrared (NIR) excitation to produce emission in the visible region. The isolated complexes exhibited Er(III)-centered up-conversion luminescence in solution and demonstrated detectable emission in HeLa cells. These findings highlight the potential of molecular up-conversion systems for biological imaging applications. Sensitizer-capped Eu2O3 nanoparticles (NPs) were synthesized and functionalized with different aromatic ligands to enhance Eu(III)-centered emission and excited state lifetimes in aqueous solutions and tissue lysate. A family of common aromatic ligands was investigated for its ability to sensitize Eu(III) emission while maintaining water solubility and enabling longer emission lifetimes. These experiments led to the isolation of a co-sensitizer-capped nanoparticle system, which demonstrated an extended excited-state lifetime of over 1 ms. Furthermore, time-delayed photoluminescence measurements demonstrated improved detection of the metal centered emission. The studies mentioned above demonstrate various approaches for developing Ln(III)-based luminescent materials that perform well for bio-imaging or photosensing applications in aqueous solutions. The results offer insight into ligand design, environmentally responsive Ln(III) probes, low energy sensitization, and modification of nanoparticle surface strategies that enhance Ln(III) emission and lifetimes. These findings contribute to the broader development of luminescent Ln(III) materials for applications in bioimaging and sensing.Item Advancing carbon cycling understanding in the peatlands of the Caribbean through predictive mapping and peat accumulation modeling(2026)A peatland is a type of wetland that is identified by a thick layer of organic matter that has accumulated over decades to millennia, due to dead and decaying plant matter in permanently or seasonally saturated conditions. Peatlands cover approximately three percent of the Earth’s land surface but account for almost a third of stored soil carbon, which makes them one of the world’s largest terrestrial natural carbon sinks. Tropical peatlands face high rates of degradation, which are coupled with a warming climate and increased hydroclimatic variability. Those new conditions draw concern about the ability of tropical peatlands to safeguard their large carbon stores while continuing to draw down atmospheric carbon in the future. Along with carbon sequestration, peatlands provide many ecosystem services, including water regulation, biological diversity, habitat for wildlife, and paleo-environmental archives.Although peatlands worldwide play crucial ecological roles, very little is known about tropical peatlands compared to their high-latitude counterparts. The current data available, in terms of peatland extent, distribution, and ecosystem dynamics, are underwhelming. For instance, current peatland mapping efforts put their tropical extent between 600,000 km2 and 1.07M km2. This wide range is caused by a number of issues, including the lack of a formal peat definition across countries, the range of mapping techniques that have been employed and their respective uncertainties, and the scarcity of local ground-truthing to confirm the presence or absence of peatlands across large swaths of land. Regionally, the distribution and extent of peatlands is also believed to be overestimated or underestimated, depending on the availability of country-level peatland inventories, the scale of the data used, as well as the reliability of data sources. As for peatland ecosystem dynamics, we know that changes in temperature and precipitation regimes, in combination with water level manipulations via land-use change, can have complex effects on peat accumulation and create uncertainties in the system’s ability to accumulate and store carbon. These data and knowledge gaps need to be addressed by gathering information such as ecological data, peatland age and condition, and current carbon storage, to understand how peatlands contribute to the global carbon budget and how they may respond to future environmental changes. In the Caribbean region, peatlands are severely understudied. Assessments of peatland extent and distribution are limited, with many countries neither having national peatland definitions nor peatland inventories. With peatlands currently being affected by natural and anthropogenic factors, the lack of formal assessments creates knowledge gaps that impede our ability to determine how these ecosystems might respond to future environmental and land-use changes. The Caribbean is becoming increasingly sensitive to the effects of climate change such as sea-level rise, seasonal changes in precipitation patterns, and extreme weather. Peatlands here are also under threat from drainage, burning, livestock overgrazing, resource extraction, and conversion for agricultural needs. These increasing threats disturb peatland’s natural ecosystem dynamics and can transform them into strong sources of greenhouse gases. These uncertainties in how tropical peatlands in the Caribbean will respond to natural and anthropogenic changes exemplify why there is an urgent need for research to be conducted in order to provide data that can help inform decision- and policymaking about peatland management, including conservation and restoration. My MSc thesis is split into two chapters that help bridge some of the critical data and knowledge gaps identified above. In the first chapter, I introduce a peatland probability map of Nicaragua that uses a probabilistic approach with proxy data; this map represents the first national peatland mapping effort. In the second chapter, I evaluate the impact of environmental changes on the carbon-sink capacity of two types of peatlands found in Costa Rica, using an amended version of the Holocene Peatland Model.Item The Politics of Poetry in the Reign of Charles II: 1660-1685(2026)This dissertation reconstructs the political poetry of England between 1660 and 1685 by examining the full extent of printed verse circulating during the reign of Charles II. Drawing on a survey of over 3,000 texts—including poetry collections, pamphlets, ballads, almanacs, and prose works containing embedded verse—I recover a vast body of political poetry that has been largely neglected by modern scholarship. Rather than beginning from a narrow canon of exemplary poets, this study situates political verse within the broader culture of print, performance, and polemic that shaped everyday political and religious experience in the late seventeenth century. Political poems most studied as representative of the period—works by figures such as Dryden, Marvell, and Butler—emphasize concerns and rhetorical strategies that are atypical when set against the wider corpus. These exemplars often privilege moderation, formal complexity, and elite political discourse, while the majority of political verse circulating at the time was shorter, more anonymous, more combative, and far more explicitly theological. By recovering this broader archive, the project demonstrates that religious conflict, rather than secular political partisanship alone, constituted the dominant animating force of political poetry throughout the Carolean period. Against scholarly narratives that emphasize secularization, moderation, or the emergence of Enlightenment rationality, this study shows that political verse remained deeply invested in the perceived stakes of salvation and damnation. Poets framed political allegiance as inseparable from religious orthodoxy, treating succession and sedition as matters of divine judgment. Political verse frequently worked in tandem with contemporary sermons, echoing clerical arguments, extending sermonic theology into the broader sphere of printed verse and balladry performance. By foregrounding anonymous, occasional, and performative verse—including ballads designed for communal singing—this dissertation challenges the assumption that canonical exemplars can adequately represent the political poetry of the age. It argues instead that political verse functioned as an active participant in shaping political consciousness, mobilizing religious fear, and sustaining a culture of vigilance in a society still haunted by civil war, regicide, and the threat of Catholic rule.
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