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.
Learn more about ScholarWolf and the submission process.
Recent Submissions
Item Conditions of the Oral Cavity in Early Bronze Age Anatolia: Reconstruction of Dietary Behavior, Biological Impact, and Social Structure(2025)The Early Bronze Age (EBA; 3000-2000 BCE) in Anatolia is recognized as a period of increased social stratification, expansive trade, urbanization, agricultural intensification, craft specialization in metallurgy, and socioeconomic shifts. This combination of sociocultural and sociopolitical changes distinguishes the EBA from the preceding Neolithic and Chalcolithic. Most research supporting these extensive changes stems from archaeological research, while more recent trends in reconstructing the EBA have followed biocultural approaches in bioarchaeology studies. Moreover, even fewer investigations seek to answer questions with evidence from the oral cavity. This dissertation intends to examine social organization from the EBA site of Karataş-Semayük (Karataş; 2700-2300 BCE) located on the Elmalı Plain of Anatolia, by combining several conditions of the oral cavity (i.e., dental caries, dental calculus, periapical lesions, periodontal disease, antemortem tooth loss, dental wear, dental chipping, and atypical dental wear). The oral cavity provides optimal biocultural evidence due to the entangled relationship between diet, food preparation, non-alimentary application of teeth, cultural modifications, trauma, hygiene, and pathological conditions of the oral cavity. The study is centered on the 2733 deciduous and permanent teeth of subadult and adult individuals (n = 274) curated at the Human Behavior Ecology and Archeometry Laboratory (IDEA Lab) at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Türkiye. To contextualize the results from Karataş, comparisons are made to sites through the Neolithic to EBA, including the sites Çayönü Tepesi, Aşıklı Höyük, Çatalhöyük, Tepecik-Çiftlik, Hakemi Use, Çamlıbel Tarlası, İkiztepe, Bakla Tepe, Titriş Höyük, and Salat Tepe. Throughout the findings, the dental conditions indicated the similarities across the intersectional identities represented at Karataş. Limited differences in dental conditions between sex and social status at Karataş suggest that the inhabitants generally shared resources and habits. Slight differences between dental chipping and dental calculus frequencies by burial location indicate the potential of very few individuals having different dietary and non-alimentary habits. While age groupings displayed differences in dental conditions, this is expected due to the progressive nature of dental conditions. In addition to the intrasite findings, the intersite comparisons on dental conditions suggest that Karataş aligns with the rise of and expansive reliance on agriculture in Anatolia following the Ceramic Neolithic. This dissertation serves and advocates as 1) a further biocultural illustration of the social organization during the EBA in Anatolia and 2) an example of the application of multiple dental conditions when studying the oral cavity to capture the entangled relationships between conditions and extrinsic factors.Item Using a Minority Stress Framework to Explore Psychological Distress in Gay Asian American Men: A Moderation Analysis(2025)The number of Asian Americans and individuals identifying as LGBTQ+ is increasing in the United States. Mental health disparities exist for both of these populations and their intersections. The intersection of being both gay and Asian American has been understudied. Dual identity development for Gay Asian American men produces a conflict of allegiance, which requires the negotiation of Asian cultural values. Within the current study, Meyer’s (2003) minority stress theory was utilized to conceptualize the stressful impact of marginalized identities and their overall mental health and psychological distress. This exploratory study utilized moderation analysis to examine the role of conflict of allegiance, Asian cultural values, and psychological distress in a sample of 118 gay Asian American men. Results indicated significant predictors of conflict of allegiance and Asian cultural values on psychological distress. No significant moderation was supported. The practical significance of counseling implications and interventions are discussed for gay Asian American men.Item Ion Mobility-Mass Spectrometry to Augment Middle-Down Fragmentation Coverage(2025)Proteomics aims to characterize all proteins in a sample including their identification, quantification and any chemical modifications. Proteins are the primary functional molecules in all living organisms carrying out many processes necessary for life. To respond to external stimuli and accomplish these tasks, proteins are strictly regulated and a single gene will give rise to multiple proteoforms each possessing variability due to alternative splicing, sequence variations, and/or post-translational modifications (PTMs). Understanding this protein diversity helps us uncover how cells function, the mechanism of disease, and aid in the development of drug design.Mass spectrometry is a powerful tool and can rapidly identify and characterize proteins with high sensitivity and provide detailed information on the PTM status of proteins. There are three main mass-spectrometry proteomics approaches, and they are bottom-up, middle-down and top-down methods. Bottom-up is a well-developed and high-throughput technique involving the digestion of proteins into peptides and separation of the peptides by liquid chromatography and analysis by mass spectrometry. While bottom-up proteomics is highly mature and sensitive, there are frequent gaps in the sequence coverage due to the digestion process generating very short peptides that go undetected. Additionally, reliance on digestion can result in the inability to assign concurrent PTM modifications making it an unreliable method for technique for the analysis of proteoforms. In middle-down analysis the protein is partially digested to generate larger peptides and subunits. Middle-down approach is able to preserve proteoform information better than bottom-up and assign concurrent PTM’s. This makes it an excellent option to study both mid-size proteins and big proteins like antibodies. Although the middle-down approach sounds promising, the larger peptides result in highly complex tandem mass spectra, overlapping product ions, decreased signal to noise ratios, and reduced fragmentation coverage when compared to bottom-up. Ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) techniques have been successful in deconvoluting overlapping product ions, enabling their facile annotation. Trapped ion mobility spectrometry is a type of IMS which offers great resolution. The benefits of pairing collision-induced dissociation and this IMS technique to generate and separate product ions derived from protein ions has been extensively studied but its application to middle-down workflows has yet to be investigated. In this work, we utilize CIDtims to sequence middle-down peptides and subunits. We assess five proteins ranging in mass from 8.6 kDa ubiquitin to a 150 kDa immunoglobulin G. While the benefits for small proteins like cytochrome c and ubiquitin were minimal, increases in sequence coverage of 43.6%, 24.5%, and 39.3% were measured for myoglobin, carbonic anhydrase, and NIST antibody, respectively. We can conclude that CIDtims is an effective method to improve fragmentation coverage by middle-down approach.Item Towards a New Generation of UHPC Spent Nuclear Fuel Storage Systems(2025)Spent nuclear fuel (SNF) is currently stored in a growing number of dry cask storage systems (DCSSs) across the U.S. As policymakers have not yet reached consensus on defined strategies for permanent fuel disposal, the DCSSs will likely be used significantly longer than initially anticipated. The desired extended service life raises concerns about the long-term performance and potential degradation of the commonly utilized concrete shielding structures, which mandates the rethinking of current and future designs with a focus on enhanced durability and longevity. This potential can be realized through the incorporation of advanced materials like ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC), which possesses superior mechanical and durability properties, and is currently making major strides across the globe to use for critical structural applications. However, despite its potential, limited research exists on utilizing UHPC specifically for SNF storage. This doctoral study aims to bridge this gap by comprehensively exploring the viability of a new generation of DCSSs using UHPC with focus on canister-based horizontal storage modules (HSM) that heavily incorporate concrete and susceptible to aging and durability issues. The research methodology integrates a critical review with a suite of advanced numerical simulations. Initially, the dedicated review study identifies concrete degradation mechanisms in DCSSs, and assesses UHPC’s projected performance against these compared to normal strength concrete (NSC). A summary of emerging data on UHPC’s radiation attenuation properties, suggested mix modification, and key knowledge gaps in this domain are provided. Following this foundational review, advanced numerical modeling of an archetype HSM is performed. First, coupled steady-state computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and linear finite element (FE) analyses are used to compare thermal and structural performance of NSC and UHPC under normal operating conditions, evaluating temperature distributions and demand-to-capacity ratios under combined thermal and mechanical loads. Subsequently, transient CFD and nonlinear FE analyses, incorporating a coupled damage-plasticity microplane model and steel reinforcement for NSC and UHPC, are performed to study severe accident thermal conditions (i.e., 40-hour vent blockage), assessing thermal response, structural damage evolution, and the influence of temperature-dependent material properties. Finally, triaxial time-history FE seismic analysis investigates the seismic behavior, examining the effect of global HSM stiffness, using both baseline and thermally degraded properties of NSC and UHPC, on the global and local dynamic responses, including canister and fuel assemblies. This doctoral research provides compelling evidence that demonstrates the enhanced performance capabilities of UHPC for HSM in DCSSs compared to NSC. The numerical analyses consistently reveal UHPC’s significant advantages in thermal performance under both normal and accident conditions. Furthermore, UHPC exhibits substantially improved structural performance with no damage against severe thermal loads, indicating greater structural robustness for long-term storage. The study also confirms the comparable seismic performance UHPC-based systems while advancing the understanding of the overall seismic behavior of HSMs; an aspect of the behavior that is also needed to assess the what-become long-term storage risks.Item Pheromones, nectar, and computer vision: investigating large-scale patterns of chemodiversity.(2025)At its core, chemical ecology attempts to describe the complex forces that generate the vast chemical diversity observed in nature and which allow natural products to mediate interactions across biological scales. Chemodiversity is a major component of functional biodiversity in all ecosystems, and in plant – insect interactions especially mediates mutualisms, antagonisms, defense, reproduction, and many more fundamentally important ecosystem processes. Working with large datasets across multiple insect systems, this dissertation provides insight into major drivers of chemical diversity across taxa, ecological functions of specialized chemistry in plant – pollinator interactions, and methods of automating data collection for monitoring insect diversity. In particular, I investigate the role of specialized nectar chemistry under several existing hypotheses, generate and test novel hypotheses regarding global patterns of insect semiochemical diversity, and discuss methods for rapidly and scalably monitoring insect biodiversity using machine learning. Chapter 1 builds a framework for understanding large scale patterns of chemodiversity. Here I apply ideas from information theory to semiochemical communication, especially concepts surrounding communication in noisy channels, to predict variation in semiochemical diversity at global scales. While an understanding of chemical noise allows the interpretation of existing hypotheses in the chemical ecology of plant and animal systems, it also suggests several patterns which have yet to be observed. Testing two predictions made under this framework, that insect volatile semiochemical blends should be less rich in biodiverse regions and contact semiochemicals more rich, using a large scale meta-analysis approach, I show that insect semiochemistry broadly follows the patterns expected under information theory. These results suggest that large scale patterns of chemodiversity may arise due to selection imposed by chemical noise, and that information theory can allow interpretation of these patterns across systems. Chapter 2 investigates a specific aspect of chemical communication: the role of specialized nectar chemistry in mediating plant – pollinator interactions. The Nectar Pleiotropy hypothesis suggests that the presence of specialized metabolites in nectar is non-adaptive, and that these compounds are maintained in the nectar solely through selective pressures for antiherbivore chemistry in leaves and floral tissues. Using common garden experiments with milkweed flowers in Idaho and Arizona, I found that nectar chemistry is consistently distinct from leaf chemistry within and across species, with large numbers of nectar compounds not found in leaves, and the concentrations of the majority of shared compounds uncorrelated between leaves and nectar. These findings demonstrate that the Nectar Pleiotropy hypothesis does not apply to most compounds in the milkweed nectar metabolome, suggesting that nectar chemistry is maintained separately from leaf chemistry to mediate interactions with nectar feeding organisms. Chapter 3 builds on the work of chapter two by directly linking milkweed nectar chemistry to pollinator visitation, behavior, and plant fitness. Using gardens of milkweeds in Nevada and California, I show that compounds which strongly associate with insect feeding are also strongly associated with average pollinator efficiency, and that the concentration of these compounds in nectar indirectly alters plant fitness through the manipulation of high efficiency pollinators, but not nectar larcenists. These results indicate that nectar chemistry in these species acts primarily to manipulate high quality pollinating insects, with little impact on non-pollinating insects. Finally, chapter 4 moves from interrogations of chemical diversity in plants and insects to discuss methods of monitoring insect biodiversity as a whole. Here I developed a computer vision system and data pipeline for rapidly gathering training data and deploying automated systems for insect monitoring. By incorporating hierarchical data into computer vision models, I demonstrate that model performance can be greatly improved when working in systems where the majority of taxa are unknown to science. These systems, while only capable of measuring a specific dimension of insect diversity, pave the way to more generalized and scalable models for automated insect monitoring.
Communities in ScholarWolf
Select a community to browse its collections.