Theses and Dissertations

The use of pulsed laser beam fusion welding to join copper wires to aluminum, palladium, and silver wires has been studied and optimum welding conditions for the joining of these materials has been defined.

During interphase, chromatin is in a state of least condensation and most accessible to transcription factors. When cells enter mitosis, replicated chromosomes are compacted, and sister chromatids are cohered to form specific mitotic architectures, which are essential for appropriate chromosome segregation. Disruption of the formation, regulation and maintenance of mitotic chromosome structure results in aneuploidy, which is tightly correlated with severe developmental maladies, aging and tumorigenesis.

ABSTRACTIntercollegiate Athletics Directors (ADs) are the primary managers of athletics programs on college campuses. At the Division I level of the NCAA, ADs manage multimillion dollar budgets and programs that relate to their institutions' profitability, visibility, student-interest, student-achievement, and donations, yet little is known about ADs' day-to-day job responsibilities.

Although many experts projected that the discovery of penicillin signaled an end to infectious diseases, the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria has unfortunately rendered many antimicrobial therapeutics ineffective. The arsenal of drugs that physicians once had to combat infections has been reduced to last resort antibiotics with high patient toxicity. In conjunction with the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria, we have witnessed a languid pursuit in the discovery of novel antimicrobials as the last clinically useful antibiotic was identified thirty years ago.

This paper represents an attempt to unify some fairly recent results in the field of point-set topology. The concepts with which we shall be chiefly concerned are topological completeness, paracompactness, the Lindelof property, real compactness, and complete metrizability.

The study of mental illness attributions, or beliefs about the causes of mental illness, is well-documented and ongoing in the academic literature. Attributions have traditionally been dichotomized along four dimensions based on their locus, controllability, specificity, and stability and have been associated with a wide variety of thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and actions related to mental illness.

As global afforestation and reforestation efforts gain momentum, it becomes ever more important to understand the long-term effects of management strategies on secondary forest development. The Lehigh University Experimental Forest (LUEF) is a unique 5.5-ha forest in eastern Pennsylvania that is well poised to inform these forest management efforts. The forest was densely planted with 22 species of evergreen and deciduous tree seedlings in 1915, which were arranged in 43 distinct monospecific or bispecific plots.

Since DNA-SWCNT hybrids have a number of potential biomedical applications such as molecular sensing, drug delivery and cell imaging, it is essential to characterize them and to understand their structure and properties. Certain single stranded DNA (ssDNA) sequences are known to recognize their partner single wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT). We report here the activation energies for removal of several ssDNA sequences from a few SWCNT species by a surfactant molecule.

Skeletal development is a tightly regulated process and requires proper communication between the cells for efficient exchange of information. Cell–cell communication, facilitating the exchange of small metabolites, ions and second messengers, takes place via aqueous proteinaceous channels called gap junctions. Connexins (Cx) are the subunits of a gap junction channel, and Cx43 is the major Cx expressed in bone cells.

The plane problem of two joined dissimilar materials containing a crack along their common interface and subjected to an isolated force acting at an interior point of one of the two materials is considered.

This thesis presents a revised space-time autoregressive (ST-AR) model usingmultiple neighboring orders for damage detection and localization with dynamic sensornetwork data (DSN), where ST-AR residuals were used as damage sensitive feature. Animportant r