PHD, Kent State University, 2019, College of Arts and Sciences / School of Biomedical Sciences

The overall goal of this work is to relate stress and emotional state to the processes of hearing and communication. We focus on two forms of the aforementioned relationship, investigating 1. Situations in which there is a particularly salient relationship among stress, emotional state, and hearing or acoustic communication and 2. How these relationships differ between males and females. Experiments in Aim 1 focus on the behavioral and hormonal responses of typical male and female mice to vocal communication signals, in order to understand the communicative function of four social vocalization categories. Aim 2 investigates the relationship between emotional state and tinnitus, the perception of sound in the absence of an external stimulus (Jastreboff, 1995), in males and females, utilizing behavioral and hormonal assays. Together, the Aims identify behavioral and hormonal components of the relationship between stress and emotional state and the processes of hearing and communication, as they differ between males and females. This work utilizes CBA/CaJ mice, a strain of mice that is widely used as a model of mammalian hearing and communication (Portfors 2007; Radziwon et al., 2009; Ohlemiller et al., 2010; Longenecker & Galazyuk, 2011; Grimsley et al., 2016).

Committee: Jeffrey Wenstrup (Advisor); Alexander Galazyuk (Committee Member); Sheila Fleming (Committee Member); Bruna Mussoi (Committee Member); Joel Hughes (Committee Member) Subjects: Neurosciences; Psychology

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2015, Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering

With a growing global population and a higher demand for potable water, society relies on Reverse Osmosis (RO) for large-scale desalination. Reverse Osmosis is currently the most economic and commonly used method to desalinate saline or brackish water to produce potable drinking water. This research investigated the alternative use of Microbial Desalination Cells (MDCs), and compared MDC technology to RO by performing life cycle and economic analyses. The additional advantage of an MDC, as compared with an RO desalination plant, is the production of a small amount of electricity as a by-product of the microorganisms' anaerobic respiration in the MDC device. The goal of this project was to determine if this production of electricity was enough to make MDC technology a more sustainable and economically favorable long term desalination option. A currently operating reverse osmosis plant was analyzed along with a laboratory scale MDC. Given that the RO facility under investigation is much larger than the bench scale MDC, both analyses were normalized on a per cubic meter basis, for implementation in Columbus, Ohio, USA. Results indicate that although the MDC is not currently the more sustainable option, design improvements can be made to the MDC that will make this technology much more promising in the future.

Committee: Ann Christy (Advisor); Bhavik Bakshi (Committee Member); Matthew Roberts (Committee Member) Subjects: Agriculture; Alternative Energy; Environmental Management; Environmental Science; Sustainability; Water Resource Management