Thruster maintenance system Patent

System for removing and repairing spacecraft control thrusters by use of portable air lock

The pulsed air gust generator Final report

Wind tunnel simulation of jet pulsing apparatus for controlled gust

French Women in Art: Reclaiming the Body through Creation/Les Femmes Artistes Françaises : La Réclamation du corps à travers la création

The research I have conducted for my French Major Senior Thesis is a culmination of my passion for and studies of both French language and culture and the history and practice of Visual Arts. I have examined, across the history of art, the representation of women, and concluded that until the 20th century, these representations have been tools employed by the makers of history and those at the top of the patriarchal system, used to control women’s images and thus women themselves. I survey these representations, which are largely created by men—until the 20th century. I discuss pre-historical portrayals in the form of fertility figurines, the representation of Marie Antoinette, (Queen at Versailles during the late 18th century), by portraitist Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, and depictions of women in impressionism, a male-centric modernist art movement of the mid-19th century. The remainder of my research centers on female French artists and their work (e.g., Louise Bourgeois, Annette Messager, Agnès Varda), emerging in the 20th century, grounded in writings by French theorist Hélène Cixous, who calls for “l’écriture feminine,” or female writing—women writing their own stories. I argue that, finally, proper representations of women are created due to the fact that women themselves are creating them. The common denominator in these women’s work is the authenticity of communicating their own experience. In conclusion, my intention is to show how and why the art historical canon is flawed, to introduce audiences to women creating their own representations, and to examine our cultural landscape regarding gender representation and how women may identify and create as a result

Buffy vs. Dracula: Feminism and its Fanged Foe

Writings and artwork critiquing popular vampire culture and strong female characters in popular media through a feminist lens.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/feminist_zines/1011/thumbnail.jp

The impact of secondary forest regeneration on ground-dwelling ant communities in the Tropical Andes

Natural regeneration of abandoned farmland provides an important opportunity to contribute to global reforestation targets, including the Bonn Challenge. Of particular importance are the montane tropics, where a long history of farming, frequently on marginal soils, has rendered many ecosystems highly degraded and hotspots of extinction risk. Ants play crucial roles in ecosystem functioning, and a key question is how time since abandonment and elevation (and inherent temperature gradients therein) affect patterns of ant recovery within secondary forest systems. Focusing on the Colombian Andes across a 1300 m altitudinal gradient and secondary forest (2–30 years) recovering on abandoned cattle pastures, we find that over time ant community composition and species richness recovered towards that of primary forest. However, these relationships are strongly dependent on elevation with the more open and warmer pasturelands supporting more ants than either primary or secondary forest at a particular elevation. The loss of species richness and change in species composition with elevation is less severe in pasture than forests, suggesting that conditions within pasture and its remaining scattered trees, hedgerows and forest fragments, are more favourable for some species, which are likely in or near thermal debt. Promoting and protecting natural regenerating forests over the long term in the montane tropics will likely offer significant potential for returning ant communities towards primary forest levels

Remote sensing of tropical forest degradation from selective logging

Remote sensing is the most accurate and cost effective way to monitor forests at large spatial scales. The preceding decade has seen incredible progress in accurate forest monitoring from space, with operationalized deforestation and fire alerts available in near-real-time globally. In contrast, methods for detecting and mapping forest degradation from selective logging have lagged behind; despite recognition that selective logging is a key driver of both deforestation and forest degradation. In this these I develop novel methods that utilize detailed spatial and temporal logging records to train machine learning algorithms to detect and map tropical selective logging. First, I utilized optical satellite data from the Landsat program and show that imagery acquired before the cessation of logging activities (i.e. the final cloud-free image of the dry season during logging) was best for detection, displaying a 90% detection rate (with roughly 20% commission and 8% omission error rates). Next, I tried extending this methodology to the detection of logging with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data, but poor performance made logging predictions too uncertain. I go on to show that SAR data from Sentinel-1 display a distinct breakpoint in the time series of pixels logged under higher intensities (> 20 m3 ha-1) and could be used to detect more intensive selective logging within the Amazon. I then assess if combining optical and SAR data improve the detection of logging over the use of either on their own. I show that a combined model performs worse than optical data alone and including SAR data adds uncertainty that lowers model performance. Finally, I refine the optical approach developed in the beginning, generalizing the methodology to facilitate a large spatial and temporal scale assessment of selective logging. We create annual estimates of selective logging between 2000 and 2019 over the Brazilian state of Rondônia. I estimate that 41.0% of the State of Rondônia remained undisturbed forest through 2019, with 3.4% having undergone selective logging and 25.7% being deforested (with 13% Commission Error and 45% Omission Error over the twenty year period). In general, rates of selective logging were twice as high in the first decade relative to the last decade of the period. My results show improved access to data and technologies will enable advances in space-based forest monitoring and reiterate the value of free and open data access policies. Our approach is step in the direction of an operationalized selective logging monitoring system capable of detecting subtle forest disturbances over large spatial scales